The grass from the previous summer had matted, creating its own bonding network of roots, and the shrubs had sprouted up through the wire and the grass to match the undergrowth on the original hills.
Above the crater, the roof of the fortress was surely a geodesic dome, so cast that it too contained thousands of pockets where grass could grow. There were even artificial boulders, painted the gray of real rocks, with streaks where the rain had run off.
Martin began to concentrate on the area near the point where the rim of the crater would have been before the construction of the rotunda.
It was about fifty feet below the summit of the dome that he found what he sought. He had already swept his glasses across the slight protuberance fifty times and had not noticed.
It was a rocky outcrop, faded gray, but two black lines ran across it from side to side. The more he studied the lines, the more he wondered why anyone would have clambered so high to draw two lines across a boulder.
A squall of wind came from the northeast, ruffling the scrim netting around his face. The same wind caused one of the lines to move. When the wind dropped, the line ceased to move. Then Martin realized they were not drawn lines but steel wires, running across the rock and away into the grass.
Smaller boulders stood around the perimeter of the large one, like sentries in a ring. Why so circular, why steel wires? Supposing someone, down below, jerked hard on those wires—would the boulder move?
At half past three he realized it was not a boulder. It was a gray tarpaulin, weighted down by a circle of rocks, to be twitched to one side when the wires were jerked downward into the cavern beneath.
Under the tarp he gradually made out a shape, circular, five feet in diameter. He was staring at a canvas sheet, beneath which, invisible to him, the last three feet of the Babylon gun projected, from its breech two hundred yards inside the crater up into the sky. It was pointing south-southeast toward Dhahran, 750 kilometers away.
“Rangefinder,” he muttered to the men behind him. He passed back the binoculars and took the implement offered to him. It was like a telescope.
When he held it to his eye, as they had shown him in Riyadh, he saw the mountain and the tarp that hid the gun, but not with any magnification.
On the prism were four V-shaped chevrons, the points all directed inward. Slowly he rotated the knurled knob on the side of the scope until all four points touched each other to form a cross. The cross rested on the tarpaulin.
Taking the scope from his eye, he consulted the numbers on the rotating band. One thousand and eighty yards.
“Compass,” he said. He pushed the rangefinder behind him and took the electronic compass. This was no device dependent on a dish swimming in a bowl of alcohol, nor even a pointer balanced on a gimbal.
He held it to his eye, sighted the tarpaulin across the valley, and pressed the button. The compass did the rest, giving him a bearing from his own position to the tarpaulin of 348 degrees, ten minutes, and eighteen seconds.
The SATNAV positioner gave him the last thing he needed—his own exact location on the planet’s surface, to the nearest square fifteen yards by fifteen.
It was a clumsy business trying to erect the satellite dish in the confined space, and it took ten minutes.
When he called Riyadh, the response was immediate. Slowly Martin read to the listeners in the Saudi capital three sets of figures: his own exact position, the compass direction from himself to the target, and the range. Riyadh could work out the rest and give the pilot his coordinates.
Martin crawled back into the crevice, to be replaced by Stephenson, who would keep an eye open for Iraqi patrols, and tried to sleep.
At half-past eight, in complete darkness, Martin tested the infrared target marker. In shape it was like a large flash lamp with a pistol-grip, but it had an eyepiece in back.
He linked it to its battery, aimed it at the Fortress, and looked. The whole mountain was as clearly lit as if bathed in a great green moon. He swung the barrel of the image intensifier up to the tarpaulin that masked the barrel of the Babylon and squeezed the pistol-trigger.
A single, invisible beam of infrared light raced across the valley, and he saw a small red dot appear on the mountainside. Moving the night-sight, he settled the red dot on the tarpaulin and kept it there for half a minute. Satisfied, he switched it off and crawled back beneath the netting.
The four Strike Eagles took off from Al Kharz at ten forty-fiveP.M. and climbed to twenty thousand feet. For three of the crews, it was a routine mission to hit an Iraqi air base. Each Eagle carried two two-thousand-pound laser-guided bombs, in addition to their self-defense air-to-air missiles.
