Chapter 18
The two men from Century House arrived in Riyadh before Chip Barber did from Washington. Steve Laing and Simon Paxman landed before dawn, having taken the night flight from Heathrow.
Julian Gray, the Riyadh Head of Station, met them in his usual unmarked car and brought them to the villa where he had been virtually living, with only occasional visits home to see his wife, for five months. He was puzzled by the sudden reappearance of Paxman from London, let alone the more senior Steve Laing, to oversee an operation that had effectively been closed down.
In the villa, behind closed doors, Laing told Gray exactly why Jericho had to be traced and brought back into play without delay.
"Jesus. So the bastard's really managed to do it."
"We have to assume so, even though we have no proof," said Laing. "When does Martin have a listening window?" "Between eleven-fifteen and eleven forty-five tonight," said Gray. "For security, we haven't sent him anything for five days. We've been expecting him to reappear over the border anytime." "Let's hope he's still there. If not, we're in deep shit. We'll have to reinfiltrate him, and that could take forever. The Iraqi deserts are alive with patrols." "How many know about this?" asked Gray. "As few as possible, and it stays that way," replied Laing. A very tight need-to-know group had been established between London and Washington, but for the professionals it was still too big. In Washington there was the President and four members of his Cabinet, plus the Chairman of the National Security Council and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Add to that four men at Langley, of whom one, Chip Barber, was heading for Riyadh. Back in California, the unfortunate Dr. Lomax had an unwanted house guest in his cabin to ensure he made no contact with the outside world. In London, the news had gone to the new Prime Minister, John Major, the Cabinet Secretary, and two members of the Cabinet; at Century
House, three men knew. In Riyadh there were now three at the SIS villa, and Barber on his way to join them. Among the military, the information was confined to four generals--three American and one British. Dr. Terry Martin had developed a diplomatic bout of flu and was residing comfortably in an SIS safe house in the countryside, looked after by a motherly housekeeper and three not-so-motherly minders. From henceforth, all operations against Iraq that concerned the search for, and destruction of, the device the Allies assumed to be codenamed Qubth-ut-Allah, or the Fist of God, would be undertaken under the cover of active measures designed to terminate Saddam Hussein himself, or for some other plausible reason. Two such attempts had in fact already been made. Two locations had been identified at which the Iraqi President might be expected to reside, at least temporarily. No one could say precisely when, for the Rais moved like a will-o'-the-wisp from hiding place to hiding place when he was not in the bunker in Baghdad. Continuous overhead surveillance watched the two locations. One was a villa out in the countryside forty miles from Baghdad, the other a big mobile home converted into a war caravan and planning center. On one occasion the aerial watchers had seen mobile missile batteries and light armor moving into position around the villa. A flight of Strike Eagles went in and blew the villa apart. It was a false alarm--the bird had flown. On the second occasion, two days before the end of January, the large trailer had been seen to move to a new location. Again an attack went in; again the target was not at home. On both occasions the fliers took enormous risks in pressing their attacks, for the Iraqi gunners fought back furiously. The failure to
terminate the Iraqi dictator on both occasions left the Allies in a quandary. They simply did not know Saddam Hussein's precise movements. The fact was, no one knew them, outside of a tiny group of personal bodyguards drawn from the Amn-al-Khass, commanded by his own son Kusay.
In reality, he was moving around most of the time. Despite the assumption that Saddam was in his bunker deep underground for the whole of the air war, he was really in residence there for less than half that time. But his safety was assured by a series of elaborate deceptions and false trails.
On several occasions he was "seen" by his own cheering troops--cynics said they were cheering because they were the ones not at the front being pounded by the Buffs. The man the Iraqi troops saw on all such occasions was one of the doubles who could pass for Saddam among all but his closest intimates.
At other times, convoys of limousines, up to a dozen, swept through the city of Baghdad with blackened windows, causing the citizenry to believe their Rais was inside one of the cars. Not so; these cavalcades were all decoys. When he moved, he sometimes went in a single unmarked car. Even among his innermost circle, the security measures prevailed. Cabinet members alerted for a conference with him would be given just five minutes to leave their residences, get into their cars, and follow a motorcycle outrider.
Even then, the destination was not the meeting place. They would be driven to a parked bus with blackened windows, there to find all the other ministers sitting in the dark. There was a screen between the ministers and the driver. Even the driver had to follow an Amn-al-Khass motorcyclist to the eventual destination. Behind the driver, the ministers, generals, and advisers sat in darkness like schoolboys on a mystery tour, never knowing where they were going or, afterward, where they had been.
In most cases these meetings were held in large and secluded villas, commandeered for the day and vacated before nightfall. A special detail of the Amn-al-Khass had no other job than to find such a villa when the Rais wanted a meeting, hold the villa owners incommunicado, and let them return home when the Rais was long gone.
Small wonder the Allies could not find him. But they tried--until the first week of February. After that, all assassination attempts were called off, and the military never understood why.
Chip Barber arrived at the British villa in Riyadh just after midday on the last day of January. After the greetings, the four men sat and waited out the hours until they could contact Martin, if he was still there.
"I suppose we have a deadline on this?" asked Laing. Barber nodded. "February twentieth. Stormin' Norman wants to march the troops in there on February twentieth."
Paxman whistled. "Twenty days, hell. Is Uncle Sam going to pick up the tab for this?"
"Yep. The Director has already authorized Jericho's one million dollars to go into his account now, today. For the location of the device, assuming there's one and only one of them, we'll pay the bastard five." "Five million dollars?" expostulated Laing. "Christ, no one had ever paid anything like that for information!"
