Miraculously the mission appeared on the Air Tasking Order from Riyadh, although it had only been devised twelve hours and not three days earlier.
The other three needed crews were at once taken off any other tasking and assigned to the Tikrit East mission, slated for the night of the twenty-second (maybe) or any other night they were ordered. Until then, they were on permanent one-hour standby.
The four Strike Eagles were prepared by sundown of the twenty-second, and at tenP.M. the mission was canceled. No other mission was substituted. The eight aircrew were told to rest, while the remainder of the squadron went tank-zapping among the Republican Guard units north of Kuwait.
When they returned in the dawn of the twenty-third, the four idle aircrew came in for their turn of ribbing.
With the mission planning staff, a route was worked out for Tikrit East that would take the four Eagles up the corridor between Baghdad and the Iranian border to the east, with a turn of course through forty-five degrees over Lake As Sa’diyah and then straight on, northwest to Tikrit.
As he sipped his breakfast coffee in the mess hall, Don Walker was summoned outside by his squadron commander.
“Your target marker is in place,” he was told. “Get some rest. It could be a rough night.”
By the rising sun, Mike Martin began to study the mountain across the steep valley. On full magnification his glasses could pick out individual bushes; pulling the focus back, he could see an area any size he wanted.
For the first hour it looked like just a mountain. The grass grew, as on all the others. There were stunted shrubs and bushes, as on all the rest. Here and there a patch of bare rock, occasionally a small boulder, clung to the slopes. like all the other hills within his vision, it was of an irregular shape. There seemed nothing out of place.
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 gli
nt flashed again. Then he saw the source: a fragment of wire in the grass.
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 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 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.