Chapter 15
The deadline for Saddam Hussein to leave Kuwait expired at midnight on January 15. In a thousand rooms, huts, tents, and cabins across Saudi Arabia, and in the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf, men glanced at their watches and then at each other. There was very little to say.
Two floors beneath the Saudi Defense Ministry, behind the steel doors that would have protected any bank vault in the world, there was almost a sense of anticlimax. After all that work, all that planning, there was nothing more to do--for a couple of hours. Now it was down to the younger men. They had their tasks, and they would carry them out in the pitch blackness far above the generals' heads.
At 2:15 A.M., General Schwarzkopf entered the war room. Everyone stood. He read aloud a message to the troops, the chaplain said a prayer, and the commander-in-chief said, "Okay, let's get to work."
Far out across the desert, men were already at work. First across the border were not the warplanes but a flight of eight Apache helicopters belonging to the Army's 101st Airborne Division. Their task was limited but crucial. North of the border but short of Baghdad were two powerful Iraqi radar bases, whose dishes commanded all the skies from the Gulf in the east to the western desert.
The helicopters had been chosen, despite their slow speed compared with supersonic jet fighters, for two reasons. Skimming the desert, they could pass under the radar and approach the bases unseen; further, the commanders wanted human-eyeball confirmation that the bases were really wrecked, and from close range. Only the choppers could give that. It would cost a lot of lives if those radars were left functioning.
The Apaches did all that was asked. They had still not been noticed when they opened fire. All their crew had night-vision helmets, which look as if they have short binoculars sticking out the front. They give the pilot complete night vision, so that in utter darkness to the naked eye he can see everything as if it were illuminated by a brilliant moon. First they shattered the electrical generators that powered the radars, then the communications facilities from which their presence could be reported to missile sites farther inland; finally, they blew away the radar dishes.
In less than two minutes they had loosed twenty-seven Hellfire laserguided missiles, a hundred 70-mm. rockets, and four thousand rounds of heavy-duty cannon fire. Both radar sites were left smoldering ruins. The mission opened a huge hole in the air defense system of Iraq, and through this hole poured the remainder of the night's attack.
Those who saw General Chuck Horner's air-war plan later suggested it was probably one of the most brilliant ever devised. It contained a surgical, step-by-step precision and enough flexibility to cope with any contingency that required a variation.
Stage one was quite clear in its objectives and led on to the other three stages. It was to destroy all Iraq's air defense systems and convert the Allies' air superiority, with which they started, into air supremacy. For the other three stages to succeed within the self-imposed thirty-five day time limit, Allied aircraft had to have the absolute run of Iraqi air space without hindrance.
In suppressing the air defense of Iraq, the key was radar. In modern warfare, radar is the single most important and most used tool, despite the brilliance of all the others in the armory. Radar detects incoming warplanes; radar guides your own fighters to intercept; radar guides the antiaircraft missiles; and radar aims the guns.
Destroying the radar makes the enemy blind, like a heavyweight boxer in the ring with no eyes. He may be big and powerful still, he may pack a fearsome punch, but his enemy can move around the sightless Samson, jabbing and slashing at the helpless giant until the foregone conclusion is reached.
With the great hole punched in the forward radar cover of Iraq, the Tornados and Eagles, the F-111 Aardvarks and F-4G Wild Weasels powered through the gap, going for the radar sites farther inland,
heading for the missile bases guided by those radars, aiming for the command centers where the Iraqi generals sat, and blowing away the communications posts through which the generals were trying to talk to their outlying units.
From the battleships Wisconsin and Missouri and the cruiser San Jacinto out in the Gulf, fifty-two Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched that night. Guiding themselves by a combination of computerized memory bank and television nose camera, Tomahawks hug the contours of the landscape, swerving on preordained courses to where they have to go. When in the area, they "see" the target, compare it with the one in their memory, identify the exact building, and home in.
The Wild Weasel is a version of the Phantom, but specializing in radar destruction. It carries HARMs, High-speed Anti-Radiation Missiles. When a radar dish lights up or "illuminates," it emits electromagnetic waves, including infrared. It can't help it. The HARM's job is to find those waves with its sensors and go straight to the heart of the radar before exploding.
Perhaps strangest of all the warplanes slipping northward through the sky that night was the F-117A, known as the Stealth fighter. All black, created in such a shape that its multiple angles reflect most of the radar waves directed at it and absorb the rest into its own body, the Stealth fighter refuses to bounce hostile radar waves back to the receiver and thereby betray its existence to the enemy. Thus invisible, the American F-117As that night simply slid unnoticed through Iraqi radar screens to drop their two-thousand-pound laserguided bombs precisely onto thirty-four targets associated with the national air defense system. Thirteen of those targets were in and around Baghdad.
