by Robert Gandt
Still no answer.
Maxwell ordered a beer, then chatted with a young British Airways first officer who was on a crew layover. At ten minutes after four, Maxwell went back to his room to get dressed for CAG’s beer call.
He tried Claire again. Still no answer.
“Do you want to leave a message?” asked the hotel operator.
Annoyed, he hesitated, then said, “No.”
<>
CAG Boyce took a test puff on the Cohiba, then exhaled a long stream of smoke. He smiled in approval to the bartender. That was one of the blessings of deploying overseas. You could obtain real Cubans, not the knock-offs they sold back in the states for which they charged you twenty bucks.
From his stool at the end of the bar, Boyce watched his pilots. They were slamming down beers, telling flying stories, maneuvering their hands in the way fighter pilots always did at bars. Most were wearing chinos, polo shirts, loafers. By the short haircuts and the way they moved their hands, there was no mistaking them for anything but U.S. military jocks. Each held the rank of lieutenant commander or commander and was either a squadron commanding officer or a strike leader.
Hanging out like this with his pilots was a treat for Boyce. Being the air wing commander was a lonely job. He wasn’t directly in command of a squadron, just the overall boss of the flying units aboard the Reagan. What he sorely missed was the daily hands-on business of running his own fighter squadron.
He couldn’t help thinking about the real reason they were here. Behind the joking and hand-flying was a serious purpose. Boyce remembered how it had been during the last Gulf War, and again during the punitive raids they had delivered on Iraq throughout the last decade. The procedure was simple. Take out the SAM sites first, the AA positions, drop a few bridges, put some smart bombs on their command and control facilities. Inflict a little pain.
This time, he had a feeling, would be different. The targets were not benign. If they didn’t succeed in eradicating the threat, the threat could eradicate them. Somebody else would be inflicting the pain.
At the end of the bar, DeLancey was telling a story. Craze Manson was glued to his side, paying rapt attention and chortling in the right places with his goofy laugh. Boyce noticed that Brick Maxwell stood apart from DeLancey’s group, drinking a beer by himself.
Boyce waited until DeLancey had finished his tale, then he ambled down to the end of the bar.
DeLancey was on a roll. He saw CAG coming and said, “Smoking those things will make your hair fall out, CAG.”
“It’s worth it.” Boyce took another puff on the cigar. “Update me on the female pilot problem. The mouthy one, Parker. Is she getting her act together?”
A look of alarm flashed over DeLancey’s face, then quickly vanished. “Spam? Oh, sure, she’s gonna be all right.”
“Doesn’t look all right to me. She’s been scaring the hell out of the LSO. The air boss and the captain both called me about it.”
“She’s showing a lot improvement, CAG. I think she’s gonna work out fine.”
Boyce knocked the ash off his cigar. Something just didn’t compute. DeLancey sticking up for a woman pilot. He had been one of the loudest female-bashers in the strike fighter community. Now he sounded like a women’s-libber. Why?
There was one frighteningly obvious possibility.
Boyce placed his cigar in the big marble ashtray. He looked around, then said in a low voice, “Killer, would you by any chance be screwing Lieutenant Parker?”
DeLancey broke out in a laugh. “C’mon, CAG, give me a break. I’m her commanding officer, for Christ’s sake. You know I wouldn’t —”
“You’d screw a pile of rocks if you thought there was a snake in it.”
DeLancey kept smiling, but his eyes darted around, making sure no one else was listening. “Not if it had ‘U.S. Navy’ stamped on it. I know better than that. I just think the kid deserves a break. Hell, she’s a good pilot. In fact, she’s already approached me about being a section lead.”
“Section lead?” Boyce nearly choked. “Tell her she’d better learn how to get aboard the ship first. Next cruise, maybe we’ll talk about section lead.” If she’s still around, he thought.
DeLancey nodded. “I’ll tell her.”
Boyce puffed his cigar back to life. He hoped Killer wasn’t bullshitting him. When a female pilot was having flying problems, it was a no-win situation. If you saved her life by kicking her out, you faced a sexism charge. If you kept her in the cockpit and she hurt herself, you were to blame. Either way, everybody lost.
