Part 13 (1/2)

Major Zayeed smiled and shook his head. He had saved his best piece of news till last. He wanted to be appreciated.

”No, sir, he's here in the Mansour district. I think he's inside an area two kilometers by two.”

Rahmani thought furiously. This was getting close, amazingly close.

The phone rang. He listened for several seconds, then put it down and rose.

”I am summoned. One last thing. How many more intercepts until you can pin it right down? To a block, or even a house?”

”With luck, one. I may not catch him the first time, but at the first intercept I think I can find him. I pray he will send a long message, several seconds on the air. Then I can give you a square one hundred meters by one hundred.”

Rahmani was breathing heavily as he descended to the waiting car.

They came to the meeting with the Rais in two blacked-out buses. The seven ministers came in one, the six generals and the three intelligence chiefs in another. None saw where they were going, and beyond the winds.h.i.+eld the driver simply followed the motorcycle. Only when the bus drew to a halt in a walled courtyard were the nine men in the second bus allowed to emerge. It had been a forty-minute, indirect drive. Rahmani estimated they were in the country about thirty miles from Baghdad. There were no sounds of traffic noise, and the stars above showed the dim outline of a large villa with black-screened windows. Inside the princ.i.p.al sitting room the seven ministers were already waiting. The generals took a.s.signed places and sat in silence. Guards showed Dr. Ubaidi of Foreign Intelligence, Ha.s.san Rahmani of Counterintelligence, and Omar Khatib of the Secret Police to three seats facing the single large padded chair reserved for the Rais himself. The man who had sent for them entered a few minutes later. They all rose and were gestured to sit. For some, it had been over three weeks since they had seen the President. He seemed strained, the bags under his eyes and jowls more p.r.o.nounced. Without preamble, Saddam Hussein launched into the business of their meeting. There had been a bombing raid-they all knew about it, even those who before the raid had known nothing of a place called Al Qubai. The place was so secret that no more than a dozen men in Iraq knew exactly where it was. Yet it had been bombed. None but the highest in the land and a few dedicated technicians had ever visited the place except blindfolded or in sealed transportation, yet it had been bombed. There was silence in the room, the silence of fear. The generals-Radi of the Infantry, Kadiri of the Armored Corps, Ridha of the Artillery, and Musuli of the Engineers, and the other two, the head of the Republican Guard and the Chief of Staff-stared fixedly at the carpet ahead of them. Our comrade, Omar Khatib, had interrogated the two British fliers, intoned the Rais. He would now explain what had happened. No one had stared at the Rais, but now all eyes went to the rake-thin form of Omar Khatib. The Tormentor kept his gaze on the midsection of the head of state, facing him across the room. The airmen had talked, he said flatly. They had held nothing back. They had been told by their squadron commander that Allied aircraft had seen trucks, Army trucks, moving into and out of a certain automobile junkyard. From this, the Sons of Dogs had gained the impression that the yard disguised an ammunition dump, specifically a depository for poison gas sh.e.l.ls. It was not regarded as high priority and was not thought to have any antiaircraft defenses. So only two planes had been a.s.signed to the mission, with two more above them to mark the target. There had been no protecting aircraft a.s.signed to suppress the triple-A, because it was not thought there was any. They-the pilot and the navigator-knew nothing more than that. The Rais nodded at General Farouk Ridha. ”True or false, Rafeek?” ”It is normal, Sayid Rais,” said the man who commanded the artillery and SAM missile sites, ”for them to send in first the missile fighters to hit the defenses, then the bombers for the target. They always do that. For a high-priority target, two airplanes only and no support has never happened.”

