Bill followed Arnold down to his office, where his briefing began. And Admiral Morgan explained everything, the potential deal with Adnam, the hopelessness of a public trial, the consequences and wastefulness of executing him. And the President’s expressed wish that a strike be organized against Iraq.
Bill was particularly interested in the avowed statement from the ex–Israeli submariner to Admiral Morgan the previous day that he could rid the United States of the menace of Iraq.
“Christ. What do you think he has in mind?”
“Who knows. But when he does have something in his mind, we know, to our cost, that he is usually not joking.”
“Ain’t that right.”
By 1800 the helicopter was back, miraculously bearing Admiral Dunsmore. The three old friends, in company with two Secret Service agents, took off from the White House in good time for the seven o’clock rendezvous with the ladies. Only Kathy O’Brien was absent, but she had to hold the fort, first thing in the morning, in Admiral Morgan’s office.
The flight was swift, and the pilot brought them in over the Potomac before dark, touching down on the wide back lawn above the river.
There was a chill in the air, as there often is in the late spring on the East Coast. But Scott Dunsmore said that the cool weather would not deflect him from his plans. He was cooking outside tonight, come hell or high water. It would be the first barbecue of the season, and he intended it to be memorable. Therefore, he expected a full attendance around the gas grill while he perfected a flawless butterflied leg of lamb, just the way his cook had taught him during his days in the surface Navy as a Fleet Commander.
The fact that the huge leg of lamb was already carefully cut by Grace’s butcher, and carefully marinated and half-cooked in the oven by Grace herself, did not discourage Admiral Dunsmore from claiming full credit, in advance. Grace mentioned that it would be a real shame if he burned it, like he did the last one, on her birthday two years ago.
“I was under a bit of pressure then,” said the chief of the entire Pentagon. “They’ll be no mistakes tonight. Let’s get in there for some drinks…then you’ll see me in action, putting a forty-minute charcoal finish to this banquet.”
Laura, who had not met the Dunsmores, was captivated by them both. Grace had been charm itself during the late afternoon, and the arrival of the admiral, the most powerful man in the United States Armed Forces, was something she had viewed with some trepidation. Even though both her father and her husband had always told her that Scott was a prince of men, and she would like him, as she had liked all of those high-ranking military Americans she had met. Even Arnold Morgan, who was not precisely everyone’s cup of tea.
Now, as Admiral Morgan assumed, always, that everyone had coffee black, “with buckshot,” Admiral Dunsmore assumed that anyone who had endured a long day would be revived by the dark smooth taste of Johnny Walker Black Label Scotch with club soda. And with this drink he was something of an artist: in the high summer he allowed two cubes of ice in a tall glass, with a lot of soda. On Labor Day he eliminated the ice for the season, and then, as the days drew in and the temperature dropped, he reduced the soda water, until by Christmas, it became quite a short drink.
That night, only six weeks before the summer solstice, when the ice went back in, the drinks were medium long but warm. And, on a silver tray, he brought five Scotch and sodas into the big room at the front of the house. They each took one, and Arnold Morgan stepped forward to propose a toast.
“We are here tonight for several reasons, some of which can be talked about and some of which cannot. So I’ll confine myself to proposing the health of Laura’s father, and our friend, Admiral Sir Iain MacLean, who has, as before, been some way ahead of us.”
They all raised their glasses, smiling at the thought of the urbane Scottish officer, who would have been mortified with embarrassment had he been in attendance. But Arnold Morgan was not prone to mawkish sentimentality. If he said Iain MacLean was out in front in his thinking, then that was so. And if it hadn’t been after midnight on Loch Fyne, they would have all called him right there and then to congratulate him.
By now the gas grill was at full power, and Scott Dunsmore had the leg of lamb in prime position. Wearing sweaters, they all stood around outside, admiring the dusk over the dark Potomac, sipping their drinks and watching the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs strategically adjusting the angle of the gently sizzling lamb.
By common agreement, he had gotten it right this time. And dinner was outstanding, not least because the admiral decided to open his last two bottles of 1961 Haut Brion. “Bill and I drank a bottle to the memory of his brother right after we lost the Jefferson,” he said. “This seems the right time to finish the vintage…on a high note, at the conclusion of an unhappy episode.” The fact that the rare bottles were worth about $500 each was not lost on anyone. And the forty-five-year-old Bordeaux from the Graves district lived up to its towering reputation, casting a deep warm glow over the gathering. No one discussed the project that lay uppermost in their minds. Indeed, during the entire evening, it was touched upon only once, lightly, when Admiral Dunsmore raised his glass, and said quietly, “Welcome back on board, Bill.”
The following morning Admiral Morgan’s chauffeur arrived at 0800 to drive his boss and Bill the short distance back to the CIA safe house, where Benjamin Adnam awaited them. They both walked straight into the room where the terrorist was reading the newspaper, and Admiral Morgan wished him, “Good morning, Commander.”
