“Yes, General. Thank you, I—”
“I am in your debt, Doctor. In another day, I would have become a mass murderer, remembered for being another Eichmann or Himmler. Now take that infernal canister and go, and Allah be with you!”
Shakir turned to leave the office, but something on the general’s desk which he had been staring at unconsciously had snagged in the back of his mind. Suddenly it coalesced into a piece of yellow teletype paper, a message in Arabic directing all units to search for the American colonels Westerman and Harris.
Shakir had been horrified at hearing their names many hours ago in the hallway. He had assumed the strike force had flown safely back to Saudi territory. Something catastrophic had obviously happened, though the aide he dared to ask had called them spies and knew nothing of a plane crash. Sandar and other subordinates he knew well had been aboard that airplane, and he had no idea of their fate.
There was, however, another realization that tugged at his conscience: if he hadn’t come south asking for help, those two colonels wouldn’t be in trouble.
The teletype had mentioned only the two pilots. They were to be found and captured as fast as possible and brought to Baghdad, which was an ominous order. After all, Doug Harris and Will Westerman had destroyed Iraq’s most promising biological lab, an act that would trigger Saddam’s instincts for homicidal revenge. If nothing was done, Westerman and Harris could easily end up tortured and killed, and Shakir could not stand by and let that happen.
I got them into this, I’ve got to get them out!
Shakir’s decision took less than a second to make. He had to take the gamble, though he might be pushing much too far.
“General …” Shakir turned to face Hashamadi. “May I ask you, have those two American colonels been found?”
Hashamadi froze, searching Shakir’s face once again with those penetrating eyes. He sat hard against his desk then, a slow smile creeping across his face. He knew all about the two Americans who had flown the attack team into the western desert. Being one of the key commanders, he saw most important messages, and the story of the desert raid and the subsequent crash had been very curious. How could such a precision raid have been done without outside help? The question had surfaced in his mind the day before.
“So you know the colonels who destroyed your lab? I should have suspected as much. It makes sense.” Hashamadi cocked his head, his eyes still locked on Shakir. “You are a very brave man, Doctor, to come to me under such pretenses. If you had asked about these two when I first got in my helicopter—if I had figured this out before you told me what this canister really holds—I would have dropped you out the door with a bullet in your head.”
Hashamadi stood away from the desk and paced heavily toward the window. “And then, my friend, we would both have died, along with many others.”
He stared through the shutters for a few seconds before turning back to Shakir. “These Americans, you care about them? They are friends?”
“General, if they had not been brave enough to fly that mission, there would be many more of these containers for Saddam to use. They worked very hard and against grave difficulties to bring me …” There was no sense in holding anything back, now. They had given each other enough damaging information to condemn both of them. “They brought me back to Saad-18 so that I could kill all the virus we had created. There were two canisters missing. I found one of them. This”—he held up the one Hashamadi had given him—“is the other. There are no more.”
Hashamadi sighed. “Your two colonels were captured late last night far to the south. They will be detained pending a prisoner exchange.”
Shakir simply stood there, in a quandary. How far could the man be pushed, he wondered. Was there any chance …
General Hashamadi leaned forward as if examining Shakir’s eyes. “Are you serious, Doctor? Do you really want to dare to help them?”
Shakir nodded.
“I respect your loyalty, Doctor. It is that of a true believer, even though it is a couple of infidels you want to help.”
He returned to his desk and scribbled two more notes, folding both of them before drawing a crude map of western Baghdad on another page and looking back at Shakir.
“You will be in danger every inch of the way. I can only give you the basic tools. I cannot guarantee that you—or they—won’t be shot trying to get out. And Saddam may have to let them go soon anyway. This risk may be unnecessary for them. Think on these things, Doctor.”
“I’ll take the risk,” Shakir said quietly.
“Very well. This … is where they are being taken. It’s not a prison, but a temporary outpost. Go there after midnight. Stop somewhere and commandeer a couple of basic soldiers with this letter to go with you and look official”—he held up another sheet of official stationery—“then present this other one to the guard. Be demanding, be firm, and be insistent, and don’t give him time to check with anyone. He will have no telephone. Only radios. Since he can’t check with me, he will have to obey this order. Collect these two then and get out of there immediately, across the border.”
“This will work?” Shakir asked, holding up the paper.
“Headquarters will call me later on the radio, screaming, and I’ll say I moved them on Saddam’s orders. It will take most of the morning for anyone to get up enough courage to ask Saddam. Be gone by then.”
Shakir started to thank him again, and the general waved him out.
“Go! Someday we will talk about this, Dr. Abbas. Perhaps in exile, perhaps in hell.”
CENTCOM, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Sunday, March 10, 1991—8:30 A.M. (0530 GMT)
Walter Hajek looked at his shaking hands and tried to calm down.
You knew there would be an angry reaction! he told himself.
But he had failed to think it through.
