Fire Hawk (11 page)

‘We'll need to go through their files meticulously. The MD of the company has a BSc from a British university, so he's likely to be pretty organised in keeping notes of everything that goes on there.'

Burgess reacted and felt the Dutch woman doing the same. Hardcastle could be unconsciously arrogant at times, as if only
British
-educated scientists were capable of such thoroughness. For an audience like this he would do well to choose his words more carefully, Burgess decided.

The beam of the laser pointer moved across the plan.

‘We believe that just
here
there's a small laboratory,' Hardcastle went on blithely. ‘Normally used for test batches and so on. If they
have
been brewing something they shouldn't, it could well be in here that we find some trace of it. We'll need to check the lab from top to bottom. There'll be masks, gloves and gowns available for the team that does that. Then finally, over
here
, there's the freeze-drying plant. If they've used some of the equipment for lyophilising anthrax spores, they'll have a devil of a job cleaning it afterwards, so it's quite likely to
be “broken down” or “waiting for spare parts” when we have a look around.'

He switched off the projector. ‘Now, about our methods. Urn, would you mind?' Hardcastle raised his eyebrows in the direction of the back row, indicating that the blinds could be opened again. ‘Thank you so much. I think the most useful thing we could do next is for Pierre to organise you into four separate teams so we can do some role-playing to remind you of procedures. And it'll give newcomers an idea of what to expect from our hosts when we get on the ground. It's not always pleasant and the quicker you get used to that the better.

‘Remember gentlemen – and ladies – this may at times seem like a game, but it's a deadly serious one. That's why we spend time preparing for it here, secure from eavesdroppers. Once in Iraq we'll be under scrutiny the whole time. Old hands know this, but it bears repeating: the Iraqi secret police will be listening to your every breath. Your hotel room is bugged, and so are many of the public rooms you may visit and restaurant tables. Our base – the Baghdad Monitoring and Verification Centre – that isn't safe either. Nor are the vehicles. Just assume that everything the Iraqis
can
bug, they will have done. So do not discuss anything confidential with one another unless you are in the open air, well away from anything that could contain a directional microphone.

‘The time now is after ten-thirty. Our flight departs at fourteen hundred hours, with an ETA at Habbaniyah of sixteen-thirty. By the time we get to the hotel it'll be seven or eight in the evening. Just time for a meal and some sleep.'

Burgess nodded appreciatively.

‘Then, at nine tomorrow morning we'll reveal to the Iraqis where we want to inspect. Remember the bottom line, ladies and gentlemen,' Hardcastle concluded. ‘We're as certain as we can be that Saddam still possesses a
couple of dozen ballistic missiles and a stockpile of mass destruction warheads. With those he could cause huge and horrific casualties in Israel, Saudi Arabia or Iran. Our job is to find them if we possibly can, but failing that, to keep up the pressure on Saddam so he never has the chance to bring 'em out and use 'em.'

A little under three hours later the motor-coach deposited the team outside a hangar on the military flight-line of Bahrain's Al Muharraq airport. The baggage was quickly unloaded onto a trolley for transportation to the aircraft. Each of the inspectors carried a small rucksack large enough to hold the personal kit needed to keep going for forty-eight hours in case the Iraqis played games with them on their arrival.

As Burgess got out he heard the deep-throat crackle of a jet. A Bahrain Air Force F-16 hurtled down the runway for the start of a training flight.

The afternoon heat was as fierce and dry as a sauna. They entered the hangar, grateful for its shade. Along the flank wall was a row of offices once used by aircraft maintenance teams with windows overlooking the hangar floor.

‘Right. Now pay attention,' Hardcastle said, clasping his hands like a school-teacher. ‘At the first window you'll be issued with UN hats and armbands, and a forty-eight-hour emergency ration pack. At the second you'll be given an envelope for all your personal stuff. Put everything in it that you won't be needing in Iraq, including your national passports. Anything that identifies who you are and where you come from, leave it here. In exchange you'll be issued with special UN documents. From now on you don't belong to any particular nation any more, just to the UN.'

