All three of the presidents were dissatisfied with such a state of affairs. They each think once the Israelis are defeated there will be a new leader of the Middle East—and it will almost certainly end up being the head of whichever Islamic country is the first to have nuclear weapons and is willing to use them to force the others into line. That’s why each of them has a secret program under way to be the first Islamic country in the region to have a nuclear bomb.
Well, actually, each of the presidents had to admit to himself, “It’s only my destiny to be the leader of the entire Islamic world that is a secret; that I’m trying to develop nuclear weapons is only sort of a secret. Of course it is. It’s impossible to buy the necessary equipment and hire the necessary foreign experts without someone finding out about it sooner or later.”
******
Jordan and Lebanon are not involved. They were deliberately ignored during the long weeks of intense negotiations and planning. They’d either join the Coalition and help with the attack on Israel, or be run over and set aside as the new Islamic Army comes through their countries on its way towards Israel. Besides, with the little countries involved it would have been much harder to keep everything secret.
As it turned out, not involving the Jordanians and Lebanese was a serious mistake—because, when he did finally find out about it through his spies in Damascus, the new and relatively young King of Jordan organized a conference call with the Lebanese warlord claiming to be its president, the Saudi king, and the incredibly wealthy hereditary emir who heads up the United Arab Emirates. They were irate as they talked about the insult of being left out of the coalition, its chances of success, and what they should do about it—not that they would have joined, of course, but they felt slighted because they weren’t asked.
Nothing was resolved by their discussion except, of course, as the Jordanian King knew it would, the NSA intercepted their conversation and I read a transcript of it about sixty minutes later at breakfast in the Morning Report. Now what?
After thinking about it for a couple of minutes I decided to send copies of their phone conversations to Israel. I saw doing so as a confidence building gesture towards the Israelis. And confidence building is about all it ever turned out to be since one of Israel’s intelligence officers listened to a recording of the conversation less than ten minutes after it concluded.
Unbeknownst to anyone, except perhaps the Mossad and the latest “plucky little king” of Jordan, years ago the British had run the phone line from Beirut to Amman through the northern part of what is now Israel. The Arabs had finally found out about it and replaced that line and many others with new and more secure lines involving satellites. It hadn’t made a bit of difference; today all their phone calls are monitored and all their conversations are recorded around the clock by both the CIA and the Mossad.
Chapter Seven
The almost simultaneous announcements of an end to the current fighting between the Shiites and Sunnis and the formation of a coalition to fight Israel were widely applauded in the Islamic world. The people of the “Arab street,” particularly the Palestinians and the religious ultra-conservatives in the Shia communities, were ecstatic to learn the current fighting has suddenly ended and the recent enemies will now be uniting to destroy Israel.
Muslims everywhere in the Middle East were so pleased and excited by the news that many of them let themselves believe their government controlled media—that the peaceful ending to the latest fighting between the Shiites and Sunnis meant the destruction of Israel would finally occur. Boisterous celebrations broke out in the streets of a number of Islamic countries including Lebanon and Jordan. Everyone celebrated except the Druze, Kurds, Christians, Jews, Yazidis, and various and sundry other religious and ethnic minorities.
Enthusiasm for the agreement was so great in the three principal countries that the usual government rent-a-crowds bussed to the city centers for the highly organized “spontaneous demonstrations of support” were actually joined by real citizens. Nowhere were the celebrations of the peace agreement greater, or more understandable, than among the front line soldiers and militias of war-ravaged Syria and Iraq.
Elsewhere in the Islamic world the governments and their suppliers and beneficiaries professed great joy at the news of the peace and Israel’s imminent demise. In fact, many weren’t particularly thrilled at all, particularly in the Sunni-dominated oil kingdoms. The Saudis and the leaders of their client kingdoms were particularly unhappy.
“It’s those damn Iranian and Syrian heretics again, particularly that damn Ayatollah. They’re trying to cut into our influence,” thundered the elderly prince from his elegantly embroidered couch.
“It’s your fault,” his older brother, the King, responded. “You were too busy fucking your German and Polish bints and didn’t help the Kurds buy enough weapons from the Americans.”
“That’s not true, and you know it. I bought thousands of British and German anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles for the Kurds—but those idiot Americans convinced the British and Germans to send the missiles to those heretics in Baghdad to give to the Kurds. So, of course, the Kurds never got any of them.”
“Well we’ve got to do something. They’ll come after us next if they really do destroy the Jews, and maybe even if they don’t. What that crazy Ayatollah and his Shiite infidels really want is to throw us out of Mecca and take control of the Kaaba. That’s what they’ve always wanted.”
“One thing’s for sure,” added his nephew, the defense minister. “We’ve got to be ready for an attack on us even if they don’t win, particularly if the Shia take over Iraq again. It means we’ll have to buy more weapons, a lot more, and improve our security agreements with the Americans and our other suppliers, maybe even the Israelis. We’ll also have to step up our surveillance of our own accursed Shia and strengthen our alliances with the smaller kingdoms.”