When the bombs landed, the Iraqis fired blindly upward but could see nothing and missed. In Arabic, the Stealths were called shabah; it means "ghost." They came from the secret base of Khamis Mushait deep in the south of Saudi Arabia, where they had been transferred from their equally secret home at Tonopah, Nevada.
While less fortunate American airmen had to live in tents, Khamis Mushait had been built miles from anywhere but with hardened aircraft shelters and air-conditioned accommodation, which was why the prized Stealths had been put there. Because they flew so far, theirs were among the longest missions of the war, up to six hours from takeoff to landing, and all under strain.
They threaded their way undetected through some of the most intense air defense systems in the world--those of Baghdad--and not one was ever touched, on that or any other night. When they had done what they came to do, they slipped away again, cruising like stingrays in a calm sea, and went back to Khamis Mushait.
The most dangerous job of the night went to the British Tornados. Their task then, and for the next week until it was discontinued, was "airfield denial," using their big, heavy JP-233 runway-busting bombs.
Their problem was twofold. The Iraqis had built their military airfields to be absolutely vast. Tallil was four times the size of Heathrow, with sixteen runways and taxi tracks that could be used for takeoff and landing as well. It was simply impossible to destroy it all.
The second problem was one of height and speed. The JP-233s had to be launched from a Tornado in stabilized straight and level flight. Even after bomb launch, the Tornados had no choice but to overfly the target. Even if the radars were knocked out, the gunners weren't; antiaircraft artillery, known as triple-A, came up at them in rolling waves as they approached, so that one pilot described those missions as "flying through tubes of molten steel."
The Americans had abandoned tests on the JP-233 bomb, judging it to be a pilot-killer. They were right. But the RAF crews pressed on, losing planes and crews until they were called off and given other duties.
The bomb-droppers were not the only planes aloft that night. Behind them and with them flew an extraordinary array of backup services. Air superiority fighters flew cover on and over the strike bombers.
The Iraqi ground controllers' instructions to their own pilots--the few who managed to take off that night--were jammed by the American Air Force Ravens and the Navy equivalent Prowlers. Iraqi pilots aloft got no verbal instructions and no radar guidance. Most, wisely, went straight back home.
Circling south of the border were sixty tankers: American KC-135s and KC-10s, U.S. Navy KA-6Ds, and British Victors and VC-10s. Their job was to receive the warplanes coming up from Saudi Arabia, refuel them for the mission, then meet them on the way back to give them more fuel to get home. This may sound routine, but actually doing it in pitch darkness was described by one flier as "trying to shove spaghetti up a wildcat's backside."
And out over the Gulf, where they had been for five months, the U.S. Navy's E-2 Hawkeyes and the USAF's E-3 Sentry AWACS circled around and around, their radars picking up every friendly and every enemy aircraft in the sky, warning, advising, guiding, and watching.
By dawn, Iraq's radars had mostly been crushed, her missile bases blinded, and her main command centers ruined. It would take four more days and nights to complete the job, but air supremacy was
already in sight.
Later would come the power-generating stations, telecommunications towers, telephone exchanges, relay stations, aircraft shelters, control towers, and all those known facilities for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction.
Later still would come the systematic "degradation" to less than fifty percent of its fighting power of the Iraqi Army south and southwest of the Kuwaiti border, a condition on which General Schwarzkopf insisted before he would attack with ground troops.
Two then-unknown factors would later cause changes to the course of the war. One was Iraq's decision to launch a barrage of Scud missiles at Israel; the other would be triggered by an act of sheer frustration on the part of Captain Don Walker of the 336th Tactical Fighter Squadron.
Dawn broke on the morning of January 17 over a Baghdad that was very badly shaken. The ordinary citizens had not slept a wink from three A.M. on, and when daylight came, some of them ventured out to peer curiously at the rubble of a score of major sites across their city.
That they had survived the night seemed to many miraculous, for they were simple folk who did not realize that the twenty smoking mounds of rubble had been carefully selected and hit with such precision that the citizenry had been in no mortal danger. But the real sense of shock was among the hierarchs.
Saddam Hussein had left the Presidential Palace and was lodged in his extraordinary multistory bunker behind and beneath the Rashid Hotel, which was still full of Westerners, mainly from the media. The bunker had been built years earlier inside a vast crater dug by earth-movers, with mainly Swedish technology.
So sophisticated were its security measures that it was in fact a box within a box, and beneath and around the inner box were springs of such strength as to protect the inhabitants from a nuclear bomb, reducing shock waves that would flatten the city above into a minor tremor down below.
Although access was via a hydraulically operated ramp set in waste ground behind the hotel, the main structure was beneath the Rashid, which had deliberately been built on the ground above as a specific repose for Westerners in Baghdad. Any enemy wishing to attempt a deep-penetration bombing of the bunker would have to obliterate the Rashid first.
Try as they might, the sycophants surrounding the Rais were hard put to create a gloss over the night's disasters. Slowly, the level of the catastrophe penetrated all their minds.