Barber shrugged. "Jericho, whoever he is, ranks as a mercenary. He
wants money, nothing else. So let him earn it. There's a catch. Arabs haggle, we don't. Five days after he gets the message, we drop the ante by half a million a day until he comes up with the precise location. He has to know that."
The three Britishers mulled over the sums that constituted more than all their salaries combined for a lifetime's work. "Well," remarked Laing, "that should put the breeze up him."
The message was composed during the late afternoon and evening. First, contact would have to be established with Martin, who would have to confirm with preagreed code words that he was still there and a free man.
Then Riyadh would tell him of the offer to Jericho, in detail, and press on him the massive urgency now involved.
The men ate sparingly, toying with food, hard pressed to cope with the tension in the room. At half past ten Simon Paxman went into the radio shack with the others and spoke the message into the tape machine. The spoken passage was speeded to two hundred times its real duration and came out at just under two seconds.
At ten seconds after eleven-fifteen, the senior radio engineer sent a brief signal--the "are you there" message. Three minutes later, there was a tiny burst of what sounded like static. The satellite dish caught it, and when it was slowed down, the five listening men heard the voice of Mike Martin: "Black Bear to Rocky Mountain, receiving. Over."
There was an explosion of relief in the Riyadh villa, four mature men pumping each other's backs like football fans whose team has won the Super Bowl. Those who have never been there can ill imagine the sensation of learning that "one of ours" far behind the lines is still, somehow, alive and free.
"Fourteen fucking days he's sat there," marveled Barber. "Why the hell didn't the bastard pull out when he was told?"
"Because he's a stubborn idiot," muttered Laing. "Just as well."
The more dispassionate radio man was sending another brief interrogatory. He wanted five words to confirm--even though the oscillograph told him the voice pattern matched that of Martin--that the SAS major was not speaking under duress. Fourteen days is more than enough to break a man. His message back to Baghdad was as short as it could be: "Of Nelson and the North, I say again, of Nelson and the North. Out."
Another three minutes elapsed. In Baghdad, Martin crouched on the floor of his shack at the bottom of First Secretary Kulikov's garden, caught the brief blip of sound, spoke his reply, pressed the speedup button, and transmitted a tenth-of-a-second burst back to the Saudi capital.
The listeners heard him say "Sing the brilliant day's renown." The radio man grinned. "That's him, sir. Alive and kicking and free."
"Is that a poem?" asked Barber.
"The real second line," said Laing, "is: 'Sing the glorious day's renown.' If he'd got it right, he'd have been talking with a gun to his temple. In which case ..." He shrugged.
The radio man sent the final message, the real message, and closed down. Barber reached into his briefcase. "I know it may not be strictly according to local custom, but diplomatic life has certain privileges." "I say," murmured Gray. "Dom Perignon. Do you think Langley can afford it?"
"Langley," said Barber, "has just put five million greenbacks on the poker table. I guess it can offer you guys a bottle of fizz."
"Jolly decent," said Paxman.
A single week had brought about a transformation in Edith Hardenberg --a week, that is, and the effects of being in love. With Karim's gentle encouragement she had been to a coiffeur in Grinzing, who had let down her hair and cut and styled it, chin-length, so that it fell about her face, filling out her narrow features and giving her a hint of mature glamour.
Her lover had selected a range of makeup preparations with her shy approval; nothing garish, just a hint of eyeliner, foundation cream, a little powder, and a touch of lipstick at the mouth.
At the bank, Wolfgang Gemuetlich was privately aghast, secretly watching her cross the room, taller now in one-inch heels. It was not even the heels or the hair or the makeup that distressed him, though he would have flatly banned them all had Frau Gemuetlich even mentioned the very idea. What perturbed him was her air, a sense of selfconfidence when she presented him with his letters for signing or took dictation.
He knew, of course, what had happened. One of those foolish girls downstairs had persuaded her to spend money. That was the key to it all, spending money. It always, in his experience, led to ruin, and he feared for the worst.
Her natural shyness had not entirely evaporated, and in the bank she was as retiring as ever in speech if not quite in manner. But in Karim's presence, when they were alone, she constantly amazed herself with her boldness.
For twenty years things physical had been abhorrent to her, and now she was like a traveler on a voyage of slow and wondering discovery, half abashed and horrified, half curious and excited. So their loving--at first wholly one-sided--became more exploratory and mutual.
The first time she touched him "down there," she thought she would die of shock and mortification, but to her surprise she had survived. On the evening of the third of February he brought home to her flat a box wrapped in gift paper with a ribbon.
"Karim, you mustn't do things like this. You are spending too much."
He took her in his arms and stroked her hair. She had learned to love it when he did that. "Look, little kitten, my father is wealthy. He makes me a generous allowance. Would you prefer me to spend it in nightclubs?"
She liked it also when he teased her. Of course, Karim would never go to one of those terrible places. So she accepted the perfumes and the toiletries that once, only two weeks ago, she would never have touched. "Can I open it?" she asked.
"That's what it's there for." At first she did not understand what they were. The contents of the box seemed to be a froth of silks and lace and colors. When she understood, because she had seen advertisements in magazines--not the sort she bought, of course--she turned bright pink. "Karim, I couldn't. I just couldn't."
"Yes, you could," he said, and grinned. "Go on, kitten. Go into the bedroom and try. Close the door--I won't look."
