"So he didn't like him much."

"Maybe."

"Terry, please, leave it alone. It was just a phrase. It's the gas weapon.

That's what he's counting on. All the rest of your a.n.a.lysis we agree with."

Martin left first, the two intelligence officers twenty minutes later.

Shrugged into their coats, collars up, they went down the sidewalk looking for a taxi.

"You know," said Laing, "he's a clever little b.u.g.g.e.r, and I quite like him. But he really is a terrible fusspot. You've heard about his private life?"

A cab went by, empty, its light off. Tea break time. Laing swore at it.

"Yes, of course, the Box ran a check."

The Box, or Box 500, is slang for the Security Service, MI-5. Once, long ago, the address of MI-5 really was P.O. Box 500, London.

"Well, there you are then," said Laing.

"Steve, I really don't think that's got anything to do with it."

Laing stopped and turned to his subordinate.

"Simon, trust me. He's got a bee in his bonnet, and he's just wasting our time. Take a word of advice. Just drop the professor."

"It will be the poison gas weapon, Mr. President."

Three days after the New Year, such festivities as there had been in the White House-and for most there had been no pause at all-had long died away. The whole West Wing, the heart of the Bush administration, was humming with activity.

In the quiet of the Oval Office, George Bush sat behind the great desk, backed by the tall narrow windows, five inches of pale green bulletproof gla.s.s, and beneath the seal of the United States.

Facing him was Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft, the National Security Adviser.

The President glanced down at the digest of the a.n.a.lyses that had just been presented to him.

"Everyone is agreed on this?" he asked.

"Yes, sir. The stuff that just came in from London shows their people completely concur with ours. Saddam Hussein will not pull out of Kuwait unless he is given an out, a face-saver, which we will ensure he does not get. For the rest, he will rely on ma.s.s gas attacks on the Coalition ground forces, either before or during their invasion across the border."

George Bush was the first American President since John F. Kennedy who had actually been in combat. He had seen American bodies killed in action. But there was something particularly hideous, especially foul, in the thought of young combat soldiers writhing through their

last moments of life as gas tore at their lung tissues and crippled their central nervous systems. "And how will he launch this gas?" he asked. "We believe there are four options, Mr. President. The obvious one is by canisters launched from fighters and strike bombers, Colin Powell has just been on the line to Chuck Horner in Riyadh. General Horner says he needs thirty-five days of unceasing air war. After day twenty, no Iraqi airplane will reach the border. By day thirty, no Iraqi plane will take off for more than sixty seconds. He says he guarantees it, sir. You can have his stars on it." "And the rest?" "Saddam has a number of MLRS batteries. That would seem to be the second line of possibility." Iraq's multilaunch rocket systems were Soviet-built and based on the old Katyushkas used with devastating effect by the Soviet Army in the Second World War. Now much updated, these rockets, launched in rapid sequence from a rectangular "pack" on the back of a truck or from a fixed position, had a range of one hundred kilometers. "Naturally, Mr. President, because of their range, they would have to be launched from within Kuwait or the Iraqi desert to the west. We believe the J-STARs will find them on their radars and they will be taken out. The Iraqis can camouflage them all they like, but the metal will show up. "For the rest, Iraq has stockpiles of gas-tipped sh.e.l.ls for use by tanks and artillery. Range, under thirty-seven kilometers-nineteen miles. We know the stockpiles are already on site, but at that range it's all desert-no cover. The Air boys are confident they can find them and destroy them. And then there are the Scuds-they're being taken care of even as we speak."

"And the preventive measures?"

"They're completed, Mr. President. In case of an anthrax attack, every man is being inoculated. The Brits have done it too. We are increasing production of the anti-anthrax vaccine every hour. And every man and woman has a gas mask and a coverall gas cape. If he tries it ..."

The President rose, turned, and stared up at the seal. The bald eagle, clutching its arrows, stared back.

Twenty years earlier, there had been those awful zip-up body bags coming back from Vietnam, and he knew that a supply was even now stored in discreet unmarked containers under the Saudi sun. Even with all the precautions, there would be patches of exposed skin, masks that could not be reached and pulled on in time.

The following year would be the reelection campaign. But that was not the point. Win or lose, he had no intention of going down in history as the American President who consigned tens of thousands of soldiers to die, not as in Vietnam over nine years, but over a few weeks or even days.

"Brent ..."

"Mr. President."

"James Baker is due to see Tariq Aziz shortly."

"In six days in Geneva."

"Ask him to come and see me, please."

In the first week of January, Edith Hardenberg began to enjoy herself, really enjoy herself, for the first time in years. There was a thrill in exploring and explaining to her eager young friend the wonders of culture that lay within her city.

The Winkler Bank was permitting its staff a four-day break to include

New Year's Day; after that, they would have to confine their cultural outings to the evenings, which still gave the promise of theater, concerts, and recitals, and weekends, when the museums and galleries were still open. They spent half a day at the Jugendstil, admiring the Art Nouveau, and another half-day in the Sezession, where hangs the permanent exhibition of the works of Klimt. The young Jordanian was delighted and excited, a fund of questions pouring from him, and Edith Hardenberg caught the enthusiasm, her eyes alight as she explained that there was another wonderful exhibition at the Kunstlerhaus that was definitely a must for the next weekend. After the Klimt viewing, Karim took her to dine at the Rotisserie Sirk. She protested at the expense, but her new friend explained that his father was a wealthy surgeon in Amman and that his allowance was generous. Amazingly, she allowed him to pour her a gla.s.s of wine and failed to notice when he refilled it. Her talk became more animated, and there was a small flush on each pale cheek. Over coffee, Karim leaned forward and placed his hand on hers. She looked fl.u.s.tered and glanced hastily around to see if anyone had noticed, but no one bothered. She withdrew her hand, but quite slowly. By the end of the week, they had visited four of the cultural treasures she had in mind, and when they walked back through the cold darkness toward her car after an evening at the Musikverein, he took her gloved hand in his and kept it there. She did not pull it away, feeling the warmth seep through the cotton glove. "You are very kind to do all this for me," he said gravely. "I am sure it must be boring for you."

"Oh, no, it's not at all," she said earnestly. "I enjoy seeing and hearing all these beautiful things. I'm so glad you do too. Quite soon, you'll be an expert on European art and culture." When they reached her car, he smiled down at her, took her wind-chilled face between both his bare but surprisingly hot hands, and kissed her lightly on the lips. "Danke, Edith." Then he walked away. She drove herself home as usual, but her hands were trembling and she nearly hit a tram.

