The Fist Of God Part 9

He was gone five minutes later. She put out the lights, changed into her prim cotton nightdress, scrubbed her face and brushed her teeth, and went to bed.

In the darkness she lay with her knees drawn close to her chest. After two hours she did something she had not done for years: She smiled in the darkness. There was a mad thought going through her mind over and over again, and she did not mind. I have a boyfriend. He is ten years younger, a student, a foreigner, an Arab, and a Moslem. And I don't mind.

Colonel d.i.c.k Beatty of the USAF was on the graveyard s.h.i.+ft that night, deep below Old Airport Road in Riyadh.

The Black Hole never stopped, it never slackened, and in the first days of the air war, it was working harder and faster than ever.

General Chuck Horner's master plan for the air war was experiencing the dislocation caused by the diversion of hundreds of his warplanes to hunt Scud launchers instead of taking out the targets prea.s.signed to them.

Any combat general will confirm that a plan can be worked out to the last nut and bolt, but when the balloon goes up, it is never quite like

that. The crisis caused by the rockets dropping onto Israel was proving a serious problem. Tel Aviv was screaming at Was.h.i.+ngton, and Was.h.i.+ngton was screaming at Riyadh. The diversion of all those warplanes to hunt the elusive mobile launchers was the price Was.h.i.+ngton had to pay to keep Israel out of retaliatory action, and Was.h.i.+ngton's orders did not brook argument. Everyone could see that Israel losing patience and its entering the war would prove disastrous for the frail Coalition now ranged against Iraq, but the problem was still major. Targets originally slated for day three were being deferred for lack of aircraft, and the effect was like dominoes. A further problem was that there could still be no Bomb Damage a.s.sessment, or BDA. It was essential, and it had to be done. The alternative could be appalling. BDAs were crucial because the Black Hole had to know the level of the success, or lack of it, of each day's wave of air strikes. If a major Iraqi command center, radar emplacement, or missile battery were on the Air Tasking Order, it would duly be attacked. But had it been destroyed? If so, to what degree? Ten percent, fifty percent, or a pile of smoking rubble? Simply to a.s.sume that the Iraqi base had been wiped out was no good. The next day, unsuspecting Allied planes might be sent over that site on another mission. If the place were still functioning, pilots could die. So each day the missions were flown, and the tired pilots described exactly what they had done and what they had hit. Or thought they had hit. The next day, other airplanes flew over the targets and photographed them. Thus, each day as the Air Tasking Order began its three-day pa.s.sage to preparation, the original menu of designated targets had to include the second visit missions, to finish the jobs only partly done.

January 20, the fourth day of the air war, the Allied air forces had not officially gotten around to wasting the industrial plants tagged as those making weapons of ma.s.s destruction. They were still concentrating on SEAD-Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses.

That night, Colonel Beatty was preparing the list of the next day's photoreconnaissance missions on the basis of the harvest of all those debriefing sessions with squadron intelligence officers. By midnight, he was nearly through, and the early orders were already speeding their way to the various squadrons a.s.signed to photorecon missions at dawn.

"Then there's this, sir."

It was a chief petty officer, U.S. Navy, by his side. The colonel glanced at the target.

"What do you mean, Tarmiya?"

"That's what it says, sir."

"So where the h.e.l.l's Tarmiya anyway?"

"Here, sir."

The colonel glanced at the air map. The location meant nothing to him.

"Radar? Missiles, air base, command post?"

"No, sir. Industrial facility."

The colonel was tired. It had been a long night, and it would go on until dawn.

"For chrissake, we haven't gotten to industrials yet. Give me the list anyway."

He ran his eye down the list. It included every industrial facility known to the Allies that was dedicated to the production of weapons of ma.s.s destruction; it had factories known to produce sh.e.l.ls, explosives, vehicles, gun parts, and tank spares.

In the first category were listed Al Qaim, As-Sharqat, Tuwaitha,

Fallujah, Al-Hillah, Al-Atheer, and Al-Furat. The colonel could not know that missing from the list was Rashadia, where the Iraqis had installed their second gas centrifuge cascade for producing refined uranium, the problem that had eluded the experts on the Medusa Committee. That plant, discovered by the United Nations much later, was not buried but disguised as a water-bottling enterprise.

Nor could Colonel Beatty know that Al-Furat was the buried location of the first uranium cascade, the one visited by the German, Dr.

