“The best, while it lasted.”
Stewart hung up. Laing went upstairs to see Sir Colin. The decision was made within an hour.
By the hour of breakfast on the morning of January 15 in Saudi Arabia, every aircrew member, American, British, French, Italian, Saudi, and Kuwaiti, knew that they were going to war. The politicians and the diplomats, they believed, had failed to prevent it. Through the day all air units moved to prebattle alert.
The nerve centers of the campaign were located in three establishments in Riyadh.
On the outskirts of Riyadh military air base was a collection of huge air-conditioned tents, known because of the green light that suffused them through the canvas as the Barn. This was the first filter for the tidal wave of air intelligence photographs that had been flowing in for weeks and that would double and triple in the weeks to come.
The product of the Barn—a synthesis of the most important photographic information pouring in from so many reconnaissance sorties—went a mile up the road to the headquarters of the Royal Saudi Air Force, a great chunk of which had been made over to Central Air Force, or CENTAF.
A giant building of gray mottled concrete and glass built on piles a hundred fifty meters long, the headquarters has a basement running its full length, and it was here, one level below ground, that CENTAF was based.
Despite the size of the basement, there was still not enough space, so the parking lot had been crammed with an array of more green tents and prefab buildings, where further interpretation took place.
In the basement was the focal point of it all, the Joint Imagery Production Center, a warren of interconnecting rooms in which worked throughout the war two hundred and fifty analysts, American and British, of all three armed forces, and of all ranks. This was the Black Hole.
The overall air commander, General Chuck Horner, was technically in charge, but as he was often called to the Defense Ministry a mile farther up the road, the more usual presence was that of his deputy, General Buster Glosson.
The air war planners in the Black Hole consulted on a daily and even hourly basis a document called the Basic Target Graphic, a list and map of everything in Iraq that was targeted for a hit. From this they derived the daily bible of every air commander, squadron intelligence officer, planning ops officer, and aircrew in the Gulf Theater—the Air Tasking Order.
Each day’s ATO was an immensely detailed document, running to over a hundred pages of typescript. It took three days to prepare.
First came Apportionment—the decision on the percentages of the target types in Iraq that could be struck in a single day and the available aircraft suitable for such a strike.
Day two saw Allocation—the conversion of the percentage of Iraqi targets into actual numbers and locations. Day three was for Distribution—the “who gets what” decision. It was in the distribution process that it might be decided, for example, that this one is for the British Tornados, this for the American Strike Eagles, this one for the Navy Tomcats, this for the Phantoms, and that one for the B-52
Stratofortresses.
Only then would each squadron and wing be sent its menu for the following day. After that, it was up to them to do it—find the target, work out the route, link up with the air-refueling tankers, plan the strike direction, calculate the secondary targets in case of a no-go, and work out their way home.
The squadron commander would choose his crews—many squadrons had multiple targets designated in a single day—and pick his flight leaders and their wingmen. The weapons officers, of which Don Walker was one, would select the ordnance—“iron” or “dumb” bombs, which are unguided bombs, laser-guided bombs, laser-guided rockets, and so forth.
A mile down Old Airport Road was the third building. The Saudi Defense Ministry is immense, five linked main buildings of shimmering white cement, seven stories high, with fluted columns up to the fourth.
It was on this fourth floor that General Norman Schwarzkopf had been allocated a handsome suite that he hardly ever saw, frequently bunking down on a cot in the subbasement where he could be near his command post.
In all, the Ministry is four hundred meters long and a hundred feet high, a lavishness that paid dividends in the Gulf War, when Riyadh had to play host to so many unexpected foreigners.
Belowground are two more floors of rooms running the length of the building, and of the four hundred meters, Coalition Command was allocated sixty. It was here that the generals sat in conclave throughout the war, watching on a giant map as staff officers pointed out what had been done, what had been missed, what had shown up, what had moved, and what the Iraqi response and dispositions had been.
Shielded from the hot sun that January day, a British squadron leader stood before the wall map showing the seven hundred targets listed in Iraq, 240 primaries and the rest secondary, and remarked:
“Well, that’s about it,”
Alas, that was not it. Unbeknownst to the planners, for all the satellites and all the technology, sheer human ingenuity in the form of camouflage and maskirovka had deceived them.
In hundreds of emplacements across Iraq and Kuwait, Iraqi tanks sat and brooded under their netting, well-targeted by the Allies due to their metal content, picked up by overhead radars. They were in many cases made of matchboard, plywood, and tinplate, the drums of scrap iron inside giving the appropriate metallic response to the sensors. Scores of old truck chassis now mounted replica launching tubes for Scud missiles. These mobile “launchers” would all be solemnly blown apart by the Allies.
But more seriously, seventy primary targets concerned with weapons of mass destruction had not been spotted because they were buried deep or cunningly disguised as something else. Only later would planners puzzle over how the Iraqis had managed to reconstitute entire destroyed divisions with such unbelievable speed; only later would United Nations inspectors discover plant after plant and store after store that had escaped, and come away knowing there were yet more buried underground.
