The Fist of God (71 page)

Instead, he went to the fruit market at Kasra and found a truck driver heading west. The man was only going a few miles beyond Habbaniyah, and twenty dinars persuaded him to take a passenger.

Many trucks preferred to drive by night, believing that the Sons of Dogs up there in their airplanes could not see them in the dark, unaware that by either night or day, battered fruit trucks were not General Chuck Horner’s top priority.

So they drove through the night, by headlights generating at least one candlepower, and at dawn Martin found himself deposited on the highway just west of Lake Habbaniyah, where the driver turned off for the rich farms of the Upper Euphrates Valley.

They had been stopped twice by patrols, but on each occasion Martin had produced his papers and the Russian letter, explaining that he had worked as gardener for the infidel, but they were going home and had dismissed him. He whined about the way they had treated him until the impatient soldiers told him to be quiet and get on his way.

That night, Osman Badri was not far from Mike Martin, heading in the same direction but ahead of him. His destination was the fighter base where his elder brother, Abdelkarim, was the squadron commander.

During the 1980s a Belgian construction company called Sixco had been contracted to build eight superprotected air bases to house the cream of Iraq’s best fighters.

The Fist of God

The key to them was that almost everything was buried underground—barracks, hangars, fuel stores, ammunition magazines, workshops, briefing rooms, crew quarters, and the big diesel generators to power the bases.

The only things visible aboveground were the actual runways, three thousand meters long. But as these appeared to have no buildings or hangars associated with them, the Allies thought they were barebones airfields, as Al Kharz in Saudi Arabia had been before the Americans moved in.

A closer inspection on the ground would have revealed one-meter-thick concrete blast doors set into downward-leading ramps at the ends of the runways. Each base was in a square five kilometers by five, the perimeter surrounded by barbed-wire fencing. But like Tarmiya, the Sixco bases appeared inactive and were left alone.

To operate out of them, the pilots would be briefed underground, get into their cockpits, and start their engines there. Only when they were fully run-up, with blast walls protecting the rest of the base from their jet exhaust and diverting the gases upward to mingle with the hot desert air outside, would the doors to the ramps be opened.

The fighters could race up the ramps, emerge at full power, afterburners on, scream down the runway, and be airborne in seconds.

Even when the AWACS spotted them, they appeared to have come from nowhere and were assumed to be on low-level missions originating somewhere else.

Colonel Abdelkarim Badri was stationed at one of these Sixco bases, known only as KM 160 because it was off the Baghdad-Ar-Rutba road, 160 kilometers west of Baghdad. His younger brother presented himself at the guard post in the wire just after sundown.

Because of his rank, a phone call was at once made from the guard hut The Fist of God

to the squadron commander’s private quarters, and soon a jeep appeared, trundling across the empty desert, apparently having come from nowhere.

A young Air Force lieutenant escorted the visitor into the base, the jeep rolling down another hidden but small ramp into the belowground complex, where the jeep was parked. The lieutenant led the way down long concrete corridors, past caverns where mechanics worked on MiG

29s. The air was clean and filtered, and everywhere was the hum of generators.

Eventually they entered the senior officers’ area, and the lieutenant knocked at a door. At a command from inside, he showed Osman Badri into the CO’s apartment.

Abdelkarim rose, and the brothers embraced. The older man was thirty-seven, also a colonel and darkly handsome, with a slim moustache. He was unmarried but never lacked for female attention. His looks, his sardonic manner, his dashing uniform, and his pilot’s wings ensured it.

Nor was his appearance a sham; Air Force generals admitted he was the best fighter pilot in the country, and the Russians, who had trained him on the ace of the Soviet fighter fleet, the MiG 29 Fulcrum supersonic fighter, agreed with that.

“Well, my brother, what brings you out here?” Abdelkarim asked.

Osman, when he had sat down and gotten coffee from a freshly perked brew, had had time to study his older sibling. There were lines of strain around the mouth that had not been there before, and weariness in the eyes.

