By May, the exact specifications of Babylon had been worked out. It would be an incredible machine.
One meter of bore; a barrel 156 meters long and weighing 1,665 tons—the height of the Washington Monument.
Bull had already made plain to Baghdad that he would have to make a smaller prototype, a Mini-Babylon, with a 350-mm. bore weighing only 113 tons. But in this he could test nose cones that would also be useful for the rocket project. The Iraqis liked this—they needed nose-cone technology as well.
The full significance of the insatiable Iraqi appetite for nose-cone technology seems to have escaped Gerry Bull at the time. Maybe, in his limitless enthusiasm to see his life’s dream realized at last, he just suppressed it. Nose cones of very advanced design are needed to prevent a payload from burning up from friction heat as it reenters earth’s atmosphere. But orbiting payloads in space do not return; they stay up there.
By late May 1988, Christopher Cowley was placing his first orders with Walter Somers of Birmingham for the tube sections that would make up the barrel of Mini-Babylon. The sections for full-scale Babylons 1, 2, 3, and 4 would come later. Other strange steel orders were placed all around Europe.
The pace at which Bull was working was awesome. Within two months he covered ground that would have taken a government enterprise two years. By the end of 1988, he had designed for Iraq two new guns—self-propelled guns, as opposed to the towed machines supplied by South Africa. Both pieces would be so powerful, they could crush the guns of the surrounding nations of Iran, Turkey, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, who purchased theirs from NATO and America.
Bull also managed to crack the problems of tying the five Scuds together to form the first stage of the Bird rocket, to be called Al-Abeid, “the Believer.” He had discovered that the Iraqis and Brazilians at Saad 16 were working on faulty data, produced by a wind tunnel that was itself malfunctioning. After that, he handed over his fresh calculations and left the Brazilians to get on with it.
In May 1989 most of the world’s armaments industry and press, along with government observers and intelligence officers, attended a great weapons exhibition in Baghdad. Considerable interest was shown in the mock-up prototypes of the two great guns. In December, the Al-Abeid was test-fired to great media hoopla, seriously jolting Western analysts.
Heavily covered by Iraqi TV cameras, the great three-stage rocket roared off from the Al-Anbar Space Research Base, climbed away from the earth, and disappeared. Three days later, Washington admitted that the rocket did indeed appear capable of putting a satellite into space.
But the analysts worked out more. If Al-Abeid could do that, it could also be an intercontinental ballistic missile. Suddenly, Western intelligence agencies were jerked out of their assumption that Saddam Hussein was no real danger, years away from being a serious threat.
The three main intelligence agencies, the CIA in America, the Secret Intelligence Service—SIS—in Britain, and the Mossad in Israel, came to the view that of the two systems, the Babylon gun was an amusing toy and the Bird rocket a real threat. All three got it wrong. It was the Al-Abeid that did not work.
Bull knew why, and he told the Israelis what had happened. The Al-Abeid had soared to twelve thousand meters and been lost to view. The second stage had refused to separate from the first. The third stage had not existed. It had been a dummy. He knew because he had been charged with trying to persuade China to provide a third stage and would be going to Beijing in February.
He did indeed go, and the Chinese turned him down flat. While he was there, he met and talked at length with his old friend George Wong. Something had gone wrong with the Iraqi business, something that was worrying the hell out of Gerry Bull, and it was not the Israelis. Several times he insisted he wanted out of Iraq, and in a hurry. Something had happened inside his own head, and he wanted out of Iraq. In this decision he was entirely right, but too late.
* * *
On February 15,1990, President Saddam Hussein called a full meeting of his group of inner advisers at his palace at Sarseng, high up in the Kurdish mountains.
He liked Sarseng. It stands on a hilltop, and through its triple-glazed windows he could gaze out and down to the surrounding countryside, where the Kurdish peasants huddled through the bitter winters in their shacks and hovels. It was not many miles from here to the terrified town of Halabja, where for the two days of March 17 and 18 in the year 1988, he had ordered the seventy thousand citizens to be punished for their alleged collaboration with the Iranians.
