But this was different. Rahmani was head of Counterintelligence. Had he taken the initiative on his own, and if so, why? Was it an operation with the knowledge and approval of the Rais himself, and if so, why?
What had he said? the general wondered. Things indiscreet, no doubt. But traitorous?
The body had stayed in the basement until the bombs fell, then Kemal had found a crater on a patch of waste ground to dump it. The general had insisted the handbag be placed nearby. Let that bastard Rahmani know what had happened to his slut.
As midnight passed, General Abdullah Kadiri sweated alone, tipping a few drops of water into his tenth tumbler of arak. If it was Rahmani alone, he would finish the bastard. But how could he know how far up the ladder he was distrusted? He would have to be careful henceforth, more careful than he had ever been before. Those late-night trips into the city would end. In any case, with the air war started, it was time to cease.
Simon Paxman had flown back again to London. There was no point in staying in Riyadh. Jericho had been kicked firmly into touch by the CIA, although the unseen renegade in Baghdad would not know it yet, and Mike Martin was confined to quarters until he could escape to the desert and find his way to safety across the border.
Later, Paxman could swear with his hand on his heart the meeting on the evening of the eighteenth with Dr. Terry Martin had been a true coincidence. He knew Martin lived in Bayswater, as he did himself, but it is a large borough with many shops.
With his wife away at the bedside of her sick mother and his own return unforeseen, Paxman had come home to an empty flat and an empty fridge, so he went shopping at an open-late supermarket on Westbourne Grove.
Terry Martin’s cart nearly crashed into his own as he came around the corner of pastas and pet food.
Both men were startled.
“Am I allowed to know you?” asked Martin with an embarrassed grin.
There was no one else in that aisle at the time.
“Why not?” said Paxman. “I’m just a humble civil servant shopping for his evening meal.”
They finished their purchases together and agreed to adjourn to an Indian restaurant for a meal rather than cook at home alone. Hilary, it seemed, was also away.
Paxman should, of course, not have done it. He should never have felt uncomfortable that Terry Martin’s elder brother was in a situation of appalling danger and that he, with others, had sent him into it. It should not have worried him that the trusting scholar should really believe that his adored sibling was safe inside Saudi Arabia. All tradecraft insists that one does not worry about that sort of thing. But he did.
There was another worry. Steve Laing was his superior at Century House, but Laing had never been to Iraq. His background was in Egypt and Jordan. Paxman knew Iraq—and Arabic. Not like Terry Martin, of course, but Martin was exceptional. Paxman knew enough, from several visits before he had been made head of the Iraq Desk, to form a sincere respect for the quality of Iraqi scientists and the ingenuity of their engineers. It was no secret that most British technical institutes considered their graduates from Iraq the best in the Arab world.
The worry that had nagged at him since he was told by his superiors that the last Jericho report could be none other than a load of nonsense was simply the fear that, despite all the odds, Iraq might actually be further ahead than the Western scientists were prepared to credit.
He waited until the two meals had arrived, surrounded by small pots of the accessories without which no Indian meal is complete, then made up his mind.
“Terry,” he said, “I am going to do something which, if it ever got out, would mean the end of my career in the Service.”
Martin was startled.
“That sounds drastic. Why?”
“Because I have been officially warned off you.”
The scholar was about to spoon some mango chutney onto his plate, then stopped.
“I am not thought to be reliable anymore? It was Steve Laing who pulled me into all this.”
“It’s not that. The view is that—you worry too much.”
Paxman was not prepared to use Laing’s word fusspot .
“Perhaps I do. It’s the training. Academics do not like puzzles that seem to have no answer. We have to go on worrying at it until the jumbled hieroglyphic makes sense. Was it that business of the phrase in the intercept?”
“Yes, that and other things.”
Paxman had chosen chicken khorma; Martin liked his hotter—vindaloo. Because he knew his eastern food, Martin drank hot black tea, not ice-cold beer, which only makes things worse. He blinked at Paxman over the edge of his mug.
“All right. So what is the great confession?”
“Will you give me your word that this goes no further?”
“Of course.”
“There’s been another intercept.”
Paxman had not the slightest intention of revealing the existence of Jericho. The group who knew of that asset in Iraq was still tiny and would stay that way.
“Can I listen to it?”
“No. It’s been suppressed. Don’t approach Sean Plummer. He’d have to deny it, and that would reveal where you got the information.”
Martin helped himself to more raita to cool down the flaming curry.
“What does it say, this new intercept?”
Paxman told him. Martin put down his fork and wiped his face, which was bright pink beneath the ginger thatch of his hair.
“Can it—could it, under any circumstances, be true?” asked Paxman.
“I don’t know. I’m not a physicist. The brass has given it a no-no?”
“Absolutely. The nuclear scientists all agree it simply cannot be true. So Saddam was lying.”
Privately, Martin thought it was a very odd radio intercept. It sounded more like information from inside a closed meeting.
“Saddam lies,” Martin said, “all the time. But usually for public consumption. This was to his own inner core of confidants? I wonder why? Morale booster on the threshold of war?”
“That’s what the powers think,” said Paxman.
“Have the generals been told?”
