The Network - Jason Elliot [59]
When Saddam Hussein is foolish enough to invade Kuwait, the Baroness summons us to discuss things. We are both preparing to deploy to the Gulf and awaiting our final orders. It won’t be real war, the Baroness tells us. She predicts confidently that Kuwait will be quickly liberated, but that the West will be blinded by its victory to the greater consequences of the conflict. America’s willingness to turn its back on the heroic and ruined nation of Afghanistan but to spend billions in defence of a corrupt oil-rich state will confirm the deepest cynicism of its opponents. The time, she says, is drawing near. She offers us a final chance to withdraw. The war in Kuwait will provide the context for our operational phase with the Network. She is fond of the term context. She advises us to await our orders and do nothing except what is expected of us. We will know the signal when it is given to us. ‘Like a passing bus,’ she says, ‘you will know when to jump on it.’ It is better, she explains, that neither of us sees it coming.
We do not, in the event. When hostilities begin, we are both assigned unusual extra-regimental roles with the same interrogation team in Kuwait. Our parent unit is the Joint Services Interrogation Wing, housed at Ashford and commanded by a I Corps lieutenant colonel, hence our ‘2’ designations, which indicate an intelligence role. The assignment is unusual because the forward interrogation team to which we’re assigned – me as operations officer and Manny as 2i/c – is formed primarily from reservists who are volunteer members of 22 Int Coy, the Naval Reserve unit HMS Ferret, and 7630 Flight. We have relevant backgrounds, having both been through DSL Beaconsfield, but we’re not regular senior NCOs or Reserve officers, and in time-honoured fashion we blame the mistake in tasking on the army. Most of the interrogation teams deploy forward to where enemy prisoners are being held, but we’re assigned to Category 1 prisoners, who are usually senior officers and intelligence personnel, and our team takes over a warehouse on the outskirts of the city and converts it into an interrogation centre. We’re barely up and running when the war screeches to a halt. Saddam Hussein’s great army has fled before the allied onslaught, and the Baroness’s prediction has proven uncannily accurate. The active combat phase of Desert Storm has lasted one hundred hours, Kuwait is liberated, and Saddam’s ‘mother of battles’ turns out to be a rout.
When the raid occurs, we’re not expecting it. Neither Manny nor I can have any notion of how deeply, and irreversibly, that ten-minute period of our lives will change things for us both. Manny has no idea that he will be seized by an Israeli commando team, beaten senseless and confined to a Mossad safe house in Kuwait City. But when the same Mossad officer – who has been beating Manny around his face so that the bruises will look much worse than they really are – slips him a narrow hacksaw blade and pats him on the back for good luck before throwing him into a cell with a suspected Arab terrorist, Manny knows that this is the bus he’s expected to jump on. When Manny cuts through both sets of handcuffs and then through the metal bar that secures their window, the Arab can’t believe his luck. He has no reason to suspect that his escape has been engineered. All he knows is that an enraged English soldier, vowing jihad against the Zionists, has freed him from his enemies, and he can’t believe his luck. He’s only too happy to introduce him to his superiors. Manny’s dangerous work has begun.
Not everything goes according to plan. I am not supposed to shoot and kill a man. But the Israelis are willing to overlook the accident, since they have been allowed to seize Gemayel in the process, and they have wanted him for years. Such is the deal that has been struck. Mossad gets its man, and Manny’s cover story – bruises and all – is brilliantly established from the start.
It’s nearly