Stemmler, "somewhere near Tuwaitha," and that its exact position had been given away by Jericho.

"I don't see any Tarmiya," he grunted.

"No, sir. It's not there," said the CPO.

"Give me the grid reference."

No one could expect the a.n.a.lysts to memorize hundreds of confusing Arab place names, the more so as in some cases a single name covered ten separate targets, so all targets were given a grid reference by the Global Positioning System, which pinned them down to twelve digits, a square fifty yards by fifty.

When he bombed the huge factory at Tarmiya, Don Walker had noted that reference, which was attached to his debriefing report.

"It's not here," protested the colonel. "It's not even a G.o.ddam target.

Who zapped it?"

"Some pilot from the 336th at Al Kharz. Missed out on his first two a.s.signed targets through no fault of his own. Didn't want to come home with full racks, I guess."

"a.s.shole," muttered the colonel. "Okay, give it to BDA anyway. But low priority. Don't waste film on it."

Lieutenant Commander Darren Cleary sat at the controls of his F-14 Tomcat. He was a very frustrated man. Beneath him the great gray bulk of the carrier USS Ranger had her nose into the light breeze and was making twenty-seven knots through the water. The sea of the northern Gulf was dead calm in the predawn, and the sky would soon be bright and blue. It ought to have been a day of pleasure for a young Navy pilot flying one of the world's best fighter planes. Nicknamed "the Fleet Defender," the twin-finned two-man Tomcat had come to a wider audience when it starred in the film Top Gun. Its c.o.c.kpit is probably the most sought-after chair in American combat aviation, certainly in Navy flying, and to be at the controls of such an airplane on such a lovely day just a week after arriving on station in the Gulf should have made Darren Cleary very happy. The reason for his misery was that he was a.s.signed not to a combat mission but to BDA, "taking happy snapshots," as he had complained the night before. He had beseeched the squadron operations officer to let him go hunting MiGs, but to no avail. "Someone's got to do it," was his answer. Like all air-superiority combat pilots among the Allies in the Gulf War, Cleary feared that the Iraqi jets would leave the skies after a few days, putting an end to any chance to tangle. So to his chagrin, he had been "fragged"-a.s.signed-to a TARPS mission. Behind him and his flight officer, two General Electric jet engines rumbled away as the deck crew hooked him up the steam catapult on the angled flight deck, pointing his nose slightly off the centerline of the Ranger. Cleary waited, throttle in his left hand, control column steady and neutral in his right, as the last preparations were made.

Finally the terse inquiry, the nod, and that great blast of power as the throttle went forward, right through the gate into afterburn, and the catapult threw him and 68,000 pounds of warplane from zero to 150 knots in three seconds. The gray steel of the Ranger vanished behind him, and the dark sea flashed below. The Tomcat felt for the rus.h.i.+ng air around her, sensed its support, and climbed smoothly away for the lightening sky. It would be a four-hour mission with two refuels. He had twelve targets to photograph, and he would not be alone. Already up ahead of him was an A-6 Avenger with laser-guided bombs in case they should run into antiaircraft artillery, in which eventuality the Avenger would teach the Iraqi gunners to be quiet. An EA-6B Prowler was coming on the same mission, armed with HARMs in case they ran into a SAM missile site guided by radar. The Prowler would use its HARMs to blow away the radar, and the Avenger would employ its bombs on the missiles. In case the Iraqi Air Force showed up, two more Tomcats would be riding shotgun, above and to either side of the photographer, their powerful AWG-9 in-air radars capable of discerning the Iraqi pilot's inside leg measurement before he got out of bed. All this metal and technology was to protect what hung below and behind Darren Cleary's feet, a Tactical Air Reconnaissance Pod System, or TARPS. Hanging slightly right of the Tomcat's centerline, the TARPS resembled a streamlined coffin seventeen feet long. It was rather more complicated than a tourist's Pentax. In its nose was a powerful frame camera with two positions: forward-and-down, or straight down. Behind it was the panoramic camera looking outward, sideways, and down. Behind that was the infrared Reconnaissance Set, designed to record thermal (heat) imaging and its source. In a final twist, the pilot could see on his Head-Up Display inside his c.o.c.kpit what he was photographing while still overhead. Darren Cleary climbed to fifteen thousand feet, met up with the rest of his escorts, and they proceeded to link with their a.s.signed KC-135 tanker just south of the Iraqi border. Without being troubled by Iraqi resistance, Cleary photographed the eleven princ.i.p.al targets he had been a.s.signed, then turned back over Tarmiya for the secondary-interest twelfth location. As he went over Tarmiya, he glanced at his display and muttered, "What the f.u.c.k is that?" This was the moment the last of the 750 frames in each of his main cameras chose to run out. After a second refuel the mission landed back on the Ranger without incident. The deck crew downloaded the cameras and took them off to the photo lab for development to negatives. Cleary was debriefed on an uneventful mission, then went down to the light table with the intelligence officer. As the negatives came up on the screen with the white-light underneath, Cleary explained what each frame was and where it had come from. The intel officer made notes for his own report, which would be attached to Cleary's, plus the photos. When they came to the last twenty frames, the intel officer asked, "What are these?" "Don't ask me," said Cleary. "They come from that target at Tarmiya. You remember-the one Riyadh tacked on at the last moment?" "Yeah. So what are those things inside the factory?" "Look like Frisbees for giants," suggested Cleary dubiously. It was a phrase that stuck. The intel officer used it in his own report, coupled with an admission that he had not the slightest idea what they were. When the package was complete, a Lockheed S-3 Viking was thrown off the Ranger's deck and took the whole package to Riyadh. Darren Cleary went back to air combat missions, never tangled with the elusive MiGs, and left the Gulf with the USS Ranger in late April 1991.