When his artillery had finished, five thousand Kurdish dogs were dead and seven thousand maimed for life. Personally, he had been quite impressed with the effects of the hydrogen cyanide sprayed out from the artillery shells. The German companies that had helped him with the technology to acquire and create the gas—along with the nerve agents Tabun and Sarin—had his gratitude. They had earned it with their gas, similar to the Zyklon-B which had so properly been used on the Jews years before and might well be again.
He stood before the windows of his dressing room and gazed down that morning. He had been in power, undisputed power, for sixteen years, and he had been forced to punish many people. But much also had been achieved.
A new Sennacherib had risen out of Nineveh and another Nebuchadnezzar out of Babylon. Some had learned the easy way, by submission. Others had learned the hard, the very hard way and were mostly dead. Still others, many others, had yet to learn. But they would, they would.
He listened as the convoy of helicopters clattered in from the south, while his dresser fussed to adjust the green kerchief he liked to wear in the V above his combat jacket to hide his jowls. When all was to his satisfaction, he took his personal sidearm, a gold-plated Beretta of Iraqi make, bolstered and belted, and secured it around his waist. He had used it before on a cabinet minister and might wish to again. He always carried it.
A flunky tapped on the door and informed the President that those he had summoned awaited him in the conference room.
When he entered the long room with the plate-glass windows dominating the snowy landscape, everyone rose in unison. Only up here at Sarseng did his fear of assassination diminish. He knew that the palace was ringed by three lines of the best of his presidential security detail, the Amn-al-Khass, commanded by his own son Kusay, and that no one could approach those great windows. On the roof were French Crotale antiaircraft missiles, and his fighters ranged the skies above the mountains.
He sat himself down in the throne-like chair at the center of the top table that formed the crossbar of the T. Flanking him, two on each side, were four of his most trusted aides. For Saddam Hussein there was only one quality he demanded of a man in his favor: loyalty. Absolute, total, slavish loyalty. Within this quality, experience had taught him, there were gradations. At the top of the list came family; after that the clan; then the tribe. There is an Arabic saying: “I and my brother against our cousin; I and my cousin against the world.” He believed in it. It worked.
He had come from the gutters of a small town called Tikrit and from the tribe of the Al-Tikriti. An extraordinary number of his family and the Al-Tikriti were in high office in Iraq, and they could be forgiven any brutality, any failure, any personal excess, provided they were loyal to him. Had not his second son, the psychopathic Uday, beaten a servant to death and been forgiven?
To his right sat Izzat Ibrahim, his first deputy, and beyond was his son-in-law, Hussein Kamil, head of MIMI, the man in charge of weapons procurement. To his left were Taha Ramadam, the Prime Minister, and beyond him Sadoun Hammadi, the Deputy Premier and devout Shi’a Moslem. Saddam Hussein was Sunni, but his one and only area of tolerance was in matters of religion. As a non-observer (except when it suited), he did not care. His Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, was a Christian. So what? He did what he was told.
The Army chiefs were near the top of the stem of the T, the generals commanding the Republican Guard, the Infantry, the Armor, the Artillery, and the Engineers. Further down came t
he four experts whose reports and expertise were the reason he had called the meeting.
Two sat to the right of the table: Dr. Amer Saadi, technologist and deputy to his son-in-law, and beside him Brigadier Hassan Rahmani, head of the Counterintelligence wing of the Mukhabarat, or Intelligence Service. Facing them were Dr. Ismail Ubaidi, controlling the foreign arm of the Mukhabarat, and Brigadier Omar Khatib, boss of the feared Secret Police, the Amn-al-Amm, or AMAM.
The three secret service men had clearly denned tasks. Dr. Ubaidi conducted espionage abroad; Rahmani counterattacked foreign-mounted espionage inside Iraq; Khatib kept the Iraqi population in order, crushing all possible internal opposition through a combination of his vast network of watchers and informers and the sheer, stark terror generated by the rumors of what he did to opponents arrested and dragged to the Abu Ghraib jail west of Baghdad or to his personal interrogation center known jokingly as the Gymnasium beneath the AMAM headquarters.