They had all counted on a blanket bombing of the city, which would have left residential areas flattened and thousands of innocent civilians dead. This carnage would then be shown to the media, who would film it all and show it to the sickened audiences back home. Thus would begin the global wave of revulsion against President Bush and the United States, culminating in an emergency session of the UN Security Council and the veto of China and Russia against further massacre.
By midday, it was plain that the Sons of Dogs from across the Atlantic were not obliging. So far as the Iraqi generals were aware, the bombs fell approximately where they had been aimed, but that was all. With every major military installation in Baghdad deliberately sited in densely populated housing areas, it should have been impossible for massive civilian casualties to be avoided. Yet while a tour of the city revealed twenty command posts, missile sites, radar bases, and communication centers blasted to rubble, those not in the targeted buildings had sustained little more than broken windows and were even now gaping at the mess.
The authorities had to be satisfied with inventing a civilian death toll and claims that American aircraft had been shot out of the skies like autumn leaves. Most Iraqis, stultified by years of propaganda, believed these first reports--for a while.
The generals in charge of air defense knew better. By midday, it was clear to them that they had lost almost all their radar warning ability, that their SAMs--surface-to-air missiles--were blind, and that communication with the outlying units was all but cut.
Worse, the radar operators who had survived kept insisting the damage had been done by bombers that simply had not shown up on their screens. The liars were at once put under arrest.
Some civilian casualties had indeed occurred. At least two Tomahawk cruise missiles, their fins damaged by conventional triple-A gunfire rather than SAMs, had crashed off-target. One had demolished two houses and blown tiles off a mosque, an outrage that the press corps was shown during the afternoon.
The other had fallen on waste ground and made a large crater. During the late afternoon the body of a woman was found at the bottom of it, badly smashed by the impact that apparently killed her.
Bombing raids continued throughout the day, so that the ambulance crews were not prepared to do more than wrap the corpse hastily in a blanket, bring it to the morgue of the nearest hospital, and leave it there. The hospital happened to be close to a major Air Force command center that had been demolished, and all beds were occupied by service personnel wounded in the attack. Several scores of bodies were taken to the same morgue, all dead from bomb blasts. The woman's was just one of them.
With his resources at the breaking point, the pathologist worked fast and cursorily. Identification and cause of death were his principal priorities, and he had no time for leisured examination. Across the city the crump of more bombs could be heard, and the blast of counterfire was unceasing. He had no doubt the evening and night would bring him more bodies.
What surprised the doctor was that all his dead bodies were service personnel, except the woman. She seemed to be about thirty and had once been comely. The concrete dust clinging to the blood of her smashed face, coupled with the place she had been found, gave cause for no other explanation than that she had been running away when the missile struck the waste ground and killed her.
The body was so tagged, then wrapped for burial. Her handbag had been found next to the body, and it contained a powder compact, lipstick, and her identity cards. Having established that one Leila Al-Hilla was undoubtedly a civilian victim of a bomb blast, the harassed pathologist had her taken away for hasty burial.
The more elaborate post-mortem for which he did not have time that January 17 would have shown the woman had been repeatedly and savagely raped before being systematically beaten to death. The dumping in the crater had come several hours later.
General Abdullah Kadiri had moved from his sumptuous office in the Defense Ministry two days earlier. There was no point in staying to be blown to bits by an American bomb, and he was sure the Ministry would be hit and destroyed before the air war was many days old.
He was right. He had established himself in his villa, which he was reasonably certain was anonymous enough--albeit luxurious--not to be on any American target map. In this too he was right.
The villa had long since been provided with its own communications room, which staff from the Ministry were now manning. All his communications to the various command headquarters of the Armored Corps around Baghdad were by buried fiber-optic cable, which was also out of reach of the bombers. Only the farther units had to be contacted by radio, with a threat of intercept--plus, of course, those in Kuwait.
His problem, as darkness fell over Baghdad that night, was not how to contact his Armored Corps commanders or what orders to give them. They could take no part in the air war, being tasked to disperse their tanks as widely as possible among the rows of dummies or bury them in the subterranean bunkers and wait. His problem, rather, was his personal security, and it was not the Americans he feared.
Two nights earlier, rising from his bed with a bursting bladder, bleary with arak as usual, he had stumbled to the bathroom. Finding the door, as he thought, stuck, he had pushed hard. His two hundred pounds of body weight had torn the inner bolt from its screws, and the door flew open.
Bleary he might have been, but Abdullah Kadiri had not come from a back street near Tikrit to command all Iraq's tanks outside the Republican Guard, had not climbed the slippery ladder of Ba'ath Party internal feuding, and had not sustained a trusted place on the Revolutionary Command Council without ample reserves of animal cunning.
He had stared in silence at his mistress, sitting wrapped in a robe on the toilet seat, her paper sustained by the back of a Kleenex box, her mouth in a round O of horror and surprise, her pen still poised in midair. Then he had hauled her to her feet and hit her on the point of the jaw.
