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On the northward road, down which he had traveled three days earlier, was the junction where travelers could turn east for Basra or northwest for Baghdad.

South, the road ran straight through the Kuwaiti border post five miles away. From where he stood, looking south, he could see the dim glow of Jahra, and beyond it, farther east across the bay, the glow of the lights of Kuwait City itself.

He was excited because his country’s time had come. Time to punish the Kuwaiti scum for what they had done to Iraq, for the undeclared economic warfare, for the financial damage and their haughty arrogance.

Had not his country for eight bloody years held off the hordes of Persia from sweeping into the northern Gulf and ending all their luxury lifestyles? And was her reward now to sit silent while the Kuwaitis stole more than their fair portion of the oil from the shared Rumailah field? Were they now to be beggared as Kuwait overproduced and drove the oil price downward? Should they now meekly succumb as the Al Sabah dogs insisted on repayment of the miserable $15 billion loan they had made to Iraq during the war?

No, the Rais had gotten it right as usual. Kuwait was historically the nineteenth province of Iraq; always had been, until the British drew their damned line in the sand in 1913 and created the richest emirate in the world. Kuwait would be reclaimed this night, this very night, and Osman Badri would be a part of it.

As an Army Engineer, he would not be in the first line, but he would come close behind with his bridging units, earthmovers, bulldozers, and sappers to cut open the path should the Kuwaitis try to block it. Not that aerial surveillance had shown any obstructions. No earthworks, no sand berms, no antitank trenches, no concrete traps. But just in case, the engineers would be there under the command of Osman Badri to cut open the road for the tanks and mechanized infantry of the Republican Guard.

A few yards from where he stood, the field command tent was full of the senior officers poring over their maps and making last-minute adjustments to their plan of attack as the hours and minutes ticked by while they waited for the final “go” order from the Rais in Baghdad.

Colonel Badri had already seen and conversed with his own commanding general, All Musuli, who was in charge of the entire Engineering Corps of the Iraqi Army and to whom he owed utter devotion for recommending him for the “special duty” last February. He had been able to assure his chief that his—Badri’s—men were fully equipped and ready to go.

As he stood talking with Musuli, another general had strolled up, and he had been introduced to Abdullah Kadiri, commander of the tanks. In the distance he had seen General Saadi Tumah Abbas, commanding the elite Republican Guard, enter the tent. As a loyal Party member and worshipper of Saddam Hussein, he had been perplexed to hear the tank general Kadiri mutter “political creep” under his breath. How could this be? Was not Tumah Abbas an intimate of Saddam Hussein, and had he not been rewarded for winning the crucial battle of Fao that finally beat the Iranians? Colonel Badri had dismissed from his mind rumors that Fao had actually been won by the now-vanished General Maher Rashid.

All around him, men and officers of the Tawakkulna and Medina divisions of the Guard swarmed in the darkness. His thoughts strayed back to that memorable night in February, when General Musuli had ordered him from his duties putting the finishing touches to the facility at Al Qubai to report to headquarters in Baghdad. He had assumed he would be reassigned.

“The President wants to see you,” Musuli had said abruptly. “He will send for you. Move into the officers’ quarters here, and keep yourself available night and day.”

Colonel Badri bit his lip. What had he done? What had he said? Nothing disloyal—that would have been impossible. Had he been falsely denounced? No, the President would not send for such a man. The wrongdoer would simply be picked up by one of the goon squads of Brigadier Khatib’s Amn-al-Amm and taken away to be taught a lesson. Seeing his face, General Musuli burst out laughing, his teeth flashing beneath the heavy black moustache that so many senior officers wore in imitation of Saddam Hussein.

“Don’t worry. He has a task for you, a special task.”

And he had. Within twenty-four hours Badri had been summoned to the lobby of the officers’ quarters, where a long black staff car was waiting for him, with two men from the Amn-al-Khass, the presidential security detail. He was whisked straight to the Presidential Palace for the most thrilling and momentous meeting of his life.

