The Fist Of God Part 12

United States Department of State Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. 20520

February 5, 1991 MEMORANDUM FOR: Mr. James Baker FROM: Political Intelligence and a.n.a.lysis Group SUBJECT: a.s.sa.s.sination of Saddam Hussein CLa.s.sIFICATION: 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 a.s.sa.s.sinate Mr. Hussein. The ideal outcome would, of course, be for any successor regime to the present Ba'ath Party dictators.h.i.+p, 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 s.h.i.+'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 pa.s.sed 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 dictators.h.i.+p by a.s.sa.s.sination, there are only two realistic scenarios. The first would be an attempt to impose from outside a consensus government embracing all the princ.i.p.al 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 s.h.i.+'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 ma.s.s 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 a.s.sa.s.sinate 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 gla.s.sine 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 b.u.t.ton, 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 a.n.a.lysts 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 a.s.sociated 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 d.a.m.n 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 mult.i.task 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 a.n.a.lysis. 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 a.n.a.lysts. 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 b.u.g.g.e.rs," 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 a.s.semble 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 b.u.g.g.e.rs" 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 ma.s.ses 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 pa.s.senger 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 sc.r.a.p steel. The whole system had actually been seen early on by AWACS, which registered a great ma.s.s 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 ZSU23-4 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 d.a.m.n 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 ma.s.s of planes, a gorilla." Laing shot Barber a warning glance. "We'd prefer something a little more discreet," said Barber. "A two-s.h.i.+p 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. f.u.c.king 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 target-marking 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 a.s.signed to General Horner himself. "What the h.e.l.l 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 princ.i.p.al and perhaps only store of a particularly vicious poison gas sh.e.l.l. 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 a.n.a.lysts believe them to be military trucks, and they have jumped to the conclusion this apparent sc.r.a.pyard hides an ammunition dump-princ.i.p.ally, 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 pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.sification. 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 h.e.l.l out of there before the unG.o.dly know what's. .h.i.t '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 last-minute 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 a.s.signed. Williamson would liaise with their pilots in the morning. The armorers had been instructed to fit three one-thousandpound 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 brick-built bachelor quarters nearer the air base. The food was excellent, drink was available, and the worst loneliness of the combat life was a.s.suaged 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 b.u.t.tes 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 alt.i.tude 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 h.e.l.l 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 thirty-second "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 1000 in five gold sovereigns and the "goolie chit." This remarkable doc.u.ment 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 t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es and preferably where they ought to be and not in his mouth, you will be rewarded with 5000 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 flas.h.i.+ng 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 talk-through 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 G.o.d had been buried in the womb where it had been created was marred by the loss of the two young men.

Chapter 19.

Brigadier Ha.s.san Rahmani sat in his private office in the Mukhabarat building in Mansour and contemplated the events of the previous twenty-four hours with near despair. That the princ.i.p.al military and war-production centers of his country were being systematically torn apart by bombs and rockets did not worry him. These developments, predicted by him weeks before, simply brought closer the pending American invasion and the fall from office of the man from Tikrit.

