23
The command bunker at the sprawling military base outside of Riyadh looked like a Star Wars movie set. A long rack of television monitors mounted above a huge wall chart of the region displayed everything from the current CNN broadcast to real-time satellite ambient light and infrared views of selected areas inside Iraq, computer presentations of Iraqi and U.N. troop positions, computer presentations of the vehicles moving near Baghdad and Samarra, aircraft aloft over Iraq, Arabia, Kuwait, and the Persian Gulf, ships at sea in the Gulf — everything a commander might want to know was on one of those screens. At computer stations facing the screens were the men and women who punched the keys that made it all work.
Just now all eyes in the room were on the CNN monitor. Jake Grafton and the European colonels stood together in a knot staring upward at the jowly visage of Saddam Hussein, who was busy calling the Washington Post and Boris Yeltsin liars. “Iraq does not possess nuclear weapons. Lies have been told. Yeltsin is desperate, attempting to use Iraq as a scapegoat to prevent political collapse in Russia.”
“What do you think?” Jake asked Jocko West.
“If he has trained Russian technicians, I think he can shoot the missiles on launchers any time. At best, within hours. But he probably only has two or three missiles on their Russian Army launchers. The launchers were just too bulky and heavy to transport. He took as many missiles as he could, probably intending to put them on launchers he already has. And he took warheads, which are small and could be loaded quickly onto his planes. I suspect that he’s playing for time in order to load the missiles he stole on old Scud launchers and adapt the warheads for use on his missiles.”
Colonel Rheinhart agreed. “If he has the people and the proper tools, he can begin placing nuclear warheads on the Scuds in a few days, arm perhaps thirty Scuds in ten days or so. Five or six ready-to-shoot weapons are not enough for a war.”
The Italian and Frenchman nodded at this assessment. Jake Grafton wasn’t so sure. A lunatic might start a war even if he had only one bullet.
As Jake Grafton stared at Saddam’s image on the monitor, he reviewed what he knew about the Iraqi dictator. Born poor, poor as only an Arab can be, in a squalid village a hundred miles north of Baghdad, he went to live with an uncle in the capital at the age of ten, about 1947. His uncle was the author of a screed entitled Three Things That God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews, and Flies. This tract became young Saddam’s Mein Kampf. Within months, according to his official biography, he killed his first man.
When he was twenty, the young thug joined the Iraqi Baath party, where he became a triggerman disposing of the party’s enemies, of whom there were many. One of the people he murdered was his brother-in-law. Two years later, in 1959, he bungled an assassination attempt aimed at the current Iraqi dictator, General Abdul Kassem, and was shot by Kassem’s guards. Somehow he escaped and fled to Egypt.
In 1963 the Baath party successfully murdered Kassem and took power. Saddam returned to Iraq and ended up in prison nine months later when the Baathists were overthrown by an army junta.
When the Baathists seized power again in 1968, Saddam was there in the councils of power. In a stunning parallel to the career of Josef Stalin, he took control of the secret police and systematically set out to murder everyone he could not control, thereby becoming the real ruler of Iraq. Before long he took personal control of the nation’s foreign policy. The nominal president of the country soldiered on under Saddam’s orders until 1979, when he retired, thereby becoming the first ruler of Iraq not to die in office within the memory of living men. Saddam anointed himself dictator and gave himself a new title, The Awesome. Perhaps it loses something in translation.
Yet Saddam never forgot how he got to the top, never lost touch with his roots. New title and all, he still liked to use a pistol to personally execute cabinet officers, generals, and relatives who had the temerity to argue with him or whom he suspected of harboring a nascent seed of disloyalty.
From any possible viewpoint, Jake Grafton thought, Saddam appeared as the master thug, a self-centered man without conscience or remorse capable of any crime. In other words, a perfect dictator.
Oh, he had screwed up badly a time or two — the eight-year war with Iran cost Iraq a hundred thousand lives and $70 billion it didn’t have, and the little fracas over Kuwait didn’t turn out quite the way Saddam thought it would. But the man wasn’t a quitter. After those debacles he had ruthlessly shot, gassed and starved his domestic enemies into oblivion. Iraq was still his: he was hanging tough, arming himself with nuclear weapons. Then he would find who still wanted to play the game and who was willing to kneel at his throne.
Saddam’s tragedy was that he ruled such a small corner of the world. If only he could have had a stage the size of Germany or Russia!
A naive person might wonder why the civilized nations of the earth continued to deal with miserable vermin like Saddam, but Jake Grafton didn’t. Realpolitik kept him alive. He was part and parcel of the forces in dynamic tension that kept the Middle East from exploding into religious and race war. And Iraq had oil.
Jake wondered if now, finally, the fearful politicians of the “civilized nations” had had enough. He was still pondering that question when he was called into a room with General Frank Loy, the UN commander. General Loy was talking on the satellite link. He handed the telephonelike handset to Jake.
“Rear Admiral Grafton, sir.”
“Hayden Land. Glad you arrived.”
“I just watched Saddam on the tube.”
“Yeah. They’re in a dither here. They’re pissed that you gave the story to the Post and I had to admit I authorized it. So they’re peeved at me. If I weren’t black they would have fired me.” He indulged himself in an expletive. “Anyway, Saddam isn’t cooperating. He denied he has nukes, so now the fact that there is no independent confirmation has them in a sweat.”
“So no air strike?”
“No air strike,” Land said wearily.
“Saddam has put his forces on alert,” Jake said. “It’ll take four or five days to bring them up to full alert, so whatever we’re going to do we must do quickly. Every hour that goes by is going to cost us lives.”
“I know that,” Land said.
“The German expert thinks that Saddam could have the stolen missiles ready to launch in hours, if they aren’t ready to go now.”
Land didn’t respond. In a moment he said, “These people here are trying to figure out a way to blame this mess on George Bush. He had his chance to stomp this cockroach and didn’t, so now they have to dirty their shoes with it.”
“Yessir. Should Yocke do another story?”
“Your staff reporter? No. Not right now. They would lock me out of the White House if that happened. Soooo…I want you to plan an assault on that airfield. Figure out what it will take, when you can do it, what it will cost.” Jake knew that when Hayden Land talked cost, he wasn’t talking dollars: he was talking lives. “Then call me back. If you and Loy think an assault is feasible, my idea is for you to take some network camera teams along. If we treated the world to a live broadcast showing the Russian missiles and warheads that Saddam says he doesn’t have, these people here will be off the hook. Then you can fly the weapons out.”
“We try to fly the weapons out, General, this is going to be a big operation and damned risky.”
“I know that. But these people inside the Beltway don’t have the balls to take any flak from the Sierra Club about nuclear pollution. They’d rather take U.S. casualties than Iraqi casualties. It’s not that they’re callous, it’s just the fact that they got in with a plurality of the votes. We’re dealing with a president that sixty percent of the American people didn’t want. He knows it, his staff knows it — and they won’t risk alienating the support they do have. That’s political reality. So plan for an airlift.”