She laid the things out on the bed and stared at them. She, Edith Hardenberg? Never. There were stockings and girdles, panties and bras, garters and short nighties, in black, pink, scarlet, cream, and beige. Things in filmy lace or trimmed with it, silky-smooth fabrics over which the fingertips ran as over ice.
She was an hour alone in that room before she opened the door in a bathrobe. Karim put down his coffee cup, rose, and walked over. He stared down at her with a kind smile and began to undo the sash that held the robe together. She blushed red again and could not meet his gaze. She looked away. He let the robe fall open. "Oh, kitten," he said softly, "you are sensational."
She did not know what to say, so she just put her arms around his neck, no longer frightened or horrified when her thigh touched the hardness in his jeans. When they had made love, she rose and went to the bathroom.
On her return she stood and looked down at him. There was no part of him that she did not love. She sat on the edge of the bed and ran a forefinger down the faint scar along one side of his chin, the one he said he had sustained when falling through a greenhouse in his father's orchard outside Amman.
He opened his eyes, smiled, and reached up for her face; she gripped his hand and nuzzled the fingers, stroking the signet ring on the smallest finger, the ring with the pale pink opal that his mother had given him. "What shall we do tonight?" she asked.
"Let's go out," he said. "Sirk's at the Bristol."
"You like steak too much." He reached behind her and held her small buttocks under the filmy gauze. "That's the steak I like." He grinned.
"Stop it--you're terrible, Karim!" she said. "I must dress." She pulled away and caught sight of herself in the mirror. How could she have changed so much? she thought. How could she ever have brought herself to wear lingerie?
Then she realized why. For Karim, her Karim, whom she loved and who loved her, she would do anything. Love might have come late in her life, but it had come with the force of a mountain torrent.
United States Department of State Washington, D.C. 20520
February 5, 1991
MEMORANDUM FOR: Mr. James Baker FROM: Political Intelligence and Analysis Group
SUBJECT: Assassination of Saddam Hussein
CLASSIFICATION: EYES ONLY
It will certainly not have escaped your attention that since the inception of hostilities between the Coalition Air Forces flying out of Saudi Arabia and neighboring states, and the Republic of Iraq, at least two and possibly more attempts have been made to achieve the demise of the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein. All such attempts have been by aerial bombardment and exclusively by the United States.
This group therefore considers it urgent to spell out the likely consequences of a successful attempt to assassinate Mr. Hussein. The ideal outcome would, of course, be for any successor regime to the present Ba'ath Party dictatorship, set up under the auspices of the victorious Coalition forces, to take the form of a humane and democratic government.
We believe such a hope to be illusory. In the first place, Iraq is not nor ever was a united country. It is barely a generation away from being a patchwork quilt of rival, often warring tribes. It contains in almost equal parts two potentially hostile sects of Islam, the Sunni and Shi'a faiths, plus three Christian minorities. To these one should add the Kurdish nation in the north, vigorously pursuing its search for separate independence.
In the second place, there has never been a shred of democratic experience in Iraq, which has passed from Turkish to Hashemite to Ba'ath Party rule without the benefit of an intervening interlude of democracy as we understand it.
In the event, therefore, of the sudden end of the present dictatorship by assassination, there are only two realistic scenarios. The first would be an attempt to impose from outside a consensus government embracing all the principal factions along the lines of a broadly based coalition.
In the view of this group, such a structure would survive in power for an extremely limited period. Traditional and age-old rivalries would need little time literally to pull it apart.
The Kurds would certainly use the opportunity, so long denied, to opt for secession and the establishment of their own republic in the north. A weak central government in Baghdad based upon agreement by consensus would be impotent to prevent such a move. The Turkish reaction would be predictable and furious, since Turkey's own Kurdish minority along the border areas would lose no time in joining their fellow Kurds across the border in a much invigorated resistance to Turkish rule.
To the southeast, the Shi'a majority around Basra and the Shatt-al-Arab would certainly find good reason to make overtures to Teheran. Iran would be sorely tempted to avenge the slaughter of its young people in the recent Iran-Iraq war by entertaining those overtures in the hope of annexing southeastern Iraq in the face of the helplessness of Baghdad. The pro-Western Gulf States and Saudi Arabia would be precipitated into something approaching panic at the thought of an Iran reaching to the very border of Kuwait. Farther north, the Arabs of Iranian Arabistan would find common cause with their fellow Arabs across the border in Iraq, a move that would be vigorously repressed by the Ayatollahs in Teheran.
In the rump of Iraq we would almost certainly see an outbreak of intertribal fighting to settle old scores and establish supremacy over what was left.
We have all observed with distress the civil war now raging between Serbs and Croats in the former Yugoslavia. So far, this fighting has not yet spread to Bosnia, where a third component force in the form of the Bosnian Moslems awaits. When the fighting enters Bosnia, as one day it will, the slaughter will be even more appalling and even more intractable.
Nonetheless, this group believes that the misery of Yugoslavia will pale into insignificance compared with the scenario now painted for an Iraq in full disintegration. In such a case, one can look forward to a major civil war in the rump of the Iraqi heartland, four border wars, and the complete destabilization of the Gulf. The refugee problem alone would amount to millions.
The only other viable scenario is for Saddam Hussein to be succeeded by another general or senior member of the Ba'ath hierarchy. But as all those in the present hierarchy are as bloodstained as their leader, it is hard to see what benefits would accrue from the replacement of one monster by another, possibly even a cleverer despot.
The ideal, though admittedly not perfect, solution must therefore be the retention of the status quo in Iraq, except that all weapons of mass destruction must be destroyed and the conventional weapons power be so degraded as not to present a threat to any neighboring state for a minimum of a decade.