When she came to, with a jug of water dashed in the face, he had had time to read the report she was preparing and to summon the trusty Kemal from his quarters across the yard. It was Kemal who had taken the whore down to the basement.
Kadiri had read and reread the report she had almost finished. Had it concerned his personal habits and preferences, a lever for future blackmail, he would have dismissed it and simply had her killed. In any case, no blackmail would ever have worked. The personal baseness of some of the entourage of the Rais was greater than his own, he knew. He also knew that the Rais did not care.
This was worse. Apparently he had talked of things that had happened within the government and the Army. That she was spying was obvious. He needed to know for how long and what she had reported already, but most of all, for whom. Kemal took his long-awaited pleasures first, with his master's permission.
No man would lust after what remained when Kemal had finished the interrogation. It had taken several hours. Then, Kadiri knew, Kemal had gotten it all--at least, all the courtesan knew. After that, Kemal had continued for his own amusement until she was dead.
Kadiri was convinced that she had not known the real identity of the man who had recruited and ran her to spy on him, but the picture had to fit Hassan Rahmani. The description of the information-against-money exchanges in the confessional of St. Joseph's showed the man was professional, and Rahmani was certainly that.
That he should be watched did not worry Kadiri. All those around the Rais were watched; indeed, they watched each other. The rules of the Rais were simple and clear. Every figure of high rank was watched and reported on by three of his peers. A denunciation for treachery could and probably would lead to ruin. Thus, few conspiracies could get very far.
One of those confided in would report the matter, and it would come to the ears of the Rais. To complicate matters, each member of the entourage was occasionally provoked, to see what his reaction would be.
A colleague, briefed to do so, would take his friend aside and propose treason. If the friend agreed, he was finished. If he failed to report the proposer, he was finished. So any approach could be a provocation--it was simply too unsafe to assume otherwise. Thus, each reported on the others.
But this was different. Rahmani was head of Counterintelligence. Had he taken the initiative on his own, and if so, why? Was it an operation with the knowledge and approval of the Rais himself, and if so, why? What had he said? the general wondered. Things indiscreet, no doubt. But traitorous?
The body had stayed in the basement until the bombs fell, then Kemal had found a crater on a patch of waste ground to dump it. The general had insisted the handbag be placed nearby. Let that bastard Rahmani know what had happened to his slut.
As midnight passed, General Abdullah Kadiri sweated alone, tipping a few drops of water into his tenth tumbler of arak. If it was Rahmani alone, he would finish the bastard. But how could he know how far up the ladder he was distrusted? He would have to be careful henceforth, more careful than he had ever been before. Those late-night trips into the city would end. In any case, with the air war started, it was time to cease.
Simon Paxman had flown back again to London. There was no point in staying in Riyadh. Jericho had been kicked firmly into touch by the CIA, although the unseen renegade in Baghdad would not know it yet, and Mike Martin was confined to quarters until he could escape to the desert and find his way to safety across the border.
Later, Paxman could swear with his hand on his heart the meeting on the evening of the eighteenth with Dr. Terry Martin had been a true coincidence. He knew Martin lived in Bayswater, as he did himself, but it is a large borough with many shops. With his wife away at the bedside of her sick mother and his own return unforeseen, Paxman had come home to an empty flat and an empty fridge, so he went shopping at an open-late supermarket on Westbourne Grove.
Terry Martin's cart nearly crashed into his own as he came around the corner of pastas and pet food. Both men were startled. "Am I allowed to know you?" asked Martin with an embarrassed grin. There was no one else in that aisle at the time. "Why not?" said Paxman. "I'm just a humble civil servant shopping for his evening meal."
They finished their purchases together and agreed to adjourn to an Indian restaurant for a meal rather than cook at home alone. Hilary, it seemed, was also away. Paxman should, of course, not have done it. He should never have felt uncomfortable that Terry Martin's elder brother was in a situation of appalling danger and that he, with others, had sent him into it. It should not have worried him that the trusting scholar should really believe that his adored sibling was safe inside Saudi Arabia. All tradecraft insists that one does not worry about that sort of thing. But he did.
There was another worry. Steve Laing was his superior at Century House, but Laing had never been to Iraq. His background was in Egypt and Jordan. Paxman knew Iraq--and Arabic. Not like Terry Martin, of course, but Martin was exceptional.
Paxman knew enough, from several visits before he had been made head of the Iraq Desk, to form a sincere respect for the quality of Iraqi scientists and the ingenuity of their engineers. It was no secret that most British technical institutes considered their graduates from Iraq the best in the Arab world.
The worry that had nagged at him since he was told by his superiors that the last Jericho report could be none other than a load of nonsense was simply the fear that, despite all the odds, Iraq might actually be further ahead than the Western scientists were prepared to credit.
