open the body bag, and the way their father had been buried that morning.
The older man leaned forward sharply when Osman told how he had been intercepted as he left the cemetery, and of the conversation that had taken place.
“You told him all that?” he asked, when his brother had finished.
“Yes.”
“Is it true, all true? You really built this Fortress, this Qa’ala?”
“Yes.”
“And you told him where it is, so that he can tell the Americans?”
“Yes. Did I do wrong?”
Abdelkarim thought for some while.
“How many men, in all Iraq, know about all this, my brother?”
“Six,” said Osman.
“Name them.”
“The Rais himself; Hussein Kamil, who provided the finance and the manpower; Amer Saadi, who provided the technology. Then General Ridha, who supplied the artillerymen, and General Musuli of the Engineers—he proposed me for the job. And me, I built it.”
“The helicopter pilots who bring in the visitors?”
“They have to know the directions in order to navigate, but not what is inside. And they are kept quarantined in a base somewhere, I don’t know where.”
“Visitors—how many could know?”
“None. They are blindfolded before takeoff and until they have arrived.”
“If the Americans destroy this Qubth-ut-Allah, who do you think the AMAM will suspect? The Rais, the ministers, the generals—or you?”
Osman put his head in his hands.
“What have I done?” he moaned.
“I’m afraid, little brother, that you have destroyed us all.”
Both men knew the rules. For treason, the Rais does not demand a single sacrifice but the extirpation of three generations: father and uncles, so there will be no more of the tainted seed, brothers for the same reason, and sons and nephews, so that none may grow up to carry on the vendetta against him. Osman Badri began quietly to weep.
Abdelkarim rose, pulled Osman to his feet, and embraced him.
“You did right, brother. You did the right thing. Now we must see how to get out of here.”
He checked his watch: eight o’clock.
“There are no telephone lines for the public from here to Baghdad,” he said. “Only underground lines to the Defense people in their various bunkers. But this message is not for them. How long would it take you to drive to our mother’s house?”
“Three, maybe four hours,” said Osman.
“You have eight, to get there and back. Tell our mother to pack all she values into our father’s car. She can drive it—not well, but enough.
She should take Talat and go to Talat’s village. She should seek shelter with his tribe until one of us contacts her. Understood?”
“Yes. I can be back by dawn. Why?”
“Before dawn. Tomorrow I am leading a flight of MiGs across to Iran.
Others have gone before. It is a crazy scheme by the Rais to save his best fighter planes. Nonsense, of course, but it may save our lives. You will come with me.”
“I thought the MiG 29 was a single-seater?”
“I have one trainer version with two seats. The UB model. You will be dressed as an Air Force officer. With luck, we can get away with it. Go now.”
Mike Martin was walking west that night along the Ar-Rutba road when the car of Osman Badri flashed past him, heading toward Baghdad. Neither took any notice of the other. Martin’s destination was the next river crossing, fifteen miles ahead. There, with the bridge down, trucks would have to wait for the ferry, and he would have a better chance of paying another driver to take him farther west.
In the small hours of the morning he found exactly such a truck, but it could take him only to a point just beyond Muhammadi. There he began to wait again. At three o’clock the car of Colonel Badri sped back again. He did not hail it, and it did not stop. The driver was clearly in a hurry. Just before dawn a third truck came along, pulled out of a side road onto the main highway, and paused to take him aboard. Again he paid the driver from his dwindling stock of dinar notes, grateful to whoever had thought to give him the wad of money back in Mansour. By dawn, he assumed, the Kulikov household would complain that they had lost their gardener.
A search of his shack would reveal the writing pad beneath the mattress—an odd possession for an illiterate—and a further search would reveal the transmitter beneath the tiles. By midday, the hunt would be well up, starting in Baghdad but spreading across the country. By nightfall, he needed to be far away in the desert, heading for the border.
The truck in which he rode was beyond KM 160 when the flight of MiG 29s took off.
Osman Badri was terrified, being one of those people with a deep loathing of flying. In the underground caverns that made up the base, he had stood to one side as his brother briefed the four young pilots who would form the rest of the flight. Most of Abdelkarim’s contemporaries were dead; these were youngsters, more than a decade his junior, not long out of training school. They listened with rapt attention to their squadron commander and nodded their assent.
Inside the MiG, even with the canopy closed, Osman thought he had never heard a roar like it as, in the enclosed space, the two RD 33
Soviet turbofans ran up to maximum dry power. Crouching in the rear cockpit behind his brother, Osman saw the great blast doors open on their hydraulic pistons and a square of pale blue sky appear at the end of the cavern. The noise increased as the pilot ran his throttle through the gate and into afterburn, and the twin-finned Soviet interceptor shuddered against her brakes.
When the brakes came off, Osman thought he had been kicked in the small of the back by a mule. The MiG leaped forward, the concrete walls flashed past, and the jet took the ramp and emerged into the dawn light.
Osman shut his eyes and prayed. The rumbling of the wheels ceased, he seemed to be drifting, and he opened his eyes. They were airborne, the lead MiG circling low over KM 160 as the other four jets screamed out of the tunnel below. Then the doors closed, and the air base ceased to exist.
All around him, because the UB version is a trainer, were dials and clocks, buttons, switches, screens, knobs, and levers. Between his legs was a duplicate control column. His brother had told him to leave everything alone, which he was glad to do.
At one thousand feet the flight of five MiGs formed into a staggered line, the four youngsters behind the squadron commander. His brother set course just south of due east, keeping low, hoping to avoid detection and to cross the southern outskirts of Baghdad, losing his MiGs from prying American eyes in the clutter of industrial plants and other radar images.
It was a high-risk gamble, trying to avoid the radars of the AWACS
out over the Gulf, but he had no choice. His orders were formal, and now Abdelkarim Badri had an extra reason for wishing to reach Iran.
Luck was with him that morning, through one of those flukes in warfare that are not supposed to occur but do. At the end of every long shift on station over the Gulf, the AWACS had to return to base and be replaced by another. It was called changing the cab rank. During the cab rank changes, there was sometimes a brief window when radar cover was suspended. The MiG flight’s low passage across South Baghdad and Salman Pak coincided with just such a lucky break.
The Iraqi pilot hoped that by keeping to one thousand feet, he could slip under any American flights, which