“Bring me a plan,” the King ordered as he nibbled on some strawberries. They were delicious.
******
Many officials and former officials in the United States government and the rest of the world, on the other hand, didn’t see the new peace agreement the way the Saudis do. They are pleased the war has ended. And, as one might expect from men and women consumed with political ambition to the exclusion of everything else, both the Secretary of State and his predecessor, the woman who had been defeated by the new President in the last election, quickly hailed the announcement as a triumph of diplomacy and did so in a way suggesting they’d been significantly involved.
They didn’t have any involvement, of course, but that didn’t stop either of them from reaching out to sympathetic newspaper columnists and friendly talk show hosts to imply they’d been "leading from behind" by doing yeoman work behind the scenes.
Both of them smiled with appropriate modesty when their interviewers implied they had worked diligently behind the scenes and deserve a great deal of credit for ending the latest round of fighting. The newly announced coalition against Israel means nothing they assured everyone with earnest sincerity, just an excuse to placate the Arab Street.
“The new coalition means nothing,” the current secretary explained. “Israel is safe behind America’s military shield.”
“Diplomacy really works,” said the former Secretary of State, “and this proves it.” She didn’t disagree when a sympathetic interviewer suggested she might have won the presidency if the voters had known of how successful her diplomatic efforts had been instead of only hearing accusations and lies about her lack of integrity and accomplishments.
“Confidences can’t be broken and state secrets revealed just to enhance someone’s political career,” she answered modestly with a sincere smile directed towards the camera instead of her interviewer. “We can only look to the future and hope to do better.”
In fact, neither of the Secretaries had the slightest thing to do with the agreement ending the current round of fighting in the Middle East. They had not even known ab
out the negotiations until they watched the peace agreement being announced on CNN.
Even NSA and the CIA were caught flatfooted until the Jordanian king deliberately let the cat out of the bag with his phone call on a satellite line he knew was being monitored.—the CIA because it had no one on the ground following agency cutbacks during the previous administration and the NSA listeners because all the negotiations were conducted in person by the three leaders and all the planning conducted in person in Damascus by a dozen or so senior officers from each country.
Unknown to any of the celebrants and the Americans, the Israeli Prime Minister had independently obtained copies of both the agreement and summaries of the conversations the three presidents had been having with the President of Egypt. He nodded with grim determination as he read them. The Mossad had done its job; he’d known for weeks that a peace agreement uniting much of the Islamic world against Israel was coming.
******
The men in the dilapidated Somali hangar ignored the initial celebrations and media reports. They wouldn’t have cared much even if they had known about them, which they didn’t until they heard them reported on their radio. They had other more pressing concerns such as completing the installation of the remote control systems needed to get the planes to their targets without having any pilots on board. It was a particular challenge because the planes will have to fly low to stay off radar screens as they fly over other countries, and particularly as they come in over the enemy coastlines and fly to their targets.
One problem that initially resulted in much study and anxiety was how to constantly reset the altimeters measuring each plane’s altitude. If it is to continually fly extremely low in order to avoid detection from ground based radars, each plane will need to have its new laser altimeter constantly reset since the barometric pressure along its route will inevitably change over and over again as each plane flies to its final destination.
Every high tech solution the team tried did not work. The engineers were perplexed in their non-descript office building in their nation’s capital as they tried to figure out how to constantly reset the altimeter in an unmanned plane. They know how to pinpoint within inches exactly where each plane is but, try as they might, no one could figure out how to obtain the constantly changing barometric pressures needed to constantly reset the planes’ all-important altimeters.
Everything changed and the decision was made to proceed with the mission when one of the men assigned to the team as an instrument technician, an electrician in civilian life of all things, came up with a “fix” from the past. He suggested they use two infrared spotlights and a little downward pointing television camera to beam a picture of the circles of light generated by the two spotlights back to the vans in the hangar. The distance between the two light rings would give them the plane’s actual height. Its altimeters could then be reset to reflect the then-current altitude.
His concept was simplicity itself as good ideas often are and it wasn’t a new idea—it had been successfully used by the British in World War Two—when the circles of infrared light shining on the ground or ocean surface overlapped, the pilots watching the circles knew their plane was too high; when the circles didn’t touch they knew it was too low. It worked like a charm and the much-lauded electrician never mentioned he’d gotten the idea from an old war movie about the RAF in World War Two.
Another automation challenge to be overcome was the need to move each plane’s controls so its remote control pilots could adjust its throttle setting and continually adjust its flaps, aileron, and horizontal stabilizers. They have to be able to do that so the plane can fly efficiently after it takes off and so they can steer it to its target—all from thousands of miles away without having anyone on board. Some pretty fancy radio controlled automation devices involving line of sight links to a civilian satellite were hastily developed to solve the problem.
