Fire Hawk (10 page)

The second file detailed two other sites they were to inspect, one in Baghdad, the other in the desert about ninety kilometres to the west – a patch of ground showing signs of being recently dug over as if in preparation for the erection of a large building.

‘The concern is they could be trying to bury something,' Hardcastle explained. ‘Ah, yes! Now
this
is what I was waiting for.' He held up a list. ‘All the top personnel at the Haji plant. Out of date, but better than nothing. It's come from some Norwegian supplier whose last deal with the Haji company was before sanctions, of course.'
He did a quick count. ‘Oh God! Only nine names on it. There must be several hundred employed there.'

Burgess read over his shoulder.

‘If they're top guys they'll probably still be there,' he suggested.

‘Probably. Aha!
That's
interesting,' Hardcastle muttered, jabbing a finger at the page. ‘This chap Shenassi, MD and Chief Scientific Officer. Got his BSc in Food Science at the University of Leeds in 1978. You know it's that sort of information that can make all the difference in tripping these buggers up.'

Burgess didn't quite see what he meant, but decided not to query it. His head was beginning to throb from the jet lag.

‘Good. Excellent!' Hardcastle stood up again, looking at his watch. ‘Better get the briefing under way before they start the slow hand clap. Thank you very much, ladies,' he called, heading for the door.

‘Now Andy, you're not forgetting to call Mr Waddell?' the Lieutenant Colonel chided.

‘Oh, yes,' Hardcastle faltered, snapping his fingers. ‘I was forgetting. Dean, would you mind going on ahead and telling them I'll be another few minutes?'

‘Sure thing.'

With Burgess out of the room, Hardcastle asked the English Captain to get SIS on the circuit.

‘We'll have a jolly good try,' she replied, picking up the handset of an encrypted telephone and dialling.

At the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service in London it was a little after six in the morning.

‘Hello.' The voice at the other end sounded deeper than Hardcastle expected. He remembered Waddell as being small.

‘Hardcastle here.'

‘Oh, excellent. Thanks for finding the time to call. Look, I know you must be in coiled spring mode by now,
but there's some intelligence come our way that you should know about. It comes with a bit of a health warning, mind.'

An Ulsterman, Hardcastle remembered from the accent. Young, pushy and too fond of the jargon they taught on management courses.

‘Go on.'

‘The source was in Baghdad. It's not corroborated yet. We've got absolutely nothing else that matches it. And it could even be disinformation. But the line is that some anthrax warheads have been smuggled out of Iraq for imminent use.'

‘Good Lord!'

‘But as I said, we've no collateral. Just this one source who may have had any one of a dozen motives for peddling such a yarn. Anyway, there's nothing
you
can actually do about it, but I just thought you ought to know for background. In case it fits in with anything you pick up. Keep it to yourself please. We've told Washington and Tel Aviv, but treat it as info for us and the Americans only at this stage if you wouldn't mind.'

‘Of course. But how alarming. If it's true it means UNSCOM's failed. All our efforts in vain.'

‘Yes, well let's just hope it
isn't
true, Mr Hardcastle.'

‘Quite.'

Hardcastle replaced the receiver and distractedly left the communications centre without another word to the women who ran it.

Dean Burgess was sitting in the briefing room in the first of four rows of plastic stacking chairs. Next to him was Major Martha Cok who'd been chattering to him solidly for the past five minutes. He'd been responding with monosyllables, his mind unable to quit thinking about the newspaper clipping his wife had inserted into his suitcase just before he left home and which he'd only discovered when opening it in the hotel that morning.

The clipping was a sign of her new attitude to him. His promotion within the Bureau had prompted Carole to take a stand about his performance as husband and father. Her complaint was common enough in his line of business – he was a ‘workaholic who treated his wife and children like toys, to be taken out and played with only when the Bureau allowed'. And she was right. He wasn't proud of it and he knew his constant refrain of ‘Please be patient, it's only for now' had long ago lost all credibility. The trouble was that Carole was refusing to move with the kids to DC.