Many had been the complaints brought to Saddam Hussein about the brutality of his Secret Police chief, but he always chuckled and waved them away. It was rumored that he personally had given Khatib his nickname Al-Mu’azib, “the Tormentor.” Khatib, of course, was Al-Tikriti and loyal to the end.
Some dictators, when delicate matters are to be discussed, like to keep the meeting small. Saddam thought the opposite; if there was dirty work to be done, they should all be involved. No man could say:
“I have clean hands, I did not know.” In this way, all around him would get the message: “If I fall, you fall.”
When all had resumed their seats, the President nodded to his son-in-law Hussein Kamil, who called on Dr. Saadi to report. The technocrat read his report without raising his eyes. No wise man raised his eyes to stare Saddam in the face. The President claimed he could read into a man’s soul through his eyes, and many believed it. Staring into his face might signify courage, defiance, disloyalty. If the President suspected disloyalty, the offender usually died horribly.
When Dr. Saadi had finished, Saddam thought for a while.
“This man, this Canadian. How much does he know?”
“Not all, but enough, I believe, to work it out, sayidi .”
Saadi used the honorific Arabic address equivalent to the Western sir, but more respectful. An alternative acceptable title was Sayid Rais , or “Mr. President.”
“How soon?”
“Soon, if not already, sayidi .”
“And he has been talking to the Israelis?”
“Constantly, Sayid Rais ,” replied Dr. Ubaidi. “He has been friends of theirs for years. Visited Tel Aviv and given lectures on ballistics to their artillery staff officers. He has many friends there, possibly among the Mossad, though he may not know that.”
“Could we finish the project without him?” asked Saddam Hussein.
Hussein Kamil cut in. “He is a strange man. He insists on carrying all his most intimate scientific paperwork around with him in a big canvas bag. I instructed our counterintelligence people to have a look at this paperwork and copy it.”
“And this was done?” The President was staring at Hassan Rahmani, his Counterintelligence chief.
“Immediately, Sayid Rais . Last month during his visit here. He drinks much whiskey. It was doped, and he slept long and deep. We took his bag and photocopied every page in it. Also, we have taped all his technical conversations. The papers and the transcripts have all been passed to our comrade Dr. Saadi.”
The presidential stare swiveled back to the scientist.
“So, once again, can you complete the project without him?”
“Yes, Sayid Rais , I believe we can. Some of his calculations make sense only to himself, but I have had our best mathematicians studying them for a month. They can understand them. The engineers can do the rest.”
Hussein Kamil shot his deputy a warning look: You had better be right, my friend.
“Where is he now?” asked the President.
“He has left for China, sayidi ,” replied Dr. Ubaidi. “He is trying to find us a third stage for the Al-Abeid rocket. Alas, he will fail. He is expected back in Brussels in mid-March.”
“You have men there, good men?”
“Yes, sayidi . I have had him under surveillance in Brussels for ten months. That is how we know he has been entertaining Israeli delegations at his offices there. We also have keys to his apartment building.”
“Then let it be done. On his return.”
“Without delay, Sayid Rais .” Dr. Ubaidi thought of the four men he had in Brussels on arm’s-length surveillance work. One of them had done this before: Abdelrahman Moyeddin. He would give the job to him.
The three intelligence men and Dr. Saadi were dismissed. The rest stayed. When they were alone, Saddam Hussein turned to his son-in-law.
“And the other matter—when will I have it?”
“I am assured, by the end of the year, Abu Kusay .”
Being family, Kamil could use the more intimate title “Father of Kusay.” It reminded the others present who was family and who was not. The President grunted.
“We shall need a place, a new place, a fortress; not an existing place, however secret. A new secret place that no one will know about. No one but a tiny handful, not even all of us here. Not a civil engineering project, but military. Can you do it?”
General Ali Musuli of the Army Engineers straightened his back, staring at the President’s midchest.
“With pride, Sayid Rais .”
“The man in charge—your best, your very best.”
