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picked up the heat source and logged a missile launch. The fighters vectored onto the location did the rest and claimed a kill.

The men who could not be fooled this way were the SAS. Although only a handful in number, they swarmed into the western deserts in their Land-Rovers and motorbikes, lay up in the blistering days and freezing nights, and watched. At two hundred yards, they could see what was a real mobile launcher and what was a dummy.

As the real rocket launchers came out from the culverts and beneath the bridges where they were hidden from aerial observation, the silent men in the crags watched through binoculars. If there were too many Iraqis around, they quietly called in air strikes by radio. If they could get away with it, they used their own Milan antitank rockets, which made a very nice bang when hitting the fuel tank of a real Al-Husayn.

It was soon realized there was an invisible north-south line running down the desert. West of that line, the Iraqi rockets could hit Israel; east of it, they were out of range. The job was to terrorize the Iraqi crews into not daring to venture west of that line but to fire from east of it and lie to their superiors. It took eight days, and then the rocket attacks on Israel stopped. They never started again.

Later, the Baghdad-to-Jordan road was used as a divider. North of it was Scud Alley North, terrain of the American Special Forces, who went in by long-range helicopter. Below the road was Scud Alley South, bailiwick of the British Special Air Service. Four good men died in those deserts, but they did the job they had been sent in to do, where billions of dollars of technology had been deceived.

On day four of the air war, January 20, the 336th Squadron out of Al Kharz was one of the units that had not been diverted to the western deserts.

Its assignment that day included a big SAM missile site northwest of Baghdad. The SAMs were controlled by two large radar dishes.

The air attacks in General Horner’s plan were now rolling northward. With just about every missile base and radar dish south of a horizontal line through southern Baghdad wiped out, the time had come to clear the air space east, west, and north of the capital.

With twenty-four Strike Eagles in the squadron, January 20 was going to be a multimission day. The squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Turner, had allocated a twelve-plane detail for the missile base. A swarm of Eagles that large was known as a “gorilla.”

The gorilla was led by one of the two senior flight commanders. Four of the twelve planes were packing HARMs, the radar-busting missiles that home in on infrared signals from a radar dish. The other eight carried two long, gleaming, stainless-steel-cased laser-guided bombs known as GBU-10-I’s. When the radars were dead and the missiles blind, they would follow the HARMs and blow away the rocket batteries.

It did not seem as if things were going to go wrong. The twelve Eagles took off in three groups of four, established themselves in a loose echelon formation, and climbed to an altitude of twenty-five thousand feet. The sky was a brilliant blue, and the ochre desert below clearly visible.

The weather report over the target indicated a stronger wind than over Saudi Arabia but made no mention of a shamal , one of those rapid dust storms that can wipe out a target in seconds.

South of the border, the twelve Eagles met their tankers, two KC-10s. Each tanker could suckle six hungry fighters, so one by one the Eagles drifted onto station behind the tankers and waited as the boom operator, gazing at them through his Perspex window only a few feet away, “swam” his boom arm to lock onto their waiting fuel nozzles.

Finally, the twelve Eagles refueled for their mission and turned north toward Iraq. An AWACS out over the Gulf told them there was no hostile air activity ahead of them. Had there been Iraqi fighters in the air, the Eagles carried, apart from their bombs, two kinds of air-to-air rockets: the Air Interception Missile 7

and the AIM-9, better known as the Sparrow and the Sidewinder.

The missile base was there, all right. But its radars were not active. If the radar dishes were not operating on their arrival, they should have illuminated immediately to guide the SAMs in their search for the oncoming intruders. As soon as the radars went active, the four Strike Eagles carrying the HARMs would simply take them out or, in USAF parlance, ruin their whole day.

Whether the Iraqi commander was afraid for his skin or just extremely smart, the Americans never did work out. But those radars refused to come alive. The first four Eagles, led by the flight commander, dropped down and down to provoke the radars into switching on. They refused.

It would have been foolish for the bomb-carriers to go in with the radars still intact—had they suddenly illuminated without warning, the SAMs would have had the Eagles cold.

After twenty minutes over the target, the attack was called off. Components of the gorilla were assigned to their secondary targets.

Don Walker had a quick word with Tim Nathanson, his wizzo, sitting behind him. The secondary target for the day was a fixed Scud site south of Samarra, which was in any case being visited by other fighter-bombers because it was a known poison gas facility.

The AWACS confirmed there was no takeoff activity out of the two big Iraqi air bases at Samarra East and Balad Southeast. Don Walker called up his wingman, and the two-plane element headed for the Scud site.

All communications between the American aircraft were coded by the Have-quick system, which garbles the 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.”