Fire Hawk

by Geoffrey Archer

  The Englishman briefed the operations officer to send the lab results in an encrypted signal to New York where it was the middle of the night, then stalked out to the car park like a hunting dog, pausing in the centre of the tarmac as if sniffing the wind. He spun round on his heel, looking first at the six UN vehicles lined up for departure, then across at the single Iraqi escort vehicle waiting by the exit.

  ‘Strange. Mustafa’s men aren’t exactly out in strength this morning,’ he murmured to Burgess under his breath.

  ‘Guess that means they’ve gone over the Haji factory with a fine-tooth comb and are confident we won’t find anything of interest there. They have had forty-eight hours to check the place over.’

  Hardcastle raised an eyebrow.

  ‘You think they’re wrong to believe it’s clean?’ Burgess queried.

  ‘I was born an optimist,’ the Englishman answered flippantly. ‘That’s all.’

  But it wasn’t all. Burgess could see that Hardcastle was fired up by something much stronger than optimism.

  ‘You believe this is connected with what your SIS picked up?’ he checked. ‘The warheads that are supposed to have been moved out of Iraq?’

  The Englishman stared at him for a few seconds, not wanting to commit himself.

  ‘Well, the timing could be right, couldn’t it?’

  ‘Sure. So you think the Haji factory could be the place where this particular batch of spores was produced?’

  Hardcastle’s eyes widened like marbles.

  ‘Well, it’s the timing again, isn’t it?’ he nodded sombrely. ‘Everything happening about three weeks ago – the equipment smuggled into the Haji factory in the middle of the night, the fatalities in the desert.’

  Burgess saw a flaw in the argument.

  ‘But why should they need to test the stuff after perfecting all their weapon systems at Al Hakam years ago?’

  ‘That’s puzzling, I agree. One explanation is that there’s something different about this particular weapon.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘That the way the anthrax spores are to be released involves a method they hadn’t tried before.’

  ‘A terrorist weapon, you mean?’

  ‘Precisely. In the past we’ve always assumed Saddam would use anthrax in one of his SCUDs lobbed at Tel Aviv or Riyadh. The explosive warhead technology for that particular missile was certainly perfected before the Gulf War. No more testing needed.’

  ‘But for a terrorist attack don’t they just spray the stuff into the ventilation shaft of a government building or the subway?’ Burgess countered.

  ‘It’s not quite that simple. The spray technology has to be right. Nozzle size for liquids, particle size if it’s a dry powder. And that’s maybe what they had to check out in the desert.’

  ‘Particle size? You talked about that in Bahrain. The grains have to be five microns.’

  ‘Between one and five microns in diameter. Smaller than one micron and the particles of spores or toxin get sucked into the lungs of the intended victims and then exhaled, doing no damage; bigger than five microns and they get trapped in the phlegm of the upper respiratory tract where they’re relatively harmless. Only when they’re between one and five microns do they penetrate to the alveoli – those are the terminal air sacs of the lungs – which is where they need to be if they’re to do their worst.’

  ‘I follow. But this particle size, it’s tough to produce? What’s the technology they need?’

  ‘The first part of the process is quite easy. The toxins or pathogens can be brewed up in a growth medium in a relatively simple laboratory – like the Haji single-cell protein plant where they have self-sterilising fermenters and centrifuges. They’d need a freeze-dryer to turn the fermented liquid into a concentrated dry cake of lethal agent. But it’s after that that the critical part comes. Milling the solid into a powder of the right size. Every suitable milling machine that we know about in Iraq has a UN tag on it or a camera watching over it. That’s why the object the U-2 photographed being smuggled into the Haji factory is of special interest. It’s quite possible they had a machine somewhere we hadn’t managed to tag, or else sneaked a new one into the country. And they chose the Haji plant to set it up in, for the very reason that our fixed cameras were there. They calculated we would be so confident about the place we wouldn’t be giving it an extra look.’

  ‘Neat idea. But there’s no way that particular machine is still going to be there.’

  ‘No. We won’t find the machine, that’s for certain, but we might find something else.’