“I know the man, sayidi . A colonel. Brilliant at construction and deception. The Russian Stepanov said he was the best pupil in maskirovka that he had ever taught.”
“Then bring him to me. Not here—in Baghdad, in two days. I will commission him myself. Is he a good Ba’athist, this colonel? Loyal to the party and to me?”
“Utterly, sayidi . He would die for you.”
“So would you all, I hope.” There was a pause, then quietly: “Let us hope it does not come to that.”
As a conversation-stopper, it worked. Fortunately that was the end of the meeting anyway.
Dr. Gerry Bull arrived back in Brussels on March 17, exhausted and depressed. His colleagues assumed his depression was caused by his rebuff in China. But it was more than that.
Ever since he had arrived in Baghdad more than two years earlier, he had allowed himself to be persuaded—because it was what he wanted to believe—that the rocket program and the Babylon gun were for the launch of small, instrument-bearing satellites into earth orbit. He could see the enormous benefits in self-esteem and pride for the whole Arab world if Iraq could do that. Moreover, it would be lucrative, pay its way, as Iraq launched communications and weather satellites for other nations.
As he understood it, the plan was for Babylon to fire its satellite-bearing missile southeast over the length of Iraq, on over Saudi Arabia and the south Indian Ocean, and into orbit. That was what he had designed it for.
He had been forced to agree with his colleagues that no Western nation would see it that way. They would assume it was a military gun. Hence, the subterfuge in the ordering of the barrel parts, breech, and recoil mechanism.
Only he, Gerald Vincent Bull, knew the truth, which was very simple—the Babylon gun could not be used as a weapon for launching conventional explosive shells, however gigantic those shells might be.
For one thing, the Babylon gun, with its 156-meter barrel, could not stay rigid without supports. It needed one trunnion, or support, for every second of its twenty-six barrel sections, even if, as he foresaw, its barrel ran up the forty-five-degree side of a mountain. Without these supports, the barrel would droop like wet spaghetti and tear itself apart as the joins ripped open.
Therefore, it could not raise or depress its elevation, nor traverse from side to side. So it could not pick a variety of targets. To change its angle, up or down or side to side, it would have to be dismantled, taking weeks. Even to clea
n out and reload between discharges would take a couple of days. Moreover, repeated firings would wear out that very expensive barrel. Lastly, Babylon could not be hidden from counterattack.
Every time it fired, a gobbet of flame ninety meters long would leap from its barrel, and every satellite and airplane would spot it. Its map coordinates would be with the Americans in seconds. Also, its reverberation shock waves would reach any good seismograph as far away as California. That was why he told anyone who would listen, “It cannot be used as a weapon.”
His problem was that after two years in Iraq, he had realized that for Saddam Hussein science had one application and one only: It was to be applied to weapons of war and the power they brought him and to nothing else . So why the hell was he financing Babylon? It could only fire once in anger before the retaliatory fighter-bombers blew it to bits, and it could only fire a satellite or a conventional shell.
It was in China, in the company of the sympathetic George Wong, that he cracked it. It was the last equation he would ever solve.
Chapter 2
The big Ram Charger sped down the main highway from Qatar toward Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, making good time. The air conditioning kept the interior cool, and the driver had some of his favorite country-and-western tapes filling the interior with back-home sounds.
Beyond Ruweis, they were out in open country, the sea to their left only intermittently visible between the dunes, to their right the great desert stretching away hundreds of bleak and sandy miles toward Dhofar and the Indian Ocean.
Beside her husband Maybelle Walker gazed excitedly at the ochre-brown desert shimmering under the midday sun. Ray Walker kept his eyes on the road. An oil man all his life, he had seen deserts before.
“Seen one, seen ’em all,” he would grunt when his wife made one of her frequent exclamations of wonderment at the sights and sounds that were so new to her.
But for Maybelle Walker it was all new, and although she had packed enough medications before leaving Oklahoma to open a new branch of Eckerd, she had loved every minute of her two-week tour of the Arabian Gulf—what used to be called the Persian Gulf.