Wolfgang Gemutlich was becoming more and more worried, through that morning, by the state of his private secretary. She was as polite and formal as ever and as efficient as he could have demanded-and Herr Gemutlich demanded much. Not a man of excessive sensitivity, he saw nothing out of the ordinary at first, but by her third visit into his private sanctum to take a letter, he observed there was something unusual about her. Nothing lighthearted, of course, and certainly not frivolous-he would never have tolerated that. It was an air that she carried with her. On her third visit he observed her more closely as, head bent over her note pad, she took down his dictation. True, the dowdy business suit was in place, hem below the knees. The hair was still sc.r.a.ped back into a bun behind her head. ... It was on the fourth visit that he realized with a start of horror that Edith Hardenberg was wearing a touch of face powder. Not a lot, just a hint. He checked quickly to ensure that there was no lipstick on her mouth and was relieved to see not a trace. Perhaps, he reasoned, he was deluding himself. It was January, the freezing weather outside might have caused chapping to her skin; no doubt the powder was to ease the soreness. But there was something else. The eyes. Not mascara-um Gotteswillen, let it not be mascara. He checked again, but there was none. He had been deluded, he rea.s.sured himself. It was in the lunch hour as he spread his linen napkin on his blotter and ate the sandwiches dutifully prepared by Frau Gemutlich, as on every day, that the solution came to him. They sparkled. Fraulein Hardenberg's eyes sparkled. It could not be the winter weather-she had been indoors for four hours by then. The banker put down his half-eaten sandwich and realized he had seen the same syndrome among some of the younger secretaries just before going-home time on a Friday evening. It was happiness. Edith Hardenberg was actually happy. It showed, he realized now, in the way she walked, the way she talked, and the way she looked. She had been like that all morning-that, and the hint of powder. It was enough to trouble Wolfgang Gemutlich deeply. He hoped she had not been spending money.

