Excerpt.....

These are the facts, the way I first heard them. In September 1991, a journalist on a specialist UK defence magazine was attending a three-day conference in Geneva. On the first evening, late, he found himself talking to an American. The American was a senior design engineer with a major defence contractor. He was very drunk.

The journalist bought more drinks. They talked about the Gulf War. They moved on to a night club. Past three in the morning, in the cab back to the hotel, the American confided that his own company had done exceptionally well out of the war. Their equipment had showcased on the Basra Road and he had the videos to prove it. Better still, post-war, they'd won a multi-million dollar re-equipment order from the Kuwaitis. For this, the American had been duly grateful. In the post-Cold War sales vacuum, Saddam Hussein was effectively keeping his company afloat.

Back at the hotel, the journalist sensed there was more to come. Over brandies in the privacy of his hotel room, the American got into the small print of the re-equipment deal. His company, he said, had been contacted at the highest level by the US State Department and given specific instructions on when to pitch to the Kuwaitis and what bid would be acceptable. The instructions were very precise: a specific day and a specific price. His company was left in no doubt that the business was there for the taking. All they had to do was follow the chalk marks on the trees. And so it had proved.

The journalist said that sounded very interesting. He'd heard similar stories from other sources. The American nodded and fell silent for a while. Then, according to the journalist, he looked up. The point about the State Department, he said, was the date of their covert approach. They'd been in touch on the 7th January, 1991...nine days before Desert Storm had even begun.

The journalist thought about the conversation overnight. To him, the Gulf War had never made any kind of military sense. The Allied casualties had been impossibly low, lower even than the budgeted deaths for a peacetime exercise of equivalent scale. Not because of luck or some special genius in the Americans' conduct of the war but because Saddam had consistently pulled his punches, making a long tally of elementary mistakes.

Why no overseas strikes? Why only one serious attack on Allied shipping? Why withdraw the best Iraqi warplanes, Saddam's precious MiG-29s, so quickly? Why such poor targeting of the Scud missiles? Error margins so gross that they began to look deliberate? Why deploy the best Iraqi army units to totally ineffective positions? How come the Allies got through the minefields so quickly? With such little loss of life? Why no use of chemical weapons?

In review, the cumulative scale of military blunders had occasionally made the journalist wonder whether Saddam had ever been serious about "the mother of battles".

Now, the conversation with the American fresh in his mind, the journalist began to think the thing through all over again. The Gulf War had, after all, conferred blessings on both leaders. Internationally, George Bush had emerged with enormous political and military prestige, architect and master of a "new world order". Domestically, likewise, he'd become the hero-president: guardian of American lives, saviour of the American arms industry, moral leader of the Free World. God knows, thanks to lavish dollar contributions from non-participating nations (like the Japanese) he'd even managed to run the war at a profit. For the expense of little blood, he'd acquired huge amounts of treasure.

And Saddam? Remarkably, despite the attentions of the best-equipped coalition army in the history of warfare, he and his regime had survived intact. Bridges were down, sewage flooded the streets, food was scarce, and the chemical and nuclear programmes had been set back a decade, but Saddam's grip on Iraq was, if anything, even tighter. The Republican Guards were as loyal as ever and huge portions of the troublesome conscript army had been incinerated on the Basra Road. In the immediate aftermath of the war - thanks to the passive connivance of the Americans - Saddam had even managed to deploy his gunships and armour to smash a dissident Shiite rebellion in the south.

So why the symmetry? How come so much violence had finally resolved so little?

The journalist brooded. On the face of it, a behind-the-scenes, covert understanding between Washington and Baghdad on precisely how the war should be fought seemed inconceivable. yet the more he thought about it, the more this explanation seemed to fit all the facts. What if the two leaderships had conferred through third parties after the invasion of Kuwait? What if an agreement had been hammered out? A shooting script for the conduct of the war? A painstaking, highly publicised build-up of arms in the Gulf followed by the swift expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait? Baghdad spared? Saddam spared? American lives spared? George Bush (and the American arms industry) walking tall?

Next morning, the journalist went looking for the American. He had more questions to ask. He needed detail: names, dates, phone numbers. He knocked on the American's hotel door. There was no reply. Downstairs, he enquired at the desk. The clerk consulted the overnight log. Unaccountably, at six in the morning, the American had checked out and returned to the States. The remaining two days of the conference were, it seemed, no longer of any interest.

That was the way I first heard it. Later, I got to know the journalist. His name was Wesley Keogh. I knew the American, too, a man called Grant Wallace. I visited his grave last month, a small, shadowed half-acre within sight of the Shenandoah River. I went there for two reasons: partly to pay my respects and partly to make sure the man was really dead. Three months with Wesley had that kind of effect on me. Believe nothing until you've seen it for yourself.

Wesley's dead, too. I was very close to him in the months before he died and everything that follows is based on what he told me, what I found out for myself, and on the tapes, notes and diaries that he left behind, the material that surrounds me now.

Towards the end, when it was obvious that he wasn't going to make it, Wesley brooded on whether or not to ask me to take over, to risk unleashing me on the foothills of the mountain he'd tried so hard to climb. He was far too proud to put the thought into words and when I did it for him he pretended that the idea had come as a great surprise. He thought about it for a day or so and then he said yes, on two conditions. It had to do justice to the story. And it had to be worth my while, something I truly believed in.

He need never have worried. Wesley Keogh was an exceptional man, the bravest person I ever met, and I loved him for it. Hence, if he's still listening, this book....

Reviews

A thriller which delivers far more than you'd ever expect. A love story, as well as a cracking good read. -
Keith Newbery, Portsmouth News

Hugely enjoyable and definitely in the "unputdownable" category. -
Pete Hoban, Shout.

Superficially a run-of-the-mill politico-media-espionage plot but Thunder in the Blood offers much, much more. An absurd premise? Read, make up your own mind, and enjoy.....
Western Mail