“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 bitch,” 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 assert 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 class 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 principal 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 passengers and their bicycles, some mere rowboats.
Most major buildings remained untouched. The Rashid Hotel in Karch was still stuffed with foreign press people, even though the Rais was assuredly 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 eightP.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 shifting of cramped muscles, a scrape 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 fourA.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 assembled 4300th Bomb Wing of the USAF, flying B-52 Stratofortresses.
The B-52 was arguably the ol
dest 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 prone 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 constituted the usual cell for Buff operations, and their crews had been looking forward to a day fishing, 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-Fif ty Two. It just stands for Big Ugly Fat Fucker.
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 Washington began to yell for more pictures of these mysterious Frisbees, a further BDA mission was assigned, 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. Washington and London had to be satisfied with the dozen pictures they had from Lieutenant Commander Darren Cleary.
The best analysts 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 Washington to ENPIC.
Those passing this drab, square brick-built building on a corner in a seedy and run-down precinct of downtown Washington 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 analysts 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 analysts, 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 Washington 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 mass 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 Abassid 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 nobody 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 threeP.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 passion, 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 Li
vermore National Laboratory, in Alameda County. He was just in time.
“Could you put me through to Department Z?” he asked, pronouncing 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.