The Fist of God

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 title 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 massive 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 space.

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 altitude. The new rocket, entering inner space 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 assigned 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 antitank 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 assignment 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 space 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 altitude 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 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-

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 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 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 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 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.

“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 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.

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.”

“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.

Colonel Dick Beatty of the USAF was on the graveyard shift that night, deep below Old Airport Road in Riyadh.

The Black Hole never stopped, it never slackened, and in the first days of the air war, it was working harder and faster than ever.

General Chuck Horner’s master plan for the air war was experiencing the dislocation caused by the diversion of hundreds of his warplanes to hunt Scud launchers instead of taking out the targets preassigned to them.

Any combat general will confirm that a plan can be worked out to the last nut and bolt, but when the balloon goes up, it is never quite like that. The crisis caused by the rockets dropping onto Israel was proving a serious problem. Tel Aviv was screaming at Washington, and Washington was screaming at Riyadh. The diversion of all those warplanes to hunt the elusive mobile launchers was the price Washington had to pay to keep Israel out of retaliatory action, and Washington’s orders did not brook argument. Everyone could see that Israel losing patience and its entering the war would prove disastrous for the frail Coalition now ranged against Iraq, but the problem was still major.

Targets originally slated for day three were being deferred for lack of aircraft, and the effect was like dominoes. A further problem was that there could still be no Bomb Damage Assessment, or BDA. It was essential, and it had to be done. The alternative could be appalling.

BDAs were crucial because the Black Hole had to know the level of the success, or lack of it, of each day’s wave of air strikes. If a major Iraqi command center, radar emplacement, or missile battery were on the Air Tasking Order, it would duly be attacked. But had it been destroyed? If so, to what degree? Ten percent, fifty percent, or a pile of smoking rubble? Simply to assume that the Iraqi base had been wiped out was no good. The next day, unsuspecting Allied planes might be sent over that site on another mission. If the place were still functioning, pilots could die.

So each day the missions were flown, and the tired pilots described exactly what they had done and what they had hit. Or thought they had hit. The next day, other airplanes flew over the targets and photographed them.

Thus, each day as the Air Tasking Order began its three-day passage to preparation, the original menu of designated targets had to include the second visit missions, to finish the jobs only partly done.

January 20, the fourth day of the air war, the Allied air forces had not officially gotten around to wasting the industrial plants tagged as those making weapons of mass destruction. They were still concentrating on SEAD—Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses.

That night, Colonel Beatty was preparing the list of the next day’s photoreconnaissance missions on the basis of the harvest of all those debriefing sessions with squadron intelligence officers. By midnight, he was nearly through, and the early orders were already speeding their way to the various squadrons assigned to photorecon missions at dawn.

“Then there’s this, sir.”

It was a chief petty officer, U.S. Navy, by his side. The colonel glanced at the target.

“What do you mean, Tarmiya?”

“That’s what it says, sir.”

“So where the hell’s Tarmiya anyway?”

“Here, sir.”

The colonel glanced at the air map. The location meant nothing to him.

“Radar? Missiles, air base, command post?”

“No, sir. Industrial facility.”

The colonel was tired. It had been a long night, and it would go on until dawn.

“For chrissake, we haven’t gotten to industrials yet. Give me the list anyway.”

He ran his eye down the list. It included every industrial facility known to the Allies that was dedicated to the production of weapons of mass destruction; it had factories known to produce shells, explosives, vehicles, gun parts, and tank spares.

In the first category were listed Al Qaim, As-Sharqat, Tuwaitha,

Fallujah, Al-Hillah, Al-Atheer, and Al-Furat. The colonel could not know that missing from the list was Rashadia, where the Iraqis had installed their second gas centrifuge cascade for producing refined uranium, the problem that had eluded the experts on the Medusa Committee. That plant, discovered by the United Nations much later, was not buried but disguised as a water-bottling enterprise.

Nor could Colonel Beatty know that Al-Furat was the buried location of the first uranium cascade, the one visited by the German, Dr.

Stemmler, “somewhere near Tuwaitha,” and that its exact position had been given away by Jericho.

“I don’t see any Tarmiya,” he grunted.

“No, sir. It’s not there,” said the CPO.

“Give me the grid reference.”

No one could expect the analysts to memorize hundreds of confusing Arab place names, the more so as in some cases a single name covered ten separate targets, so all targets were given a grid reference by the Global Positioning System, which pinned them down to twelve digits, a square fifty yards by fifty.

When he bombed the huge factory at Tarmiya, Don Walker had noted that reference, which was attached to his debriefing report.

“It’s not here,” protested the colonel. “It’s not even a goddam target.

Who zapped it?”

“Some pilot from the 336th at Al Kharz. Missed out on his first two assigned targets through no fault of his own. Didn’t want to come home with full racks, I guess.”

“Asshole,” muttered the colonel. “Okay, give it to BDA anyway. But low priority. Don’t waste film on it.”

Lieutenant Commander Darren Cleary sat at the controls of his F-14 Tomcat. He was a very frustrated man.

Beneath him the great gray bulk of the carrier USS Ranger had her nose into the light breeze and was making twenty-seven knots through the water. The sea of the northern Gulf was dead calm in the predawn, and the sky would soon be bright and blue. It ought to have been a day of pleasure for a young Navy pilot flying one of the world’s best fighter planes.

Nicknamed “the Fleet Defender,” the twin-finned two-man Tomcat had come to a wider audience when it starred in the film Top Gun. Its cockpit is probably the most sought-after chair in American combat aviation, certainly in Navy flying, and to be at the controls of such an airplane on such a lovely day just a week after arriving on station in the Gulf should have made Darren Cleary very happy. The reason for his misery was that he was assigned not to a combat mission but to BDA, “taking happy snapshots,” as he had complained the night before. He had beseeched the squadron operations officer to let him go hunting MiGs, but to no avail.

“Someone’s got to do it,” was his answer. Like all air-superiority combat pilots among the Allies in the Gulf War, Cleary feared that the Iraqi jets would leave the skies after a few days, putting an end to any chance to tangle.

So to his chagrin, he had been “fragged”—assigned—to a TARPS mission.

Behind him and his flight officer, two General Electric jet engines rumbled away as the deck crew hooked him up the steam catapult on the angled flight deck, pointing his nose slightly off the centerline of the Ranger. Cleary waited, throttle in his left hand, control column steady and neutral in his right, as the last preparations were made.

Finally the terse inquiry, the nod, and that great blast of power as the throttle went forward, right through the gate into afterburn, and the catapult threw him and 68,000 pounds of warplane from zero to 150 knots in three seconds.

The gray steel of the Ranger vanished behind him, and the dark sea flashed below. The Tomcat felt for the rushing air around her, sensed its support, and climbed smoothly away for the lightening sky.

It would be a four-hour mission with two refuels. He had twelve targets to photograph, and he would not be alone. Already up ahead of him was an A-6 Avenger with laser-guided bombs in case they should run into antiaircraft artillery, in which eventuality the Avenger would teach the Iraqi gunners to be quiet. An EA-6B Prowler was coming on the same mission, armed with HARMs in case they ran into a SAM

missile site guided by radar. The Prowler would use its HARMs to blow away the radar, and the Avenger would employ its bombs on the missiles.

