OK? It's on two floors, ground and upper, possibly also a basement. Concrete block construction, painted some light colour, buffor cream. Flat roof, double skinned to give some insulation from the sun. Metal window frames. This is where the target lives during his working week.'
'How wide's that gap between the building and the fence?' I asked.
'Maybe a hundred yards, maybe a little more. I'll take you in closer for more detail.'
In the next image the building occupied most of the picture. Two vehicles were parked in front of it, and part of a swimming pool was visible on the left-hand side. 'OK. The main entrance is here, 6n the southern side. There's another door on the right-hand end, here, — and a rear door at the left, here. See this curving row of trees? It looks as though there's some sort of garden been planted in back. The private accommodation is here, around the west end. The room in which the target works nights is this one, on the corner of the upper floor. Two windows, one facing south, one west.
Look at this.'
The speaker put up a night-time shot, taken from an oblique angle. Everything was dim and hazy, and needed explanation. 'You're still looking down, but from a little way out front — a slightly different orbit.
These are the lights on the perimeter fence… and this is the south face of the accommodation building. The main doorway I mentioned is about there.' He pointed at the middle of the south front. 'Now. See the bright spot in this top corner? That's been there on several satellite passes made between one and two a.m. Rest of the building dark, this window lit, OK? That's where we think he'll be.'
'But how do we know it's him?' I asked.
Gus hesitated and turned towards Gilbert, as if uncertain who should answer the question.
'Inside information,' Gilbert quickly explained. 'We have a sleeper who works in the building — a computer maintenance technician. The guy files us reports on a regular basis. The only thing is, he has one hell of a time because the power supply keeps going down. There are *back-up generators, but they don't work too well either.'
I was rather impressed. I hadn't realised that the Firm had such a far-flung web of contacts. 'How late does the target stay there?' I asked.
'Typically until two or three in the morning,' Gus replied.
'And where does he sleep?'
'In back of the building, on that same floor.'
'What about guards?'
'Two or three sleep on the premises. There are normally two on duty nights, but that doesn't mean they're going to be awake. You know what Arabs are like.'
Gus paused, thinking. Then he added, 'If you're going in close, one thing in your favour will be the primitive air conditioning. There's no central system.
Each room has its own unit set into an outside wall, and the fans are pretty noisy. Whenever the AC's on, there'll be a solid background roar. That'll help mask any sound you make.'
'How far away is the nearest building?'
The CIA man switched to another photo, halfway between the first and second in scale, and measured the space from the house to a neighbouring structure, offto the north. 'Also about a hundred yards, we think. This other thing's some kind of a store, probably uninhabited at night. I don't think it'll worry you.'
For a minute or two we all sat staring, memorising details, and I made a few notes in my book. Then Whinger forgot himself and declared, 'All we need do is take a couple of Uzis with us and accidentally scatter them about the place..That'd put the finger on fucking Israel, all right.'
I saw Gilbert looking rather pained, so I said, 'Not on, mate. We need to keep ourselves clean.'
'Was that a joke?' asked Gus. 'I hope so. Oh, I nearly forgot. I don't want to overburden you guys, but there's a secondary target that would merit your attention.'
He projected yet another image from his laptop and showed us a picture of a satellite receiving station — a thirty-foot steerable dish aerial with a couple of ancillary buildings — in a small compound of its own. 'This is one of the nerve centres of their military communications network,' he said. 'Knock that out and you'd do everyone a good turn. It was built by the Soviets, and with things being as they are now it might not be too easy to replace.'
'Where is it in relation to the accommodation block?' I asked.
'On the other side of camp. The east side. I think you'd see it OK from the perimeter wire.'
'And how far from that gate you showed us?'
'Maybe three hundred yards.'
'P-PG,' said Whinger judiciously. 'Slip a rocket up it as we're moving off. No problem.'
'Like I said,' Gus emphasised, 'it's very much a secondary target. Only to be engaged if you've hit Number One. And certainly I wouldn't want you to prejudice the main operation.'
'Got that,' I said. 'Can you fill us in on the surrounding terrain?'
'Sure.'
A wide-angle shot (or maybe one taken from a higher orbit) showed an expanse of desert south of the camp. To our untrained eyes the picture didn't mean, much. Apart from a single dirt road coming out from the fence to the south-east and ending at a range, there were a few wadis and stream-beds winding about, but we couldn't identify anything else specific. Yet Gus, armed with notes, gave a useful general description.
During the chopper flight in we would overfly one MS1L (main supply route), a metalled road running north-east to south-west, he told us. Once on the ground we'd have to cross another road, a smaller one, and a single large wadi. Down to the south the desert was flat, but as we approached the area of the camp we would come into a belt of dunes a couple of miles across from south to north, the range as a whole lying east and west, the northern edge of which was less than a quarter of a mile from the camp fence. Gus reckoned the dunes were 150 feet high, and should give us an excellent site for an observation post. The elevation was ideaclass="underline" we'd be looking down slightly. Another picture, taken soon after sunrise, proved his point: strong light coming low from the east caught on the sweeping, curved rims of the dunes, casting pools of shadow hundreds or maybe thousands of yards long.
As I stared at the picture my mind flew back to the Gulf, and the crappy gen we'd been fed in the run-up to the war. For months we had trained in the sand of the United Arab Emirates, firmly believing that the desert plateau in the west oflraq — where our patrols would be inserted — also consisted of sand. The basis of our belief was US satellite imagery, from which our own int boys had deduced that Iraq was covered with sand from top to bottom. Then, when our patrols had gone in, what did we find? The entire environment was rock and shale, with not a grain of sand in sight. All the kit we'd brought for building OPs was useless, and we were caught with our pants down: you can't build anything out of solid rock.
Were we being given another load of crap now? I didn't want to seem aggressive, but I had to ask — so I put the point as politely as possible. 'Excuse me,' I said, 'but in Iraq we got stuffed because everyone misread the terrain.'
'I know, I know!' Gus grinned in a friendly enough fashion. 'That was real tough. But the fault didn't lie in the imagery. The trouble was, your intelligence guys didn't know how to interpret the data they were getting. Nobody had time to brief them properly and pass information on down the line.'
'So you're confident this environment is sand?' I gestured at the screen.
'One hundred per cent. Look at the'soft curves on these dunes. They couldn't be made of rock. Apart from anything else, they change shape with the seasons as the winds shift their surface. There's another thing, too: it's the loose texture of the ground that stops the Libyans using this sector for manoeuvres. As I said, they've got enormous infantry training areas, but those are all further north where the desert's harder and more stable.'