In the CENTAF headquarters on Old Airport Road, the delight of Steve Laing and Chip Barber that had been buried in the womb where it had been created was marred by the loss of the two young men.
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.”
Rahmani had been in contact with friends in the Army who had talked to” their gunners, and the reports were adamant on one thing: The British raid had involved two airplanes. There had been two more higher up, hut it was assumed these were fighters giving cover; certainly they had not dropped any bombs.
From the Army, Rahmani had talked to Air Force Opera-lions Planning. Their view—and several of their officers were Western-
trained—was that no target of great military significance would ever merit only a two-plane strike. No way.
So, reasoned Rahmani, if the British did not think the car junkyard was a scrap metal dump, what did they think it was? The answer probably lay with the two downed British airmen. Personally, he would have loved to conduct the interrogations, convinced that with certain hallucinogenic drugs he could have them talking within hours, and truthfully.
The Army had confirmed they had caught the pilot and navigator within three hours of the raid, out in the desert, one limping from a broken ankle. Unfortunately, a detail from the AMAM had turned up with remarkable speed and taken the fliers with them. No one argued with the AMAM. So the two Britishers were now with Omar Khatib, and Allah have mercy on them.
Cheated of his chance to shine by producing the information supplied by the fliers, Rahmani realized he would have to contribute something.
The question was—what? The only thing that would suffice was what the Rais wanted. And what would he want? Why, a conspiracy. Then a conspiracy he would have. The key would be the transmitter.
He reached for his phone and called Major Mohsen Zayeed, the head of his unit’s sigint section, the people charged with intercepting radio transmissions. It was time they talked again.
Twenty miles west of Baghdad lies the small town of Abu Ghraib, a most unremarkable place and yet a name known if rarely mentioned throughout Iraq. For in Abu Ghraib stood the great prison, confined almost exclusively to use in the interrogation and confinement of political detainees. As such, it was staffed and run not by the national prison service but by the Secret Police, the AMAM.
At the time Hassan Rahmani was calling his sigint expert, a long black Mercedes approached the double wooden doors of the prison. Two guards, recognizing the occupant of the car, hurled themselves at the gates and dragged them open. Just in time; the man in the car could respond with icy brutality to those causing him a momentary delay through slackness on the job.
The car went through, the gates closed. The figure in the back acknowledged the efforts of the guards with neither nod nor gesture.
They were irrelevant.
At the steps to the main office building, the car stopped, and another guard ran to open the rear passenger door. Brigadier Omar Khatib alighted, trim in a tailored
Doors were hastily opened for him all the way. A junior officer, an aide, brought his attache case.
To reach his office, Khatib took the elevator to the fifth and top floor, and when he was alone, he ordered Turkish coffee and began to study his papers. The reports of the day detailed progress in the extraction of needed information from those in the basement.
Behind his facade, Omar Khatib was as worried as his colleague across Baghdad—a man whom he loathed with the same venom as the feeling was returned.
Unlike Rahmani, who with his part-English education, grasp of languages, and cosmopolitan airs was bound to be inherently suspect, Khatib could count on the fundamental advantage of being from Tikrit.
So long as he did the job with which he had been tasked by the Rais, and did it well, keeping the confessions of treachery flowing to assuage the unappeasable paranoia, he was safe.
But the last twenty-four hours had been troubling. He too had received a telephone call the previous day, but from the son-in-law, Hussein Kamil. Like Ibrahim to Rahmani, Kamil had brought news of the Rais’s unbounded rage over the bombing of Al Qubai and was demanding results.
Unlike Rahmani, Khatib actually had the British fliers in his hands.
That was an advantage on the one hand, a snare on the other. The Rais would want to know, and fast, just how the fliers had been briefed before the mission—just how much did the Allies know about Al Qubai, and how had they learned it?
It was up to him, Khatib, to produce that information. His men had been working on the fliers for fifteen