He waited until the two meals had arrived, surrounded by small pots of the accessories without which no Indian meal is complete, then made up his mind. "Terry," he said, "I am going to do something which, if it ever got out, would mean the end of my career in the Service."
Martin was startled. "That sounds drastic. Why?" "Because I have been officially warned off you."
The scholar was about to spoon some mango chutney onto his plate, then stopped. "I am not thought to be reliable anymore? It was Steve Laing who pulled me into all this."
"It's not that. The view is that--you worry too much." Paxman was not prepared to use Laing's word fusspot.
"Perhaps I do. It's the training. Academics do not like puzzles that seem to have no answer. We have to go on worrying at it until the
jumbled hieroglyphic makes sense. Was it that business of the phrase in the intercept?"
"Yes, that and other things." Paxman had chosen chicken khorma; Martin liked his hotter--vindaloo. Because he knew his eastern food, Martin drank hot black tea, not ice-cold beer, which only makes things worse. He blinked at Paxman over the edge of his mug. "All right. So what is the great confession?"
"Will you give me your word that this goes no further?" "Of course." "There's been another intercept."
Paxman had not the slightest intention of revealing the existence of Jericho. The group who knew of that asset in Iraq was still tiny and would stay that way.
"Can I listen to it?" "No. It's been suppressed. Don't approach Sean Plummer. He'd have to deny it, and that would reveal where you got the information."
Martin helped himself to more raita to cool down the flaming curry. "What does it say, this new intercept?"
Paxman told him. Martin put down his fork and wiped his face, which was bright pink beneath the ginger thatch of his hair.
"Can it--could it, under any circumstances, be true?" asked Paxman. "I don't know. I'm not a physicist. The brass has given it a no-no?"
"Absolutely. The nuclear scientists all agree it simply cannot be true. So Saddam was lying."
Privately, Martin thought it was a very odd radio intercept. It sounded more like information from inside a closed meeting.
"Saddam lies," Martin said, "all the time. But usually for public consumption. This was to his own inner core of confidants? I wonder
why? Morale booster on the threshold of war?"
"That's what the powers think," said Paxman.
"Have the generals been told?" "No. The reasoning is, they are extremely busy right now and do not need to be bothered by something that simply has to be rubbish."
"So what do you want from me, Simon?" "Saddam's mind. No one can figure it out. Nothing he does makes sense in the West. Is he certifiably insane or crazy like a fox?"
"In his world, the latter. In his world, what he does makes sense. The terror that revolts us has no moral downside for him, and it makes sense. The threats and the bluster make sense to him. Only when he tries to enter our world--with those ghastly PR exercises in Baghdad, ruffling that little English boy's hair, playing the benign uncle, that sort of thing--only when he tries that does he look a complete fool. In his own world he is not a fool. He survives, he stays in power, he keeps Iraq united, his enemies fail and perish."
"Terry, as we sit here, his country is being pulverized." "It doesn't matter, Simon. It's all replaceable."
"But why did he say what he is supposed to have said?"
"What do the powers think?" "That he lied." "No," said Martin, "he lies for public consumption. To his inner core, he doesn't have to. They are his, anyway. Either the source of the information lied and Saddam never said that; or he said it because he believed it was true."
"Then he was himself lied to?" "Possibly. Whoever did that will pay dearly when he finds out. But then, the intercept could be phony. A deliberate bluff, designed to be intercepted."
Paxman could not say what he knew: that it was not an intercept. It came from Jericho. And in two years under the Israelis and three months under the Anglo-Americans, Jericho had never been wrong.
"You've got doubts, haven't you?" said Martin. "I suppose I have," admitted Paxman.
Martin sighed. "Straws in the wind, Simon. A phrase in an intercept, a man told to shut up and called a son of a whore, a phrase from Saddam about succeeding and being seen to succeed--in the hurting of America--and now this. We need a piece of string." "String?"
"Straw only makes up a bale when you can wrap it around with string. There has to be something else as to what he really has in mind. Otherwise, the powers are right, and he will go for the gas weapon he already has."
"All right. I'll look for a piece of string."
"And I," said Martin, "did not meet you this evening, and we have not spoken." "Thank you," said Paxman.
Hassan Rahmani heard of the death of his agent Leila two days after it happened, on January 19. She had not appeared for a scheduled handover of information from General Kadiri's bed, and fearing the worst, he had checked morgue records. The hospital in Mansour had produced the evidence, though the corpse had been buried, with many others from the destroyed military buildings, in a mass grave.
Hassan Rahmani no more believed that his agent had been hit by a stray bomb while crossing a piece of waste ground in the middle of the night than he believed in ghosts. The only ghosts in the skies above Baghdad were the invisible American bombers of which he had read in Western defense magazines, and they were not ghosts but logically contrived inventions. So was the death of Leila Al-Hilla.
His only logical conclusion was that Kadiri had discovered her extramural activities and put a stop to them. Which meant she would have talked before she died. That meant, for him, that Kadiri had become a powerful and dangerous enemy.