In case the Iraqi Air Force showed up, two more Tomcats would be riding shotgun, above and to either side of the photographer, their powerful AWG-9 in-air radars capable of discerning the Iraqi pilot’s inside leg measurement before he got out of bed.

All this metal and technology was to protect what hung below and behind Darren Cleary’s feet, a Tactical Air Reconnaissance Pod System, or TARPS. Hanging slightly right of the Tomcat’s centerline, the TARPS resembled a streamlined coffin seventeen feet long. It was rather more complicated than a tourist’s Pentax.

In its nose was a powerful frame camera with two positions: forward-and-down, or straight down. Behind it was the panoramic camera looking outward, sideways, and down. Behind that was the infrared Reconnaissance Set, designed to record thermal (heat) imaging and its source. In a final twist, the pilot could see on his Head-Up Display inside his cockpit what he was photographing while still overhead.

Darren Cleary climbed to fifteen thousand feet, met up with the rest of his escorts, and they proceeded to link with their assigned KC-135 tanker just south of the Iraqi border.

Without being troubled by Iraqi resistance, Cleary photographed the eleven principal targets he had been assigned, then turned back over Tarmiya for the secondary-interest twelfth location.

As he went over Tarmiya, he glanced at his display and muttered,

“What the fuck is that?” This was the moment the last of the 750 frames in each of his main cameras chose to run out.

After a second refuel the mission landed back on the Ranger without incident. The deck crew downloaded the cameras and took them off to the photo lab for development to negatives.

Cleary was debriefed on an uneventful mission, then went down to the light table with the intelligence officer. As the negatives came up on the screen with the white-light underneath, Cleary explained what each frame was and where it had come from. The intel officer made notes for his own report, which would be attached to Cleary’s, plus the photos.

When they came to the last twenty frames, the intel officer asked,

“What are these?”

“Don’t ask me,” said Cleary. “They come from that target at Tarmiya.

You remember—the one Riyadh tacked on at the last moment?”

“Yeah. So what are those things inside the factory?”

“Look like Frisbees for giants,” suggested Cleary dubiously.

It was a phrase that stuck. The intel officer used it in his own report, coupled with an admission that he had not the slightest idea what they were. When the package was complete, a Lockheed S-3 Viking was thrown off the Ranger’s deck and took the whole package to Riyadh.

Darren Cleary went back to air combat missions, never tangled with the elusive MiGs, and left the Gulf with the USS Ranger in late April 1991.

Wolfgang Gemütlich was becoming more and more worried, through that morning, by the state of his private secretary.

She was as polite and formal as ever and as efficient as he could have demanded—and Herr Gemütlich demanded much. Not a man of excessive sensitivity, he saw nothing out of the ordinary at first, but by her third visit into his private sanctum to take a letter, he observed there was something unusual about her.

Nothing lighthearted, of course, and certainly not frivolous—he would never have tolerated that. It was an air that she carried with her. On her third visit he observed her more closely as, head bent over her note pad, she took down his dictation.

True, the dowdy business suit was in place, hem below the knees. The hair was still scraped back into a bun behind her head. ... It was on the fourth visit that he realized with a start of horror that Edith Hardenberg was wearing a touch of face powder. Not a lot, just a hint. He checked quickly to ensure that there was no lipstick on her mouth and was relieved to see not a trace.

Perhaps, he reasoned, he was deluding himself. It was January, the freezing weather outside might have caused chapping to her skin; no doubt the powder was to ease the soreness. But there was something else.

The eyes. Not mascara— um Gotteswillen, let it not be mascara. He checked again, but there was none. He had been deluded, he reassured himself. It was in the lunch hour as he spread his linen napkin on his blotter and ate the sandwiches dutifully prepared by Frau Gemütlich, as on every day, that the solution came to him.

They sparkled. Fräulein Hardenberg’s eyes sparkled. It could not be the winter weather—she had been indoors for four hours by then. The banker put down his half-eaten sandwich and realized he had seen the same syndrome among some of the younger secretaries just before going-home time on a Friday evening.

It was happiness. Edith Hardenberg was actually happy. It showed, he realized now, in the way she walked, the way she talked, and the way she looked. She had been like that all morning—that, and the hint of powder. It was enough to trouble Wolfgang Gemütlich deeply. He hoped she had not been spending money.

The snapshots taken by Lieutenant Commander Darren Cleary came into Riyadh in the afternoon, part of a blizzard of fresh images that poured into CENTAF headquarters every day.

Some of those images were from the KH-11 and KH-12 satellites high above the earth, giving the big-dimension picture, the wide angle, the whole of Iraq. If they showed no variation from the previous day, they were stacked.

Others were from the constant photorecon missions flown at lower levels by the TR-1s. Some showed Iraqi activity, military or industrial, that was new—troop movements, war-planes taxiing where they had not been before, missile launchers in new locations. These went to Target Analysis.

The ones from the Ranger’s Tomcat were for Bomb Damage Assessment. They were filtered through the Barn, the collection of 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 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.

“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 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.”

“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 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 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 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.

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 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.

“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?”

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

Someone on the American end of the committee, whom he knew, had checked a list and confirmed the claim. Jacobs was impressed. The visitor might look young, but he must be pretty high-powered over in England. The Deputy Director knew all about Medusa because he and his colleagues had been consulted for weeks about Iraq and had handed over everything they had, every detail of the story of foolishness and neglect on the part of the West that had damn nearly given Saddam Hussein a nuclear option.

“So how can I help?” he asked.

“I know it’s a long shot,” said Martin, reaching into his attaché case.

“But I suppose you have seen this already?”

He laid a copy of one of the dozen pictures of the Tarmiya factory on the desk, the one Paxman had disobediently given him. Jacobs glanced at it and nodded.

“Sure, had a dozen of them through from Washington three, four days ago. What can I say? They don’t mean a thing. Can’t say more to you than I said to Washington. Never seen anything like them.”

Sandy came in with a tray of coffee, a bright blond California woman full of self-assurance.

“Hi, there,” she said to Martin.

“Oh, er, hallo. Did the Director see these?”

Jacobs frowned. The implication was that he himself might not be senior enough. “The Director’s skiing in Colorado. But I ran them past some of the best brains we have here, and believe me, they are very, very good.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” said Martin. Another blank wall. Well, it had only been a long shot.

Sandy placed the cups of coffee on the desk. Her eye fell on the photograph.

“Oh, them again,” she said.

“Yes, them again,” said Jacobs, and smiled teasingly. “Dr. Martin here thinks maybe someone ... older should have a look at them.”

“Well,” she said, “show ’em to Daddy Lomax.”

With that she was gone.

“Who’s Daddy Lomax?” asked Martin.

“Oh, take no notice. Used to work here. Retired now, lives alone up in the mountains. Pops in now and then for old times’ sake. The girls adore him, he brings them mountain flowers. Funny old guy.”

They drank their coffee, but there was little more to say. Jacobs had work to do. He apologized once again for not being able to help. Then he showed his visitor out, returned to his sanctum, and closed the door.

Martin waited in the corridor a few seconds, then put his head around the door.

“Where would I find Daddy Lomax?” he asked Sandy.

“I don’t know. Lives way up in the hills. Nobody’s ever been there.”