Secretary of State James Baker met Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz in Geneva on January 9. It was not a long meeting, and it was not a friendly one. It was not intended to be. There was a single English-Arabic interpreter present, though Tariq Aziz's English was perfectly up to the task of understanding the American, who spoke slowly and with great clarity. His message was quite simple. If, during the course of any hostilities that may occur between our countries, your government chooses to employ the internationally banned weapon of poison gas, I am authorized to inform you and President Hussein that my country will use a nuclear device. We will, in short, nuke Baghdad. The dumpy, gray-haired Iraqi took in the sense of the message but at first could not believe it. For one thing, no man in his senses would dare convey such a barefaced threat to the Rais. He had a habit, in the manner of former Babylonian kings, of taking out his displeasure on the message-bearer. For another, he was not sure at first that the American was serious. The fallout, the collateral damage of a nuclear bomb, would not be confined to Baghdad, surely? It would devastate half the Middle East, would it not?Tariq Aziz, as he headed home for Baghdad a deeply troubled man, did not know three things.One was that the so-called "theater" nuclear bombs of modern science are a far cry from the Hiroshima bomb of 1945. The new, limited-damage "clean" bombs are called thus because although their heat-andblast damage is as appalling as ever, the radioactivity they leave behind is of extremely short duration.The second thing was that within the hull of the battleship Wisconsin, then stationed in the Gulf and joined by the Missouri, were three very special steel-and-concrete caissons, strong enough, if the ship went down, not to degrade for ten thousand years. Inside them were three Tomahawk cruise missiles the United States hoped never to have to use.The third was that the Secretary of State was not joking at all.

General Sir Peter de la Billiere walked alone in the darkness of the desert night, accompanied only by the crunch of sand beneath his feet and his troubled private thoughts.

A lifelong professional soldier and a combat veteran, his tastes were as ascetic as his frame was spare. Unable to take much pleasure in the luxury offered by cities, he felt more at home and at ease in camps and bivouacs and the company of fellow soldiers. Like others before him, he appreciated the Arabian desert-its vast horizons, blazing heat, and numbing cold, and many times its awesome silence.

That night, on a visit to the front lines-one of the treats he permitted himself as often as possible-he had walked away from St. Patrick's

Camp, leaving behind him the brooding Challenger tanks beneath their nets, crouching animals patiently waiting for their time, and the hussars preparing the evening meal beneath them. By then a close friend of General Schwarzkopf and privy to all the planning staff's innermost councils, the general knew that war was coming. Less than a week before the expiration of the United Nations deadline, there was not a hint that Saddam Hussein had any intention of pulling out of Kuwait. What worried him that night under the stars of the Saudi desert was that he could not understand what the tyrant of Baghdad thought he was up to. As a soldier, the British general liked to understand his enemy, to plumb his intentions, his motivations, his tactics, his overall strategy. Personally, he had nothing but contempt for the man in Baghdad. The amply doc.u.mented files depicting genocide, torture, and murder revolted him. Saddam was not a soldier, never had been, and what real military talent he had had in his army he had largely wasted by overruling his generals or having the best of them executed. That was not the problem; the problem was that Saddam Hussein had clearly taken overall command of every aspect-political and military-and nothing he did made a fraction of sense. He had invaded Kuwait at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons. That done, he had blown away his chances of rea.s.suring his fellow Arabs that he was open to diplomacy, susceptible to reason, and that the problem could be resolved within the ambit of inter-Arab negotiations. Had he taken that road, he could probably have counted quite rightly on the oil continuing to flow, and the West gradually losing interest as the inter-Arab conferences bogged down for years. It was the dictator's own stupidity that had brought in the West, and to cap it, the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, with its multiple rapes and brutality and its attempt to use Westerners as human shields, had guaranteed his utter isolation. In the early days Saddam Hussein had had the rich oil fields of northeastern Saudi Arabia at his mercy, and he had hung back. With his army and air force under good generalship, he could even have reached Riyadh and dictated his terms. He had failed, and Desert Shield had been put in place while he masterminded one public relations disaster after another in Baghdad. He might be streetwise, but in all other matters he was a strategic buffoon. And yet, reasoned the British general, how could any man be so stupid? Even in the face of the air power now ranged against him, Saddam Hussein was making every single wrong move, politically and militarily. Had he no idea what rage from the skies was about to be visited on Iraq? Did he really not comprehend the level of the firepower that was about to set his armory back by ten years in five weeks? The general stopped and stared across the desert toward the north. There was no moon that night, but the stars in the desert are so bright that dim outlines can be seen by their light alone. The land was flat, running away to the labyrinth of sand walls, fire ditches, minefields, barbed-wire entanglements, and gullies that made up the Iraqi defensive line, through which the American engineers of the Big Red One would blast a path to let the Challengers roll. And yet the tyrant of Baghdad had one single ace of which the general knew and which he feared: Saddam could simply pull out of Kuwait. Time was not on the Allies' side; it belonged to Iraq. On March 15 the Moslem feast of Ramadan would begin. For a month no food or water should pa.s.s the lips of any Moslem between sunrise and sunset. The nights were for eating and drinking. That made going to war, for a Moslem army in Ramadan, almost impossible. After April 15, the desert would become an inferno, with temperatures rising to 130 degrees. Pressure would build up back home to bring the boys out; by summer, the pressure at home and the misery of the desert would become irresistible. The Allies would have to pull out and, having done so, would never come back again like this. The Coalition was a one-time-only phenomenon. So March 15 was the limit. Working backward, the ground war might last up to twenty days. It would have to start, if at all, by February 23. But Chuck Horner needed his thirty-five days of air war to smash the Iraqi weapons, regiments, and defenses. January 17-that was the latest possible date. Supposing Saddam pulled out? He would leave half a million Allies looking like fools, strung out in the desert, hanging in the wire, with nowhere to go but back. Yet Saddam was adamant-he would not pull out. What was that crazy man up to? the general asked himself again. Was he waiting for something, some divine intervention of his own imagining, that would crush his enemies and leave him triumphant? There was a yell out of the tank camp behind him. He turned. The commanding officer of the Queen's Royal Irish Hussars, Arthur Denaro, was calling him to supper. Burly, jovial Arthur Denaro, who would be in the first tank through that gap one day. He smiled and began to walk back. It would be good to squat in the sand with the men, shoveling baked beans and bread out of a mess tin, listening to the voices in the glow of the fire, the flat tw.a.n.g of Lancashire, the rolling burr of Hampshire, and the soft brogue of Ireland; to laugh at the leg-pulling and the jokes, the crude vocabulary of men who used blunt English to say exactly what they meant, and with good humor.

Lord rot that man in the north. What the h.e.l.l was he waiting for?

Chapter 14.