Abdelkarim was neither a fool nor a coward. He had flown eight missions against the Americans and the British. He had returned from them all—just. He had seen his best colleagues shot down or blown apart by Sparrow and Sidewinder missiles, and he had dodged four The Fist of God

himself.

The odds, he had recognized after his first attempt to intercept the American strike bombers, were impossible. On his own side, he had neither information nor guidance as to where the enemy was, how many, of what type, at what height, or on which heading. The Iraqi radars were down, the control and command centers were in pieces, and the pilots were simply on their own.

Worse, the Americans with their AWACS could pick up the Iraqi warplanes before they had reached a thousand feet, telling their own pilots where to go and what to do to secure the best attack position.

For the Iraqis, Abdelkarim Badri knew, every combat mission was a suicide quest.

Of all this, he said nothing, forcing a smile and a request for his brother’s news. That news killed the smile.

Osman related the events of the past sixty hours: the arrival of the AMAM troops at their parents’ house at dawn, the search, the discovery in the garden, the beating of their mother and Talat, and the arrest of their father. He told how he had been summoned when the neighboring pharmacist finally got a message to him, and how he had driven home to find their father’s body on the dining-room table.

Abdelkarim’s mouth tightened to an angry line when Osman revealed what he had discovered when he cut open the body bag, and the way their father had been buried that morning.

The older man leaned forward sharply when Osman told how he had been intercepted as he left the cemetery, and of the conversation that had taken place.

“You told him all that?” he asked, when his brother had finished.

“Yes.”

“Is it true, all true? You really built this Fortress, this Qa’ala?”

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“Yes.”

“And you told him where it is, so that he can tell the Americans?”

“Yes. Did I do wrong?”

Abdelkarim thought for some while.

“How many men, in all Iraq, know about all this, my brother?”

“Six,” said Osman.

“Name them.”

“The Rais himself; Hussein Kamil, who provided the finance and the manpower; Amer Saadi, who provided the technology. Then General Ridha, who supplied the artillerymen, and General Musuli of the Engineers—he proposed me for the job. And me, I built it.”

“The helicopter pilots who bring in the visitors?”

“They have to know the directions in order to navigate, but not what is inside. And they are kept quarantined in a base somewhere, I don’t know where.”

“Visitors—how many could know?”

“None. They are blindfolded before takeoff and until they have arrived.”

“If the Americans destroy this Qubth-ut-Allah, who do you think the AMAM will suspect? The Rais, the ministers, the generals—or you?”

Osman put his head in his hands.

“What have I done?” he moaned.

“I’m afraid, little brother, that you have destroyed us all.”

Both men knew the rules. For treason, the Rais does not demand a single sacrifice but the extirpation of three generations: father and uncles, so there will be no more of the tainted seed, brothers for the same reason, and sons and nephews, so that none may grow up to carry on the vendetta against him. Osman Badri began quietly to weep.

Abdelkarim rose, pulled Osman to his feet, and embraced him.

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“You did right, brother. You did the right thing. Now we must see how to get out of here.”

He checked his watch: eight o’clock.

“There are no telephone lines for the public from here to Baghdad,” he said. “Only underground lines to the Defense people in their various bunkers. But this message is not for them. How long would it take you to drive to our mother’s house?”

“Three, maybe four hours,” said Osman.

“You have eight, to get there and back. Tell our mother to pack all she values into our father’s car. She can drive it—not well, but enough.

She should take Talat and go to Talat’s village. She should seek shelter with his tribe until one of us contacts her. Understood?”

“Yes. I can be back by dawn. Why?”

“Before dawn. Tomorrow I am leading a flight of MiGs across to Iran.

Others have gone before. It is a crazy scheme by the Rais to save his best fighter planes. Nonsense, of course, but it may save our lives. You will come with me.”

“I thought the MiG 29 was a single-seater?”

“I have one trainer version with two seats. The UB model. You will be dressed as an Air Force officer. With luck, we can get away with it. Go now.”