“He has a phone?”

“No, no lines go up there. But I think he has a cellular. The insurance company insisted. I mean, he’s terribly old.”

Her face was creased with that genuine concern that only California youth can show for anyone over sixty. She rifled through a Rolodex and came up with a number. Martin noted it, thanked her, and left.

Ten time zones away, it was evening in Baghdad. Mike Martin was on his bicycle, pedaling northwest up Port Said Street. He had just passed the old British Club at what used to be called Southgate, and because he recalled it from his boyhood, he turned to stare back at it.

His lack of attention nearly caused an accident. He had reached the edge of Nafura Square and without thinking pedaled forward. There was a big limousine coming from his left and although technically it did not have right of way, its two motorcycle escorts were clearly not going to stop.

One of them swerved violently to avoid the clumsy fellagha with the vegetable basket attached to his pillion, the motorcycle’s front wheel clipping the smaller bicycle and sending it crashing to the tarmac.

Martin went down with his bicycle, sprawling on the road, his vegetables spilling out. The limousine braked, paused, and swerved around him before accelerating away.

On his knees, Martin looked up as the car passed. The face of the rear seat passenger stared out the window at the oaf who had dared to delay him by a fraction of a second.

It was a cold face in the uniform of a brigadier general, thin and acerbic, channels running down either side of the nose to frame the bitter mouth. In that half-second, what Martin noticed were the eyes.

Not cold or angry eyes, not bloodshot red or shrewd or even cruel.

Blank eyes, utterly and completely blank, the eyes of death long gone.

Then the face behind the window had passed by.

He did not need the whisperings of the two working men who pulled him to his feet and helped gather up his vegetables. He had seen the face before, but dimly, blurred, taken on a saluting base, in a photograph on a table in Riyadh weeks before. He had just seen the most feared man in Iraq after the Rais, perhaps including the Rais. It was the one they called Al-Mu’azib, the Tormentor, the extractor of confessions, head of the AMAM, Omar Khatib.

Terry Martin tried the number he had been given during the lunch hour. There was no reply, just the honeyed tones of the recorded voice advising him: “The party you have called is not available or is out of range. Please try your call later.”

Paul Maslowski had taken Martin to lunch with his faculty colleagues on the campus. The conversation was lively and academic. Over the meal Martin thanked his hosts again for their invitation and repeated his appreciation of the endowment that had funded his visit. He tried the number again after lunch on his way to Barrows Hall, guided by Near Eastern Studies Director Kathlene Keller, but again there was no reply.

The lecture went across well. There were twenty-seven graduate students, all heading for their doctorates, and Martin was impressed at the level and depth of their understanding of the papers he had written on the subject of the Caliphate that ruled central Mesopotamia in what the Europeans call the Middle Ages.

When one of the students rose to thank him for coming all that way to talk to them and the rest had applauded, Terry Martin went pink and bobbed his thanks to them. Afterward, he spotted a pay phone on the wall in the lobby. This time there was an answer, and a gruff voice said:

“Yeah.”

“Excuse me, is that Dr. Lomax?”

“There’s only one, friend. That’s me.”

“I know this sounds crazy, but I’ve come from England. I’d like to see you. My name’s Terry Martin.”

“England, eh? Long ways away. What would you want with an old coot like me, Mr. Martin?”

“Want to tap a long memory. Show you something. People at Livermore say you’ve been around longer than most, seen just about everything. I want to show you something. Difficult to explain on the phone. Could I come up and see you?”

“It ain’t a tax form?”

“No.”

“Or a Playboy centerfold?”

“ ’Fraid not.”

“Now you got me curious. Do you know the way?”

“No. I have pencil and paper. Can you describe it?”

Daddy Lomax told him how to get to where he lived. It took some time. Martin wrote it all down.

“Tomorrow morning,” said the retired physicist. “Too late now, you’ll get lost in the dark. And you’ll need a four-wheel drive.”

It was one of the only two E-8A J-STARs in the Gulf War that caught the signal that morning of January 27. The J-STARs had been still experimental aircraft and were flying with largely civilian technicians on board when they were rushed in early January from their base at the Grumman Melbourne plant in Florida halfway across the world to Arabia.

That morning, one of the two flying out of Riyadh military air base was high over the Iraqi border, still inside Saudi air space, peering with its Norden down-and-sideways radar more than a hundred miles into the western desert of Iraq.

The plink was faint, but it indicated metal, moving slowly, far into Iraq, a convoy no longer than two, maybe three trucks. Still, that was what the J-STAR was there for, so the mission commander told one of the AWACS circling over the northern end of the Red Sea, giving the AWACS the exact position of the small Iraqi convoy.

Inside the hull of the AWACS the mission commander logged the precise spot and looked around for an airborne element that might be available to give the convoy an unfriendly visit. All the western desert operations were still keyed toward Scud-hunting at that time, apart from the attention being given to the two huge Iraqi air bases called H2 and H3 that were situated in those deserts. The J-STAR might have picked up a mobile Scud-launcher, even though it would be unusual in daylight.

The AWACS came up with an element of two F-15E Strike Eagles coming south from Scud Alley North.

Don Walker was riding south at twenty thousand feet after a mission to the outskirts of Al Qaim, where he and his wingman, Randy Roberts, had just destroyed a fixed missile base protecting one of the poison gas factories targeted for later destruction.

Walker took the call and checked his fuel. It was low. Worse, with his laser-guided bombs gone, his underwing pylons contained only two Sidewinders and two Sparrows. But these were air-to-air missiles in case they ran into Iraqi jets. Somewhere south of the border his assigned refueling tanker was patiently waiting, and he would need every drop to get back to Al Kharz. Still, the convoy location was only fifty miles away and just fifteen off his intended track. Even though he had no ordnance left, there was no harm in having a look.

His wingman had heard everything, so Walker gestured through the canopy to the flier half a mile away through the clear air, and the two Eagles rolled into a dive to their right.

At eight thousand feet, he could see the source of the plink that had showed up on the screen of the J-STAR. It was not a Scud-launcher,

but two trucks and two BRDM-2s, Soviet-made light armored vehicles on wheels, not tracks.

From his perch, he could see much more than the J-STAR could.

Down in a deep wadi beneath him was a single Land-Rover. At five thousand feet, he could see the four British SAS men around it, tiny ants on the brown cloth of the desert. What they could not see were the four Iraqi vehicles forming a horseshoe around them, nor the Iraqi soldiers pouring down from the tailboards of the two trucks to encircle the wadi.

Don Walker had met the SAS down in Oman. He knew they were operating in the western deserts against Scud-launchers, and several of his squadron had already been in radio contact with these strange-sounding English voices from the ground when the SAS men had tagged a target they could not handle themselves.

At three thousand feet, he could see the four Britishers looking up curiously. So, half a mile away, were the Iraqis. Walker pressed his transmit button.

“Line astern, take the trucks.”

“You got it.”

Though he had neither bombs nor rockets left, tucked in the glove of his right wing, just outside the gaping air intake, was an M-61-A1

Vulcan 20-min. cannon, six rotating barrels capable of spewing out its entire magazine of 450 shells with impressive speed. The 20-mm.

cannon shell is the size of a small banana and explodes on impact. For those caught in a truck or running in the open, they can spoil everything.