The answer to the British general's puzzlement lay on a padded trolley under the fluorescent lights of the factory, eighty feet beneath the desert of Iraq, where it had been built. An engineer stepped rapidly back to stand at attention as the door to the room opened. Only five men came in before the two armed guards from the presidential security detail, the Amn-al-Kha.s.s, closed the door. Four of the men deferred to the one in the center. He wore, as usual, his combat uniform over gleaming black calf-boots, his personal sidearm at his waist, green cotton kerchief covering the triangle between jacket and throat. One of the other four was the personal bodyguard who, even in here, where everyone had been checked five times for concealed weapons, would not leave his side. Between the Rais and his bodyguard stood his son-in-law, Hussein Kamil, head of the Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization, the MIMI. As in so many things, it was the MIMI that had taken over from the Ministry of Defense. On the other side of the President stood the mastermind of the program, Dr. Jaafar Al-Jaafar, Iraq's nuclear genius. Beside him, but a bit to the rear, stood Dr. Salah Siddiqui. Where Jaafar was the physicist, Siddiqui was the engineer. The steel of their baby gleamed dully in the white light. It was fourteen feet long and just over three feet in diameter. At the rear, four feet were taken up by an elaborate impact-absorbing device that would be shed as soon as the projectile had been launched. Even the remainder of the ten-foot-long casing was in fact a sabot, a sleeve in eight identical sections. Tiny explosive bolts would cause this to break away as the projectile departed on its mission, leaving the slimmer, two-foot-diameter core to carry on alone. The sabot was only there to fill out the twenty-four-inch projectile to the thirty-nine inches needed to occupy the bore of the launcher, and to protect the four rigid tail fins it concealed. Iraq did not possess the telemetry necessary to operate movable fins by radio signals from the earth, but the rigid fins would serve to stabilize the projectile in flight and prevent it from wobbling or tumbling. At the front, the nose cone was on ultratough maraging steel and needle-pointed. This too would eventually become dispensable. When a rocket, having entered inner s.p.a.ce on its flight, reenters the earth's atmosphere, the air becoming denser on the downward flight creates a friction heat enough to melt the nose cone away. That is why reentering astronauts need that heat shield-to prevent their capsule from being incinerated. The device the five Iraqis surveyed that night was similar. The steel nose cone would ease its flight upward but could not survive reentry. Were it retained, the melting metal would bend and buckle, causing the falling body to sway, swerve, turn broadside onto the rushing air, and burn up. The steel nose was designed to blow apart at the apogee of flight, revealing beneath it a reentry cone, shorter, blunter, and made of carbon fiber. In the days when Dr. Gerald Bull was alive, he had tried to buy, on behalf of Baghdad, a British firm in Northern Ireland called LearFan. It was an aviation company gone bust. It had tried to build executive jets with many components made of carbon fiber. What interested Dr. Bull and Baghdad was not executive airplanes, but the carbon-fiber filament-winding machines at LearFan. Carbon fiber is extremely heat-resistant, but it is also very hard to work. The carbon is first reduced to a sort of wool, from which a thread or filament is spun. The thread is laid and cross-plaited many times over a mold, then bonded into a sh.e.l.l to create the desired shape. Because carbon fiber is vital in rocket technology, and that technology is cla.s.sified, great care is taken in monitoring the export of such machines. When the British intelligence people learned where the LearFan equipment was destined and consulted Washington, the deal had been killed. It was then a.s.sumed that Iraq would not acquire her carbon-filament technology. The experts were wrong. Iraq tried another tack, which worked. An American supplier of air-conditioning and insulation products was unwittingly persuaded to sell to an Iraqi front company the machinery for spinning rock-wool. In Iraq this was modified by Iraqi engineers to spin carbon fiber. Between the impact-absorber at the back and the nose cone rested the work of Dr. Siddiqui-a small, workaday, but perfectly functioning atomic bomb, to be triggered on the gun-barrel principle, using the catalysts of lithium and polonium to create the blizzard of neutrons necessary to start the chain reaction. Inside the engineering of Dr. Siddiqui was the real triumph, a spherical ball and a tubular plug, between them weighing thirty-five kilograms and produced under the aegis of Dr. Jaafar. Both were of pure enriched uranium-235.A slow smile of satisfaction spread beneath the thick black moustache. The President advanced and ran a forefinger down the burnished steel."It will work? It will really work?" he whispered."Yes, Sayid Rais," said the physicist.The head in the black beret nodded slowly several times."You are to be congratulated, my brothers."Beneath the projectile, on a wooden stand, was a simple plaque. It read: Qubth-ut-Allah.

* * * Tariq Aziz had contemplated long and hard as to how, if at all, he could convey to his President the American threat so brutally put before him in Geneva. Twenty years they had known each other, twenty years during which the Foreign Minister had served his master with doglike devotion, always taking his side during those early struggles within the Ba'ath Party hierarchy when there had been other claimants for power, always following his personal judgment that the utter ruthlessness of the man from Tikrit would triumph, and always being proved right. They had climbed the greasy pole of power in a Middle East dictatorship together, the one always in the shadow of the other. The gray-haired, stubby Aziz had managed to overcome the initial disadvantage of his higher education and grasp of two European languages by sheer blind obedience. Leaving the actual violence to others, he had watched and approved, as all must do in the court of Saddam Hussein, as purge after purge had seen columns of Army officers and once-trusted Party men disgraced and taken away for execution, a sentence often preceded by agonized hours with the tormentors at Abu Ghraib. He had seen good generals removed and shot for trying to stand up for the men under their command, and he knew that real conspirators had died more horribly than he cared to imagine. He had watched the Al-Juburi tribe, once so powerful in the Army that no one dared to offend them, stripped and humbled, the survivors brought to heel and obedience. He had stayed silent as Saddam's half-brother Ali Ha.s.san Majid, then Interior Minister, had masterminded the genocide of the Kurds, not simply at Halabja but at fifty other towns and villages, wiped away with bombs, artillery, and gas. Tariq Aziz, like all those in the entourage of the Rais, knew that there was nowhere else for him to go. If anything happened to his master, he too would be finished for all time. Unlike some around the throne, he was too smart to believe that this was a popular regime. His real fear was not the foreigners but the awful revenge of the people of Iraq if ever the veil of Saddam's protection were removed from him. His problem that January 11, as he waited for the personal appointment to which he had been summoned on his return from Europe, was how to phrase the American threat without attracting the inevitable rage onto himself. The Rais, he knew, could easily suspect that it was he, the Foreign Minister, who had really suggested the threat to the Americans. There is no logic to paranoia, only gut instinct, sometimes right and sometimes wrong. Many innocent men had died, and their families with them, on the basis of some inspirational suspicion by the Rais. Two hours later, returning to his car, he was relieved, smiling and puzzled. The reason for his relief was easy; his President had proved to be relaxed and genial. He had listened with approval to Tariq Aziz's glowing report of his mission to Geneva, of the widespread sympathy he detected in all those he spoke to with regard to Iraq's position, and of the general anti-American feeling that appeared to be growing in the West. He had nodded understandingly as Tariq heaped blame on the American warmongers, and when, finally consumed with his own sense of outrage, he mentioned what James Baker had actually said to him, the awaited explosion of rage from the Rais had not come. While others around the table glowered and fumed, Saddam Hussein had continued to nod and smile. The Foreign Minister was smiling as he left because at the last his Rais had actually congratulated him on his European mission. The fact that, by any normal diplomatic standards, that mission had been a disaster-rebuffed on every side, treated with freezing courtesy by his hosts, unable to dent the resolve of the Coalition ranged against his country-did not seem to matter. His puzzlement stemmed from something the Rais had said at the end of the audience. It had been an aside, a muttered remark to the Foreign Minister alone as the President had seen him to the door. "Rafeek, dear Comrade, do not worry. Soon I shall have a surprise for the Americans. Not yet. But if the Beni el Kalb ever try to cross the border, I shall respond not with gas, but with the Fist of G.o.d." Tariq Aziz had nodded in agreement, even though he did not know what the Rais was talking about. With others, he found out twenty-four hours later.