Saddam mused on the answer, his dark eyes betraying nothing of his thoughts. That was a part of the power he held over these men; they never knew which way he would react. ”Is there any chance, Rafeek Khatib, that these men have hidden things from you, that they know more than they have said?” ”No, Rais. They have been ... persuaded to cooperate completely.” ”Then that is the end of the matter?” asked the Rais quietly. ”The raid was just an unfortunate chance?” Heads nodded round the room. The scream when it came paralyzed them all. ”Wrong! You are all wrong!” In a second the voice dropped back to a calm whisper, but the fear had been instilled. They all knew that the softness of the voice could precede the most terrible of revelations, the most savage of penalties. ”There have been no trucks, no Army trucks. An excuse given to the pilots in case they were caught. There is something more, is there not?” Most of them were sweating despite the air conditioning. It had always been thus, since the dawn of history, when the tyrant of a tribe called in the witch-finder and the tribe sat and trembled lest he should be the one at whom the juju-stick pointed. ”There is a conspiracy,” whispered the Rais. ”There is a traitor. Someone is a traitor, who conspires against me.” He stayed silent for several minutes, letting them tremble. When he spoke again, it was to the three men who faced him across the room. ”Find him. Find him and bring him to me. He shall learn the punishment for such crimes. He and all his family.” Then he swept from the room followed by his personal bodyguard. The sixteen men left behind did not even look at each other, could not meet another's gaze. There would be a sacrifice. No one knew who it would be. Each feared for himself, for some chance remark, perhaps not even that. Fifteen of the men kept distance from the last, the witch-finder, the one they called Al-Mu'azib, the Tormentor. He would produce the sacrifice. Ha.s.san Rahmani too kept silent. This was no time to mention radio intercepts. His operations were delicate, subtle, based on detection and real intelligence. The last thing he needed was to find the thumping boots of the AMAM trampling all over his investigations. In a mood of terror the ministers and generals departed back into the night and to their duties.

”He doesn't keep them in his office safe,” said Avi Herzog, alias Karim, to his controller Gidi Barzilai over a late breakfast the next morning. The meeting was safe, in Barzilai's own apartment. Herzog had not made the phone call, from a public booth, until Edith Hardenberg was safely in the bank. Shortly after, the yarid team had arrived, boxing in their colleague as they escorted him to the rendezvous to ensure there was no chance he was being followed. Had he grown a tail, they would have seen it. It was their speciality. Gidi Barzilai leaned forward across the food-strewn table, eyes alight. ”Well done, boychick. So now I know where he doesn't keep the codes. The point is, where?” ”In his desk.” ”The desk? You're mad. Anyone can open a desk.” ”Have you seen it?”

”Gemutlich's desk? No.” ”Apparently it is very big, very ornate, and very old. A real antique. Also, it has a compartment, created by the original cabinetmaker, so secret, so hard to find, that Gemutlich thinks it is safer than any safe. He believes a burglar might go for the safe but would never think of the desk. Even if a burglar went through the desk, he would never find the compartment.” ”And she doesn't know where it is?” ”Nope. Never seen it opened. He always locks himself in the office when he has to refer to it.” Barzilai thought it over. ”Cunning b.a.s.t.a.r.d. I wouldn't have given him credit for it. You know, he's probably right.” ”Can I break it off now-the affair?” ”No, Avi, not yet. If you're right, you've done brilliantly. But stick around, keep play-acting. If you vanish now, she will think back to your last conversation, put two and two together, have a fit of remorse, whatever. Stay with her, talk, but never again about banking.” Barzilai thought over his problem. No one of his team in Vienna had ever seen the safe, but there was one man who had. Barzilai sent a heavily coded message to Kobi Dror in Tel Aviv. The spotter was brought in and sat in a room with an artist. The spotter was not mult.i.talented, but he had one amazing skill: He had a photographic memory. For over five hours he sat with his eyes closed and cast his mind back to the interview he had had with Gemutlich while posing as a lawyer from New York. His princ.i.p.al task had been to look for alarm catches on windows and doors, for a wall safe, wires indicating pressure pads-all the tricks for keeping a room secure. These he had noted and reported. The desk had not interested him too much. But sitting in a room beneath King Saul Boulevard weeks later, he could close his eyes and see it all again. Line by line, he described the desk to the artist. Sometimes the spotter would look at the drawing, make a correction, and resume. The artist worked in India ink with a fine pen and colored the desk with watercolors. After five hours the artist had a sheet of the finest cartridge paper on which was an exact colored picture of the desk then sitting in the office of Herr Wolfgang Gemutlich at the Winkler Bank in the Ballga.s.se, Vienna. The drawing went to Gidi Barzilai in the diplomatic pouch from Tel Aviv to the Israeli emba.s.sy in Austria. He had it within two days. Before then a check on the list of sayanim across all Europe had revealed the existence of Monsieur Michel Levy, an antiquarian on the Boulevard Raspail in Paris, noted as one of the leading experts on cla.s.sical furniture on the continent.

