The Fist of God (62 page)

cruised over the designated patch of desert west of Baghdad and south of the Al-Muhammadi air base, the images it saw came straight to a television screen in the basement of the Saudi Air Force headquarters.

There were five men in the room, including the technician who operated the console and who could, at a word from the other four, order the computer to freeze-frame and run off a photographic print for study.

Chip Barber and Steve Laing were there, tolerated in their civilian dress in this mecca of military prowess; the other two were Colonel Beatty of the USAF and Squadron Leader Joe Peck of” the RAF, both experts in target analysis.

The reason for using
Al Qubai
was simply that this was the nearest village to the target; as it was too small a settlement to show up on their maps, it was the accompanying grid reference and description that mattered to the analysts.

The TR-1 found it a few miles from the grid reference sent by Jericho, but there could be no question that the description was exact, and there were no other locations remotely near that fit the description.

The four men watched the target swim into vision, freeze on the best frame, and hold. The modem punched out a print for study.

“It’s under there?” breathed Laing.

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“Must be,” said Colonel Beatty. “There’s nothing else like it for miles around.”

“Cunning buggers,” said Peck.

Al Qubai was in fact the nuclear engineering plant for Dr. Jaafar Al-Jaafar’s entire Iraqi nuclear program.

A British nuclear engineer once remarked that his craft was “ten percent genius and ninety percent plumbing.” There is rather more to it than that. The engineering plant is where craftsmen take the product of the physicists, the calculations of the mathematicians and the computers, and the results of the chemists and assemble the final product. It is the nuclear engineers who actually make the device into a deliverable piece of metal.

Iraq had buried its Al Qubai plant completely beneath the desert, eighty feet down, and that was just the level of the roof. Beneath the roof, three stories of workshops ran farther downward. What caused Squadron Leader Peck’s “cunning buggers” remark was the skill with which it had been disguised.

It is not all that difficult to build an entire factory underground, but disguising it presents major problems. Once it is constructed in its giant crater, sand may be bulldozed back against the ferroconcrete walls and over the roof until the building is concealed. Sinks beneath the lowest floor may cope with drainage.

But the factory will need air conditioning; that requires a fresh-air intake and a foul-air outlet—both pipes jutting out of the desert floor.

It will also need masses of electric power, implying a powerful diesel generator. That too needs an air intake and exhaust outlet—two more pipes.

There must be a down-ramp or a passenger elevator and a cargo hoist for deliveries and departures of personnel and materials—another The Fist of God

above-surface structure. Delivery trucks cannot roll on soft sand; they need a hard road, a spur of tarmac running from the nearest main road.

There will be heat emissions, concealable during the day when the outside air is hot, but not during the chill nights.

How therefore to disguise from aerial surveillance an area of virgin desert entertaining a tarmac road that seems to run to nowhere, four major pipes, an elevator shaft, the constant arrival and departure of trucks, and frequent heat emissions?

It was Colonel Osman Badri, the young genius of Iraq’s Army Engineering Corps, who had cracked it; and his solution fooled the Allies with all their spy planes.

From the air, Al Qubai was a forty-five-acre automobile junkyard.

Though the watchers in Riyadh, even with their best magnifiers, could not see it, four of the heaps of rusting car wrecks were welded frames—solid domes of twisted metal—beneath which pipes sucked in fresh air or filtered out the foul gases through the broken bodies of cars and vans.

The main shed, the cutting shop, with its steel tanks of oxygen and acetylene ostentatiously parked outside, hid the entry to the elevator shafts. The naturalness of welding in such a place would justify a heat source.

The reason for the single-track tarred road was obvious—trucks needed to arrive with car wrecks and leave with scrap steel.

The whole system had actually been seen early on by AWACS, which registered a great mass of metal in the middle of the desert. Was it a tank division? An ammunition dump? An early fly-over had established it was just a car junkyard, and interest had been abandoned.

What the four men in Riyadh could also not see was that four other minimountains of rusted car bodies were also solidly welded frames, The Fist of God

internally shaped like domes, but with hydraulic jacks beneath them.

