“Rangefinder,” he muttered to the men behind him. He passed back the binoculars and took the implement offered to him. It was like a telescope.
When he held it to his eye, as they had shown him in Riyadh, he saw the mountain and the tarp that hid the gun, but not with any magnification.
On the prism were four V-shaped chevrons, the points all directed inward. Slowly he rotated the knurled knob on the side of the scope until all four points touched each other to form a cross. The cross rested on the tarpaulin.
Taking the scope from his eye, he consulted the numbers on the rotating band. One thousand and eighty yards.
“Compass,” he said. He pushed the rangefinder behind him and took the electronic compass. This was no device dependent on a dish swimming in a bowl of alcohol, nor even a pointer balanced on a gimbal.
He held it to his eye, sighted the tarpaulin across the valley, and pressed the button. The compass did the rest, giving him a bearing from his own position to the tarpaulin of 348 degrees, ten minutes, and eighteen seconds.
The SATNAV positioner gave him the last thing he needed—his own exact location on the planet’s surface, to the nearest square fifteen yards by fifteen.
It was a clumsy business trying to erect the satellite dish in the confined space, and it took ten minutes.
When he called Riyadh, the response was immediate. Slowly Martin read to the listeners in the Saudi capital three sets of figures: his own exact position, the compass direction from himself to the target, and the range. Riyadh could work out the rest and give the pilot his coordinates.
Martin crawled back into the crevice, to be replaced by Stephenson, who would keep an eye open for Iraqi patrols, and tried to sleep.
At half-past eight, in complete darkness, Martin tested the infrared target marker. In shape it was like a large flash lamp with a pistol-grip, but it had an eyepiece in back.
He linked it to its battery, aimed it at the Fortress, and looked. The whole mountain was as clearly lit as if bathed in a great green moon. He swung the barrel of the image intensifier up to the tarpaulin that masked the barrel of the Babylon and squeezed the pistol-trigger.
A single, invisible beam of infrared light raced across the valley, and he saw a small red dot appear on the mountainside. Moving the night-sight, he settled the red dot on the tarpaulin and kept it there for half a minute. Satisfied, he switched it off and crawled back beneath the netting.
The four Strike Eagles took off from Al Kharz at ten forty-fiveP.M. and climbed to twenty thousand feet. For three of the crews, it was a routine mission to hit an Iraqi air base. Each Eagle carried two two-thousand-pound laser-guided bombs, in addition to their self-defense air-to-air missiles.
Refueling from their designated KC-10 tanker just south of the Iraqi border was normal and uneventful.
When they were topped up, they turned away in loose formation, and the flight, coded Bluejay, set course almost due north, passing over the Iraqi town of As-Samawah at 11:14.
They flew in radio silence as always and without lights, each wizzo able to see the other three aircraft clearly on his radar. The night was clear, and the AWACS over the Gulf had given them a “picture clear”
advice, meaning no Iraqi fighters were up.
At 11:39, Don Walker’s wizzo muttered:
“Turning point in five.”
They all heard it and understood they would be turning over Lake As Sa’diyah in five minutes.
Just as they went into the forty-five-degree turn to port, to set the new heading for Tikrit East, the other three aircrew heard Don Walker say quite clearly:
“Bluejay Flight Leader has ... engine problems. I’m going to RTB. Bluejay Three, take over.”
Bluejay Three was Bull Baker that night, leader of the other two-plane element. From that transmission onward, things began to go wrong, in a very weird manner.
Walker’s wingman Randy “R-2” Roberts closed up with his leader but could see no apparent trouble from Walker’s engines, yet the Bluejay leader was losing power and height. If he was going to RTB—return to base—it would be normal for his wingman to stay with him, unless the problem was minimal. Engine trouble far over enemy territory is not minimal.
“Roger that,” acknowledged Baker. Then they heard Walker say:
“Bluejay Two, rejoin Bluejay Three, I say again, rejoin. That is an order. Proceed to Tikrit East.”
The wingman, now baffled, did as he was ordered and climbed back to rejoin the remainder of Bluejay.
Their commander continued to lose height over the lake; they could see him on their radars.
At the same moment they realized he had done the unthinkable. For some reason—confusion caused by the engine problem, perhaps—he had spoken not on the Have-quick coded radio, but “in clear.” More amazingly, he had actually mentioned their destination.