The Fist of God (74 page)

There was cloud and rain over the Jebal that day, but with its infrared and thermal imaging radar, the ASARS-2 device that defies cloud, rain, hail, sleet, snow, and darkness, the spy plane got its pictures anyway.

They were studied as they arrived by Colonel Beatty of the USAF and Squadron Leader Peck of the RAF, the two top photoreconnaissance analysts in the Black Hole.

The planning conference began at six. There were only eight men present. In the chair was General Horner’s deputy, the equally decisive but more jovial General Buster Glosson. The two intelligence officers, Steve Laing and Chip Barber, were there because it was they who had brought the target and knew the background to its revelation. The two analysts, Beatty and Peck, were required to explain their interpretation of the pictures of the area. And there were three staff officers, two American and one British, who would note what had to be done and ensure that it was.

Colonel Beatty opened with what was to become the leitmotif of the conference.

“We have a problem here,” he said.

The Fist of God

“Then explain it,” said the general.

“Sir, the information provided gives us a grid reference. Twelve figures, six of longitude and six of latitude. But it is not a SATNAV

reference, pinning the area down to a few square yards. We are talking about one square kilometer. To be on the safe side, we enlarged the area to one square mile.”

“So?”

“And there it is.”

Colonel Beatty gestured to the wall. Almost the entire space was covered by a blown-up photograph, high-definition, computer-enhanced, and covering six feet by six. Everyone stared at it.

“I don’t see anything,” said the general. “Just mountains.”

“That, sir, is the problem. It isn’t there.”

The attention switched to the spooks. It was, after all, their intelligence.

“What,” said the general slowly, “is supposed to be there?”

“A gun,” said Laing.

“A gun?”

“The so-called Babylon gun.”

“I thought you guys had intercepted all of them at the manufacturing stage.”

“So did we. Apparently one got through.”

“We’ve been through this before. It’s supposed to be a rocket, or a secret fight-bomber base. No gun can fire a payload that big.”

“This one can, sir. I’ve checked with London. A barrel over one hundred and eighty meters long, a bore of one meter. A payload of over half a ton. A range of up to a thousand kilometers, according to the propellant used.”

“And the range from here to the Triangle?”

The Fist of God

“Four hundred and seventy miles, or 750 kilometers. General, can your fighters intercept a shell?”

“No.”

“Patriot missiles?”

“Possibly, if they’re in the right place at the right time and can spot it in time. Probably not.”

“The point is,” interjected Colonel Beatty, “gun or missile, it’s not there.”

“Buried underground, like the Al Qubai assembly factory?” suggested Barber.

“That was disguised with a car junkyard on top,” said Squadron Leader Peck. “Here there’s nothing. No road, no tracks, no power lines, no defenses, no helipad, no razor wire, no guard barracks—just a wilderness of hills and low mountains with valleys between.”

“Supposing,” said Laing defensively, “they used the same trick as at Tarmiya—putting the defense perimeter so far out, it was off the frame?”

“We tried that,” said Beatty. “We looked fifty miles out in all directions. Nothing—no defenses.”

“Just a pure deception operation?” proposed Barber.

“No way. The Iraqis
always
defend their prize assets, even from their own people. Look—see here.”

Colonel Beatty advanced to the picture and pointed out a group of huts.

“A peasant village, right next door. Woodsmoke, goat pens, goats here out foraging in the valley. There are two others off the frame.”

“Maybe they hollowed out the whole mountain,” said Laing. “You did, at Cheyenne Mountain.”

“That’s a series of caverns, tunnels, a warren of rooms behind The Fist of God

reinforced doors,” said Beatty. “You’re talking about a barrel 180

meters long. Try to get that inside a mountain, you’d bring the whole damn thing down on top. Look, gentlemen, I can see the breech, the magazine, all the living quarters being underground, but a chunk of that barrel has to stick out somewhere. It doesn’t.”

They all stared at the picture again. Within the square were three hills and a portion of a fourth. The largest of the three was unmarked by any blastproof doors or access road.

“If it’s in there somewhere,” proposed Peck, “why not saturate-bomb the square mile? That would bring down any mountain on top of the weapon.”