  From the corner of his eye Burgess saw movement behind Hardcastle’s back.

  ‘Watch out. Here comes ya ol’ buddy.’

  Hardcastle turned.

  ‘Ah, Mustafa. Good morning to you.’

  ‘Where you go today? Haji factory?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you be surprised if I said no, Mustafa?’ Hardcastle teased.

  The Iraqi’s eyes became beads of glass.

  ‘You ready now?’

  ‘Pretty well.’

  Mustafa turned on his heel and headed for his jeep.

  Fifteen minutes later they were on the northern outskirts of Baghdad, cutting through a different part of the city from yesterday. No broad avenues lined by palaces and monuments this time, but grubby, potholed roads strung with a cat’s cradle of overhead power and phone wires and dotted with shops and businesses that seemed unused to customers. Traffic was light. Dilapidated trucks and an overladen bus or two. Very few private cars, but the occasional orange and white taxi. The only new-looking vehicles belonged to the police.

  ‘God knows how they smuggle them in,’ Hardcastle murmured. ‘Strictly forbidden under UN sanctions. But you can see where Saddam spends his money. Palaces for himself and new kit for his security men instead of aspirins and anaesthetics for his hospitals.’

  Most people were on foot, unable to afford any transport. A tide of dusty humanity, most of them in need of a good meal.

  ‘There is real hardship in this country,’ Hardcastle continued, twisting round from the front seat. ‘UN sanctions hurt both the poor and what used to be the professional classes. The statistics for child mortality are horrific. Poor diet, poor sanitation, lack of medicine.’ He pointed to a large poster of Saddam Hussein smiling down at them from a billboard on a street corner. ‘While that man and his friends live very nicely, of course.’

  ‘There’s no justice,’ Burgess mumbled, uncomfortable at being a part of the system helping to cause such hardship.

  They reached an interchange. Signposts in English and Arabic pointed ahead to the towns of Samarra and Mosul. There’d been a nerve-gas factory at Samarra, Burgess recalled, bombed in the 1991 war, and nuclear research sites near Mosul. Huge programmes for weapons of mass destruction employing tens of thousands of scientists. An industry for domination, not self-defence. And the man who’d felt the need for it was still in charge, still chasing the same dreams in greater secrecy than ever before.

  The Haji Animal Feed factory loomed up on their right, a block of long pre-fabricated buildings set back some fifty metres from the road and ringed by a high fence. Beyond the buildings stretched an open landscape of sandy-brown earth dotted with fig and eucalyptus trees, and the remains of a crop of maize.

  Led by the Iraqi jeep, the UN convoy turned into the compound. By now well prepared for the visit, the firm’s managers were lined up outside the entrance to greet the inspectors, their faces nervous but confident. Stepping forward from the line, a man whose scalp was as bald and domed as an egg introduced himself as the general manager, Youssef Haydar. A contrary gust of wind blew aside the greased flap with which he endeavoured to conceal his baldness. It stuck out at the side now like a broken wing.

  ‘I am very sorry, but Doctor Shenassi is not able to be here today,’ Haydar explained in good English having announced he was the ‘responsible’ at the plant. ‘His mother is sick and he must visit her. It is a pity you couldn’t come t
wo days ago. He was here then.’

  Hardcastle checked the name Haydar against the list he’d been provided with at the Gateway in Bahrain. It gave his title as production manager.

  As they began their tour Burgess’s heart sank. Nothing, it seemed, had been left to chance. They inspected halls filled with stainless steel cylinders, attended by regimented staff in white coats who greeted their progress with curiosity and lightly suppressed annoyance. They were shown the small, unnaturally tidy laboratory used for batch production where there was a fourteen-litre fermenter vessel that might so easily have been employed a few weeks earlier to brew up an initial seed stock of Bacillus anthracis. They checked the tags on all the dual-use equipment against the numbers on their lists, to ensure none of the equipment had been moved. And they monitored the correct operation of the camera fixed above the plant’s milling machines that would have surely picked up any misuse.