It was not until the night of the fourteenth, the same day Barzilai received his watercolor painting in Vienna, that Saddam Hussein reconvened his meeting of ministers, generals, and intelligence chiefs. Again the meeting was called at the behest of AMAM chief Omar Khatib, who had pa.s.sed news of his success via the son-in-law Hussein Kamil, and again it was in a villa in the dead of night. The Rais simply entered the room and gestured to Khatib to report upon his findings. ”What can I say, Sayid Rais?” The head of the Secret Police raised his hands and let them drop in a gesture of helplessness. It was a masterpiece in the acting of self-deprecation. ”The Rais was, as ever, right, and we were all wrong. The bombing of Al Qubai was indeed no accident. There was a traitor, and he has been found.”There was a buzz of sycophantic amazement around the room. The man in the upright padded chair with his back to the windowless wall beamed and held up his hands for such unnecessary applause to cease. It did, but not too quickly.Was I not right? the smile said. Am I not always right?”How did you discover this, Rafeek?” asked the Rais.”A combination of good luck and detective work,” admitted Khatib modestly. ”As for the good fortune, this as we know is the gift of Allah, who smiles upon our Rais.”There was an a.s.senting rumble around the room.”Two days before the attack by the bombers of the Beni Naji, a traffic control point was established on a road nearby. It was a routine spot check by my men on movements by possible deserters, contraband goods. ... The vehicle numbers were noted.”Two days ago I checked these and found that most of the vehicles were local-vans and trucks. But one was an expensive car, registered here in Baghdad. The owner was traced, a man who might have had reason to visit Al Qubai. But a telephone call ascertained that he had not visited the facility. Why, I wondered, had he been in the area, then?”Ha.s.san Rahmani nodded. That was good detective work, if it was true. And it was unlike Khatib who usually relied on brute force.”And why was he there?” asked the Rais.Khatib paused to let the revelation sink in.”To note a precise description of the aboveground car junkyard, to define the distance from the nearest major landmark and the exact compa.s.s bearing-everything an Air Force would need to find it.”

There was a universal exhalation of breath around the room. ”But that came later, Sayid Rais. First I invited the man to join me at AMAM headquarters for a little frank talk.” Khatib's mind strayed back to the frank conversation in the bas.e.m.e.nt beneath the AMAM headquarters in Saadun, Baghdad, that bas.e.m.e.nt known as the Gymnasium. Habitually, Omar Khatib had his underlings conduct interrogations, contenting himself to decree the level of severity and supervise the outcome. But this had been a matter of such delicacy that he had accomplished the task himself, banning all others beyond the soundproof door. From the roof of the cell jutted two steel hooks, a yard apart, and from them hung two short chains hooked to a timber bar. The wrists of the suspect he had had lashed to the ends of the bar, so the man hung with arms a yard apart. Because the arms were not vertical, the strain was all the greater. The feet were four inches off the floor, the ankles tied to another yard-long pole. The X-shaped configuration of the prisoner gave access to all parts of the body, and because he hung in the center of the room, he could be approached from all sides. Omar Khatib had laid the clotted rattan cane on a side table and came around to the front. The manic screaming of the man under the first fifty lashes had ceased, dying to a mumbling burble of pleas. Khatib stared him in the face. ”You are a fool, my friend. You could end all this so easily. You have betrayed the Rais, but he is merciful. All I need is your confession.” ”No, I swear ... wa-Allah-d-Adheem ... by Allah the Great, I have betrayed no one.” The man was weeping like a child, tears of agony pouring down his face. He was soft, Khatib noted; this will not take long.”Yes, you have betrayed. Qubth-ut-Allah-you know what that means?””Of course,” whimpered the man.”And you know where it was stored for safety?””Yes.”Khatib brought his knee hard upward into the exposed t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es. The man would have liked to double up but could not. He vomited, the slick running down his bare body to dribble off the end of his p.e.n.i.s.”Yes-what?””Yes, sayidi.””Better. And where the Fist of G.o.d was hidden-that was not known to our enemies?””No, sayidi, it is a secret.”Khatib's hand flashed out and caught the hanging man across the face.”Monyouk, filthy monyouk, then how is it that this very morning at dawn, the enemy planes bombed it and destroyed our weapon?”The prisoner opened his eyes wide, his shock overcoming his shame at the insult. Monyouk in Arabic is the man who plays the female role in a h.o.m.os.e.xual coupling.”But that is not possible. No one but a few know about Al Qubai-””But the enemy knew. ... They have destroyed it.””Sayidi, I swear, this is impossible. They could never find it. The man who built it, Colonel Badri, disguised it too well. ...”The interrogation had continued for a further half hour until its inevitable conclusion.Khatib was interrupted from his reverie by the Rais himself.”And who is he, our traitor?””The engineer, Dr. Salah Siddiqui, Rais.”

