IT WAS A busy time at PALM BOWL. Something was going on. You could tell that by what wasn’t going on. Traffic on the encrypted channels used by senior Iraqi generals had peaked and zeroed, then peaked again, and zeroed again. At the moment it was back at zero. Back at KKMC in Saudi Arabia, the computers were grinding through solutions to the chip-controlled scrambling systems used on Iraqi tactical radios. It took time in every case. Encryption technology, once the province only of affluent countries, had, with the advent of personal computers, become readily available to the humblest citizen in America and other technically advanced countries, and an unexpected spin-off of that fact was the current availability of highly advanced communications-security apparatus to the humblest nations. Now Malaysia had codes nearly as hard to break as Russia’s—and so did Iraq, courtesy of Americans who worried about having the FBI read their fictitious e-mail adulteries. The encryption systems on tactical radios were necessarily somewhat simpler, and still breakable, but even that required a Cray computer that had been flown to the Saudi Kingdom years earlier. Another factor was that PALM BOWL was in Kuwait, and had indeed been fully financed by the local government, for which courtesy a return courtesy was required. They got to see the “take” from the NSA station. That was only fair, but the NSA and military-intelligence personnel hadn’t been trained to consider what “fair” was. They had their orders, even so.
“They’re talking about their families?” a USAF sergeant asked himself aloud. That was new. PALM BOWL had tapped into intimate information on this network before, and learned more than a few things about the personal habits of senior Iraqi generals, along with some crude jokes which alternately did and did not translate well into English, but this was a first.
“Evac,” the Chief Master Sergeant next to him observed. “It’s a bug-out. Lieutenant!” he called. “Something happening here.”
The junior watch officer was working on something else. The radar at Kuwait International Airport was an unusually powerful one, installed since the war, and it operated in two modes, one for the aircraft controllers, and another for the Kuwaiti air force. It could see a good, long way. For the second time in as many days, there was a business jet heading toward Baghdad from Iran. The flight path was identical with the previous trip, and the transponder code was the same. The distance between the two capitals was a mere four hundred miles, just enough distance to make it worthwhile for a business jet to climb up to cruising altitude and so make efficient use of its fuel—and, by the way, touch the fringe of their radar coverage. There would be a circling E-3B AWACS around, too, but that reported directly to KKMC and not to PALM BOWL. It was a matter of professional pride for the uniformed spooks at the ground station to beat the airborne people at their own game, all the more so since most of them were themselves USAF personnel. The lieutenant made a mental note of that information, then walked across the room to where the sergeants were.
“What is it, Chief?” she asked.
The chief master sergeant scrolled his computer screen, showing the translated content of several “cracked” conversations, tapping his finger on the screen to call attention to the times. “We have some folks getting the hell outa Dodge City, ma’am.” A moment later, a Kuwaiti major slid alongside. Ismael Sabah was distantly related to the royal family, Dartmouth-educated, and rather liked by the American personnel. During the war he’d stayed behind and worked with a resistance group—one of the smart ones. He’d laid low, gathered information on the movement and disposition of Iraqi military units, and gotten it out, mainly using cellular phones which were able to reach into a Saudi civilian network just across the border, and which the Iraqis had been unable to track. Along the way, he’d lost three close family members to the Iraqi terror. He’d learned all manner of lessons from the experience, the least of which was a hatred for the country to his north. A quiet, insightful man in his middle thirties now, he seemed to get smarter every day. Sabah leaned in to scan the translations on the computer screen.
“How do you say, the rats are leaving the ship?”
“You think so, too, sir?” the chief asked, before his lieutenant could.
“To Iran?” the American officer asked. “I know it looks that way, but it doesn’t make sense, does it?”
Major Sabah grimaced. “Sending their air force to Iran didn’t make sense either, but the Iranians kept the fighter planes and let the pilots go home. You need to learn more of the local culture, Lieutenant.”
I’ve learned that nothing here makes much sense, she couldn’t say.
“What else do we have?” Sabah asked the sergeant.
“They talk and go quiet and then they talk some more and go quiet. There’s traffic under way now, but KKMC is still trying to crack it.”
“Radar surveillance reports an inbound from Mchrabad to Baghdad, coded as a business jet.”
“Oh? Same one as before?” Sabah asked the American lieutenant.
“Yes, Major.”
“What else? Anything?” The chief master sergeant handled the answer.
“Major, that’s probably what the computers are cooking on right now. Maybe in thirty minutes.”
Sabah lit a cigarette. PALM BOWL was technically a Kuwaiti-owned facility, and smoking was permitted, to the relief of some and the outrage of others. His relatively junior rank did not prevent him from being a fairly senior member of his country’s intelligence service, all the more so that he was modest and businesslike in manner, a useful contrast with his war record, on which he’d lectured in Britain and America.
“Opinions?” he asked, already having formed his own.
“You said it, sir. They’re bugging out,” the chief master sergeant replied.
Major Sabah completed the thought. “In hours or days, Iraq will not have a government, and Iran is assisting in the transition to anarchy.”
“Not good,” the chief breathed.
“The word ‘catastrophe’ comes to mind,” Sabah observed mildly. He shook his head and smiled in a grim sort of way, earning additional admiration from the American spooks.