It was something he had planned for, longed for, and confidently expected, unaware on that midday of February 1991 that it was not going to happen. Rahmani was a highly intelligent man, but he did not have a crystal ball. What concerned him that morning was his own survival, the odds that he would live to see the day of Saddam Hussein's fall. The bombing at dawn of the previous day of the nuclear engineering plant at Al Qubai, so cunningly disguised that no one had ever envisaged its discovery, had shaken the power elite of Baghdad to its roots. Within minutes of the departure of the two British bombers, the surviving gunners had been in contact with Baghdad to report the attack. On hearing of the event, Dr. Jaafar Al-Jaafar had personally leaped into his car and driven to the spot to check on his underground staff. He was beside himself with rage and by noon had complained bitterly to Hussein Kamil, under whose Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization the entire nuclear program reposed. Here was a program, the diminutive scientist had reportedly screamed at Saddam's son-in-law, that out of a total arms expenditure of $50 billion in a decade had alone consumed $8 billion, and at the very moment of its triumph it was being destroyed. Could the state offer no protection to his people? The Iraqi physicist might have stood a whisker over five feet and been built like a mosquito, but in terms of influence he packed quite a punch, and the word was that he had gone on and on. A chastened Hussein Kamil had reported to his father-in-law, who had also been consumed by a transport of rage. When that happened, all Baghdad trembled for its life. The scientists underground had not only survived but escaped, for the factory included a narrow tunnel leading half a mile under the desert and terminating in a circular shaft with handrails in the wall. The personnel had emerged this way, but it would be impossible to move heavy machinery through the same tunnel and shaft. The main elevator and cargo hoist was a twisted wreck from the surface down to a depth of twenty feet. Restoring it would be a major engineering feat occupying weeks-weeks that Ha.s.san Rahmani suspected Iraq did not have. Had that been the end of the matter, he would simply have been relieved, for he had been a deeply worried man since that conference at the palace before the air war began, when Saddam had revealed the existence of "his" device. What now worried Rahmani was the crazed rage of his head of state. Deputy President Izzat Ibrahim had called him shortly after noon of the previous day, and the head of Counterintelligence had never known Saddam's closest confidant to be in such a state. Ibrahim had told him the Rais was beside himself with anger, and when that happened, blood usually spilled. Only this could appease the rage of the man from Tikrit. The Deputy President had made plain that it was expected that he-Rahmani-would produce results, and fast. "What results, precisely, did you have in mind?" he had asked Ibrahim. "Find out," Ibrahim had yelled at him, "how they knew." Rahmani had been in contact with friends in the Army who had talked to" their gunners, and the reports were adamant on one thing: The British raid had involved two airplanes. There had been two more higher up, hut it was a.s.sumed these were fighters giving cover; certainly they had not dropped any bombs. From the Army, Rahmani had talked to Air Force Opera-lions Planning. Their view-and several of their officers were Westerntrained-was that no target of great military significance would ever merit only a two-plane strike. No way. So, reasoned Rahmani, if the British did not think the car junkyard was a sc.r.a.p metal dump, what did they think it was? The answer probably lay with the two downed British airmen. Personally, he would have loved to conduct the interrogations, convinced that with certain hallucinogenic drugs he could have them talking within hours, and truthfully. The Army had confirmed they had caught the pilot and navigator within three hours of the raid, out in the desert, one limping from a broken ankle. Unfortunately, a detail from the AMAM had turned up with remarkable speed and taken the fliers with them. No one argued with the AMAM. So the two Britishers were now with Omar Khatib, and Allah have mercy on them. Cheated of his chance to s.h.i.+ne by producing the information supplied by the fliers, Rahmani realized he would have to contribute something. The question was-what? The only thing that would suffice was what the Rais wanted. And what would he want? Why, a conspiracy. Then a conspiracy he would have. The key would be the transmitter. He reached for his phone and called Major Mohsen Zayeed, the head of his unit's sigint section, the people charged with intercepting radio transmissions. It was time they talked again.

