The Fist of God (54 page)

It would have been foolish for the bomb-carriers to go in with the radars still intact—had they suddenly illuminated without warning, the SAMs would have had the Eagles cold.

After twenty minutes over the target, the attack was called off.

Components of the gorilla were assigned to their secondary targets.

Don Walker had a quick word with Tim Nathanson, his wizzo, sitting behind him. The secondary target for the day was a fixed Scud site south of Samarra, which was in any case being visited by other fighter-The Fist of God

bombers because it was a known poison gas facility.

The AWACS confirmed there was no takeoff activity out of the two big Iraqi air bases at Samarra East and Balad Southeast. Don Walker called up his wingman, and the two-plane element headed for the Scud site.

All communications between the American aircraft were coded by the Have-quick system, which garbles the speech to anyone trying to listen in who is not carrying the same system. The codings can be changed daily but were common to all Allied aircraft.

Walker glanced around. The sky was clear; half a mile away his wingman, Randy “R-2” Roberts, rode astern and slightly above him, with wizzo Jim “Boomer” Henry sitting behind.

Over the Scud fixed-launcher position, Walker dropped down to identify the target properly. To his rage, it was obscured by swirling clouds of desert dust, a
shamal
that had sprung up, created by the strong desert wind down there on the floor.

His laser-guided bombs would not miss, so long as they could follow the beam projected at the target from his own aircraft. To project the guiding beam, he had to see his target.

Furious and running short of fuel, he turned away. Two frustrations in the same morning were too much. He hated to land with a full rack of ordnance. But there was nothing for it, the road home lay south.

Three minutes later, he saw an enormous industrial complex beneath him.

“What’s that?” he asked Tim. The WSO checked his briefing maps.

“It’s called Tarmiya.”

“Jesus, it’s big.”

“Yeah.”

Although neither man knew it, the Tarmiya industrial complex The Fist of God

contained 381 buildings and covered an area of ten miles by ten miles.

“Listed?”

“Nope.”

“Going down anyway. Randy, cover my ass.”

“Got it,” came over the air from his wingman.

Walker dropped his Eagle clean down to ten thousand feet.

The industrial spread was huge. In the center was one enormous building, the size of a covered sports stadium.

“Going in.”

“Don, it’s nontarget.”

Dropping to eight thousand feet, Walker activated his laser-guidance system and lined up on the vast factory below and in front of him. His head-up display ran off the distance as it shortened and gave him a seconds-to-fire reading. As the latter hit zero, he released his bombs, keeping his nose still on the approaching target.

The laser-sniffer in the nose of the two bombs was the PAVEWAY

system. Under his fuselage was the guidance module, called LANTIRN. The LANTIRN threw an invisible infrared beam at the target, where the beam rebounded to form a sort of funnel-shaped electronic basket pointing back toward him.

The PAVEWAY nose cones sensed this basket, entered it, and followed the funnel down and inward until they impacted precisely where the beam was aimed.

Both bombs did their job. They blew up under the lip of the roof of the factory. Seeing them explode, Don Walker hauled back, lifted the nose of the Eagle, and powered it back to twenty-five thousand feet. An hour later, he and his wingman, after another refuel in midair, were back at Al Kharz.

Before he lifted his nose, Walker had seen the blinding flash of the two The Fist of God

explosions and the great column of smoke that had arisen, and he had caught a glimpse of the dust cloud that would follow the bombing.

What he did not see was that those two bombs tore out one end of the factory, lifting a large section of roof up into the air like the sail of a ship at sea.

Nor did he observe that the strong desert wind that morning—the same one that had created the dust storm to blot out the Scud site—did the rest. It tore the roof off the factory, peeling it back like the lid of a sardine can, as sheets of roofing steel flew lethally in all directions.

Back at base, Don Walker, like every other pilot, was extensively debriefed. It was a tiresome process for weary pilots, but it had to be done. In charge was the squadron intelligence officer, Major Beth Kroger.

