Part 12 (2/2)
”Oh, all right. But I want an hors d'oeuvre.”
She was puzzled. ”All right, order one.”
”I mean you.”
He reached out and grabbed the waist of her skimpy panties, pulling her with a hooked finger back onto the bed. She was giggling with
delight. He rolled over on top of her and began to kiss. Suddenly he stopped. She looked alarmed.
”I know what I'd do,” he breathed. ”I'd hire a safecracker, break into old Gemutlich's safe, and look at the codes. Then I could get away with it.”
She laughed in relief that he had not changed his mind about making love.
”Wouldn't work. Mmmmmm. Do that again.”
”Would so.”
”Aaaaaah. Wouldn't.”
”Would. Safes are broken all the time. See it in the papers every day.”
She ran her exploring hand below, and her eyes opened wide.
”Ooooh, is that all for me? You're a lovely, big, strong man, Karim, and I love you. But old Gemutlich, as you call him, is a bit smarter than you. ...”
A minute later, she no longer cared how smart Gemutlich was.
While the Mossad agent made love in Vienna, Mike Martin was setting up his satellite dish as midnight approached and the eleventh of the month gave way to the twelfth.
Iraq was then just eight days away from the scheduled invasion of February 20. South of the border, the northern slice of the desert of Saudi Arabia bristled with the biggest single concentration of men and arms, guns, tanks, and stores crammed into such a relatively small piece of land since the Second World War.
The relentless pounding from the air went on, though most of the targets on General Horner's original list had been visited, sometimes twice or more. Despite the insertion of fresh targets caused by the short-
lived Scud barrage on Israel, the air master plan was back on track. Every known factory for the production of weapons of ma.s.s destruction had been pulverized, and that included twelve new ones added by information from Jericho. As a functioning weapon, the Iraqi Air Force had virtually ceased to exist. Rarely had her interceptor fighters, if they chose to tangle with the Eagles, Hornets, Tomcats, Falcons, Phantoms, and Jaguars of the Allies, returned to their bases, and by mid-February they were not even bothering to try. Some of the cream of the fighter and fighter-bomber force had deliberately been sent to Iran, where they had at once been impounded. Others still had been destroyed inside their hardened shelters or ripped apart if caught out in the open. At the highest level, the Allied commanders could not understand why Saddam had chosen to send the cream of his warplanes to his old enemy. The reason was that after a certain date he firmly expected every nation in the region to have no choice but to bow the knee to him; at that point he would recover his war fleet. There was by then hardly a bridge left intact in the entire country or a functioning power-generating station. By mid-February, an increasing Allied air effort was being directed at the Iraqi Army in south Kuwait and over the Kuwaiti border into Iraq itself. From the east-west Saudi northern border up to the Baghdad-Basra highway, the Buffs were pounding the artillery, tank, rocket-battery, and infantry positions. American A-10 Thunderbolts, nicknamed for their grace in the sky ”the flying warthog,” were roaming at will doing what they did best-destroying tanks. Eagles and Tornados were also allocated the task of ”tank-plinking.” What the Allied generals in Riyadh did not know was that forty major facilities dedicated to weapons of ma.s.s destruction still remained hidden beneath the deserts and the mountains, or that the Sixco air bases were still intact. Since the burial of the Al Qubai factory, the mood was lighter both among the four generals who knew what it had really contained, as it was among the men of the CIA and the SIS stationed in Riyadh. It was a mood mirrored in the brief message Mike Martin received that night. His controllers in Riyadh began by informing him of the success of the Tornado mission despite the loss of one airplane. The transmission went on to congratulate him for staying in Baghdad after being allowed to leave, and on the entire mission. Finally, he was told there was little more to do. Jericho should be sent one final message, to the effect the Allies were grateful, that all his money had been paid, and that contact would be reestablished after the war. Then, Martin was told, he really should escape to safety in Saudi Arabia before it became impossible. Martin closed down his set, packed it away beneath the floor, and lay on his bed before sleeping. Interesting, he thought. The armies are not coming to Baghdad. What about Saddam-wasn't that the object of the exercise? Something had changed.
Had he been aware of the conference then taking place in the headquarters of the Mukhabarat not half a mile away, Mike Martin's sleep would not have been so easy. In matters of technical skill there are four levels-competent, very good, brilliant, and a natural. The last category goes beyond mere skill and into an area where all technical knowledge is backed by an innate feel, a gut instinct, a sixth sense, an empathy with the subject and the machinery that cannot be taught in textbooks.
In matters of radio, Major Mohsen Zayeed was a natural. Quite young, with owlish spectacles that gave him the air of an earnest student, Zayeed lived, ate, and breathed the technology of radio. His private quarters were strewn with the latest magazines from the West, and when he came across a new device that might increase the efficiency of his radio-interception department, he asked for it. Because he valued the man, Ha.s.san Rahmani tried to get it for him.
Shortly after midnight, the two men sat in Rahmani's office.
”Any progress?” asked Rahmani.
”I think so,” replied Zayeed. ”He's there, all right-no doubt about it.
The trouble is, he's using burst transmissions that are almost impossible to capture. They take place so fast. Almost, but not quite.
With skill and patience, one can occasionally find one, even though the bursts may only be a few seconds long.”
”How close are you?” said Rahmani.
”Well, I've tracked the transmission frequencies to a fairly narrow band in the ultra-high-frequency range, which makes life easier.
Several days ago, I got lucky. We were monitoring a narrow band on the off-chance, and he came on the air. Listen.”
Zayeed produced a tape recorder and pushed Play. A jumbled mess of sound filled the office. Rahmani looked perplexed.
”That's it?”
”It's encrypted, of course.”
”Of course,” said Rahmani. ”Can you break it?”
”Almost certainly not. The encryption is by a single silicon chip, patterned with complex microcircuitry.”
”It can't be decoded?” Rahmani was getting lost; Zayeed lived in his own private world and spoke his own private language. He was
already making a great effort to try and speak plainly to his commanding officer.
”It's not a code. To convert that jumble back to the original speech would need an identical silicon chip. The permutations are in the hundreds of millions.”
”Then what's the point?”
”The point, sir, is-I got a bearing on it.”
Ha.s.san Rahmani leaned forward in excitement.
”A bearing?”
”My second. And guess what? That message was sent in the middle of the night, thirty hours before the bombing of Al Qubai. My guess is, the details of the nuclear plant were in it. There's more.”
”Go on.”
”He's here.”
”Here in Baghdad?”
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