But that hot day in 1990 no one knew these things. What the young men out on the flight lines from Tabuq in the west to Bahrain in the east and down to the ultrasecret Khamis Mushait in the south knew was that in forty hours they would go to war and some of them would not come back.
In the last full day before final briefings began, most of them wrote home. Some chewed on their pencils and wondered what to say. Others thought of their wives and children and cried as they wrote; hands accustomed to controlling many tons of deadly metal sought to craft inadequate words into saying what they felt; lovers tried to express what they should have whispered before, fathers urged their sons to look after their mothers if the worst should happen.
Captain Don Walker heard the news with all the other pilots and aircrew of the Rocketeers of the 336th TFS in a terse announcement from the wing commander at Al Kharz. It was just before nine in the morning, and the sun was already beating down on the desert like a sledgehammer on a waiting anvil.
There was none of the usual banter as the men filed out of the tented briefing hall, each plunged in his private thoughts. For each, these thoughts were much the same: the last attempt to avoid a war had been tried and had failed; the politicians and the diplomats had shuttled from conference to conference, postured and declaimed, urged, bullied, pleaded, threatened, and cajoled in order to avoid a war—and had failed.
So at least they believed, those young men who had just learned that the talking was over at last, failing to understand that they had for months past been destined for this day.
Walker watched Squadron Commander Steve Turner stump away to his tent to write what he genuinely believed might be his last letter to Betty Jane back in Goldsboro, North Carolina. Randy Roberts had a brief, muttered few words with Boomer Henry, then they parted and walked away.
The young Oklahoman looked at the pale blue vault of sky where he had lusted to be since he was a small boy in Tulsa and where he soon might die in this thirtieth year, and turned his steps toward the
perimeter. Like the others, he wanted to be alone.
There was no fence to the base at Al Kharz, just the ochre sea of sand, shale, and gravel stretching away to the horizon and beyond that to the next and the next. Walker passed the clamshell hangars grouped around the concrete apron, where the mechanics were by then working on their charges and the crew chiefs were passing among each team, conferring and checking to ensure that when each of their babies finally went to war, they would be machines as perfect as the hand of man could make them.
Walker spotted his own Eagle among them and was awed as always when he contemplated the F-15E
from afar by its air of quiet menace. It crouched silently amid the teeming swarm of men and women in coveralls who crawled all over its burly frame, immune to love or lust, hate or fear, patiently waiting for the moment when it would finally do what it had been designed to do all those years ago on the drawing board—bring flame and death to the people designated as its target by the President of the United States. Walker envied his Eagle; for all its myriad complexity, it could not feel anything, it could never be afraid.
He left the city of canvas behind him and walked across the plain of shale, his eyes shaded by the peak of his baseball cap and the aviator glasses, hardly feeling the heat of the sun on his shoulders.
For eight years he had flown the aircraft of his country and done so because he loved it. But never once had he really, truly contemplated the prospect that he might die in battle. Part of every combat pilot muses with the notion of testing his skill, his nerve, and the excellence of his airplane against another man in a real rather than a dummy contest. But another part always assumes that it will never happen. It will never really come to killing other mothers’ sons, or being killed by them.
That morning, like all the others, he realized at last that it truly had come to this: that all those years of study and training had finally led to this day and this place; that in forty hours he would take his Eagle into the sky again, and that this time he might not come back.
Like the others, he thought of home. Being an only child and a single man, he thought of his mother and father. He remembered all the times and places of his boyhood in Tulsa, the things he and his parents had done together in the yard behind the house, the day he had been given his first catcher’s mitt and forced his father to pitch to him until the sun went down.
His thoughts strayed back to the vacations they had shared before he left home to go to college and then to the Air Force. The one he recalled best was the time his father took him on a men-only fishing trip to Alaska the summer he was twelve.
Ray Walker had been almost twenty years younger then, leaner and fitter, stronger than his son, before the years reversed the difference. They had taken a kayak, with a guide and other vacationers, and skimmed the icy waters of Glacier Bay, watched the black bears gathering berries on the mountain slopes, the harbor seals basking on the last remaining floes of August, and the sun rising over the Mendenhall Glacier behind Juneau. Together they had hauled two seventy-pound monsters out of Halibut Hole and taken the deep-running king salmon out of the channel off Sitka.
Now he found himself walking across a sea of baking sand in a land far from home with tears running down his face, unwiped, drying in the sun. If he died, he would never marry or have children of his own.
Twice he had almost proposed; once to a girl in college, but that was when he was very young and infatuated, the second time to a more mature woman he had met off-base near McConnell, who let him know she could never be the wife of a jet jockey.
Now he wanted, as he had never wanted before, to have children of his own; he wanted a woman to come home to at the end of the day, and a daughter to tuck up in her crib with a bedtime story, and a son to teach how to catch a spinning football, to bat and pitch, to hike and fish, the way his father had taught him. More than that, he wanted to go back to Tulsa and embrace his mother again, who had worried so much over the things he had done and had bravely pretended not to. ...