The snapshots taken by Lieutenant Commander Darren Cleary came into Riyadh in the afternoon, part of a blizzard of fresh images that poured into CENTAF headquarters every day. Some of those images were from the KH-11 and KH-12 satellites high above the earth, giving the big-dimension picture, the wide angle, the whole of Iraq. If they showed no variation from the previous day, they were stacked. Others were from the constant photorecon missions flown at lower levels by the TR-1s. Some showed Iraqi activity, military or industrial, that was new-troop movements, war-planes taxiing where they had not been before, missile launchers in new locations. These went to Target a.n.a.lysis. The ones from the Ranger's Tomcat were for Bomb Damage a.s.sessment. They were filtered through the Barn, the collection of green tents on the edge of the military air base; then, duly tagged and identified, they went down the road to the Black Hole, where they landed in the BDA department. Colonel Beatty came on duty at seven that evening. He worked for two hours poring over shots of a missile site (partially destroyed, two batteries apparently still intact) and a communications center (reduced to rubble), plus an array of hardened aircraft shelters that housed Iraqi MiGs, Mirages, and Sukhois (shattered). When he came to a dozen pictures of a factory at Tarmiya, he frowned, rose, and walked over to a desk manned by a British flight sergeant of the Royal Air Force. "Charlie, what are these?" "Tarmiya, sir. You recall that factory hit by a Strike Eagle yesterday-the one that wasn't on the list?" "Oh, yeah, the factory that was never even a target?" "That's the one. A Tomcat from the Ranger took these just after ten this morning." Colonel Beatty tapped the photos in his hand. "So what the h.e.l.l's going on down here?" "Don't know, sir. That's why I put 'em on your desk. No one can work it out." "Well, that Eagle jockey certainly rattled someone's cage. They're going apes.h.i.+t here." The American colonel and the British NCO stared at the images brought back by the Tomcat from Tarmiya. They were utterly clear, the definition fantastic. Some were from the forward-and-down frame camera in the nose of the TARPS pod showing the ruined factory as the Tomcat approached at fifteen thousand feet; others from the panoramic camera in the midsection of the pod. The men at the Barn had extracted the dozen best and clearest."How big is this factory?" asked the colonel."About a hundred meters by sixty, sir."The giant roof had been torn off, and only a fragment was left covering a quarter of the floor s.p.a.ce of the Iraqi plant.In the three-quarters that had been exposed to view, the entire factory layout could be observed in a bird's-eye view. There were subdivisions caused by part.i.tions, and in each division a great dark disk occupied most of the floor."These metal?""Yes, sir, according to the infrared scanner. Steel of some kind."Even more intriguing, and the reason for all the attention by the BDA people, was the Iraqi reaction to Don Walker's raid. Around the roofless factory were grouped not one but five enormous cranes, their booms poised over the interior like storks pecking at a morsel. With all the damage going on in Iraq, cranes this size were at a premium.Around the factory and inside it, a swarm of laborers could be seen toiling to attach the disks to the crane hooks for removal."You counted these guys, Charlie?""Over two hundred, sir.""And these disks"-Colonel Beatty consulted the report of the Ranger's Intel officer-"these 'Frisbees for giants'?""No idea, sir. Never seen anything like them.""Well, they're sure as h.e.l.l important to Mr. Saddam Hussein. Is Tarmiya really a no-target zone?""Well, that's the way it's been listed, Colonel. But would you have a look at this?"The flight sergeant pulled over another photo he had retrieved from the files. The colonel peered where the NCO pointed.

"Chain-link fencing." "Double chain-link. And here?" Colonel Beatty took the magnifying gla.s.s and looked again. "Mined strip ... triple-A batteries ... guard towers. Where did you find all these, Charlie?" "Here. Take a big-picture look." Colonel Beatty stared at the fresh picture placed before him, an ultrahigh-alt.i.tude shot of the whole of Tarmiya and the surrounding area. Then he breathed out in a long exhalation. "Jesus H. Christ, we're going to have to reevaluate the whole of Tarmiya. How the h.e.l.l did we miss it?" The fact was, the whole of the 381-building industrial complex of Tarmiya had been cleared by the first a.n.a.lysts as nonmilitary and nontarget for reasons that later became part of the folklore of the human moles who worked in and survived the Black Hole. They were Americans and British, and they were all NATO men. Their training had been in a.s.sessing Soviet targets, and they looked for the Soviet way of doing things. The clues they looked for were the standard indicators. If the building or complex was military and important, it would be off-limits. It would be guarded from trespa.s.sers and protected from attack. Were there guard towers, chain-link fencing, triple-A batteries, missiles, mined strips, barracks? Were there signs of heavy trucks going in and out; were there heavy-duty power lines or a designated generating station inside the enclosure? These signs meant a target. Tarmiya had none of these-apparently. What the RAF sergeant had done, on a hunch, was to reexamine a very high-angle picture of the entire area. And there it was-the fence, the batteries, the barracks, the reinforced gates, the missiles, the razor-wire entanglements, the mined strip. But far away.

The Iraqis had simply taken a vast tract of land one hundred kilometers square and fenced off the lot. No such land-grab would have been possible in Western or even Eastern Europe.

The industrial complex, of whose 381 buildings seventy later turned out to be dedicated to war production, lay at the center of the square, widely scattered to avoid bomb damage, but still only five hundred acres out of the ten thousand in the protected zone.

