“Then why are his fellow Arabs turning against him?”
“Because they think he won’t get away with it,” said Martin.
“And he won’t get away with it. They’re right.”
“Only because of America, not because of the Arab world. If he is to gain the acclamation of the Arab world, he must humiliate America, not his Arabian neighbor. Have you been to Baghdad?”
“Not recently,” said Paxman.
“It’s full of pictures of Saddam portrayed as the desert warrior on a white charger with raised sword. All bunkum, of course; the man’s a back-street shooter. But that’s how he sees himself.”
Paxman rose.
“It’s all very theoretical,’ Terry. But thanks for your thoughts, anyway. Trouble is, I have to deal with hard facts. In any case, no one can see how he can humiliate America. The Yanks have all the power, all the technology. When they’re ready, they can go in there and blow his army and air force away.”
Terry Martin squinted up against the sun.
“Casualties, Simon. America can take many things, but she cannot take massive casualties. Saddam can.
They don’t matter to him.”
“But there aren’t enough Americans there yet.”
“Precisely.”
The Rolls-Royce bearing Ahmed Al-Khalifa swept up to the front of the office building that announced itself in English and Arabic as the headquarters of Al-Khalifa Trading Corporation Ltd. and hissed to a stop.
The driver, a big manservant, half chauffeur and half bodyguard, stepped out of the driver’s seat and went to the rear to open the door for his master.
Perhaps it had been foolish to bring the Rolls, but the Kuwaiti millionaire had brushed aside all pleas to use the Volvo for fear of offending the Iraqi soldiers on the roadblocks.
“Let them rot in hell,” he had growled over breakfast. In fact, the drive had been uneventful from his sumptuous home in its walled garden in the luxurious suburb of Andalus to the office building in Shamiya.
Within ten days of the invasion, the disciplined and professional soldiers of the Iraqi Republican Guard had been withdrawn from Kuwait City, to be replaced by the conscript rabble of the Popular Army. If he had hated the first, he had nothing but contempt for the latter.
In their first few days, the Guards had looted his city, but systematically and deliberately. He had seen them enter the national bank and remove the $5 billion worth of gold bullion that constituted the national reserve. But this was not looting for personal gain. The bullion bars had been placed in containers, sealed in trucks, and driven to Baghdad.
The gold Soukh had yielded another billion dollars in solid gold artifacts, and that had gone the same way.
The roadblocks of the Guards, who were distinguishable by their black berets and general bearing, had been strict and professional. Then, quite suddenly, they had been needed farther south, to take up position on the southern border facing Saudi Arabia.
In their place had come the Popular Army, ragged, unshaven, and undisciplined and, for that reason, more unpredictable and dangerous. The occasional killing of a Kuwaiti for refusing to hand over his watch or his car gave testimony to that.
By the middle of August, the heat was coming down like a hammer on an anvil. The Iraqi soldiers, seeking shelter, ripped up paving slabs and built themselves small stone huts down the streets they were supposed to be checking, and crawled inside. In the cool of the dawn and the evening they emerged to pretend to be soldiers. Then they harassed civilians and looted food and valuables under pretense of checking cars for contraband.
Mr. Al-Khalifa normally liked to be at work by seven in the morning but by delaying until ten, when the sun was hot, he had swept past the stone bivouacs with the Popular Army inside them and no one had stopped him. Two soldiers, scruffy and hatless, had actually thrown up an inept salute at the Rolls-Royce, assuming it must contain some notable of their own side.
It could not last, of course. Some thug would steal the Rolls at gunpoint sooner or later. So what? When he had been driven back home—he was convinced he would be, but he did not know how—he would buy another.
He stepped out onto the pavement in gleaming white thob , the light cotton material of the ghutra , secured around his head with two black cords, falling about his face. The driver closed the door and returned to the other side of the car to take it away to the company garage.
“Alms, sayidi , alms. For one who has not eaten for three days.”
He had only half seen the man squatted on the sidewalk close to the door, apparently asleep in the sun, a sight common in any Middle Eastern city. Now the man was beside him, a Bedou in stained robes, hand outstretched.
His driver was striding back around the Rolls to send the mendicant away with a stream of curses.
Ahmed Al-Khalifa held up his hand. He was a practicing Moslem who tried to abide by the teachings of the Holy Koran, one of which is that a man should give alms as generously as he can.