The morning of January 12 saw the last meeting of the full Revolutionary Command Council to be held in the Presidential Palace, at the corner of July 14 Street and Kindi Street. A week later it was bombed to rubble, but the bird inside was long flown. As usual, the summons to the meeting came at the last moment. No matter how high one rose in the hierarchy, no matter how trusted one might be, no one but a tiny handful of family, intimates, and personal bodyguards ever knew exactly where the Rais would be at a given hour on any day. If he was still alive at all after seven major, serious attempts at a.s.sa.s.sination, it was because of his obsession with personal security. Neither Counterintelligence nor the Secret Police of Omar Khatib, and certainly not the Army; not even the Republican Guard were entrusted with that security. That task fell to the Amn-al-Kha.s.s. Young they might be, most barely out of their teens, but their loyalty was fanatical and absolute. Their commander was the Rais's own son Kusay. No conspirator could ever know upon what road the Rais would be traveling, when, or in what vehicle. His visits to army bases or industrial installations were always surprises, not only to the visited but also to those around him. Even in Baghdad he flitted from location to location on a whim, sometimes spending a few days in the palace, at other times retiring to his bunker behind and beneath the Rashid Hotel. Every plate set before him had to be tasted first, and the food-taster was the first-born son of the chef. Every drink came from a bottle with an unbroken seal. That morning the summons to the meeting at the palace came to each member of the RCC by special messenger one hour before the meeting. No time was thus left for preparations for an a.s.sa.s.sination.

The limousines swerved through the gate, deposited their charges, and went away to a special parking garage. Each member of the RCC pa.s.sed through a metal-detecting arch; no personal sidearms were allowed. When they were a.s.sembled in the large conference room with its T-shaped table, there were thirty-three of them. Eight sat at the top of the T, flanking the empty throne at the center. The rest faced each other down the length of the stem of the T. Seven of those present were related to the Rais by blood and three more by marriage. These plus eight more were from Tikrit or its immediate surroundings. All were long-standing members of the Ba'ath Party. Ten of the thirty-three were cabinet ministers and nine were Army or Air Force generals. Saadi Tumah Abbas, former commander of the Republican Guard, had been promoted to Defense Minister that very morning and sat beaming on the top table. He had replaced Abd Al-Jabber Shenshall, the renegade Kurd who had long since thrown in his lot with the butcher of his own people. Among the Army generals were Mustafa Radi for the Infantry, Farouk Ridha of the Artillery, Ali Musuli of the Engineers, and Abdullah Kadiri of the Armored Corps. At the far end of the table were the three men controlling the intelligence apparatus: Dr. Ubaidi of the Foreign Intelligence arm of the Mukhabarat, Ha.s.san Rahmani of Counterintelligence, and Omar Khatib of the Secret Police. When the Rais entered, everyone rose and clapped. He smiled, took his chair, bade them be seated, and began his statement. They were not here to discuss anything; they were here to be told something. Only the son-in-law, Hussein Kamil, showed no surprise when the Rais made his peroration. When, after forty minutes of speech invoking the unbroken series of triumphs that had marked his leadership, he gave them his news, the immediate reaction was of stunned silence. That Iraq had been trying for years, they knew. That fruition in this one area of technology that alone seemed capable of inspiring a thrill of fear throughout the world and awe even among the mighty Americans had been achieved-now, on the very threshold of war-seemed unbelievable. Divine intervention. But the Divinity was not in heaven above; he sat right here, with them, smiling quietly. It was Hussein Kamil, forewarned, who rose and led the ovation. The others scrambled to follow, each fearing to be last to his feet or most subdued in his applause. Then no one was prepared to be first to stop. When he returned to his office two hours later, Ha.s.san Rahmani, the urbane and cosmopolitan head of Counterintelligence, cleared his desk, ordered no interruptions, and sat at his desk with a strong black coffee. He needed to think, and think deeply. As with everyone else in that room, the news had shaken him. At a stroke the balance of power in the Middle East had changed, even though no one else yet knew. After the Rais, who with raised hands called with admirable self-deprecation for the ovation to cease, had resumed his chairmanship, every man in the room had been sworn to silence. This Rahmani could understand. Despite the raging euphoria that had enveloped them all as they left and in which he had unstintingly joined, he could foresee major problems. No device of this kind was worth a jot unless your friends-and more important, your enemies-knew that you had it. Then only did potential enemies come crawling as friends.

Some nations who had developed the weapon had simply announced the fact with a major test and let the rest of the world work out the consequences. Others, like Israel and South Africa, had simply hinted at what they possessed but never confirmed, leaving the world and particularly the neighbors to guess. Sometimes that worked better; imaginations ran riot. But that, Rahmani became convinced, would simply not work for Iraq. If what he had been told was true-and he was not convinced that the whole exercise was not another ploy, counting on an eventual leak to gain another stay of execution-then no one outside Iraq would believe it. The only way for Iraq to deter would be to prove it. This the Rais apparently now refused to do. There were, of course, major problems to proving any such claim. To test on home territory would be out of the question, utter madness. To send a ship deep into the southern Indian Ocean, abandon it, and let the test happen there might have been possible once, but not now. All ports were firmly blockaded. But a team from the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna could be invited to examine and satisfy themselves that this was no lie. After all, the IAEA had been visiting almost yearly for a decade and had always been consummately fooled as to what was going on. Given visual evidence, they would have to believe their own eyes and tests, eat humble pie over their past gullibility, and confirm the truth. Yet he, Rahmani, had just heard that that route was formally forbidden. Why? Because it was all a lie? Because the Rais had something else in mind? And more important, what was in it for him, Rahmani? For months he had counted on Saddam Hussein to bl.u.s.ter his way into a war he could not win; now he had done it. Rahmani had counted on the defeat culminating in the American-engineered downfall of the Rais and his own elevation in the American-sponsored successor regime. Now things had changed. He needed, he realized, time to think, to work out how best to play this amazing new card.