"Electrical power lines?" said the colonel. "There's nothing here that would power more than a toothbrush."

"Over here, sir. Forty-five kilometers to the west. The power lines run in the opposite direction. Fifty quid to a pint of warm beer, those power lines are phony. The real cable will be buried underground and run from the power station into the heart of Tarmiya. That's a hundred- fifty-megawatt generating station, sir."

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h," breathed the colonel. Then he straightened up and grabbed the sheaf of photographs.

"Good job, Charlie. I'm taking all these in to Buster Glosson.

Meanwhile, there's no need to wait around on that roofless factory. If it's important to the Iraqis-we blow it away."

"Yes, sir. I'll put it on the list."

"Not for three days from now. Tomorrow. What's free?"

The flight sergeant went to a computer console and tapped out the inquiry.

"Nothing, sir. Booked solid, every unit."

"Can't we divert a squadron?"

"Not really. Because of the Scud-hunting, we have a backlog. Oh, hold on, there's the Forty-three Hundred down at Diego. They have capacity."

"Okay, give it to the Buffs."

"If you'll forgive my saying so," remarked the NCO, with that elaborately courteous phrasing that masks a disagreement, "the Buffs are not exactly precision bombers."

"Look, Charlie, in twenty-four hours those Iraqis will have cleaned the place out. We have no choice. Give it to the Buffs."

"Yes, sir."

Mike Martin was too restless to hole up in the Soviet compound for more than a few days. The Russian steward and his wife were distraught, sleepless at night because of the endless cacophony of falling bombs and rockets coupled with the roar of Baghdad's limitless but largely ineffective antiaircraft fire.

They yelled imprecations out of the windows at all American and British fliers, but they were also running out of food, and the Russian stomach is a compelling argument. The solution was to send Mahmoud the gardener to do their shopping again.

Martin had been pedaling around the city for three days when he saw the chalk mark. It was on the rear wall of one of the old Khayat houses in Karadit-Mariam, and it meant that Jericho had delivered a package to the corresponding dead-letter box.

Despite the bombing, the natural resilience of ordinary people trying to get on with their lives had begun to a.s.sert itself. Without a word being spoken, save in muttered undertones and then only to a family member who would not betray the speaker to the AMAM, the realization had dawned on the working cla.s.s that the Sons of Dogs and the Sons of Naji seemed to be able to hit what they wanted to hit and leave the rest alone.

