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Sparky thought it over. “Right.”

Sparky Low’s commandeered villa was not half bad, thought Martin. It belonged to an American oil executive from Aramco, which had pulled its man out of there and back to Dhahran.

Martin knew better than to ask just what Sparky Low was doing in that neck of the woods. It was obvious that he, too, had been “borrowed” by Century House, and his task seemed to be intercepting the refugees filtering south and, if they would talk, debriefing them on what they had seen and heard.

Khafji was virtually deserted, apart from the Saudi National Guard, who were dug in defensive positions in and around the town. But there were still a few disconsolate Saudis wandering around, and from one stallholder in the market, who could not believe that he actually had a customer, Martin bought the clothes he needed.

Electric power was still running in Khafji in mid-August, which meant the air conditioning functioned, as did the water pump from the well and the water heater. There was a bath available, but he knew better than to take one.

He had not washed, shaved, or brushed his teeth for three days. If Mrs. Gray, his hostess back in Riyadh, had noticed the increasing odor, which she certainly had, she was too well bred to mention it.

For dental hygiene Martin just picked his teeth with a splint of wood after a meal. Sparky Low did not mention it, either, but then, he knew the reason.

The Kuwaiti officer turned out to be a handsome young man of twenty-six who was consumed with rage at what had been done to his country and was clearly a supporter of the ousted Al Sabah royal dynasty, which was now lodged in a luxury hotel in Taif as guests of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia.

He was also bewildered to find that though his host was what he expected—a British officer in civilian casual dress—the third person at the meal appeared to be a fellow Arab but was dressed in a soiled off-white thob with a speckled keffiyeh on his head, one trailing corner tucked across the lower half of his face. Low introduced them.

“You are really British?” asked the young man in surprise. It was explained to him why Martin was dressed the way he was and why he kept his face covered. Captain Khaled Al-Khalifa nodded.

“My apologies, Major. Of course I understand.”

The captain’s story was clear and straightforward. He had been called at his home on the evening of August 1 and told to report to Ahmadi air base, where he was stationed. Through the night, he and his fellow officers had listened to radio reports of the invasion of their country from the north. By dawn, his squadron of Skyhawk fighters had been fueled, armed, and ready for takeoff. The American Skyhawk, though by no means a modern fighter, could still prove quite useful in a ground attack. It would never be any match for the Iraqi MiG 23, 25, or 29 or the French-built Mirage, but fortunately, on his one combat mission to date, he had never met any.

He had found his targets in the northern suburbs of Kuwait City just after dawn.

“I got one of their tanks with my rockets,” he explained excitedly. “I know, because I saw it brew. Then I’d only the cannon left, so I went for the trucks behind. Got the first one—it swerved into a ditch and rolled over. Then I was out of ammo, so I flew back. But over Ahmadi, the control tower told us to head south for the border and save the planes. I had just enough fuel to make Dhahran.

“We got over sixty of our aircraft out, you know. Skyhawks, Mirages, and the British Hawk trainers.

Plus Gazelles, Puma and Super-Puma helicopters. Now I’ll fight from here and go back when we are liberated. When do you think the attack will start?”

Sparky Low smiled cautiously. The boy was so blissfully certain.

“Not yet, I’m afraid. You must be patient. There is preparatory work to be done. Tell us about your father.”

The pilot’s father, it seemed, was an extremely wealthy merchant, a friend of the royal family and a power in the land.

“Will he favor the invasion forces?” asked Low.

The young Al-Khalifa was incensed.

“Never, never! He will do anything he can to assist the liberation!” He turned to the dark eyes above the checkered cloth. “Will you see my father? You can rely on him.”

“Possibly,” said Martin.

“Will you give him a message from me?”

He wrote for several minutes on a sheet of paper and gave it to Martin. When he had driven back to Dhahran, Martin burned the sheet in an ashtray. He could carry nothing incriminating into Kuwait City.

On the following morning, he and Low packed the gear he had asked for into the rear of the jeep, and they drove south again as far as Manifah, then turned west along the Tapline Road, which shadows the Iraqi border all the way across Saudi Arabia. It was called Tapline because TAP stands for Trans Arabian Pipeline, and the road serviced the pipeline carrying so much Saudi crude to the west.

Later, the Tapline Road would become the main transport artery for the biggest military land armada ever seen, as 400,000 American, 70,000 British, 10,000 French, and 200,000 Saudi and other Arab soldiers massed for the invasion of Iraq and Kuwait from the south. But that day it was empty.

A few miles along it, the jeep turned north again, back to the Saudi-Kuwaiti border but at a different place, well inland. Near the fly-blown desert village of Hamatiyyat on the Saudi side, the border is at its nearest point to Kuwait City itself.

Moreover, American photoreconnaissance pictures obtained by Gray in Riyadh showed that the mass of Iraqi forces were grouped just above the border but near the coast. The farther inland one went, the thinner the scattering of Iraqi outposts. They were concentrating their forces between the Nuwaisib crossing point on the coast and the Al-Wafra border post forty miles inland.

The village of Hamatiyyat was a hundred miles into the desert, tucked up into a kink in the line of the