No one pretended the gorilla had been a success, but every pilot had taken out his secondary target, except one. Their hotshot weapons officer had flunked his secondary target and picked a tertiary one at random.

“What the hell did you do that for?” Kroger asked.

“Because it was huge and looked important.”

“It wasn’t even on the Tasking Order,” she complained. She logged the target he had chosen, its exact location and description, and his own bomb-damage report and filed it for the attention of TACC—the Tactical Air Control Center, which shared the basement of CENTAF

beneath the Saudi Air Force headquarters with the Black Hole analysts in Riyadh.

“If this turns out to be a water-bottling plant or a baby-food factory, they’re gonna can your ass,” she warned Walker.

“You know, Beth, you’re beautiful when you’re angry,” he teased her.

Beth Kroger was a good career officer. If she was going to be flirted The Fist of God

with, she preferred colonels and up. As the three of those on the base were seriously married, Al Kharz was turning out to be a pain.

“You’re out of line,
Captain
,” she told him, and went off to file her report.

Walker sighed and went off to his cot to rest. She was right, though. If he had just totaled the world’s biggest orphanage, General Horner would personally have his captain’s bars for toothpicks. As it happened, they never did tell Don Walker just what he had hit that morning. But it was not an orphanage.

Chapter 16

Karim came to dine with Edith Hardenberg at her flat in Grinzing that same night. He found his own way out to the suburbs by public transportation, and he brought with him gifts: a pair of aromatically scented candles, which he placed on the small table in the eating alcove and lit; and two bottles of fine wine.

Edith let him in, pink and embarrassed as ever, then returned to fuss over the Wiener schnitzel she was preparing in her tiny kitchen. It had been twenty years since she had prepared a meal for a man; she was finding the ordeal daunting but, to her surprise, exciting.

Karim had greeted her with a chaste peck on the cheek in the doorway, which had made her even more flustered, then found Verdi’s
Nabucco
in the library of her records and put it on the player.

Soon the aroma of the candles, musk and patchouli, joined the gentle The Fist of God

cadences of the “Slaves’ Chorus” to drift through the apartment.

It was just as he had been told to expect it by the neviot team that had broken in weeks before: very neat, very tidy, extremely clean. The flat of a fussy woman who lived alone.

When the meal was ready, Edith presented it with copious apologies.

Karim tried the meat and pronounced it the best he had ever tasted, which made her even more flustered, yet immensely pleased.

They talked as they ate, of things cultural; of their projected visit to the Schönbrunn Palace and to see the fabulous Lipizzaner horses at the Hofreitschule, the Spanish Riding School inside the Hofburg on Josefsplatz.

Edith ate as she did everything else—precisely, like a bird pecking at a morsel. She wore her hair scraped back as always, gripped into a severe bun behind her head.

By the light of the candles, for he had switched off the too-bright lamp above the table, Karim was darkly handsome and courteous as ever.

He refilled her wineglass all the time, so that she consumed far more than the occasional glass that she normally permitted herself from time to time.

The effect of the food, the wine, the candles, the music, and the company of her young friend slowly corroded the defenses of her reserve.

Over the empty plates, Karim leaned forward and gazed into her eyes.

“Edith?”

“Yes.”

“May I ask you something?”

“If you wish.”

“Why do you wear your hair drawn back like that?”

It was an impertinent question, personal. She blushed more deeply.

The Fist of God

“I ... have always worn it like this.”

No, that was not true. There was a time, she recalled, with Horst, when it had flowed about her shoulders, thick and brown, in the summer of 1970. There was a time when it had blown in the wind on the lake at the Schlosspark in Laxenburg.

Karim rose without a word and walked behind her. She felt a rising panic. This was preposterous. Skillful fingers eased the big tortoiseshell comb out of her bun. This must stop. She felt the bobby pins withdrawn, her hair coming undone, falling down her back. She sat rigid at her place. The same fingers lifted her hair and drew it forward to fall on either side of her face.

