Black Storm (2 page)

MARK, THE
border,” said the copilot, over the intercom so their passengers could hear.

The pilot grunted. He was down to twenty feet now, and totally fixated on not flying into the ground. Voiding that ground-contact warranty. Gluing the shadow to the airplane. Jokes, his brain feeding back jokes so he didn't actually have to think about how close death was. It had happened to crews before. You didn't have any depth perception with the goggles, just light and shade and the blurry speckling seethe of amplified light. An HH-60 would make a hell of a big hole in the sand.

The Pave Hawk swung hard left and tracked up a side wadi, the bluff edges closing in, then rose, rose, as the land climbed. He pulled the collective and climbed too, following, then suddenly popped up over a rise.

They went over the Bedouin camp about ten feet up. He only realized what it was after they were past, retrieving from memory the conical tents a fraction of a second after they rocketed over them, the dark sparkling with gun flashes. The Bedoui gypsied back and forth over the border. Some were Iraqi, others Saudi, most pretty much independent of both sides, according to the briefers. Like the Arabs said, me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousins against the infidel.

The pilot hoped he never went down out here. He was Jewish.

A brilliant flash jerked his head around. A climbing flame rose majestically out of the dark. He ignored it, knowing it probably didn't have a lock on. The border Arabs had Strelas, but they launched them blind, without waiting for a fire-acquisition tone. True to form, the glare wavered, then fell aft and at last plunged downward to lose itself in the chalk-dust and sand-cloud plume they were dragging across the desert floor behind them.

The lead chopper was getting too far ahead. He couldn't lose sight of it. They needed two birds in case
one went down. Pushing the cyclic forward as he added power, he breathed very slowly in and out, and with tiny, nearly imperceptible movements of the stick threaded the hurtling needle of night.

 

THE COMMUNICATOR
rolled himself awkwardly, humping the weight of ruck and radio and batteries and ammo slowly up the back of the aluminum column that enclosed the landing gear shock absorbers, till he could sit upright. Rifle and radio; defend yourself with one, save yourself with the other. Call in fire. Call in air support. Call in emergency extract if things went to shit.

He couldn't get over how cold it was. Seemed like the coldest place he'd ever been. He squeezed his eyes closed and tried to see the map. Made himself go over it again, how they were going to do the linkup, the passwords, the frequencies.

He'd left Guatemala when he was nine. He did not recall much of those days, of what his aunt still spoke of in mutters as
la violencia
. But he remembered listening to the distant flutter-beat of helicopters over the folded green jungle, the deep ravines and lofty mountains. The government troops could not catch the
guerrilleros
. So they wiped out the K'iche' villages they said supported the rebels. The troops came from the sky and killed everyone. Women. Children. Everything that lived. So that in the night he woke, hearing the distant pulse of rotor blades, and lay wondering if they were coming to kill his family.

And now he was a soldier. No, not a soldier, a marine…but he wore a uniform and carried a gun…and now he himself, little A Tun who was, rode the invisible helicopters through the night. Did children listen fearfully now below him, linking past to future in an invisible chain? When had that chain begun? When would it end? The fear in his belly, was it the fear of a child? When did a man stop being a child? When did a
Guatemalan become an American, cowboy-confident in himself and his gun?

He thought, but did not speak. He seldom spoke. Only when there was need.

Somewhere in there, thinking about it, he went to sleep.

 

THE COPILOT
sat tensely, plotting fixes and trying to keep his hands from shaking. He wanted a cigarette, but knew he couldn't have one. The ground flashed by too close to look at. So he didn't, just kept his eyeballs pressed to the map and then the TACNAV, trying to keep his jitters under control.

An hour went by that way, and nothing changed except that now they were a hundred miles inside Iraq. The fuel-onboard gauge dropped gradually as they headed northeast, threading between two SA-8 sites and then swinging due east to pass the Roland battery at Mudaysis. The ground getting flatter, less cut by wadis. The relief going level, into what looked like meticulously graded gravel.

