The Fist of God (77 page)

From time to time he squeezed his eyes tightly to rest them, pillowed his head on his forearms for a while, and started again.

By midmorning, a pattern began to emerge. On certain parts of the mountain the grass appeared to grow in a manner different from that on other parts. There were areas where the vegetation seemed too regular, as if in lines. But there was no door, unless it was on the other side, no road, no track with tire marks, no standpipe venting foul air from inside, no mark of present or previous excavation. It was the moving sun that gave the first clue.

Shortly after eleven, he thought he caught a glint of something in the grass. He brought the glasses back to that patch and went to full magnification. The sun went behind a cloud. When it came out, the glint flashed again. Then he saw the source: a fragment of wire in the grass.

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He blinked and tried again. Slantwise, it was a length of wire a foot long in the grass. It was part of a longer strand, green plastic-covered wire, of which a small part had been abraded to reveal the metal beneath.

The wire was one of several he glimpsed, all buried in the grass, occasionally revealed as the wind blew the stems from side to side.

Diagonals in the opposite direction, a patch of chain-link wire, underneath the grass.

By midday, he could see it better. A section of mountainside where green wire mesh held the soil to a surface below the earth; the grass and shrubs planted in every diamond-shaped gap between the fencing, growing through the gaps, covering the wire beneath.

Then he saw the terracing. One part of the mountainside was made up of blocks, presumably concrete, each set back three inches from the one below it. Along the horizontal terraces thus created were runnels of earth out of which the shrubs grew. Where they sprouted, they were in horizontal lines. At first it did not look so, because they were of different heights, but when he studied their stems only, it became clear they were indeed in lines. Nature does not grow in lines.

He tried other parts of the mountain, but the pattern ended, then began again farther to his left. It was in the early afternoon that he solved it.

The analysts in Riyadh had been right—up to a point. Had anyone attempted to gouge out the whole center of the hill, it would have fallen in. Whoever had done this must have taken three existing hills, cut away the inner faces, and built up the gaps between the peaks to create a gigantic crater.

In filling the gaps, the builder had followed the contours of the real hills, stepping his rows of concrete blocks backward and upward, creating the miniterraces, pouring tens of thousands of tons of topsoil The Fist of God

down from the top.

The cladding must have come later: sheets of green vinyl-coated chain-link wire presumably stapled to the concrete beneath, holding the earth to the slopes. Then the grass seed, sprayed onto the earth, there to root and spread, with bushes and shrubs sown into deeper bowls left in the concrete terraces.

The grass from the previous summer had matted, creating its own bonding network of roots, and the shrubs had sprouted up through the wire and the grass to match the undergrowth on the original hills.

Above the crater, the roof of the fortress was surely a geodesic dome, so cast that it too contained thousands of pockets where grass could grow. There were even artificial boulders, painted the gray of real rocks, with streaks where the rain had run off.

Martin began to concentrate on the area near the point where the rim of the crater would have been before the construction of the rotunda.

It was about fifty feet below the summit of the dome that he found what he sought. He had already swept his glasses across the slight protuberance fifty times and had not noticed.

It was a rocky outcrop, faded gray, but two black lines ran across it from side to side. The more he studied the lines, the more he wondered why anyone would have clambered so high to draw two lines across a boulder.

A squall of wind came from the northeast, ruffling the scrim netting around his face. The same wind caused one of the lines to move. When the wind dropped, the line ceased to move. Then Martin realized they were not drawn lines but steel wires, running across the rock and away into the grass.

Smaller boulders stood around the perimeter of the large one, like sentries in a ring. Why so circular, why steel wires? Supposing The Fist of God

someone, down below, jerked hard on those wires—would the boulder move?

At half past three he realized it was not a boulder. It was a gray tarpaulin, weighted down by a circle of rocks, to be twitched to one side when the wires were jerked downward into the cavern beneath.

Under the tarp he gradually made out a shape, circular, five feet in diameter. He was staring at a canvas sheet, beneath which, invisible to him, the last three feet of the Babylon gun projected, from its breech two hundred yards inside the crater up into the sky. It was pointing south-southeast toward Dhahran, 750 kilometers away.

