The Fist of God (57 page)

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 The Fist of God

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 The Fist of God

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.

The Fist of God

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 The Fist of God

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 three P.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.

The Fist of God

“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 Livermore 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?”

The Fist of God

“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.

When he swept her up and carried her through to her tiny bedroom, she just turned her face into his shoulder and let it happen. She hardly felt her severe little dress slip to the floor. His fingers had a deftness that Horst had never possessed—no pushing and shoving and snagging of zips and buttons.

She was still in her slip when he joined her beneath the
Bettkissen
, the big soft Viennese duvet, and the heat from his hard young body was like a great comfort on a bitter winter’s night.

She did not know what to do, so she closed her eyes tight and let it happen. Strange, awful, sinful sensations began to run through her The Fist of God

unaccustomed nerves beneath the attentions of his lips and softly searching fingers. Horst had never been like this.

She began to panic when his lips strayed from her own and from her breasts and went to other places, bad, forbidden places, what her mother had always referred to as “down there.”

She tried to push him away, protesting feebly, knowing the waves beginning to run through her lower body were not proper and decent, but he was eager as a spaniel puppy on a downed partridge.

He took no notice of her repeated “
Nein
, Karim,
das sollst du nicht
,”

and the waves became a tidal flow and she was a lost rowboat on a crazy ocean until the last great wave crashed over her and she drowned in a sensation with which she had never once in her thirty-nine years needed to burden the ears of her father confessor at the Votivkirche.

Then she took his head in her arms and pressed his face to her thin little breasts and rocked him in silence.

Twice more during the night he made love to her, once just after midnight and again in the blackness before dawn, and each time he was so gentle and strong that her pent-up love came pouring to meet his in a way she had never envisaged could be possible. Only after the second time could she bring herself to run her hands over his body while he slept and wonder at the sheen of the skin and the love that she felt for every inch of it.

Although he had no idea his guest had any interest in the world other than Arab studies, Dr. Maslowski insisted that he drive Terry Martin out to Livermore in the morning rather than go to the expense of a cab.

“I guess I have a more important guy in my house than I thought I had,” he suggested on the drive. But though Martin expostulated that The Fist of God

this was not so, the California scholar knew enough about the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to know that not everyone blew in there on a phone call. Dr. Maslowski, with masterly discretion, refrained from asking any more questions.

At the main security gate uniformed guards checked a list, examined Martin’s passport, made a phone call, and directed them to a parking area.

“I’ll wait here,” said Maslowski.

Considering the work it does, the Laboratory is an odd-looking collection of buildings on Vasco Road, some of them modern, but many dating back to the days when it was an old military base. To add to the conglomeration of styles, “temporary” buildings that have somehow become permanent are slotted between the old barracks.

Martin was led to a group of offices on the East Avenue side of the complex.

It does not look like much, but it is out of this cluster of buildings that a group of scientists monitor the spread of nuclear technology across the Third World.

Jim Jacobs turned out to be little older than Terry Martin, just under forty, a Ph.D., and a nuclear physicist. He welcomed Martin into his paper-strewn office.

“Cold morning. Bet you thought California was going to be hot.

Everyone does. Not up here, though. Coffee?”

“Love some.”

“Sugar, cream?”

“No, black, please.”

Dr. Jacobs pressed an intercom button.

“Sandy, could we have two coffees? Mine you know. And one black.”

He smiled across the desk at his visitor. He did not bother to mention The Fist of God

that he had talked with Washington to confirm the English visitor’s name and that he really was a member of the Medusa Committee.