The palace was then situated in the angle of Kindi Street and July 14 Street, near the bridge of the same name, both celebrating the date of the first of the two coups of July 1968 that had brought the Ba’ath Party to power and broken the rule of the generals. Badri was shown into a waiting room and kept there for two hours. He was frisked thoroughly, twice, before being shown into the Presence.

As soon as the guards beside him stopped, he stopped, then threw up a quivering salute and held it for three seconds, before whipping off his beret and swinging it under his left arm. After that he remained at attention.

“So you are the genius of maskirovka ?”

He had been told not to look the Rais straight in the eyes, but when he was spoken to he could not help it. Saddam Hussein was in a good mood. The eyes of the young officer in front of him shone with love and admiration. Good, nothing to fear. In measured tones the Rais told the engineer what he wanted.

Badri’s chest swelled with pride and gratitude.

For five months after that, he had worked against the impossible deadline and succeeded with days to spare. He had had all the facilities the Rais had promised him. Everything and everyone was at his disposal. If he needed more concrete or steel, he had but to call Kamil on his personal number, and the President’s son-in-law would provide it at once from Ministry of Industry sources. If he needed more manpower, hundreds of laborers would arrive, and always indentured Koreans or Vietnamese. They cut and they dug, they lived in miserable cantonments down in the valley during that summer, and then they were taken away, he did not know where.

Apart from the coolies, no one came in by road, for the single rough track, eventually to be obliterated itself, was only for the trucks bringing steel and cargo, and the cement-mixers. Every other human being except the truck drivers came in by one of the Russian MIL helicopters, and only when they arrived were their blindfolds removed, to be replaced when they left. This applied to the most senior as to the humblest Iraqi.

Badri had chosen the site himself, after days of scouting by helicopter over the mountains. He had finally picked his spot high in the Jebal al Hamreen, north and farther into the mountains from Kifri, where the hills of the Hamreen range become mountains on the road to Sulaymaniyam.

He had worked twenty hours a day, slept rough on the site, bullied, threatened, cajoled, and bribed amazing work performances from his men, and finally it had been done before the end of July. The area had been cleared of every trace of work, every brick and lump of concrete, every piece of steel that might glint in the sun, every scrape and scratch on the rocks.

The three guardian villages had been completed and inhabited with their goats and sheep. Finally, the single track had been obliterated, tumbled in rough rubble and scree into the valley beneath by an earth-mover trundling backward, and the three valleys and the raped mountain had been restored to what they once were. Almost.

For he, Osman Badri, colonel of engineers, inheritor of the building skills that had erected Nineveh and Tyre, student of the great Stepanov of Russia, master of maskirovka , the art of disguising something to look like nothing or something else, had built for Saddam Hussein the Qa’ala, the Fortress. No one could see it, and no one knew where it was.

Before it was closed over, Badri had watched the others, the gun assemblers and the scientists, build that awesome cannon whose barrel seemed to reach up to the very stars. When all was complete they left, and only the garrison remained behind. They would stay

and live there. None would walk out. Those who had to arrive or leave would do so by helicopter. None of these would land; they would hover over a small patch of grass away from the mountain. The few arriving or leaving would always be blindfolded.

The pilots and crew would be sealed inside one single air base with neither visitors nor phones. The last wild grass seeds were scattered, the last shrubs planted, and the Fortress was left alone to its isolation.

Though Badri did not know it, the workers who had arrived by truck were finally driven away, then transferred to buses with blackened windows. Far away in a gulch the buses containing the three thousand Asian workers were stopped, and the guards ran away. When the detonations brought down the mountain side all the buses were buried forever. Then the guards were shot by others. They had all seen the Qa’ala.

Badri’s reverie was interrupted by an eruption of shouting from the command tent, and word ran quickly through the crowds of waiting soldiers that the attack was “go.”