“Rangefinder,” he muttered to the men behind him. He passed back the binoculars and took the implement offered to him. It was like a telescope.

When he held it to his eye, as they had shown him in Riyadh, he saw the mountain and the tarp that hid the gun, but not with any magnification.

On the prism were four V-shaped chevrons, the points all directed inward. Slowly he rotated the knurled knob on the side of the scope until all four points touched each other to form a cross. The cross rested on the tarpaulin.

Taking the scope from his eye, he consulted the numbers on the rotating band. One thousand and eighty yards.

“Compass,” he said. He pushed the rangefinder behind him and took the electronic compass. This was no device dependent on a dish swimming in a bowl of alcohol, nor even a pointer balanced on a gimbal. He held it to his eye, sighted the tarpaulin across the valley, and pressed the button. The compass did the rest, giving him a bearing from his own position to the tarpaulin of 348 degrees, ten minutes, and eighteen seconds.

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The SATNAV positioner gave him the last thing he needed—his own exact location on the planet’s surface, to the nearest square fifteen yards by fifteen.

It was a clumsy business trying to erect the satellite dish in the confined space, and it took ten minutes. When he called Riyadh, the response was immediate. Slowly Martin read to the listeners in the Saudi capital three sets of figures: his own exact position, the compass direction from himself to the target, and the range. Riyadh could work out the rest and give the pilot his coordinates.

Martin crawled back into the crevice, to be replaced by Stephenson, who would keep an eye open for Iraqi patrols, and tried to sleep.

At half-past eight, in complete darkness, Martin tested the infrared target marker. In shape it was like a large flash lamp with a pistol-grip, but it had an eyepiece in back.

He linked it to its battery, aimed it at the Fortress, and looked. The whole mountain was as clearly lit as if bathed in a great green moon.

He swung the barrel of the image intensifier up to the tarpaulin that masked the barrel of the Babylon and squeezed the pistol-trigger.

A single, invisible beam of infrared light raced across the valley, and he saw a small red dot appear on the mountainside. Moving the night-sight, he settled the red dot on the tarpaulin and kept it there for half a minute. Satisfied, he switched it off and crawled back beneath the netting.

The four Strike Eagles took off from Al Kharz at ten forty-five P.M. and climbed to twenty thousand feet. For three of the crews, it was a routine mission to hit an Iraqi air base. Each Eagle carried two two-thousand-pound laser-guided bombs, in addition to their self-defense The Fist of God

air-to-air missiles.

Refueling from their designated KC-10 tanker just south of the Iraqi border was normal and uneventful. When they were topped up, they turned away in loose formation, and the flight, coded Bluejay, set course almost due north, passing over the Iraqi town of As-Samawah at 11:14.

They flew in radio silence as always and without lights, each wizzo able to see the other three aircraft clearly on his radar. The night was clear, and the AWACS over the Gulf had given them a “picture clear”

advice, meaning no Iraqi fighters were up.

At 11:39, Don Walker’s wizzo muttered:

“Turning point in five.”

They all heard it and understood they would be turning over Lake As Sa’diyah in five minutes.

Just as they went into the forty-five-degree turn to port, to set the new heading for Tikrit East, the other three aircrew heard Don Walker say quite clearly:

“Bluejay Flight Leader has ... engine problems. I’m going to RTB.

Bluejay Three, take over.”

Bluejay Three was Bull Baker that night, leader of the other two-plane element. From that transmission onward, things began to go wrong, in a very weird manner.

Walker’s wingman Randy “R-2” Roberts closed up with his leader but could see no apparent trouble from Walker’s engines, yet the Bluejay leader was losing power and height. If he was going to RTB—return to base—it would be normal for his wingman to stay with him, unless the problem was minimal. Engine trouble far over enemy territory is not minimal.

“Roger that,” acknowledged Baker. Then they heard Walker say: The Fist of God

“Bluejay Two, rejoin Bluejay Three, I say again, rejoin. That is an order. Proceed to Tikrit East.”