Refueling from their designated KC-10 tanker just south of the Iraqi border was normal and uneventful.
When they were topped up, they turned away in loose formation, and the flight, coded Bluejay, set course almost due north, passing over the Iraqi town of As-Samawah at 11:14.
They flew in radio silence as always and without lights, each wizzo able to see the other three aircraft clearly on his radar. The night was clear, and the AWACS over the Gulf had given them a “picture clear”
advice, meaning no Iraqi fighters were up.
At 11:39, Don Walker’s wizzo muttered:
“Turning point in five.”
They all heard it and understood they would be turning over Lake As Sa’diyah in five minutes.
Just as they went into the forty-five-degree turn to port, to set the new heading for Tikrit East, the other three aircrew heard Don Walker say quite clearly:
“Bluejay Flight Leader has ... engine problems. I’m going to RTB. Bluejay Three, take over.”
Bluejay Three was Bull Baker that night, leader of the other two-plane element. From that transmission onward, things began to go wrong, in a very weird manner.
Walker’s wingman Randy “R-2” Roberts closed up with his leader but could see no apparent trouble from Walker’s engines, yet the Bluejay leader was losing power and height. If he was going to RTB—return to base—it would be normal for his wingman to stay with him, unless the problem was minimal. Engine trouble far over enemy territory is not minimal.
“Roger that,” acknowledged Baker. Then they heard Walker say:
“Bluejay Two, rejoin Bluejay Three, I say again, rejoin. That is an order. Proceed to Tikrit East.”
The wingman, now baffled, did as he was ordered and climbed back to rejoin the remainder of Bluejay.
Their commander continued to lose height over the lake; they could see him on their radars.
At the same moment they realized he had done the unthinkable. For some reason—confusion caused by the engine problem, perhaps—he had spoken not on the Have-quick coded radio, but “in clear.” More amazingly, he had actually mentioned their destination.
Out over the Gulf, a young USAF sergeant manning part of the battery of consoles in the hull of the AWACS plane summoned his mission commander in perplexity.
“We have a problem, sir. Bluejay Leader has engine trouble. He wants to RTB.”
“Right, noted,” said the mission commander. In most airplanes the pilot is the captain and in complete charge. In an AWACS the pilot has that charge for the safety of the airplane, but the mission commander calls the shots when it comes to giving orders across the air.
“But sir,” protested the sergeant, “Bluejay Leader spoke in clear. Gave the mission target. Shall I RTB
them all?”
“Negative, mission continues,” said the controller. “Carry on.”
The sergeant returned to his console completely bewildered. This was madness: If the Iraqis had heard that transmission, their air defenses at Tikrit East would be on full alert.
Then he heard Walker again.
“Bluejay Leader, Mayday, Mayday. Both engines out. Ejecting.”
He was still speaking in clear. The Iraqis, if they were listening, could have heard it all.
In fact, the sergeant was right—the messages had been h
eard. At Tikrit East the gunners were hauling their tarpaulins off their triple-A, and the heat-seeking missiles were waiting for the sound of incoming engines. Other units were being alerted to go at once to the area of the lake to search for two downed aircrew.
“Sir, Bluejay Leader is down. We have to RTB the rest of them.”
“Noted. Negative,” said the mission commander. He glanced at his watch. He had his orders. He did not know why, but he would obey them.
Bluejay Flight was by then nine minutes from target, heading into a reception committee. The three pilots rode their Eagles in stony silence.
In the AWACS the sergeant could still see the blip of Bluejay Leader, way down over the surface of the lake. Clearly the Eagle had been abandoned and would crash at any moment.
Four minutes later, the mission commander appeared to change his mind.
“Bluejay Flight, AWACS to Bluejay Flight, RTB, I say again RTB.”
The three Strike Eagles, despondent at the night’s events, peeled away from their course and set heading for home. The Iraqi gunners at Tikrit East, deprived of radar, waited in vain for another hour.