That evening, when darkness had fallen, a chalk sign appeared on a wall behind the Chaldean Church of St. Joseph in the Area of the Christians. It resembled a figure eight on its side. The citizens of Baghdad trembled that night. Despite the ceaseless blast of propaganda on the local Iraqi radio and the blind faith of many that it was all true, there were others who quietly listened to the BBC World Service in Arabic, prepared in London but broadcast out of Cyprus, and knew that the Beni Naji were telling the truth. War was coming. The a.s.sumption in the city was that the Americans would start with the carpet-bombing of Baghdad, an a.s.sumption that went right up to the Presidential Palace itself. There would be ma.s.sive civilian casualties. The regime a.s.sumed this but did not mind. In high places the calculation was that the global effect of such ma.s.sive slaughter of civilians in their homes would cause a worldwide revulsion against the United States, forcing her to desist and depart. That was why such a heavy foreign press contingent was still allowed and indeed encouraged to occupy the Rashid Hotel. Guides were on standby to hurry the foreign TV cameras to the scenes of the genocide as soon as it started. The subtlety of this argument somehow escaped those who were actually living in the homes of Baghdad. Many had already fled, the non-Iraqis heading for the Jordanian border to swell the five-monthlong tide of refugees from Kuwait, the Iraqis seeking sanctuary in the countryside. No one suspected, including the millions of couch potatoes glued to their screens across the United States and Europe, the true level of sophistication that was now within the grasp of the lugubrious Chuck Horner down in Riyadh. n.o.body then could envisage that most of the targets would be selected from a menu prepared by the cameras of satellites in s.p.a.ce and demolished by laser-guided bombs that rarely hit what they were not aimed at. What the citizens of Baghdad did know, as the truth gleaned from the BBC filtered through the bazaars and markets, was that four days from midnight January 12, the deadline to quit Kuwait would expire and the American warplanes would come. So the city was quiet in expectation. Mike Martin pedaled his bicycle slowly out of Shurja Street and around the back of the church. He saw the chalk mark on the wall as he pedaled by, and went on. At the end of the alley he paused, stepped off the bicycle, and spent some time adjusting the chain while he looked back the way he had come to see if there was any movement behind him. None. No shifting of the feet of the Secret Police in their doorways, no heads poking over the skyline of the roofs. He pedaled back, reached out with the damp cloth, erased the mark, and rode away. The figure eight meant that a message awaited him under the flagstone in the abandoned courtyard off Abu Nawas Street, down by the river barely half a mile away. As a boy he had played down there, running along the quaysides with Ha.s.san Rahmani and Abdelkarim Badri, where the vendors cooked the delicious mosgouf over beds of camelthorn embers, selling the tender portions of the Tigris river carp to pa.s.sersby. Now the shops were closed, the tea houses shuttered; few people wandered along the quays as they used to. The silence served him well. At the top of Abu Nawas he saw a group of AMAM plainclothes guards, but they took no notice of the fellagha pedaling on his master's business. He was heartened by the sight of them; the AMAM was nothing if not clumsy. If they were going to stake out a dead-letter box, they would not put a group of men so obviously at the head of the street. Their stake-out would be an attempt at sophistication, but flawed. The message was there. The brick went back into its place in a second, the folded paper into the crotch of his underpants. Minutes later, he was crossing the Ahrar Bridge over the Tigris, back from Risafa into Karch, and on to the Soviet diplomat's house in Mansour. In nine weeks his life had settled down in the walled villa. The Russian cook and her husband treated him fairly, and he had picked up a smattering of their language. He shopped every day for fresh produce, which gave him good reason to service all his dead-letter boxes. He had transmitted fourteen messages to the unseen Jericho and had received fifteen from him. Eight times he had been stopped by the AMAM, but each time his humble demeanor, his bicycle and basket of vegetables, fruit, coffee, spices, and groceries, plus his letter from the diplomatic household and his visible poverty had caused him to be sent on his way. He could not know what war plans were shaping up in Riyadh, but he had to write all the questions and queries for Jericho in his own Arabic script after listening to them on the incoming tapes, and he had to read Jericho's answers in order to send them back in burst transmissions to Simon Paxman.

As a soldier, he could only estimate that Jericho's information, political and military, had to be invaluable to a commanding general preparing to attack Iraq. He had already acquired an oil heater for his shack and a kerosene lamp to light it. Hessian sacks from the market now made curtains for all the windows, and the crunch of feet on the gravel warned him if anyone approached the door. That night, he returned gratefully to the warmth of his home, bolted the door, made sure all the curtains covered every square inch of the windows, lit his lamp, and read Jericho's latest message. It was shorter than usual, but that did not lessen its impact. Martin read it twice to make sure that even he had not suddenly lost his grasp of Arabic, muttered "Jesus Christ," and removed his loose tiles to reveal the tape recorder. Lest there be any misunderstanding, he read the message slowly and carefully in both Arabic and English into the tape machine before switching the controls to speed-wind and reducing his five-minute message to one and a half seconds. He transmitted it at twenty minutes after midnight.

Because he knew there was a transmission window between fifteen and thirty minutes after twelve that night, Simon Paxman had not bothered to go to bed. He was playing cards with one of the radio men when the message came in. The second radio operator brought the news from the communications room. "You'd better come and listen to this now, Simon," he said. Although the SIS operation in Riyadh involved a lot more than four men, the running of Jericho was regarded as so secret that only Paxman, the Head of Station Julian Gray, and two radio men were involved. Their three rooms had been virtually sealed off from the rest of the villa. Simon Paxman listened to the voice on the big tape machine in the radio shack, which was in fact a converted bedroom. Martin spoke in Arabic first, giving the literal handwritten message from Jericho twice, then his own translation twice. As he listened, Paxman felt a great cold hand moving deep in his stomach. Something had gone wrong, badly wrong. What he was hearing simply could not be. The other two men stood in silence beside him. "Is it him?" asked Paxman urgently as soon as the message had finished. His first thought was that Martin had been taken and the voice was that of an impostor. "It's him-I checked the ossy. There's no doubt it's him." Speech patterns have varying tones and rhythms, highs and lows, cadences that can be recorded on an oscilloscope that reduces them to a series of lines on a screen, like a heart monitor in a cardiac unit. Every human voice is slightly different, no matter how good the mimic. Before leaving for Baghdad, Mike Martin's voice had been recorded on such a machine. Later transmissions out of Baghdad had endured the same fate, in case the slowing-down and speeding-up, together with any distortion by tape machine or satellite transmission, caused distortions. The voice that came from Baghdad that night checked with the recorded voice. It was Martin speaking and no one else. Paxman's second fear was that Martin had been caught, tortured, and turned, that he was now broadcasting under duress. He rejected the idea as very unlikely.

