The Fist of God

Even as they watched, a long truck loaded with old car bodies entered the picture. It seemed to move in little jerks, because the TR-1, flying eighty thousand feet above Al Qubai, was running off still frames at the rate of several a second. Fascinated, the two intelligence officers watched until the truck reversed into the welding shed.

“Betcha the food, water, and supplies are under the car bodies,” said Beatty. He sat back. “Trouble is, we’ll never get at the damn factory. Not even the Buffs can bomb that deep.”

“We could close them down,” said Peck. “Crush the lift shaft, seal ’em in. Then if they try any rescue work to unblock, we shoot them up again.”

“Sounds good,” agreed Beatty. “How many days till the land invasion?”

“Twelve,” said Barber.

“We can do it,” said Beatty. “High-level, laser-guided, a mass of planes, a gorilla.”

Laing shot Barber a warning glance.

“We’d prefer something a little more discreet,” said Barber. “A two-ship raid, low-level, eyeball confirmation of destruction.”

There was silence.

“You guys trying to tell us something?” asked Beatty. “Like, Baghdad is not supposed to know we’re interested?”

“Could you please do it that way?” urged Laing. “There don’t seem to be any defenses. The key here is disguise.”

Beatty sighed. Fucking spooks, he thought. They’re trying to protect someone. Well, none of my business.

“What do you think, Joe?” he asked the squadron leader.

“The Tornados could do it,” said Joe Peck, “with Buccaneers target-marking for them. Six one-thousand-pound bombs right through the door of the shed. I’ll bet that tin shed is ferroconcrete inside. Should contain the blast nicely.”

Beatty nodded. “Okay, you guys have it. I’ll clear it with General Horner. Who do you want to use, Joe?”

“Six-oh-eight Squadron, at Maharraq. I know the CO, Phil Curzon. Shall I get him over here?”

Wing Commander Philip Curzon commanded twelve of the Royal Air Force’s Panavia Tornados of the 608th Squadron, on the island of Bahrain, where they had arrived two months earlier from their base at Laarbruck, Germany. Just after noon that day, February 8, he received an order that brooked no denial: to report immediately to the CENTAF headquarters in Riyadh. So great was the urgency that by the time he had acknowledged the message, his orderly officer reported that a Beach King Air from Shakey’s Pizza on the other side of the island had landed and was taxiing in to pick him up. When he boarded the Beach King Air after throwing on a uniform jacket and cap, he discovered that the twin-engined executive plane was assigned to General Horner himself.

“What the hell is going on?” the wing commander asked himself, and with justification.

At Riyadh military air base a USAF staff car was waiting to carry him the mile down Old Airport Road to the Black Hole.

The four men who had been in conference to see the TR-1’s mission pictures at ten that morning were still there. Only the technician was missing. They needed no more pictures. The ones they had were spread all over the table. Squadron Leader Peck made the introductions.

Steve Laing explained what was needed, and Curzon examined the photos.

Philip Curzon was no fool, or he would not have been commanding a squadron of Her Majesty’s very expensive fighter-bombers. In the early low-level missions with JP-233 bombs against Iraqi airfields, he had lost two aircraft and four good men; two he knew were dead. The other two had just been paraded, battered and dazed, on Iraqi TV, another of Saddam’s PR masterpieces.

“Why not put this target on the Air Tasking Order, like all the others?” he asked quietly. “Why the hurry?”

“Let me be perfectly straight with you,” said Laing. “We now believe this target to house Saddam’s principal and perhaps only store of a particularly vicious poison gas shell. There is evidence that the first stocks are about to be moved to the front. Hence the urgency.”

Beatty and Peck perked up. This was the first explanation they had received to explain the spooks’

interest in the factory beneath the junkyard.

“But two attack planes?” Curzon persisted. “Just two? That makes it a very low-priority mission. What am I supposed to tell my aircrew? I’m not going to lie to them, gentlemen. Please get that quite straight.”

“There’s no need, and I wouldn’t tolerate that either,” said Laing. “Just tell them the truth. That aerial surveillance has indicated movement of trucks to and from the site. The analysts believe them to be military trucks, and they have jumped to the conclusion this apparent scrapyard hides an ammunition dump—principally, inside that big central shed. So that’s the target. As for a low-level mission, you can see there are no missiles, no triple-A.”

“And that’s the truth?” asked the wing commander.

“I swear it.”