It could well be argued that the continuing human rights abuses of the present Iraqi regime, if it is allowed to survive, will prove most distressing. This is beyond any doubt. Yet the West has been required to witness terrible scenes in China, Russia, Vietnam, Tibet, East Timor, Cambodia, and many other parts of the world. It is simply not possible for the United States to impose humanity on a worldwide scale unless it is prepared to enter into permanent global war.
The least catastrophic outcome of the present war in the Gulf and the eventual invasion of Iraq is therefore the survival in power of Saddam Hussein as sole master of a unified Iraq, albeit militarily emasculated as regards foreign aggression.
For all the stated reasons, this group urges an end to all the efforts to assassinate Saddam Hussein, or to march to Baghdad and occupy Iraq.
Respectfully submitted, PIAG Mike Martin found the chalk mark on February 7 and retrieved the slim glassine envelope from the dead-letter box that same evening.
Shortly after midnight, he set up his satellite dish pointing out of the doorway of his shack and read the spidery Arabic script on the single page of onionskin paper straight into the tape machine. After the Arabic, he added his own English translation and sent the message at 0016 A.M., one minute into his window.
When the burst came through and the satellite caught it in Riyadh, the radio man on duty shouted: "He's here. Black Bear's coming through!"
The four sleepy men in the adjoining room ran in. The big tape machine against the wall slowed down and decrypted the message. When the technician punched the playback button, the room was filled with the sound of Martin speaking Arabic.
Paxman, whose Arabic was best, listened to the halfway point and hissed: "He's found it. Jericho says he's found it." "Quiet, Simon."
The Arabic stopped, and the English text began. When the voice stopped and signed off, Barber smacked one bunched fist into the palm of his other hand in excitement. "Boy, he's done it. Guys, can you get me a transcript of that--like, now?"
The technician ran the tape back, put on earphones, turned to his word processor, and began to type. Barber went to a telephone in the living room and called the underground headquarters of CENTAF. There was only one man he needed to talk to.
General Chuck Horner apparently needed very little sleep. No one either in the Coalition Command offices beneath the Saudi Defense Ministry or the CENTAF headquarters beneath the Saudi Air Force building on Old Airport Road was getting much sleep during those weeks, but General Horner seemed to get less than most. Perhaps when his beloved aircrew was aloft and flying deep into enemy territory, he did not feel able to sleep. As the flying was going on twenty-four hours per day, that left little sleeping time.
He had a habit of prowling the offices of the CENTAF complex in the middle of the night, ambling from the analysts of the Black Hole along to the Tactical Air Control Center. If a telephone rang unattended and he was near it, he would answer it.
Several bemused Air Force officers out in the desert, calling up for a clarification or with a query and expecting a duty major to come on the line, found themselves speaking to the boss himself. It was a very democratic habit, but it occasionally brought surprises.
On one occasion a squadron commander, who will have to remain nameless, called to complain that his pilots were nightly running a gauntlet of triple-A fire on their way to their targets. Could not the Iraqi gunners be squashed by a visit from the heavy bombers, the Buffs?
General Horner told the lieutenant colonel that this was not possible--the Buffs were fully tasked. The squadron commander out in the desert protested, but the answer was still the same. Well, said the lieutenant colonel, in that case you can suck me.
Very few officers can tell a full general to do that and get away with it. It says much for Chuck Horner's approach to his flying crews that two weeks later the feisty squadron commander got his promotion to full
colonel.
That was where Chip Barber found Horner that night, just before one o'clock, and they met in the general's private office inside the underground complex forty minutes later.
The general read the transcription of the English language text from Riyadh gloomily. Barber had used the word processor to annotate certain parts--it no longer looked like a radio message.
"This another of your deductions from interviewing businessmen in Europe?" he asked mordantly.
"We believe the information to be accurate, General."
Horner grunted. Like most combat men, he had little time for the covert world--the people referred to as spooks. It was ever thus.
The reason is simple. Combat is dedicated to the pursuit of optimism --cautious optimism perhaps, but nevertheless optimism --or no one would ever take part in it. The covert world is dedicated to the presumption of pessimism.
The two philosophies have little in common, and even at this stage of the war the U.S. Air Force was becoming increasingly irritated by the CIA's repeated suggestions that it was destroying fewer targets than it claimed.
"And is this supposed target associated with what I think it is?" asked the general.
"We just believe it to be very important, sir."
"Well, first thing, Mr. Barber, we're going to have a damn good look at it."
This time it was a TR-1 out of Taif that did the honors. An upgraded version of the old U-2, the TR-1 was being used as a multitask information gatherer, able to overfly Iraq out of sight and sound, using its technology to probe deep into the defenses with radar imaging and listening equipment. But it still had its cameras and was occasionally used not for the broad picture but for a single intimate mission. The task of photographing a location known only as Al Qubai was about as intimate as one can get.
There was a second reason for the TR-1: It can transmit its pictures in real time. No waiting for the mission to come back, download the TARPS, develop the film, and rush it across to Riyadh. As the TR-1 cruised over the designated patch of desert west of Baghdad and south of the Al-Muhammadi air base, the images it saw came straight to a television screen in the basement of the Saudi Air Force headquarters.
There were five men in the room, including the technician who operated the console and who could, at a word from the other four, order the computer to freeze-frame and run off a photographic print for study.