Walker flicked the Aim and Arm switches, and his Head-Up Display—his HUD—showed him the two armored cars straight through his screen, plus an aiming cross, whose position had already taken account of drift and aim-off.

The first BRDM took a hundred cannon shells and blew apart. Raising his nose slightly, he put the swimming cross on the Plexiglas of the HUD onto the rear of the second vehicle. He saw the gas tank ignite.

Then he was up and over it, climbing and rolling until the brown desert appeared above his head.

Keeping the roll going, Walker brought the Eagle back down again.

The horizon of blue and brown turned back to its usual position, with the brown desert at the bottom and the blue sky at the top. Both BRDMs were flaming, one truck was on its side, the other shredded.

Small figures ran frantically for the cover of the rocks.

Inside the wadi the four SAS men had gotten the message. They were aboard and rolling down the dry watercourse and away from the ambush. Just who had spotted them—wandering shepherds, probably—and given their position away, they would never know, but they knew who had just saved their backsides.

The Eagles lifted away, waggled their wings, and climbed toward the border and the waiting tanker.

The NCO commanding the SAS patrol was one Sergeant Peter Stephenson. He raised a hand at the departing fighters and said:

“Dunno who you are, mate, but I owe you one.”

As it happened, Mrs. Maslowski had a Suzuki Jeep as a runabout, and though she had never driven it in four-wheel mode, she insisted Terry Martin borrow it. His flight to London was not until five that afternoon, and he set off early because he did not know how long he would be. He told her he intended to be back by two at the latest.

Dr. Maslowski had to return to his office but gave Martin a map so he would not get lost.

The road to the valley of the Mocho River took him right back past Livermore, where he found Mines Road running off Tesla. Mile by mile, the last houses of the suburb of Livermore dropped away, and the ground rose. He was lucky in the weather. Winter in these parts is never very cold, but the proximity of the sea gives rise to thick dense clouds and sudden banks of swirling fog. That January 27 the sky was blue and crisp, the air calm and cold.

Through the windshield he could see the icy tip of Cedar Mountain far away. Ten miles after the turnoff, he left Mines Road and turned onto a dirt road, clinging to the side of a precipitous hill.

Down in the valley far below, the Mocho glittered in the sun as it tumbled between its rocks. The grass on either side gave way to a mix of sagebrush and she-oak; high above, a pair of kites wheeled against the blue, and the road ran on, along the edge of Cedar Mountain Ridge into the wilderness.

He passed a single green farmhouse, but Lomax had told him to go to the end of the road. After another three miles he found the cabin, rough-hewn with a raw stone chimney and a plume of blue woodsmoke drifting up to the sky.

He stopped in the yard and got out. From a barn, a single Jersey cow surveyed him with velvet eyes. Rhythmic sounds came from the other side of the cabin, so he walked around to the front to find Daddy Lomax on a bluff looking out over the valley and the river far below.

He must have been seventy-five, but despite Sandy’s concern, he looked as if he beat up grizzly bears for a hobby. An inch over six feet, in soiled jeans and a plaid shirt, the old scientist was splitting logs with the ease of one slicing bread.

Snow-white hair hung to his shoulders, and a stubble of ivory whiskers rimmed his chin. More white curls spilled from the V of his shirt, and he seemed to feel no cold, although Terry Martin was glad for his quilted parka.

“Found it then? Heard you coming,” said Lomax, and split one last log with a single swing. Then he laid down the ax and came over to his visitor. They shook hands; Lomax gestured to a nearby log and sat down on one himself.

“Dr. Martin, is it?”

“Er, yes.”

“From England?”

“Yes.”

Lomax reached into his top pocket, withdrew a pouch of tobacco and some rice paper, and began to roll a cigarette.

“Not politically correct, are you?” Lomax asked.

“No, I don’t think so.”

Lomax grunted in apparent approval.

“Had a politically correct doctor. Always yellin’ at me to stop smoking.”

Martin noted the past tense.

“I suppose you left him?”

“Nope, he left me. Died last week. Fifty-six. Stress. What brings you up here?”

Martin fumbled in his attaché case.

“I ought to apologize at the outset. It’s probably a waste of your time and mine. I just wondered if you’d glance at this.”

Lomax took the proffered photograph and stared at it.

“You really from England?”

“Yes.”

“Helluva long way to come to show me this.”

“You recognize it?”

“Ought to. Spent five years of my life working there.”

Martin’s mouth dropped open in shock.

“You’ve actually been there?”

“Lived there for five years.”

“At Tarmiya?”

“Where the hell’s that? This is Oak Ridge.”

Martin swallowed several times.

“Dr. Lomax. That photograph was taken six days ago by a U.S. Navy fighter overflying a bombed factory in Iraq.”

Lomax glanced up, bright blue eyes under shaggy white brows, then looked back at the photo.

“Sonofabitch,” he said at last. “I warned the bastards. Three years ago.

Wrote a paper warning that this was the sort of technology the Third World would be likely to use.”

“What happened to it?”

“Oh, they trashed it, I guess.”

“Who?”

“You know, the pointy-heads.”

“Those disks—the Frisbees inside the factory—you know what they are?”

“Sure. Calutrons. This is a replica of the old Oak Ridge facility.”

“Calu-what?”

Lomax glanced up again.

“You’re not a doctor of science? Not a physicist?”

“No. My subject is Arabic studies.”

Lomax grunted again, as if not being a physicist were a hard burden for a man to carry through life.

“Calutrons. California cyclotrons. Calutrons, for short.”

“What do they do?”

“EMIS. Electromagnetic isotope separation. In your language, they refine crude uranium-238 to filter out the bomb-grade uranium-235.

You say this place is in Iraq?”

“Yes. It was bombed by accident a week ago. This picture was taken the next day. No one seems to know what it means.”

Lomax gazed across the valley, sucked on his butt, and let a plume of azure smoke trickle away.

“Sonofabitch,” he said again. “Mister, I live up here because I want to.

Away from all that smog and traffic—had enough of that years ago.

Don’t have a TV, but I have a radio. This is about that man Saddam Hussein, ain’t it?”

“Yes, it is. Would you tell me about calutrons?”

The old man stubbed out his butt and stared now, not just across the valley but back across many years.

“Nineteen forty-three. Long time ago, eh? Nearly fifty years. Before you were born, before most people were born nowadays. There was a bunch of us then, trying to do the impossible. We were young, eager, and ingenious, and we didn’t know it was impossible. So we did it.

“There was Fermi from Italy, and Pontecorvo; Fuchs from Germany, Nils Bohr from Denmark, Nunn May from England, and others. And us Yankees: Urey and Oppie and Ernest. I was very junior. Just twenty-seven.

“Most of the time, we were feeling our way, doing things that had never been tried, testing out things they said couldn’t be done. We had a budget that nowadays wouldn’t buy squat, so we worked all day and all night and took shortcuts. Had to—the deadline was as tight as the money. And somehow we did it, in three years. We cracked the codes and made the bomb. Little Boy and Fat Man.

“Then the Air Force dropped them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the world said we shouldn’t have done it after all. Trouble was, if we hadn’t, somebody else would. Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia—”

“Calutrons ...,” suggested Martin.