In the southern fringes of the Jebal al Hamreen another Iraqi listening post had heard the interchange.
The signals colonel in charge was not tasked with alerting Tikrit East or any other air base to approaching enemy aircraft. His sole job was to ensure none entered the Jebal.
As Bluejay Flight turned over the lake, he had gone to amber alert; the track from the lake to the air base would have taken the Eagles along the southern fringe of the range. When one of them crashed, he was delighted; when the other three peeled away to the south, he was relieved. He stood his alert down.
Don Walker had spiraled down to the surface of the lake until he levelled at one hundred feet and made his Mayday call. As he skimmed the waters of As Sa’diyah, he punched in his new coordinates and turned north into the Jebal. At the same time he went to LANTIRN, with whose aid he could look through his canopy and see the landscape ahead of him, clearly lit by the infrared beam being emitted from beneath his wing.
Columns of information on his Head-Up Display were now giving him course and speed, height, and time to Launch Point.
He could have gone to automatic pilot, allowing the computer to fly the Eagle, throwing it down the canyons and the valleys, past the cliffs and hillsides, while the pilot kept his hands on his thighs. But he preferred to stay on manual and fly it himself.
With the aid of recon photos supplied by the Black Hole, he had plotted a course up through the range that never let him come above the skyline. He stayed low, hugging the valley floors, swerving from gap to gap, a roller-coaster zigzag course that carried him upward into the range toward the Fortress.
When Walker made his Mayday call, Mike Martin’s radio had squawked out a series of preagreed blips. Martin had crawled forward to the ledge above the valley, aimed the infrared target marker at the tarpaulin a thousand yards away, settled the red dot onto the dead center of the target, and now kept it there.
The blips on the radio had meant “seven minutes to bomb launch,” and from then on Martin was not to move the red spot by an inch.
“About time,” muttered Eastman. “I’m bloody freezing in here.”
“Not long,” said Stephenson, cramming the last bits and pieces into his Bergen. “Then you’ll have all the running you want, Benny.”
Only the radio remained unpacked, ready for its next transmission.
In the rear seat of the Eagle, Tim, the wizzo, could see the same information as his pilot. Four minutes to launch, three-thirty, three ... the figures on the HUD counted down as the Eagle screamed through the mountains to its target. It flashed over the small dip where Martin and his men had landed, and took seconds to cover the terrain across which they had labored beneath their packs. “Ninety seconds to launch ...”
The SAS men heard the sound of the engines coming from the south as the Eagle began its loft.
The fighter-bomber came over the last ridge three miles south of the target, just as the countdown hit zero. In the darkness the two torpedo-shaped bombs left their pylons beneath the wings and climbed for a few seconds, driven by their own inertia.
In the three dummy villages the Republican Guards were drowned in the roar of the jet engines erupting from nowhere over their heads, jumped from their bunks, and ran to their weapons. In a few seconds the roofs of the forage barns were lifting away on their hydraulic jacks to expose the missiles beneath.
The two bombs felt the tug of gravity and began to fall. In their noses, infrared seekers sniffed for the guiding beam, the upturned bucket of invisible rays bouncing back from the red spot on their target, the bucket which, once entered, they could never leave.
Mike Martin lay prone, waiting, buffeted by engine noise as the mountains trembled, and held the red dot steady on the Babylon gun.
He never saw the bombs. One second he was gazing at a pale green mountain in the light of the image intensifier; the next, he had to pull his eyes away and shield them as night turned into blood-red day.
The two bombs impacted simultaneously, three seconds before the Guard colonel deep below the hollow mountain reached for his Launch lever. He never made it.
Looking across the valley without the night-sight, Martin saw the entire top of the Fortress erupt in flame. By its glare, he caught the fleeting image of a massive barrel, rearing like a stricken beast, twisting and turning in the blast, breaking, and crashing back with the fragments of the dome into the crater beneath.
