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Phantom Strike

Page 21

by William H. Lovejoy


  “But, sir…”

  “Get hold of your team and turn them back.”

  Fourteen

  George Embry’s office was not as large as Church’s, and it was made even smaller by the dominant, double-sized poster of Madonna in a classic Marilyn Monroe pose on one wall.

  “Jesus, George. Why did you put that up there?”

  “To remind me of the love of my life.”

  “Not Madonna?”

  “No, Marty. Women.”

  Church skirted the corner of the square conference table, which had been shoved against the wall opposite Madonna, and sat in a chair next to Embry.

  “Welcome to the high-tech African desk, Marty.”

  “I see.”

  There were two high-resolution monitors on the table, along with a blue telephone and a green telephone.

  “I want you to understand that this stuff isn’t in my budget, Marty. I cajoled them out of the NSA’s rent-to-own program.”

  “We could have just driven out to Fort Meade.”

  The National Security Agency, which was responsible for the monitoring and interception of electronic communications, was located at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland. It was the largest agency in the intelligence community, and, though it was an agency of the Department of Defence, worked closely with the CIA on the development of foreign intelligence.

  “I’ve got other irons in the fire, too, Marty. I don’t want to sit around out there for two days. Look, the blue phone is a direct link to NSA, so Cummings can reach me.”

  Marianne Cummings had a tiny transceiver concealed somewhere in her hotel room. It had a range of only a mile but a relay and satellite up-link was emplaced in one of Tobruk’s derelict buildings within that range.

  “The green phone is hooked into the Air Force’s CRITICOM satellite communications system, which we’re borrowing for our link with Wyatt.” He pointed to a blank monitor. “That one is decorative, I think. They tell me I can get maps and the like if I ask for them, but I haven’t asked. The other monitor is giving us a live, near real-time shot of the region from a KH-11 they’ve moved into geo-stationary orbit.”

  “I can’t tell shit from that,” Church said.

  “Well, the orbit is over the equator, some twenty-two hundred miles south of Wyatt’s position. Then, too, you’re seeing light-enhanced, night-vision video. Plus, the lens is at the limit of its telescopic ability, and the angle and the distance make things a little fuzzy. See this dark blue stuff at the top of the screen? That’s the Med.”

  “I picked right up on that, George.”

  “Then, down here, where they’ve superimposed a red circle? That’s Marada. The runway is painted in camouflage colours, but the high-tech tinkerers have outlined it for us with white lines. They’re great guys over there.”

  “And the yellow circle is Wyatt?”

  “You’ve got it, Marty. Go to the head of the photo analysis class. One other thing, they can get us infrared, also.”

  “For what?”

  “Live video of camouflaged aircraft against the desert may not show us anything. If it doesn’t, we can pick up on their heat trails.”

  “All right. So what are they doing?”

  “Nothing. Same thing they’ve been doing for lo, these many hours. Actually, I can call and have them put up earlier tapes on the other monitor, if you want to see a flight of MiGs take off from Marada or Wyatt’s people landing at the staging base. They all look like the little airplanes you see on computer games.”

  “I’ll pass. What were the MiGs doing?”

  “Normal recon or air defence patrol, I think. They flew the border with Egypt, then returned to base.” Church leaned back in his chair, and Embry got up to refill his mug from a drip coffee maker on the credenza behind his desk.

  “Want some, Marty?”

  “No, I’m coffeed out. Did you get anything from Cummings on a time line?”

  “Not yet. I have to wait until she calls. Won’t do to ring her up, if someone’s in the room with her, you know.”

  “I promised to contact Wyatt at four his time with any new data. That’ll be eight o’clock tonight our time.”

  “I can count, Marty.”

  “You don’t want to break policy and call her?”

  “No. I want her to live through this. Oops.”

  “What?” Church asked.

  “Look here,” Embry said, pointing to the red circle on the screen.

  Two aircraft had appeared, as if out of nowhere. Church understood that they had been underground. They rolled onto the outlined runway and paused.

  The two men waited.

  The jets began moving, gathering speed quickly, then rising from the runway and moving out of the red circle.

  “MiG-23s I think,” Embry said.

  “They make many night flights, George?”

  “Not very many.”

  “So this is unusual.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t like unusual, George. Or surprises.”

  “Am I going to get a surprise?” Embry asked.

  “Yes. You can send all this stuff back to Meade. Call Wyatt and tell him his vacation is over.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No. The DCI can’t get sign-off.”

  “I am going to call the son of a bitch,” Embry said.

  “No, you’re not.”

  Embry’s eyes burned hot. “Marty, get on that fucking phone and stand your ground. If I recall this mission, I walk.”

  Church studied him for a full two minutes, then walked his castered chair over to the desk, picked up the phone, and asked Embry’s secretary to locate the Director.

  When somebody found him, he said, “Yes, Martin?”

  “Mr. Director, the time for politicking is over. I want an executive order for Icarus, and I want it on my desk in the next two hours.”

  “Martin? What the hell?”

  “You started this shit, and you’d better damn well finish it. We’re not playing one-upmanship in this room. You go, you beg, you borrow, you spend your favours, you do what you have to do to back up what you started.”