What terrified him was the emptiness. On and on and nothing living, no vegetation, no trees, not the smallest stunted bush. As if death itself had moved over this empty terrain. Some immense evil in the shadow of which nothing could live. Occasionally a tone in their earphones signaled the edge of a missile envelope, the invisible grope of a fire-control radar. But each time they heard it the Pave Hawk had already turned away, and they banked to follow and the deadly whine faded.

 

THE SNIPER
was from Yauhannah, South Carolina. He was twenty-six. He'd rolled aboard folded over his rifle, tucking the scope into his gut, protecting his zero. He'd shot the Colt in every day during the lockdown. A heavy-barreled sniper-select M16 with a 203 forty-millimeter
grenade launcher under the rifle barrel. The nine-mils were okay for close quarters, but you could reach out and touch someone with the 5.56. Day or night, he could put a bullet through a man's eye socket at four hundred meters. One shot. One kill.

Like at Khafji. When the Iraqi armor came through and surrounded them in that deserted town.

The colonel had climbed out of the tank in his natty greens and black beret like Saddam himself. From the rooftop overlooking the square the sniper had put the crosshairs down on him. Looked for a moment into his face; the heavy black mustache, the sunglasses, the self-satisfied smirk. He'd taken one more click for the wind, sucked a slow breath, and half let it out. Checked for shadow effect and quartered his target.

Then, one after the other, he shot the colonel and the three other officers who sat frozen in the staff car, still staring at the man whose skull had suddenly opened like a grisly tulip in front of them. By his third round the enlisted troops got wise, diving for cover, but the staffies just sat with their seat belts buckled as he killed them. When he had punched all their tickets, he'd gone back to the tank in time to see the colonel roll off his perch on the frontal armor and topple facedown into a sky-streaked puddle rut filled with the rain that had fallen all that day.

He hadn't felt bad about it. If they didn't want their asses shot off, they shouldn't have invaded somebody else's country. Shouldn't have taken on the US Marine Corps, and with it, package deal, the best damn sniper ever born.

He just wished he had something to chew. Aside from that, he was content. Rifle tucked protectively along his side, he stared out into the passing night.

 

AT
0150, the sky ahead suddenly turned to white fire. It outlined the lead helicopter black against white, so clearly the pilot could see its rotors going around.

He hauled into a hard bank, goggles flaring into a solid blinding brilliance as the light kept increasing. He pushed them up, close to panic, and saw the light pouring down across the desert as the fire climbed toward the sky. For a moment he couldn't tell what it was.

“It's a fucking Scud,” breathed his copilot.

“Tag the way point, goddamn it, tag it now.”

A wall of tracers rose suddenly and all at once out of the desert, blazing toward and then over them. They were huge, brilliant, but the pilot could barely see them. Afterimages chased across dazzled retinas, fear shuddered his hands. They were from ZSU-23s. A four-barreled, twenty-three-millimeter son of a bitch with a dish radar on a tank chassis, and for every one of those huge balls of tracer there were three high-explosive rounds in between. If they locked him up, he was dead. He popped chaff but knew it might not help.

Out of control, the helicopter lurched to starboard, rotor tips clawing toward the sand.

 

THE DOCTOR
lay with her eyes squeezed tight, trying not to throw up. She'd felt sick to her stomach ever since they took off. She didn't think this was going to work. A squad of grunts, on foot, trying to find what a mad dictator had spent years and billions hiding? What the CIA couldn't locate, and Defense Intelligence said didn't exist? These people were insane. Totally unconnected to reality.

But they wouldn't listen to her. When four stars gave an order, that was the burning bush. But it wasn't just that. Even she had to admit it.

She'd studied with Fayzah Al-Syori. Fayzah worshipped Saddam. But could she do something like this? Could any physician? It was bullshit. It had to be.

But with that many lives at stake, you couldn't take a chance. You couldn't stand aside when people started perverting everything science had learned in the century since Pasteur first guessed what all those strange little
wigglers you saw through the microscope were actually doing.

