As it turned out, getting into the Nasrat facility had likewise been a great deal less difficult than Bogner had anticipated. Using the car that Baddour had assigned to his head of research, and with Matba playing the role of chauffeur, they drove through the south gate of the Nasrat complex, past two security guards who apparently recognized Rashid’s car, and into a secured parking area. It occurred to Bogner that apparently Fahid’s security people still thought they had him confined to the cell complex. Sooner or later, though, he knew the search would be expanded.
Despite the early hour, some of the Nasrat workers were already starting to filter in as well.
It helped that Baddour hadn’t confined his recruiting efforts to his native country. As far as Bogner could determine, Nasrat personnel included Orientals and Caucasians, as well as a healthy cross section of Middle Easterners. Still wearing the uniform fatigues Jahin had provided on the first day, Bogner, carrying a metal toolbox and walking in tandem with Matba, looked very much like a facility maintenance man. Along the way he picked up fragments of conversation spoken in German, French, Turkish, and the inevitable Arabic. Most of what Bogner was able to pick up amounted to little more than comments on the weather and early morning small talk.
At one point Rashid balked when two NIMF officers passed the foursome in an upper-level corridor, and Bogner was forced to nudge him with the muzzle of the automatic. They boarded an elevator and descended three levels. Bogner determined that if they were going to go any further, he would have to persuade the Rashids to get him past a series of security doors. Each time they moved deeper into the complex, Rashid seemed to be less willing to cooperate. He was getting braver.
“Don’t stop now. Doctor,” Bogner warned.
“We’re just getting to the good part.”
“Just what is it you expect to see?” Talia Rashid demanded. Her voice, like her husband’s, exposed her growing nervousness.
“You, Mrs. Rashid, are going to show me what our satellites can’t see. When you do that, you’ll be done, and I’ll see that you get back to your little concrete quarters unharmed,” Bogner said.
Talia Rashid, a small, middle-aged woman with olive skin and intense brown eyes, stared back at Bogner with obvious contempt.
“Americans amuse me, Mr. Bogner. They operate on the assumption that we fear death as they do. I do not fear for my own life. If it were only myself that I must consider, I would say go ahead and use your weapon. My faith has taught me not to fear death.
I am cooperating only to spare the life of my husband.”
“As long as you both do what I tell you to do, you can express all the contempt you want to, little lady. Just show me what I want to see and you might live long enough to tell your grandkids about this whole affair.”
The woman moved past Bogner and laid her hand on a small illuminated glass plate under an acrylic covering. The device read her palm imprint, a green light went on, and the door opened.
Inside they were a number of laboratories and at the end of the corridor, another door with a sign over it. Pravitsa.
“What’s in there?” Bogner asked.
Talia hesitated.
“That’s all I needed to know,” Bogner said.
“Open it.”
Talia Rashid hesitated again, glanced at her husband, then finally opened the door and the lights went on automatically. Bogner knew immediately he had hit the mother lode. The area was climate-controlled, warning signs were everywhere, and there were more security cameras in this one area alone than he had seen in any other part of the Nasrat facility.
“Before we go in, is there any way to turn off the security cameras?” Bogner asked. Even before he had finished asking, Talia Rashid was shaking her head. “I am afraid you have outsmarted yourself.
When the door is unlocked and the lights go on, all security cameras in this holding room are activated.”
Talia Rashid had opened the door to an elaborate mini-warehouse. There were six open bays, each a twenty-foot cube, some filled with cartons, some with twenty-gallon metal drums. They were all marked with Nasrat labels, but the chemical designations on the barrels told Bogner all he needed to know.
Bogner opened his toolbox, handed Matba a wrench, and instructed the little Iraqi to step into the room, stay where the camera could see him, and act like he was working on something. Matba followed his instructions to the letter. He dropped to his knees and began working with one of the emergency water valves. Then Bogner pulled Rashid’s wife around so that she was facing him and instructed her to gesture with her hands. He had no way of knowing how realistic it was going to look to some guard watching a monitor somewhere in the bowels of Nasrat, but he needed time to look over the woman’s shoulder and get some idea of the NIMF inventory. He was banking on the monitor guard assuming they were deep in conversation. Talia Rashid obviously hadn’t taken acting lessons, but she did as she was told and it was at least good enough to temporarily fool whoever was watching the monitors. Only then did Bogner get his first good look at the Rashids’ playthings.
The first bay, marked with the Arabic symbol for one, contained a number of ten-gallon drums with VX painted on the side of the container,in large red letters. Bogner knew VX to be a highly lethal nerve gas, lethal enough that a small dose, something like ten milligrams as he remembered it, was deadly enough to kill an average adult. If it was dispersed by a Scud-type missile, or even from artillery shells, Fahid had enough VX in that one bay alone to make any war with the government in Baghdad, or anyone else for that matter, a very short war.
In the second bay were several drums marked VM-50. His knowledge of VM-50 was limited, but he did know it was a gelled form of the nerve gas Soman, a derivative variant of VX. In the other bays he identified containers, mostly small drums, marked to indicate such deadly contents as Sarin, Anthrax, Clostridium, and mustard gas. Miller and Langley had guessed right. Baddour not only had stockpiles of chemical weapons, but with the help of the Rashids, he was developing his own, even more deadly, variations. And he had enough to sell to nations friendly to the NIMF cause.
For the first time, Bogner was beginning to understand the full impact that Baddour’s GG-2 project would have on anyone who crossed swords with the NIMF. The NIMF may have been outnumbered, underfinanced, and poorly equipped, but it had more than enough GG-2 weapons. Scud missiles, and enough short-range hardware to deliver any kind of misery it desired. It was also fairly evident at this point why Baddour hadn’t been more aggressive in launching his own campaign.
To go beyond the borders of Iraq or counterattack anyone other than his immediate neighbors, he needed a way to deliver his long-range biological and chemical weapons. To the best knowledge of those who monitored the NIMF situation, that meant ICBMs and/or long-range bombers, something the NIMF so far didn’t appear to have in its inventory.
Bogner backed out into the hall, out of the range of the main security camera mounted over the door, and looked at Rashid’s wife.
“That wasn’t so difficult, was it? Sorta like a game of show-and-tell.”