There were preagreed words, a pause, a hesitation, a cough, that would warn the listeners in Riyadh if ever he were not transmitting as a free agent. Besides, his previous broadcast had been only three days earlier.Brutal the Iraqi Secret Police might be, but they were not quick. And Martin was tough. A man broken and turned at such speed would be shattered, a tortured wreck, and it would show in the speech delivery.That meant Martin was on the level-the message he had read was precisely what he had received that night from Jericho. Which left more imponderables. Either Jericho was right, mistaken, or lying."Get Julian," Paxman told one of the radio men.While the man went to fetch the British Head of Station from his bed upstairs, Paxman rang the private line of his American counterpart, Chip Barber."Chip, better get your backside over here-fast," he said.The CIA man came awake fast. Something in the Englishman's voice told him this was no time for sleepy banter."Problem, ol' buddy?""That's the way it looks from here," admitted Paxman.Barber was across the city and into the SIS house in thirty minutes, sweater and trousers over his pajamas. It was one A.M.By then, Paxman had the tape in English and Arabic, plus a transcript in both languages. The two radio men, who had worked for years in the Middle East, were fluent and confirmed Martin's translation was quite accurate."He has to be joking," breathed Barber when he heard the tape.Paxman ran through the checks he had already made for authenticity of Martin's speaking voice."Look, Simon," said Barber, "this is just Jericho reporting what he claims he heard Saddam say this morning-sorry, yesterday morning.

Chances are, Saddam's lying. Let's face it, he lies like he breathes." Lie or not, this was no matter to be dealt with in Riyadh. The local SIS and CIA stations might supply their generals with tactical and even strategic military information from Jericho, but politics went to London and Washington. Barber checked his watch: seven P.M. in Washington. "They'll be mixing their c.o.c.ktails by now," he said. "Better make 'em strong, boys. I'll get this to Langley right away." "Cocoa and biscuits in London," said Paxman. "I'll have this to Century. Let them sort it out." Barber left to send his copy of the transmission in heavily encrypted code to Bill Stewart, with an urgency rating of "flash," the highest known. That would mean that wherever he was, the cipher people would find him and tell him to go to a secure line. Paxman did the same for Steve Laing, who would be awakened in the middle of the night and told to leave his warm bed to step into a freezing night and head back to London. There was one last thing Paxman could do, which he did. Martin had a transmission window for listening only, and it was at four A.M. Paxman waited up and sent his man in Baghdad a very short but very explicit message. It said Martin should make no attempt until further notice to approach any of his six dead-letter boxes. Just in case.

Karim, the Jordanian student, was making slow but steady progress in his courtship of Fraulein Edith Hardenberg. She allowed him to hold her hand when they walked through the streets of Old Vienna, the sidewalks crackling with frost beneath their feet. She even admitted to herself that she found the hand-holding pleasant.

In the second week of January she obtained tickets at the Burgtheater-Karim paid. The performance was of a play by Grillparzer, Gygus und sein Ring. She explained excitedly before they went in that it was about an old king with several sons, and the one to whom he bequeathed his ring would be the successor. Karim sat through the performance entranced and asked for several explanations in the text, to which he referred constantly during the play. During the intermission Edith was happy to answer them. Later, Avi Herzog would tell Barzilai it was all as exciting as watching paint dry. "You're a philistine," said the Mossad man. "You have no culture." "I'm not here for my culture," said Avi. "Then get on with it, boy." On Sunday Edith, a devout Catholic, went to morning ma.s.s at the Votivkirche. Karim explained that as a Moslem he could not accompany her but would wait at a cafe across the square. Afterward, over coffee that he deliberately laced with a slug of schnapps that brought a pink flush to her cheeks, he explained the differences and similarities between Christianity and Islam-the common worship of the one true G.o.d, the line of patriarchs and prophets, the teachings of the holy books and the moral codes. Edith was fearful but fascinated. She wondered if listening to all this might imperil her immortal soul, but she was amazed to learn that she had been wrong in thinking Moslems bowed down to idols. "I would like dinner," said Karim three days later. "Well, yes, but you spend too much on me," said Edith. She found she could gaze into his young face and his soft brown eyes with pleasure, while constantly warning herself that the ten-year age gap between them made anything more than a platonic friendship quite ridiculous.

"Not in a restaurant." "Where then?" "Will you cook a meal for me, Edith? You can cook? Real Viennese food?" She went bright red at the thought. Each evening, unless she was going alone to a concert, she prepared herself a modest snack that she ate in the small alcove of her flat that served as a dining area. But yes, she thought, she could cook. It had been so long. Besides, she argued with herself, he had taken her to several expensive meals in restaurants ... and he was an extremely well-brought-up and courteous young man. Surely there could be no harm in it.

To say that the Jericho report of the night of January 12-13 caused consternation in certain covert circles in London and Washington would be an understatement. Controlled panic would be nearer the mark. One of the problems was the tiny circle of people who knew of Jericho's existence, let alone the details. The need-to-know principle may sound persnickety or even obsessive, but it works for a reason. All agencies feel an obligation to an a.s.set working for them in a very high-risk situation, no matter how ign.o.ble that a.s.set may be as a human being. The fact that Jericho was clearly a mercenary and no high-minded ideologue was not the point. The fact that he was cynically betraying his country and its government was irrelevant. The government of Iraq was perceived to be repulsive anyway, so one rogue was playing traitor to another bunch. The point was, apart from his obvious value and the fact that his information might well save Allied lives on the battlefield, Jericho was a high-value a.s.set, and both the agencies running him had kept his very existence known only to a tiny circle of initiates. No government ministers, no politicians, no civil servants, and no soldiers had been formally told that any Jericho existed. His product therefore had been disguised in a variety of ways. A whole range of cover stories had been devised to explain where this torrent of information was coming from. Military dispositions were supposed to stem from a series of defections by Iraqi soldiers from the Kuwait theater, including a nonexistent major being extensively debriefed at a secret intelligence facility in the Middle East but outside Saudi Arabia. Scientific and technical information regarding weapons of ma.s.s destruction was said to have been gleaned from an Iraqi science graduate who had defected to the British after studying at Imperial College, London, and falling in love with an English girl, and an intensive second run-through of European technicians who had worked inside Iraq between 1985 and 1990. Political intelligence was attributed to a mix of refugees pouring out of Iraq, covert radio messages from occupied Kuwait, and brilliant signals intelligence and electronic intelligence-sigint and elint-listening-in, and aerial surveillance. But how to explain a direct report of Saddam's own words, however bizarre their claim, conducted within a closed meeting inside his own palace, without admitting to an agent in the highest circles of Baghdad? The dangers of making such an admission were appalling. For one thing, there are leaks. There are leaks all the time. Cabinet doc.u.ments leak, civil service memoranda leak, and interdepartmental messages leak.

