Saddam’s claim—if indeed he ever made the claim at all. Dammit, Jericho is a mercenary, he could be lying in his teeth. Scientists can be wrong, Saddam lies as he breathes. What have we actually
“You want to take the risk?” asked Laing.
Barber slumped in a chair.
“No,” he said at length, “no, I don’t. Okay, I’ll clear it with Washington. Then we tell the generals. They have to know this. But I tell you guys one thing: One day I’m going to meet this Jericho, and if he’s putting us on, I’m going to pull his arms off and beat him to death with the soggy end.”
At four that afternoon, Major Zayeed brought his maps and his calculations to Hassan Rahmani’s office. Carefully he explained that he had that day secured his third triangulation and narrowed the area down to the lozenge shown on the map of Mansour. Rahmani gazed at it dubiously.
“It’s a hundred yards by a hundred yards,” he said. “I thought modern technology could get these emission sources down to a square yard.”
“If I get a long transmission, yes, I can,” explained the young major patiently. “I can get a beam from the intercepting receiver no wider than a yard. Cross that with another intercept from a different point, and you get your square yard. But these are terribly short transmissions. They’re on the air and off within two seconds. The best I can get is a very narrow cone, its point on the receiver, running out across country and getting wider as it goes. Maybe an angle of one second of one degree on the compass. But a couple of miles away, that becomes a hundred yards. Look, it’s still a small area.”
Rahmani peered at the map. The marked lozenge had four buildings in it.
“Let’s get down there and look at it,” he suggested.
The two men prowled Mansour with the map until they had traced the area shown. It was residential and very prosperous. The four residences were all detached, walled, and standing in their own grounds. It was getting dark by the time they finished.
“Raid them in the morning,” said Rahmani. “I’ll seal the area with troops, quietly. You know what you’re looking for. You go in with your specialists and take all four places apart. You find it, we have the spy.”
“One problem,” said the major. “See that brass plaque over there?
That’s a Soviet embassy residence.”
Rahmani thought it over. He would get no thanks for starting an international incident.
“Do the other three first,” he ordered. “If you get nothing, I’ll clear the Soviet building with the Foreign Ministry.”
While they talked, one of the staff of that Soviet villa was three miles away. The gardener Mahmoud Al- Khouri was in the old British cemetery, placing a slim envelope in a stone jar by a long-untended gravestone. Later, he made a chalk mark on the wall of the Union of Journalists building. On a late-night tour of the district, he noticed just before midnight that the chalk mark had been expunged.
That evening, there was a conference in Riyadh, a very private conference in a sealed office two floors below the Saudi Defense Ministry building. There were four generals present, one of them seated at the head of the table, and two civilians, Barber and Laing.
When the civilians had finished speaking, the four military men sat in gloomy silence.
“Is this for real?” asked one of the Americans.
“In terms of one hundred percent proof, we don’t have that,” said Barber. “But we think there is a very high likelihood that the information is accurate.”
“What makes you so sure?” asked the USAF general.
“As you gentlemen have probably already guessed, we have for some months past had an asset working for us high in the hierarchy in Baghdad.”
There was a series of assenting grunts.
“Didn’t figure all that target information was coming from Langley’s crystal ball,” said the Air Force general, who still resented the CIA doubting his pilots’ hit record.
“The point is,” said Laing, “so far, we have never found his information to be anything but bang-on accurate. If he’s lying now, it’s a hell of a scam. Second point is, can we take that risk?”
There was silence for several minutes.
“There’s one thing you guys are overlooking,” said the USAF man.
“Delivery.”
“Delivery?” asked Barber.
“Right. Having a weapon is one thing; delivering it right on top of your enemy is another. Look, no one can believe Saddam is into miniaturization yet. That’s hypertech. So he can’t launch this thing, if he has it, from a tank gun. Or an artillery piece—same caliber. Or a Katyushka-type battery. Or a rocket.”
“Why not a rocket, General?”
“Payload,” said the flier sarcastically. “Goddam payload. If this is a crude device, we have to be looking at half a ton. A thousand pounds, say. We now know the Al-Abeid and the Al-Tammuz rockets were still only in development when we smashed the facility at Saad-16.
The Al-Abbas and the Al-Badr, same thing. Inoperative—either smashed up or a too-small payload.”
“What about the Scud?” asked Laing.
“Same thing,” said the general. “The long-range so-called Al-Husayn keeps on breaking up on reentry and has a payload of 160 kilograms.
Even the basic Soviet-supplied Scud has a maximum payload of 600 kilograms. Too small.”
“There’s still an aircraft-launched bomb,” pointed out Barber.
The Air Force general glowered. “Gentlemen, I will give you my personal guarantee, here and now: From henceforth, not one single Iraqi warplane will reach the border. Most won’t even get off the tarmac. Those that do and head south will be shot down halfway to the border. I have enough AWACS, enough fighters—I can guarantee it.”
“And the Fortress?” asked Laing. “The launch pad?”
“A top-secret hangar, probably underground, a single runway leading from the mouth; housing a Mirage, a MiG, a Sukhoi—tooled up and ready to go. But we’ll get it before the border.
The decision rested with the American general at the head of the table.
“Are you going to find the repository of this device, this so-called Fortress?” he asked quietly.
“Yes, sir,” said Barber. “We are trying even now. We figure we may need a few more days.”
“Find it, and we will destroy it.”
“And the invasion in four days, sir?” asked Laing.
“I will let you know.”
That evening, it was announced that the ground invasion of Kuwait and Iraq had been postponed and rescheduled for the twenty-fourth of
February.
Later, historians gave two alternate reasons for this postponement. One was that the U.S. Marines wanted to alter their main axis of attack a few miles farther west and that this would require troop movements, transfer of stores, and further preparations. That was true, too.
A reason later advanced in the press was that two British computer hackers had cut into the Defence Ministry computer and badly dislocated the collation of weather reports for the attack area, causing confusion over the choice of the best day for the attack from the climatic point of view.
In fact, the weather was fine and clear between the twentieth and the twenty-fourth, and it deteriorated just as the advance began.
General Norman Schwarzkopf was a big and very strong man, physically, mentally, and morally. But he would have been more, or perhaps less, than human if the sheer strain of those last few days had not begun to tell on
