The Fist of God

“Yes, sir, according to the infrared scanner. Steel of some kind.”

Even more intriguing, and the reason for all the attention by the BDA people, was the Iraqi reaction to Don Walker’s raid. Around the roofless factory were grouped not one but five enormous cranes, their booms poised over the interior like storks pecking at a morsel. With all the damage going on in Iraq, cranes this size were at a premium.

Around the factory and inside it, a swarm of laborers could be seen toiling to attach the disks to the crane hooks for removal.

“You counted these guys, Charlie?”

“Over two hundred, sir.”

“And these disks”—Colonel Beatty consulted the report of the Ranger ’s Intel officer—“these ‘Frisbees for giants’?”

“No idea, sir. Never seen anything like them.”

“Well, they’re sure as hell important to Mr. Saddam Hussein. Is Tarmiya really a no-target zone?”

“Well, that’s the way it’s been listed, Colonel. But would you have a look at this?”

The flight sergeant pulled over another photo he had retrieved from the files. The colonel peered where the NCO pointed.

“Chain-link fencing.”

“Double chain-link. And here?”

Colonel Beatty took the magnifying glass and looked again.

“Mined strip ... triple-A batteries ... guard towers. Where did you find all these, Charlie?”

“Here. Take a big-p

icture look.”

Colonel Beatty stared at the fresh picture placed before him, an ultrahigh-altitude shot of the whole of Tarmiya and the surrounding area. Then he breathed out in a long exhalation.

“Jesus H. Christ, we’re going to have to reevaluate the whole of Tarmiya. How the hell did we miss it?”

The fact was, the whole of the 381-building industrial complex of Tarmiya had been cleared by the first analysts as nonmilitary and nontarget for reasons that later became part of the folklore of the human moles who worked in and survived the Black Hole.

They were Americans and British, and they were all NATO men. Their training had been in assessing Soviet targets, and they looked for the Soviet way of doing things. The clues they looked for were the standard indicators. If the building or complex was military and important, it would be off-limits. It would be guarded from trespassers and protected from attack.

Were there guard towers, chain-link fencing, triple-A batteries, missiles, mined strips, barracks? Were there signs of heavy trucks going in and out; were there heavy-duty power lines or a designated generating station inside the enclosure? These signs meant a target. Tarmiya had none of these—apparently.

What the RAF sergeant had done, on a hunch, was to reexamine a very high-angle picture of the entire area. And there it was—the fence, the batteries, the barracks, the reinforced gates, the missiles, the razor-wire entanglements, the mined strip. But far away.

The Iraqis had simply taken a vast tract of land one hundred kilometers square and fenced off the lot.

No such land-grab would have been possible in Western or even Eastern Europe.

The industrial complex, of whose 381 buildings seventy later turned out to be dedicated to war production, lay at the center of the square, widely scattered to avoid bomb damage, but still only five hundred acres out of the ten thousand in the protected zone.

“Electrical power lines?” said the colonel. “There’s nothing here that would power more than a toothbrush.”

“Over here, sir. Forty-five kilometers to the west. The power lines run in the opposite direction. Fifty quid to a pint of warm beer, those power lines are phony. The real cable will be buried underground and run from the power station into the heart of Tarmiya. That’s a hundred-fifty-megawatt generating station, sir.”

“Son of a bitch,” breathed the colonel. Then he straightened up and grabbed the sheaf of photographs.

“Good job, Charlie. I’m taking all these in to Buster Glosson. Meanwhile, there’s no need to wait around on that roofless factory. If it’s important to the Iraqis—we blow it away.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll put it on the list.”