“Buried underground, like the Al Qubai assembly factory?” suggested Barber.
“That was disguised with a car junkyard on top,” said Squadron Leader Peck. “Here there’s nothing. No road, no tracks, no power lines, no defenses, no helipad, no razor wire, no guard barracks—just a wilderness of hills and low mountains with valleys between.”
“Supposing,” said Laing defensively, “they used the same trick as at Tarmiya—putting the defense perimeter so far out, it was off the frame?”
“We tried that,” said Beatty. “We looked fifty miles out in all directions. Nothing—no defenses.”
“Just a pure deception operation?” proposed Barber.
“No way. The Iraqis
Colonel Beatty advanced to the picture and pointed out a group of huts.
“A peasant village, right next door. Woodsmoke, goat pens, goats here out foraging in the valley. There are two others off the frame.”
“Maybe they hollowed out the whole mountain,” said Laing. “You did, at Cheyenne Mountain.”
“That’s a series of caverns, tunnels, a warren of rooms behind reinforced doors,” said Beatty. “You’re talking about a barrel 180 meters long. Try to get that inside a mountain, you’d bring the whole damn thing down on top. Look, gentlemen, I can see the breech, the magazine, all the living quarters being underground, but a chunk of that barrel has to stick out somewhere. It doesn’t.”
They all stared at the picture again. Within the square were three hills and a portion of a fourth. The largest of the three was unmarked by any blastproof doors or access road.
“If it’s in there somewhere,” proposed Peck, “why not saturate-bomb the square mile? That would bring down any mountain on top of the weapon.”
“Good idea,” said Beatty. “General, we could use the Buffs. Paste the whole square mile.”
“May I make a suggestion?” asked Barber.
“Please do,” said General Glosson.
“If I were Saddam Hussein, with his paranoia, and I had one single weapon of this value, I’d have a man in command I could trust. And I’d give him orders that if ever the Fortress came under bombing attack, he was to fire. In short, if the first couple of bombs fell wide—and a square mile is quite a big area—the rest might be a fraction of a second too late.”
General Glosson leaned forward.
“What is your precise point, Mr. Barber?”
“General, if is inside these hills, it is hidden by a deception operation of extreme skill. The only way to be a hundred percent certain of destroying it is by a similar operation. A single plane, coming out of nowhere, delivering one attack, and hitting the target on the button the first and only time.”
“I don’t know how many times I have to say this,” said the exasperated
Colonel Beatty, “but we don’t know where the button is—precisely.”
“I think my colleague is talking about target-marking,” said Laing.
“But that means another airplane,” objected Peck. “Like the Buccaneers marking for the Tornados. Even the target-marker must see the target first.”
“It worked with the Scuds,” said Laing.
“Sure, the SAS men marked the missile launchers, and we blew them away. But they were right there on the ground, a thousand yards from the missiles with binoculars,” said Peck.
“Precisely.”
There was silence for several seconds.
“You are talking,” said General Glosson, “of putting men into the mountains to give us a ten-square-yard target.”
The debate went on for two more hours. But it always came back to Laing’s argument.
First find it, then mark it, then, destroy it—and all without the Iraqis noticing until it was too late.
At midnight a corporal of the Royal Air Force went to the Hyatt Hotel.
He could get no reply from the sitting-room door, so the night manager let him in. He went into the bedroom and shook by the shoulder the man sleeping in a terrycloth robe on top of the bed.
“Sir, wake up, sir. You’re wanted across the road, Major.”
“It’s there,” said Mike Martin two hours later.
“Where?” asked Colonel Beatty with genuine curiosity.
“In there somewhere.”
In the conference room down the corridor from the Black Hole, Martin was leaning over the table studying a photograph of a larger section of the Jebal al Hamreen range. It showed a square five miles by five miles. He pointed with his forefinger.
“The villages, the three villages—here, here, and here.”
“What about them?”
“They’re phony. They’re beautifully done, they’re perfect replicas of the villages of mountain peasants, but they’re full of guards.”
Colonel Beatty stared at the three villages. One was in a valley only half a mile from the middle of the three mountains at the center of the frame. The other two occupied terraces on the mountain slopes farther out.
None was big enough to support a mosque; indeed, they were little more than hamlets. Each had its main and central barn for the storage of winter hay and feed, and smaller barns for the sheep and goats. A dozen humble shacks made up the rest of the settlements, mud-brick dwellings with thatch or tin roofs of the kind that can be seen anywhere in the mountains of the Middle East. In summer there might be small patches of tilled crops nearby, but not in winter.
Life in the mountains of Iraq is harsh in winter, with slanting bitter rain and scudding clouds. The notion that all parts of the Middle East are warm is a popular fallacy.
“Okay, Major, you know Iraq, I don’t. Why are they phony?”
“Life-support system,” said Martin. “Too many villages, too many peasants, too many goats and sheep. Not enough forage. They’d starve.”
“Shit,” said Beatty with feeling. “So damn simple.”
“That may be, but it proves Jericho wasn’t lying, or mistaken again. If they’ve done that, they’re hiding something.”
Colonel Craig, commanding officer of the 22nd SAS, had joined them in the basement. He had been talking quietly to Steve Laing. Now he came over.
“What do you reckon, Mike?”
“It’s there, Bruce. One could probably see it—at a thousand yards with good binoculars.”
“The brass wants to put a team in to mark it. You’re out.”
“Bullshit, sir. These hills are probably alive with foot patrols. You can see there are no roads.”
“So? Patrols can be avoided.”
“And if you run into any? There’s no one speaks Arabic like me, and you know it. Besides, it’s a HALO drop. Helicopters won’t work either.”
“You’ve had all the action you need, so far as I can gather.”
“That’s crap, too. I haven’t seen any action at all. I’m fed up with spooking. Let me have this one. The others have had the desert for weeks, while I’ve been tending a garden.”
Colonel Craig raised an eyebrow. He had not asked Laing exactly what Martin had been up to—he would not have been told anyway—but he was surprised one of his best officers had been posing as a gardener.
“Come back to the base. We can plan better there. If I like your idea, you can have it.”
Before dawn, General Schwarzkopf had agreed there was no alternative and given his consent. In that cordoned-off corner of the Riyadh military air base that was the private preserve of the SAS, Martin had outlined his ideas to Colonel Craig and had been given the go-ahead.
Coordination of planning would reside with Colonel Craig for the men on the ground and with General Glosson