  At each new sign that the place had been thoroughly sanitised for their visit, Burgess’s heart sank a little lower. There was nothing out of place. No sign of the extra machinery that had been smuggled in here one dark night three weeks ago. As they completed the tour and returned to the car park, Hardcastle looked depressed but determined. He gathered his team around him well away from the minders who were watching them from the shaded entrance to the administration building. They looked like sheep waiting to see if the dogs were fed up enough to leave their flock alone.

  ‘This is a bust, so far,’ Hardcastle sighed. ‘Nothing out of place and all the staff I’ve spoken to deny all knowledge of additional equipment being set up here three weeks ago.’ He looked to Burgess for help. ‘What d’you think, Dean? You’ve been scrutinising faces through your zoom lens – d’you think they’re lying?’

  ‘Hard to say,’ Burgess hedged. ‘If they are deceiving us, they’re darn good at it. How many people have we talked to? Thirty? Forty?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘In a witness group that large, there’s usually some character who gives the game away.’

  ‘Except perhaps when they realise that to let anything slip will result in an excruciating death for themselves and their entire extended family,’ Hardcastle growled, gritting his teeth. ‘Look. The one thing about which there is no doubt whatsoever is that in the early hours of the morning of Thursday the twelfth of September some heavy piece of equipment was delivered here. And the fact that the head man Doctor Shenassi is absent today is to my mind distinctly suspicious.’

  ‘I agree with that,’ Burgess said.

  Suddenly his eye was caught by movement in a wide window on the upper floor of the administration block. Two women were watching them studiedly, as if they’d been told to do so. When they saw that he’d noticed them they moved back from the glass.

  ‘So we go for the documents next, yes?’ Burgess ventured.

  ‘Exactly. We’ll split into two search groups, one linguist to each group. One takes the ground floor, the other upstairs. Dean and I will provide oversight. Every filing cabinet, every cupboard and desk drawer needs to be opened and searched. Every single document you can find – receipts, invoices, correspondence with suppliers, the lot – I want it all bundled up and brought down to the admin vehicle here.’ He pointed to the large armoured personnel carrier that had accompanied them from the BMVC. ‘We’ll photocopy most of it and examine it in detail later.’

  The administration building was small and on two storeys. The ground floor housed a large general accounting office, a smaller one for health and safety monitoring and a couple of rooms for managers. On the level above was Dr Shenassi’s office and several others including a department of general administration with four staff.

  General Manager Haydar, who’d so efficiently conducted them round the plant’s technical areas, seemed more reluctant about letting them into the offices.

  ‘There is nothing there which is relevant to your enquiries,’ he insisted, the flap of hair now stuck firmly back across his shiny scalp.

  ‘We’ll decide that,’ stated Hardcastle.

  Realising further protest was pointless Haydar delegated two of his staff to escort the search teams; one upstairs, one into the main accounts office. Hardcastle and Burgess hovered in the small entrance lobby under the suspicious gaze of Mustafa.

  ‘Why you come here, when you already have cameras here?’ the security man asked, frowning with puzzled curiosity.

  ‘To look at things the cameras cannot see,’ Hardcastle retorted dismissively.

  At the foot of the stairs an elderly doorman with a wizened face and milky grey eyes sat behind a small table. He eyed them as if wanting to speak, but held back because of the presence of the security official.

  ‘Good morning,’ Burgess said to him encouragingly.

  ‘Good morning sahr!’

  The old man got smartly to his feet and saluted. Then in gentle English and in one breath he announced that he was the security man and company dogsbody and that he’d served as a boy soldier when the Iraqi army was officered by the British.

  ‘Oh really? You must’ve seen a lot of changes over the years,’ Burgess chatted.

  ‘Yes sahr.’

  ‘Security man, you say?’ Burgess checked. ‘Does that mean you have to know about everything that comes in and out of this place?’

  ‘Oh, yes sahr.’ The man gave a little twist of his leathery neck as he answered, his eyes darting towards Mustafa to see if it was safe to speak. ‘Everything that they deliver and send away.’

  ‘And you keep a record? A log book?’ Hardcastle chipped in.