But he did not waste one second on formalities. “Right now,” he said, “I am here to hack out a deal. And this is what I propose. I have a project, and I would like your guidance and general input. If this is deemed to be a success, we will then settle down and make some kind of a long-term agreement for you to work with us along the lines we outlined yesterday. Naturally, we can have nothing in writing, but in your business I expect you are accustomed to that.
“The project we are working on is against Iraq, and will be a one-time one-shot proposition. It will either succeed or fail. If I judge your role to have been critical, and it will be, and we are successful, we will make a one-time payment to you of $250,000 to start off your life here in America. You will not be required in an operational capacity. Only in strategic planning.”
“Since I am sitting here thinking and reading the paper,” replied Adnam, “I suppose I may as well earn some money for it.” But then he smiled, and said, “Admiral, I think that would be an excellent way to start off our relationship. Might save me the trouble of taking cyanide.”
“Then we are agreed? You trust me sufficiently?”
Commander Adnam held up his handcuffed wrists. “I don’t really have very much choice, do I? If I do not agree, you could always go immediately to Option One, despite the uncomfortable consequences for you, as well as me.”
Admiral Morgan nodded. “Yes. And now I would like to talk to you, and so would Bill, whom I believe you know well enough?”
“Yes, I think so. We have a few things in common.”
“Right. If I yell ‘coffee’ loud enough, will something happen?”
“I think so. There is a housekeeper for the agents and the Marine guards.”
“I’ll go and find someone, Arnold,” said Bill. “But I bet they don’t have buckshot.”
The admiral grinned, but he was very preoccupied, and he turned to Ben Adnam, and said deliberately, “My President does not believe that Iraq should get away with shooting down three airliners, in the process murdering our oil-negotiating team, six politicians, and the Vice President of the United States. Neither has it escaped him that we, as yet, have taken no retribution against them for the loss of the aircraft carrier.
“We now propose to attend to these matters, with or without your help. But I hope with.”
Adnam nodded.
“Now, you mentioned yesterday that you could offer a way for us to deal with Iraq on a long-term basis. Could you elaborate on that?”
As the Iraqi again nodded his assent, Bill came in with the coffee. Three mugs. All black. A blue tube of sweeteners on the side.
“That’s one fucking miracle,” said the admiral, firing the little white pellets into the coffee, somehow making the clicker sound like a six-shooter. “Now let’s see if young Ben here can come up with a second.”
Despite himself, Commander Adnam laughed. He thought he might enjoy working with this American cowboy. “Admiral,” he said, “one of the biggest problems in Iraq is water. We have two great rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris. Both of them flow out of Turkey, and the Euphrates crosses Syria. Those two rivers are the lifeblood of Iraq. They are the reasons civilization flourished in ancient Mesopotamia, the old name for modern Iraq.
“The rivers still control the country’s agriculture, wheat and barley, both irrigation and direct pumping. They control fertilizer plants, cement-making plants, light industry, the production of steel, the growing of dates. They control Iraq’s drinking water and hydroelectric power. For centuries, when the water level dropped, and occasionally dried up in some areas, there was something close to national panic. But it was even worse when they flooded, as they often do at the end of the winter. Right back to biblical times…I expect you both know that Noah and his Ark were in Mesopotamia in that great flood.
“In order to control these waters, various governments have built a succession of dams and barrages and canals. These in turn helped to form lakes and reservoirs, which first of all absorb the floodwater, and secondly provide enormous backup when the rivers are very low.
“There is one at Dukan on the Tigris, others at Mosul and Al Hadithah. There is a huge one at Darband-I-Khan right up in the Kurdish Mountains on a tributary called the River Diyala. There is another at Basdush and Fathah, both on the Tigris. Another on a tributary, the Great Zab; a critical one at Samarra, the Samarra Barrage. There are several also on the Euphrates, at Habbaniyah, Hindiya, and Ash Shinafiya.
“But the most important ones are at Darband-I-Khan and Samarra. The Darband Reservoir stands at the southern end of a massive lake. It is surrounded by mountains, 130 miles northeast of Baghdad. It contains 3 cubic kilometers of water. Imagine that? A reservoir 4 miles long, 3 miles wide, and a quarter mile deep. The Samarra Barrage, about 76 miles north of the city, right on the Tigris, holds 85 billion cubic meters of water.
“If I were you, I’d blow out both those dams, and Iraq’s economy would collapse for several years.
“Once you get out of the northeastern mountains, it’s a flat country, and the flooding would be ruinous. But the distances are so great there would be no serious loss of life. The water would rise relatively slowly over the key areas, along the river. People would have time to get away. I know that because the government has made careful studies of the consequences of a dam failure. I’ve seen them. We’d just have a lot of factories that no longer worked, a lot of crops that would not grow, a lot of flooded oil fields. And a lot of flooded towns and villages. The country would be forced to throw itself on the mercy of the West.”
“Jesus,” said Arnold and Bill, almost simultaneously.