After five days the Presidential Palace was a heap of rubble. The Defense Ministry no longer existed, nor did the telephone exchange or the princ.i.p.al generating station. Even more inconveniently, all nine bridges now decorated the bottom of the Tigris, but an array of small entrepreneurs had established ferry services across the river, some large enough to take trucks and cars, some punts carrying ten pa.s.sengers and their bicycles, some mere rowboats. Most major buildings remained untouched. The Ras.h.i.+d Hotel in Karch was still stuffed with foreign press people, even though the Rais was a.s.suredly in his bunker beneath it. Even worse, the headquarters of the AMAM, a collection of linked houses with old frontages and modernized interiors in a blocked-off street near Qasr-el-Abyad in Risafa, was safe. Beneath two of those houses was the Gymnasium, never mentioned except in whispers, where Omar Khatib the Tormentor extracted his confessions. Across the river in Mansour, the single big office building forming the headquarters of the Mukhabarat, both Foreign and Counterintelligence, was unmarked. Mike Martin considered the problem of the chalk mark as he cycled back to the Soviet villa. He knew his orders were formal-no approach. Had he been a Chilean diplomat called Benz Moncada he would have obeyed that instruction, and he would have been right. But Moncada had not been trained to lie immobile, if necessary for days, in a single observation post and watch the surrounding countryside until even the birds nested on his hat. That night, on foot, Martin recrossed the river into Risafa as the air raids began and made his way to the vegetable market at Kasra. There were figures on the sidewalks here and there, scurrying toward shelter as if their humble dwellings would ward off a Tomahawk cruise and he were merely one of them. More important, his gamble regarding the AMAM patrols was paying off: they too had no taste for the open streets with the Americans overhead. He found his observation position on the roof of a fruit warehouse, from whose edge he could see the street, the wall of the vegetable market, and the brick and the flagstone that marked the drop. For eight hours, from eight P.M. until four in the morning, he lay and watched. If the drop were staked out, the AMAM would not have used less than twenty men. In all that time there would have been the scuffle of a boot on stone, a cough, a s.h.i.+fting of cramped muscles, a sc.r.a.pe of match, the glow of a cigarette, the guttural order to stub it out; there would have been something. He simply did not believe that Khatib's or Rahmani's people could remain immobile and silent for eight hours. Just before four A.M., the bombing stopped. There were no lights in the market below. He checked again for a camera mounted in a high window, but there were no high windows in the area. At ten past four he slipped off his roof, crossed the alley, a piece of blackness in a dark gray dish-dash moving through blackness, found the brick, removed the message, and was gone. He came over the wall of First Secretary Kulikov's compound just before dawn and was in his shack before anyone stirred. The message from Jericho was simple: He had heard nothing for nine days. He had seen no chalk marks. Since his last message there had been no contact. No fee had arrived in his bank account. Yet his message had been retrieved; he knew this because he had checked. What was wrong? Martin did not transmit the message to Riyadh. He knew he should not have disobeyed orders, but he believed that he, not Paxman, was the man on the spot and he had the right to make some decisions for himself. His risk that night had been a calculated one; he had been pitting his skills against men he knew to be inferior at the covert game. Had there been one hint the alley was under surveillance, he would have been gone as he had come, and no one would have seen him. It was possible that Paxman was right and Jericho was compromised. It was also possible Jericho had simply been transmitting what he had heard Saddam Hussein say. The sticking point was the million dollars that the CIA refused to pay. Martin crafted his own reply. He said that there had been problems caused by the start of the air war but that nothing was wrong that a little more patience would not sort out. He told Jericho that the last message had indeed been picked up and transmitted, but that he, Jericho, as a man of the world, would realize that a million dollars was a very large sum and that the information had to be checked out. This would take a little longer. Jericho should keep cool in these troubled times and wait for the next chalk mark to alert him to a resumption of their arrangement. During the day Martin lodged the message behind the brick in the wall by the stagnant moat of the citadel in Aadhamiya, and in the dusk made, his chalk mark on the rusty red surface of the garage door in Yarmuk. Twenty-four hours later, the chalk mark had been expunged. Each night Martin tuned in to Riyadh but nothing came. He knew his orders were to escape from Baghdad and that his controllers were probably waiting for him to cross the border. He decided to wait it out a little longer.