The clipping from the
New York Post
was a further sign of her desperation to hold the family together and for him to change. The news feature had concerned Pledge for the Family, a right-wing Christian movement that was gathering strength across the States on a platform of male renewal and rededication to family values. Joining such a movement of what he dismissed as religious head-bangers was unimaginable for him, and the fact that Carole had thought he might was a mark of how far apart they'd drifted.

‘Ah! Here is our great leader,' whispered Martha Cok.

Andrew Hardcastle had entered the briefing room. Burgess saw at once that something was up. As the Englishman stepped onto the raised dais, his mind seemed elsewhere. He put his hand on the projection equipment as if trying to steady himself.

‘Good morning again, gentlemen – and ladies,' he began, absent-mindedly sifting through the material he would need to project. He looked up as if to check his brief opening words had been understood by those with poor English. ‘I thought I would start with some background for those of you new to UNSCOM.'

He glanced down at Burgess, then at the rows behind him.

‘First thing to stress is the
importance
of what we are doing. Be under no illusions, ladies and gentlemen. What we are dealing with in Baghdad is a regime that has refined the art of deception to a level almost unprecedented in the history of the world.' He paused for effect. ‘And
our
problem is this: our inspections have certainly produced conclusive evidence that biological weapon agents have been produced in Iraq, but no signs of stockpiles of the agents themselves. Finding those weapons – and they
must
exist – is what this UNSCOM mission is all about.

‘A quick reminder of the BW story so far. After the Gulf War, when the UN search for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction began, Saddam's men strenuously denied ever having had a serious biological weapons production programme. Chemical, yes. Mustard and nerve gases. But biological they denied. We didn't believe them of course, but couldn't find the evidence we needed. Then in 1995, you'll remember, we had a breakthrough.

‘As you all know, one essential ingredient for producing large quantities of bacteria, viruses or toxins is growth medium. Well, in 1995 we discovered that suppliers in Britain and Switzerland had sold the Iraqis
thirty-nine
tonnes of the stuff back in 1988. Far more than they could possibly use legitimately in medical labs and so on. So we managed to acquire the delivery details from the companies concerned and then asked the Iraqis to account for these stocks.

‘It took time. But eventually they did come up with an extraordinary tale of woe. Ten tonnes had been lost in riots, they said. Other stocks had been burned accidentally. And, would you believe it, some had even got lost falling off the back of a truck! They even produced a fistful of blatantly forged documents to back up their nonsensical fairy tales. Anyway, to cut a long story short,
eleven tonnes of the medium was accounted for legitimately, but for the remaining twenty-eight tonnes they had no valid explanation of use.

‘So in the end they did admit it. Yes, they
had
had a BW research programme, but had never weaponised the stuff. There were no piles of warheads and they'd destroyed all the stocks they'd produced.' Hardcastle raised a derisory eyebrow. ‘They seemed to hope that would be enough to make the UN draw a line under the affair and ease up on sanctions. Well, my friends, they were nearly right. There
was
a move to abandon the inspections. But then came an amazing stroke of luck. Lieutenant General Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of the president, fled to Jordan and admitted being a key figure in their biological weapons programme. Known as Project 324, it was based at Al Hakam, a sprawling site in the desert. He gave us a mass of documentary detail, including all the types of warheads they'd developed and tested and where they'd been stored. But then, you'll remember, Hussein Kamel made a fatal mistake. Saddam asked him to return to Iraq with a promise of safety. The idiot did so, and was dead within days.

‘Anyway, the evidence he gave us meant we had 'em. Proof at last that everything they'd told us up until then was lies. We demolished Al Hakam with explosives a few months ago. And UNSCOM moved into a new phase, with more remote surveillance cameras set up in dozens of Iraqi labs and factories, the pictures live-linked back to the thirtieth floor of the UN building in New York. All these sites have a legitimate use of course – pharmaceutical plants, agricultural feed-stuff factories – but all have the capability also of being rapidly switched into BW production. But gentlemen – and ladies – despite those breakthroughs, despite the monitoring, we
still
haven't found any stocks of anthrax, botulinum toxin, aflatoxins
or ricin, all of which, according to General Kamel, have been turned into weapons by the Iraqi regime.'