“Yeah. You’ve heard of the Manhattan Project?”

“Of course.”

“Well, we had many geniuses in Manhattan, two in particular. Robert J. Oppenheimer and Ernest O. Lawrence. Heard of them?”

“Yes.”

“Thought they were colleagues, partners, right?”

“I suppose so.”

“Wrong. They were rivals. See, we all knew the key was uranium, the world’s heaviest element. And we knew by 1941 that only the lighter isotope, 235, would create the chain reaction we needed. The trick was to separate the point seven percent of the 235 hiding somewhere in the mass of uranium-238.

“When America entered the war, we got a big leg up. After years of neglect, the brass wanted results yesterday. Same old story. So we tried every which way to separate those isotopes.

“Oppenheimer went for gas diffusion—reduce the uranium to a fluid and then a gas, uranium hexafluoride, poisonous and corrosive, difficult to work. The centrifuge came later, invented by an Austrian captured by the Russians and put to work at Sukhumi. Before the centrifuge, gas diffusion was slow and hard.

“Lawrence went for the other route—electromagnetic separation by particle acceleration. Know what that means?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Basically, you speed the atoms up to a hell of a velocity, then use giant magnets to throw them into a curve. Two racing cars enter a curve at speed, a heavy car and a light car. Which one ends up on the outside track?”

“The heavy one,” said Martin.

“Right. That’s the principle. The calutrons depend on giant magnets about twenty feet across. These”—he tapped the Frisbees in the photograph—“are the magnets. The layout is a replica of my old baby at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.”

“If they worked, why were they discontinued?” asked Martin.

“Speed,” said Lomax. “Oppenheimer won out. His way was faster.

The calutrons were extremely slow and very expensive. After 1945, and even more when that Austrian was released by the Russians and came over here to show us his centrifuge invention, the calutron technology was abandoned. Declassified. You can get all the details, and the plans, from the Library of Congress. That’s probably what the Iraqis have done.”

The two men sat in silence for several minutes.

“What you are saying,” suggested Martin, “is that Iraq decided to use Model-T Ford technology, and because everyone assumed they’d go for Grand Prix racers, no one noticed.”

“You got it, son. People forget—the old Model-T Ford may be old, but it worked. It got you there. It carried you from A to B. And it hardly ever broke down.”

“Dr. Lomax, the scientists my government and yours have been consulting know that Iraq has got one cascade of gas diffusion centrifuges working, and it has been for the past year. Another one is about to come on stream, but probably is not operating yet. On that basis, they calculate Iraq cannot possibly have refined enough pure uranium—say, thirty-five kilograms—to have enough for a bomb.”

“Quite right,” nodded Lomax. “Need five years with one cascade,

maybe more. Minimum three years with two cascades.”

“But supposing they’ve been using calutrons in tandem. If you were head of Iraq’s bomb program, how would you play it?”

“Not that way,” said the old physicist, and began to roll another cigarette. “Did they tell you, back in London, that you start with yellowcake, which is called zero-percent pure, and you have to refine it to ninety-three-percent pure to get bomb-grade quality?”

Martin thought of Dr. Hipwell, with his bonfire of a pipe, in a room under Whitehall saying just that.

“Yes, they did.”

“But they didn’t bother to say that purifying the stuff from zero to twenty takes up most of the time? They didn’t say that as the stuff gets purer, the process gets faster?”

“No.”

“Well, it does. If I had calutrons and centrifuges, I wouldn’t use them in tandem. I’d use them in sequence. I’d run the base uranium through the calutrons to get it from zero to twenty, maybe twenty-five-percent pure; then use that as the feedstock for the new cascades.”

“Why?”

“It would cut your refining time in the cascades by a factor of ten.”

Martin thought it over while Daddy Lomax puffed.

“Then when would you calculate Iraq could have those thirty-five kilograms of pure uranium?”

“Depends when they started with the calutrons.”

Martin thought. After the Israeli jets destroyed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, Baghdad operated on two policies: dispersal and duplication, scattering the laboratories all over the country so they could never all be bombed again; and using a cover-all-angles technique in purchasing and experimentation. Osirak had been bombed in 1981.

“Say they bought the components on the open market in 1982 and assembled them by 1983.”

Lomax took a stick from the ground near his feet and began to doodle in the dust.

“These guys got any problem with supplies of yellowcake, the basic feedstock?” he asked.

“No, plenty of feedstock.”

“Suppose so,” grunted Lomax. “Buy the damn stuff in K-mart nowadays.

After a while he tapped the photo with his stick.

“This photo shows about twenty calutrons. That all they had?”

“Maybe more. We don’t know. Let’s assume that’s all they had working.”

“Since 1983, right?”

“Basic assumption.”

Lomax kept scratching in the dust.

“Mr. Hussein got any shortage of electric power?”

Martin thought of the 150-megawatt power station across the sand From Tarmiya, and the suggestion from the Black Hole that the cable ran underground into Tarmiya.

“No, no shortage of power.”

“We did,” said Lomax. “Calutrons take an amazing amount of electrical power to function. At Oak Ridge we built the biggest coal-fired power station ever made. Even then we had to tap into the public grid. Each time we turned ’em on, there was a brown-out right across Tennessee—soggy fries and brown light bulbs—we were using so much.”

He went on doodling with his stick, making a calculation, then scratching it out and starting another in the same patch of dust.

“They got a shortage of copper wire?”

“No, they could buy that on the open market too.”

“These giant magnets have to be wrapped in thousands of miles of copper wire,” said Lomax. “Back in the war, we couldn’t get any.

Needed for war production, every ounce. Know what old Lawrence did?”

“No idea.”

“Borrowed all the silver bars in Fort Knox and melted it into wire.

Worked just as well. End of the war, we had to hand it all back to Fort Knox.” He chuckled. “He was a character.”

Finally he finished and straightened up.

“If they assembled twenty calutrons in 1983 and ran the yellowcake through them till ’89 ... and then took thirty-percent-pure uranium and fed it into the centrifuge cascade for one year, they’d have their thirty-five keys of ninety-three percent bomb-grade uranium ... November.”

“Next November,” said Martin.

Lomax rose, stretched, reached down, and pulled his guest to his feet.

“No, son, last November.”

Martin drove back down the mountain and glanced at his watch.

Midday. Eight P.M. in London. Paxman would have left his desk and gone home. Martin did not have his home number.

He could wait twelve hours in San Francisco to telephone, or he could fly. He decided to fly. Martin landed at Heathrow at eleven on the morning of January 28 and was with Paxman at twelve-thirty. By two P.M., Steve Laing was talking urgently to Harry Sinclair at the embassy in Grosvenor Square and an hour later the CIA’s London Station Head was on a direct and very secure line to Deputy Director (Operations)

Bill Stewart.

It was not until the morning of January 30 that Bill Stewart was able to produce a full report for the DCI, William Webster.

“It checks out,” he told the former Kansas judge. “I’ve had men down at that cabin near Cedar Mountain, and the old man, Lomax, confirmed it all. We’ve traced his original paper.—it was filed. The records from Oak Ridge confirm that these disks are calutrons.”

“How on earth did it happen?” asked the DCI. “How come we never noticed?”