The wingman, now baffled, did as he was ordered and climbed back to rejoin the remainder of Bluejay. Their commander continued to lose height over the lake; they could see him on their radars.

At the same moment they realized he had done the unthinkable. For some reason—confusion caused by the engine problem, perhaps—he had spoken not on the Have-quick coded radio, but “in clear.” More amazingly, he had actually mentioned their destination.

Out over the Gulf, a young USAF sergeant manning part of the battery of consoles in the hull of the AWACS plane summoned his mission commander in perplexity.

“We have a problem, sir. Bluejay Leader has engine trouble. He wants to RTB.”

“Right, noted,” said the mission commander. In most airplanes the pilot is the captain and in complete charge. In an AWACS the pilot has that charge for the safety of the airplane, but the mission commander calls the shots when it comes to giving orders across the air.

“But sir,” protested the sergeant, “Bluejay Leader spoke in clear. Gave the mission target. Shall I RTB them all?”

“Negative, mission continues,” said the controller. “Carry on.”

The sergeant returned to his console completely bewildered. This was madness: If the Iraqis had heard that transmission, their air defenses at Tikrit East would be on full alert.

Then he heard Walker again.

“Bluejay Leader, Mayday, Mayday. Both engines out. Ejecting.”

He was still speaking in clear. The Iraqis, if they were listening, could have heard it all.

In fact, the sergeant was right—the messages had been heard. At Tikrit The Fist of God

East the gunners were hauling their tarpaulins off their triple-A, and the heat-seeking missiles were waiting for the sound of incoming engines. Other units were being alerted to go at once to the area of the lake to search for two downed aircrew.

“Sir, Bluejay Leader is down. We have to RTB the rest of them.”

“Noted. Negative,” said the mission commander. He glanced at his watch. He had his orders. He did not know why, but he would obey them.

Bluejay Flight was by then nine minutes from target, heading into a reception committee. The three pilots rode their Eagles in stony silence.

In the AWACS the sergeant could still see the blip of Bluejay Leader, way down over the surface of the lake. Clearly the Eagle had been abandoned and would crash at any moment.

Four minutes later, the mission commander appeared to change his mind.

“Bluejay Flight, AWACS to Bluejay Flight, RTB, I say again RTB.”

The three Strike Eagles, despondent at the night’s events, peeled away from their course and set heading for home. The Iraqi gunners at Tikrit East, deprived of radar, waited in vain for another hour.

In the southern fringes of the Jebal al Hamreen another Iraqi listening post had heard the interchange. The signals colonel in charge was not tasked with alerting Tikrit East or any other air base to approaching enemy aircraft. His sole job was to ensure none entered the Jebal.

As Bluejay Flight turned over the lake, he had gone to amber alert; the track from the lake to the air base would have taken the Eagles along the southern fringe of the range. When one of them crashed, he was delighted; when the other three peeled away to the south, he was relieved. He stood his alert down.

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Don Walker had spiraled down to the surface of the lake until he levelled at one hundred feet and made his Mayday call. As he skimmed the waters of As Sa’diyah, he punched in his new coordinates and turned north into the Jebal. At the same time he went to LANTIRN, with whose aid he could look through his canopy and see the landscape ahead of him, clearly lit by the infrared beam being emitted from beneath his wing.

Columns of information on his Head-Up Display were now giving him course and speed, height, and time to Launch Point.

He could have gone to automatic pilot, allowing the computer to fly the Eagle, throwing it down the canyons and the valleys, past the cliffs and hillsides, while the pilot kept his hands on his thighs. But he preferred to stay on manual and fly it himself.

With the aid of recon photos supplied by the Black Hole, he had plotted a course up through the range that never let him come above the skyline. He stayed low, hugging the valley floors, swerving from gap to gap, a roller-coaster zigzag course that carried him upward into the range toward the Fortress.

When Walker made his Mayday call, Mike Martin’s radio had squawked out a series of preagreed blips. Martin had crawled forward to the ledge above the valley, aimed the infrared target marker at the tarpaulin a thousand yards away, settled the red dot onto the dead center of the target, and now kept it there.