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He told them the device had gone to the Fortress, whose whereabouts did not concern them, and from the Qa’ala it would be launched, to change all history, on the day the first combat boot of an American soldier stepped onto the holy land of Iraq.

Chapter 20

The news that the British Tornados had missed their real target at Al Qubai badly shook the man known only as Jericho. It was as much as he could do to force himself to his feet and applaud the Rais with the adoration of all the rest.

In the blacked-out bus with the other generals being transported back into central Baghdad, he had sat in silence in back, wrapped in his own thoughts.

That the use of the device now hidden elsewhere—at a place called Qa’ala, the Fortress, of which he had never heard and whose location he did not know—might cause many, many deaths, he cared not a jot.

It was his own position that absorbed him. For three years he had risked everything—exposure, ruin, and a terrible death—to betray his country’s regime. The point had not simply been to establish a huge personal fortune abroad; that he could probably have done by extortion and theft right here in Iraq, though there would have been risks to that as well.

The point had been to retire abroad with a new identity and background, provided by his foreign paymasters, secure under their mantle, safe from the vengeful assassination squads. He had seen the fate of those who simply stole and fled; they lived constantly in fear until, one day, the Iraqi avengers caught up.

He, Jericho, wanted both his fortune and security, which was why he had welcomed the transfer of his control from Israel to the Americans. They would look after him, abide by the agreement, and create the new identity, allowing him to become another man with another nationality, buy his mansion by the sea in Mexico, and live out a life of ease and comfort.

Now things had changed. If he kept silent and the device were used, the Americans would think he had lied about Al Qubai. He had not, but in their rage they would never believe that. Come hell or high water, the Americans would reject his account, and it would all have been for nothing. Somehow he had to warn them that there had been a mistake. A few more risks, and it would all be over—Iraq defeated, the Rais brought down, and he, Jericho, out of there and far away.

In the privacy of his office he wrote his message, as always in Arabic, on the thin paper that took up so little space. He explained the conference of that evening; that when he sent his last message, the device had indeed been at Al Qubai, as he had said, but forty-eight hours later when the Tornados struck, it had been moved. That this was not his fault.

He went on to say all he knew: That there was a secret place called the Fortress; that the device was there, and from Qa’ala it would be launched when the first American crossed the border into Iraq.

Shortly after midnight, he took an unmarked car and disappeared into the back streets of Baghdad. No one queried his right to do so; no one would dare. He planted the message beneath a flagstone in an old courtyard off Abu Nawas Street, then made the chalk mark behind the Church of St. Joseph in the Area of the Christians. This time the chalk mark was slightly different. He hoped the unseen man who collected his messages would waste no time.

As it happened, Mike Martin left the Soviet villa early on the morning of February 15. The Russian cook had given him a long list of fresh produce to buy, a list that was going to prove extremely hard to fill.

Food was running short. It was not the farmers in the countryside; it was the transportation problems.

Most of the bridges were down. The central Iraqi plain is a land of rivers watering the spread of crops that feed Baghdad. Forced to pay ferry charges across them all, the produce-growers were choosing to stay home.

Luckily, Martin started with the spice market in Shurja Street, then pedaled around the Church of St.

Joseph to the alley at the back. When he saw the chalk mark, he was jolted.

The mark of that particular wall was always supposed to be a figure eight on its side, with a single short stroke horizontally through the join of the two circles. But he had warned Jericho previously that if there were ever a real emergency, the single stroke should be replaced by two small crosses, one in each circle of the figure eight. Today the crosses were there.

Martin pedaled hard to the courtyard off Abu Nawas Street, waited till the coast was clear, stooped as always to adjust his sandal, slid a hand into the hiding place in the wall, and found the slim envelope. By midday, he was back at the villa, explaining to the angry cook that he had done his best but the produce would be later than ever reaching the city. He would have to go back in the afternoon.

When he read Jericho’s message, it became all too plain why the man was in a panic. Martin composed a message of his own, explaining to Riyadh why he now felt he had been forced to take matters into his own hands and make his own decision. There was no time left for conferences in Riyadh and a further interchange of messages. The worst part, for him, was Jericho’s revelation that Iraqi Counterintelligence was aware of an illegal transmitter sending burst signals. He co

uld not know how close they were, but he had to assume there could be no further extended exchange of messages with Riyadh. Therefore he was making the decision himself.

Martin read the Jericho message in Arabic first, then his own translation, into the tape recorder. He added his own message and prepared to send.

He had no transmission window until late in the night—the night was always chosen so that the Kulikov household would be fast asleep. But, like Jericho, he did have an emergency procedure.

It was the transmission of a single long blast of sound, in this case a high-pitched whistle, on a completely different frequency, well outside the usual VHF band.

He checked that the Iraqi chauffeur was with First Secretary Kulikov at the embassy in the city center and that the Russian houseman and his wife were at lunch. Then, despite the risk of discovery, he erected the satellite dish near the open doorway and sent the whistle blast.

In the radio shack, a former bedroom in the SIS villa in Riyadh, a single light flashed on. It was half past one in the afternoon. The duty radio operator, handling the normal traffic between the villa and Century House in London, dropped what he was doing, yelled through the door for backup, and tuned to Receive on Martin’s frequency-of-the-day.

The second operator put his head around the door.

“What’s up?”

“Get Steve and Simon. Black Bear’s coming on, and it’s an emergency.”

The man left. Martin gave Riyadh fifteen minutes, then ran his main transmission.