A terrifying roar came through the howl of the engine. Light played through the canted windows, throwing shadows across the grease-painted faces around her. She flung her arms out instinctively as the nose pitched up. Gay bright Independence Day sparklers she recognized after a horrified instant as tracers burned past the door gunner. Then the flame was
inside, with them
. A deafening bang cracked through the metal around her. And God help her, she hadn't meant to, but that was her screaming as they went down.

 

THE TEAM
leader reached out, grabbing the people closest to him. If the helo went in, they'd ballistic through the cockpit windshield a fraction of a second after the pilots. Holding on to them wouldn't help. He knew that. But it was all there was to do.

The door gunner was firing. Not bursts, a steady clatter like he didn't care if he burned the barrel out. Another round punched through the fuselage, loud as a stun grenade in a closed room. Blinded, deafened, he braced for impact.

So they were right, the ones who'd said it was too risky. But Semper Fi wasn't just a motto. It meant accepting risk, when the mission called for it. Accepting the possibility that you, and the men you led, might not come back.

They were heading for the desert floor, bodies sliding toward him and then lifting off the deck as the aircraft nosed over. He wasn't afraid, though. Hadn't been afraid of anything since the night he'd shot his son.

Clamping his teeth together, holding tight to his men, he closed his eyes and waited for the end.

Those who knew him from West Point called the CINC “the Bear.” Behind his back, those who had to endure his outbursts called him “Stormin' Norman”—and other things as well. Colonel E.H. Salter, his deputy intelligence chief, stood before his desk now, perspiring despite the air-conditioning, while the general read the message he'd just been handed.

The office the Saudis had assigned him was the size of a small ballroom. Winged-back chairs upholstered in cream brocade stood along the walls. At its far end hung life-size oil portraits of the king and the crown prince in gold frames. An easel tilted a huge map of Kuwait, Iraq, and northern Saudi Arabia. The desk was gigantic, blond Swedish modern, completely bare except for two black telephones, a tray of iced water and glasses, and a half-eaten instant Cup O' Noodles with a plastic spoon stuck in it. Behind it on a shelf was another phone, this one red, the scrambled direct line to Washington. This room was on the second floor of the Ministry of Defence building in downtown Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. It was 0300, and outside the windows the skies were dark.

The CINC—the commander in chief, US Central Command—was in chocolate-chip battle dress with the sleeves rolled. H. Norman Schwarzkopf's beefy bare forearms rested heavily on the desk. The four subdued
stars of a full general weighed down his collar points. He was wearing a heavy chrome diver's watch, a wedding ring, and the reading glasses he didn't like to be photographed with. The intelligence officer noted that his face was slack with fatigue, and that he was gaining weight again. None of these were good signs. When Schwarzkopf raised his eyes from the paper, his expression had taken on a familiar chill, the one that all too often presaged the storm.

“Where the hell'd this come from?”

“It's a personal ultimatum from Saddam Hussein to you, sir.”

“I can see that. I can read, damn it! How did it get here? How do we know it's actually from him?”

“Lieutenant General Ahmad handed it to the Swiss ambassador in Baghdad at ten hundred this morning with a request it go direct to you by hand. Not to State. Not to General Powell. Direct to you.”

“Well, the son of a bitch has got that right. As soon as anything in writing gets to Washington, you can consider it compromised.” Schwarzkopf scowled, fanning himself with the paper. Then he suddenly reared, throwing his weight back till the chair groaned. “Wait a minute. If it's supposed to come by hand, how did
you
get it?”

“We intercepted the Swiss embassy's report of the text,” the intel officer said. He didn't look away from the general's eyes. The only way to deal with the Bear was to stand directly in front of him, know your shit, tell it straight, and give off no scent of fear. “You'll get the actual paper later today. The Swiss are sending a courier from Beirut by air.”

“It's horseshit. It's a bluff.” The general threw the paper down and looked at it with contempt. “What is this—if a single Allied tank crosses the border, he'll destroy Tel Aviv. Horseshit.”

“Make it a crematorium, General,” Salter said.

“What's that?”

“He says he'll make the city ‘a crematorium,' sir. Not ‘destroy' it.”

“What's the difference?”

