The Fist of God (51 page)

Martin thought it through for the remainder of the night. He was not surprised that the West disbelieved Jericho. That the mercenary’s payments were now to cease was a blow. The man had only reported the contents of a conference at which Saddam had spoken. So Saddam had lied—nothing new in that. What else was Jericho to do—ignore it?

It was the cheek of the man in asking for a million dollars that had done it.

Beyond that, Paxman’s logic was impeccable. Within four days, maybe five, Jericho would have checked and found no more money.

He would become angry, resentful. If he were not himself blown away and in the hands of Omar Khatib the Tormentor, he might well respond by making an anonymous tipoff.

The Fist of God

Yet it would be foolish for Jericho to do that. If Martin were caught and broken—and he was uncertain how much pain he could take at the hands of Khatib and his professionals in the Gymnasium—his own information could point the finger at Jericho, whoever he was.

Still, people do foolish things. Paxman was right, the drops might be under surveillance.

As for escaping Baghdad, that was easier said than done. From gossip in the markets, Martin had heard that the roads out of town were thick with patrols of the AMAM and the Military Police, looking for deserters and draft-dodgers. His own letter from the Soviet diplomat Kulikov authorized him only to serve the man as gardener in Baghdad.

Hard to explain to a patrol checkpoint what he was doing heading west into the desert, where his motorcycle was buried.

On balance he decided to stay inside the Soviet compound for a while.

It was probably the safest place in Baghdad.

Chapter 15

The deadline for Saddam Hussein to leave Kuwait expired at midnight on January 15. In a thousand rooms, huts, tents, and cabins across Saudi Arabia, and in the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf, men glanced at their watches and then at each other. There was very little to say.

Two floors beneath the Saudi Defense Ministry, behind the steel doors that would have protected any bank vault in the world, there was almost a sense of anticlimax. After all that work, all that planning, The Fist of God

there was nothing more to do—for a couple of hours. Now it was down to the younger men. They had their tasks, and they would carry them out in the pitch blackness far above the generals’ heads.

At 2:15 A.M., General Schwarzkopf entered the war room. Everyone stood. He read aloud a message to the troops, the chaplain said a prayer, and the commander-in-chief said, “Okay, let’s get to work.”

Far out across the desert, men were already at work. First across the border were not the warplanes but a flight of eight Apache helicopters belonging to the Army’s 101st Airborne Division. Their task was limited but crucial.

North of the border but short of Baghdad were two powerful Iraqi radar bases, whose dishes commanded all the skies from the Gulf in the east to the western desert.

The helicopters had been chosen, despite their slow speed compared with supersonic jet fighters, for two reasons. Skimming the desert, they could pass under the radar and approach the bases unseen; further, the commanders wanted human-eyeball confirmation that the bases were really wrecked, and from close range. Only the choppers could give that. It would cost a lot of lives if those radars were left functioning.

The Apaches did all that was asked. They had still not been noticed when they opened fire. All their crew had night-vision helmets, which look as if they have short binoculars sticking out the front. They give the pilot complete night vision, so that in utter darkness to the naked eye he can see everything as if it were illuminated by a brilliant moon.

First they shattered the electrical generators that powered the radars, then the communications facilities from which their presence could be reported to missile sites farther inland; finally, they blew away the radar dishes.

The Fist of God

In less than two minutes they had loosed twenty-seven Hellfire laser-guided missiles, a hundred 70-mm. rockets, and four thousand rounds of heavy-duty cannon fire. Both radar sites were left smoldering ruins.

The mission opened a huge hole in the air defense system of Iraq, and through this hole poured the remainder of the night’s attack.

Those who saw General Chuck Horner’s air-war plan later suggested it was probably one of the most brilliant ever devised. It contained a surgical, step-by-step precision and enough flexibility to cope with any contingency that required a variation.

Stage one was quite clear in its objectives and led on to the other three stages. It was to destroy all Iraq’s air defense systems and convert the Allies’ air superiority, with which they started, into air supremacy. For the other three stages to succeed within the self-imposed thirty-five-day time limit, Allied aircraft had to have the absolute run of Iraqi air space without hindrance.