Yet another control challenge was keeping each of the low-flying planes precisely on course so it can fly to its target without running into things such as power lines and mountains. That means the remote control pilots in the van must always know exactly where the plane is located in time to make the necessary adjustments.
The location problem was finally solved with line of sight laser transmitter and receivers tuned to the upper end of a satellite channel their country “borrowed” from an Australian communications satellite several years earlier. It seems that while he was making a “final check,” one of their local co-religionists quietly installed sophisticated software that took over some unused bandwidth in an Australian telecommunications satellite just before it was launched for its Australian telephone company owner.
All in all, in addition to the tremendous amount of high explosives each is carrying, the six old planes in the two hangars will have some pretty advanced technologies on board when they are pushed out of their hangars one at a time to be fueled on the dirty and cracked concrete apron out beyond their hangars’ rusty old sliding doors.
But perhaps the biggest challenge of all for the project team, and related to all the others, is one of the most basic of all and has been around since the beginning of aviation—keeping the planes from blowing up or catching fire before they reach their destinations, particularly when they are still in or near their hangars.
Fear about the safety of the planes and the men in the hangar was warranted. The reality of high octane aviation gas is that its fumes are highly explosive. And the reality of old airplanes is their fuel tanks and fuel lines and fuel couplings sooner or later leak as a result of the constant vibration. Add high explosives and hook together a large number of range-extending portable gasoline tanks in the fuselage to the mix and you have a witch’s brew of potential disaster just waiting to happen.
And indeed, as only the white haired project director knew, it was hearing about just such a disaster which led to this operation.
Years ago he’d been a young foreign student in Massachusetts studying aeronautical engineering at MIT when an American navy veteran was running for president. One of his professors had made much of the fact the man’s older brother had died when the plane he was flying blew up during World War Two.
According to the professor, the plane had been packed to the gills with high explosives and the plan had been for his brother to aim the plane at its target and then bail out just before it crashed into it. But something had gone wrong and the plane had blown up along the way. Probably an electrical spark and leaking gasoline his professor had suggested.
The white haired man told that story to his team several times and repeatedly asked everyone to be on the lookout for anything and everything they could do to lessen the chances of a premature explosion.
The mechanics and technicians on his team had taken the story to heart and done their best—navigation and cabin lights, and their wiring, had been removed; fuel connections wrapped and batteries relocated; the cockpit electronics and automation controls tightly sealed off; the auxiliary fuel tanks elevated to be above the wings so gravity would empty them in the wing tanks instead of pumps; and electrical connections wrapped and foamed to prevent sparks. In addition, a truly major effort was made to increase the ventilation inside the plane in case any fumes escaped—by mounting a couple of little air scoops at the front of each plane’s cabin and punching holes in the fuselages in the rear so the air rushing through the cabin could escape out the back with the dangerous fumes.
But will it work?
Well, I guess we’ll know soon enough.
******
Once each plane is fueled a battered old pickup truck with rusty Syrian license plates, running with its headlights turned off, will tow the plane to the end of the runway. Then a volunteer pilot will climb in and prepare the plane for takeoff. When its wheel brakes are on and its engines have started, the volunteer will finish setting the controls for takeoff and hurriedly jump out into the back of a pickup truck parked alongside the plane.
As soon as the volunte
er pilot gets clear and shuts the plane door behind him, his pilot counterpart sitting at a duplicate set of remote controls in one of the vans in the hangar, will use a line of sight transmission signal from the borrowed satellite to release the plane’s brakes and push its four engine throttles forward. The satellite signal will, so everyone hopes, send the plane rolling down the runway until it reaches enough speed to takeoff, hopefully before the heavily loaded plane runs out of runway. The co-pilot sitting next to the pilot in the remote control van will steer the plane down the runway using the infrared spotlight mounted in the plane’s nose to look ahead and keep the plane on the runway until it takes off.
The government minister had been pretty emphatic about the importance of the project’s success when he spoke with the white haired team leader last year and told him to proceed.
“Yes, we’re going with the plan because it’s all we’ve got. It worked both times when we made the simulated takeoffs several months ago. So hopefully it will work out there too. It better. The boss is going to be seriously pissed off at both of us if it doesn’t.”
******
Two hours later, after one last scrambled telephone call was bounced off the satellite to reconfirm the launch order, the hangar door opened and one of the pickup trucks in the hangar, with its brake lights disconnected, slowly towed the DC-6 out of the darkened hangar and into the black and windy night. The pickup’s head lights had infrared bulbs and driver was wearing infrared night vision goggles so he could see in the dark—and he was mumbling to himself and so nervous and excited that at times his hands and arms actually trembled. He was nervous because he was pretty sure of what will happen to him if it exploded.
About three hundred yards from the hangar the plane stopped moving and the watching men saw the driver’s flashlight flash twice in the pickup’s cabin. A few minutes later the big fuel truck was pushed into place next to it. A pickup full of guards and technicians followed the fuel truck in case there were last minute problems. Everyone traveled in the dark with all their lights disconnected.
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