“He's making a historical reference,” the intel officer said. He took a deep breath. “And I don't think it's ‘horseshit,' General. He's threatened something like this before, back in July, then again in a broadcast in September. And he may be able to do something close to what he threatens.”

“I don't think so. He's talking more Scud attacks. Even though he's not doing that much with them so far, not in terms of actual damage.”

“Sir, with all due respect, the Israelis are taking this seriously. I have a back door to David Ivri. They want to know what we're going to do about it.”

Ivri was the director general of the Israeli Defense Ministry. Salter watched the name take effect. Schwarzkopf sagged back, scowling, lips pursed. After a moment he said, “I won't even ask how
they
got hold of this.”

“I agree, General. That's an interesting question in and of itself.”

“Your point being I've got to hold their hands, or they'll send their own people in after whatever it is they think he's threatening them with.”

“Yes, sir. They have to feel confident we're dealing with it.”

Both men knew the Israelis had prepared a major air and commando raid to go into the western desert and root out the missiles that were killing families in Tel Aviv. And that if that happened, the fragile coalition of Arabs and Westerners would collapse, handing Saddam political victory no matter what happened on the battlefield.

The general sat thinking. Finally he said, “What exactly do you think he has? He can't actually pop a nuke, can he?”

A phone rang then. Not the red one, a plain black one.
Schwarzkopf picked it up, listened, then rasped, “You two work it out, Walt. You hear me? Settle it yourself. I'm trying to run a war. Don't call me again on piddly shit like this, General. Earn your goddamn paycheck.” He slammed the handset down.

Salter went on, answering the question he'd been asked before the call. “No, sir, we don't think he can. Our belief is that if he had a working bomb, even a bread-boarded one, he'd announce it. He hasn't done that. Therefore, it's something else.”

“Chemicals?”

“He's talked about that from day one. The tone of this message is different.”

“You reading tea leaves on me, Salter?”

“Possibly, General. But the corporate-knowledge people think he's talking about something new.”

“I still think it's a bluff.”

“Sir, if I can interject a personal opinion.”

Schwarzkopf nodded warily. Salter said, “The trouble is, Prince Bandar's right. Saddam doesn't make empty threats. The Al-Sabahs thought he was bluffing when he moved the Republican Guard to their border. He wasn't. We thought he was kidding when he said he'd use his Scuds. He launched them the day after we raided Baghdad. He's already proved he can reach Israel with conventionally armed missiles. Whatever he's got now, he thinks it'll do what he says. Or he wouldn't say so.”

The general pursed his lips. He read the paper again. His heavy round face was set now. “Turn Tel Aviv into a crematorium,” he said. “So what's he got?”

A gradually rising siren note outside came at the same moment the black phone purred again. Both the staff officer and the general reached automatically to check the gas masks slung at their belts. Schwarzkopf stood, holding the phone. When he put it down, he said tersely, “Three Scuds launched from vicinity of As-Salmān. Headed our way.”

THE WAR
room was seven stories down and eighty feet underground. Salter followed the general and his security man down a long passageway lit by fan-shaped sconces. Saudi and US sentries snapped to present arms. Past them, the three men went down another long stairwell, narrow, concrete-walled, echoing and empty, and through heavy steel doors that clanged shut behind them.

The room within was large but low-ceilinged and dim. A continuous murmur of voices and the hum of computer blowers floated from the desks and consoles. It smelled musty, like a tomb. Schwarzkopf stopped to pour black coffee into a plastic foam cup, exchanged terse words with an Air Force colonel, then looked around impatiently for Salter. They ended up in a small room deep in the JIC, the intelligence center where the photo analysts did bomb damage assessment.

“You asked me what he might have, other than chemicals,” the intel officer said, going on as if they hadn't been interrupted. He took a lap briefing from his briefcase and laid it out in front of the general. “There are several possibilities. The Defense Intelligence Agency's appreciation of Iraqi military capabilities says Saddam might have, not a bomb, but a crude nuclear device that depends on radioactivity more than blast. It might take days, but it could still kill thousands of people. Also, sources inside the Soviet weapons program report that the Iraqis could have weaponized anthrax and possibly bubonic plague.”