<>
At exactly six o’clock Boyce finished the stub of his cigar. “Drink up!” he bellowed. “CAG’s hungry.”
He knew a restaurant called Cico’s which, he informed them, had the most superb Italian food in the Middle East. Maybe in the whole damned world. Boyce knew this because his mother was Italian. No one argued. The pilots understood the realities of military life. CAG was boss; they were on their way to a joint called Cico’s.
Maxwell thought once again about the Gulf Hotel and Claire. Why hadn’t she answered his calls? Damn it, she knew he was here. She had left the note.
On the way through the lobby, he tried phoning again. Still no response. This time he left a message with the concierge that he would call after dinner.
The food at Cico’s, just as Boyce had promised, was excellent. He presided at the head of a long table with a red-and-white-checkered cloth. Bottles of wine were passed up and down the table. Boyce told a story about when he’d been on exchange duty with the Royal Air Force in Oman and they’d gotten drunk and stolen a camel. Everyone laughed, though most of the senior pilots had heard the story a dozen times.
The pilots liked CAG Boyce. He was a traditional fighter jock, not one of the politically astute fast-burners on his way to higher command. Boyce was an old war horse who, everyone figured, had gone as far as he would in the Navy’s pyramidal rank structure.
The conversation around the table dwelled on the usual subjects: airplanes and women. The only subject not being talked about was the one most on their minds: why they were in Bahrain. If asked, the pilots had been warned to say only that they were on weekend liberty. Sea duty was a bitch, you know. This was the New Navy, and they had to give you time on the beach to blow off steam.
Leaving the restaurant, the group dispersed. Boyce and a contingent of his strike leaders piled into taxis and headed for a jazz place. DeLancey and his followers announced they were laying siege to a gin mill called Henry’s. They had gotten reliable intelligence reports that a flock of GAGs had been sighted on the premises.
Maxwell watched them depart, then took a taxi back to the hotel.
<>
“Come on, Claire, be a sport. Let’s drink up and go to my room.” Chris Tyrwhitt gave her a bleary smile. “For old times’ sake.”
Claire Phillips swirled the ice in her vodka tonic and regarded him over the rim of her glass. He hadn’t changed. Still ruddy-faced, probably from all the drinking. He was wearing the same old attire: wrinkled khaki shorts, long stockings, safari shirt. His mop of reddish hair had begun to show flecks of gray. “You haven’t forgotten how to make a girl feel wanted, have you?” she said. “Is that still all you ever think about?”
“When I’m with you, yes.”
“You haven’t been with me for — what? A year and a half?”
“Nineteen months, sixteen days and —” he made a show of looking at his watch, “— nearly seven hours. Your choice, not mine.”
“I remember. After you’d spent the night with that Danish woman, the consul’s wife. Or was it the other one, the German floozy who —”
“She wasn’t a floozy. She was a cabaret singer with a voice like Piaf.”
“And a disposition like Himmler. Wasn’t she the one who threatened you with castration?”
“No, that was the Ukrainian girl who worked over at the Reuters bureau. And I’m pleased to report that she didn’t succeed. Since you bel
ieve nothing I say, however, you may wish to verify that fact for yourself.”
She ignored the suggestion while she fumbled in her purse for a half-empty Marlboro pack. She had nearly kicked the habit. These days she smoked only when she was stressed out. She pulled a cigarette from the pack, then changed her mind and left it unlit in the ash tray.
“Baghdad must be pretty boring now,” she said. “Most of the embassies shut down, no major news services except your own. What do you do for amusement?”
“The usual thing. I’ve developed a relationship with a certain female named Martha.”
“Martha? Is she Iraqi. . .?”
“Hard to tell. She’s a camel, but I’m not sure of her nationality.”
Claire had to laugh. It was that wacky outback humor that had drawn her to him in the first place. She reminded herself to be careful. This was a guy who could flaunt every code of moral conduct — especially the seventh commandment — and have you laughing about it. At least for a while.
“Do the Iraqis censor your dispatches?”
“Sure,” he said. “But they like what I write, so it’s no problem.”
