Fire Hawk (19 page)

That action had convinced Burgess that something very odd indeed was going on. The Special Republican Guard had direct lines to the President, he reasoned; if this burial ground in the desert
was
connected to the
biological weapons programme, then surely the presence of a human corpse among the animal carcasses would have been known to the Guards. So why not
prevent
the inspectors finding such a damning piece of evidence by stopping the dig earlier? Why wait until the stiff came to light? In his own mind it argued for the site being connected with some local mishap rather than anything of international interest.

Burgess had argued the point with Hardcastle, who'd told him in a tone which he'd found unnecessarily dismissive that he was overlooking the muddle factor and the paranoia factor. What they in the West would call a normal cascading of information from the administration downwards simply didn't apply in Iraq.

The inspectors had returned to Baghdad angry and frustrated, praying that the tissue samples which Martha Cok had taken from the lungs of a cow and a goat and hermetically sealed in two specimen boxes would provide the evidence they needed. A lab technician had been working on them overnight.

Burgess drifted over to a corner of the room where there was a small refrigerator. On top of it an electric kettle fought for space with packs of coffee, tea and whitener. He picked it up to check there was water in it, then clicked the switch and put a spoon of Maxwell House into a plastic cup.

Despite Hardcastle's words of caution, the conclusion Burgess had drawn from yesterday's events was that the Iraqi security people had
not
known what was buried in the desert, and therefore the men at the top hadn't either. His expectation of what would emerge from the analysis of the animal samples was low, therefore. He suspected that the cause of the creatures' death would prove to be something rather less dramatic than pulmonary anthrax or poisoning by botulinum toxin.

‘Do me a coffee too, would you?' Hardcastle had appeared beside him. ‘Frustrating, this hanging around.'

‘Like waiting for fish to bite in a swimming pool.'

For Burgess the wait had had the added disadvantage of setting him thinking about Carole again. Just before leaving home in the Hudson River Valley to catch the flights to Europe and Bahrain she'd told him he was on notice. That if he didn't buck up and become a proper husband and father again, they'd be heading for divorce. The injustice which he perceived in the situation had gotten his investigative mind scouring through their ten years of marriage trying to find the point where it went sour.

They'd begun dating at sixteen as high-school sweethearts, kept the romance going through college, then married a couple of months after graduation. To the best of his knowledge he was the only man she'd ever had sex with, and, apart from a couple of misguided and embarrassing one-night stands, she was the only woman he himself had had. The church had played a big part in their lives both as kids and in the early years of their marriage, but in the past couple of years Carole had mostly taken Patty and Dean Jr to the Sunday service on her own.

Their sexual relationship had all but ceased in recent months and he knew it was his fault. When he'd been around at a suitable time to initiate it, he'd wanted it so bad it had been over almost as soon as it began, leaving her wound up and dissatisfied; whenever she'd tried to get things started he was usually too preoccupied to perform.

The whole framework of their relationship was going to have to change if they were to get their balance back, she'd told him. And she was right – if the marriage was to survive as anything more than an umbrella for the kids to grow up under, they would need somehow to find space
and time for each other. But the way she seemed to think it could be achieved was for him a non-runner. Pledge for the Family, the renewal movement she was pressing him to join, aimed ‘to get America's pops back into the pews'. Even if he went along with that, he knew the fundamental problem would remain. The job was demanding more from him than ever before and he had no inclination to change it.

‘Ah, at last,' Hardcastle breathed, clutching the coffee Burgess had made for him. ‘News!'

Martha Cok had entered the room. After hours in the lab she looked weary but triumphant.

‘Well?' Hardcastle demanded, hungry for the confirmation he needed.

‘Here,' she replied, handing him a sheet of paper.

Hardcastle read her note and smiled with satisfaction. ‘Excellent, Martha. Excellent.' Then he passed it to Burgess.

Cause of death of the cow and goat examined on site and at BMVC lab – internal haemorrhaging due to inhalation of anthrax spores. Live organisms were found in the lung tissue. Animals had almost certainly been used in an experiment to test biological weapons material.

‘Excellent,' Hardcastle repeated, burning with excitement. ‘We'll nail Saddam to the wall with this one.'

Burgess swallowed hard. He'd judged it wrong. Totally wrong. But the key question in his head remained. Who among the Iraqi hierarchy had known about it?

He detected a new glint in Hardcastle's eyes. St George had his dragon in sight.

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 two 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.