“No. The reasoning is, they are extremely busy right now and do not need to be bothered by something that simply has to be rubbish.”
“So what do you want from me, Simon?”
“Saddam’s mind. No one can figure it out. Nothing he does makes sense in the West. Is he certifiably insane or crazy like a fox?”
“In his world, the latter. In his world, what he does makes sense. The terror that revolts us has no moral downside for him, and it makes sense. The threats and the bluster make sense to him. Only when he tries to enter our world—with those ghastly PR exercises in Baghdad, ruffling that little English boy’s hair, playing the benign uncle, that sort of thing—only when he tries that does he look a complete fool. In his own world he is not a fool. He survives, he stays in power, he keeps Iraq united, his enemies fail and perish.”
“Terry, as we sit here, his country is being pulverized.”
“It doesn’t matter, Simon. It’s all replaceable.”
“But why did he say what he is supposed to have said?”
“What do the powers think?”
“That he lied.”
“No,” said Martin, “he lies for public consumption. To his inner core, he doesn’t have to. They are his, anyway. Either the source of the information lied and Saddam never said that; or he said it because he believed it was true.”
“Then he was himself lied to?”
“Possibly. Whoever did that will pay dearly when he finds out. But then, the intercept could be phony. A deliberate bluff, designed to be intercepted.”
Paxman could not say what he knew: that it was not an intercept. It came from Jericho. And in two years under the Israelis and three months under the Anglo-Americans, Jericho had never been wrong.
“You’ve got doubts, haven’t you?” said Martin.
“I suppose I have,” admi
tted Paxman.
Martin sighed.
“Straws in the wind, Simon. A phrase in an intercept, a man told to shut up and called a son of a whore, a phrase from Saddam about succeeding and being seen to succeed—in the hurting of America—and now this. We need a piece of string.”
“String?”
“Straw only makes up a bale when you can wrap it around with string. There has to be something else as to what he really has in mind. Otherwise, the powers are right, and he will go for the gas weapon he already has.”
“All right. I’ll look for a piece of string.”
“And I,” said Martin, “did not meet you this evening, and we have not spoken.”
“Thank you,” said Paxman.
Hassan Rahmani heard of the death of his agent Leila two days after it happened, on January 19. She had not appeared for a scheduled handover of information from General Kadiri’s bed, and fearing the worst, he had checked morgue records.
The hospital in Mansour had produced the evidence, though the corpse had been buried, with many others from the destroyed military buildings, in a mass grave.
Hassan Rahmani no more believed that his agent had been hit by a stray bomb while crossing a piece of waste ground in the middle of the night than he believed in ghosts. The only ghosts in the skies above Baghdad were the invisible American bombers of which he had read in Western defense magazines, and they were not ghosts but logically contrived inventions. So was the death of Leila Al-Hilla.
His only logical conclusion was that Kadiri had discovered her extramural activities and put a stop to them. Which meant she would have talked before she died.
That meant, for him, that Kadiri had become a powerful and dangerous enemy. Worse, his principal conduit into the inner councils of the regime had been closed down.
Had he known that Kadiri was as worried as he himself, Rahmani would have been delighted. But he did not know. He only knew that from thenceforward he was going to have to be extremely careful.
On the second day of the air war, Iraq launched its first battery of missiles against Israel. The media at once announced them as being Soviet-built Scud-Bs, and the title stuck throughout the rest of the war. In fact, they were not Scuds at all.
The point of the onslaught was not foolish. Iraq recognized quite clearly that Israel was not a country prepared to accept large numbers of civilian casualties. As the first rocket warheads fell into the suburbs of Tel Aviv, Israel reacted by going on the warpath. This was exactly what Baghdad wanted.
Within the fifty-nation Coalition ranged against Iraq were seventeen Arab states, and if there was one thing they all shared apart from the Islamic faith, it was a hostility to Israel. Iraq calculated, probably rightly, that if Israel could be provoked into joining the war by a strike against her, the Arab nations in the Coalition would pull out. Even King Fahd, monarch of Saudi Arabia and Keeper of the Two Holy Places, would be in an impossible position.
The first reactions to the fall of the rockets on Israel was that they might be loaded with gas or germ cultures. Had they been, Israel could not have been restrained. It was quickly proved that the warheads were of conventional explosives. But the psychological effect inside Israel was still enormous.
The United States immediately brought massive pressure on Jerusalem not to respond with a counterstrike. The Allies, Itzhak Shamir was told, would take care of it. Israel actually launched a counterstrike in the form of a wave of her own F-15 fighter-bombers but called them back while still in Israeli air space.
The real Scud was a clumsy, obsolete Soviet missile of which Iraq had bought nine hundred several years earlier. It had a range of under three hundred kilometers and carried a warhead of close to a thousand pounds. It was not guided, and even in its original form it would, at full range, land anywhere within half a mile of its target.
From Iraq’s point of view, it had been a virtually useless purchase. It could not reach Teheran in the Iran-Iraq war, and it certainly could not reach Israel, even if fired from the extreme western border of Iraq.
