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The Rais would not concede that Kuwait was a foreign country—it was the nineteenth province of Iraq.

So it was Omar Khatib’s job to ensure compliance.

As he contemplated his sheaf of reports that morning in the Hilton Hotel, Rahmani was rather relieved that he did not have the task. It was a nightmare, and as he had predicted, Saddam Hussein had played his cards consistently wrong.

The taking of Western hostages as human shields against attack was proving a disaster, totally counterproductive. He had missed his chance to roll south and take the Saudi oil fields, forcing King Fahd to the conference table, and now the Americans were pouring into the theater.

All attempts to assimilate Kuwait were failing, and within a month, probably less, Saudi Arabia would be impregnable with its American shield along the northern border.

Saddam Hussein, he believed, could neither get out of Kuwait without humiliation, nor stay in there if attacked without a bigger one. Yet the mood around the Rais was still one of confidence, as if he were convinced something would turn up. What on earth did the man expect? Rahmani wondered. That

Allah himself would lean down from heaven and smash his enemies in the face?

Rahmani rose from his desk and walked to the window. He liked to stroll as he thought; it marshaled his brain. He looked down from the window. The once-sparkling marina was now a garbage dump.

There was something about the reports on his desk that disturbed him. He went back and scanned them again. Yes, something odd. Some of the attacks on Iraqis were with handguns and rifles; others with bombs made from industrial TNT. But here were others, a constant niggling stream, that clearly indicated that a plastic explosive had been used. Kuwait had never had plastic explosives, least of all Semtex-H.

So who was using it, and where did they get it?

Then there were radio reports of an encrypted transmitter somewhere out in the desert that moved all the time, coming on air at different times, talking scrambled nonsense for ten or fifteen minutes and then going silent, and always on different bearings.

Then there were these reports of a strange Bedou who seemed to wander about at will, appearing, disappearing, and reappearing, and always a trail of destruction in his wake. Before they died of wounds, two badly injured soldiers had reported seeing the man, tall and confident in a red-and-white checkered keffiyeh , one trailing end drawn across his face.

Two Kuwaitis under torture had mentioned the legend of the invisible Bedou but claimed they had never actually seen him. Sabaawi’s men were trying to persuade the prisoners with even more pain to admit they had. Fools. Of course, they would invent anything to stop the agony.

The more Hassan Rahmani thought about it, the more he became convinced that he had a foreign infiltrator on his hands, definitely part of his authority. He found it hard to believe that there was any Bedou who knew about plastic explosives and encrypted transceivers—if they were from the same man.

He might have trained up a few bomb planters, but he also seemed to be carrying out a lot of the attacks himself.

It would just not be possible to pick up every Bedou wandering around the city and the desert—that would be the AMAM way, but they would be pulling out fingernails for years and getting nowhere.

For Rahmani, the problem resolved itself into three choices: Capture the man during one of his attacks—but that would be haphazard and possibly never happen. Capture one of his Kuwaiti associates and trace the man to his lair. Or take him crouched over his transmitter in the desert.

Rahmani decided on the last. He would bring in from Iraq two or three of his best radio-detector teams, post them at different points, and try to triangulate on the source of the broadcast. He would also need an Army helicopter on standby, with a team of Special Forces ready to move. As soon as he got back to Baghdad, he would set it in motion.

Hassan Rahmani was not the only man that day in Kuwait who was interested in the Bedou. In a suburban villa miles away from the Hilton, a handsome, moustached young Kuwaiti Army colonel in a white cotton thob sat in an armchair and listened to a friend who had come to him with an interesting snippet.

“I was just sitting in my car at the traffic light, watching nothing in particular, when I noticed this Iraqi Army truck on the opposite side of the intersection. It was parked there, with a group of soldiers around the hood, eating and smoking. Then a young man, one of our own, walked out of a café clutching what looked like a tiny box. It was really small. I thought nothing of it until I saw him flick it under the truck.

Then he turned the corner and disappeared. The lights changed, but I stayed where I was.

“In five seconds the truck disintegrated. I mean, it just blew apart. The soldiers were all on the ground with their legs off. I’ve never seen such a small package do so much damage. I tell you, I hung a U and got out of there before the AMAM came along.”

“Plastic,” mused the Army officer. “What would I not give for some of that. It must have been one of the Bedou’s men. Who is that bastard, anyway? I’d love to meet him.”

“The point is, I recognized the boy.”

“What?” The young colonel leaned forward, his face alight with interest.

“I wouldn’t have come all this way just to tell you what you will have heard already. I tell you, I recognized the bomb-thrower. Abu Fouad, I’ve been buying cigarettes from his father for years.”

Dr. Reinhart, when he addressed the Medusa Committee in London three days later, looked tired. Even though he had relinquished all his other duties at Porton Down, the documentation he had taken away with him from the first meeting and the supplementary information that had come pouring in ever since had given him a monstrous task.

“The study is probably not yet complete,” he said, “but a fairly comprehensive picture emerges.

“First, of course, we know that Saddam Hussein has a large poison-gas-production capacity, I estimate at over a thousand tons a year.

“During the Iran-Iraq war, some Iranian soldiers who had been gassed were treated here in Britain, and I was able to examine them. We could recognize phosgene and mustard gas even then.