Burgess collected the envelope with his name on and began emptying his pockets. Credit cards, FBI badge,
personal diary and wallet. He began stuffing them all in, then stopped to take from the wallet the Polaroid of Carole and the kids, snapped in front of the tree last Christmas. He looked at it for a couple of seconds, wanting it with him. But nothing personal, Hardcastle had said. Nothing the Iraqis could use against him if things got unpleasant. He pushed it into the envelope and closed the seal.

When he'd finished, he found Hardcastle waiting for him. The Englishman took him to one side.

‘Just to keep you informed,' Hardcastle breathed, his voice too low for anyone else to overhear. ‘The British Secret Intelligence Service has picked up something that's rather alarming. Word is the Iraqis have managed to assemble some anthrax warheads in recent weeks and to smuggle them out of the country.'

‘Shoot!'

‘No word on when or where they're to be used. Can't even be certain the tip-off's true. Washington's been told of course, but just wanted
you
to know. Puts everything we're doing into context, don't you think?'

‘Absolutely, Andrew,' he breathed.

Fifteen minutes later they sat strapped into the webbing seats lining the fuselage of a UN L-100 Hercules, on charter from a company in South Africa. Buckled firmly to the aircraft floor in front of them were pallets piled with the equipment and supplies they would need for their mission.

Dean Burgess felt the adrenalin buzz of an assignment under way. On the opposite side of the fuselage Hardcastle looked drawn and anxious. The Englishman hated flying, he'd confessed as they'd boarded. As the four big turbo-props spun up to their operating revs Burgess dug the foam plugs deeper into his ears. He closed his eyes and rested his head against the red nylon straps that
supported the seats. He felt dog tired suddenly. The travel was catching up with him again.

His mind was still churning over what Hardcastle had whispered to him a few minutes ago – anthrax warheads already in place. Somewhere outside Iraq. Somewhere that might even be the United States of America . . .

Keeping him going up to now had been the childlike sense of adventure he always felt at the start of a new mission, but as his mind began to fog, that stimulus evaporated. In its place there emerged a dark foreboding, some premonition that what he was embarking on would have consequences far beyond anything he'd imagined.

As he began to doze, he had a nightmare vision of an imminent disaster with Carole and the kids in the midst of it, their faces turned his way, begging him to save them.

He shivered, because in his bones he sensed he was going to be powerless to help.

A GREY-BLUE POLLUTION
haze shrouded the dawn sun as the black-hulled, Gibraltar-registered container ship was eased from the jetty by two tugs. The vessel had been in the Greek port for a mere six hours, off-loading cargoes she'd brought from further west and hoisting on board others which had destinations to the east.

The great sack of the eastern Mediterranean is criss-crossed by a spider's web of shipping routes, at the centre of which lies Piraeus. Well-placed for the Med and the Aegean with its routes to the Black Sea, a quarter of the port's ‘box traffic' consists of transshipments from one container line to another.

The thick, oily water of the inner harbour churned and frothed as the ship's screw began to turn. This modern, well-run vessel was a workhorse of the container business, shuttling relentlessly the length of the Mediterranean, transporting her sealed and invisible cargoes. The next port of call on her journey east was Limassol on the southern coast of Cyprus. Some twenty of the containers stacked on her deck were bound for that divided island, all of them loaded at Piraeus. Among them was a forty-footer transshipped from a vessel out of Ilychevsk in
Ukraine. The Single Administrative Document accompanying it gave the container's final destination as Haifa in Israel and its contents as defective fruit and vegetable juices being returned to their supplier.

The clasp locking the container's doors bore the seal of the Ukrainian customs in Odessa. The officer who'd applied the seal had not checked the container's repacked contents. A bribe had seen to that. If he
had
looked behind the single pallet of expanding Tetrapaks, he would have found a far more explosive cargo.