Worse, his principal conduit into the inner councils of the regime had been closed down.
Had he known that Kadiri was as worried as he himself, Rahmani would have been delighted. But he did not know. He only knew that from thenceforward he was going to have to be extremely careful.
On the second day of the air war, Iraq launched its first battery of missiles against Israel. The media at once announced them as being Soviet-built Scud-Bs, and the title stuck throughout the rest of the war. In fact, they were not Scuds at all.
The point of the onslaught was not foolish. Iraq recognized quite clearly that Israel was not a country prepared to accept large numbers of civilian casualties. As the first rocket warheads fell into the suburbs of Tel Aviv, Israel reacted by going on the warpath. This was exactly what Baghdad wanted.
Within the fifty-nation Coalition ranged against Iraq were seventeen Arab states, and if there was one thing they all shared apart from the Islamic faith, it was a hostility to Israel.
Iraq calculated, probably rightly, that if Israel could be provoked into joining the war by a strike against her, the Arab nations in the Coalition would pull out. Even King Fahd, monarch of Saudi Arabia and Keeper of the Two Holy Places, would be in an impossible position.
The first reactions to the fall of the rockets on Israel was that they might be loaded with gas or germ cultures. Had they been, Israel could not have been restrained. It was quickly proved that the warheads were of conventional explosives. But the psychological effect inside Israel was still enormous.
The United States immediately brought massive pressure on Jerusalem not to respond with a counterstrike. The Allies, Itzhak Shamir was told, would take care of it. Israel actually launched a counterstrike in the form of a wave of her own F-15 fighter-bombers but called them back while still in Israeli air space.
The real Scud was a clumsy, obsolete Soviet missile of which Iraq had bought nine hundred several years earlier. It had a range of under three hundred kilometers and carried a warhead of close to a thousand pounds. It was not guided, and even in its original form it would, at full range, land anywhere within half a mile of its target.
From Iraq's point of view, it had been a virtually useless purchase. It could not reach Teheran in the Iran-Iraq war, and it certainly could not reach Israel, even if fired from the extreme western border of Iraq. What the Iraqis had done in the meantime, with German technical help, was bizarre.
They had cut up the Scuds into chunks and used three of them to create two new rockets. To put not too fine a point on it, the new Al-Husayn rocket was a mess. By adding extra fuel tanks the Iraqis had increased the range to 620 kilometers so that it could (and did) reach Teheran and Israel. But its payload was cut to a pathetic 160 pounds. Its guidance, always erratic, was now chaotic. Two of them, launched at Israel, not only missed Tel Aviv, they missed the entire republic and fell in Jordan.
But as a terror weapon it almost worked. Even though all the Al- Husayns that fell on Israel had less payload than one American twothousand-pound bomb falling on Iraq, they sent the Israeli population into something approaching panic.
The United States responded in three ways. Fully a thousand sorties were flown to shoot down the incoming rockets and the even more elusive mobile launchers. Batteries of American Patriot missiles were sent into Israel within hours in an attempt to shoot down the incoming rockets but mainly to persuade Israel to stay out of the war. And the SAS, and later the American Green Berets, were sent into the western deserts of Iraq to find the mobile rocket launchers and either destroy them with their own Milan missiles or call in air strikes by radio.
The Patriots, although hailed as the saviors of all creation, had limited success--but that was not their fault. Raytheon had designed the Patriot to intercept airplanes, not rockets, and they had been hastily adapted to a new role. The reason they hardly ever hit an incoming warhead was never disclosed.
The fact was, in extending the Scud's range by turning it into the Al- Husayn, the Iraqis had also increased its altitude. The new rocket, entering inner space on its parabolic flight, was getting red-hot as it came back down, something the Scud was never designed to do. As it reentered earth's atmosphere, it just broke up. What descended on Israel was not an entire rocket but a falling trash can.
The Patriot, doing its job, went up to intercept and found itself with not one piece of metal coming toward it but a dozen. So its tiny brain told it to do what it was programmed to do--go for the biggest one. This was usually the spent fuel tank, tumbling downward out of control. The warhead, much smaller and detached in the breakup, just fell free. Many failed to explode at all, and most of the battering sustained by Israeli buildings was impact-damage.
If the so-called Scud was a psychological terror, the Patriot was a psychological savior. But the psychology worked, inasmuch as it was part of the solution to keeping Israel out of the war.
Another part was the promise of the much-improved Arrow rocket when it was ready--installed by 1994.
Section three was the right of Israel to choose up to one hundred extra targets that the Allied air forces would obliterate. The choices were made--mainly targets in Western Iraq that affected Israel, roads, bridges, airfields, anything pointing west at her. None of these targets by their geographical location had anything to do with the liberation of Kuwait on the other side of the peninsula.