THE GULFSTREAM LANDED in calm air after the sixty-five-minute flight in from Tehran, timed by Badrayn’s watch. As punctual as Swissair, he noted. Well, that was to be expected. As soon as it stopped, the door dropped open and the five passengers deplaned, to be met with elaborately false courtesy, which they returned in kind. A small convoy of Mercedes sedans spirited them off at once to regal accommodations awaiting them in the city center, where they would, of course, be murdered if things went poorly. Scarcely had their cars pulled off when two generals, their wives, their children, and one bodyguard each emerged from the VIP terminal and walked to the aircraft. They quickly boarded the G-IV. The co-pilot lifted the door back into place, and the engines started up, all in less than ten additional minutes by Badrayn’s Seiko. Just that fast, it taxied off to make the return flight to Mehrabad International. It was something too obvious for the tower personnel to miss. That was the problem with security, Badrayn knew. You really couldn’t keep some things secret, at least not something like this. Better to use a commercial flight, and treat the departing generals as normal passengers on a normal trip, but there were no regular flights between the two countries, and the generals would not have submitted themselves to such plebeian treatment in any case. And so the tower people would know that a special flight had come in and out under unusual circumstances, and so would the terminal employees who’d been required to fawn on the generals and their retinues. For one such flight, that might not be important. But it would matter for the next.
Perhaps that was not overly important in the Great Scheme of Things. There was now no stopping the events he had helped to set in motion, but it offended Ali Badrayn in a professional sense. Better to keep everything he did secret. He shrugged as he walked back to the VIP terminal. No, it didn’t matter, and through his actions he’d won the gratitude of a very powerful man in charge of a very powerful country, and for doing no more than talking,
telling people what they already knew, and helping them to make a decision which could not have been avoided, whatever their efforts to the contrary. How curious life was.
“SAME ONE. JEEZ, he wasn’t on the ground very long.” Through a little effort, the radio traffic for that particular aircraft was isolated and playing in the earphones of an Army spec-6 language expert. Though the language of international aviation was English, this aircraft was speaking in Farsi. Probably thought a security measure, it merely highlighted that aircraft, tracked by radar and radio-direction finders. The voice traffic was wholly ordinary except for that, and for the fact that the aircraft hadn’t even been on the ground long enough to refuel. That meant the whole thing was preplanned, which was hardly a surprise under the circumstances, but enlightening even so. Aloft, over the far northwest end of the Persian Gulf, an AWACS was now tracking the aircraft as well. Interest, cued by PALM BOWL, had perked up enough to move the E-3B off its normal patrol station, now escorted by four Saudi F-15 Eagle fighters. Iranian and Iraqi electronic-intelligence troops would take note of this and know that someone was interested in what was going on—and wonder why, because they didn’t know. The game was ever a fascinating one, neither side knowing all it wished, and assuming the other side—at the moment there were actually three sides in the game—knew too much, when in fact none of the three knew much of anything.
ABOARD THE G-IV, the language was Arabic. The two generals chatted quietly and nervously in the rear, their conversation masked by engine sounds. Their wives just sat, more nervous still, while the various children read books or napped. It was hardest on the bodyguards, who knew that if anything went wrong in Iran they could do nothing but die uselessly. One of these sat in the middle of the cabin and found that his seat was wet, with what he didn’t know, but it was sticky and ... red? Tomato juice or something, probably. Annoyed, he went to the lavatory and washed his hands off, taking a towel back to wipe the seat off. He returned the towel to the lav before he reseated himself, then looked down at the mountains and wondered if he’d live to see another sunrise, not knowing that he’d just limited the number to twenty.
“HERE WE GO,” the chief master sergeant said. “That was the vice-chief of their air force, and the commanding general of Second Iraqi Army Corps—plus families,” he added. The decryption had required just over two hours from the time the scrambled signal had been copied down.
“Expendables?” the USAF lieutenant asked. She was learning, the other spooks thought.
“Relatively so,” Major Sabah agreed with a nod. “We need to look for another aircraft lifting off from Mehrabad soon after this one lands.”
“Where to, sir?”
“Ah. Lieutenant, that is the question, is it not?”
“Sudan,” the chief thought. He’d been in-country for two years, and it was his second tour at PALM BOWL.
“I would not wager against you on that, Sergeant,” Sabah observed with a wink. “We should confirm that through the time cycle of the flights out of Baghdad.” And he really couldn’t make a judgment call on the entire exercise until then, though he already had flagged his own superiors that something unusual was afoot. Soon it would be time for the Americans to do the same.
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, a preliminary report was on its way from KKMC to Fort Meade, Maryland, where the vagaries of time landed it in the watch center just after midnight. From the National Security Agency it was cross-decked by fiber-optic cable to Langley, Virginia, into Mercury, the CIA’s communications-watch facility, then upstairs to the CIA’s Operations Center, room 7-F- 27 in the old headquarters building. At every stop, the information was handed over raw, sometimes with the local assessment, but more often without, or if it were, placed at the bottom so that the national intelligence officers in charge of the various watches could make their own assessments, and duplicate the work of others. Mostly this made sense, but in fast-breaking situations it very often did not. The problem was that one couldn’t tell the difference in a crisis.