  Lips tight with suppressed pride the old fellow produced a ledger from his drawer and opened it for them to see.

  ‘Even something that arrives in the middle of the night?’ Burgess pressed, unable to read the Arabic script. ‘Would that be in here too?’

  The security man shot them a scornful look. ‘Six o’clock, sir,’ he assured them. ‘Factory close for deliveries after six in the evening. Nothing come here in the night.’

  ‘Never? Not even in the middle of September?’

  The man closed his ledger and put it away. The specificity of the question had unnerved him. He sealed his lips.

  Suddenly the door to the general accounting office banged open and one of the Russian inspectors who’d been gathering documents staggered out with a blue plastic bin-liner filled with papers. Pursued by the dome-headed general manager who was protesting volubly, he pushed past Mustafa and out into the car park where the APC equipped with copiers and scanners was waiting. The manager held his arms wide in exasperation. Mustafa led him back into the accounts office.

  Hardcastle beckoned to Burgess and took to the stairs.

  ‘While there’s a diversion,’ he whispered. ‘Let’s go and see how the other lot are doing.’

  On either side of the first-floor corridor they found four small offices, including the one normally occupied by the absent managing director Dr Shenassi. Burgess tried the door, but it was locked. From an office opposite where two inspectors were picking through the contents of a filing cabinet a matronly woman dressed in a white lab coat bustled forth gabbling in Arabic and interposed herself between Hardcastle and the door to Shenassi’s office.

  ‘You speak any English?’ Hardcastle enquired.

  ‘No.’ Then she continued to berate him in Arabic, pushing him away from the door.

  ‘They claim they have no key for that door,’ the German demolition specialist announced, pushing past with a sack of papers for checking.

  ‘A likely story,’ Hardcastle mouthed.

  The search seemed to be progressing, and the staff up here looked to be more junior than in the accounts office downstairs, so they returned to the ground floor.

  ‘We’ve no idea what he looks like, this Shenassi guy?’ Burgess checked, his suspicions mounting by the second.

  ‘No. We don’t have a photo.’

  ‘So if he was here some place, keeping his head down, like in that offi
ce of his upstairs, we wouldn’t have any way of knowing it was him even if we broke the door down.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘He could even be in the accounts office posing as a clerk.’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘Then maybe we should ask to see everybody’s ID,’ Burgess suggested. ‘Every male member of staff, that is.’

  ‘Not a bad idea.’

  Shouts erupted from inside the accounts office. One of the voices belonged to the UN’s interpreter. The old soldier sat as motionless as a sculpture behind his small table, as if taught by experience that in unpredictable situations even a minor facial movement was potentially dangerous.

  Suddenly, from the accounts office a bespectacled man with hair that was flecked with grey emerged in a state of agitation and hurried up the stairs. He wore a well-pressed pale blue shirt and dark trousers and carried an air of authority about him. Burgess and Hardcastle exchanged glances, both of a similar mind. Burgess scooted up the stairs after him.

  ‘What’s that man’s name?’ Hardcastle asked the security officer. The old soldier stared back, mute. ‘His name?’ Hardcastle repeated. ‘Who is he?’

  The wizened face turned slowly towards the open door of the accounts office. Hardcastle followed his look. Mustafa was standing there stony-faced.

  Suddenly the front door to the building banged open. A British Intelligence Corps officer serving as an Arabic speaker at the BMVC, who’d been examining papers taken from the accounts office, burst in holding a single A4 page. Attached to it was a yellow Post-It note on which he’d written the words, This memo is to the staff telling them the plant will be closed for four days for maintenance. The dates in question were the 12th to the 16th of September.

  ‘Aah,’ breathed Hardcastle. ‘Thank you very much, my friend.’

  No wonder nobody knew about a machine being delivered here in the middle of the night. The entire staff had been given four days off. Enough time to produce all the finely milled anthrax spores they could need for a weapon and for the place to be thoroughly cleaned again.

  Burgess thundered down the stairs to report that the man in the blue shirt had gone into Shenassi’s office.