“No, sayidi ,” said the man sadly. “Whenever it rains they all run inside.”
“By Allah the Great,” murmured the officer, “it’s not for the rain, oaf! It’s for sending messages.”
“An umbrella that sends messages,” repeated the gardener slowly, “I will look for one, sayidi .”
“Get on your way,” said the officer in despair. “And stay silent about what you have seen here.”
Martin pedaled down the road, past the limousine. As he approached, Rahmani lowered his head into the rear seat. No need to let the peasant see the head of Counterintelligence for the Republic of Iraq.
Martin found the chalk mark at seven and recovered the message at nine. He read it by the light from the window of a café—not electric light, for there was none anymore, but a gasoline lamp. When he saw the text, he let out a low whistle, folded the paper small, and stuffed it inside his underpants.
There was no question of going back to the villa. The transmitter was blown, and a further message would spell disaster. He contemplated the bus station, but there were Army and AMAM patrols all over it, looking for deserters.
Instead, he went to the fruit market at Kasra and found a truck driver heading west. The man was only going a few miles beyond Habbaniyah, and twenty dinars persuaded him to take a passenger. Many trucks preferred to drive by night, believing that the Sons of Dogs up there in their airplanes could not see them in the dark, unaware that by either night or day, battered fruit trucks were not General Chuck Horner’s top priority.
So they drove through the night, by headlights generating at least one candlepower, and at dawn Martin found himself deposited on the highway just west of Lake Habbaniyah, where the driver turned off for the rich farms of the Upper Euphrates Valley.
They had been stopped twice by patrols, but on each occasion Martin had produced his papers and the Russian letter, explaining that he had worked as gardener for the infidel, but they were going home and had dismissed him. He whined about the way they had treated him until the impatient soldiers told him to be quiet and get on his way.
That night, Osman Badri was not far from Mike Martin, heading in the same direction but ahead of him.
His destination was the fighter base where his elder brother, Abdelkarim, was the squadron commander.
During the 1980s a Belgian construction company called Sixco had been contracted to build eight superprotected air bases to house the cream of Iraq’s best fighters.
The key to them was that almost everything was buried underground—barracks, hangars, fuel stores, ammunition magazines, workshops, briefing rooms, crew quarters, and the big diesel generators to power the bases.
The only things visible aboveground were the actual runways, three thousand meters long. But as these appeared to have no buildings or hangars associated with them, the Allies thought they were barebones airfields, as Al Kharz in Saudi Arabia had been before the Americans moved in.
A closer inspection on the ground would have revealed one-meter-thick concrete blast doors set into downward-leading ramps at the ends of the runways. Each base was in a square five kilometers by five, the perimeter surrounded by barbed-wire fencing. But like Tarmiya, the Sixco bases appeared inactive and were left alone.
To operate out of them, the pilots would be briefed underground, get into their cockpits, and start their engines there. Only when they were fully run-up, with blast walls protecting the rest of the base from their jet exhaust and diverting the gases upward to mingle with the hot desert air outside, would the doors to the ramps be opened.
The fighters could race up the ramps, emerge at full power, afterburners on, scream down the runway, and be airborne in seconds. Even when the AWACS spotted them, they appeared to have come from nowhere and were assumed to be on low-level missions originating somewhere else.
Colonel Abdelkarim Badri was stationed at one of these Sixco bases, known only as KM 160 because it was off the Baghdad-Ar-Rutba road, 160 kilometers west of Baghdad. His younger brother presented himself at the guard post in the wire just after sundown.
Because of his rank, a phone call was at once made from the guard hut to the squadron commander’s private quarters, and soon a jeep appeared, trundling across the empty desert, apparently having come from nowhere.
A young Air Force lieutenant escorted the visitor into the base, the jeep rolling down another hidden but small ramp into the belowground complex, where the jeep was parked. The lieutenant led the way down long concrete corridors, past caverns where mechanics worked on MiG 29s. The air was clean and filtered, and everywhere was the hum of generators.
Eventually they entered the senior officers’ area, and the lieutenant knocked at a door. At a command from inside, he showed Osman Badri into the CO’s apartment.
Abdelkarim rose,
and the brothers embraced. The older man was thirty-seven, also a colonel and darkly handsome, with a slim moustache. He was unmarried but never lacked for female attention. His looks, his sardonic manner, his dashing uniform, and his pilot’s wings ensured it. Nor was his appearance a sham; Air Force generals admitted he was the best fighter pilot in the country, and the Russians, who had trained him on the ace of the Soviet fighter fleet, the MiG 29 Fulcrum supersonic fighter, agreed with that.
“Well, my brother, what brings you out here?” Abdelkarim asked.
Osman, when he had sat down and gotten coffee from a freshly perked brew, had had time to study his older sibling. There were lines of strain around the mouth that had not been there before, and weariness in the eyes.
Abdelkarim was neither a fool nor a coward. He had flown eight missions against the Americans and the British. He had returned from them all—just. He had seen his best colleagues shot down or blown apart by Sparrow and Sidewinder missiles, and he had dodged four himself.
The odds, he had recognized after his first attempt to intercept the American strike bombers, were impossible. On his own side, he had neither information nor guidance as to where the enemy was, how many, of what type, at what height, or on which heading. The Iraqi radars were down, the control and command centers were in pieces, and the pilots were simply on their own.
Worse, the Americans with their AWACS could pick up the Iraqi warplanes before they had reached a thousand feet, telling their own pilots where to go and what to do to secure the best attack position. For the Iraqis, Abdelkarim Badri knew, every combat mission was a suicide quest.
Of all this, he said nothing, forcing a smile and a request for his brother’s news. That news killed the smile.