Chip Barber and Steve Laing were there, tolerated in their civilian dress in this mecca of military prowess; the other two were Colonel Beatty of the USAF and Squadron Leader Joe Peck of the RAF, both experts in target analysis.
The reason for using Al Qubai was simply that this was the nearest village to the target; as it was too small a settlement to show up on their maps, it was the accompanying grid reference and description that mattered to the analysts.
The TR-1 found it a few miles from the grid reference sent by Jericho, but there could be no question that the description was exact, and there were no other locations remotely near that fit the description. The four men watched the target swim into vision, freeze on the best frame, and hold. The modem punched out a print for study.
"It's under there?" breathed Laing.
"Must be," said Colonel Beatty. "There's nothing else like it for miles around."
"Cunning buggers," said Peck.
Al Qubai was in fact the nuclear engineering plant for Dr. Jaafar Al- Jaafar's entire Iraqi nuclear program. A British nuclear engineer once remarked that his craft was "ten percent genius and ninety percent plumbing". There is rather more to it than that.
The engineering plant is where craftsmen take the product of the physicists, the calculations of the mathematicians and the computers, and the results of the chemists and assemble the final product. It is the nuclear engineers who actually make the device into a deliverable piece of metal.
Iraq had buried its Al Qubai plant completely beneath the desert, eighty feet down, and that was just the level of the roof. Beneath the roof, three stories of workshops ran farther downward.
What caused Squadron Leader Peck's "cunning buggers" remark was the skill with which it had been disguised. It is not all that difficult to build an entire factory underground, but disguising it presents major problems.
Once it is constructed in its giant crater, sand may be bulldozed back against the ferroconcrete walls and over the roof until the building is concealed. Sinks beneath the lowest floor may cope with drainage. But the factory will need air conditioning; that requires a fresh-air intake and a foul-air outlet--both pipes jutting out of the desert floor.
It will also need masses of electric power, implying a powerful diesel generator. That too needs an air intake and exhaust outlet--two more pipes.
There must be a down-ramp or a passenger elevator and a cargo hoist for deliveries and departures of personnel and materials--another
above-surface structure. Delivery trucks cannot roll on soft sand; they need a hard road, a spur of tarmac running from the nearest main road.
There will be heat emissions, concealable during the day when the outside air is hot, but not during the chill nights. How therefore to disguise from aerial surveillance an area of virgin desert entertaining a tarmac road that seems to run to nowhere, four major pipes, an elevator shaft, the constant arrival and departure of trucks, and frequent heat emissions?
It was Colonel Osman Badri, the young genius of Iraq's Army Engineering Corps, who had cracked it; and his solution fooled the Allies with all their spy planes.
From the air, Al Qubai was a forty-five-acre automobile junkyard. Though the watchers in Riyadh, even with their best magnifiers, could not see it, four of the heaps of rusting car wrecks were welded frames--solid domes of twisted metal--beneath which pipes sucked in fresh air or filtered out the foul gases through the broken bodies of cars and vans.
The main shed, the cutting shop, with its steel tanks of oxygen and acetylene ostentatiously parked outside, hid the entry to the elevator shafts. The naturalness of welding in such a place would justify a heat source. The reason for the single-track tarred road was obvious--trucks needed to arrive with car wrecks and leave with scrap steel.
The whole system had actually been seen early on by AWACS, which registered a great mass of metal in the middle of the desert. Was it a tank division? An ammunition dump? An early fly-over had established it was just a car junkyard, and interest had been abandoned.
What the four men in Riyadh could also not see was that four other minimountains of rusted car bodies were also solidly welded frames,
internally shaped like domes, but with hydraulic jacks beneath them. Two of them housed powerful antiaircraft batteries, multibarreled ZSU- 23-4 Russian cannon; the other two concealed SAMs, models 6,8, and 9, not radar-guided but the smaller heat-seeking type--a radar dish would have given the game away.
"So it's under there," breathed Beatty. Even as they watched, a long truck loaded with old car bodies entered the picture. It seemed to move in little jerks, because the TR-1, flying eighty thousand feet above Al Qubai, was running off still frames at the rate of several a second. Fascinated, the two intelligence officers watched until the truck reversed into the welding shed.
"Betcha the food, water, and supplies are under the car bodies," said Beatty. He sat back. "Trouble is, we'll never get at the damn factory. Not even the Buffs can bomb that deep."
"We could close them down," said Peck. "Crush the lift shaft, seal 'em in. Then if they try any rescue work to unblock, we shoot them up again."
"Sounds good," agreed Beatty. "How many days till the land invasion?" "Twelve," said Barber.
"We can do it," said Beatty. "High-level, laser-guided, a mass of planes, a gorilla."
Laing shot Barber a warning glance. "We'd prefer something a little more discreet," said Barber. "A twoship raid, low-level, eyeball confirmation of destruction." There was silence.
"You guys trying to tell us something?" asked Beatty. "Like, Baghdad is not supposed to know we're interested?"
"Could you please do it that way?" urged Laing. "There don't seem to
be any defenses. The key here is disguise."
Beatty sighed. Fucking spooks, he thought. They're trying to protect someone. Well, none of my business. "What do you think, Joe?" he asked the squadron leader.
"The Tornados could do it," said Joe Peck, "with Buccaneers targetmarking for them. Six one-thousand-pound bombs right through the door of the shed. I'll bet that tin shed is ferroconcrete inside. Should contain the blast nicely."
Beatty nodded. "Okay, you guys have it. I'll clear it with General Horner. Who do you want to use, Joe?"
