There was no fence to the base at Al Kharz, just the ochre sea of sand, shale, and gravel stretching away to the horizon and beyond that to the next and the next. Walker passed the clamshell hangars grouped around the concrete apron, where the mechanics were by then working on their charges and the crew chiefs were passing among each team, conferring and checking to ensure that when each of their babies finally went to war, they would be machines as perfect as the hand of man could make them.
Walker spotted his own Eagle among them and was awed as always when he contemplated the F-15E
from afar by its air of quiet menace. It crouched silently amid the teeming swarm of men and women in coveralls who crawled all over its burly frame, immune to love or lust, hate or fear, patiently waiting for the moment when it would finally do what it had been designed to do all those years ago on the drawing board—bring flame and death to the people designated as its target by the President of the United States. Walker envied his Eagle; for all its myriad complexity, it could not feel anything, it could never be afraid.
He left the city of canvas behind him and walked across the plain of shale, his eyes shaded by the peak of his baseball cap and the aviator glasses, hardly feeling the heat of the sun on his shoulders.
For eight years he had flown the aircraft of his country and done so because he loved it. But never once had he really, truly contemplated the prospect that he might die in battle. Part of every combat pilot muses with the notion of testing his skill, his nerve, and the excellence of his airplane against another man in a real rather than a dummy contest. But another part always assumes that it will never happen. It will never really come to killing other mothers’ sons, or being killed by them.
That morning, like all the others, he realized at last that it truly had come to this: that all those years of study and training had finally led to this day and this place; that in forty hours he would take his Eagle into the sky again, and that this time he might not come back.
Like the others, he thought of home. Being an only child and a single man, he thought of his mother and father. He remembered all the times and places of his boyhood in Tulsa, the things he and his parents had done together in the yard behind the house, the day he had been given his first catcher’s mitt and forced his father to pitch to him until the sun went down.
His thoughts strayed back to the vacations they had shared before he left home to go to college and then to the Air Force. The one he recalled best was the time his father took him on a men-only fishing trip to Alaska the summer he was twelve.
Ray Walker had been almost twenty years younger then, leaner and fitter, stronger than his son, before the years reversed the difference. They had taken a kayak, with a guide and other vacationers, and skimmed the icy waters of Glacier Bay, watched the black bears gathering berries on the mountain slopes, the harbor seals basking on the last remaining floes of August, and the sun rising over the Mendenhall Glacier behind Juneau. Together they had hauled two seventy-pound monsters out of Halibut Hole and taken the deep-running king salmon out of the channel off Sitka.
Now he found himself walking across a sea of baking sand in a land far from home with tears running down his face, unwiped, drying in the sun. If he died, he would never marry or have children of his own.
Twice he had almost proposed; once to a girl in college, but that was when he was very young and infatuated, the second time to a more mature woman he had met off-base near McConnell, who let him know she could never be the wife of a jet jockey.
Now he wanted, as he had never wanted before, to have children of his own; he wanted a woman to come home to at the end of the day, and a daughter to tuck up in her crib with a bedtime story, and a son to teach how to catch a spinning football, to bat and pitch, to hike and fish, the way his father had taught him. More than that, he wanted to go back to Tulsa and embrace his mother again, who had worried so much over the things he had done and had bravely pretended not to. ...
The young pilot finally returned to the base, sat down at a rickety table in his shared tent, and sought to write a letter home. He was not a good letter writer. Words did not come easily. He usually tended to describe the things that had happened recently in the squadron, his friends, the state of the weather. This was different.
He wrote two pages to his parents, like so many sons that day. He sought to explain what was going on in his head, which was not easy.
He told them about the news that had been announced that morning and what it meant, and he asked them not to worry about him. He had had the best training in the world and flew the best fighter in the world for the best air force in the world.
He wrote that he was sorry for all the times he had been a pain, and he thanked them for all they had done for him over the years, from the first day they had had to wipe his bottom to the time they had come to be present when the general pinned those coveted flier’s wings on his chest.
In forty hours, he explained., he would take his Eagle off the runway again, but this time it would be different. This time, for the first time, he would seek to kill other human beings, and they would seek to kill him.
He would not see their faces or sense their fear, as they would not know his, for that is not the way of modern war. But if they succeeded and he failed, he wanted his parents to know how much he had loved them, and he hoped he had been a good son.
When he had finished, he sealed his letter. Many other letters were sealed mat day across the length and breadth of Saudi Arabia. Then the military postal services took them, and they were delivered to Trenton and Tulsa and London and Rouen and Rome.
That night Mike Martin received a burst from his controllers in Riyadh. When he played the tape back, it was Simon Paxman speaking. It was not a long message, but it was clear and to the point.
In his previous message, Jericho had been wrong, completely and utterly wrong. Every scientific check proved there was no way he could be right.
He had been wrong either deliberately or inadvertently. In the first case he must have turned, lured by the lust for money, or been turned. In the second he would be aggrieved because the CIA absolutely refused to pay him a further dollar for this sort of product.
That being so, there was no choice but to believe either that, with Jericho’s cooperation, the whole operation had been blown to Iraqi Counterintelligence, now in the hands of “your friend Hassan Rahmani”; or that it soon would be, if Jericho sought revenge by sending Rahmani an anonymous tip.
All six dead-letter boxes must now be assumed to be compromised. Under no circumstances were they to be approached. Martin should make his own preparations to escape Iraq at the first safe opportunity, perhaps under the mantle of the chaos that would ensue in twenty-four hours. End of message.
Martin thought it through for the remainder of the night. He was not surprised that the West disbelieved Jericho. That the mercenary’s payments were now to cease was a blow. The man had only reported the contents of a conference at which Saddam had spoken. So Saddam had lied—nothing new in that. What else was Jericho to do—ignore it? It was the cheek of the man in asking for a million dollars that had done it.
Beyond that, Paxman’s logic was impeccable. Within four days, maybe five, Jericho would have checked and found no more money. He would become angry, resentful. If he were not himself blown away and in the hands of Omar Khatib the Tormentor, he might well respond by making an anonymous tipoff.
Yet it would be foolish for Jericho to do that. If Martin were caught and broken—and he was uncertain how much pain he could take at the hands of Khatib and his professionals in the Gymnasium—his own information could point the finger at Jericho, whoever he was.
Still, people do foolish things. Paxman was right, the drops might be under surveillance.
As for escaping Baghdad, that was easier said than done. From gossip in the markets, Martin had heard that the roads out of town were thick with patrols of the AMAM and the Mi
litary Police, looking for deserters and draft-dodgers. His own letter from the Soviet diplomat Kulikov authorized him only to serve the man as gardener in Baghdad. Hard to explain to a patrol checkpoint what he was doing heading west into the desert, where his motorcycle was buried.