In suppressing the air defense of Iraq, the key was radar. In modern warfare, radar is the single most important and most used tool, despite the brilliance of all the others in the armory.

Radar detects incoming warplanes; radar guides your own fighters to intercept; radar guides the antiaircraft missiles; and radar aims the guns.

Destroying the radar makes the enemy blind, like a heavyweight boxer in the ring with no eyes. He may be big and powerful still, he may pack a fearsome punch, but his enemy can move around the sightless Samson, jabbing and slashing at the helpless giant until the foregone conclusion is reached.

With the great hole punched in the forward radar cover of Iraq, the Tornados and Eagles, the F-111 Aardvarks and F-4G Wild Weasels powered through the gap, going for the radar sites farther inland, The Fist of God

heading for the missile bases guided by those radars, aiming for the command centers where the Iraqi generals sat, and blowing away the communications posts through which the generals were trying to talk to their outlying units.

From the battleships
Wisconsin
and
Missouri
and the cruiser
San
Jacinto
out in the Gulf, fifty-two Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched that night. Guiding themselves by a combination of computerized memory bank and television nose camera, Tomahawks hug the contours of the landscape, swerving on preordained courses to where they have to go. When in the area, they “see” the target, compare it with the one in their memory, identify the exact building, and home in.

The Wild Weasel is a version of the Phantom, but specializing in radar-destruction. It carries HARMs, High-speed Anti-Radiation Missiles.

When a radar dish lights up or “illuminates,” it emits electromagnetic waves, including infrared. It can’t help it. The HARM’s job is to find those waves with its sensors and go straight to the heart of the radar before exploding.

Perhaps strangest of all the warplanes slipping northward through the sky that night was the F-117A, known as the Stealth fighter. All black, created in such a shape that its multiple angles reflect most of the radar waves directed at it and absorb the rest into its own body, the Stealth fighter refuses to bounce hostile radar waves back to the receiver and thereby betray its existence to the enemy.

Thus invisible, the American F-117As that night simply slid unnoticed through Iraqi radar screens to drop their two-thousand-pound laser-guided bombs precisely onto thirty-four targets associated with the national air defense system. Thirteen of those targets were in and around Baghdad.

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When the bombs landed, the Iraqis fired blindly upward but could see nothing and missed. In Arabic, the Stealths were called
shabah
; it means “ghost.”

They came from the secret base of Khamis Mushait deep in the south of Saudi Arabia, where they had been transferred from their equally secret home at Tonopah, Nevada. While less fortunate American airmen had to live in tents, Khamis Mushait had been built miles from anywhere but with hardened aircraft shelters and air-conditioned accommodation, which was why the prized Stealths had been put there.

Because they flew so far, theirs were among the longest missions of the war, up to six hours from takeoff to landing, and all under strain.

They threaded their way undetected through some of the most intense air defense systems in the world—those of Baghdad—and not one was ever touched, on that or any other night.

When they had done what they came to do, they slipped away again, cruising like stingrays in a calm sea, and went back to Khamis Mushait.

The most dangerous job of the night went to the British Tornados.

Their task then, and for the next week until it was discontinued, was

“airfield denial,” using their big, heavy JP-233 runway-busting bombs.

Their problem was twofold. The Iraqis had built their military airfields to be absolutely vast. Tallil was four times the size of Heathrow, with sixteen runways and taxi tracks that could be used for takeoff and landing as well. It was simply impossible to destroy it all.

The second problem was one of height and speed. The JP-233s had to be launched from a Tornado in stabilized straight and level flight.

Even after bomb launch, the Tornados had no choice but to overfly the target. Even if the radars were knocked out, the gunners weren’t; The Fist of God

antiaircraft artillery, known as triple-A, came up at them in rolling waves as they approached, so that one pilot described those missions as “flying through tubes of molten steel.”

The Americans had abandoned tests on the JP-233 bomb, judging it to be a pilot-killer. They were right. But the RAF crews pressed on, losing planes and crews until they were called off and given other duties.

