'You said it, sir. They're bugging out,' the chief master sergeant replied.
Major Sabah completed the thought. 'In hours or days, Iraq will not have a government, and Iran is assisting in the transition to anarchy.'
'Not good,' the chief breathed.
'The word 'catastrophe' comes to mind,' Sabah observed mildly. He shook his head and smiled in a grim sort of way, earning additional admiration from the American spooks.
THE GULFSTREAM LANDED in calm air after the sixty-five-minute flight in from Tehran, timed by Badrayn's watch. As punctual as Swissair, he noted. Well, that was to be expected. As soon as it stopped, the door dropped open and the five passengers deplaned, to be met with elaborately false courtesy, which they returned in kind. A small convoy of Mercedes sedans spirited them off at once to regal accommodations awaiting them in the city center, where they would, of course, be murdered if things went poorly. Scarcely had their cars pulled off when two generals, their wives, their children, and one bodyguard each emerged from the VIP terminal and walked to the aircraft. They quickly boarded the G-IV. The co-pilot lifted the door back into place, and the engines started up, all in less than ten additional minutes by Badrayn's Seiko. Just that fast, it taxied off to make the return flight to Mehrabad International. It was something too obvious for the tower personnel to miss. That was the problem with security, Badrayn knew. You really couldn't keep some things secret, at least not something like this. Better to use a commercial flight, and treat the departing generals as normal passengers on a normal trip, but there were no regular flights between the two countries, and the generals would not have submitted themselves to such plebeian treatment in any case. And so the tower people would know that a special flight had come in and out under unusual circumstances, and so would the terminal employees who'd been required to fawn on the generals and their retinues. For one such flight, that might not be important. But it would matter for the next.
Perhaps that was not overly important in the Great Scheme of Things. There was now no stopping the events he had helped to set in motion, but it offended Ali Badrayn in a professional sense. Better to keep everything he did secret. He shrugged as he walked back to the VIP terminal. No, it didn't matter, and through his actions he'd won the gratitude of a very powerful man in charge of a very powerful country, and for doing no more than talking, telling people what they already knew, and helping them to make a decision which could not have been avoided, whatever their efforts to the contrary. How curious life was.
'SAME ONE. JEEZ, he wasn't on the ground very long.' Through a little effort, the radio traffic for that particular aircraft was isolated and playing in the earphones of an Army spec-6 language expert. Though the language of international aviation was English, this aircraft was speaking in Farsi. Probably thought a security measure, it merely highlighted that aircraft, tracked by radar and radio-direction finders. The voice traffic was wholly ordinary except for that, and for the fact that the aircraft hadn't even been on the ground long enough to refuel. That meant the whole thing was preplanned, which was hardly a surprise under the circumstances, but enlightening even so. Aloft, over the far northwest end of the Persian Gulf, an AWACS was now tracking the aircraft as well. Interest, cued by PALM BOWL, had perked up enough to move the E-3B off its normal patrol station, now escorted by four Saudi F-15 Eagle fighters. Iranian and Iraqi electronic-intelligence troops would take note of this and know that someone was interested in what was going on—and wonder why, because they didn't know. The game was ever a fascinating one, neither side knowing all it wished, and assuming the other side—at the moment there were actually three sides in the game— knew too much, when in fact none of the three knew much of anything.
ABOARD THE G-IV, the language was Arabic. The two generals chatted quietly and nervously in the rear, their conversation masked by engine sounds. Their wives just sat, more nervous still, while the various children read books or napped. It was hardest on the bodyguards, who knew that if anything went wrong in Iran they could do nothing but die uselessly. One of these sat in the middle of the cabin and found that his seat was wet, with what he didn't know, but it was sticky and… red? Tomato juice or something, probably. Annoyed, he went to the lavatory and washed his hands off, taking a towel back to wipe the seat off. He returned the towel to the lav before he reseated himself, then looked down at the mountains and wondered if he'd live to see another sunrise, not knowing that he'd just limited the number to twenty.
'HERE WE GO,' the chief master sergeant said. 'That was the vice-chief of their air force, and the commanding general of Second Iraqi Army Corps—plus families,' he added. The decryption had required just over two hours from the time the scrambled signal had been copied down.
'Expendables?' the USAF lieutenant asked. She was learning, the other spooks thought.
'Relatively so,' Major Sabah agreed with a nod. 'We need to look for another aircraft lifting off from Mehrabad soon after this one lands.'
'Where to, sir?'
'Ah. Lieutenant, that is the question, is it not?'
'Sudan,' the chief thought. He'd been in-country for two years, and it was his second tour at PALM BOWL.
'I would not wager against you on that, Sergeant,' Sabah observed with a wink. 'We should confirm that through the time cycle of the flights out of Baghdad.' And he really couldn't make a judgment call on the entire exercise until then, though he already had flagged his own superiors that something unusual was afoot. Soon it would be time for the Americans to do the same.
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, a preliminary report was on its way from KKMC to Fort Meade, Maryland, where the vagaries of time landed it in the watch center just after midnight. From the National Security Agency it was cross-decked by fiber-optic cable to Langley, Virginia, into Mercury, the CIA's communications-watch facility, then upstairs to the CIA's Operations Center, room 7-F-27 in the old headquarters building. At every stop, the information was handed over raw, sometimes with the local assessment, but more often without, or if it were, placed at the bottom so that the national intelligence officers in charge of the various watches could make their own assessments, and duplicate the work of others. Mostly this made sense, but in fast-breaking situations it very often did not. The problem was that one couldn't tell the difference in a crisis.
The national intelligence officer in charge of the watch at CIA was Ben Goodley, a fast-riser in the Directorate of Intelligence, recently awarded his NIO card, along with the worst duty schedule because of his lack of seniority. As usual, he showed his good sense by turning to his area-specialist and handing over the printout just as fast as he could read the pages and tear the sheets away from the staple.
'Meltdown,' the area-specialist said by the end of page three. Which was not unexpected, but neither was it pleasant.
'Doubts?'
'My boy' — the area specialist had twenty years on his boss—'they ain't going to Tehran to shop.'
'SNIE?' Goodley asked, meaning a Special National Intelligence Estimate, an important official document meant for unusual situations.
'I think so. The Iraqi government is coming down.' It wasn't all that much of a surprise.
'Three days?'
'If that much.'
Goodley stood. 'Okay, let's get it drafted.'
17 THE REVIVAL
IT IS TO BE EXPECTED THAT important things never happen at convenient times. Whether the birth of a baby or a national emergency, all such events seem to find the appropriate people asleep or otherwise indisposed. In this case, there was nothing to be done. Ben Goodley determined that CIA had no assets in place to confirm the signal-intelligence take, and interested though his country was in the region, there was no action that could be taken. The public news organizations hadn't twigged to this development, and as was often the case, CIA would play dumb until they did. In doing so, the Central Intelligence Agency would give greater substance to the public belief that the news organizations were as efficient as the government in finding things out. It wasn't always the case, but was more frequently so than Good-ley would have preferred.
This SNIE would be a short one. The substance of it didn't require a great deal of pontificating, and the fact of it didn't take long to present. Goodley and his area specialist took half an hour to draft it. A computer printer