The fighter-bombers of the American and British air forces assigned to Scud-hunting claimed numerous successes, claims regarded with immediate skepticism by the CIA, to the rage of General Chuck Horner and General Schwarzkopf.
Two years after the war, Washington officially denied that a single mobile Scud-launcher had been destroyed by air power--a suggestion still capable today of reducing any pilot involved to incandescent rage.
The fact was, the pilots had largely been deceived again by maskirovka. If the southern desert of Iraq is a featureless billiard table, the western and northwestern deserts are rocky, hilly, and riven by a thousand wadis and gullies. This was the land over which Mike Martin had driven on his infiltration to Baghdad.
Before launching its rocket attacks, Baghdad had created scores of dummy Scud mobile launchers, and these were hidden, along with the real ones, across the landscape. The habit was to produce them in the night, a tube of sheet metal mounted on an old flatbed truck, and at dawn torch a drum of oil and cotton waste inside the tube.
Far away, the sensors in the AWACS picked up the heat source and logged a missile launch. The fighters vectored onto the location did the rest and claimed a kill.
The men who could not be fooled this way were the SAS. Although only a handful in number, they swarmed into the western deserts in their Land-Rovers and motorbikes, lay up in the blistering days and freezing nights, and watched. At two hundred yards, they could see what was a real mobile launcher and what was a dummy.
As the real rocket launchers came out from the culverts and beneath the bridges where they were hidden from aerial observation, the silent men in the crags watched through binoculars. If there were too many Iraqis around, they quietly called in air strikes by radio. If they could get away with it, they used their own Milan antitank rockets, which made a very nice bang when hitting the fuel tank of a real Al-Husayn.
It was soon realized there was an invisible north-south line running down the desert. West of that line, the Iraqi rockets could hit Israel; east of it, they were out of range. The job was to terrorize the Iraqi crews into not daring to venture west of that line but to fire from east of it and lie to their superiors. It took eight days, and then the rocket attacks on Israel stopped. They never started again.
Later, the Baghdad-to-Jordan road was used as a divider. North of it was Scud Alley North, terrain of the American Special Forces, who went in by long-range helicopter. Below the road was Scud Alley South, bailiwick of the British Special Air Service. Four good men died in those deserts, but they did the job they had been sent in to do, where billions of dollars of technology had been deceived.
On day four of the air war, January 20, the 336th Squadron out of Al Kharz was one of the units that had not been diverted to the western deserts. Its assignment that day included a big SAM missile site northwest of Baghdad. The SAMs were controlled by two large radar dishes.
The air attacks in General Horner's plan were now rolling northward. With just about every missile base and radar dish south of a horizontal line through southern Baghdad wiped out, the time had come to clear the air space east, west, and north of the capital. With twenty-four Strike Eagles in the squadron, January 20 was going to be a multimission day.
The squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Turner, had allocated a twelve-plane detail for the missile base. A swarm of Eagles that large was known as a "gorilla." The gorilla was led by one of the two senior flight commanders. Four of the twelve planes were packing HARMs, the radar-busting missiles that home in on infrared signals from a radar dish.
The other eight carried two long, gleaming, stainless-steel-cased laser-guided bombs known as GBU-10-I's. When the radars were dead and the missiles blind, they would follow the HARMs and blow away the rocket batteries.
It did not seem as if things were going to go wrong. The twelve Eagles took off in three groups of four, established themselves in a loose echelon formation, and climbed to an altitude of twenty-five thousand feet. The sky was a brilliant blue, and the ochre desert below clearly visible. The weather report over the target indicated a stronger wind than over Saudi Arabia but made no mention of a shamal, one of those rapid dust storms that can wipe out a target in seconds. South of the border, the twelve Eagles met their tankers, two KC-10s.
Each tanker could suckle six hungry fighters, so one by one the Eagles drifted onto station behind the tankers and waited as the boom operator, gazing at them through his Perspex window only a few feet away, "swam" his boom arm to lock onto their waiting fuel nozzles. Finally, the twelve Eagles refueled for their mission and turned north toward Iraq.
An AWACS out over the Gulf told them there was no hostile air activity ahead of them. Had there been Iraqi fighters in the air, the Eagles carried, apart from their bombs, two kinds of air-to-air rockets: the Air Interception Missile 7 and the AIM-9, better known as the Sparrow and the Sidewinder.
The missile base was there, all right. But its radars were not active. If the radar dishes were not operating on their arrival, they should have illuminated immediately to guide the SAMs in their search for the oncoming intruders. As soon as the radars went active, the four Strike Eagles carrying the HARMs would simply take them out or, in USAF parlance, ruin their whole day.
Whether the Iraqi commander was afraid for his skin or just extremely smart, the Americans never did work out. But those radars refused to come alive. The first four Eagles, led by the flight commander, dropped down and down to provoke the radars into switching on. They refused.