Two of them housed powerful antiaircraft batteries, multibarreled ZSU-23-4 Russian cannon; the other two concealed SAMs, models 6,8, and 9, not radar-guided but the smaller heat-seeking type—a radar dish would have given the game away.

“So it’s under there,” breathed Beatty.

Even as they watched, a long truck loaded with old car bodies entered the picture. It seemed to move in little jerks, because the TR-1, flying eighty thousand feet above Al Qubai, was running off still frames at the rate of several a second. Fascinated, the two intelligence officers watched until the truck reversed into the welding shed.

“Betcha the food, water, and supplies are under the car bodies,” said Beatty. He sat back. “Trouble is, we’ll never get at the damn factory.

Not even the Buffs can bomb that deep.”

“We could close them down,” said Peck. “Crush the lift shaft, seal ’em in. Then if they try any rescue work to unblock, we shoot them up again.”

“Sounds good,” agreed Beatty. “How many days till the land invasion?”

“Twelve,” said Barber.

“We can do it,” said Beatty. “High-level, laser-guided, a mass of planes, a gorilla.”

Laing shot Barber a warning glance.

“We’d prefer something a little more discreet,” said Barber. “A two-ship raid, low-level, eyeball confirmation of destruction.”

There was silence.

“You guys trying to tell us something?” asked Beatty. “Like, Baghdad is not supposed to know we’re interested?”

“Could you please do it that way?” urged Laing. “There don’t seem to The Fist of God

be any defenses. The key here is disguise.”

Beatty sighed. Fucking spooks, he thought. They’re trying to protect someone. Well, none of my business.

“What do you think, Joe?” he asked the squadron leader.

“The Tornados could do it,” said Joe Peck, “with Buccaneers target-marking for them. Six one-thousand-pound bombs right through the door of the shed. I’ll bet that tin shed is ferroconcrete inside. Should contain the blast nicely.”

Beatty nodded. “Okay, you guys have it. I’ll clear it with General Horner. Who do you want to use, Joe?”

“Six-oh-eight Squadron, at Maharraq. I know the CO, Phil Curzon.

Shall I get him over here?”

Wing Commander Philip Curzon commanded twelve of the Royal Air Force’s Panavia Tornados of the 608th Squadron, on the island of Bahrain, where they had arrived two months earlier from their base at Laarbruck, Germany. Just after noon that day, February 8, he received an order that brooked no denial: to report immediately to the CENTAF

headquarters in Riyadh. So great was the urgency that by the time he had acknowledged the message, his orderly officer reported that a Beach King Air from Shakey’s Pizza on the other side of the island had landed and was taxiing in to pick him up. When he boarded the Beach King Air after throwing on a uniform jacket and cap, he discovered that the twin-engined executive plane was assigned to General Horner himself.

“What the hell is going on?” the wing commander asked himself, and with justification.

At Riyadh military air base a USAF staff car was waiting to carry him the mile down Old Airport Road to the Black Hole.

The four men who had been in conference to see the TR-1’s mission The Fist of God

pictures at ten that morning were still there. Only the technician was missing. They needed no more pictures. The ones they had were spread all over the table. Squadron Leader Peck made the introductions.

Steve Laing explained what was needed, and Curzon examined the photos.

Philip Curzon was no fool, or he would not have been commanding a squadron of Her Majesty’s very expensive fighter-bombers. In the early low-level missions with JP-233 bombs against Iraqi airfields, he had lost two aircraft and four good men; two he knew were dead. The other two had just been paraded, battered and dazed, on Iraqi TV, another of Saddam’s PR masterpieces.

“Why not put this target on the Air Tasking Order, like all the others?”

he asked quietly. “Why the hurry?”

“Let me be perfectly straight with you,” said Laing. “We now believe this target to house Saddam’s principal and perhaps only store of a particularly vicious poison gas shell. There is evidence that the first stocks are about to be moved to the front. Hence the urgency.”

Beatty and Peck perked up. This was the first explanation they had received to explain the spooks’ interest in the factory beneath the junkyard.

“But two attack planes?” Curzon persisted. “Just two? That makes it a very low-priority mission. What am I supposed to tell my aircrew? I’m not going to lie to them, gentlemen. Please get that quite straight.”

