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“That’s madness,” he exploded when she had finished. “Anybody could turn up and claim ownership. If Gemütlich has never even seen the owner—”

“There are identity procedures, idiot. Very complex codes, methods of writing letters, certain ways the signatures have to be placed—all sorts of things to verify that the person is really the account owner.

Unless they are all complied with—to the letter—Herr Gemütlich will not cooperate. So impersonation is impossible.”

“He must have a hell of a memory.”

“Oh, you are too stupid for words. It is all written down. Are you taking me out to dinner?”

“Do you deserve it?”

“You know I do.”

“Oh, all right. But I want an hors d’oeuvre.”

She was puzzled. “All right, order one.”

“I mean you.”

He reached out and grabbed the waist of her skimpy panties, pulling her with a hooked finger back onto the bed. She was giggling with delight. He rolled over on top of her and began to kiss. Suddenly he stopped. She looked alarmed.

“I know what I’d do,” he breathed. “I’d hire a safecracker, break into old Gemütlich’s safe, and look at the codes. Then I could get away with it.”

She laughed in relief that he had not changed his mind about making love.

“Wouldn’t work. Mmmmmm. Do that again.”

“Would so.”

“Aaaaaah. Wouldn’t.”

“Would. Safes are broken all the time. See it in the papers every day.”

She ran her exploring hand below, and her eyes opened wide.

“Ooooh, is that all for me? You’re a lovely, big, strong man, Karim, and I love you. But old Gemütlich, as you call him, is a bit smarter than you. ...”

A minute later, she no longer cared how smart Gemütlich was.

While the Mossad agent made love in Vienna, Mike Martin was setting up his satellite dish as midnight approached and the eleventh of the month gave way to the twelfth.

Iraq was then just eight days away from the scheduled invasion of February 20. South of the border, the northern slice of the desert of Saudi Arabia bristled with the biggest single concentration of men and arms, guns, tanks, and stores crammed into such a relatively small piece of land since the Second World War.

The relentless pounding from the air went on, though most of the targets on General Horner’s original list had been visited, sometimes twice or more. Despite the insertion of fresh targets caused by the short-lived Scud barrage on Israel, the air master plan was back on track. Every known factory for the production of weapons of mass destruction had been pulverized, and that included twelve new ones added by information from Jericho.

As a functioning weapon, the Iraqi Air Force had virtually ceased to exist. Rarely had her interceptor fighters, if they chose to tangle with the Eagles, Hornets, Tomcats, Falcons, Phantoms, and Jaguars of the Allies, returned to their bases, and by mid-February they were not even bothering to try. Some of the cream of the fight

er and fighter-bomber force had deliberately been sent to Iran, where they had at once been impounded. Others still had been destroyed inside their hardened shelters or ripped apart if caught out in the open.

At the highest level, the Allied commanders could not understand why Saddam had chosen to send the cream of his warplanes to his old enemy. The reason was that after a certain date he firmly expected every nation in the region to have no choice but to bow the knee to him; at that point he would recover his war fleet.

There was by then hardly a bridge left intact in the entire country or a functioning power-generating station.

By mid-February, an increasing Allied air effort was being directed at the Iraqi Army in south Kuwait and over the Kuwaiti border into Iraq itself.

From the east-west Saudi northern border up to the Baghdad-Basra highway, the Buffs were pounding the artillery, tank, rocket-battery, and infantry positions. American A-10 Thunderbolts, nicknamed for their grace in the sky “the flying warthog,” were roaming at will doing what they did best—destroying tanks. Eagles and Tornados were also allocated the task of “tank-plinking.”

What the Allied generals in Riyadh did not know was that forty major facilities dedicated to weapons of mass destruction still remained hidden beneath the deserts and the mountains, or that the Sixco air bases were still intact.