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
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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,”
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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.
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“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 Good-ley 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-
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off was a premium Russian label. The combination had given him five and a half hours of sleep until the usual dis-orientation 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.