“There’s no need, and I wouldn’t tolerate that either,” said Laing. “Just tell them the truth. That aerial surveillance has indicated movement of trucks to and from the site. The analysts believe them to be military trucks, and they have jumped to the conclusion this apparent scrapyard hides an ammunition dump—principally, inside that big central shed.

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So that’s the target. As for a low-level mission, you can see there are no missiles, no triple-A.”

“And that’s the truth?” asked the wing commander.

“I swear it.”

“Then why, gentlemen, the clear intention that if any of my crews are shot down and interrogated, Baghdad should not learn where the information really came from? You don’t believe the military truck story any more than I do.”

Colonel Beatty and Squadron Leader Peck sat back. This man really was squeezing the spooks hard where it hurt most. Good for him.

“Tell him, Chip,” said Laing in resignation.

“Okay, Wing Commander, I’ll level with you. But this is for your ears only. The rest is absolutely true. We have a defector. In the States.

Came over before the war as a graduate student. Now he’s fallen for an American girl and wants to stay. During the interviews with the immigration people, something came up. A smart interviewer passed him over to us.”

“The CIA?” asked Curzon.

“Okay, yes, the CIA. We did a deal with the guy. He gets the green card, he helps us. When he was in Iraq, in Army Engineers, he worked on a few secret projects. Now he’s spilling all. So now you know. But it’s top classification. It doesn’t alter the mission, and it isn’t lying for you not to tell the aircrew that—which, incidentally, you may not do.”

“One last question,” said Curzon. “If the man is safe in the States, why the need to fool Baghdad anymore?”

“There are other targets he’s spilling for us. It takes time, but we may get twenty fresh targets out of him. We alert Baghdad that he’s singing like a canary, they move the goodies somewhere else by night. They can add two and two as well, you know.”

The Fist of God

Philip Curzon rose and gathered the photos. Each had its exact grid reference on the map stamped on one side.

“All right. Dawn tomorrow. That shed will cease to exist.”

Then he left. On the flight back he mulled over the mission. Something inside him said it stank like an old cod. But the explanations were perfectly feasible, and he had his orders. He would not lie, but he had been forbidden to disclose everything. The good part was, the target was based on deception, not protection. His men should get in and out unscathed. He already knew who would lead the attack.

Squadron Leader Lofty Williamson was happily sprawled in a chair in the evening sun when the call came. He was reading the latest edition of
World Air Power Journal
, the combat pilots’ bible, and was annoyed to be torn away from a superbly authoritative article on one of the Iraqi fighters he might run into.

The squadron commander was in his office, photos spread out before him. For an hour he briefed his senior flight commander on what was wanted.

“You’ll have two Bucks to mark target for you, so you should be able to loft and get the hell out of there before the ungodly know what’s hit

’em.”

Williamson found his navigator, the rear-seat man the Americans call the wizzo, who nowadays does a lot more than navigate, being in charge of air electronics and weapons systems. Flight Lieutenant Sid Blair was reputed to be able to find a tin can in the Sahara if it needed bombing.

Between them, with the aid of the Operations people, they mapped out the mission. The exact location of the junkyard was found, from its grid reference, on their air maps.

The pilot made plain that he wanted to attack from the east at the very The Fist of God

moment of the rising of the sun, so that any Iraqi gunners would have the light in their eyes while he, Williamson, would see the target with complete clarity.

Blair insisted he wanted a “stone bonker,” some unmistakable landmark along the run-in track by which he could make tiny last-minute adjustments on his course-to-steer. They found one twelve miles back from the target in an easterly direction—a radio mast exactly one mile from the run-in track.

Going in at dawn would give them the vital Time on Target, or TOT, that they needed. The reason the TOT must be followed to the second is that precision makes the difference between success and failure. If the first pilot is late even by one second, the follow-up pilot could run right into the explosion of his colleague’s bombs; worse, the first pilot will have a Tornado coming up on his rear at nearly ten miles a minute—not a pretty sight. Finally, if the first pilot is too early or the second pilot too late, the gunners will have time to wake up, man their guns, and aim them. So the second fliers go in just as the shrapnel of the first explosions subside.