Diego Garcia is not one of the world's most visited places. It happens to be a tiny island, little more than a coral atoll, at the bottom of the Chagos archipelago in the southern Indian Ocean. Once a British territory, it has for years been leased to the United States. Despite its isolation, during the Gulf War it played host to the hastily a.s.sembled 4300th Bomb Wing of the USAF, flying B-52 Stratofortresses. The B-52 was arguably the oldest veteran in the war, having been in service for over thirty years. For many of those, it had been the backbone of Strategic Air Command, headquartered at Omaha, Nebraska, the great flying mastodon that circled the periphery of the Soviet empire day and night packing thermonuclear warheads. Old the B-52 may have been, but it remained a fearsome bomber, and in the Gulf War the updated G version was used to devastating effect on the dug-in troops of Iraq's so-called elite Republican Guard in the deserts of southern Kuwait. If the cream of the Iraqi Army came out of their bunkers haggard and with arms raised during the Coalition ground offensive, it was in part because their nerves had been shattered and their morale broken by around-the-clock pounding from B-52s. There were only eighty of these bombers in the war, but so great is their carrying capacity and so enormous their bomb-load that they dropped 26,000 tons of ordnance, forty percent of the entire tonnage dropped in the war. They are so big that in repose on the ground, their wings, supporting eight Pratt and Whitney J-57 engines in four pods of two, droop toward the ground. On takeoff with a full load, the wings become airborne first, seeming to lift above the great hull like those of a gull. Only in flight do they stick straight out to the side. One of the reasons they cast such terror into the Republican Guard in the desert was that they fly out of sight and sound, so high that their bombs arrive without any warning and are the more frightening for it. But if they are good carpet bombers, pinpoint accuracy is not their strong point, as the flight sergeant had tried to point out. At dawn of January 22, three Buffs lifted off from Diego Garcia and headed toward Saudi Arabia. Each carried its maximum payload, fifty-one 750-pound dumb bombs p.r.o.ne to fall where they will from thirty-five thousand feet. Twenty-seven bombs were housed internally, the rest on racks under each wing. The three bombers const.i.tuted the usual cell for Buff operations, and their crews had been looking forward to a day fis.h.i.+ng, swimming, and snorkeling on the reef of their tropical hideaway. With resignation, they plotted their course for a faraway factory that they had never seen and never would. The B-52 Stratofortress is not called the Buff because it is painted a tan or dun-brown color. The word is not even a derivation of the first two syllables of its number-Bee-Fifty Two. It just stands for Big Ugly Fat f.u.c.ker. So the Buffs plodded their way northward, found Tarmiya, picked up the image of the designated factory, and dropped all 153 bombs. Then they went home to the Chagos archipelago. On the morning of the twenty-third, about the time London and Was.h.i.+ngton began to yell for more pictures of these mysterious Frisbees, a further BDA mission was a.s.signed, but this time the photo-call was carried out by a recon Phantom flown by the Alabama Air National Guard out of Sheikh Isa base on Bahrain, known locally as Shakey's Pizza. In a remarkable break with tradition, the Buffs had actually hit the target. Where the Frisbee factory had been was a vast gaping crater. Was.h.i.+ngton and London had to be satisfied with the dozen pictures they had from Lieutenant Commander Darren Cleary. The best a.n.a.lysts in the Black Hole had seen the pictures, shrugged their ignorance, and sent them to their superiors in the two capital cities. Copies went at once to JARIC, the British photointerpretation center, and in Was.h.i.+ngton to ENPIC. Those pa.s.sing this drab, square brick-built building on a corner in a seedy and run-down precinct of downtown Was.h.i.+ngton would be unlikely to guess what goes on inside. The only clue to the National Photographic Interpretation Center comes from the complex exhaust flues for the air conditioning inside, which keep at controlled temperatures an awesome battery of the most powerful computers in the United States. For the rest, the dust- and rain-streaked windows, the un-imposing door, and the trash blowing down the street outside might suggest a not very prosperous warehouse. But it is here that the images taken by those satellites come; it is the a.n.a.lysts who work here who tell the men at the National Reconnaissance Office and the Pentagon and the CIA exactly what it is that all those expensive "birds" have seen. They are good, those a.n.a.lysts, up-to-the-minute in their grasp of technology, young, bright, and brainy. But they had never seen any disks like those Frisbees at Tarmiya. So they filed the photos and said so.

Experts at the Pentagon in Was.h.i.+ngton and at the Ministry of Defence in London, who knew just about every conventional weapon since the crossbow, examined the pictures, shook their heads, and handed them back.

In case they had anything to do with weapons of ma.s.s destruction, they were shown to scientists at Sandia, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Livermore in America and at Porton Down, Harwell, and Aldermaston in England. The result was the same.

The best suggestion was that the disks were part of big electrical transformers destined for a new Iraqi power-generating station. That was the explanation that had to be settled for, when the request for more pictures from Riyadh was answered with the news that the Tarmiya factory had literally ceased to exist.

It was a very good explanation, but it failed to elucidate one problem: Why were the Iraqi authorities in the pictures trying so desperately to cover or rescue them?

It was not until the evening of the twenty-fourth that Simon Paxman, speaking from a phone booth, called Dr. Terry Martin at his flat.

"Care for another Indian meal?" he asked.

"Can't tonight," said Martin. "I'm packing."

He did not mention that Hilary was back, and he also wished to spend the evening with his friend.

"Where are you going?" asked Paxman.

"America," said Martin. "An invitation to lecture on the Aba.s.sid Caliphate. Rather flattering, actually. They seem to like my research into the law structure of the third caliph. Sorry."

"It's just that something else has come through from the south.

Another puzzle that n.o.body can explain. But it's not about nuances of the Arabic language, it's technical. Still ..."

"What is it?"

"A photo. I've run off a copy."

Martin hesitated.

"Another straw in the wind?" he asked. "All right, same restaurant. At

eight."

"That's probably all it is," said Paxman, "just another straw."

What he did not know was that what he held in his hand in that freezing phone booth was a very large piece of string.

Chapter 17.

