Page 127

“All right.”

He was gone five minutes later. She put out the lights, changed into her prim cotton nightdress, scrubbed her face and brushed her teeth, and went to bed.

In the darkness she lay with her knees drawn close to her chest. After two hours she did something she had not done for years: She smiled in the darkness. There was a mad thought going through her mind over and over again, and she did not mind. I have a boyfriend. He is ten years younger, a student, a foreigner, an Arab, and a Moslem. And I don’t mind.

Colonel Dick Beatty of the USAF was on the graveyard shift that night, deep below Old Airport Road in Riyadh.

The Black Hole never stopped, it never slackened, and in the first days of the air war, it was working harder and faster than ever.

General Chuck Horner’s master plan for the air war was experiencing the dislocation caused by the diversion of hundreds of his warplanes to hunt Scud launchers instead of taking out the targets preassigned to them.

Any combat general will confirm that a plan can be worked out to the last nut and bolt, but when the balloon goes up, it is never quite like that. The crisis caused by the rockets dropping onto Israel was proving a serious problem. Tel Aviv was screaming at Washington, and Washington was screaming at Riyadh. The diversion of all those warplanes to hunt the elusive mobile launchers was the price Washington had to pay to keep Israel out of retaliatory action, and Washington’s orders did not brook argument. Everyone could see that Israel losing patience and its entering the war would prove disastrous for the frail Coalition now ranged against Iraq, but the problem was still major.

Targets originally slated for day three were being deferred for lack of aircraft, and the effect was like dominoes. A further problem was that there could still be no Bomb Damage Assessment, or BDA. It was essential, and it had to be done. The alternative could be appalling.

BDAs were crucial because the Black Hole had to know the level of the success, or lack of it, of each day’s wave of air strikes. If a major Iraqi command center, radar emplacement, or missile battery were on the Air Tasking Order, it would duly be attacked. But had it been destroyed? If so, to what degree?

Ten percent, fifty percent, or a pile of smoking rubble? Simply to assume that the Iraqi base had been wiped out was no good. The next day, unsuspecting Allied planes might be sent over that site on another mission. If the place were still functioning, pilots could die.

So each day the missions were flown, and the tired pilots described exactly what they had done and what they had hit. Or thought they had hit. The next day, other airplanes flew over the targets and photographed them.

Thus, each day as the Air Tasking Order began its three-day passage to preparation, the original menu of designated targets had to include the second visit missions, to finish the jobs only partly done.

January 20, the fourth day of the air war, the Allied air forces had not officially gotten around to wasting the industrial plants tagged as those making weapons of mass destruction. They were still concentrating on SEAD—Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses.

That night, Colonel Beatty was preparing the list of the next day’s photoreconnaissance missions on the basis of the harvest of all those debriefing sessions with squadron intelligence officers. By midnight, he was nearly through, and the early orders were already speeding their way to the various squadrons assigned to photorecon missions at dawn.

“Then there’s this, sir.”

It was a chief petty officer, U.S. Navy, by his side. The colonel glanced at the target.

“What do you mean, Tarmiya?”

“That’s what it says, sir.”

“So where the hell’s Tarmiya anyway?”

“Here, sir.”

The colonel glanced at the air map. The location meant nothing to him.

“Radar? Missiles, air base, command post?”

“No, sir. Industrial facility.”

The colonel was tired. It had been a long night, and it would go on until dawn.

“For chrissake, we haven’t gotten to industrials yet. Give me the list anyway.”

He ran his eye down the list. It included every industrial facility known to the Allies that was dedicated to the production of weapons of mass destruction; it had factories known to produce shells, explosives, vehicles, gun parts, and tank spares.

In the first category were listed Al Qaim, As-Sharqat, Tuwaitha, Fallujah, Al-Hillah, Al-Atheer, and Al-Furat. The colonel could not know that missing from the list was Rashadia, where the Iraqis had installed their second gas centrifuge cascade for producing refined uranium, the problem that had eluded the experts on the Medusa Committee. That plant, discovered by the United Nations much later, was not buried but disguised as a water-bottling enterprise.

Nor could Colonel Beatty know that Al-Furat was the buried location of the first uranium cascade, the one visited by the German, Dr. Stemmler, “somewhere near Tuwaitha,” and that its exact position had been given away by Jericho.

“I don’t see any Tarmiya,” he grunted.

“No, sir. It’s not there,” said the CPO.