There was a gasp. The President nodded slowly, as if he had suspected the man all along. ”Might one ask,” said Ha.s.san Rahmani, ”who the wretch was working for?” Khatib darted a look of venom at Rahmani and took his time. ”This he did not say, Sayid Rais.” ”But he will, he will,” said the President. ”Sayid Rais,” murmured Khatib, ”I'm afraid I have to report that at this point of his confession, the traitor died.” Rahmani was on his feet, protocol ignored. ”Mr. President, I must protest. This shows the most amazing incompetence. The traitor must have had a link line through to the enemy, some way of sending his messages. Now we may never know.” Khatib shot him a look of such pure hate that Rahmani, who had read Kipling as a boy in Mr. Hartley's school, was reminded of Krait, the dust-snake who hissed ”Beware, for I am death.” ”What have you to say?” asked the Rais. Khatib was contrite! ”Sayid Rais, what can I say? The men who serve under me love you as their own father-nay, more. They would die for you. When they heard this traitorous filth pouring out ... there was an excess of zeal.” Bulls.h.i.+t, thought Rahmani. But the Rais was nodding slowly. It was the sort of language he liked to hear. ”It is understandable,” the Rais said. ”These things happen. And you, Brigadier Rahmani, who criticize your colleague, have you had any success?” It was noticeable that Rahmani was not referred to as Rafeek, ”Comrade.” He would have to be careful, very careful. ”There is a transmitter, Sayid Rais, in Baghdad.” He went on to reveal what Major Zayeed had told him. He thought of adding one last phrase-”One more transmission, if we can catch it, and I think we will have the sender”-but he decided it could wait. ”Then since the traitor is dead,” said the Rais, ”I can reveal to you what I could not say two days ago. The Fist of G.o.d is not destroyed, not even buried. Twenty-four hours before the bombing raid, I ordered it to be removed to a safer place.” It took several seconds for the applause to die down as the inner circle expressed their admiration for the sheer genius of the leader. He told them the device had gone to the Fortress, whose whereabouts did not concern them, and from the Qa'ala it would be launched, to change all history, on the day the first combat boot of an American soldier stepped onto the holy land of Iraq.

Chapter 20.

The news that the British Tornados had missed their real target at Al Qubai badly shook the man known only as Jericho. It was as much as he could do to force himself to his feet and applaud the Rais with the adoration of all the rest. In the blacked-out bus with the other generals being transported back into central Baghdad, he had sat in silence in back, wrapped in his own thoughts. That the use of the device now hidden elsewhere-at a place called Qa'ala, the Fortress, of which he had never heard and whose location he did not know-might cause many, many deaths, he cared not a jot.