The three military policemen had come for him in his Riyadh hotel room, and suddenly his GM-15 civil service rating—which normally entitled him to respect and careful treatment—was worthless. They had gently but coldly forced him into the backseat of a black sedan and whisked him to the basement of CENTCOM, and then to a small office within the cipher-lock-secured intelligence analysis section. He had asked if he was under arrest, but the MPs had refused to answer, which was even more chilling.
The door to the office opened now, admitting a contingent of grim-faced men, most of them military—several of them CIA.
“Dr. Hajek, I am Jon McCarthy of the National Security Agency.” McCarthy did not offer his hand.
“Am … am I under arrest?”
“If that time arrives, Doctor, you will be read your rights and given access to counsel. This is an emergency inquiry convened under the authority of the United States government and the office of the President as well as the National Security Council.”
Hajek sighed deeply and tried to look puzzled. “What’s this all about?”
McCarthy cleared his throat and spoke at last. “Doctor, the sample of the Iraqi biological agent that you were assigned to test and safeguard was shipped on orders from your superiors to Washington, correct?”
“Yes.”
“What did you place in that container before you sealed it and gave it to the courier?”
Hajek described the hazardous biological agent sample containment vessel, and the safeguards for sealing and resealing it as the small central core was placed inside a glass-lined container, which in turn was inserted in other containers.
“I’m not interested in the packing, Doctor. I’m interested in hearing about the contents of the central container. What was in it?”
“Nothing,” he said at last. “I forgot the final step—placing the active viral sample in the core container. It was empty. I, ah, discovered that later.”
“In fact it was empty on arrival, after the expenditure of approximately sixty thousand dollars of flight expense to rush it to Washington. Why was it empty, Doctor?”
“I made a mistake.”
McCarthy pulled out a sheaf of papers and consulted them, letting seconds tick by as Hajek sweated and tried to think ahead. His insides were shaking, and his voice sounded wobbly.
At last McCarthy looked up.
“Dr. Hajek, this is a statement from Dr. Alan Benedict, a government consultant to the National Security Council. Did you call Dr. Benedict yesterday at 5:30 A.M. local time on a secured telephone and ask him to intervene with the President to stop the shipment of the sample you had been tasked to provide?”
Hajek nodded.
“And then you accidentally forgot to fill the sample vial? A bit coincidental, don’t you think?”
Walter Hajek took another deep breath and opened his palms to the air.
“All right. There’s no use pretending, Mr. McCarthy. I elected not to send that sample, because I don’t believe anybody involved in the order to bring it back understood what we were dealing with, and how deadly this stuff is. I was trying to buy some time to convince the people in Washington they don’t want this on our shores.”
McCarthy was listening dispassionately, his eyes boring into Hajek as he waited for the silence to become too uncomfortable. It was a learned technique of interrogation that failed only with the pathologically self-assured.
Hajek could stand it no longer. “I … I don’t understand, though, what this is all about. Why not just fire me and send the sample yourself? I knew, of course, this would be discovered.”
“Yet you started to lie about it. You told us a minute ago it was a mistake.”
Hajek’s palms were offered to the ceiling again. He placed his hands back in his lap then, and looked at McCarthy.
“So I guess I’m fired, and somebody else can package the sample and send it.”
The impassive, silent stare remained for fully thirty seconds, no one else in the room moving, before McCarthy spoke. “You most likely will be fired, sir. You are already suspended and your security clearance has been canceled. But no one else will be sending that sample.”
Hajek brightened at that. “Really? They changed their minds? Thank God! Was it the President who changed his mind?”
“No sir. The remaining samples of the biological agent retrieved from Iraq—which was the only key the United States and the Coalition had to formulate an antidote or any personnel defense strategies—are still here in the lab, but all of them have been neutralized. Someone purposefully put both vials in that kiln and killed the virus.”
“What? You don’t think …”
McCarthy stood up and addressed an Army colonel. “Read him his rights, Colonel, and let’s put the rest of this on the record. When he’s had access to criminal defense counsel, we’ll proceed.”
Walter Hajek was on his feet then, his eyes wide with shock and fright.
“Mr. McCarthy! I didn’t … I mean … I didn’t do that! It wasn’t me!”
McCarthy barely turned his head as he pulled open the door. “That’s a question for a prosecutor and the courts, isn’t it?”
The slam of the door punctuated McCarthy’s words, leaving Hajek standing in a panic, looking from face to face and finding no solace. He looked at the Army colonel in desperation.
“What are you charging me with?”
The door opened again as several of the men began filing out, one of them stopping momentarily to answer.
“Don’t worry, Doctor, we’ll think of something.”
Two floors above, General Herm Bullock was stuffing his briefcase with a legal pad and a sandwich for a meeting across town as Colonel Richard Kerr walked in, responding to his summons for a quick meeting.
“You’ve heard about the Iraqi pilot, Richard?”
“Yes sir. Your aide filled me in about the note he was carrying from Doug and everything. I can’t believe we—they—came so close to getting out!”
Bullock snapped the unassuming Samsonite case closed and straightened up, wincing as his back protested the action. “Well, there’s no doubt at all now. They’re in Iraqi hands and headed north. I’m afraid we’ve lost the gambit, Richard.”