The national intelligence officer in charge of the watch at CIA was Ben Goodley, a fast-riser in the Directorate of Intelligence, recently awarded his NIO card, along with the worst duty schedule because of his lack of seniority. As usual, he showed his good sense by turning to his area-specialist and handing over the printout just as fast as he could read the pages and tear the sheets away from the staple.
“Meltdown,” the area-specialist said by the end of page three. Which was not unexpected, but neither was it pleasant.
“Doubts?”
“My boy”—the area specialist had twenty years on his boss—“they ain’t going to Tehran to shop.”
“SNIE?” Goodley asked, meaning a Special National Intelligence Estimate, an important official document meant for unusual situations.
“I think so. The Iraqi government is coming down.” It wasn’t all that much of a surprise.
“Three days?”
“If that much.”
Goodley stood. “Okay, let’s get it drafted.”
17
THE REVIVAL
IT IS TO BE EXPECTED THAT important things never happen at convenient times. Whether the birth of a baby or a national emergency, all such events seem to find the appropriate people asleep or otherwise indisposed. In this case, there was nothing to be done. Ben Goodley determined that CIA had no assets in place to confirm the signal-intelligence take, and interested though his country was in the region, there was no action that could be taken. The public news organizations hadn’t twigged to this development, and as was often the case, CIA would play dumb until they did. In doing so, the Central Intelligence Agency would give greater substance to the public belief that the news organizations were as efficient as the government in finding things out. It wasn’t always the case, but was more frequently so than Goodley would have preferred.
This SNIE would be a short one. The substance of it didn’t require a great deal of pontificating, and the fact of it didn’t take long to present. Goodley and his area specialist took half an hour to draft it. A computer printer generated the hard copy for in-house use, and a modem transmitted it via secure lines to interested government agencies. With that done, the men returned to the Operations Center.
GOLOVKO WAS DOING his best to sleep. Aeroflot had just purchased ten new Boeing 777 jetliners for use in its international service to New York, Chicago, and Washington. They were far more comfortable, and reliable, than the Soviet airliners in which he’d traveled for so many years, but he was less than enthralled with the idea of flying so far on two engines, American-made or not, rather than the usual four. The seats, at least, were comfortable here in first class, and the vodka he’d had soon after take-off was a premium Russian label. The combination had given him five and a half hours of sleep until the usual disorientation of travel clicked in, waking him up over Greenland, while his bodyguard next to him managed to remain in whatever dreamland his profession allowed. Somewhere aft, the stewardesses were probably sleeping as well as they could in their folding seats.
In previous times, Sergey Nikolayevich knew, it wouldn’t have been like this. He would have flown on a special charter with full communications gear, and if something had taken place in the world, he’d be informed just as quickly as the transmission towers outside of Moscow could dot-dash the information out. All the more frustrating was the fact that something was happening. Something had to be. It was always this way, he thought in the noisy darkness. You traveled for an important meeting because you expected something to take place, and then it happened while you were on the move and, if not totally out of touch, then at least denied the chance to confer with your senior aides. Iraq and China. Thankfully, there was a wide separation between the two hot spots. Then Golovko reminded himself that there was a wider separation still between Washington and Moscow, one which lasted about as long as an overnight flight on a twin-engine aircraft. With that pleasant realization, he turned slightly and told himself that he’d need all the sleep he
could get.
THE HARD PART wasn’t getting them out of Iraq. The hard part would be getting them from Iran to Sudan. It had been a long while since flights from Iran had been allowed to overfly the Saudi Kingdom, and the only exceptions were the pilgrimage flights into Mecca during the annual hajj. Instead, the business jet had to skirt around the Arabian Peninsula, then up the Red Sea before turning west to Khartoum, tripling both time and distance on the delivery leg of the process, and the next short flight couldn’t begin until the first long one had arrived in Africa, and the VIPs had arrived at their hastily prepared quarters, and found them satisfactory, and made a phone call with the inevitable code word confirming that all was well. It would have been so much easier had it been possible to load them all onto a single airliner for a single Baghdad-Tehran-Khartoum cycle, but that wasn’t possible. Neither was it possible to take the far shorter air routing directly from Baghdad to Khartoum through the simple expedient of overflying Jordan. But that meant passing close to Israel, not a prospect to make the Iraqi generals happy. And then there was the secrecy issue, too, to make things inconvenient.
A lesser man than Daryaei would have found it enraging. Instead he stood alone at the window of a closed portion of the main terminal, watching the G-IV stop alongside another, watching the doors open, watching the people scurry down one staircase and immediately onto another, while baggage handlers transferred what few belongings they’d brought along—doubtless jewels and other items of high value and portability, the holy man thought without a smile. It took only a few minutes, and then the waiting aircraft started moving.
It was foolish, really, to have come down just to see something so pedestrian and tedious as this, but it represented fully two decades of effort, and man of God though he was, Mahmoud Haji Daryaei was still human enough to want to see the fruits of his labor. A lifetime had gone into this, and even so it was a task not even half done. And his time was running out ...
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