She crossed her legs and tugged the hem of her skirt closer to her knees. “Is that why you write such ingratiating bullshit? Like that piece about the schoolchildren in Basra? Are you on their payroll?”
He didn’t seem to be insulted. “I wouldn’t exactly put it that way.” He gave her a wink.
“You know what the U.S. military calls you out here? Baghdad Ben. They think you’re the Iraqis’ mouthpiece.”
“How do you know what the U.S. military thinks? Still hanging out with the Yank flyboys?”
“I’m still a reporter.”
“Anything for a story.” He tipped his glass up and drained it. “Basically, we’re all whores.”
“That’s pretty tasteless, Chris.”
“We do what we have to do.”
She bristled but let it go. After all, that was Chris Tyrwhitt’s style. Three years ago, back in Washington, she had thought he was terrifically funny, that disarming Crocodile Dundee manner. She had known him only a couple of months before they were married. He was witty, good looking and, when he felt like working at it, could be a competent journalist. What she learned later was that Chris Tyrwhitt seldom worked at anything except drinking and philandering.
Tyrwhitt put his hand on her knee. “I really have missed you, you know.”
“You missed me so much you went to Baghdad.”
“You threw me out, remember?”
She was about to make a sarcastic reply when she noticed he wasn’t looking at her. Tyrwhitt was gazing at something over her shoulder. She turned to see what he was looking at.
Sam Maxwell stood in the entrance to the bar. His eyes were locked on the two of them.
“Do you know that chap?” Tyrwhitt asked. “He’s been standing there staring at us.”
For a second their gazes met. Maxwell’s face was a frozen mask. Claire was suddenly aware that Tyrwhitt’s hand was still on her knee.
Maxwell turned and walked away.
“Oh, damn!” she said, and yanked Tyrwhitt’s hand off her knee. She walked quickly over to the entrance of the bar. “Sam?” she called, looking around.
He was nowhere in sight.
<>
The bus that took them to the strike conference was the same one that had delivered them to the hotel yesterday. But instead of the smiling young Bahraini at the wheel, their driver was a Marine gunnery sergeant. He wore a sidearm and a UHF radio headset. Two more Marines in full combat gear, each carrying an M-16 and wearing their own headsets, occupied the front and the rear rows of the bus.
The bus wound through a labyrinth of back streets, while the guards maintained a watchful lookout. Not until they stopped did the pilots realize they were back at the old American embassy, an under-used facility that contained the only SCIF — Special Compartmentalized Intelligence Facility — this side of Riyadh. The SCIF had a blast door and another squad of armed guards. The exterior shell of the facility was shielded against monitoring or electronic intrusions.
Maxwell took a seat with the other pilots in the large, windowless briefing room. A half dozen tiers of seats faced a narrow dais with a lectern and a row of folding chairs. Behind the lectern sat a khaki-clad admiral with two stars on his collar, and two civilians. By their ubiquitous button-down shirts and wingtips Maxwell knew they had to be spooks — either CIA or Defense Intelligence.
Next to the admiral, wearing his own khaki outfit, sat another civilian — the Undersecretary of the Navy. Whitney Babcock smiled and came over to shake hands with Boyce and DeLancey.
Rear Admiral Dinelli, whose title was a convoluted military acronym, COMUSNAVCENT — Commander U.S. Naval Forces Central Europe — took the lectern and opened the conference. “As you know, gentlemen, the Iraqis have been scaling up their threat posture steadily since last month. It began, as you might also suspect, precisely on the afternoon of 25 April.”
Several pilots nodded. “When Killer flamed the MiG,” someone volunteered.
“Correct. But not just any MiG. It happened to be a jet flown by a pilot named Al-Fariz, who, we have determined, was the nephew of the president of Iraq.”
Someone in the room whistled. Several cast sideways glances at Killer DeLancey. DeLancey, for a change, was not grandstanding. He maintained a stoic expression.
“Since that day,” the admiral went on, “things have heated up. They’ve been lighting up their air defense radars. On the 17 May, they managed to bring down the F-16 at Az Zubayr. We have reason to believe they may have more ambitious plans than ever before.”
