The Fist Of God Part 8

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 a.s.set 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 circ.u.mstances, be true?" asked Paxman.

"I don't know. I'm not a physicist. The bra.s.s 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 bl.u.s.ter 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," admitted 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 wh.o.r.e, 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.

Ha.s.san 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 ma.s.s grave.

Ha.s.san 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 princ.i.p.al 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 t.i.tle 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 ma.s.sive 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 alt.i.tude. The new rocket, entering inner s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.signed 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 habit 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 ant.i.tank 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 a.s.signment that day included a big SAM missile site northwest of Baghdad. The SAMs were controlled by two large radar dishes. The air attacks in General Horner's plan were now rolling northward. With just about every missile base and radar dish south of a horizontal line through southern Baghdad wiped out, the time had come to clear the air s.p.a.ce east, west, and north of the capital. With twenty-four Strike Eagles in the squadron, January 20 was going to be a multimission day. The squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Turner, had allocated a twelve-plane detail for the missile base. A swarm of Eagles that large was known as a "gorilla." The gorilla was led by one of the two senior flight commanders. Four of the twelve planes were packing HARMs, the radar-busting missiles that home in on infrared signals from a radar dish. The other eight carried two long, gleaming, stainless-steel-cased laser-guided bombs known as GBU-10-I's. When the radars were dead and the missiles blind, they would follow the HARMs and blow away the rocket batteries. It did not seem as if things were going to go wrong. The twelve Eagles took off in three groups of four, established themselves in a loose echelon formation, and climbed to an alt.i.tude of twenty-five thousand feet. The sky was a brilliant blue, and the ochre desert below clearly visible. The weather report over the target indicated a stronger wind than over Saudi Arabia but made no mention of a shamal, one of those rapid dust storms that can wipe out a target in seconds. South of the border, the twelve Eagles met their tankers, two KC-10s.

Each tanker could suckle six hungry fighters, so one by one the Eagles drifted onto station behind the tankers and waited as the boom operator, gazing at them through his Perspex window only a few feet away, "swam" his boom arm to lock onto their waiting fuel nozzles. Finally, the twelve Eagles refueled for their mission and turned north toward Iraq. An AWACS out over the Gulf told them there was no hostile air activity ahead of them. Had there been Iraqi fighters in the air, the Eagles carried, apart from their bombs, two kinds of air-to-air rockets: the Air Interception Missile 7 and the AIM-9, better known as the Sparrow and the Sidewinder. The missile base was there, all right. But its radars were not active. If the radar dishes were not operating on their arrival, they should have illuminated immediately to guide the SAMs in their search for the oncoming intruders. As soon as the radars went active, the four Strike Eagles carrying the HARMs would simply take them out or, in USAF parlance, ruin their whole day. Whether the Iraqi commander was afraid for his skin or just extremely smart, the Americans never did work out. But those radars refused to come alive. The first four Eagles, led by the flight commander, dropped down and down to provoke the radars into switching on. They refused. 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 a.s.signed 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 fighterbombers 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 contained 381 buildings and covered an area of ten miles by ten miles. "Listed?" "Nope." "Going down anyway. Randy, cover my a.s.s." "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 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 h.e.l.l 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 bas.e.m.e.nt of CENTAF beneath the Saudi Air Force headquarters with the Black Hole a.n.a.lysts in Riyadh. "If this turns out to be a water-bottling plant or a baby-food factory, they're gonna can your a.s.s," 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 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 embarra.s.sed 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 fl.u.s.tered, 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 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 p.r.o.nounced it the best he had ever tasted, which made her even more fl.u.s.tered, yet immensely pleased.

They talked as they ate, of things cultural; of their projected visit to the Schonbrunn 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 winegla.s.s all the time, so that she consumed far more than the occasional gla.s.s 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.

"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 tortoisesh.e.l.l 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 G.o.d 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 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 s.p.a.ce between the furniture, dancing a waltz.

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 s.p.a.ce 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, Gemutlich, 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."

"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."