"Six-oh-eight Squadron, at Maharraq. I know the CO, Phil Curzon. Shall I get him over here?"
Wing Commander Philip Curzon commanded twelve of the Royal Air Force's Panavia Tornados of the 608th Squadron, on the island of Bahrain, where they had arrived two months earlier from their base at Laarbruck, Germany.
Just after noon that day, February 8, he received an order that brooked no denial: to report immediately to the CENTAF headquarters in Riyadh. So great was the urgency that by the time he had acknowledged the message, his orderly officer reported that a Beach King Air from Shakey's Pizza on the other side of the island had landed and was taxiing in to pick him up.
When he boarded the Beach King Air after throwing on a uniform jacket and cap, he discovered that the twin-engined executive plane was assigned to General Horner himself. "What the hell is going on?" the wing commander asked himself, and with justification.
At Riyadh military air base a USAF staff car was waiting to carry him the mile down Old Airport Road to the Black Hole. The four men who had been in conference to see the TR-1's mission pictures at ten that morning were still there. Only the technician was missing.
They needed no more pictures. The ones they had were spread all over the table. Squadron Leader Peck made the introductions. Steve Laing explained what was needed, and Curzon examined the photos.
Philip Curzon was no fool, or he would not have been commanding a squadron of Her Majesty's very expensive fighter-bombers. In the early low-level missions with JP-233 bombs against Iraqi airfields, he had lost two aircraft and four good men; two he knew were dead. The other two had just been paraded, battered and dazed, on Iraqi TV, another of Saddam's PR masterpieces.
"Why not put this target on the Air Tasking Order, like all the others?" he asked quietly. "Why the hurry?"
"Let me be perfectly straight with you," said Laing. "We now believe this target to house Saddam's principal and perhaps only store of a particularly vicious poison gas shell. There is evidence that the first stocks are about to be moved to the front. Hence the urgency."
Beatty and Peck perked up. This was the first explanation they had received to explain the spooks' interest in the factory beneath the junkyard.
"But two attack planes?" Curzon persisted. "Just two? That makes it a very low-priority mission. What am I supposed to tell my aircrew? I'm not going to lie to them, gentlemen. Please get that quite straight."
"There's no need, and I wouldn't tolerate that either," said Laing. "Just tell them the truth. That aerial surveillance has indicated movement of trucks to and from the site. The analysts believe them to be military trucks, and they have jumped to the conclusion this apparent scrapyard hides an ammunition dump--principally, inside that big central shed. So that's the target. As for a low-level mission, you can see there are no missiles, no triple-A."
"And that's the truth?" asked the wing commander.
"I swear it."
"Then why, gentlemen, the clear intention that if any of my crews are shot down and interrogated, Baghdad should not learn where the information really came from? You don't believe the military truck story any more than I do."
Colonel Beatty and Squadron Leader Peck sat back. This man really was squeezing the spooks hard where it hurt most. Good for him.
"Tell him, Chip," said Laing in resignation.
"Okay, Wing Commander, I'll level with you. But this is for your ears only. The rest is absolutely true. We have a defector. In the States. Came over before the war as a graduate student. Now he's fallen for an American girl and wants to stay. During the interviews with the immigration people, something came up. A smart interviewer passed him over to us."
"The CIA?" asked Curzon. "Okay, yes, the CIA. We did a deal with the guy. He gets the green card, he helps us. When he was in Iraq, in Army Engineers, he worked on a few secret projects. Now he's spilling all. So now you know. But it's top classification. It doesn't alter the mission, and it isn't lying for you not to tell the aircrew that--which, incidentally, you may not do."
"One last question," said Curzon. "If the man is safe in the States, why the need to fool Baghdad anymore?"
"There are other targets he's spilling for us. It takes time, but we may get twenty fresh targets out of him. We alert Baghdad that he's singing like a canary, they move the goodies somewhere else by night. They can add two and two as well, you know."
Philip Curzon rose and gathered the photos. Each had its exact grid reference on the map stamped on one side. "All right. Dawn tomorrow. That shed will cease to exist."
Then he left. On the flight back he mulled over the mission. Something inside him said it stank like an old cod. But the explanations were perfectly feasible, and he had his orders. He would not lie, but he had been forbidden to disclose everything. The good part was, the target was based on deception, not protection. His men should get in and out unscathed. He already knew who would lead the attack.
Squadron Leader Lofty Williamson was happily sprawled in a chair in the evening sun when the call came. He was reading the latest edition of World Air Power Journal, the combat pilots' bible, and was annoyed to be torn away from a superbly authoritative article on one of the Iraqi fighters he might run into.
The squadron commander was in his office, photos spread out before him. For an hour he briefed his senior flight commander on what was wanted.
"You'll have two Bucks to mark target for you, so you should be able to loft and get the hell out of there before the ungodly know what's hit 'em."
Williamson found his navigator, the rear-seat man the Americans call the wizzo, who nowadays does a lot more than navigate, being in charge of air electronics and weapons systems. Flight Lieutenant Sid Blair was reputed to be able to find a tin can in the Sahara if it needed bombing.
Between them, with the aid of the Operations people, they mapped out the mission. The exact location of the junkyard was found, from its grid reference, on their air maps. The pilot made plain that he wanted to attack from the east at the very
moment of the rising of the sun, so that any Iraqi gunners would have the light in their eyes while he, Williamson, would see the target with complete clarity.
Blair insisted he wanted a "stone bonker," some unmistakable landmark along the run-in track by which he could make tiny lastminute adjustments on his course-to-steer. They found one twelve miles back from the target in an easterly direction--a radio mast exactly one mile from the run-in track.