Karim stood beside her, and she looked up. He held out two hands and smiled.

“That’s better. You look ten years younger and prettier. Let’s sit on the sofa. You pick your favorite piece for the record player and I’ll make coffee. Deal?”

Without permission, he took her small hands and lifted her up from her seat. Letting one hand drop, he led her out of the alcove into the sitting room. Then he turned into the kitchen, releasing her other hand as he did so.

Thank God he had done that. She was shaking from head to toe. Theirs was supposed to be a platonic friendship. But then, he had not touched her, not really touched her. She would, of course, never permit
that
sort of thing
.

She caught sight of herself in a mirror on the wall, pink and flushed, hair about her shoulders, covering her ears, framing her face. She thought she caught half a glimpse of a girl she had known twenty years ago.

She took a grip on herself and chose a record. Her beloved Strauss, the The Fist of God

waltzes every note of which she knew, “Roses from the South,”

“Vienna Woods,” “Skaters,” “Danube” ... Thank goodness he was in the kitchen and did not see her nearly drop it as she placed it on the turntable. He seemed to have great ease in finding the coffee, the water, the filters, the sugar.

She sat at one far end of the sofa when he joined her, knees together, coffee on her lap. She wanted to talk about the concert scheduled for the Musikverein next week, but the words did not come. She sipped her coffee instead.

“Edith, please don’t be frightened of me,” he murmured. “I am your friend, no?”

“Don’t be silly. Of course I’m not frightened.”

“Good. Because I will never hurt you, you know.”

Friend. Yes, they were friends, a friendship born of a mutual love of music, art, opera, culture. Nothing more, surely. Such a small gap, friend to boyfriend. She knew that the other secretaries at the bank had husbands and boyfriends, watched them excited before going out on a date, giggling in the hall the morning after, pitying her for being so alone.

“That’s ‘Roses from the South,’ isn’t it?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I think it’s my favorite of all the waltzes.”

“Mine too.” That was better—back to music.

He took her coffee cup from her lap and put it beside his own on a side table. Then he rose, took her hands, and pulled her to her feet.

“What ...?”

She found her right hand taken in his left, a strong and persuasive arm around her waist, and she was turning gently on the strip-pine flooring of the small space between the furniture, dancing a waltz.

The Fist of God

Gidi Barzilai would have said, go for it, boychick, don’t waste any more time. What did he know? Nothing. First the trust, then the fall.

Karim kept his right hand well up Edith’s back.

As they turned, several inches of space between them, Karim brought their locked hands closer to his shoulder, and with his right arm he eased Edith nearer to his body. It was imperceptible.

Edith found her face against his chest and had to turn her face sideways. Her small bosom was against his body, and she could sense that man-smell again.

She pulled away. He let her, released her right hand, and used his left to tilt her chin upward. Then he kissed her, as they danced.

It was not a salacious kiss. He kept his lips together, made no effort to force hers apart. Her mind was a rush of thoughts and sensations, an airplane out of control, spinning, falling, protests rising to fight and failing. The bank, Gemütlich, her reputation, his youth, his foreignness, their ages, the warmth, the wine, the odor, the strength, the lips. The music stopped. If he had done anything else, she would have thrown him out. He took his lips from hers and eased her head forward until it rested against his chest. They stayed motionless like that in the silent apartment for several seconds.

It was she who pulled away. She turned to the sofa and sat down, staring ahead of her. She found him on his knees in front of her. He took both her hands in his.

“Are you angry with me, Edith?”

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said.

“I didn’t mean to. I swear it. I couldn’t help it.”

“I think you should go.”

“Edith, if you are angry and you want to punish me, there is only one way you can. By not letting me see you again.”

The Fist of God

“Well, I’m not sure.”

“Please say you’ll let me see you again.”

“I suppose so.”

“If you say no, I’ll abandon the study course and go home. I couldn’t live in Vienna if you won’t see me.”

“Don’t be silly. You must study.”

“Then you will see me again?”

“All right.”

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.