Fist of God

In August 1990, Saddam Hussein’s forces invade Kuwait and confront an international coalition preparing to remove them. Major Mike Martin, a British SAS officer raised in Iraq and fluent in Arabic, enters occupied Kuwait to support the resistance and report on Iraqi deployments. His brother Terry works within the intelligence effort in London, while Mike is later sent into Baghdad to handle Jericho, a highly placed source inside the regime.

The investigation begins with the murder of supergun designer Gerald Bull and develops into a search for Qubth-ut-Allah, a concealed weapon that may transform the coming ground war. As coalition commanders weigh incomplete intelligence, Martin must locate the system and prevent its use. Forsyth places his fictional operation among the real decisions and personalities of the Gulf crisis, including Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev, while treating intelligence analysis, air warfare and the vulnerability of agents in occupied territory as parts of the same campaign.