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The students stared open-mouthed.

“We have to give it to the Iraqis?”

“No, you carry the loaves in open baskets on scooters, or in the trunks of cars. They will stop you at roadblocks and steal it. We meet here again in six days.”

Four days later, Iraqi trucks began to break down. Some were towed away and others abandoned, six trucks and four jeeps. The mechanics found out why but could not discover when or by whom. Tires began to blow out and the plywood squares were handed over to the Secret Police, who fumed and beat up several Kuwaitis seized at random on the streets.

Hospital wards began to fill with sick soldiers, all with vomiting and stomach pain. As they were hardly ever given food rations by their own army and lived hand-to-mouth at their roadblocks and in their stone-slab cantonments up and down the streets, it was assumed they had been drinking polluted water.

Then at the Amiri hospital in Dasman, a Kuwaiti lab technician ran an analysis of a sample of vomit from one of the Iraqis. He approached his departmental chief in great perplexity.

“He’s been eating rat poison, professor. But he says he only had bread for three days, and some fruit.”

The professor was puzzled.

“Iraq Army bread?”

“No, they didn’t deliver any for some days. He took it from a passing Kuwaiti baker’s boy.”

“Where are your samples?”

“On the bench, in the lab. I thought it best to see you first.”

“Quite right. You have done well. Destroy them. You have seen nothing, you understand?”

The professor walked back into his office shaking his head. Rat poison. Who the hell had thought of that?

The Medusa Committee met again on August 30, because the bacteriologist from Porton Down felt he had discovered all he could at that point about Iraq’s germ warfare program, such as it was or appeared to be.

“I’m afraid we are looking at somewhat slim pickings,” Dr. Bryant told his listeners. “The main reason is that the study of bacteriology can quite properly be carried out at any forensic or veterinary laboratory using the same equipment that you would find in any chemical lab and that won’t show up on export permits.

“You see, the overwhelming majority of the product is for the benefit of mankind, for the curing of diseases, not the spreading of them. So nothing could be more natural than for a developing country to want to study bilharzia, beri-beri, yellow fever, malaria, cholera, typhoid, or hepatitis. These are human diseases. There is another range of animal diseases that the veterinary colleges might quite properly want to study.”

“So there’s virtually no way of establishing whether Iraq today has a germ-bomb facility or not?” asked Sinclair of the CIA.

“Virtually not,” said Bryant. “There’s a record to show that way back in 1974, when Saddam Hussein was not on the throne, so to speak—”

“He was vice-president, then, and the power behind the throne,” said Terry Martin. Bryant was flustered.

“Well, whatever. Iraq signed a contract with the Institut Merieux in Paris to build them a bacteriological research project. It was supposed to be for veterinary research into animal diseases, and it may have been.”

“What about the stories of anthrax cultures for use against humans?” the American asked.

“Well, it’s possible. Anthrax is a particularly virulent disease. It mainly affects cattle and other livestock, but it can infect humans if they handle or ingest products from infected sources. You may recall the British government experimented with anthrax on the Hebridean island of Grainard during the Second World War. It’s still out of bounds.”

“That bad, eh? Where would he get this stuff?”

“That’s the point, Mr. Sinclair. You’d hardly go to a reputable European or American laboratory and say ‘Can I have some nice anthrax cultures because I want to throw them at people?’ Anyway, he wouldn’t need to. There are diseased cattle all over the Third World. One would only have to note an outbreak and buy a couple of diseased carcasses. But it wouldn’t show up on government paperwork.”

“So he could have cultures of this disease for use in bombs or shells, but we don’t know. Is that the position?” asked Sir Paul Spruce. His rolled-gold pen was poised above his note pad.

“That’s about it,” said Bryant. “But that’s the bad news. The better news is, I doubt if it would work against an advancing army. I suppose that if you had an army advancing against you and you were ruthless enough, you’d want to stop them in their tracks.”

“That’s about the shape of it,” said Sinclair.

“Well, anthrax wouldn’t do that. It would impregnate the soil if dropped from a series of air bursts above and ahead of the army. Anything growing from that soil—grass, fruit, vegetables—would be infected.

Any beast feeding on the grass would succumb. Anyone eating the meat, drinking the milk, or handling the hide of any such beast would catch it. But the desert is not a good vehicle for such spore cultures.