“Well, first thing, Mr. Barber, we’re going to have a damn good look at it.”
This time it was a TR-1 out of Taif that did the honors. An upgraded version of the old U-2, the TR-1
was being used as a multitask information gatherer, able to overfly Iraq out of sight and sound, using its technology to probe deep into the defenses with radar imaging and listening equipment. But it still had its cameras and was occasionally used not for the broad picture but for a single intimate mission. The task of photographing a location known only as Al Qubai was about as intimate as one can get.
There was a second reason for the TR-1: It can transmit its pictures in real time. No waiting for the mission to come back, download the TARPS, develop the film, and rush it across to Riyadh. As the TR-1 cruised over the designated patch of desert west of Baghdad and south of the Al-Muhammadi air base, the images it saw came straight to a television screen in the basement of the Saudi Air Force headquarters.
There were five men in the room, including the technician who operated the console and who could, at a word from the other four, order the computer to freeze-frame and run off a photographic print for study.
Chip Barber and Steve Laing were there, tolerated in their civilian dress in this mecca of military prowess; the other two were Colonel Beatty of the USAF and Squadron Leader Joe Peck of” the RAF, both experts in target analysis.
The reason for using Al Qubai was simply that this was the nearest village to the target; as it was too small a settlement to show up on their maps, it was the accompanying grid reference and description that mattered to the analysts.
The TR-1 found it a few miles from the grid reference sent by Jericho, but there could be no question that the description was exact, and there were no other locations remotely near that fit the description.
The four men watched the target swim into vision, freeze on the best frame, and hold. The modem punched out a print for study.
“It’s under there?” breathed Laing.
“Must be,” said Colonel Beatty. “There’s nothing else like it for miles around.”
“Cunning buggers,” said Peck.
Al Qubai was in fact the nuclear engineering plant for Dr. Jaafar Al-Jaafar’s entire Iraqi nuclear program.
A British nuclear engineer once remarked that his craft was “ten percent genius and ninety percent plumbing.” There is rather more to it than that. The engineering plant is where craftsmen take the product of the physicists, the calculations of the mathematicians and the computers, and the results of the chemists and assemble the final product. It is the nuclear engineers who actually make the device into a deliverable piece of metal.
Iraq had buried its Al Qubai plant completely beneath the desert, eighty feet down, and that was just the level of the roof. Beneath the roof, three stories of workshops ran farther downward. What caused Squadron Leader Peck’s “cunning buggers” remark was the skill with which it had been disguised.
It is not all that difficult to build an entire factory underground, but disguising it presents major problems.
Once it is constructed in its giant crater, sand may be bu
lldozed back against the ferroconcrete walls and over the roof until the building is concealed. Sinks beneath the lowest floor may cope with drainage.
But the factory will need air conditioning; that requires a fresh-air intake and a foul-air outlet—both pipes jutting out of the desert floor. It will also need masses of electric power, implying a powerful diesel generator. That too needs an air intake and exhaust outlet—two more pipes.
There must be a down-ramp or a passenger elevator and a cargo hoist for deliveries and departures of personnel and materials—another above-surface structure. Delivery trucks cannot roll on soft sand; they need a hard road, a spur of tarmac running from the nearest main road.
There will be heat emissions, concealable during the day when the outside air is hot, but not during the chill nights.
How therefore to disguise from aerial surveillance an area of virgin desert entertaining a tarmac road that seems to run to nowhere, four major pipes, an elevator shaft, the constant arrival and departure of trucks, and frequent heat emissions?
It was Colonel Osman Badri, the young genius of Iraq’s Army Engineering Corps, who had cracked it; and his solution fooled the Allies with all their spy planes.
From the air, Al Qubai was a forty-five-acre automobile junkyard. Though the watchers in Riyadh, even with their best magnifiers, could not see it, four of the heaps of rusting car wrecks were welded frames—solid domes of twisted metal—beneath which pipes sucked in fresh air or filtered out the foul gases through the broken bodies of cars and vans.
The main shed, the cutting shop, with its steel tanks of oxygen and acetylene ostentatiously parked outside, hid the entry to the elevator shafts. The naturalness of welding in such a place would justify a heat source.
The reason for the single-track tarred road was obvious—trucks needed to arrive with car wrecks and leave with scrap steel.
The whole system had actually been seen early on by AWACS, which registered a great mass of metal in the middle of the desert. Was it a tank division? An ammunition dump? An early fly-over had established it was just a car junkyard, and interest had been abandoned.
What the four men in Riyadh could also not see was that four other minimountains of rusted car bodies were also solidly welded frames, internally shaped like domes, but with hydraulic jacks beneath them.
Two of them housed powerful antiaircraft batteries, multibarreled ZSU-23-4 Russian cannon; the other two concealed SAMs, models 6,8, and 9, not radar-guided but the smaller heat-seeking type—a radar dish would have given the game away.
“So it’s under there,” breathed Beatty.