What the Iraqis had done in the meantime, with German technical help, was bizarre. They had cut up the Scuds into chunks and used three of them to create two new rockets. To put not too fine a point on it, the new Al-Husayn rocket was a mess.
By adding extra fuel tanks the Iraqis had increased the range to 620 kilometers so that it could (and did) reach Teheran and Israel. But its payload was cut to a pathetic 160 pounds. Its guidance, always erratic, was now chaotic. Two of them, launched at Israel, not only missed Tel Aviv, they missed the entire republic and fell in Jordan.
But as a terror weapon it almost worked. Even though all the Al-Husayns that fell on Israel had less payload than one American two-thousand-pound bomb falling on Iraq, they sent the Israeli population into something approaching panic.
The United States responded in three ways. Fully a thousand sorties were flown to shoot down the incoming rockets and the even more elusive mobile launchers.
Batteries of American Patriot missiles were sent into Israel within hours in an attempt to shoot down the incoming rockets but mainly to persuade Israel to stay out of the war.
And the SAS, and later the American Green Berets, were sent into the western deserts of Iraq to find the mobile rocket launchers and either destroy them with their own Milan missiles or call in air strikes by radio.
The Patriots, although hailed as the saviors of all creation, had limited success—but that was not their fault. Raytheon had designed the Patriot to intercept airplanes, not rockets, and they had been hastily adapted to a new role. The reason they hardly ever hit an incoming warhead was never disclosed.
The fact was, in extending the Scud’s range by turning it into the Al-Husayn, the Iraqis had also increased its altitude. The new rocket, entering inner space on its parabolic flight, was getting red-hot as it came back down, something the Scud was never designed to do. As it reentered earth’s atmosphere, it just broke up. What descended on Israel was not an entire rocket but a falling trash can.
The Patriot, doing its job, went up to intercept and found itself with not one piece of metal coming toward it but a dozen. So its tiny brain told it to do what it was programmed to do—go for the biggest one. This was usually the spent fuel tank, tumbling downward out of control. The warhead, much smaller and detached in the breakup, just fell free. Many failed to explode at all, and most of the battering sustained by Israeli buildings was impact-damage.
If the so-called Scud was a psychological terror, the Patriot was a psychological savior. But the psychology worked, inasmuch as it was part of the solution to keeping Israel out of the war.
Another part was the promise of the much-improved Arrow rocket when it was ready—installed by 1994. Section three was the right of Israel to choose up to one hundred extra targets that the Allied air forces would obliterate. The choices were made—mainly targets in Western Iraq that affected Israel, roads, bridges, airfields, anything pointing west at her. None of these targets by their geographical location had anything to do with the liberation of Kuwait on the other side of the peninsula.
The fighter-bombers of the American and British air forces assigned to Scud-hunting claimed numerous successes, claims regarded with immediate skepticism by the CIA, to the rage of General Chuck Horner and General Schwarzkopf.
Two years after the war, Washington officially denied that a single mobile Scud-launcher had been destroyed by air power—a suggestion still capable today of reducing any pilot involved to incandescent rage. The fact was, the pilots had largely been deceived again by maskirovka .
If the southern desert of Iraq is a featureless billiard table, the western and northwestern deserts are rocky, hilly, and riven by a thousand wadis and gullies. This was the land over which Mike Martin had driven on his infiltration to Baghdad. Before launching its rocket attacks, Baghdad had created scores of dummy Scud mobile launchers, and these were hidden, along with the real ones, across the landscape.
The ha
bit was to produce them in the night, a tube of sheet metal mounted on an old flatbed truck, and at dawn torch a drum of oil and cotton waste inside the tube. Far away, the sensors in the AWACS
picked up the heat source and logged a missile launch. The fighters vectored onto the location did the rest and claimed a kill.
The men who could not be fooled this way were the SAS. Although only a handful in number, they swarmed into the western deserts in their Land-Rovers and motorbikes, lay up in the blistering days and freezing nights, and watched. At two hundred yards, they could see what was a real mobile launcher and what was a dummy.
As the real rocket launchers came out from the culverts and beneath the bridges where they were hidden from aerial observation, the silent men in the crags watched through binoculars. If there were too many Iraqis around, they quietly called in air strikes by radio. If they could get away with it, they used their own Milan antitank rockets, which made a very nice bang when hitting the fuel tank of a real Al-Husayn.
It was soon realized there was an invisible north-south line running down the desert. West of that line, the Iraqi rockets could hit Israel; east of it, they were out of range. The job was to terrorize the Iraqi crews into not daring to venture west of that line but to fire from east of it and lie to their superiors. It took eight days, and then the rocket attacks on Israel stopped. They never started again.
Later, the Baghdad-to-Jordan road was used as a divider. North of it was Scud Alley North, terrain of the American Special Forces, who went in by long-range helicopter. Below the road was Scud Alley South, bailiwick of the British Special Air Service. Four good men died in those deserts, but they did the job they had been sent in to do, where billions of dollars of technology had been deceived.
On day four of the air war, January 20, the 336th Squadron out of Al Kharz was one of the units that had not been diverted to the western deserts.
Its assignment that day included a big SAM missile site northwest of Baghdad. The SAMs were controlled by two large radar dishes.