It was his own position that absorbed him. For three years he had risked everything-exposure, ruin, and a terrible death-to betray his country's regime. The point had not simply been to establish a huge personal fortune abroad; that he could probably have done by extortion and theft right here in Iraq, though there would have been risks to that as well. The point had been to retire abroad with a new ident.i.ty and background, provided by his foreign paymasters, secure under their mantle, safe from the vengeful a.s.sa.s.sination squads. He had seen the fate of those who simply stole and fled; they lived constantly in fear until, one day, the Iraqi avengers caught up. He, Jericho, wanted both his fortune and security, which was why he had welcomed the transfer of his control from Israel to the Americans. They would look after him, abide by the agreement, and create the new ident.i.ty, allowing him to become another man with another nationality, buy his mansion by the sea in Mexico, and live out a life of ease and comfort. Now things had changed. If he kept silent and the device were used, the Americans would think he had lied about Al Qubai. He had not, but in their rage they would never believe that. Come h.e.l.l or high water, the Americans would reject his account, and it would all have been for nothing. Somehow he had to warn them that there had been a mistake. A few more risks, and it would all be over-Iraq defeated, the Rais brought down, and he, Jericho, out of there and far away. In the privacy of his office he wrote his message, as always in Arabic, on the thin paper that took up so little s.p.a.ce. He explained the conference of that evening; that when he sent his last message, the device had indeed been at Al Qubai, as he had said, but forty-eight hours later when the Tornados struck, it had been moved. That this was not his fault. He went on to say all he knew: That there was a secret place called the Fortress; that the device was there, and from Qa'ala it would be launched when the first American crossed the border into Iraq. Shortly after midnight, he took an unmarked car and disappeared into the back streets of Baghdad. No one queried his right to do so; no one would dare. He planted the message beneath a flagstone in an old courtyard off Abu Nawas Street, then made the chalk mark behind the Church of St. Joseph in the Area of the Christians. This time the chalk mark was slightly different. He hoped the unseen man who collected his messages would waste no time. As it happened, Mike Martin left the Soviet villa early on the morning of February 15. The Russian cook had given him a long list of fresh produce to buy, a list that was going to prove extremely hard to fill. Food was running short. It was not the farmers in the countryside; it was the transportation problems. Most of the bridges were down. The central Iraqi plain is a land of rivers watering the spread of crops that feed Baghdad. Forced to pay ferry charges across them all, the produce-growers were choosing to stay home. Luckily, Martin started with the spice market in Shurja Street, then pedaled around the Church of St. Joseph to the alley at the back. When he saw the chalk mark, he was jolted. The mark of that particular wall was always supposed to be a figure eight on its side, with a single short stroke horizontally through the join of the two circles. But he had warned Jericho previously that if there were ever a real emergency, the single stroke should be replaced by two small crosses, one in each circle of the figure eight. Today the crosses were there. Martin pedaled hard to the courtyard off Abu Nawas Street, waited till the coast was clear, stooped as always to adjust his sandal, slid a hand into the hiding place in the wall, and found the slim envelope. By midday, he was back at the villa, explaining to the angry cook that he had done his best but the produce would be later than ever reaching the city. He would have to go back in the afternoon. When he read Jericho's message, it became all too plain why the man was in a panic. Martin composed a message of his own, explaining to Riyadh why he now felt he had been forced to take matters into his own hands and make his own decision. There was no time left for conferences in Riyadh and a further interchange of messages. The worst part, for him, was Jericho's revelation that Iraqi Counterintelligence was aware of an illegal transmitter sending burst signals. He could not know how close they were, but he had to a.s.sume there could be no further extended exchange of messages with Riyadh. Therefore he was making the decision himself. Martin read the Jericho message in Arabic first, then his own translation, into the tape recorder. He added his own message and prepared to send. He had no transmission window until late in the night-the night was always chosen so that the Kulikov household would be fast asleep. But, like Jericho, he did have an emergency procedure. It was the transmission of a single long blast of sound, in this case a high-pitched whistle, on a completely different frequency, well outside the usual VHF band. He checked that the Iraqi chauffeur was with First Secretary Kulikov at the emba.s.sy in the city center and that the Russian houseman and his wife were at lunch. Then, despite the risk of discovery, he erected the satellite dish near the open doorway and sent the whistle blast. In the radio shack, a former bedroom in the SIS villa in Riyadh, a single light flashed on. It was half past one in the afternoon. The duty radio operator, handling the normal traffic between the villa and Century House in London, dropped what he was doing, yelled through the door for backup, and tuned to Receive on Martin's frequency-ofthe-day. The second operator put his head around the door. ”What's up?” ”Get Steve and Simon. Black Bear's coming on, and it's an emergency.” The man left. Martin gave Riyadh fifteen minutes, then ran his main transmission. Riyadh was not the only radio mast that caught the burst. Outside Baghdad, another satellite dish, sweeping the VHF band relentlessly, caught part of it. The message was so long that, even shortened, it lasted four seconds. The Iraqi listeners caught the last two and got a fix. As soon as he had sent, Martin closed down and packed away his equipment beneath the tiles of his floor. Hardly had he done so than he heard footsteps on the gravel. It was the Russian houseman who, in a fit of generosity, had crossed the yard to offer him a Balkan cigarette. Martin accepted it with much bobbing and bowing and mutterings of ”Shukran.” The Russian, proud of his good nature, walked back to the house. ”Poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d,” he thought. ”What a life.” When he was alone again, the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d began to write in closely scripted Arabic on the pad of airmail paper he kept under his pallet. As he did so, the radio genius called Major Zayeed pored over a very-large-scale map of the city, particularly of the district of Mansour. When he had finished his calculations, he double-checked them and called Brigadier Ha.s.san Rahmani at the Mukhabarat headquarters, barely five hundred yards from the diamond-shaped lozenge of Mansour that had been traced out in green ink. His appointment was fixed for four o'clock.