The admiral turned to the wall behind him. “Chart, please,” he said, and an eight-foot-square illuminated map of Iraq lowered from the overhead. The admiral aimed a laser pointer at the map, positioning the beam directly over a spot to the south of Baghdad.
“Latifiyah,” he said, making a tiny circle around the spot. “Iraq insists the facility is a pharmaceutical plant. They have, of course, denied United Nations inspectors access to the facility. The admiral aimed the laser again. “Here, at Al Fallujah, and another one five kilometers south of Baqubah.” He pointed to a spot in the fertile valley northeast of Baghdad.
“Excuse me, sir,” said a lieutenant commander from the Blue Tail squadron. “I remember Latifiyah from the Gulf War. I know for a fact we nailed that place.”
The admiral nodded. “You did. It was gutted. Now they’ve rebuilt and gone deep underground. We have evidence that Latifiyah is the most heavily bunkered facility in the country with the exception of Saddam’s own headquarters in Baghdad. Baqubah and Al Fallujah were also bombed and have been totally reconstructed with fortified storage containers.’
“Storage for what, sir?” asked CAG Boyce.
The admiral seemed to consider the question, then he nodded to the seated civilians. “I’ll let Mr. Ormsby of the Central Intelligence Agency take that one.”
Ormsby took the lectern. His plump face was punctuated with round oyster-shell framed glasses beneath a receding hairline. “For the past six years, after the first U. N. inspection team was thrown out, Latifiyah was developed as a chemical and biological weapons plant. We have new evidence that it is being used as a rocket propellant facility and probably a missile assembly shop.”
“What kind of missile?” asked Burner Crump, the F-14 squadron commander. “The new Scud?”
The spook shook his head. “Not a Scud, and not even a Silkworm, though the Iraqis would have no trouble obtaining them. Something not seen before in the Middle East.” Ormsby turned to the screen behind him. The map of Iraq vanished and was replaced by a projected color image of a long, tapered missile cradled in a mobile launcher. The missile had sharply swept-back guide vanes and a concave indentation in its body.
“The Krait,” he said. “Developed in China, brokered and sold by North Korea. Uses cheap and efficient global positioning satellite guidance — courtesy
of our own Defense Department. The surface-launched version of the Krait has a range of three hundred miles and a speed in excess of mach three.”
Murmurs came from the assembled pilots. Each was doing the same quick calculation.
“That’s right,” said Ormsby. “Operating in the extreme northern Gulf, the Reagan battle group could be within range of the surface-launched version.”
“You said ‘surface-launched version,” said Gordon. “Does that mean—”
“It does. Our sources report that they are reconfiguring several Fulcrums at Al-Taqqadum as strike fighters. We’ve observed what appears to be extensive low-altitude pilot training being conducted in the north, in the Mosul area. If they use the Fulcrum as a launch vehicle for the Krait, then every target in the Middle East will be vulnerable. Including the Reagan.”
<>
Tyrwhitt emerged from the windowless gloom of the SCIF. He stood for a moment on the curbside, blinking in the sudden brilliant sunlight. Even with the dark glasses it was painful.
The blue Toyota was waiting. “Hilton Hotel,” Tyrwhitt said as he climbed in the back. He recognized the driver — a young Bahraini in the employ of the American consul.
As the Toyota headed down the road that paralleled the access to the SCIF, Tyrwhitt looked back at the front entrance. He saw the bus that had just delivered the American Navy pilots. They were getting their own briefing, most of it based on the information he had just delivered to his handler.
The pipeline of secrets, he thought. It flowed through the Middle East like crude oil.
His handler, Ormsby, was a pompous twit. He had conducted the debriefing as if it were a therapy session, delivering all this professional wisdom to the amateur spy. He even saw fit to admonish Tyrwhitt about drinking and exercising discretion with local women. The slightest lapse in discipline, you know, could jeopardize the balance of power.
For nearly three hours Ormsby had grilled him about the reports from the Iraqi military informer. What did the informer want? He didn’t know. What was his job? No idea. Why was he willing to inform? He didn’t say. Did he want to defect? Apparently not. Could he be trusted? Of course not. Could anybody?