The bomb-droppers were not the only planes aloft that night. Behind them and with them flew an extraordinary array of backup services.

Air superiority fighters flew cover on and over the strike bombers. The Iraqi ground controllers’ instructions to their own pilots—the few who managed to take off that night—were jammed by the American Air Force Ravens and the Navy equivalent Prowlers. Iraqi pilots aloft got no verbal instructions and no radar guidance. Most, wisely, went straight back home.

Circling south of the border were sixty tankers: American KC-135s and KC-10s, U.S. Navy KA-6Ds, and British Victors and VC-10s.

Their job was to receive the warplanes coming up from Saudi Arabia, refuel them for the mission, then meet them on the way back to give them more fuel to get home. This may sound routine, but actually doing it in pitch darkness was described by one flier as “trying to shove spaghetti up a wildcat’s backside.”

And out over the Gulf, where they had been for five months, the U.S.

Navy’s E-2 Hawkeyes and the USAF’s E-3 Sentry AWACS circled around and around, their radars picking up every friendly and every enemy aircraft in the sky, warning, advising, guiding, and watching.

By dawn, Iraq’s radars had mostly been crushed, her missile bases blinded, and her main command centers ruined. It would take four more days and nights to complete the job, but air supremacy was The Fist of God

already in sight. Later would come the power-generating stations, telecommunications towers, telephone exchanges, relay stations, aircraft shelters, control towers, and all those known facilities for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction.

Later still would come the systematic “degradation” to less than fifty percent of its fighting power of the Iraqi Army south and southwest of the Kuwaiti border, a condition on which General Schwarzkopf insisted before he would attack with ground troops.

Two then-unknown factors would later cause changes to the course of the war. One was Iraq’s decision to launch a barrage of Scud missiles at Israel; the other would be triggered by an act of sheer frustration on the part of Captain Don Walker of the 336th Tactical Fighter Squadron.

Dawn broke on the morning of January 17 over a Baghdad that was very badly shaken.

The ordinary citizens had not slept a wink from three A.M. on, and when daylight came, some of them ventured out to peer curiously at the rubble of a score of major sites across their city. That they had survived the night seemed to many miraculous, for they were simple folk who did not realize that the twenty smoking mounds of rubble had been carefully selected and hit with such precision that the citizenry had been in no mortal danger.

But the real sense of shock was among the hierarchs. Saddam Hussein had left the Presidential Palace and was lodged in his extraordinary multistory bunker behind and beneath the Rashid Hotel, which was still full of Westerners, mainly from the media.

The bunker had been built years earlier inside a vast crater dug by The Fist of God

earth-movers, with mainly Swedish technology. So sophisticated were its security measures that it was in fact a box within a box, and beneath and around the inner box were springs of such strength as to protect the inhabitants from a nuclear bomb, reducing shock waves that would flatten the city above into a minor tremor down below.

Although access was via a hydraulically operated ramp set in waste ground behind the hotel, the main structure was beneath the Rashid, which had deliberately been built on the ground above as a specific repose for Westerners in Baghdad. Any enemy wishing to attempt a deep-penetration bombing of the bunker would have to obliterate the Rashid first.

Try as they might, the sycophants surrounding the Rais were hard put to create a gloss over the night’s disasters. Slowly, the level of the catastrophe penetrated all their minds.

They had all counted on a blanket bombing of the city, which would have left residential areas flattened and thousands of innocent civilians dead. This carnage would then be shown to the media, who would film it all and show it to the sickened audiences back home. Thus would begin the global wave of revulsion against President Bush and the United States, culminating in an emergency session of the UN Security Council and the veto of China and Russia against further massacre.

By midday, it was plain that the Sons of Dogs from across the Atlantic were not obliging. So far as the Iraqi generals were aware, the bombs fell approximately where they had been aimed, but that was all. With every major military installation in Baghdad deliberately sited in densely populated housing areas, it should have been impossible for massive civilian casualties to be avoided. Yet while a tour of the city revealed twenty command posts, missile sites, radar bases, and communication centers blasted to rubble, those not in the targeted The Fist of God