“Well, the idea probably came from Jaafar Al-Jaafar, the Iraqi boss of their program. Apart from Harwell in England, he also trained at CERN, outside Geneva. It’s a giant particle accelerator.”

“So?”

“Calutrons are particle accelerators. Anyway, all calutron technology was declassified in 1949. It’s been available on request ever since.”

“And the calutrons—where were they bought?”

“In bits, mainly from Austria and France. The purchases raised no eyebrows because of the antiquated nature of the technology. The plant was built by Yugoslavs under contract. They said they wanted plans to build on, so the Iraqis simply gave them the plans of Oak Ridge—that’s why Tarmiya is a replica.”

“When was all this?” asked the DCI.

“Nineteen eighty-two.”

“So what this agent, what’s his name—”

“Jericho,” said Stewart.

“What he said was not a lie?”

“Jericho only reported what he claims he heard Saddam Hussein say at a closed conference. I’m afraid we can no longer exclude the conclusion that this time the man was actually telling the truth.”

“And we have kicked Jericho out of play?”

“He was demanding a million dollars for his information. We have never paid that amount, and at the time—”

“For God’s sake, Bill, it’s cheap at the price!”

The DCI rose and went over to the picture windows. The aspens were bare now, not as they had been in August, and in the valley the Potomac swept past on its way to the sea.

“Bill, I want you to get Chip Barber back into Riyadh. See if there is any way of reestablishing contact with this Jericho.”

“There is a conduit, sir. A British agent inside Baghdad. He passes for an Arab. But we suggested that the Century people pull him out of there.”

“Just pray they haven’t, Bill. We need Jericho back. Never mind the funds—I’ll authorize them. Wherever this device is secreted, we have to find it and bomb it into oblivion before it is too late.”

“Yes. Er—who is going to tell the generals?”

The Director sighed. “I’m seeing Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft in two hours.”

Rather you than me, thought Stewart as he left.

Chapter 18

The two men from Century House arrived in Riyadh before Chip Barber did from Washington. Steve Laing and Simon Paxman landed before dawn, having taken the night flight from Heathrow.

Julian Gray, the Riyadh Head of Station, met them in his usual unmarked car and brought them to the villa where he had been virtually living, with only occasional visits home to see his wife, for five months. He was puzzled by the sudden reappearance of Paxman from London, let alone the more senior Steve Laing, to oversee an operation that had effectively been closed down.

In the villa, behind closed doors, Laing told Gray exactly why Jericho had to be traced and brought back into play without delay.

“Jesus. So the bastard’s really managed to do it.”

“We have to assume so, even though we have no proof,” said Laing.

“When does Martin have a listening window?”

“Between eleven-fifteen and eleven forty-five tonight,” said Gray.

“For security, we haven’t sent him anything for five days. We’ve been expecting him to reappear over the border anytime.”

“Let’s hope he’s still there. If not, we’re in deep shit. We’ll have to reinfiltrate him, and that could take forever. The Iraqi deserts are alive with patrols.”

“How many know about this?” asked Gray.

“As few as possible, and it stays that way,” replied Laing.

A very tight need-to-know group had been established between London and Washington, but for the professionals it was still too big.

In Washington there was the President and four members of his Cabinet, plus the Chairman of the National Security Council and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Add to that four men at Langley, of whom one, Chip Barber, was heading for Riyadh. Back in California, the unfortunate Dr. Lomax had an unwanted house guest in his cabin to ensure he made no contact with the outside world.

In London, the news had gone to the new Prime Minister, John Major, the Cabinet Secretary, and two members of the Cabinet; at Century

House, three men knew.

In Riyadh there were now three at the SIS villa, and Barber on his way to join them. Among the military, the information was confined to four generals—three American and one British.

Dr. Terry Martin had developed a diplomatic bout of flu and was residing comfortably in an SIS safe house in the countryside, looked after by a motherly housekeeper and three not-so-motherly minders.

From henceforth, all operations against Iraq that concerned the search for, and destruction of, the device the Allies assumed to be code-named Qubth-ut-Allah, or , would be undertaken under the cover of active measures designed to terminate Saddam Hussein himself, or for some other plausible reason.

Two such attempts had in fact already been made. Two locations had been identified at which the Iraqi President might be expected to reside, at least temporarily. No one could say precisely when, for the Rais moved like a will-o’-the-wisp from hiding place to hiding place when he was not in the bunker in Baghdad.

Continuous overhead surveillance watched the two locations. One was a villa out in the countryside forty miles from Baghdad, the other a big mobile home converted into a war caravan and planning center.

On one occasion the aerial watchers had seen mobile missile batteries and light armor moving into position around the villa. A flight of Strike Eagles went in and blew the villa apart. It was a false alarm—the bird had flown.

On the second occasion, two days before the end of January, the large trailer had been seen to move to a new location. Again an attack went in; again the target was not at home.

On both occasions the fliers took enormous risks in pressing their attacks, for the Iraqi gunners fought back furiously. The failure to terminate the Iraqi dictator on both occasions left the Allies in a quandary. They simply did not know Saddam Hussein’s precise movements. The fact was, no one knew them, outside of a tiny group of personal bodyguards drawn from the Amn-al-Khass, commanded by his own son Kusay.

In reality, he was moving around most of the time. Despite the assumption that Saddam was in his bunker deep underground for the whole of the air war, he was really in residence there for less than half that time. But his safety was assured by a series of elaborate deceptions and false trails. On several occasions he was “seen” by his own cheering troops—cynics said they were cheering because they were the ones not at the front being pounded by the Buffs. The man the Iraqi troops saw on all such occasions was one of the doubles who could pass for Saddam among all but his closest intimates.

At other times, convoys of limousines, up to a dozen, swept through the city of Baghdad with blackened windows, causing the citizenry to believe their Rais was inside one of the cars. Not so; these cavalcades were all decoys. When he moved, he sometimes went in a single unmarked car.

Even among his innermost circle, the security measures prevailed.

Cabinet members alerted for a conference with him would be given just five minutes to leave their residences, get into their cars, and follow a motorcycle outrider. Even then, the destination was not the meeting place.

They would be driven to a parked bus with blackened windows, there to find all the other ministers sitting in the dark. There was a screen between the ministers and the driver. Even the driver had to follow an Amn-al-Khass motorcyclist to the eventual destination.

Behind the driver, the ministers, generals, and advisers sat in darkness like schoolboys on a mystery tour, never knowing where they were going or, afterward, where they had been.

In most cases these meetings were held in large and secluded villas, commandeered for the day and vacated before nightfall. A special detail of the Amn-al-Khass had no other job than to find such a villa when the Rais wanted a meeting, hold the villa owners incommunicado, and let them return home when the Rais was long gone.

Small wonder the Allies could not find him. But they tried—until the first week of February. After that, all assassination attempts were called off, and the military never understood why.

Chip Barber arrived at the British villa in Riyadh just after midday on the last day of January. After the greetings, the four men sat and waited out the hours until they could contact Martin, if he was still there.

“I suppose we have a deadline on this?” asked Laing. Barber nodded.

“February twentieth. Stormin’ Norman wants to march the troops in there on February twentieth.”

Paxman whistled. “Twenty days, hell. Is Uncle Sam going to pick up the tab for this?”

