Something had changed.
Had he been aware of the conference then taking place in the headquarters of the Mukhabarat not half a mile away, Mike Martin’s sleep would not have been so easy.
In matters of technical skill there are four levels—competent, very good, brilliant, and a natural. The last category goes beyond mere skill and into an area where all technical knowledge is backed by an innate feel, a gut instinct, a sixth sense, an empathy with the subject and the machinery that cannot be taught in textbooks.
In matters of radio, Major Mohsen Zayeed was a natural. Quite young, with owlish spectacles that gave him the air of an earnest student, Zayeed lived, ate, and breathed the technology of radio. His private quarters were strewn with the latest magazines from the West, and when he came across a new device that might increase the efficiency of his radio-interception department, he asked for it. Because he valued the man, Hassan Rahmani tried to get it for him.
Shortly after midnight, the two men sat in Rahmani’s office.
“Any progress?” asked Rahmani.
“I think so,” replied Zayeed. “He’s there, all right—no doubt about it.
The trouble is, he’s using burst transmissions that are almost impossible to capture. They take place so fast. Almost, but not quite.
With skill and patience, one can occasionally find one, even though the bursts may only be a few seconds long.”
“How close are you?” said Rahmani.
“Well, I’ve tracked the transmission frequencies to a fairly narrow band in the ultra-high-frequency range, which makes life easier.
Several days ago, I got lucky. We were monitoring a narrow band on the off-chance, and he came on the air. Listen.”
Zayeed produced a tape recorder and pushed Play. A jumbled mess of sound filled the office. Rahmani looked perplexed.
“That’s it?”
“It’s encrypted, of course.”
“Of course,” said Rahmani. “Can you break it?”
“Almost certainly not. The encryption is by a single silicon chip, patterned with complex microcircuitry.”
“It can’t be decoded?” Rahmani was getting lost; Zayeed lived in his own private world and spoke his own private language. He was already making a great effort to try and speak plainly to his commanding officer.
“It’s not a code. To convert that jumble back to the original speech would need an identical silicon chip. The permutations are in the hundreds of millions.”
“Then what’s the point?”
“The point, sir, is—I got a bearing on it.”
Hassan Rahmani leaned forward in excitement.
“A bearing?”
“My second. And guess what? That message was sent in the middle of the night, thirty hours before the bombing of Al Qubai. My guess is, the details of the nuclear plant were in it. There’s more.”
“Go on.”
“He’s here.”
“Here in Baghdad?”
Major Zayeed smiled and shook his head. He had saved his best piece of news till last. He wanted to be appreciated.
“No, sir, he’s here in the Mansour district. I think he’s inside an area two kilometers by two.”
Rahmani thought furiously. This was getting close, amazingly close.
The phone rang. He listened for several seconds, then put it down and rose.
“I am summoned. One last thing. How many more intercepts until you can pin it right down? To a block, or even a house?”
“With luck, one. I may not catch him the first time, but at the first intercept I think I can find him. I pray he will send a long message, several seconds on the air. Then I can give you a square one hundred meters by one hundred.”
Rahmani was breathing heavily as he descended to the waiting car.
They came to the meeting with the Rais in two blacked-out buses. The seven ministers came in one, the six generals and the three intelligence chiefs in another. None saw where they were going, and beyond the windshield the driver simply followed the motorcycle.
Only when the bus drew to a halt in a walled courtyard were the nine men in the second bus allowed to emerge. It had been a forty-minute, indirect drive. Rahmani estimated they were in the country about thirty miles from Baghdad. There were no sounds of traffic noise, and the stars above showed the dim outline of a large villa with black-screened windows.
Inside the principal sitting room the seven ministers were already waiting. The generals took assigned places and sat in silence. Guards showed Dr. Ubaidi of Foreign Intelligence, Hassan Rahmani of Counterintelligence, and Omar Khatib of the Secret Police to three seats facing the single large padded chair reserved for the Rais himself.
The man who had sent for them entered a few minutes later. They all rose and were gestured to sit.
For some, it had been over three weeks since they had seen the President. He seemed strained, the bags under his eyes and jowls more pronounced.
Without preamble, Saddam Hussein launched into the business of their meeting. There had been a bombing raid—they all knew about it, even those who before the raid had known nothing of a place called Al Qubai.
The place was so secret that no more than a dozen men in Iraq knew exactly where it was. Yet it had been bombed. None but the highest in the land and a few dedicated technicians had ever visited the place except blindfolded or in sealed transportation, yet it had been bombed.
There was silence in the room, the silence of fear. The generals—Radi of the Infantry, Kadiri of the Armored Corps, Ridha of the Artillery, and Musuli of the Engineers, and the other two, the head of the Republican Guard and the Chief of Staff—stared fixedly at the carpet ahead of them.
Our comrade, Omar Khatib, had interrogated the two British fliers, intoned the Rais. He would now explain what had happened.
No one had stared at the Rais, but now all eyes went to the rake-thin form of Omar Khatib.
The Tormentor kept his gaze on the midsection of the head of state, facing him across the room.
The airmen had talked, he said flatly. They had held nothing back.
They had been told by their squadron commander that Allied aircraft had seen trucks, Army trucks, moving into and out of a certain automobile junkyard. From this, the Sons of Dogs had gained the impression that the yard disguised an ammunition dump, specifically a depository for poison gas shells. It was not regarded as high priority and was not thought to have any antiaircraft defenses. So only two planes had been assigned to the mission, with two more above them to mark the target. There had been no protecting aircraft assigned to suppress the triple-A, because it was not thought there was any.
They—the pilot and the navigator—knew nothing more than that.
The Rais nodded at General Farouk Ridha. “True or false,
“It is normal,
For a high-priority target, two airplanes only and no support has never happened.”
Saddam mused on the answer, his dark eyes betraying nothing of his thoughts. That was a part of the power he held over these men; they never knew which way he would react.
“Is there any chance,
