The Fist of God

Dr. Hipwell was thanked for his weeks of analysis, and the meeting ended.

Sinclair would return to his embassy and write up his copious notes, which would go to the United States in heavy code. There they would be compared with the analyses of the American counterparts—physicists drawn from the laboratories of Sandia, Los Alamos, and principally Lawrence Livermore in California, where for years a secret section called simply Department Z had been monitoring the steady spread of nuclear technology around the world on behalf of the State Department and the Pentagon.

Though Sinclair could not know it, the findings of the British and American teams would confirm each other to a remarkable degree.

Terry Martin and Simon Paxman left the same meeting and wandered across Whitehall in the benign October sunshine.

“Quite a relief,” said Paxman. “Old Hipwell was quite adamant. Apparently the Americans agree entirely. That bastard is nowhere near his atom bomb yet. One less nightmare to worry about.”

They parted at the corner, Paxman to cross the Thames toward Century House, Martin to cross Trafalgar Square and head up St. Martin’s Lane toward Gower Street.

Establishing what Iraq had, or even probably had, was one thing. Finding out precisely where it was situated was another. The photography went on and on. The KH-11s and KH-12s drifted across the heavens in endless sequence, photographing what they saw on the Iraqi land beneath them.

By October, another device had entered the skies, a new American reconnaissance plane so secret that Capitol Hill did not know about it. Code-named Aurora, it flew on the fringes of inner space, reaching speeds of Mach 8, almost five thousand miles per hour, riding its own fireball—the ramjet effect—far beyond Iraqi radar or interceptor missiles. Not even the technology of the dying USSR could spot Aurora, which had replaced the legendary SR-71 Blackbird.

Ironically, while the Blackbird was being eased out of commission, another even more aged “old faithful”

was plying its trade above Iraq that autumn. Almost forty years old, nicknamed the Dragon Lady, the U-2 was still flying and still taking pictures. It was back in 1960 that Gary Powers was shot down in a U-2 over Sverdlovsk, Siberia, and it was the U-2 that had spotted the first Soviet missiles being deployed in Cuba in the summer of 1962, even though it was Oleg Penkovsky who had identified them as offensive and not defensive weapons, thus blowing away Khrushchev’s phony protests and sowing the seeds of his own eventual destruction.

The U-2 of 1990 had been reequipped as a “listener” rather than a “watcher” and redesignated TR-1, though it still did photography.

All this information, from the professors and scientists, analysts and interpreters, the trackers and the watchers, the interviewers and researchers, built up a picture of Iraq through the autumn of 1990, and a frightening picture it became.

From a thousand sources the information finally was channeled into a single and very secret room two floors below the Saudi Air Force headquarters on Old Airport Road. The room, down the street from where the military brass sat in conference and discussed their unauthorized (by the United Nations) plans for the invasion of Iraq, was called simply “the Black Hole.”

It was in the Black Hole that American and British targeters, drawn from all three services and of all ranks from private to general, pinpointed the sites that would have to be destroyed. Finally, they would make up General Chuck Horner’s air-war map. It contained eventually seven hundred targets. Six hundred were military—in the sense of being command centers, bridges, airfields, arsenals, ammunition dumps, missile sites, and troop concentrations. The other hundred were targets concerned with weapons of mass destruction—research facilities, assembly plants, chemical labs, storage depots.

The gas centrifuge manufacturing line at Taji was listed, as was the approximate, assumed, position of the centrifuge cascade underground somewhere in the Tuwaitha complex.

But the water-bottling plant at Tarmiya was not there, nor was Al Qubai. No one knew about them.

A copy of the comprehensive report by Harry Sinclair in London joined other reports emanating from various parts of the United States and abroad. Finally, a synthesis of all these in-depth analyses found its way to a very small and very discreet State Department think tank, known only to a restricted group in Washington as the Political Intelligence and Analysis Group. The PIAG is a sort of analytical hothouse for foreign affairs and produces reports that are absolutely not for public consumption. Indeed, the unit answers only to the Secretary of State, at that time James Baker.

Two days later, Mike Martin lay flat on a roof that gave him a commanding view of the section of Abrak Kheitan where he had set up his rendezvous with Abu Fouad.

At almost exactly the appointed hour, he watched a single car leave the King Faisal Highway leading to the airport and pull into a side street. The car cruised slowly down the street, away from the bright lights of the highway and the occasional traffic, and into darkness.

He saw the outline stop at the place he had described in his message to Al-Khalifa. Two people got out, a man and a woman. They looked around, checked that no other car had followed them off the highway, and slowly walked on, toward the place where a grove of trees covered a vacant lot.

Abu Fouad and the woman had been told to wait up to half an hour. If the Bedou had not shown up, they were to abort and go home. They actually waited forty minutes before returning to the car. Both were frustrated.

“He must have been detained,” said Abu Fouad to his companion. “An Iraqi patrol, perhaps. Who knows? Anyway, damn. I’ll have to start again.”

“I think you’re crazy to trust him,” said the woman. “You have no idea who he is.”

They spoke softly, the Kuwaiti resistance leader looking up and down the street to ensure no Iraqi soldiers had appeared while he was away.

“He’s successful and cunning, and he works like a professional. That’s all I need to know. I would like to collaborate with him, if he’s willing.”

“Then I have nothing against that.”

The woman uttered a short scream. Abu Fouad jerked in his seat.

“Don’t turn round. Let’s just talk,” said the voice from the back seat. In his rearview mirror the Kuwaiti saw the dim outline of a Bedouin keffiyeh and caught the odor of one who lives rough. He let out his breath in a long exhalation.

“You move quietly, Bedou.”

“No need to make a noise, Abu Fouad. It attracts Iraqis. I don’t like that, except when I am ready.”