In Riyadh, Chip Barber was stomping around the main sitting room of the villa with a print-out in his hand, swearing in a manner he had not done since leaving the Marines thirty years earlier. ”What the h.e.l.l does he think he's doing?” he demanded of the two British intelligence officers in the room with him. ”Easy, Chip,” said Laing. ”He's had a h.e.l.l of a long run. He's under ma.s.sive strain. The bad guys are closing in. All our tradecraft tells us we should get him out of there-now.” ”Yeah, I know, he's a great guy. But he has no right to do this. We're the people picking up the tab, remember?” ”We do remember,” said Paxman, ”but he's our man, and he's miles out in the cold. If he chooses to stay on, it's to finish the job, as much for you as for us.” Barber calmed down. ”Three million dollars. How the h.e.l.l am I to tell Langley he has offered Jericho a further three million greenbacks to get it right this time? That Iraqi a.s.shole should have gotten it right the first time. For all we know, he could be dealing from the bottom of the deck, just to make more money.” ”Chip,” said Laing, ”we're talking about a nuke here.” ”Maybe,” growled Barber, ”maybe we're talking about a nuke. Maybe Saddam got enough uranium in time, maybe he put it all together in time. All we really have are the calculations of some scientists and Saddam's claim-if indeed he ever made the claim at all. Dammit, Jericho is a mercenary, he could be lying in his teeth. Scientists can be wrong, Saddam lies as he breathes. What have we actually gotten for all this money?” ”You want to take the risk?” asked Laing. Barber slumped in a chair. ”No,” he said at length, ”no, I don't. Okay, I'll clear it with Was.h.i.+ngton. Then we tell the generals. They have to know this. But I tell you guys one thing: One day I'm going to meet this Jericho, and if he's putting us on, I'm going to pull his arms off and beat him to death with the soggy end.” At four that afternoon, Major Zayeed brought his maps and his calculations to Ha.s.san Rahmani's office. Carefully he explained that he had that day secured his third triangulation and narrowed the area down to the lozenge shown on the map of Mansour. Rahmani gazed at it dubiously. ”It's a hundred yards by a hundred yards,” he said. ”I thought modern technology could get these emission sources down to a square yard.” ”If I get a long transmission, yes, I can,” explained the young major patiently. ”I can get a beam from the intercepting receiver no wider than a yard. Cross that with another intercept from a different point, and you get your square yard. But these are terribly short transmissions. They're on the air and off within two seconds. The best I can get is a very narrow cone, its point on the receiver, running out across country and getting wider as it goes. Maybe an angle of one second of one degree on the compa.s.s. But a couple of miles away, that becomes a hundred yards. Look, it's still a small area.” Rahmani peered at the map. The marked lozenge had four buildings in it.