“Bloody hellfire,” whispered Sergeant Stephenson at his elbow. It was not a bad analogy. Orange fire began to glow down in the crater as the first explosion flashes died away and a dim half-light returned to the mountains. Martin began keying in his alert codes for the listeners in Riyadh.
Don Walker had rolled the Eagle after the bomb launch, pulling 135 degrees of bank, hauling down and through to find and pursue a reciprocal heading back to the south. But because he was not over flat land and mountains rose all around him, he had to gain more altitude than normal or risk clipping one of the peaks.
It was the village farthest away from the Fortress that got the best shot. For a fraction of a second he was above them, on one wingtip, pulling around to the south, when the two missiles were launched.
These were not Russian SAMs but the best Iraq had—Franco-German Rolands.
The first was low, racing after the Eagle as it dropped out of sight across the mountains. The Roland failed to clear the ridge. The second skimmed the rocks of the peak and caught up with the fighter in the next valley. Walker felt the tremendous shock as the missile impacted into the body of his aircraft, destroying and almost ripping out the starboard engine. The Eagle was thrown across the sky, its delicate systems in disarray, flaming fuel forming a comet’s tail behind it. Walker tested the controls, a soggy pudding where once there had been firm response. It was over, his airplane was dying underneath him, all his fire-warning lights were on, and thirty tons of burning metal were about to fall out of the sky.
“Eject, eject ...”
The canopy automatically shattered a microsecond before the two ejector seats came through, shooting upward into the night, turning, stabilizing. Their sensors knew at once that they were too low and blew apart the straps retaining the pilot into his seat, throwing him clear of the falling metal so that his parachute could open.
Walker had never bailed out before. The sense of shock numbed him for a while, robbed him of the power of decision. Fortunately the manufacturers had thought of that. As the heavy metal seat fell away, the parachute snapped itself open and unfurled. Dazed, Walker found himself in pitch darkness, swinging in his harness over a valley he could not see.
It was not a long drop—he had been far too low for that. In seconds the ground came up and hit him, and he was knocked over, tumbling, rolling, hands frantically scrabbling for the harness-release catch.
Then the parachute was gone, blowing away
down the valley, and he was on his back on wiry turf. He got up.
“Tim,” he called. “Tim, you okay?” He began to run up the valley floor, looking for another chute, certain they had both landed in the same area.
He was right in that. Both airmen had fallen two valleys to the south of their target. In the sky to the north he could make out a dim reddish glow.
After three minutes he crashed into something and banged his knee. He thought it was a rock, but in the dim light he saw it was one of the ejector seats. His, perhaps. Tim’s? He went on looking.
Walker found his wizzo. The young man had ejected perfectly, but the missile blast had wrecked the seat-separation unit on his ejector. He had landed on the mountainside locked into the seat, his parachute still tucked beneath him. The impact of the crash had torn the body from the seat at last, but no man survives a shock like that.
Tim Nathanson lay on his back in the valley, a tangle of broken limbs, his face masked by his helmet and visor. Walker tore away the mask, removed the dog tags, turned away from the glow in the mountains, and began to run, tears streaming down his face.
He ran until he could run no more, then found a crevice in the mountain and crawled in to rest.
Two minutes after the explosions in the Fortress, Martin had his contact with Riyadh. He sent his series of blips and then his message. It was:
“Now Barrabas, I say again, Now Barrabas.”
The three SAS men closed down the radio, packed it, hitched their Bergens onto their backs, and began to get off the mountain—fast. There would be patrols now as never before, looking not for them—it was unlikely the Iraqis would work out for some time how the bombing raid had been so accurate—but for the downed American aircrew.
Sergeant Stephenson had taken a bearing on the flaming jet as it passed over their heads, and the direction it had fallen. Assuming it had careered on for a while after the ejections, the aircrew, had they survived, ought to be somewhere along that heading. The SAS men moved fast, just ahead of the Ubaidi tribesmen of the Guard, who were then pouring out of their villages and heading upward into the range.