* * * Twenty miles west of Baghdad lies the small town of Abu Ghraib, a most unremarkable place and yet a name known if rarely mentioned throughout Iraq. For in Abu Ghraib stood the great prison, confined almost exclusively to use in the interrogation and confinement of political detainees. As such, it was staffed and run not by the national prison service but by the Secret Police, the AMAM. At the time Ha.s.san Rahmani was calling his sigint expert, a long black Mercedes approached the double wooden doors of the prison. Two guards, recognizing the occupant of the car, hurled themselves at the gates and dragged them open. Just in time; the man in the car could respond with icy brutality to those causing him a momentary delay through slackness on the job. The car went through, the gates closed. The figure in the back acknowledged the efforts of the guards with neither nod nor gesture. They were irrelevant. At the steps to the main office building, the car stopped, and another guard ran to open the rear pa.s.senger door. Brigadier Omar Khatib alighted, trim in a tailored barathea uniform, and stalked up the steps. Doors were hastily opened for him all the way. A junior officer, an aide, brought his attache case. To reach his office, Khatib took the elevator to the fifth and top floor, and when he was alone, he ordered Turkish coffee and began to study his papers. The reports of the day detailed progress in the extraction of needed information from those in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Behind his facade, Omar Khatib was as worried as his colleague across Baghdad-a man whom he loathed with the same venom as the feeling was returned. Unlike Rahmani, who with his part-English education, grasp of languages, and cosmopolitan airs was bound to be inherently suspect, Khatib could count on the fundamental advantage of being from Tikrit. So long as he did the job with which he had been tasked by the Rais, and did it well, keeping the confessions of treachery flowing to a.s.suage the unappeasable paranoia, he was safe. But the last twenty-four hours had been troubling. He too had received a telephone call the previous day, but from the son-in-law, Hussein Kamil. Like Ibrahim to Rahmani, Kamil had brought news of the Rais's unbounded rage over the bombing of Al Qubai and was demanding results. Unlike Rahmani, Khatib actually had the British fliers in his hands. That was an advantage on the one hand, a snare on the other. The Rais would want to know, and fast, just how the fliers had been briefed before the mission-just how much did the Allies know about Al Qubai, and how had they learned it? It was up to him, Khatib, to produce that information. His men had been working on the fliers for fifteen hours, since seven the previous evening, when they had arrived at Abu Ghraib. So far, the fools had held out. From the courtyard below his window came the sound of a hiss, a thwack, and a low whimper. Khatib's brow furrowed in puzzlement, then cleared as he recalled. In the inner yard below his window an Iraqi hung by his wrists from a crossbeam, his pointed toes just four inches above the dust. Nearby stood a ewer br.i.m.m.i.n.g with brine, once clear, now darkly pink. Every guard and soldier crossing the yard was under standing orders to pause, take one of the two rattan canes from the jar, and administer a single stroke to the back of the hanging man, between the neck and the knees. A corporal under an awning nearby kept the tally. The stupid fellow was a market trader who had been heard to refer to the President as the son of a wh.o.r.e and was now learning, albeit a trifle late, the true measure of respect that citizens should maintain at all times in reference to the Rais. The intriguing thing was that he was still there. It just showed what stamina some of these working-cla.s.s people had. The trader had sustained more than five hundred strokes already, an impressive record. He would be dead before the thousandth-no one had ever sustained a thousand-but it was interesting all the same. The other interesting thing was that the man had been denounced by his ten-yearold son. Omar Khatib sipped his coffee, unscrewed his rolled-gold fountain pen, and bent over his papers. Half an hour later, there was a discreet tap at his door. "Enter," he called, and looked up in expectation. He needed good news, and only one man could knock without being announced by the junior officer outside. The man who