“Good idea,” said Beatty. “General, we could use the Buffs. Paste the whole square mile.”

“May I make a suggestion?” asked Barber.

“Please do,” said General Glosson.

“If I were Saddam Hussein, with his paranoia, and I had one single weapon of this value, I’d have a man in command I could trust. And I’d give him orders that if ever the Fortress came under bombing attack, he was to fire. In short, if the first couple of bombs fell wide—and a square mile is quite a big area—the rest might be a fraction of a second too late.”

General Glosson leaned forward.

“What is your precise point, Mr. Barber?”

“General, if the Fist of God is inside these hills, it is hidden by a deception operation of extreme skill. The only way to be a hundred percent certain of destroying it is by a similar operation. A single plane, coming out of nowhere, delivering one attack, and hitting the target on the button the first and only time.”

“I don’t know how many times I have to say this,” said the exasperated The Fist of God

Colonel Beatty, “but we don’t know where the button is—precisely.”

“I think my colleague is talking about target-marking,” said Laing.

“But that means another airplane,” objected Peck. “Like the Buccaneers marking for the Tornados. Even the target-marker must see the target first.”

“It worked with the Scuds,” said Laing.

“Sure, the SAS men marked the missile launchers, and we blew them away. But they were right there on the ground, a thousand yards from the missiles with binoculars,” said Peck.

“Precisely.”

There was silence for several seconds.

“You are talking,” said General Glosson, “of putting men into the mountains to give us a ten-square-yard target.”

The debate went on for two more hours. But it always came back to Laing’s argument.

First find it, then mark it, then, destroy it—and all without the Iraqis noticing until it was too late.

At midnight a corporal of the Royal Air Force went to the Hyatt Hotel.

He could get no reply from the sitting-room door, so the night manager let him in. He went into the bedroom and shook by the shoulder the man sleeping in a terrycloth robe on top of the bed.

“Sir, wake up, sir. You’re wanted across the road, Major.”

Chapter 22

The Fist of God

“It’s there,” said Mike Martin two hours later.

“Where?” asked Colonel Beatty with genuine curiosity.

“In there somewhere.”

In the conference room down the corridor from the Black Hole, Martin was leaning over the table studying a photograph of a larger section of the Jebal al Hamreen range. It showed a square five miles by five miles. He pointed with his forefinger.

“The villages, the three villages—here, here, and here.”

“What about them?”

“They’re phony. They’re beautifully done, they’re perfect replicas of the villages of mountain peasants, but they’re full of guards.”

Colonel Beatty stared at the three villages. One was in a valley only half a mile from the middle of the three mountains at the center of the frame. The other two occupied terraces on the mountain slopes farther out.

None was big enough to support a mosque; indeed, they were little more than hamlets. Each had its main and central barn for the storage of winter hay and feed, and smaller barns for the sheep and goats. A dozen humble shacks made up the rest of the settlements, mud-brick dwellings with thatch or tin roofs of the kind that can be seen anywhere in the mountains of the Middle East. In summer there might be small patches of tilled crops nearby, but not in winter.

Life in the mountains of Iraq is harsh in winter, with slanting bitter rain and scudding clouds. The notion that all parts of the Middle East are warm is a popular fallacy.

“Okay, Major, you know Iraq, I don’t. Why are they phony?”

“Life-support system,” said Martin. “Too many villages, too many peasants, too many goats and sheep. Not enough forage. They’d starve.”

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“Shit,” said Beatty with feeling. “So damn simple.”

“That may be, but it proves Jericho wasn’t lying, or mistaken again. If they’ve done that, they’re hiding something.”

Colonel Craig, commanding officer of the 22nd SAS, had joined them in the basement. He had been talking quietly to Steve Laing. Now he came over.

“What do you reckon, Mike?”

“It’s there, Bruce. One could probably see it—at a thousand yards with good binoculars.”

“The brass wants to put a team in to mark it. You’re out.”

“Bullshit, sir. These hills are probably alive with foot patrols. You can see there are no roads.”

