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“Then why, gentlemen, the clear intention that if any of my crews are shot down and interrogated, Baghdad should not learn where the information really came from? You don’t believe the military truck story any more than I do.”

Colonel Beatty and Squadron Leader Peck sat back. This man really was squeezing the spooks hard where it hurt most. Good for him.

“Tell him, Chip,” said Laing in resignation.

“Okay, Wing Commander, I’ll level with you. But this is for your e

ars only. The rest is absolutely true.

We have a defector. In the States. Came over before the war as a graduate student. Now he’s fallen for an American girl and wants to stay. During the interviews with the immigration people, something came up. A smart interviewer passed him over to us.”

“The CIA?” asked Curzon.

“Okay, yes, the CIA. We did a deal with the guy. He gets the green card, he helps us. When he was in Iraq, in Army Engineers, he worked on a few secret projects. Now he’s spilling all. So now you know.

But it’s top classification. It doesn’t alter the mission, and it isn’t lying for you not to tell the aircrew that—which, incidentally, you may not do.”

“One last question,” said Curzon. “If the man is safe in the States, why the need to fool Baghdad anymore?”

“There are other targets he’s spilling for us. It takes time, but we may get twenty fresh targets out of him.

We alert Baghdad that he’s singing like a canary, they move the goodies somewhere else by night. They can add two and two as well, you know.”

Philip Curzon rose and gathered the photos. Each had its exact grid reference on the map stamped on one side.

“All right. Dawn tomorrow. That shed will cease to exist.”

Then he left. On the flight back he mulled over the mission. Something inside him said it stank like an old cod. But the explanations were perfectly feasible, and he had his orders. He would not lie, but he had been forbidden to disclose everything. The good part was, the target was based on deception, not protection. His men should get in and out unscathed. He already knew who would lead the attack.

Squadron Leader Lofty Williamson was happily sprawled in a chair in the evening sun when the call came. He was reading the latest edition of World Air Power Journal , the combat pilots’ bible, and was annoyed to be torn away from a superbly authoritative article on one of the Iraqi fighters he might run into.

The squadron commander was in his office, photos spread out before him. For an hour he briefed his senior flight commander on what was wanted.

“You’ll have two Bucks to mark target for you, so you should be able to loft and get the hell out of there before the ungodly know what’s hit ’em.”

Williamson found his navigator, the rear-seat man the Americans call the wizzo, who nowadays does a lot more than navigate, being in charge of air electronics and weapons systems. Flight Lieutenant Sid Blair was reputed to be able to find a tin can in the Sahara if it needed bombing.

Between them, with the aid of the Operations people, they mapped out the mission. The exact location of the junkyard was found, from its grid reference, on their air maps.

The pilot made plain that he wanted to attack from the east at the very moment of the rising of the sun, so that any Iraqi gunners would have the light in their eyes while he, Williamson, would see the target with complete clarity.

Blair insisted he wanted a “stone bonker,” some unmistakable landmark along the run-in track by which he could make tiny last-minute adjustments on his course-to-steer. They found one twelve miles back from the target in an easterly direction—a radio mast exactly one mile from the run-in track.

Going in at dawn would give them the vital Time on Target, or TOT, that they needed. The reason the TOT must be followed to the second is that precision makes the difference between success and failure.

If the first pilot is late even by one second, the follow-up pilot could run right into the explosion of his colleague’s bombs; worse, the first pilot will have a Tornado coming up on his rear at nearly ten miles a minute—not a pretty sight. Finally, if the first pilot is too early or the second pilot too late, the gunners will have time to wake up, man their guns, and aim them. So the second fliers go in just as the shrapnel of the first explosions subside.

Williamson brought in his wingman and the second navigator, two young flight lieutenants, Peter Johns and Nicky Tyne. The precise moment the sun should rise over the low hills to the east of the target was agreed at 0708 hours, and the attack heading at 270 degrees due west.

Two Buccaneers from the 12th Squadron, also based at Maharraq, had been assigned. Williamson would liaise with their pilots in the morning. The armorers had been instructed to fit three one-thousand-pound bombs equipped with PAVEWAY laser-guidance noses to each Tornado. At eight that night, the four aircrew ate and went to bed, with a morning call set for threeA.M.

It was still pitch-black when an aircraftman in a truck came to the 608th Squadron’s sleeping quarters to take the four crewmen to the flight hut.

If the Americans at Al Kharz were roughing it under canvas, those based on Bahrain enjoyed the comfort of civilized living. Some were bunking two to a room at the Sheraton Hotel. Others were in brick-built bachelor quarters nearer the air base. The food was excellent, drink was available, and the worst loneliness of the combat life was assuaged by the presence of three hundred female trainee flight attendants at the nearby training school of Gulf Air.

The Buccaneers had been brought out to the Gulf only a week earlier, having first been told they were not wanted. Since then, they had more than proved their worth. Essentially submarine-busters, the Bucks were more accustomed to skimming the waters of the North Sea looking for Soviet submersibles, but they did not mind the desert either.

Their speciality was low flying, and although they were thirty-year-old veterans, they had been known, in interservice war games with the USAF at the Navy Fighter School in Miramar, California, to evade the much faster American fighters simply by “eating dirt”—flying so low as to become impossible to follow through the buttes and mesas of the desert.