Kerr walked the general to his staff car before turning to go back inside. He should resume the search for Shakir Abbas, but the morning was pleasantly mild and clear, and he hesitated. The attempt to find Abbas was essentially hopeless anyway, without agents behind the lines. Abbas had simply disappeared into the Iraqi gulag, and no amount of technical wizardry from space was going to find him or the virus, let alone kill the last of the deadly strain. Only Abbas could do it now, and in that the doctor was on his own.
Kerr knew he should return to the basement and get to work on organizing a new photographic search for the APCs that had hauled away Will and Doug, but that too would be fruitless. Westerman and Harris were as submerged now as Abbas.
The silent acknowledgment of defeat triggered the first relaxation he’d felt in two days. Suddenly he was taking a deep breath and looking around as his mind leaped at the chance to consider something simple, such as the dusty beauty of this desert capital city of strange customs and stranger attitudes, as it awoke under a morning canopy of fresh air.
There was an outdoor restaurant less than a mile away, and he needed the exercise.
19
Iraq Military Command Headquarters, Baghdad
Sunday, March 10, 1991—3:00 P.M. (1200 GMT)
“This is insane, Ihsan, surely you know that.”
General Hassoun stood with his back to the Interior Ministry official and studied the tactical map of the deteriorating civil war, an almost illegible copy hastily pinned to the wall of the makeshift war room.
Ihsan Fethi, a small, thin man whose leathery skin seemed painfully stretched over excessively angular bones, had been an archeology professor of considerable intellect, but that was long ago, before his submersion into the Ba’ath party. Now he was little more than a “gofer” carrying messages back and forth to the exposed military command headquarters while the Iraqi president stayed in hiding. Saddam’s terror of the new American bomb and the possibility of assassination was earning the growing contempt of his senior military officers.
There were, of course, far too many loyalists hidden in various posts to safely give voice to such thoughts. Especially in front of Fethi.
Hassoun turned and looked at the man. The little toady was obviously tired of relaying ill-advised commands to military commanders and having to carry back the muted, upset replies. General Hassoun suspected few of those dissents ever reached Saddam’s ears.
“Well, Ihsan?” the general prompted.
“Saddam is furious about the destruction of the new biological weapon. You know that, General. We informed him of the capture of these two American officers and that they came from the transport that crashed two days ago, the one that brought in the attackers who destroyed Saad-18, and he went crazy. He wants them questioned until we know everything that happened. He wants to know if any of our people were involved, or even failed to resist. He wants names, times, places—everything. And then he wants them killed—slowly—as criminals of the state.”
The general let out a disgusted sigh and shook his head. “Hasn’t anyone bothered to tell him the war is over and we lost?”
“He knows—”
“Does he not understand that if we damage these two prisoners, we can’t send them home, and if we don’t send them home, we’ll hand Bush another excuse to bomb us to rubble? Doesn’t he understand we can’t survive another month of bombing? Doesn’t he understand that this is exactly the excuse they need to invade Baghdad? Is there no one with enough backbone to explain these things to him? Where the hell is Tariq Aziz?” Hassoun already knew the answer. Aziz was little more than a poor actor playing the part of foreign minister, and scared to death of Saddam. There was no one in the inner circle who dared expose the dictator to international realities.
Fethi studied his shoes at length before replying. “He has issued the orders, General. The Americans are to be told that these two were neve
r captured. They must have died in the desert. We have searched, we will say, but we are not holding them. That way they cannot use it as an excuse.”
Hassoun shook his head sadly as Fethi continued.
“General, all the work we’ve done to prepare the long-range cannon will be lost if we don’t have the biological agent it was supposed to deliver. They can stop our missiles from hitting Tel Aviv and Riyadh, but they can’t stop a cannon shell filled with disease and death. We could have wiped out half of Israel, as Saddam promised, in a matter of weeks if Saad-18 had not been destroyed. But now there is only one batch of the agent left, and it goes to the Kurds. Only one! Can’t you see why Saddam is so angry? And these two Americans are to be held responsible.”
“I suppose,” the general began, turning back to the map, permitting himself a little sarcasm, “that he wants to shoot them himself?”
“Perhaps after we are finished with them.”
“You want them moved to the security facilities under your control, correct?”
Fethi nodded. “We are better equipped.”
General Hassoun looked back over his shoulder at the little man and gave him a scowl. “I’ve met some of these twisted ghouls your security force employs.”
Fethi pointedly ignored the remark. The army had used such interrogators with equal readiness when it suited their purposes.
“When may I tell Saddam the transfer will take place?” he asked the general.
Hassoun swept his hand toward the ceiling. “With their satellites always looking at us? Not until tonight. Provide the location to my aide. We’ll transfer them sometime late tonight. And Fethi, one more thing.”
Ihsan Fethi kept an even expression as he waited for the inevitable postscript he was supposed to deliver, but never would. It would be suicide to say such things to Saddam.
“Tell our esteemed leader that this is against my recommendation, and he cannot hold me or my staff responsible for the consequences.”
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