Overlooking the sweet-water canal in east Baghdad, a modern hotel served as the UN Special Commission's headquarters in Iraq. Its blue frontage was pierced by large porthole-like windows and the car park in front was crowded with white-painted vehicles, some of them armoured. Two Nissan Prairies and two Toyota Landcruisers lined up with their engines running to get the air-conditioning going. Most of the members of the newly arrived UN inspection team were already inside waiting for the start of their first outing.

Dean Burgess stood in the open with Andrew Hardcastle, trying not to be irritated by the mild chauvinism which had first shown itself the day before at the briefing in Bahrain. They watched their plain-clothes Iraqi security escorts digest the news of where the day's inspection was to be. Above the pale cotton slacks and shirts and the multi-pocketed fisherman's vests which both UN men wore, Burgess was sporting the blue baseball cap with the
UN logo he'd been issued with in Bahrain. It gave him a small feeling of authority in a situation where, for an American in particular, there was little such comfort to be had.

He had a clear head this morning after a good night's sleep helped by Temazepam. His unease about his marriage had been buried under the flood of impressions that arrival in Iraq had entailed. His only problem was the lingering culture shock. The hostility with which they'd been received on arrival last night at the Habbaniyah Military Air Base west of Baghdad had been as blatant as he'd expected. As far as the Iraqi military were concerned, the UNSCOM team were spies, whatever cloak of legality the outside world had given them.

The air base itself had been eerie and unpleasant. MiG-29s stood ostentatiously on the flight-line, proof of Iraq's surviving military strength despite America's best efforts to destroy it in 1991. The immigration process had been handled in a so-called executive lounge. Burgess had needed to use the bathroom after the flight but had nearly thought better of it when he saw the filthy, excreta-caked hole in the ground he would need to crouch over.

The bus ride into the capital with its ubiquitous portraits of the Iraqi leader had surprised him, although it shouldn't have. Despite knowing that the bridges and buildings bombed in the 1991 war had all been repaired, subconsciously he'd expected
some
sign of the billions of dollars' worth of damage inflicted on the country. Gleaming palaces, broad, well-surfaced highways – it just didn't fit.

Potemkin villages,
Hardcastle had said. A good-looking frontage, but behind it poverty and hardship for the masses. Across the river in the eastern half of the city, he'd seen skinny street children hawking cigarette lighters and unemployed graduates trying to sell their textbooks at the kerb.

An hour ago they'd driven here to the Canal Hotel, home of the UN's Baghdad Monitoring and Verification Centre, from the nearby Al Hyatt where they were billeted. A tour of the BMVC had impressed him with well-equipped laboratories, and its crowded operations room with computer terminals that could call up pictures from remote cameras in over a hundred sensitive sites up and down the country.

‘Come on, come on!' Hardcastle chivvied, glaring across the car park at the trio of army-green jeeps. The news that their destination for the day was to be the Haji protein factory seemed to have caused puzzlement. They should have set off immediately, but the half-dozen minders were propped against their vehicles while their leader busied himself on the radio.

‘What's going on Andrew? How do you read this?' Burgess whispered.

‘God knows. But one thing's sure. They'll be phoning the Haji plant to warn them we're coming.'

‘Complete surprise must be pretty much impossible to achieve.'

‘It can never be total,' Hardcastle acknowledged. ‘But they'd need more than one hour's notice to remove all the evidence at the Haji factory if they
have
been up to no good there.'

‘Are these guys Mukhabarat – the Ba'ath party intelligence?' Burgess checked. He liked to classify people. To give them labels.

‘They never tell us who they are, but no, I think they're Amn al Aman. That's general security. Saddam has several parallel security organisations, each reporting to him and each keeping an eye on the others. Helps stop assassination attempts.'

‘Neat.'

‘Mr Hardcastle!'

His name had been shouted from the doorway of the hotel. The voice was antipodean.

They spun round. Burgess recognised the uniformed operations officer from New Zealand he'd met half an hour earlier.

‘Message for you, Mr Hardcastle. Urgent!'

‘Damn! Keep an eye on those minders, Dean. Don't let the buggers take off without me.'

‘Sure thing.'