Politicians, so far as the covert community is concerned, are the worst. To believe the nightmares of the master spooks, they talk to their wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, hairdressers, drivers, and bartenders. They even talk confidentially to each other with a waiter bending over the table. Add to that the fact that Washington and London have press and other media veterans whose investigative talents make the FBI and Scotland Yard seem slow on the uptake, and one has a problem explaining away Jericho's product without admitting to a Jericho. Finally, London still had hundreds of Iraqi students-some certainly agents of Dr. Ismail Ubaidi's Foreign Intelligence arm of the Mukhabarat-prepared to report back anything they saw or heard. It was not just a question of someone denouncing Jericho by name; that would be impossible. But one hint that information had come out of Baghdad that should not have come, and Rahmani's counterintelligence net would go into overdrive to detect and isolate the source. At best, that could ensure Jericho's future silence as he clammed up to protect himself; at worst, his capture. As the countdown for the start of the air war rolled on, the two agencies recontacted all their former experts in the matter of nuclear physics and asked for a rapid rea.s.sessment of the information already given. Was there, after all, any conceivable possibility that Iraq might have a greater and faster isotope separation facility than previously thought? In America experts at Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, and Los Alamos were consulted again and in Britain experts at Harwell and Aldermaston. Department Z at Livermore, the people who constantly monitor Third World nuclear proliferation, was especially pressed. The experts came back, rather testily, to reconfirm their advice. Even taking a worst-case scenario, they said-a.s.suming not one but two entire gas diffusion centrifuge cascades operating not for one but for two years-there was no way in creation Iraq could have more than half the uranium-235 she would need for a single medium-yield device. That left the agencies with a menu of options. Saddam was mistaken because he had been lied to himself. Conclusion: unlikely. Those responsible would pay with their lives for such an outrage against the Rais. Saddam had said it, but he was lying. Conclusion: quite feasible-to boost morale among his flagging and apprehensive supporters. But why confine the news to the innermost fanatics, who were not flagging and who were not apprehensive? Morale-boosting propaganda is for the ma.s.ses and abroad. Unanswerable. Saddam did not say it. Conclusion: the whole report was a farrago of lies. Secondary conclusion: Jericho lied because he is greedy for money and thinks with the war coming his time will soon be over. He had put a million-dollar price tag on his information. Jericho lied because he has been unmasked and has revealed all. Conclusion: also possible, and this option posed horrendous personal hazard to the man in Baghdad to maintain the link. At this point the CIA moved firmly into the driver's seat. Langley, being the paymaster, had a perfect right to do so. "I'll give you the bottom line, Steve," said Bill Stewart to Steve Laing on a secure line from the CIA to Century House on the evening of January 14. "Saddam's wrong or he's lying; Jericho's wrong or he's lying. Whatever, Uncle Sam is not going to pay a million greenbacks into an account in Vienna for this kind of trash." "There's no way the unconsidered option might be right after all, Bill?"

"Which one's that?"

"That Saddam said it and he's right."

"No way. It's a three-card trick. We're not going to swallow it. Look, Jericho's been great for nine weeks, even though we're now going to have to recheck what he gave us. Half has already been proved, and it's good stuff. But he's blown it with this last report. We think that's the end of the line. We don't know why, but that's the wisdom from the top of the mountain."

"Creates problems for us, Bill."

"I know, pal, and that's why I'm calling within minutes of the end of the conference with the Director. Either Jericho has been taken and has told the goon squad everything, or he's up and running. But if he gets to know we're not sending him any million dollars, I guess he'll turn nasty. Either way, that's bad news for your man in there. He's a good man, right?"

"The best. h.e.l.l of a nerve."

"So get him out of there, Steve. Fast."

"I think that's what we'll have to do, Bill. Thanks for the tip. Pity-it was a good op."

"The best, while it lasted."

Stewart hung up. Laing went upstairs to see Sir Colin. The decision was made within an hour.

By the hour of breakfast on the morning of January 15 in Saudi Arabia, every aircrew member, American, British, French, Italian, Saudi, and Kuwaiti, knew that they were going to war. The politicians and the diplomats, they believed, had failed to prevent it. Through the

day all air units moved to prebattle alert. The nerve centers of the campaign were located in three establishments in Riyadh. On the outskirts of Riyadh military air base was a collection of huge air-conditioned tents, known because of the green light that suffused them through the canvas as the Barn. This was the first filter for the tidal wave of air intelligence photographs that had been flowing in for weeks and that would double and triple in the weeks to come. The product of the Barn-a synthesis of the most important photographic information pouring in from so many reconnaissance sorties-went a mile up the road to the headquarters of the Royal Saudi Air Force, a great chunk of which had been made over to Central Air Force, or CENTAF. A giant building of gray mottled concrete and gla.s.s built on piles a hundred fifty meters long, the headquarters has a bas.e.m.e.nt running its full length, and it was here, one level below ground, that CENTAF was based. Despite the size of the bas.e.m.e.nt, there was still not enough s.p.a.ce, so the parking lot had been crammed with an array of more green tents and prefab buildings, where further interpretation took place. In the bas.e.m.e.nt was the focal point of it all, the Joint Imagery Production Center, a warren of interconnecting rooms in which worked throughout the war two hundred and fifty a.n.a.lysts, American and British, of all three armed forces, and of all ranks. This was the Black Hole. The overall air commander, General Chuck Horner, was technically in charge, but as he was often called to the Defense Ministry a mile farther up the road, the more usual presence was that of his deputy, General Buster Glosson.