Terry Martin landed at San Francisco International Airport just after three P.M. local time the following day, to be met by his host, Professor Paul Maslowski, genial and welcoming in the American academic's uniform of tweed jacket and leather patches, and at once felt himself enveloped by the warm embrace of all-American hospitality. "Betty and I figured a hotel would be kind of impersonal and wondered whether you'd prefer to stay with us?" said Maslowski as he steered his compact out of the airport complex and onto the highway. "Thank you, that would be wonderful," said Martin, and he meant it. "The students are looking forward to hearing you, Terry. There aren't many of us, of course-our Arab department must be smaller than yours at SOAS, but they're really enthusiastic." "Great. I look forward to meeting them." The pair chatted contentedly about their shared pa.s.sion, medieval Mesopotamia, until they arrived at Professor Maslowski's frame house in a suburban development in Menlo Park. There he met Paul's wife, Betty, and was shown to a warm and comfortable guest room. He glanced at his watch: a quarter before five.

"Could I use the phone?" he asked as he came downstairs."Absolutely," said Maslowski. "Do you want to phone home?""No, locally. Do you have a directory?"The professor gave him the telephone book and left.It was under Livermore: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in Alameda County. He was just in time."Could you put me through to Department Z?" he asked, p.r.o.nouncing it Zed, when the receptionist answered."Who?" asked the girl."Department Zee," Martin corrected himself. "Director's office.""Hold on, please."Another female voice came on the line."Director's office. Can I help you?"The British accent probably helped. Martin explained he was Dr. Martin, an academic over from England on a brief visit, and would be grateful to speak with the Director. A male voice took the phone."Dr. Martin?""Yes.""I'm Jim Jacobs, Deputy Director. How can I help you?""Look, I know it's terribly short notice. But I am over here on a quick visit to give a lecture to the Near Eastern studies department at Berkeley. Then I have to fly back. Fact is, I was wondering whether I might come out to Livermore to see you."The sense of puzzlement came right over the telephone wire."Could you give me some indication what this is about, Dr. Martin?""Well, not easily. I am a member of the British end of the Medusa Committee. Does that ring a bell?""Sure does. We're about to close down right now. Would tomorrow suit you?"

"Perfectly. I have to lecture in the afternoon. Would the morning be all right?"

"Say ten o'clock?" asked Dr. Jacobs.

The appointment was made. Martin had adroitly avoided mentioning that he was not a nuclear physicist at all, but an Arabist. No need to complicate matters.

That night, across the world in Vienna, Karim took Edith Hardenberg to bed. His seduction was neither hurried nor clumsy but seemed to follow an evening of concert music and dinner with perfect naturalness. Even as she drove him back from the city center to her apartment in Grinzing, Edith tried to convince herself it would just be for a coffee and a good-night kiss, though deep inside she knew she was pretending.When he took her in his arms and kissed her gently but persuasively, she just allowed him to; her earlier conviction that she would protest seemed to melt away, and she could not prevent it. Nor, deep inside, did she want to anymore.When he swept her up and carried her through to her tiny bedroom, she just turned her face into his shoulder and let it happen. She hardly felt her severe little dress slip to the floor. His fingers had a deftness that Horst had never possessed-no pus.h.i.+ng and shoving and snagging of zips and b.u.t.tons.She was still in her slip when he joined her beneath the Bettkissen, the big soft Viennese duvet, and the heat from his hard young body was like a great comfort on a bitter winter's night.She did not know what to do, so she closed her eyes tight and let it happen. Strange, awful, sinful sensations began to run through her unaccustomed nerves beneath the attentions of his lips and softly searching fingers. Horst had never been like this. She began to panic when his lips strayed from her own and from her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and went to other places, bad, forbidden places, what her mother had always referred to as "down there." She tried to push him away, protesting feebly, knowing the waves beginning to run through her lower body were not proper and decent, but he was eager as a spaniel puppy on a downed partridge. He took no notice of her repeated "Nein, Karim, das sollst du nicht," and the waves became a tidal flow and she was a lost rowboat on a crazy ocean until the last great wave crashed over her and she drowned in a sensation with which she had never once in her thirty-nine years needed to burden the ears of her father confessor at the Votivkirche. Then she took his head in her arms and pressed his face to her thin little b.r.e.a.s.t.s and rocked him in silence. Twice more during the night he made love to her, once just after midnight and again in the blackness before dawn, and each time he was so gentle and strong that her pent-up love came pouring to meet his in a way she had never envisaged could be possible. Only after the second time could she bring herself to run her hands over his body while he slept and wonder at the sheen of the skin and the love that she felt for every inch of it.