At each slide Schwarzkopf slumped farther in his chair. He took off his glasses. When Salter fell silent at last, he sat with pouchy eyes closed, rubbing his face.

A tap on the door. The security chief leaned in. “Sir, all three Scuds are down. One intercepted by Patriots. The other two impacted north of the city.”

“Casualties?”

“No word yet, sir. I'll get that to you as soon as it comes in.”

The CINC nodded and looked at Salter again. The intel officer said, “We might have an indicator. From the Iraqi underground, such as it is. We got a confused report about something called
hijurat ababeel
.”

“Meaning?”

“It seems to be a code name, a cover name,” Salter said. “Literally, it means ‘flying rocks,' or something like ‘throwing stones.' Think of what David used on Goliath. It might also be a reference to the Qur'an, but I'm not clear on that yet. I have some of our people trying to mine anything else out of it.”

“I'd better just have Buster Glosson bomb it,” Schwarzkopf said. “Generate a B-52 strike.”

“Sir, we could do that, if we could localize it.”

“I thought you said you got a report from the underground.”

“A rumor of its existence. Nothing like grid coordinates.”

“You spooks must have
some
idea where it is.”

“Only a general one.” Salter laid out his last slide. It showed Iraq, pocked with a scattering of circles. On the scale of the map the circles were tiny, but each one was miles across.

Schwarzkopf stared at it, then looked up. “SAM batteries. The air defenses.”

“Exactly, sir.”

“So what are you showing me?”

“This weapon—whatever it is—is Saddam's last-ditch deterrent. His retaliatory capability, to put it in terms we'd use. Where do countries keep their deterrents? We keep ours in silos in North Dakota, or underwater in Trident submarines. The Soviets hide theirs in the Barents Sea, or deep in the interior.” Salter's hand hovered over the map, then came down where dozens of circles interlocked. “You don't put them on the periphery; you put them in the heartland. Where is that for Saddam?”

Schwarzkopf looked at it. “In Baghdad?”

“The heart of his power,” Salter said. “The best-defended site in the country. Also where the report about ‘Flying Stones' came from. It's not much, but it's the best we have.”

“Where in Baghdad?”

“That we don't know, sir. If it's there, it's too well hidden for overhead reconnaissance, or we'd have it by now.”

Another tap at the door. It was a female captain with details on the missile attack. Two warheads had impacted in empty desert north of Riyadh. The Scud engaged by the Patriot had been damaged, not destroyed. It had fallen in a Koranic school and killed or injured thirty students and teachers, most of whom had been asleep.

Schwarzkopf pondered a moment more, then reached for a phone. “CINC here. For General Moore…Hello, Burton? I'm sending my deputy J-2 over with some bad news. Yeah. He'll tell you. He'll be right over.” He hung up and said to Salter, “Don't leave this one to the system. As of now it's your number one personal tasking. Make it happen. Report to me every day. Call me personally if anyone gives you shit or stands in the way.”

“Yes, sir,” said the intel officer.

The general hesitated, then added, “Find it. But don't hit it until I personally approve it.” He heaved himself up and stalked out. At the door he turned back. “Understand what I'm telling you?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“If we've got to put the snake eaters in to find it, so be it. But find it. Before G day.
Verstehen sie
?”

“That doesn't leave us much time, sir.”

“Five days. That's all any of us have, Colonel. I'm not going to postpone this thing again.”

“Yes, sir. Oh—the message.” Salter held it out. “Are you going to answer it?”

Schwarzkopf wadded the paper and threw it back. “The only answer he's getting to this is a bomb.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I still think he's bluffing. But if he isn't, this could be a show stopper, Colonel. Do not fail me. Do not fail the thousands of men who'll be putting their lives on the line one week from now. Do not fail the civilians who'll die if I'm wrong and he's actually got something held back.”

He turned, lightly for so big a man, and a moment later was gone.

Deep beneath a terrified city, Salter stooped slowly for the paper. He smoothed it out, looking down at it.