“So? Patrols can be avoided.”

“And if you run into any? There’s no one speaks Arabic like me, and you know it. Besides, it’s a HALO drop. Helicopters won’t work either.”

“You’ve had all the action you need, so far as I can gather.”

“That’s crap, too. I haven’t seen any action at all. I’m fed up with spooking. Let me have this one. The others have had the desert for weeks, while I’ve been tending a garden.”

Colonel Craig raised an eyebrow. He had not asked Laing exactly what Martin had been up to—he would not have been told anyway—but he was surprised one of his best officers had been posing as a gardener.

“Come back to the base. We can plan better there. If I like your idea, you can have it.”

Before dawn, General Schwarzkopf had agreed there was no alternative and given his consent. In that cordoned-off corner of the Riyadh military air base that was the private preserve of the SAS, Martin had outlined his ideas to Colonel Craig and had been given the The Fist of God

go-ahead.

Coordination of planning would reside with Colonel Craig for the men on the ground and with General Glosson for the eventual fighter-strike.

Buster Glosson had morning coffee with his friend and superior Chuck Horner.

“Any ideas for the unit we’d like to use on this one?” he asked.

General Horner thought back to a certain officer who two weeks earlier had advised him to do something extremely rude.

“Yeah,” he said. “Give it to the Three Thirty-sixth.”

Mike Martin had won his argument with Colonel Craig by pointing out—logically—that with most of the SAS soldiers in the Gulf Theater already deployed inside Iraq, he was the senior officer available, that he was commander of B Squadron, which was then on operations in the desert under the command of his number two, and that he alone spoke fluent Arabic.

But the clinching argument was his training and experience in freefall parachuting. The only way into the Iraqi mountains without raising an alarm was going to be a HALO drop—high altitude, low opening—meaning coming out of the aircraft at 25,000 feet and falling free to open the chutes at 3,500 feet. It was not a job for beginners.

The planning of the entire mission ought to have taken a week, but there was no time for that. The only solution was for the various aspects of the drop, the cross-country march, and the selection of the lying-up position to be planned simultaneously. For that, Martin needed men he could trust with his life, which was precisely what he was going to do anyway.

Back at the SAS corner of the Riyadh military air base, his first The Fist of God

question to Colonel Craig was:

“Who can I have?”

The list was short; there were so many away on operations in the desert.

When the adjutant showed him the list, one name sprang out at him.

Peter Stephenson—definite.”

“You’re lucky,” said Craig. “He came back over the border a week ago. Been resting ever since. He’s fit.”

Martin had known Sergeant Stephenson when the sergeant had been a corporal and he a captain on his first tour with the regiment as a troop commander. Like himself, Stephenson was a freefaller and a member of the air troop of his own squadron.

“He’s good,” said Craig, pointing to another name. “A mountain man.

I suggest you’ll need two of them.”

The name he pointed to was Corporal Ben Eastman.

“I know him. You’re right—I’ll take him anytime. Who else?”

The last selection was Corporal Kevin North, from another squadron.

Martin had never operated with him, but North was a mountain specialist and highly recommended by his troop commander.

There were five areas of planning that had to be accomplished simultaneously. Martin divided up the tasks among them with himself in charge overall.

First came the selection of the aircraft to drop them. Without hesitation, Martin went for the C-130 Hercules, the habitual launch pad of the SAS, and there were then nine of them serving in the Gulf.

They were all based at nearby King Khaled International Airport. Even better news came with breakfast: Three of them were from the 47th Squadron, based at Lyneham in Wiltshire, a squadron that has years of experience liaising with the SAS freefallers.

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Among the crew of one of the three Hercules was a certain Flight Lieutenant Glyn Morris.

Throughout the Gulf War, the Hercules transports had been part of the hub-and-spoke operation, shifting cargo that arrived at Riyadh to the outlying bases of the Royal Air Force at Tabuq, Muharraq, Dhahran, and even Seeb in Oman. Morris had been serving as loadmaster or cargo supervisor, but his real function on this planet was as a PJI, Parachute Jump Instructor, and Martin had jumped under his supervision before.