entered was burly, and his own mother would have been hard put to call him handsome. The face was deeply pitted by boyhood smallpox, and two circular scars gleamed where cysts had been removed. He closed the door and stood, waiting to be addressed. Though he was only a sergeant, his stained coveralls carried not even that rank, yet he was one of the few men with whom the brigadier felt any fellow feeling. Alone among the staff of the prison, Sergeant Ali was permitted to sit in his presence, when invited. Khatib gestured the man to a chair and offered him a cigarette. The sergeant lit up and puffed gratefully; his work was onerous and tiring, the cigarette a welcome break. The reason Khatib tolerated such familiarity from a man of such low rank was that he harbored a genuine admiration for Ali. Khatib held efficiency in high esteem, and his trusted sergeant was one who had never failed him. Calm, methodical, a good husband and father, Ali was a true professional. "Well?" he asked. "The navigator is close, very close, sir. The pilot ..." He shrugged. "An hour or more." "I remind you they must both be broken, Ali, nothing held back. And their stories must conform to each other. The Rais himself is counting on us. "Perhaps you should come, sir. I think in ten minutes you will have your answer. The navigator first, and when the pilot learns this, he will follow." "Very well." Khatib rose, and the sergeant held the door open for him. Together they descended past the ground floor to the first bas.e.m.e.nt level, where the elevator stopped. There was a pa.s.sage leading to the stairs to the subbas.e.m.e.nt. Along the pa.s.sage were steel doors, and behind them, squatting amid their filth, were seven American aircrew, four British, one Italian, and a Kuwaiti Sky hawk pilot. At the next level down were more cells, two occupied. Khatib peered through the Judas-hole in the door of the first. A single unshaded light bulb illuminated the cell, its walls encrusted with hardened excrement and other brown stains of old blood. In the center, on a plastic office chair, sat a man, quite naked, down whose chest ran slicks of vomit, blood, and saliva. His hands were cuffed behind him, and a cloth mask with no eye-slits covered his face. Two AMAM men in coveralls similar to those of Sergeant Ali flanked the man in the chair, their hands caressing yard-long plastic tubes packed with bitumen, which adds weight without reducing flexibility. They were standing back, taking a break. Before their interruption, they had apparently been concentrating on the s.h.i.+ns and kneecaps, which were skinned raw and turning blue-yellow. Khatib nodded and pa.s.sed to the next door. Through the hole he could see that the second prisoner was not masked. One eye was completely closed, the pulped meat of the brow and cheek knit together by crusted blood. When he opened his mouth, there were gaps where two broken teeth had been, and a froth of blood emerged from the mashed lips."Tyne," the navigator whispered, "Nicholas Tyne. Flight lieutenant. Five oh one oh nine six eight." "The navigator," whispered the sergeant. Khatib whispered back, "Which of our men is the English-speaker?"Ali gestured-the one on the left. "Bring him out."Ali entered the cell of the navigator and emerged with one of the interrogators. Khatib had a conference with the man in Arabic. The man nodded, reentered the cell, and masked the navigator. Only then would Khatib allow both cell doors to be opened.The English-speaker bent toward Nicky Tyne's head and spoke through the cloth. His English was heavily accented but pa.s.sable."All right, Flight Lieutenant, that is it. For you, it is over. No more punishment."The young navigator heard the words. His body seemed to slump in relief."But your friend, he is not so lucky. He is dying now. So we can take him to the hospital-clean white sheets, doctors, everything he needs; or we can finish the job. Your choice. When you tell us, we stop and rush him to hospital."Khatib nodded down the corridor to Sergeant Ali, who entered the other cell. From the open door came the sounds of a plastic quirt las.h.i.+ng a bare chest. Then the pilot began to scream."All right, sh.e.l.ls!" shouted Nicky Tyne under his cowl. "Stop it, you b.a.s.t.a.r.ds! It was an ammunition dump, for poison gas sh.e.l.ls. ..."The beating ceased. Ali emerged, breathing heavily, from the pilot's cell."You are a genius, Sayid Brigadier."Khatib shrugged modestly.

