The Fist of God

Darren Cleary climbed to fifteen thousand feet, met up with the rest of his escorts, and they proceeded to link with their assigned KC-135 tanker just south of the Iraqi border.

Without being troubled by Iraqi resistance, Cleary photographed the eleven principal targets he had been assigned, then turned back over Tarmiya for the secondary-interest twelfth location.

As he went over Tarmiya, he glanced at his display and muttered,

“What the fuck is that?” This was the moment the last of the 750 frames in each of his main cameras chose to run out.

After a second refuel the mission landed back on the Ranger without incident. The deck crew downloaded the cameras and took them off to the photo lab for development to negatives.

Cleary was debriefed on an uneventful mission, then went down to the light table with the intelligence officer. As the negatives came up on the screen with the white-light underneath, Cleary explained what each frame was and where it had come from. The intel officer made notes for his own report, which would be attached to Cleary’s, plus the photos.

When they came to the last twenty frames, the intel officer asked,

“What are these?”

“Don’t ask me,” said Cleary. “They come from that target at Tarmiya.

You remember—the one Riyadh tacked on at the last moment?”

“Yeah. So what are those things inside the factory?”

“Look like Frisbees for giants,” suggested Cleary dubiously.

It was a phrase that stuck. The intel officer used it in his own report, coupled with an admission that he had not the slightest idea what they were. When the package was complete, a Lockheed S-3 Viking was thrown off the Ranger’s deck and took the whole package to Riyadh.

Darren Cleary went back to air combat missions, never tangled with the elusive MiGs, and left the Gulf with the USS Ranger in late April 1991.

Wolfgang Gemutlich was becoming more and more worried, through that morning, by the state of his private secretary.

She was as polite and formal as ever and as efficient as he could have demanded—and Herr Gemutlich demanded much. Not a man of excessive sensitivity, he saw nothing out of the ordinary at first, but by her third visit into his private sanctum to take a letter, he observed there was something unusual about her.

Nothing lighthearted, of course, and certainly not frivolous—he would never have tolerated that. It was an air that she carried with her. On her third visit he observed her more closely as, head bent over her note pad, she took down his dictation.

True, the dowdy business suit was in place, hem below the knees. The hair was still scraped back into a bun behind her head. ... It was on the fourth visit that he realized with a start of horror that Edith Hardenberg was wearing a touch of face powder. Not a lot, just a hint. He checked quickly to ensure that there was no lipstick on her mouth and was relieved to see not a trace.

Perhaps, he reasoned, he was deluding himself. It was January, the freezing weather outside might have caused chapping to her skin; no doubt the powder was to ease the soreness. But there was something else.

The eyes. Not mascara— um Gotteswillen, let it not be mascara. He checked again, but there was none. He had been deluded, he reassured himself. It was in the lunch hour as he spread his linen napkin on his blotter and ate the sandwiches dutifully prepared by Frau Gemutlich, as on every day, that the solution came to him.

They sparkled. Fraulein Hardenberg’s eyes sparkled. It could not be the winter weather—she had been indoors for four hours by then. The banker put down his half-eaten sandwich and realized he had seen the same syndrome among some of the younger secretaries just before going-home time on a Friday evening.

It was happiness. Edith Hardenberg was actually happy. It showed, he realized now, in the way she walked, the way she talked, and the way she looked. She had been like that all morning—that, and the hint of powder. It was enough to trouble Wolfgang Gemutlich deeply. He hoped she had not been spending money.

The snapshots taken by Lieutenant Commander Darren Cleary came into Riyadh in the afternoon, part of a blizzard of fresh images that poured into CENTAF headquarters every day.

Some of those images were from the KH-11 and KH-12 satellites high above the earth, giving the big- dimension picture, the wide angle, the whole of Iraq. If they showed no variation from the previous day, they were stacked.

Others were from the constant photorecon missions flown at lower levels by the TR-1s. Some showed Iraqi activity, military or industrial, that was new—troop movements, war-planes taxiing where they had not been before, missile launchers in new locations. These went to Target Analysis.

The ones from the Ranger’s Tomcat were for Bomb Damage Assessment. They were filtered through the Barn, the collection of green tents on the edge of the military air base; then, duly tagged and identified, they went down the road to the Black Hole, where they landed in the BDA department.

Colonel Beatty came on duty at seven that evening. He worked for two hours poring over shots of a missile site (partially destroyed, two batteries apparently still intact) and a communications center (reduced to rubble), plus an array of hardened aircraft shelters that housed Iraqi MiGs, Mirages, and Sukhois (shattered).

When he came to a dozen pictures of a factory at Tarmiya, he frowned, rose, and walked over to a desk manned by a British flight sergeant of the Royal Air Force.

“Charlie, what are these?”

“Tarmiya, sir. You recall that factory hit by a Strike Eagle yesterday—the one that wasn’t on the list?”

“Oh, yeah, the factory that was never even a target?”

“That’s the one. A Tomcat from the Ranger took these just after ten this morning.”

Colonel Beatty tapped the photos in his hand.

“So what the hell’s going on down here?”

“Don’t know, sir. That’s why I put ’em on your desk. No one can work it out.”

“Well, that Eagle jockey certainly rattled someone’s cage. They’re going apeshit here.”

The American colonel and the British NCO stared at the images brought back by the Tomcat from Tarmiya. They were utterly clear, the definition fantastic. Some were from the forward-and-down frame camera in the nose of the TARPS pod showing the ruined factory as the Tomcat approached at fifteen thousand feet; others from the panoramic camera in the midsection of the pod. The men at the Barn had extracted the dozen best and clearest.

“How big is this factory?” asked the colonel.

“About a hundred meters by sixty, sir.”

The giant roof had been torn off, and only a fragment was left covering a quarter of the floor space of the Iraqi plant.

In the three-quarters that had been exposed to view, the entire factory layout could be observed in a bird’s- eye view. There were subdivisions caused by partitions, and in each division a great dark disk occupied most of the floor.

“These metal?”

“Yes, sir, according to the infrared scanner. Steel of some kind.”

Even more intriguing, and the reason for all the attention by the BDA people, was the Iraqi reaction to Don Walker’s raid. Around the roofless factory were grouped not one but five enormous cranes, their booms poised over the interior like storks pecking at a morsel. With all the damage going on in Iraq, cranes this size were at a premium.

Around the factory and inside it, a swarm of laborers could be seen toiling to attach the disks to the crane hooks for removal.

“You counted these guys, Charlie?”

“Over two hundred, sir.”

“And these disks”—Colonel Beatty consulted the report of the Ranger’s Intel officer—“these ‘Frisbees for giants’?”