The Fist of God (56 page)

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 hell’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 apeshit 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 The Fist of God

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 space 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 partitions, 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 hell 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.

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“Chain-link fencing.”

“Double chain-link. And here?”

Colonel Beatty took the magnifying glass 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-altitude 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 hell did we miss it?”

The fact was, the whole of the 381-building industrial complex of Tarmiya had been cleared by the first analysts 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 assessing 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 trespassers 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 The Fist of God

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 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.”

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“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.

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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 The Fist of God

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 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 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 The Fist of God

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 The Fist of God

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 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.