"Never underestimate the sentimentality of the British and the Americans," he told his pupil. "Get the translators now. Get all the details, every last one. When you have the transcripts, bring them to my office."

Back in his sanctum, Brigadier Khatib made a personal phone call to Hussein Kamil. An hour later, Kamil called him back. His father-in- law was delighted; a meeting would be summoned, probably that night. Omar Khatib should hold himself available for the summons.

That evening, Karim was teasing Edith again, gently and without malice, this time about her job.

"Don't you ever get bored at the bank, darling?" "No, it's an interesting job. Why do you ask?" "Oh, I don't know. I just don't understand how you can think it interesting. For me, it would be the most boring job in the world."

"Well, it's not, so there." "All right. What's so interesting about it?"

"You know, handling accounts, placing investments, that sort of thing.

It's important work."

"Nonsense. It's about saying 'Good morning, yes sir, no sir, of course sir' to lots of people running in and out to cash a fifty-schilling check.

Boring."

He was lying on his back on her bed. She walked over and lay beside him, pulling one of his arms around her shoulders so that they could cuddle. She loved to cuddle.

"You are crazy sometimes, Karim. But I love you crazy. Winkler Bank isn't an issuing bank-it's a merchant bank."

"What's the difference?"

"We have no checking accounts, customers with checkbooks running

in and out. It doesn't work like that.""So you have no money, without customers.""Of course we have money, but in deposit accounts.""Never had one of those," admitted Karim. "Just a small current account. I prefer cash anyway.""You can't have cash when you are talking of millions, People would steal it. So you put it in a bank and invest it.""You mean old Gemutlich handles millions? Of other people's money?""Yes, millions and millions.""Schillings or dollars?""Dollars, pounds, millions and millions.""Well, I wouldn't trust him with my money."She sat up, genuinely shocked."Herr Gemutlich is completely honest. He would never dream of doing that.""Maybe not, but somebody else might. Look-say, I know a man who has an account at Winkler. His name is Schmitt. One day I go in and say: Good morning, Herr Gemutlich, my name is Schmitt, and I have an account here. He looks in his book, and he says: Yes, you do. So I say: I'd like to withdraw it all. Then when the real Schmitt turns up, there's nothing left. That's why cash is better for me."She laughed at his naivete and pulled him down, nibbling his ear."It wouldn't work. Herr Gemutlich would probably know your precious Schmitt. Anyway, he'd have to identify himself.""Pa.s.sports can be forged. Those d.a.m.ned Palestinians do it all the time.""And he'd need a signature, of which he would have a specimen copy."

"So, I'd practice forging Schmitt's signature."

"Karim, I think you might turn out to be a criminal one day. You're bad."

They both giggled at the idea.

"Anyway, if you were a foreigner and living abroad, you'd probably have a numbered account. They are completely impregnable."

He looked down at her from one elbow, brow furrowed.

"What's that?"

"A numbered account?"

"Mmmmmm."

She explained how they worked.

"That's madness," he exploded when she had finished. "Anybody could turn up and claim owners.h.i.+p. If Gemutlich has never even seen the owner-"

"There are ident.i.ty procedures, idiot. Very complex codes, methods of writing letters, certain ways the signatures have to be placed-all sorts of things to verify that the person is really the account owner. Unless they are all complied with-to the letter-Herr Gemutlich will not cooperate. So impersonation is impossible."

"He must have a h.e.l.l of a memory."

"Oh, you are too stupid for words. It is all written down. Are you taking me out to dinner?"

"Do you deserve it?"

"You know I do."

"Oh, all right. But I want an hors d'oeuvre."

She was puzzled. "All right, order one."

"I mean you."

He reached out and grabbed the waist of her skimpy panties, pulling her with a hooked finger back onto the bed. She was giggling with

delight. He rolled over on top of her and began to kiss. Suddenly he stopped. She looked alarmed.

"I know what I'd do," he breathed. "I'd hire a safecracker, break into old Gemutlich's safe, and look at the codes. Then I could get away with it."

She laughed in relief that he had not changed his mind about making love.

"Wouldn't work. Mmmmmm. Do that again."

"Would so."

"Aaaaaah. Wouldn't."

"Would. Safes are broken all the time. See it in the papers every day."

She ran her exploring hand below, and her eyes opened wide.

"Ooooh, is that all for me? You're a lovely, big, strong man, Karim, and I love you. But old Gemutlich, as you call him, is a bit smarter than you. ..."

A minute later, she no longer cared how smart Gemutlich was.

While the Mossad agent made love in Vienna, Mike Martin was setting up his satellite dish as midnight approached and the eleventh of the month gave way to the twelfth.

Iraq was then just eight days away from the scheduled invasion of February 20. South of the border, the northern slice of the desert of Saudi Arabia bristled with the biggest single concentration of men and arms, guns, tanks, and stores crammed into such a relatively small piece of land since the Second World War.

The relentless pounding from the air went on, though most of the targets on General Horner's original list had been visited, sometimes twice or more. Despite the insertion of fresh targets caused by the short-