The air war planners in the Black Hole consulted on a daily and even hourly basis a doc.u.ment called the Basic Target Graphic, a list and map of everything in Iraq that was targeted for a hit. From this they derived the daily bible of every air commander, squadron intelligence officer, planning ops officer, and aircrew in the Gulf Theater-the Air Tasking Order. Each day's ATO was an immensely detailed doc.u.ment, running to over a hundred pages of typescript. It took three days to prepare. First came Apportionment-the decision on the percentages of the target types in Iraq that could be struck in a single day and the available aircraft suitable for such a strike. Day two saw Allocation-the conversion of the percentage of Iraqi targets into actual numbers and locations. Day three was for Distribution-the "who gets what" decision. It was in the distribution process that it might be decided, for example, that this one is for the British Tornados, this for the American Strike Eagles, this one for the Navy Tomcats, this for the Phantoms, and that one for the B-52 Stratofortresses. Only then would each squadron and wing be sent its menu for the following day. After that, it was up to them to do it-find the target, work out the route, link up with the air-refueling tankers, plan the strike direction, calculate the secondary targets in case of a no-go, and work out their way home. The squadron commander would choose his crews-many squadrons had multiple targets designated in a single day-and pick his flight leaders and their wingmen. The weapons officers, of which Don Walker was one, would select the ordnance-"iron" or "dumb" bombs, which are unguided bombs, laser-guided bombs, laser-guided rockets, and so forth.

A mile down Old Airport Road was the third building. The Saudi Defense Ministry is immense, five linked main buildings of shimmering white cement, seven stories high, with fluted columns up to the fourth. It was on this fourth floor that General Norman Schwarzkopf had been allocated a handsome suite that he hardly ever saw, frequently bunking down on a cot in the subbas.e.m.e.nt where he could be near his command post. In all, the Ministry is four hundred meters long and a hundred feet high, a lavishness that paid dividends in the Gulf War, when Riyadh had to play host to so many unexpected foreigners. Belowground are two more floors of rooms running the length of the building, and of the four hundred meters, Coalition Command was allocated sixty. It was here that the generals sat in conclave throughout the war, watching on a giant map as staff officers pointed out what had been done, what had been missed, what had shown up, what had moved, and what the Iraqi response and dispositions had been. Shielded from the hot sun that January day, a British squadron leader stood before the wall map showing the seven hundred targets listed in Iraq, 240 primaries and the rest secondary, and remarked: "Well, that's about it," Alas, that was not it. Unbeknownst to the planners, for all the satellites and all the technology, sheer human ingenuity in the form of camouflage and maskirovka had deceived them. In hundreds of emplacements across Iraq and Kuwait, Iraqi tanks sat and brooded under their netting, well-targeted by the Allies due to their metal content, picked up by overhead radars. They were in many cases made of matchboard, plywood, and tinplate, the drums of sc.r.a.p iron inside giving the appropriate metallic response to the sensors.

Scores of old truck cha.s.sis now mounted replica launching tubes for Scud missiles. These mobile "launchers" would all be solemnly blown apart by the Allies. But more seriously, seventy primary targets concerned with weapons of ma.s.s destruction had not been spotted because they were buried deep or cunningly disguised as something else. Only later would planners puzzle over how the Iraqis had managed to reconst.i.tute entire destroyed divisions with such unbelievable speed; only later would United Nations inspectors discover plant after plant and store after store that had escaped, and come away knowing there were yet more buried underground. But that hot day in 1990 no one knew these things. What the young men out on the flight lines from Tabuq in the west to Bahrain in the east and down to the ultrasecret Khamis Mushait in the south knew was that in forty hours they would go to war and some of them would not come back. In the last full day before final briefings began, most of them wrote home. Some chewed on their pencils and wondered what to say. Others thought of their wives and children and cried as they wrote; hands accustomed to controlling many tons of deadly metal sought to craft inadequate words into saying what they felt; lovers tried to express what they should have whispered before, fathers urged their sons to look after their mothers if the worst should happen. Captain Don Walker heard the news with all the other pilots and aircrew of the Rocketeers of the 336th TFS in a terse announcement from the wing commander at Al Kharz. It was just before nine in the morning, and the sun was already beating down on the desert like a sledgehammer on a waiting anvil. There was none of the usual banter as the men filed out of the tented briefing hall, each plunged in his private thoughts. For each, these thoughts were much the same: the last attempt to avoid a war had been tried and had failed; the politicians and the diplomats had shuttled from conference to conference, postured and declaimed, urged, bullied, pleaded, threatened, and cajoled in order to avoid a war-and had failed. So at least they believed, those young men who had just learned that the talking was over at last, failing to understand that they had for months past been destined for this day. Walker watched Squadron Commander Steve Turner stump away to his tent to write what he genuinely believed might be his last letter to Betty Jane back in Goldsboro, North Carolina. Randy Roberts had a brief, muttered few words with Boomer Henry, then they parted and walked away. The young Oklahoman looked at the pale blue vault of sky where he had l.u.s.ted to be since he was a small boy in Tulsa and where he soon might die in this thirtieth year, and turned his steps toward the perimeter. Like the others, he wanted to be alone. There was no fence to the base at Al Kharz, just the ochre sea of sand, shale, and gravel stretching away to the horizon and beyond that to the next and the next. Walker pa.s.sed the clamsh.e.l.l hangars grouped around the concrete ap.r.o.n, where the mechanics were by then working on their charges and the crew chiefs were pa.s.sing among each team, conferring and checking to ensure that when each of their babies finally went to war, they would be machines as perfect as the hand of man could make them. Walker spotted his own Eagle among them and was awed as always when he contemplated the F-15E from afar by its air of quiet menace. It crouched silently amid the teeming swarm of men and women in coveralls who crawled all over its burly frame, immune to love or l.u.s.t, hate or fear, patiently waiting for the moment when it would finally do what it had been designed to do all those years ago on the drawing board-bring flame and death to the people designated as its target by the President of the United States. Walker envied his Eagle; for all its myriad complexity, it could not feel anything, it could never be afraid. He left the city of canvas behind him and walked across the plain of shale, his eyes shaded by the peak of his baseball cap and the aviator gla.s.ses, hardly feeling the heat of the sun on his shoulders. For eight years he had flown the aircraft of his country and done so because he loved it. But never once had he really, truly contemplated the prospect that he might die in battle. Part of every combat pilot muses with the notion of testing his skill, his nerve, and the excellence of his airplane against another man in a real rather than a dummy contest. But another part always a.s.sumes that it will never happen. It will never really come to killing other mothers' sons, or being killed by them. That morning, like all the others, he realized at last that it truly had come to this: that all those years of study and training had finally led to this day and this place; that in forty hours he would take his Eagle into the sky again, and that this time he might not come back. Like the others, he thought of home. Being an only child and a single man, he thought of his mother and father. He remembered all the times and places of his boyhood in Tulsa, the things he and his parents had done together in the yard behind the house, the day he had been given his first catcher's mitt and forced his father to pitch to him until the sun went down. His thoughts strayed back to the vacations they had shared before he left home to go to college and then to the Air Force. The one he recalled best was the time his father took him o