Page 72

There was nothing for it but to return to the garage and abandon the radio call to Riyadh.

It took two days to have both tires repaired, and it was not until the night of the twenty-first that he found himself deep in the desert, far to the south of the city, turning his small satellite dish in the direction of the Saudi capital many hundreds of miles away, using the Send button to transmit a series of quick blips to indicate it was he who was calling and that he was about to come on the air.

His radio was basic, a ten-channel fixed-crystal set, with one channel designated for each day of the month in rotation. On the twenty-first, he was using channel one. Having identified himself, he switched to Receive and waited. Within seconds a low voice replied:

“Rocky Mountain, Black Bear, read you five.”

The codes identifying both Riyadh and Martin corresponded with the date and the channel, just in case someone hostile tried to muscle in on the waveband.

Martin went to Send and spoke several sentences.

On the outskirts of Kuwait City to the north, a young Iraqi technician was alerted by a pulsing light on the console he was monitoring in the commandeered apartment on top of a residential building. One of his sweepers had caught the transmission and locked on.

“Captain,” he called urgently. An officer from Hassan Rahmani’s Counterintelligence signals section strode over to the console. The light still pulsed, and the technician was easing a dial to secure a bearing.

“Someone has just come on the air.”

“Where?”

“Out in the desert, sir.”

The technician listened through his earphones as his direction-finders stabilized on the source of the transmission.

“Electronically scrambled transmission, sir.”

“That has to be him. The boss was right. What’s the bearing?”

The officer was reaching for the telephone to alert his other two monitoring units, the trailer trucks parked at Jahra and the Al Adan hospital down near the coast.

“Two-oh-two degrees compass.”

Two-oh-two degrees was twenty-two degrees west of due south, and there was absolutely nothing out in that direction but the Kuwaiti desert, which ran all the way to join the Saudi desert at the border.

“Frequency?” barked the officer as the Jahra trailer came on the line.

The tracker gave it to him, a rare channel down in the very-low-frequency range.

“Lieutenant,” he called over his shoulder, “get on to Ahmadi air base. Tell them to get that helicopter airborne. We’ve got a fix.”

Far away in the desert, Martin finished what he had to say and switched to Receive to get the answer from Riyadh. It was not what he had expected. He himself had spoken for only fifteen seconds.

“Rocky Mountain, Black Bear, return to the cave. I say again, return to the cave. Top urgent. Over and out.”

The Iraqi captain gave the frequency to both his other monitoring stations. In Jahra and the hospital grounds other technicians rolled their source-tracers to the indicated frequency, and above their heads four-foot-diameter dishes swung from side to side. The one on the coast covered the area from Kuwait’s northern border with Iraq down to the border with Saudi Arabia. The Jahra scanners swept east to west, from the sea in the east to the Iraqi deserts in the west.

Between the three of them, they could triangulate a fix to within a hundred yards and give a heading and distance to the Hind helicopter and its ten armed soldiers.

“Still there?” asked the captain.

The technician scanned the circular screen in front of him, calibrated around its edge with the points of the compass. The center of the dish represented the point where he sat. Seconds earlier, there had been a glittering line across the screen, running from the center to compass heading 202. Now the screen was blank. It would only light up when the man out there transmitted again.

“No, sir. He’s gone off the air. Probably listening to the reply.”

“He’ll come back,” said the captain.

But he was wrong. Black Bear had frowned over his sudden instructions from Riyadh, switched off his power, closed down his transmitter, and folded up his antenna.

The Iraqis monitored the frequency for the rest of the night until dawn, when the Hind at Al Ahmadi shut off its rotors and the stiff, tired soldiers climbed back out.