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The second problem was one of height and speed. The JP-233s had to be launched from a Tornado in stabilized straight and level flight. Even after bomb launch, the Tornados had no choice but to overfly the target. Even if the radars were knocked out, the gunners weren’t; antiaircraft artillery, known as triple-A, came up at them in rolling waves as they approached, so that one pilot described those missions as

“flying through tubes of molten steel.”

The Americans had abandoned tests on the JP-233 bomb, judging it to be a pilot-killer. They were right.

But the RAF crews pressed on, losing planes and crews until they were called off and given other duties.

The bomb-droppers were not the only planes aloft that night. Behind them and with them flew an extraordinary array of backup services.

Air superiority fighters flew cover on and over the strike bombers. The Iraqi ground controllers’

instructions to their own pilots—the few who managed to take off that night—were jammed by the American Air Force Ravens and the Navy equivalent Prowlers. Iraqi pilots aloft got no verbal instructions and no radar guidance. Most, wisely, went straight back home.

Circling south of the border were sixty tankers: American KC-135s and KC-10s, U.S. Navy KA-6Ds, and British Victors and VC-10s. Their job was to receive the warplanes coming up from Saudi Arabia, refuel them for the mission, then meet them on the way back to give them more fuel to get home. This may sound routine, but actually doing it in pitch darkness was described by one flier as “trying to shove spaghetti up a wildcat’s backside.”

And out over the Gulf, where they had been for five months, the U.S. Navy’s E-2 Hawkeyes and the USAF’s E-3 Sentry AWACS circled around and around, their radars picking up every friendly and every enemy aircraft in the sky, warning, advising, guiding, and watching.

By dawn, Iraq’s radars had mostly been crushed, her missile bases blinded, and her main command centers ruined. It would take four more days and nights to complete the job, but air supremacy was already in sight. Later would come the power-generating stations, telecommunications towers, telephone exchanges, relay stations, aircraft shelters, control towers, and all those known facilities for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction.

Later still would come the systematic “degradation” to less than fifty percent of its fighting power of the Iraqi Army south and southwest of the Kuwaiti border, a condition on which General Schwarzkopf insisted before he would attack with ground troops.

Two then-unknown factors would later cause changes to the course of the war. One was Ira

q’s decision to launch a barrage of Scud missiles at Israel; the other would be triggered by an act of sheer frustration on the part of Captain Don Walker of the 336th Tactical Fighter Squadron.

Dawn broke on the morning of January 17 over a Baghdad that was very badly shaken.

The ordinary citizens had not slept a wink from threeA.M. on, and when daylight came, some of them ventured out to peer curiously at the rubble of a score of major sites across their city. That they had survived the night seemed to many miraculous, for they were simple folk who did not realize that the twenty smoking mounds of rubble had been carefully selected and hit with such precision that the citizenry had been in no mortal danger.

But the real sense of shock was among the hierarchs. Saddam Hussein had left the Presidential Palace and was lodged in his extraordinary multistory bunker behind and beneath the Rashid Hotel, which was still full of Westerners, mainly from the media.

The bunker had been built years earlier inside a vast crater dug by earth-movers, with mainly Swedish technology. So sophisticated were its security measures that it was in fact a box within a box, and beneath and around the inner box were springs of such strength as to protect the inhabitants from a nuclear bomb, reducing shock waves that would flatten the city above into a minor tremor down below.

Although access was via a hydraulically operated ramp set in waste ground behind the hotel, the main structure was beneath the Rashid, which had deliberately been built on the ground above as a specific repose for Westerners in Baghdad. Any enemy wishing to attempt a deep-penetration bombing of the bunker would have to obliterate the Rashid first.

Try as they might, the sycophants surrounding the Rais were hard put to create a gloss over the night’s disasters. Slowly, the level of the catastrophe penetrated all their minds.

They had all counted on a blanket bombing of the city, which would have left residential areas flattened and thousands of innocent civilians dead. This carnage would then be shown to the media, who would film it all and show it to the sickened audiences back home. Thus would begin the global wave of revulsion against President Bush and the United States, culminating in an emergency session of the UN

Security Council and the veto of China and Russia against further massacre.

By midday, it was plain that the Sons of Dogs from across the Atlantic were not obliging. So far as the Iraqi generals were aware, the bombs fell approximately where they had been aimed, but that was all.

With every major military installation in Baghdad deliberately sited in densely populated housing areas, it should have been impossible for massive civilian casualties to be avoided. Yet while a tour of the city revealed twenty command posts, missile sites, radar bases, and communication centers blasted to rubble, those not in the targeted buildings had sustained little more than broken windows and were even now gaping at the mess.

The authorities had to be satisfied with inventing a civilian death toll and claims that American aircraft had been shot out of the skies like autumn leaves. Most Iraqis, stultified by years of propaganda, believed these first reports—for a while.

The generals in charge of air defense knew better. By midday, it was clear to them that they had lost almost all their radar warning ability, that their SAMs—surface-to-air missiles—were blind, and that communication with the outlying units was all but cut. Worse, the radar operators who had survived kept insisting the damage had been done by bombers that simply had not shown up on their screens. The liars were at once put under arrest.

Some civilian casualties had indeed occurred. At least two Tomahawk cruise missiles, their fins damaged by conventional triple-A gunfire rather than SAMs, had crashed off-target. One had demolished two houses and blown tiles off a mosque, an outrage that the press corps was shown during the afternoon.

The other had fallen on waste ground and made a large crater. During the late afternoon the body of a woman was found at the bottom of it, badly smashed by the impact that apparently killed her.

Bombing raids continued throughout the day, so that the ambulance crews were not prepared to do more than wrap the corpse hastily in a blanket, bring it to the morgue of the nearest hospital, and leave it there. The hospital happened to be close to a major Air Force command center that had been demolished, and all beds were occupied by service personnel wounded in the attack. Several scores of bodies were taken to the same morgue, all dead from bomb blasts. The woman’s was just one of them.

With his resources at the breaking point, the pathologist worked fast and cursorily. Identification and cause of death were his principal priorities, and he had no time for leisured examination. Across the city the crump of more bombs could be heard, and the blast of counterfire was unceasing. He had no doubt the evening and night would bring him more bodies.

What surprised the doctor was that all his dead bodies were service personnel, except the woman. She seemed to be about thirty and had once been comely. The concrete dust clinging to the blood of her smashed face, coupled with the place she had been found, gave cause for no other explanation than that she had been running away when the missile struck the waste ground and killed her. The body was so tagged, then wrapped for burial.