And, Burgess remembered from the initial brief when he'd taken up his new duties in Washington, just a few grams of the stuff fed into the ventilation system of a New York subway interchange could kill thousands within days. His jet lag was easing, his mind was focused. Hardcastle's enthusiasm had begun to get to him.

‘Some of these pathogens and toxins deteriorate when stored,' the Englishman continued, ‘but with the Iraqis finally admitting to producing some
eight thousand five hundred litres
of anthrax, we assume some of it's still around, hidden in places we haven't yet got to, like Saddam's own palaces.

‘Now. Enough of history. Let's turn to this mission. Our primary target for inspection on day one is an animal feed factory. They produce single-cell protein concentrates for cattle using fermenters, freeze-dryers and milling equipment. All dual-use gear which without too much effort could be diverted into producing bacteria or toxins in huge volumes.'

He pointed to the far end of the room where a triple-glazed window looked out onto the antenna farm.

‘Would someone mind closing the blind?'

As the room darkened, he clicked on the projector light. Under its lens he slipped the U-2 photo taken a fortnight earlier.

‘About three weeks ago this thermal-imaging shot of the factory was taken by a UN aerial platform at about two in the morning Iraqi time. A Friday. The layout of the buildings is exactly as it was in previous photographs, but in this shot there is something extra visible. Have a look to one side of the main building.' He pointed it out with the red beam of a hand-held laser. ‘What you see here is a truck – a four tonner, according to the photo analysts in New York. And –' The red beam moved a
small distance to the left ‘– what you see
here
is some sizeable object apparently being moved from the truck into the building. Now, definition isn't exactly wonderful. We can't really tell what the object is from this view. But –' he replaced the photo with another one ‘– with a little computer enhancement, the object is substantially enlarged and actually takes on a shape.'

He turned to his audience to see if they'd recognised what it was. In the front row Dean Burgess shook his head. To him it was just a lump.

‘One can't be absolutely certain, but to every expert who's studied it closely it looks like some piece of milling equipment. You see this cone shape? Could be a hopper. It's the sort of machine that could turn a cake of dried anthrax spores or botulinum toxin into a powder with grains between one and five microns in diameter. And that's exactly the size needed if the agent is to be weaponised effectively.'

‘The milling machines already at the factory can't do that?' Burgess enquired.

‘No. They produce a much coarser particle, which is quite unsuitable because it won't stay airborne for long.'

‘And this
fabrik,
' the Dutch vet asked, ‘it is in Baghdad?'

‘Um, at this stage you don't need to know where the
factory
is, Martha.' He'd spoken more sharply than he'd meant. It had sounded like a rebuke, and the pointed correction of her English a trifle rude. ‘It's the old need-to-know thing,' he went on, his voice softer. ‘Preventing the Iraqis knowing where we'll pounce next is absolutely vital. If they
have
got something at this factory which they shouldn't have, they'll sure as hell move it somewhere else if they get the slightest hint we're coming.'

Burgess remembered that when he had met Hardcastle in New York a few days back, the Englishman had told him there
had
been leaks from within the multinational
UNSCOM teams and several inspections had been turned into a farce.

‘Yes, okay,' Major Cok answered, ‘but can you tell us perhaps if this feed
factory
has been inspected before?'

‘Yes it was. A little while back. No hint of anything out of place at the time. We decided to install some remote cameras though, because of the potential dual use of the plant. All the relevant processing equipment is listed and tagged of course, so we'll know if anything's missing or been added.'

Hardcastle removed the photo from the projector and replaced it with a drawing of the layout of the factory made at the last inspection. He pointed out the main office block.