Mike Martin was walking west that night along the Ar-Rutba road when the car of Osman Badri flashed past him, heading toward Baghdad. Neither took any notice of the other. Martin’s destination was the next river crossing, fifteen miles ahead. There, with the bridge down, trucks would have to wait for the ferry, and he would have a better chance of paying another driver to take him farther west.

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In the small hours of the morning he found exactly such a truck, but it could take him only to a point just beyond Muhammadi. There he began to wait again. At three o’clock the car of Colonel Badri sped back again. He did not hail it, and it did not stop. The driver was clearly in a hurry. Just before dawn a third truck came along, pulled out of a side road onto the main highway, and paused to take him aboard. Again he paid the driver from his dwindling stock of dinar notes, grateful to whoever had thought to give him the wad of money back in Mansour. By dawn, he assumed, the Kulikov household would complain that they had lost their gardener.

A search of his shack would reveal the writing pad beneath the mattress—an odd possession for an illiterate—and a further search would reveal the transmitter beneath the tiles. By midday, the hunt would be well up, starting in Baghdad but spreading across the country. By nightfall, he needed to be far away in the desert, heading for the border.

The truck in which he rode was beyond KM 160 when the flight of MiG 29s took off.

Osman Badri was terrified, being one of those people with a deep loathing of flying. In the underground caverns that made up the base, he had stood to one side as his brother briefed the four young pilots who would form the rest of the flight. Most of Abdelkarim’s contemporaries were dead; these were youngsters, more than a decade his junior, not long out of training school. They listened with rapt attention to their squadron commander and nodded their assent.

Inside the MiG, even with the canopy closed, Osman thought he had never heard a roar like it as, in the enclosed space, the two RD 33

Soviet turbofans ran up to maximum dry power. Crouching in the rear cockpit behind his brother, Osman saw the great blast doors open on The Fist of God

their hydraulic pistons and a square of pale blue sky appear at the end of the cavern. The noise increased as the pilot ran his throttle through the gate and into afterburn, and the twin-finned Soviet interceptor shuddered against her brakes.

When the brakes came off, Osman thought he had been kicked in the small of the back by a mule. The MiG leaped forward, the concrete walls flashed past, and the jet took the ramp and emerged into the dawn light.

Osman shut his eyes and prayed. The rumbling of the wheels ceased, he seemed to be drifting, and he opened his eyes. They were airborne, the lead MiG circling low over KM 160 as the other four jets screamed out of the tunnel below. Then the doors closed, and the air base ceased to exist.

All around him, because the UB version is a trainer, were dials and clocks, buttons, switches, screens, knobs, and levers. Between his legs was a duplicate control column. His brother had told him to leave everything alone, which he was glad to do.

At one thousand feet the flight of five MiGs formed into a staggered line, the four youngsters behind the squadron commander. His brother set course just south of due east, keeping low, hoping to avoid detection and to cross the southern outskirts of Baghdad, losing his MiGs from prying American eyes in the clutter of industrial plants and other radar images.

It was a high-risk gamble, trying to avoid the radars of the AWACS

out over the Gulf, but he had no choice. His orders were formal, and now Abdelkarim Badri had an extra reason for wishing to reach Iran.

Luck was with him that morning, through one of those flukes in warfare that are not supposed to occur but do. At the end of every long shift on station over the Gulf, the AWACS had to return to base and be The Fist of God

replaced by another. It was called changing the cab rank. During the cab rank changes, there was sometimes a brief window when radar cover was suspended. The MiG flight’s low passage across South Baghdad and Salman Pak coincided with just such a lucky break.

The Iraqi pilot hoped that by keeping to one thousand feet, he could slip under any American flights, which tended to operate at twenty thousand feet and up. He wanted to skirt the Iraqi town of Al Kut to its north, then head straight for the safety of the Iranian border at its nearest point.

That morning, at that hour, Captain Don Walker of the 336th Tactical Fighter Squadron out of Al Kharz was leading a flight of four Strike Eagles north toward Al Kut, his mission to bomb a major river bridge over the Tigris across which Republican Guard tanks had been caught by a J-STAR heading south for Kuwait.