  “Martin…”

  Church hung up.

  He felt good.

  He also felt unemployed.

  *

  Ahmed al-Qati and Khalil Shummari drove directly back to their cantonment area from Ramad’s briefing. The whining roar of a second pair of MiG fighters taking off from the base deferred any talk. Shummari got out of the truck beside one of his Mi-28 assault helicopters.

  He leaned back into the cab. “Well, Ahmed?”

  “There is no choice to be made, Khalil. I will give my men another hour’s sleep, then wake them and have them prepare their gear.”

  The major nodded. “I will begin moving my helicopters to the base soon. We will need to fuel them, fold the rotors, and load them aboard the transports.”

  “Go with God, Khalil. And be prepared for the devil to strike.”

  Al-Qati drove on to the headquarters tent, shut off the ignition, and walked inside. An older sergeant manned the duty desk, which was composed simply of a folding table and a telephone.

  “Sergeant, take a few minutes’ break, then, at one-thirty, awaken the officers. At two o’clock, begin waking the rest of the company.”

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  The sergeant left the tent, and al-Qati went to sit on the camp stool behind the desk.

  He thought Ramad’s decision precipitous and foolish. Accelerating the launch time would only heighten the problems. There would be mistakes made, and they would be costly mistakes. As far as it went, the exercise was well-planned, but throw in a few unexpected developments, and many things would go wrong. The cost could be counted in lives.

  Al-Qati thought that Ramad was exchanging lives for his own advancement.

  Worse, he was certain that Colonel Ghazi was also aware of Ramad’s self-interest, but Ghazi was apparently powerless. He would not speak up against the sycophan
ts surrounding the Leader, Salmi and Amjab.

  It would be far better, in al-Qati’s view, to delay Test Strike for a week and see if the suspected incursion took place first. The country would best be served by devoting her resources to defence at this moment, rather than to boasting her offensive capabilities.

  And far worse, he thought, could be the international consequences of the folly to be executed in Ethiopia. The demonstration of offensive strength might well have gone as Ramad envisioned — unattributed, yet faintly identifiable — had the information not leaked from some source in Tripoli.

  Or from Tobruk, as he had come to suspect.

  Sophia.

  Al-Qati called Ramad foolish, and even Ghazi, but he knew in his heart that the most foolish of all was himself. He had disgorged everything, or almost everything, he knew to the gorgeous creature in the Seaside Hotel.

  And he loved her. He knew that he did.

  But she used him, abused him, probed in catlike ways for the secrets he held.

  And he coughed them up so willingly!

  How she must laugh at him.

  He was heartsick and humiliated.

  And responsible for the deaths that would come.

  He heard the whine of helicopter turbines starting. Shummari was moving his company to Marada.

  The gases would writhe like maddened snakes across the barrenness of Ethiopia.

  But he need not be the root of that evil, of innocents sent to the slaughter.

  Rising from the stool, he walked back to the radio, dialled the frequency for the battalion radio, and asked for a connection with the telephone system.

  She was always there, of course, and at one-twenty in the morning, likely sound asleep. The telephone rang three times before she answered.

  “Yes?”

  “I am sorry to awaken you, Sophia.” His voice sounded flat and dead, even to himself.

  “Ahmed! Where are you?”

  “I call only to tell you that you may start counting the hours from four-thirty this morning.”

  “What?”

  “Are you awake? Did you understand me? Four-thirty this morning.”

  “Ahmed…”

  He broke the connection.

  He could not know whether or not she would believe either him or his information.

  She now knew that he knew.

  And that was that.

  *

  Ibrahim Ramad walked slowly through the underground hangars, moving from one to another as the preparations continued. The ground crews were slowly coming awake after being jarred out of sound sleep. The ordnance men worked as if they walked on eggs, and perhaps they did.

  Ramad had released the chemical warheads earlier. He had not signed for them, since no record was to exist of their deployment. Even the fuel requisitioned for the aircraft involved was to remain unaccounted for and charged to evaporation.

  In two of the hangars, nine of the Su-24 bombers were being fitted with the bombs on the inboard pylons. The outboard pylons, on the pivoting wings, would carry four AA-8 air-to-air missiles in the event of an attack on the bombers. Ramad thought the missiles would go unused.

  The nine planes were formed into three squadrons, to be called Red, Green, and Purple for this mission. Each squadron carried one type of chemical bomb, toxin, psychological, or nerve agent. The advance party in the C-130s was codenamed Black, and the escort for the bombers, composed of eight MiG-23s, was to be called Orange.

  Before the infantry company left, Ramad would personally select one man in each platoon to carry and use the sealed still and video cameras. The photographic record was to be complete and close to the action.

  Ramad’s nine MiG-23s would stay in-country, securing Marada Air Base with round-the-clock patrols of four aircraft each, two patrolling to the west and two to the south. Four MiG-23s would stay on full alert at the end of the runway, prepared for instantaneous launch.

  He stopped to watch the loading of AA-6 and AA-7 missiles on the pylons of a MiG-23, part of the Orange air cover. These, too, would not be used, he was certain.