Going in at dawn would give them the vital Time on Target, or TOT, that they needed. The reason the TOT must be followed to the second is that precision makes the difference between success and failure.
If the first pilot is late even by one second, the follow-up pilot could run right into the explosion of his colleague's bombs; worse, the first pilot will have a Tornado coming up on his rear at nearly ten miles a minute--not a pretty sight. Finally, if the first pilot is too early or the second pilot too late, the gunners will have time to wake up, man their guns, and aim them. So the second fliers go in just as the shrapnel of the first explosions subside.
Williamson brought in his wingman and the second navigator, two young flight lieutenants, Peter Johns and Nicky Tyne. The precise moment the sun should rise over the low hills to the east of the target was agreed at 0708 hours, and the attack heading at 270 degrees due west.
Two Buccaneers from the 12th Squadron, also based at Maharraq, had been assigned. Williamson would liaise with their pilots in the morning. The armorers had been instructed to fit three one-thousand pound bombs equipped with PAVEWAY laser-guidance noses to each Tornado. At eight that night, the four aircrew ate and went to bed, with a morning call set for three A.M.
It was still pitch-black when an aircraftman in a truck came to the 608th Squadron's sleeping quarters to take the four crewmen to the flight hut.
If the Americans at Al Kharz were roughing it under canvas, those based on Bahrain enjoyed the comfort of civilized living. Some were bunking two to a room at the Sheraton Hotel. Others were in brickbuilt bachelor quarters nearer the air base. The food was excellent, drink was available, and the worst loneliness of the combat life was assuaged by the presence of three hundred female trainee flight attendants at the nearby training school of Gulf Air.
The Buccaneers had been brought out to the Gulf only a week earlier, having first been told they were not wanted. Since then, they had more than proved their worth. Essentially submarine-busters, the Bucks were more accustomed to skimming the waters of the North Sea looking for Soviet submersibles, but they did not mind the desert either.
Their speciality was low flying, and although they were thirty-year-old veterans, they had been known, in interservice war games with the USAF at the Navy Fighter School in Miramar, California, to evade the much faster American fighters simply by "eating dirt"--flying so low as to become impossible to follow through the buttes and mesas of the desert.
The inter-air-force rivalry will have it that the Americans do not like low flying and under five hundred feet tend to lower their undercarriages, whereas the Royal Air Force love it and above one hundred feet complain of altitude sickness. In fact, both can fly low or high, but the Bucks, not supersonic but amazingly maneuverable, figure they can go lower than anyone and survive.
The reason for their appearance in the Gulf was the original losses sustained by the Tornados on their first ultra-low-level missions. Working alone, the Tornados had to launch their bombs and then follow them all the way to the target, right into the heart of the triple- A.
But when they and the Buccaneers worked together, the Tornados' bombs carried the laser-seeking PAVEWAY nose cone, while the Bucks bore the laser transmitter, called PAVESPIKE. Riding above and behind a Tornado, a Buck could "mark" the target, letting the Tornado release the bomb and then get the hell out without delay.
Moreover, the Buck's PAVESPIKE was mounted in a gyroscopically stabilized gimbal in its belly, so that it too could twist and weave, while keeping the laser beam right on the target until the bomb arrived and hit.
In the flight hut, Williamson and the two Buck pilots agreed to set their IP--Initial Point, the start of the bomb run--at twelve miles east of the target shed. Then they went to change into flying gear.
As usual, they had arrived in civilian clothes; the policy on Bahrain was that too much military out on the streets might alarm the locals. When they were all changed, Williamson as mission commander completed the briefing.
It was still two hours to takeoff. The thirtysecond "scramble" of Second World War pilots was a long way gone. There was time for coffee and the next stage of preparations.
Each man picked up his handgun, a small Walther PPK that they all loathed, figuring that if attacked in the desert they might as well throw it at an Iraqi's head and hope to knock him out that way.
They also drew their ?000 in five gold sovereigns and the "goolie chit." This remarkable document was first introduced to the Americans in the Gulf War, but the British, who have been flying combat in those parts since the 1920s, understood them well.
A goolie chit is a letter in Arabic and six kinds of Bedouin dialect. It says in effect, "Dear Mr. Bedou, the presenter of this letter is a British officer. If you return him to the nearest British patrol, complete with his testicles and preferably where they ought to be and not in his mouth, you will be rewarded with ?000 in gold." Sometimes it works.
The flying uniforms had reflective shoulder patches that could possibly be detected by Allied seekers if a pilot came down in the desert; but no wings above the left breast pocket, just a Velcroed Union Jack patch.
After coffee came sterilization--not as bad as it sounds. All rings, cigarettes, lighters, letters, and family photos were removed, anything that might give an interrogator a lever on the personality of his prisoner.
The strip search was carried out by a stunning WAAF named Pamela Smith--the aircrew figured this was the best part of the mission, and younger pilots dropped their valuables into the most surprising places to see if Pamela could find them. Fortunately, she had once been a nurse and accepted this nonsense with calm good humor.
One hour to takeoff. Some men ate, some couldn't, some cat-napped, some drank coffee and hoped they would not have to pee halfway through the mission, and some threw up.
The bus took the eight men to their aircraft, already buzzing with riggers, fitters, and armorers. Each pilot walked around his ship, checking through the pretakeoff ritual. Finally they climbed aboard. The first task was to get settled, fully strapped in, and linked to the Have-quick radio so that they could talk.