“The trouble is, Admiral. You don’t have long. I read that winter stayed late in the mountains, which buys you some time. But if you want to strike hard, you need to do it while the snows are still melting, when the water in the reservoirs is at maximum height. I’d say you have about another four weeks maximum. By mid-June the levels really start to evaporate in the heat. All the Iraqi government studies show that flooding would be 50 percent worse if it happened at the end of the snowmelt.”
“Jesus Christ,” said the Admiral. Bill Baldridge looked amazed.
“I know it sounds perfect for our purposes,” said Arnold Morgan. “But it would be absolutely impossible. We’d have to use Special Forces, train them, get ’em into the mountains somehow, through Turkey, then have them operate deep underwater, against the inner wall of the dams. Christ, we’d need about 50 guys. It would be like declaring war. And they might get caught.”
“How marvelously old-fashioned,” said Commander Adnam. “That’s out of the question. Admiral, you don’t use people, you use missiles. Cruise missiles.”
“Missiles? Jesus, that’s like a world war. We can’t just stand a ship off, in the Gulf, or the Med, or somewhere, and start throwing big missiles at a couple of major Iraqi dams. The world community would go crazy with indignation. And we could never admit why we were doing it. I’m sorry, Commander, but that would be out of the question. Everyone would see a big missile launch from an American warship. The whole world would know what we had done, and we could not afford that.”
“They wouldn’t know if you did it from a submarine.”
“A submarine…of course.” The admiral never minded being outthought. “We could do that, maybe from the middle of the Gulf. But a missile big enough to come straight in and blow the wall of the dam right out? I don’t think there is a missile big enough to do that. At least not one that would fit into a submarine.”
“Not just one. How about six of them, Admiral? One after the other, all hitting the wall of the dam in precisely the same spot, until it gives way?”
“Commander, can you just imagine the scene? The Iraqi defensive force at the dam, and I’m sure they have one, standing there watching these big missiles coming in, belching fire, slamming into the wall, one after the other. It would be like Hiroshima. And, within hours, it would be world news, because there is only one nation that could send in cruise missiles like that. The United Nations would hang us out to dry…leave us swinging in the wind.”
“Not if the missiles came in from the other side, and made their final approach in the dark, right above the water,” replied Commander Adnam. “Then dropped into the water a couple of hundred yards short.”
For the first time, Arnold Morgan was totally silent.
“By which time, sir, the submarine that fired them would have slipped under the water and headed out of the strait, deep and quiet…long gone, and no one would ever know.”
“Holy Shit,” said the President’s national security advisor. “This is fucking unbelievable.”
“No it’s not, Arnold,” interjected Ben. “You have a missile that would do it. But you’d have to modify it. Because it could make its final approach under the water.”
Arnold Morgan took a deep swig of his coffee, rubbed his chin in a gesture of rumination. “Commander Adnam, I want to say just one thing. I knew you were extremely clever, but your grasp of this kind of warfare has surprised me. Welcome to the U.S. of A.”
It was Bill Baldridge who was now completely preoccupied, and he ignored the admiral’s compliment to the prisoner. “Ben’s thinking about the Raytheon Tomahawk land-attack missile,” he said. “One of those big submerged-launch cruises. It had a special navigation system, they called it TERCOM-aided. You know, preprogrammed into its computer…you just bang in the way points. This is the sucker that can be launched from a Los Angeles-Class boat…and it has a hell of range, 2,500 kilometers, about 1,550 miles, which I think would get us up the Gulf, from Hormuz.”
“Yes. Yes it would,” said the admiral thoughtfully. Then, turning to Ben Adnam, he said, “Lieutenant Commander Baldridge was a weapons officer in the United States Navy. Submarines…nuclear specialist.” The Iraqi nodded respectfully.
The admiral continued. “Didn’t we fire some of those missiles at Iraq from submarines, in the Med, during the Gulf War?”
“We did. Those Tomahawks can hit just about anything within range. No mistakes. They’re accurate now to within about 6 feet.”
“Remind me. How many can the submarine carry?”
“Eight minimum. Later boats can carry up to twelve.”
“How about this underwater bullshit?”
“That’s the special part,” said Ben. “I don’t think it should be too difficult. The Brits solved it sixty years ago. What was he called? Burns Morris? You know, the dam-buster fellow.”
“I guess you’re referring to Professor Barnes Wallis,” said Bill, pompously for a cowboy.
“Burns Wallis…Barnes Morris…what the hell? I refer to the World War II inventor who came up with the bouncing bomb…our problem is, cruise missiles don’t bounce. So…our problem is going to be slowing the missile down for entry into the water. We’ll have to use parachutes, because the speed’s gotta come down from MACH-.7—about 450 knots—to 30. Then it has to hit the water, moving through the last 200 yards, making a slow, shallow trajectory along its preprogrammed course, down to the target, somewhere near the base of the dam wall, which is probably 100 feet thick, 100 feet below the surface.”
H.M.S. Unseen (1999) Page 46