”Let's get down there and look at it,” he suggested. The two men prowled Mansour with the map until they had traced the area shown. It was residential and very prosperous. The four residences were all detached, walled, and standing in their own grounds. It was getting dark by the time they finished. ”Raid them in the morning,” said Rahmani. ”I'll seal the area with troops, quietly. You know what you're looking for. You go in with your specialists and take all four places apart. You find it, we have the spy.” ”One problem,” said the major. ”See that bra.s.s plaque over there? That's a Soviet emba.s.sy residence.” Rahmani thought it over. He would get no thanks for starting an international incident. ”Do the other three first,” he ordered. ”If you get nothing, I'll clear the Soviet building with the Foreign Ministry.” While they talked, one of the staff of that Soviet villa was three miles away. The gardener Mahmoud Al-Khouri was in the old British cemetery, placing a slim envelope in a stone jar by a long-untended gravestone. Later, he made a chalk mark on the wall of the Union of Journalists building. On a late-night tour of the district, he noticed just before midnight that the chalk mark had been expunged.

That evening, there was a conference in Riyadh, a very private conference in a sealed office two floors below the Saudi Defense Ministry building. There were four generals present, one of them seated at the head of the table, and two civilians, Barber and Laing. When the civilians had finished speaking, the four military men sat in gloomy silence.

”Is this for real?” asked one of the Americans.

”In terms of one hundred percent proof, we don't have that,” said Barber. ”But we think there is a very high likelihood that the information is accurate.”

”What makes you so sure?” asked the USAF general.

”As you gentlemen have probably already guessed, we have for some months past had an a.s.set working for us high in the hierarchy in Baghdad.”

There was a series of a.s.senting grunts.

”Didn't figure all that target information was coming from Langley's crystal ball,” said the Air Force general, who still resented the CIA doubting his pilots' hit record.

”The point is,” said Laing, ”so far, we have never found his information to be anything but bang-on accurate. If he's lying now, it's a h.e.l.l of a scam. Second point is, can we take that risk?”

There was silence for several minutes.

”There's one thing you guys are overlooking,” said the USAF man.

”Delivery.”

”Delivery?” asked Barber.

”Right. Having a weapon is one thing; delivering it right on top of your enemy is another. Look, no one can believe Saddam is into miniaturization yet. That's hypertech. So he can't launch this thing, if he has it, from a tank gun. Or an artillery piece-same caliber. Or a Katyushka-type battery. Or a rocket.”

”Why not a rocket, General?”

”Payload,” said the flier sarcastically. ”G.o.ddam payload. If this is a crude device, we have to be looking at half a ton. A thousand pounds, say. We now know the Al-Abeid and the Al-Tammuz rockets were still only in development when we smashed the facility at Saad-16.

The Al-Abbas and the Al-Badr, same thing. Inoperative-either smashed up or a too-small payload.”

”What about the Scud?” asked Laing.

”Same thing,” said the general. ”The long-range so-called Al-Husayn keeps on breaking up on reentry and has a payload of 160 kilograms.

Even the basic Soviet-supplied Scud has a maximum payload of 600 kilograms. Too small.”

”There's still an aircraft-launched bomb,” pointed out Barber.

The Air Force general glowered. ”Gentlemen, I will give you my personal guarantee, here and now: From henceforth, not one single Iraqi warplane will reach the border. Most won't even get off the tarmac. Those that do and head south will be shot down halfway to the border. I have enough AWACS, enough fighters-I can guarantee it.”

”And the Fortress?” asked Laing. ”The launch pad?”

”A top-secret hangar, probably underground, a single runway leading from the mouth; housing a Mirage, a MiG, a Sukhoi-tooled up and ready to go. But we'll get it before the border.

The decision rested with the American general at the head of the table.

”Are you going to find the repository of this device, this so-called Fortress?” he asked quietly.

”Yes, sir,” said Barber. ”We are trying even now. We figure we may need a few more days.”