The Fist of God

speech to anyone trying to listen in who is not carrying the same system. The codings can be changed daily but were common to all Allied aircraft.

Walker glanced around. The sky was clear; half a mile away his wingman, Randy “R-2” Roberts, rode astern and slightly above him, with wizzo Jim “Boomer” Henry sitting behind.

Over the Scud fixed-launcher position, Walker dropped down to identify the target properly. To his rage, it was obscured by swirling clouds of desert dust, a shamal that had sprung up, created by the strong desert wind down there on the floor.

His laser-guided bombs would not miss, so long as they could follow the beam projected at the target from his own aircraft. To project the guiding beam, he had to see his target.

Furious and running short of fuel, he turned away. Two frustrations in the same morning were too much. He hated to land with a full rack of ordnance. But there was nothing for it, the road home lay south.

Three minutes later, he saw an enormous industrial complex beneath him.

“What’s that?” he asked Tim. The WSO checked his briefing maps.

“It’s called Tarmiya.”

“Jesus, it’s big.”

“Yeah.”

Although neither man knew it, the Tarmiya industrial complex contained 381 buildings and covered an area of ten miles by ten miles.

“Listed?”

“Nope.”

“Going down anyway. Randy, cover my ass.”

“Got it,” came over the air from his wingman.

Walker dropped his Eagle clean down to ten thousand feet.

The industrial spread was huge. In the center was one enormous building, the size of a covered sports stadium.

“Going in.”

“Don, it’s nontarget.”

Dropping to eight thousand feet, Walker activated his laser-guidance system and lined up on the vast factory below and in front of him. His head-up display ran off the distance as it shortened and gave him a seconds-to-fire reading. As the latter hit zero, he released his bombs, keeping his nose still on the approaching target.

The laser-sniffer in the nose of the two bombs was the PAVEWAY

system. Under his fuselage was the guidance module, called LANTIRN. The LANTIRN threw an invisible infrared beam at the target, where the beam rebounded to form a sort of funnel-shaped electronic basket pointing back toward him.

The PAVEWAY nose cones sensed this basket, entered it, and followed the funnel down and inward until they impacted precisely where the beam was aimed.

Both bombs did their job. They blew up under the lip of the roof of the factory. Seeing them explode, Don Walker hauled back, lifted the nose of the Eagle, and powered it back to twenty-five thousand feet. An hour later, he and his wingman, after another refuel in midair, were back at Al Kharz.

Before he lifted his nose, Walker had seen the blinding flash of the two explosions and the great column of smoke that had arisen, and he had caught a glimpse of the dust cloud that would follow the bombing.

What he did not see was that those two bombs tore out one end of the factory, lifting a large section of roof up into the air like the sail of a ship at sea.

Nor did he observe that the strong desert wind that morning—the same one that had created the dust storm to blot out the Scud site—did the rest. It tore the roof off the factory, peeling it back like the lid of a sardine can, as sheets of roofing steel flew lethally in all directions.

Back at base, Don Walker, like every other pilot, was extensively debriefed. It was a tiresome process for weary pilots, but it had to be done. In charge was the squadron intelligence officer, Major Beth Kroger.

No one pretended the gorilla had been a success, but every pilot had taken out his secondary target, except one. Their hotshot weapons officer had flunked his secondary target and picked a tertiary one at random.

“What the hell did you do that for?” Kroger asked.

“Because it was huge and looked important.”

“It wasn’t even on the Tasking Order,” she complained. She logged the target he had chosen, its exact location and description, and his own bomb-damage report and filed it for the attention of TACC—the Tactical Air Control Center, which shared the basement of CENTAF

beneath the Saudi Air Force headquarters with the Black Hole analysts in Riyadh.

“If this turns out to be a water-bottling plant or a baby-food factory, they’re gonna can your ass,” she warned Walker.

“You know, Beth, you’re beautiful when you’re angry,” he teased her.

Beth Kroger was a good career officer. If she was going to be flirted with, she preferred colonels and up. As the three of those on the base were seriously married, Al Kharz was turning out to be a pain.

“You’re out of line, Captain,” she told him, and went off to file her report.

Walker sighed and went off to his cot to rest. She was right, though. If he had just totaled the world’s biggest orphanage, General Horner would personally have his captain’s bars for toothpicks. As it happened, they never did tell Don Walker just what he had hit that morning. But it was not an orphanage.

Chapter 16

Karim came to dine with Edith Hardenberg at her flat in Grinzing that same night. He found his own way out to the suburbs by public transportation, and he brought with him gifts: a pair of aromatically scented candles, which he placed on the small table in the eating alcove and lit; and two bottles of fine wine.

Edith let him in, pink and embarrassed as ever, then returned to fuss over the Wiener schnitzel she was preparing in her tiny kitchen. It had been twenty years since she had prepared a meal for a man; she was finding the ordeal daunting but, to her surprise, exciting.

Karim had greeted her with a chaste peck on the cheek in the doorway, which had made her even more flustered, then found Verdi’s Nabucco in the library of her records and put it on the player.

Soon the aroma of the candles, musk and patchouli, joined the gentle cadences of the “Slaves’ Chorus” to drift through the apartment.

It was just as he had been told to expect it by the neviot team that had broken in weeks before: very neat, very tidy, extremely clean. The flat of a fussy woman who lived alone.

When the meal was ready, Edith presented it with copious apologies.

Karim tried the meat and pronounced it the best he had ever tasted, which made her even more flustered, yet immensely pleased.

They talked as they ate, of things cultural; of their projected visit to the Schonbrunn Palace and to see the fabulous Lipizzaner horses at the Hofreitschule, the Spanish Riding School inside the Hofburg on Josefsplatz.

Edith ate as she did everything else—precisely, like a bird pecking at a morsel. She wore her hair scraped back as always, gripped into a severe bun behind her head.

By the light of the candles, for he had switched off the too-bright lamp above the table, Karim was darkly handsome and courteous as ever.

He refilled her wineglass all the time, so that she consumed far more than the occasional glass that she normally permitted herself from time to time.

The effect of the food, the wine, the candles, the music, and the company of her young friend slowly corroded the defenses of her reserve.

Over the empty plates, Karim leaned forward and gazed into her eyes.

“Edith?”

“Yes.”

“May I ask you something?”

“If you wish.”

“Why do you wear your hair drawn back like that?”

It was an impertinent question, personal. She blushed more deeply.