The young pilot finally returned to the base, sat down at a rickety table in his shared tent, and sought to write a letter home. He was not a good letter writer. Words did not come easily. He usually tended to describe the things that had happened recently in the squadron, his friends, the state of the weather. This was different.
He wrote two pages to his parents, like so many sons that day. He sought to explain what was going on in his head, which was not easy.
He told them about the news that had been announced that morning and what it meant, and he asked them not to worry about him. He had had the best training in the world and flew the best fighter in the world for the best air force in the world.
He wrote that he was sorry for all the times he had been a pain, and he thanked them for all they had done for him over the years, from the first day they had had to wipe his bottom to the time they had come to be present when the general pinned those coveted flier’s wings on his chest.
In forty hours, he explained., he would take his Eagle off the runway again, but this time it would be different. This time, for the first time, he would seek to kill other human beings, and they would seek to kill him.
He would not see their faces or sense their fear, as they would not know his, for that is not the way of modern war. But if they succeeded and he failed, he wanted his parents to know how much he had loved them, and he hoped he had been a good son.
When he had finished, he sealed his letter. Many other letters were sealed mat day across the length and breadth of Saudi Arabia. Then the military postal services took them, and they were delivered to Trenton and Tulsa and London and Rouen and Rome.
That night Mike Martin received a burst from his controllers in Riyadh. When he played the tape back, it was Simon Paxman speaking. It was not a long message, but it was clear and to the point.
In his previous message, Jericho had been wrong, completely and utterly wrong. Every scientific check proved there was no way he could be right.
He had been wrong either deliberately or inadvertently. In the first case he must have turned, lured by the lust for money, or been turned. In the second he would be aggrieved because the CIA absolutely refused to pay him a further dollar for this sort of product.
That being so, there was no choice but to believe either that, with Jericho’s cooperation, the whole operation had been blown to Iraqi Counterintelligence, now in the hands of “your friend Hassan Rahmani”; or that it soon would be, if Jericho sought revenge by sending Rahmani an anonymous tip.
All six dead-letter boxes must now be assumed to be compromised. Under no circumstances were they to be approached. Martin should make his own preparations to escape Iraq at the first safe opportunity, perhaps under the mantle of the chaos that would ensue in twenty-four hours. End of message.
Martin thought it through for the remainder of the night. He was not surprised that the West disbelieved Jericho. That the mercenary’s payments were now to cease was a blow. The man had only reported the contents of a conference at which Saddam had spoken. So Saddam had lied—nothing new in that. What else was Jericho to do—ignore it? It was the cheek of the man in asking for a million dollars that had done it.
Beyond that, Paxman’s logic was impeccable. Within four days, maybe five, Jericho would have checked and found no more money. He would become angry, resentful. If he were not himself blown away and in the hands of Omar Khatib the Tormentor, he might well respond by making an anonymous tipoff.
Yet it would be foolish for Jericho to do that. If Martin were caught and broken—and he was uncertain how much pain he could take at the hands of Khatib and his professionals in the Gymnasium—his own information could point the finger at Jericho, whoever he was.
Still, people do foolish things. Paxman was right, the drops might be under surveillance.
As for escaping Baghdad, that was easier said than done. From gossip in the markets, Martin had heard that the roads out of town were thick with patrols of the AMAM and the Mi
litary Police, looking for deserters and draft-dodgers. His own letter from the Soviet diplomat Kulikov authorized him only to serve the man as gardener in Baghdad. Hard to explain to a patrol checkpoint what he was doing heading west into the desert, where his motorcycle was buried.
On balance he decided to stay inside the Soviet compound for a while. It was probably the safest place in Baghdad.
Chapter 15
The deadline for Saddam Hussein to leave Kuwait expired at midnight on January 15. In a thousand rooms, huts, tents, and cabins across Saudi Arabia, and in the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf, men glanced at their watches and then at each other. There was very little to say.
Two floors beneath the Saudi Defense Ministry, behind the steel doors that would have protected any bank vault in the world, there was almost a sense of anticlimax. After all that work, all that planning, there was nothing more to do—for a couple of hours. Now it was down to the younger men. They had their tasks, and they would carry them out in the pitch blackness far above the generals’ heads.
At 2:15A.M. , General Schwarzkopf entered the war room. Everyone stood. He read aloud a message to the troops, the chaplain said a prayer, and the commander-in-chief said, “Okay, let’s get to work.”
Far out across the desert, men were already at work. First across the border were not the warplanes but a flight of eight Apache helicopters belonging to the Army’s 101st Airborne Division. Their task was limited but crucial.
North of the border but short of Baghdad were two powerful Iraqi radar bases, whose dishes commanded all the skies from the Gulf in the east to the western desert.
The helicopters had been chosen, despite their slow speed compared with supersonic jet fighters, for two reasons. Skimming the desert, they could pass under the radar and approach the bases unseen; further, the commanders wanted human-eyeball confirmation that the bases were really wrecked, and from close range. Only the choppers could give that. It would cost a lot of lives if those radars were left functioning.