“Yep. The Director has already authorized Jericho’s one million dollars to go into his account now, today. For the location of the device, assuming there’s one and only one of them, we’ll pay the bastard five.”

“Five million dollars?” expostulated Laing. “Christ, no one had ever paid anything like that for information!”

Barber shrugged. “Jericho, whoever he is, ranks as a mercenary. He wants money, nothing else. So let him earn it. There’s a catch. Arabs haggle, we don’t. Five days after he gets the message, we drop the ante by half a million a day until he comes up with the precise location. He has to know that.”

The three Britishers mulled over the sums that constituted more than all their salaries combined for a lifetime’s work.

“Well,” remarked Laing, “that should put the breeze up him.”

The message was composed during the late afternoon and evening.

First, contact would have to be established with Martin, who would have to confirm with preagreed code words that he was still there and a free man. Then Riyadh would tell him of the offer to Jericho, in detail, and press on him the massive urgency now involved.

The men ate sparingly, toying with food, hard pressed to cope with the tension in the room. At half past ten Simon Paxman went into the radio shack with the others and spoke the message into the tape machine.

The spoken passage was speeded to two hundred times its real duration and came out at just under two seconds.

At ten seconds after eleven-fifteen, the senior radio engineer sent a brief signal—the “are you there” message. Three minutes later, there was a tiny burst of what sounded like static. The satellite dish caught it, and when it was slowed down, the five listening men heard the voice of Mike Martin: “Black Bear to Rocky Mountain, receiving.

Over.”

There was an explosion of relief in the Riyadh villa, four mature men pumping each other’s backs like football fans whose team has won the Super Bowl.

Those who have never been there can ill imagine the sensation of learning that “one of ours” far behind the lines is still, somehow, alive and free.

“Fourteen fucking days he’s sat there,” marveled Barber. “Why the hell didn’t the bastard pull out when he was told?”

“Because he’s a stubborn idiot,” muttered Laing. “Just as well.”

The more dispassionate radio man was sending another brief interrogatory. He wanted five words to confirm—even though the oscillograph told him the voice pattern matched that of Martin—that the SAS major was not speaking under duress. Fourteen days is more than enough to break a man.

His message back to Baghdad was as short as it could be:

“Of Nelson and the North, I say again, of Nelson and the North. Out.”

Another three minutes elapsed. In Baghdad, Martin crouched on the floor of his shack at the bottom of First Secretary Kulikov’s garden, caught the brief blip of sound, spoke his reply, pressed the speedup button, and transmitted a tenth-of-a-second burst back to the Saudi capital.

The listeners heard him say “Sing the brilliant day’s renown.” The radio man grinned.

“That’s him, sir. Alive and kicking and free.”

“Is that a poem?” asked Barber.

“The real second line,” said Laing, “is: ‘Sing the glorious day’s renown.’ If he’d got it right, he’d have been talking with a gun to his temple. In which case ...” He shrugged.

The radio man sent the final message, the real message, and closed down. Barber reached into his briefcase.

“I know it may not be strictly according to local custom, but diplomatic life has certain privileges.”

“I say,” murmured Gray. “Dom Perignon. Do you think Langley can afford it?”

“Langley,” said Barber, “has just put five million greenbacks on the poker table. I guess it can offer you guys a bottle of fizz.”

“Jolly decent,” said Paxman.

A single week had brought about a transformation in Edith Hardenberg—a week, that is, and the effects of being in love.

With Karim’s gentle encouragement she had been to a coiffeur in Grinzing, who had let down her hair and cut and styled it, chin-length, so that it fell about her face, filling out her narrow features and giving her a hint of mature glamour.

Her lover had selected a range of makeup preparations with her shy approval; nothing garish, just a hint of eyeliner, foundation cream, a little powder, and a touch of lipstick at the mouth.

At the bank, Wolfgang Gemütlich was privately aghast, secretly watching her cross the room, taller now in one-inch heels. It was not even the heels or the hair or the makeup that distressed him, though he would have flatly banned them all had Frau Gemütlich even mentioned the very idea. What perturbed him was her air, a sense of self-confidence when she presented him with his letters for signing or took dictation.

He knew, of course, what had happened. One of those foolish girls downstairs had persuaded her to spend money. That was the key to it all, spending money. It always, in his experience, led to ruin, and he feared for the worst.

Her natural shyness had not entirely evaporated, and in the bank she was as retiring as ever in speech if not quite in manner. But in Karim’s presence, when they were alone, she constantly amazed herself with her boldness. For twenty years things physical had been abhorrent to her, and now she was like a traveler on a voyage of slow and wondering discovery, half abashed and horrified, half curious and excited. So their loving—at first wholly one-sided—became more exploratory and mutual. The first time she touched him “down there,”

she thought she would die of shock and mortification, but to her surprise she had survived.

On the evening of the third of February he brought home to her flat a box wrapped in gift paper with a ribbon.

“Karim, you mustn’t do things like this. You are spending too much.”

He took her in his arms and stroked her hair. She had learned to love it when he did that.

“Look, little kitten, my father is wealthy. He makes me a generous allowance. Would you prefer me to spend it in nightclubs?”

She liked it also when he teased her. Of course, Karim would never go to one of those terrible places. So she accepted the perfumes and the toiletries that once, only two weeks ago, she would never have touched.

“Can I open it?” she asked.

“That’s what it’s there for.”

At first she did not understand what they were. The contents of the box seemed to be a froth of silks and lace and colors. When she understood, because she had seen advertisements in magazines—not the sort she bought, of course—she turned bright pink.

“Karim, I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

“Yes, you could,” he said, and grinned. “Go on, kitten. Go into the bedroom and try. Close the door—I won’t look.”

She laid the things out on the bed and stared at them. She, Edith Hardenberg? Never. There were stockings and girdles, panties and bras, garters and short nighties, in black, pink, scarlet, cream, and beige. Things in filmy lace or trimmed with it, silky-smooth fabrics over which the fingertips ran as over ice.

She was an hour alone in that room before she opened the door in a bathrobe. Karim put down his coffee cup, rose, and walked over. He stared down at her with a kind smile and began to undo the sash that held the robe together. She blushed red again and could not meet his gaze. She looked away. He let the robe fall open.

“Oh, kitten,” he said softly, “you are sensational.”

She did not know what to say, so she just put her arms around his neck, no longer frightened or horrified when her thigh touched the hardness in his jeans.

When they had made love, she rose and went to the bathroom. On her return she stood and looked down at him. There was no part of him that she did not love. She sat on the edge of the bed and ran a forefinger down the faint scar along one side of his chin, the one he said he had sustained when falling through a greenhouse in his father’s orchard outside Amman.

He opened his eyes, smiled, and reached up for her face; she gripped his hand and nuzzled the fingers, stroking the signet ring on the smallest finger, the ring with the pale pink opal that his mother had given him.

“What shall we do tonight?” she asked.

“Let’s go out,” he said. “Sirk’s at the Bristol.”

“You like steak too much.”

He reached behind her and held her small buttocks under the filmy gauze.

“That’s the steak I like.” He grinned.

“Stop it—you’re terrible, Karim!” she said. “I must dress.”