It would have been foolish for the bomb-carriers to go in with the radars still intact--had they suddenly illuminated without warning, the SAMs would have had the Eagles cold. After twenty minutes over the target, the attack was called off. Components of the gorilla were assigned to their secondary targets.
Don Walker had a quick word with Tim Nathanson, his wizzo, sitting behind him. The secondary target for the day was a fixed Scud site south of Samarra, which was in any case being visited by other fighter bombers because it was a known poison gas facility.
The AWACS confirmed there was no takeoff activity out of the two big Iraqi air bases at Samarra East and Balad Southeast. Don Walker called up his wingman, and the two-plane element headed for the Scud site. All communications between the American aircraft were coded by the Have-quick system, which garbles the speech to anyone trying to listen in who is not carrying the same system. The codings can be changed daily but were common to all Allied aircraft.
Walker glanced around. The sky was clear; half a mile away his wingman, Randy "R-2" Roberts, rode astern and slightly above him, with wizzo Jim "Boomer" Henry sitting behind.
Over the Scud fixed-launcher position, Walker dropped down to identify the target properly. To his rage, it was obscured by swirling clouds of desert dust, a shamal that had sprung up, created by the strong desert wind down there on the floor. His laser-guided bombs would not miss, so long as they could follow the beam projected at the target from his own aircraft. To project the guiding beam, he had to see his target. Furious and running short of fuel, he turned away.
Two frustrations in the same morning were too much. He hated to land with a full rack of ordnance. But there was nothing for it, the road home lay south. Three minutes later, he saw an enormous industrial complex beneath him. "What's that?" he asked Tim. The WSO checked his briefing maps. "It's called Tarmiya." "Jesus, it's big." "Yeah."
Although neither man knew it, the Tarmiya industrial complex contained 381 buildings and covered an area of ten miles by ten miles.
"Listed?" "Nope." "Going down anyway. Randy, cover my ass." "Got it," came over the air from his wingman.
Walker dropped his Eagle clean down to ten thousand feet. The industrial spread was huge. In the center was one enormous building, the size of a covered sports stadium.
"Going in." "Don, it's nontarget." Dropping to eight thousand feet, Walker activated his laser-guidance system and lined up on the vast factory below and in front of him. His head-up display ran off the distance as it shortened and gave him a seconds-to-fire reading. As the latter hit zero, he released his bombs, keeping his nose still on the approaching target.
The laser-sniffer in the nose of the two bombs was the PAVEWAY system. Under his fuselage was the guidance module, called LANTIRN. The LANTIRN threw an invisible infrared beam at the target, where the beam rebounded to form a sort of funnel-shaped electronic basket pointing back toward him. The PAVEWAY nose cones sensed this basket, entered it, and followed the funnel down and inward until they impacted precisely where the beam was aimed. Both bombs did their job. They blew up under the lip of the roof of the factory.
Seeing them explode, Don Walker hauled back, lifted the nose of the Eagle, and powered it back to twenty-five thousand feet. An hour later, he and his wingman, after another refuel in midair, were back at Al Kharz.
Before he lifted his nose, Walker had seen the blinding flash of the two explosions and the great column of smoke that had arisen, and he had caught a glimpse of the dust cloud that would follow the bombing.
What he did not see was that those two bombs tore out one end of the factory, lifting a large section of roof up into the air like the sail of a ship at sea. Nor did he observe that the strong desert wind that morning--the same one that had created the dust storm to blot out the Scud site--did the rest. It tore the roof off the factory, peeling it back like the lid of a sardine can, as sheets of roofing steel flew lethally in all directions.
Back at base, Don Walker, like every other pilot, was extensively debriefed. It was a tiresome process for weary pilots, but it had to be done. In charge was the squadron intelligence officer, Major Beth Kroger. No one pretended the gorilla had been a success, but every pilot had taken out his secondary target, except one. Their hotshot weapons officer had flunked his secondary target and picked a tertiary one at random.
"What the hell did you do that for?" Kroger asked. "Because it was huge and looked important." "It wasn't even on the Tasking Order," she complained.
She logged the target he had chosen, its exact location and description, and his own bomb-damage report and filed it for the attention of TACC--the Tactical Air Control Center, which shared the basement of CENTAF beneath the Saudi Air Force headquarters with the Black Hole analysts in Riyadh.
"If this turns out to be a water-bottling plant or a baby-food factory, they're gonna can your ass," she warned Walker.
"You know, Beth, you're beautiful when you're angry," he teased her.
Beth Kroger was a good career officer. If she was going to be flirted
with, she preferred colonels and up. As the three of those on the base were seriously married, Al Kharz was turning out to be a pain.
"You're out of line, Captain," she told him, and went off to file her report.
Walker sighed and went off to his cot to rest. She was right, though. If he had just totaled the world's biggest orphanage, General Horner would personally have his captain's bars for toothpicks. As it happened, they never did tell Don Walker just what he had hit that morning. But it was not an orphanage.