  His personal MiG-23 was already outfitted with AA-8 missiles and a full magazine for the twin-barrelled 23 millimetre cannon. It would be moved up to the runway, with the avionics warmed up, and be instantly available the moment he decided to leave. He stopped beside it and gazed at his name stencilled below the cockpit canopy.

  Ramad almost hoped that the rumour proved to be grounded in fact and was not simply a scare tactic. The Americans frequently did that — leak threats that never came to fruition.

  An F-4 did not frighten him. His J-band radar, which NATO called “Jay Bird,” had a search range of twenty-five kilometres and was nearly the equivalent of that in the F-4. With radar range comparisons nullified, he was confident that the MiG-23 could outfly and out-manoeuvre the F-4.

  He saw Gamal Harisah preflighting his aircraft and crossed the hangar to join him.

  “Good morning. Colonel.”

  “Good morning, Captain. What do you think?”

  “They do not even look like bombs, Colonel.”

  The canisters were almost blunt-nosed, and they were three hundred millimetres in diameter, perhaps two meters long. They were finished in a matte grey. It was almost ludicrous how such unassuming cans could contain such a fatal substance.

  The ordnance specialist moved with careful precision as he connected the arming tether between the bomb and the pylon. Once the bomb dropped, the arming pin would be extracted, starting the internal clock. After the clock registered ten seconds, the bomb would be fully armed. Its barometric altimeter was set for two thousand meters, six hundred meters above ground level at the target site for the Purple Squadron. When the bomb reached that altitude, a one-kilogram explosive charge would detonate, destroying the canister and releasing the nerve agent to the winds.

  “The meteorologist,” Harisah said, “told me to expect ten-knot winds along the foothills near the target. With a half-kilometre spacing between airplanes, we are going to release four kilometres upwind from the village. The dispersal should achieve a wide range from that point.”

  “Good, good,” Ramad said.

  Purple Target, an unnamed village, was not even a village. The camp was a collection of tin and fabric tents, goats, camels, dogs, and at last count, thirty-two hundred emaciated and diseased people. The last photographs, taken two weeks before, showed several white United Nations trucks parked near the camp, so there might be some UN workers there. Then again, there might not be. Ramad was not going to worry unduly about it at this point.

  He crossed the hangar to the back, entered the tunnel, and double-checked that the doors to the chemical weapons stores were locked before walking back to his office.

  He was getting impatient.

  Test Strike was going to be a huge success, insuring his participation in the policy development group that surrounded the Leader.

  In fact, he was so confident of the exercise that he found himself daydreaming about Americans or Israelis insane enough to attack Marada Air Base.

  He wanted so much for it to be true. He needed the diversion.

  He was still daydreaming when Colonel Ghazi appeared in his doorway.

  Startled, he looked up. “Oh. Colonel Ghazi. Please come in.”

  “There was just one thought I wished to share with you, Ibrahim.”

  “Certainly.”

  “What defensive precautions have you taken for the chemical plant?”

  “The chemical plant? They have their own air defence system of antiaircraft guns and missiles.”

  “Do you suppose that is sufficient?”

  “It does not matter, Colonel. It is not my jurisdiction.”

  “It is now,” Ghazi told him.

  *

  At six-fifteen in the evening, Martin Church was thinking seriously of going home early and crawling in bed. Tomorrow night was going to be a long one, and he wanted to be as fresh as possible.

  He got up and took h
is suit jacket from its hanger on the hall tree behind the door.

  He was shrugging his way into it when the phone in the outer office rang.

  He called through the doorway, “I don’t want to take that, Sally.”

  “Right, boss.” She answered, then called back to him, “It’s for you.”

  “I just said…”

  Through the doorway, she mouthed, “The Director.” Church crossed to his desk and picked up.

  “Martin, you’ve got your go-ahead.”

  His sigh of relief was almost audible. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Your information had better be accurate. This cost me two years’ worth of political points.”

  “I believe in it.”

  “Good. I’ll try.”

  The Director hung up.

  The man might even earn Church’s respect, if he kept this pace up.

  He dialled Embry’s office.

  “You’ve got your go-signal, George.”

  “It’s about damned time.”

  “You can cancel the abort.”

  “I never bothered to abort. I trusted you, Marty.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “Come on down here,” Embry said.

  “What now, George?”

  “Come on down here. Quick!”

  With that much urgency in Embry’s voice, Church just slapped the phone down and headed for the elevator.

  When he got there, he found a dishevelled Embry hunched over his table before the monitors, scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad.

  The scene on the screen didn’t seem to have changed much until he looked closer. There were large aircraft on the runways at Marada Air Base.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Those are C-130s, Marty. Right now, they’re loading helicopters.”

  “Whose helicopters?”

  Embry pointed at the blue phone. “NSA tells me they go with al-Qati’s First Special Forces Company.”

  “So they’re moving them somewhere?”

  “Apparently. Sit down, Marty.”

  Church dropped into one of the straight-backed chairs at the table.

  “I got a signal from Cummings.”

  “Okay, good.”

  “They’re going at 0430 hours.”

  “That soon?”

  “Today. Today in Libya, anyway.”

  “Shit.”

 

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