lived Scud barrage on Israel, the air master plan was back on track. Every known factory for the production of weapons of ma.s.s destruction had been pulverized, and that included twelve new ones added by information from Jericho. As a functioning weapon, the Iraqi Air Force had virtually ceased to exist. Rarely had her interceptor fighters, if they chose to tangle with the Eagles, Hornets, Tomcats, Falcons, Phantoms, and Jaguars of the Allies, returned to their bases, and by mid-February they were not even bothering to try. Some of the cream of the fighter and fighter-bomber force had deliberately been sent to Iran, where they had at once been impounded. Others still had been destroyed inside their hardened shelters or ripped apart if caught out in the open. At the highest level, the Allied commanders could not understand why Saddam had chosen to send the cream of his warplanes to his old enemy. The reason was that after a certain date he firmly expected every nation in the region to have no choice but to bow the knee to him; at that point he would recover his war fleet. There was by then hardly a bridge left intact in the entire country or a functioning power-generating station. By mid-February, an increasing Allied air effort was being directed at the Iraqi Army in south Kuwait and over the Kuwaiti border into Iraq itself. From the east-west Saudi northern border up to the Baghdad-Basra highway, the Buffs were pounding the artillery, tank, rocket-battery, and infantry positions. American A-10 Thunderbolts, nicknamed for their grace in the sky "the flying warthog," were roaming at will doing what they did best-destroying tanks. Eagles and Tornados were also allocated the task of "tank-plinking." What the Allied generals in Riyadh did not know was that forty major facilities dedicated to weapons of ma.s.s destruction still remained hidden beneath the deserts and the mountains, or that the Sixco air bases were still intact. Since the burial of the Al Qubai factory, the mood was lighter both among the four generals who knew what it had really contained, as it was among the men of the CIA and the SIS stationed in Riyadh. It was a mood mirrored in the brief message Mike Martin received that night. His controllers in Riyadh began by informing him of the success of the Tornado mission despite the loss of one airplane. The transmission went on to congratulate him for staying in Baghdad after being allowed to leave, and on the entire mission. Finally, he was told there was little more to do. Jericho should be sent one final message, to the effect the Allies were grateful, that all his money had been paid, and that contact would be reestablished after the war. Then, Martin was told, he really should escape to safety in Saudi Arabia before it became impossible. Martin closed down his set, packed it away beneath the floor, and lay on his bed before sleeping. Interesting, he thought. The armies are not coming to Baghdad. What about Saddam-wasn't that the object of the exercise? Something had changed.

Had he been aware of the conference then taking place in the headquarters of the Mukhabarat not half a mile away, Mike Martin's sleep would not have been so easy. In matters of technical skill there are four levels-competent, very good, brilliant, and a natural. The last category goes beyond mere skill and into an area where all technical knowledge is backed by an innate feel, a gut instinct, a sixth sense, an empathy with the subject and the machinery that cannot be taught in textbooks.

In matters of radio, Major Mohsen Zayeed was a natural. Quite young, with owlish spectacles that gave him the air of an earnest student, Zayeed lived, ate, and breathed the technology of radio. His private quarters were strewn with the latest magazines from the West, and when he came across a new device that might increase the efficiency of his radio-interception department, he asked for it. Because he valued the man, Ha.s.san Rahmani tried to get it for him.

Shortly after midnight, the two men sat in Rahmani's office.

"Any progress?" asked Rahmani.

"I think so," replied Zayeed. "He's there, all right-no doubt about it.

The trouble is, he's using burst transmissions that are almost impossible to capture. They take place so fast. Almost, but not quite.

With skill and patience, one can occasionally find one, even though the bursts may only be a few seconds long."

"How close are you?" said Rahmani.

"Well, I've tracked the transmission frequencies to a fairly narrow band in the ultra-high-frequency range, which makes life easier.

Several days ago, I got lucky. We were monitoring a narrow band on the off-chance, and he came on the air. Listen."

Zayeed produced a tape recorder and pushed Play. A jumbled mess of sound filled the office. Rahmani looked perplexed.

"That's it?"

"It's encrypted, of course."

"Of course," said Rahmani. "Can you break it?"

"Almost certainly not. The encryption is by a single silicon chip, patterned with complex microcircuitry."

"It can't be decoded?" Rahmani was getting lost; Zayeed lived in his own private world and spoke his own private language. He was

already making a great effort to try and speak plainly to his commanding officer.

"It's not a code. To convert that jumble back to the original speech would need an identical silicon chip. The permutations are in the hundreds of millions."

"Then what's the point?"

"The point, sir, is-I got a bearing on it."

Ha.s.san Rahmani leaned forward in excitement.

"A bearing?"

"My second. And guess what? That message was sent in the middle of the night, thirty hours before the bombing of Al Qubai. My guess is, the details of the nuclear plant were in it. There's more."

"Go on."

"He's here."

"Here in Baghdad?"