Then the APU--the auxiliary power unit that set all the instruments dancing. In the rear the inertial navigation platform came alive, giving Sid Blair the chance to punch in his planned courses and turns. Williamson started his right engine, which began to howl softly, then the left.
Close canopy, taxi to number one, the holding point. Clearance from the tower, taxi to takeoff point. Williamson glanced to his right. Peter Johns's Tornado was beside him and a bit back, and beyond him the two Buccaneers. He raised a hand. Three white-gloved hands rose in return.
Foot brakes on, run up to maximum "dry" power. The Tornado was trembling gently. Through the throttle gate into afterburn, now she was shuddering against the brakes. A final thumbs-up and three acknowledgments. Brakes off, the surge, the roll, the tarmac flashing by faster and faster, and then they were up, four in formation, banking over the dark sea, the lights of Manama dropping behind, setting course for the rendezvous with the tanker waiting for them somewhere over the Saudi border with Iraq.
Williamson brought the power setting out of afterburn and settled into a climb at 300 knots to twenty thousand feet. With radar, they found the tanker in the darkness, closed behind her, and inserted their fuel nozzles into the trailing drogues.
Once topped up, all four turned and dropped away down to the desert. Williamson leveled his detail at two hundred feet, setting a maximum cruise at 480 knots, and thus they sped into Iraq.
He was flying with the aid of TIALD, the Thermal Imaging and Laser Designator, which was the British equivalent of the LANTIRN system. Low over the black desert, the pilots could see everything ahead of them, the rocks, the cliffs, the outcrops, the hills, as if they glowed.
Just before the sun rose, they turned at the IP onto the bombing run. Sid Blair saw the radio mast and told his pilot to adjust course by one degree. Williamson flicked his bomb-release catches to slave mode and glanced at his Head-Up Display, which was running off the miles and
seconds to release point. He was down to a hundred feet, over flat ground and holding steady. Somewhere behind him, his wingman was doing the same.
Time on Target was exact. He was easing the throttle in and out of afterburn to maintain an attack speed of 540 knots. The sun cleared the hills, the first beams sliced across the plain, and there it was at six miles. He could see the metal glinting, the mounds of junked cars, and the great gray shed in the center, the double doors pointing toward him. The Bucks were a hundred feet above and a mile back. The talkthrough from the Bucks, which had begun at the IP, continued in his ears. Six miles and closing, five miles, some movement in the target area, four miles.
"I am marking," said the first Buck navigator. The laser beam from the Buck was right on the door of the shed. At three miles, Williamson began his "loft," easing the nose up, blanking out his vision of the target. No matter, the technology would do the rest.
At three hundred feet his HUD told him to release. He flicked the bomb switch, and all three one-thousand-pound bombs flew away from his underside. Because he was lofting, the bombs rose slightly with him before gravity took over and they began a graceful downward parabola toward the shed.
With his plane one and a half tons lighter, he rose fast to a thousand feet, then threw on 135 degrees of bank and kept pulling at the control column. The Tornado was diving and turning, back to the earth and back the way it had come. His Buck flashed over him, then pulled away in its turn.
Because he had a TV camera in the belly of his aircraft, the Buccaneer navigator could see the bombs' impact right on the doors of the shed. The entire area in front of the shed dissolved in a sheet of flame and
smoke, while a pillar of dust rose from the place where the shed had been.
As it began to settle. Peter Johns in the second Tornado was coming in, thirty seconds behind his leader. The Buck navigator saw more than that. The movements he had seen earlier codified into a pattern. Guns were visible. "They've got triple-A!" he shouted.
The second Tornado was lofting. The second Buccaneer could see it all. The shed, blown to pieces under the impact of the first three bombs, revealed an inner structure twisted and bent. But there were antiaircraft cannon blazing among the mounds of wrecked cars.
"Bombs gone!" yelled Johns, and hauled his Tornado into a maximum- G turn. His own Buccaneer was also pulling away from the target, but its belly PAVESPIKE kept the beam on the remains of the shed. "Impact!" screamed the Buck's navigator.
There was a flicker of fire among the car wrecks. Two shoulder-borne SAMs hared off after the Tornado. Williamson had leveled from his turning dive, back to one hundred feet above the desert but heading the other way, toward the now-risen sun. He heard Peter Johns's voice shout, "We're hit!" Behind him, Sid Blair was silent.
Swearing in his anger, Williamson pulled the Tornado around again, thinking there might be a chance of holding off the Iraqi gunners with his cannon. He was too late.
He heard one of the Bucks say, "They've got missiles down there," and then he saw Johns's Tornado, climbing, streaming smoke from a blazing engine, heard the twenty-five-year-old say quite clearly, "Going down ... ejecting."
There was nothing more any of them could do. In earlier missions the Bucks used to accompany the Tornados home. By this date, it had been agreed the Bucks could go home on their own. In silence the two target markers did what they did best: They got their bellies right on the desert in the morning sun and kept them there all the way home.
Lofty Williamson was in a blind rage, convinced he had been lied to. He had not; no one knew about the triple-A and the missiles hidden at Al Qubai.
High above, a TR-1 sent real-time pictures of the destruction back to Riyadh. An E-3 Sentry had heard all the in-air talk and told Riyadh they had lost a Tornado crew.
Lofty Williamson came home alone, to debrief and vent his anger on the target selectors in Riyadh. In the CENTAF headquarters on Old Airport Road, the delight of Steve Laing and Chip Barber that the Fist of God had been buried in the womb where it had been created was marred by the loss of the two young men.