The Fist of God

Guns were visible.

“They’ve got triple-A!” he shouted. The second Tornado was lofting. The second Buccaneer could see it all. The shed, blown to pieces under the impact of the first three bombs, revealed an inner structure twisted and bent. But there were antiaircraft cannon blazing among the mounds of wrecked cars.

“Bombs gone!” yelled Johns, and hauled his Tornado into a maximum-G turn. His own Buccaneer was also pulling away from the target, but its belly PAVESPIKE kept the beam on the remains of the shed.

“Impact!” screamed the Buck’s navigator.

There was a flicker of fire among the car wrecks. Two shoulder-borne SAMs hared off after the Tornado.

Williamson had leveled from his turning dive, back to one hundred feet above the desert but heading the other way, toward the now-risen sun. He heard Peter Johns’s voice shout, “We’re hit!”

Behind him, Sid Blair was silent. Swearing in his anger, Williamson pulled the Tornado around again, thinking there might be a chance of holding off the Iraqi gunners with his cannon. He was too late.

He heard one of the Bucks say, “They’ve got missiles down there,” and then he saw Johns’s Tornado, climbing, streaming smoke from a blazing engine, heard the twenty-five-year-old say quite clearly, “Going down ... ejecting.”

There was nothing more any of them could do. In earlier missions the Bucks used to accompany the Tornados home. By this date, it had been agreed the Bucks could go home on their own. In silence the two target markers did what they did best: They got their bellies right on the desert in the morning sun and kept them there all the way home.

Lofty Williamson was in a blind rage, convinced he had been lied to. He had not; no one knew about the triple-A and the missiles hidden at Al Qubai.

High above, a TR-1 sent real-time pictures of the destruction back to Riyadh. An E-3 Sentry had heard all the in-air talk and told Riyadh they had lost a Tornado crew.

Lofty Williamson came home alone, to debrief and vent his anger on the target selectors in Riyadh.

In the CENTAF headquarters on Old Airport Road, the delight of Steve Laing and Chip Barber that the Fist of God had been buried in the womb where it had been created was marred by the loss of the two young men.

Chapter 19

Brigadier Hassan Rahmani sat in his private office in the Mukhabarat building in Mansour and contemplated the events of the previous twenty-four hours with near despair.

That the principal military and war-production centers of his country were being systematically torn apart by bombs and rockets did not worry him. These developments, predicted by him weeks before, simply brought closer the pending American invasion and the fall from office of the man from Tikrit.

It was something he had planned for, longed for, and confidently expected, unaware on that midday of February 1991 that it was not going to happen. Rahmani was a highly intelligent man, but he did not have a crystal ball.

What concerned him that morning was his own survival, the odds that he would live to see the day of Saddam Hussein’s fall.

The bombing at dawn of the previous day of the nuclear engineering plant at Al Qubai, so cunningly disguised that no one had ever envisaged its discovery, had shaken the power elite of Baghdad to its roots.

Within minutes of the departure of the two British bombers, the surviving gunners had been in contact with Baghdad to report the attack. On hearing of the event, Dr. Jaafar Al-Jaafar had personally leaped into his car and driven to the spot to check on his underground staff. He was beside himself with rage and by noon had complained bitterly to Hussein Kamil, under whose Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization the entire nuclear program reposed.

Here was a program, the diminutive scientist had reportedly screamed at Saddam’s son-in-law, that out of a total arms expenditure of $50 billion in a decade had alone consumed $8 billion, and at the very moment of its triumph it was being destroyed. Could the state offer no protection to his people?

The Iraqi physicist might have stood a whisker over five feet and been built like a mosquito, but in terms of influence he packed quite a punch, and the word was that he had gone on and on.

A chastened Hussein Kamil had reported to his father-in-law, who had also been consumed by a transport of rage. When that happened, all Baghdad trembled for its life.

The scientists underground had not only survived but escaped, for the factory included a narrow tunnel leading half a mile under the desert and terminating in a circular shaft with handrails in the wall. The personnel had emerged this way, but it would be impossible to move heavy machinery through the same tunnel and shaft.

The main elevator and

cargo hoist was a twisted wreck from the surface down to a depth of twenty feet.

Restoring it would be a major engineering feat occupying weeks—weeks that Hassan Rahmani suspected Iraq did not have.

Had that been the end of the matter, he would simply have been relieved, for he had been a deeply worried man since that conference at the palace before the air war began, when Saddam had revealed the existence of “his” device.

What now worried Rahmani was the crazed rage of his head of state. Deputy President Izzat Ibrahim had called him shortly after noon of the previous day, and the head of Counterintelligence had never known Saddam’s closest confidant to be in such a state.

Ibrahim had told him the Rais was beside himself with anger, and when that happened, blood usually spilled. Only this could appease the rage of the man from Tikrit. The Deputy President had made plain that it was expected that he—Rahmani—would produce results, and fast. “What results, precisely, did you have in mind?” he had asked Ibrahim. “Find out,” Ibrahim had yelled at him, “how they knew.”