She pulled away and caught sight of herself in the mirror. How could she have changed so much? she thought. How could she ever have brought herself to wear lingerie? Then she realized why. For Karim, her Karim, whom she loved and who loved her, she would do anything. Love might have come late in her life, but it had come with the force of a mountain torrent.

United States Department of State

Washington, D.C. 20520

February 5, 1991

MEMORANDUM FOR: Mr. James Baker

FROM: Political Intelligence and Analysis Group SUBJECT: Assassination of Saddam Hussein

CLASSIFICATION: EYES ONLY

It will certainly not have escaped your attention that since the inception of hostilities between the Coalition Air Forces flying out of Saudi Arabia and neighboring states, and the Republic of Iraq, at least two and possibly more attempts have been made to achieve the demise of the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein.

All such attempts have been by aerial bombardment and exclusively by the United States. This group therefore considers it urgent to spell out the likely consequences of a successful attempt to assassinate Mr. Hussein.

The ideal outcome would, of course, be for any successor regime to the present Ba’ath Party dictatorship, set up under the auspices of the victorious Coalition forces, to take the form of a humane and democratic government.

We believe such a hope to be illusory.

In the first place, Iraq is not nor ever was a united country. It is barely a generation away from being a patchwork quilt of rival, often warring tribes. It contains in almost equal parts two potentially hostile sects of Islam, the Sunni and Shi’a faiths, plus three Christian minorities. To these one should add the Kurdish nation in the north, vigorously pursuing its search for separate independence.

In the second place, there has never been a shred of democratic experience in Iraq, which has passed from Turkish to Hashemite to Ba’ath Party rule without the benefit of an intervening interlude of democracy as we understand it.

In the event, therefore, of the sudden end of the present dictatorship by assassination, there are only two realistic scenarios.

The first would be an attempt to impose from outside a consensus government embracing all the principal factions along the lines of a broadly based coalition.

In the view of this group, such a structure would survive in power for an extremely limited period. Traditional and age-old rivalries would need little time literally to pull it apart.

The Kurds would certainly use the opportunity, so long denied, to opt for secession and the establishment of their own republic in the north. A weak central government in Baghdad based upon agreement by consensus would be impotent to prevent such a move.

The Turkish reaction would be predictable and furious, since Turkey’s own Kurdish minority along the border areas would lose no time in joining their fellow Kurds across the border in a much invigorated resistance to Turkish rule.

To the southeast, the Shi’a majority around Basra and the Shatt-al-Arab would certainly find good reason to make overtures to Teheran. Iran would be sorely tempted to avenge the slaughter of its young people in the recent Iran-Iraq war by entertaining those overtures in the hope of annexing southeastern Iraq in the face of the helplessness of Baghdad.

The pro-Western Gulf States and Saudi Arabia would be precipitated into something approaching panic at the thought of an Iran reaching to the very border of Kuwait.

Farther north, the Arabs of Iranian Arabistan would find common cause with their fellow Arabs across the border in Iraq, a move that would be vigorously repressed by the Ayatollahs in Teheran.

In the rump of Iraq we would almost certainly see an outbreak of intertribal fighting to settle old scores and establish supremacy over what was left.

We have all observed with distress the civil war now raging between Serbs and Croats in the former Yugoslavia. So far, this fighting has not yet spread to Bosnia, where a third component force in the form of the Bosnian Moslems awaits.

When the fighting enters Bosnia, as one day it will, the slaughter will be even more appalling and even more intractable.

Nonetheless, this group believes that the misery of Yugoslavia will pale into insignificance compared with the scenario now painted for an Iraq in full disintegration. In such a case, one can look forward to a major civil war in the rump of the Iraqi heartland, four border wars, and the complete destabilization of the Gulf. The refugee problem alone would amount to millions.

The only other viable scenario is for Saddam Hussein to be succeeded by another general or senior member of the Ba’ath hierarchy. But as all those in the present hierarchy are as bloodstained as their leader, it is hard to see what benefits would accrue from the replacement of one monster by another, possibly even a cleverer despot.

The ideal, though admittedly not perfect, solution must therefore be the retention of the status quo in Iraq, except that all weapons of mass destruction must be destroyed and the conventional weapons power be so degraded as not to present a threat to any neighboring state for a minimum of a decade.

It could well be argued that the continuing human rights abuses of the present Iraqi regime, if it is allowed to survive, will prove most distressing. This is beyond any doubt. Yet the West has been required to witness terrible scenes in China, Russia, Vietnam, Tibet, East Timor, Cambodia, and many other parts of the world. It is simply not possible for the United States to impose humanity on a worldwide scale unless it is prepared to enter into permanent global war.

The least catastrophic outcome of the present war in the Gulf and the eventual invasion of Iraq is therefore the survival in power of Saddam Hussein as sole master of a unified Iraq, albeit militarily emasculated as regards foreign aggression.

For all the stated reasons, this group urges an end to all the efforts to assassinate Saddam Hussein, or to march to Baghdad and occupy Iraq.

Respectfully submitted,

PIAG

Mike Martin found the chalk mark on February 7 and retrieved the slim glassine envelope from the dead-letter box that same evening.

Shortly after midnight, he set up his satellite dish pointing out of the doorway of his shack and read the spidery Arabic script on the single page of onionskin paper straight into the tape machine. After the Arabic, he added his own English translation and sent the message at 0016 A.M., one minute into his window.

When the burst came through and the satellite caught it in Riyadh, the radio man on duty shouted:

“He’s here. Black Bear’s coming through!”

The four sleepy men in the adjoining room ran in. The big tape machine against the wall slowed down and decrypted the message.

When the technician punched the playback button, the room was filled with the sound of Martin speaking Arabic. Paxman, whose Arabic was best, listened to the halfway point and hissed:

“He’s found it. Jericho says he’s found it.”

“Quiet, Simon.”

The Arabic stopped, and the English text began. When the voice stopped and signed off, Barber smacked one bunched fist into the palm of his other hand in excitement.

“Boy, he’s done it. Guys, can you get me a transcript of that—like, now?”

The technician ran the tape back, put on earphones, turned to his word processor, and began to type.

Barber went to a telephone in the living room and called the underground headquarters of CENTAF. There was only one man he needed to talk to.

General Chuck Horner apparently needed very little sleep. No one either in the Coalition Command offices beneath the Saudi Defense Ministry or the CENTAF headquarters beneath the Saudi Air Force building on Old Airport Road was getting much sleep during those weeks, but General Horner seemed to get less than most.

Perhaps when his beloved aircrew was aloft and flying deep into enemy territory, he did not feel able to sleep. As the flying was going on twenty-four hours per day, that left little sleeping time.

He had a habit of prowling the offices of the CENTAF complex in the middle of the night, ambling from the analysts of the Black Hole along to the Tactical Air Control Center. If a telephone rang unattended and he was near it, he would answer it. Several bemused Air Force officers out in the desert, calling up for a clarification or with a query and expecting a duty major to come on the line, found themselves speaking to the boss himself.

It was a very democratic habit, but it occasionally brought surprises.

On one occasion a squadron commander, who will have to remain nameless, called to complain that his pilots were nightly running a gauntlet of triple-A fire on their way to their targets. Could not the Iraqi gunners be squashed by a visit from the heavy bombers, the Buffs?