Fire Hawk (9 page)

THE PERSIAN GULF
was new territory. Dean Burgess had never been further from the USA than Europe before. The body-clock of the tall, ectomorphic American was eight hours askew. His brain told him he should have been starting a night's sleep right now instead of lining up at the hotel buffet to fix breakfast. Ideally he would have left the States a day earlier to allow more time to adjust, but there'd been a small, or maybe not so small, domestic crisis to attend to before setting off for what was scheduled as a three-week field trip.

‘Dean! Excellent. You made it!'

Burgess turned his thin face to see the lean figure of an elderly but fit Englishman loping towards him across the coffee shop. The man thrust out a hand, then seeing that Burgess's were fully occupied with a tray, he abandoned the attempt at a formal greeting.

‘Hi, Andrew.' Burgess smiled weakly. ‘Won't say good morning, because it sure doesn't feel like one!'

‘Lousy flight?'

‘No. Just five times as long as I'm used to. I'm a simple hometown American boy, remember?'

‘You'll soon acclimatise.'

‘Sure.' He bristled, sensing the guy was patronising him.

‘Let me get a tray and I'll join you at a table.'

‘Okay. I'll stake out a claim.'

Burgess chose a table with four unoccupied chairs, on the assumption that other members of the UN Special Commission would be joining them. The inspection team leader Andrew Hardcastle was the only one of the bunch that he'd met, albeit briefly. At thirty-four, Burgess guessed he was about half the age of the Englishman.

His secondment to UNSCOM had come out of the blue, following swiftly on his relocation to FBI headquarters in Washington on the staff of the Bureau's new Counter-Terrorism Center set up in the wake of the Oklahoma bombing. Burgess had been assigned as a special agent dealing with the threat from weapons of mass destruction. His knowledge of WMD was still low, however. The move from New York and the negative salute his wife Carole had given the upheaval had left little time in which to read himself in. Being assigned as note-taker to the head of the next UNSCOM team bound for Baghdad had been seen as the best schooling available on the production and concealment of biological weapons.

The team leader approached with his tray. Burgess had an antipathy to the British which he knew he would have to control. He wiped his mouth in case some of the fruit salad he was eating had got stuck to his small honey-coloured brush of a moustache.

‘Suppose you've had about ten breakfasts in the past twenty-four hours,' Hardcastle remarked, sitting down opposite him. ‘Airlines seem to think passengers are never happy unless they have food shoved down their throats all the time.'

‘You're almost right, Andrew. Two breakfasts and
three main meals since I last saw a bed,' Burgess answered.

‘Well, I'm afraid we can't promise an easy day today,' Hardcastle warned him. ‘We go from here to the briefing, then it's a miserable three-hour ride in a Here to a military airfield outside Baghdad – as you know, the civil airport's closed because of sanctions. But tonight you'll get a proper sleep. The hotel in Baghdad's perfectly comfortable.'

‘Can't wait.'

Earlier that week the two men had met for just one hour when Hardcastle had been in New York for his mission briefing from the head of the UN Special Commission. The Englishman's childlike enthusiasm for the search for Iraq's biological weapons Burgess had found hard to interpret. The guy was either a latter-day Saint George who'd smelled the spore of the dragon and couldn't wait to see the red of its eyes, or a bumbling Don Quixote.

‘You used to work on CBW in England, you said?' Burgess checked, still feeling his way with the acronyms.

‘Yes. At Porton Down. They pensioned me off a couple of years back when I hit sixty. But retirement drove me barmy, so when the UN asked for specialists to help unravel the intricacies of Iraq's BW programme I leapt at the chance. It's been like a bloody great detective story. Huge fun. For an amateur of course,' he added hastily. ‘Just another job of work for you professionals, I suppose.'

Phoney self-deprecation. Typically goddamn British, thought Burgess.

‘No way. This is the most interesting thing I've done in a long while,' he replied flatly. ‘And it sure makes a break from the organised crime beat I've been tramping for the past ten years.'

Hardcastle looked away, his small grey eyes focusing terrier-like on something across the room.

‘Aha!' He raised his hand and waved it slightly, then smiled when he got a response. ‘It's Martha,' he explained, pronouncing the
th
as a
t
. ‘She's a veterinary officer from the Dutch army. Charming creature. And brilliant on anthrax. Aah! And here's Pierre.'

Burgess looked round to see a stocky, curly-haired man with the face of a Native American, dressed in a bright blue Hawaiian beach shirt with sunglasses pushed up onto his thick, wiry hair. He placed his tray on the table and shot out a hand.

‘Pierre Latour.'

‘Hi. I'm Dean Burgess.' He'd recognised Latour's accent as being from north of the Great Lakes.

‘
Major
Latour,' Hardcastle added. ‘Canadian Royal Mounted Police. He's our Mister Fixit. And does a good job of watching my back.'

‘Glad to know you,' said Burgess.

‘And Martha!' Hardcastle rose to his feet in a gentlemanly gesture of welcome as an ample blonde woman in her late forties joined them. Burgess stood up too and introduced himself.

‘Major Cok,' she said shaking his hand. ‘Good heavens, you're a tall man!' She peered up at his face with an exaggerated crick of the neck.

‘Six-two,' Burgess confirmed.

‘What is that, six
metres
?' she mocked.

‘Feet 'n' inches,' he grinned. ‘We're the Stone Age guys, remember? Metric's too modern for us.'

They sat again.

‘Excellent!' Hardcastle grinned. ‘All the most important members of the team gathered on one table!'

‘Don't let the others hear you say that, Andy,' the Dutch woman cautioned. ‘Some of the new ones seem a little sensitive. I was talking with them last night.'

‘Won't last,' Hardcastle countered. ‘The Iraqis' bluntness will soon knock the corners off them.'

They continued with their breakfasts, the chat centring on the idiosyncrasies of the minders who were routinely assigned to them in Baghdad. Burgess listened, feeling very much on the outside of their world. He tried to absorb some of their culture but his mind kept flipping back to the little clapboard house thirty miles north of Manhattan in Westchester County, where Carole and the kids would be sleeping soundly just now. A home that had recently lost its warmth for him.

Twenty minutes later the full UN inspection team gathered in the lobby and began to file out to a waiting motor-coach, a process involving a few seconds of intense outdoor heat before they were back in air-conditioning again.

Hardcastle took the seat next to Burgess at the front of the bus.

‘Is Clinton going to make it back in?' he asked. The presidential election was due in a month's time. ‘Saw him being interviewed on CNN while I was getting dressed this morning. Can the scandals be made to stick?'

‘I guess it's a question of whether enough people want them to,' Burgess answered. ‘The problem is, if they sink Clinton, what do they get instead?'

‘Quite. Better the devil you know. Some people say the same about Saddam Hussein, of course.'

‘All present and correct, Andrew.' The voice was Pierre Latour's and came from above them. He'd just walked backwards down the bus counting heads.

‘Good. Let's go.'

The coach turned out of the grounds of the Holiday Inn and headed down a broad highway leading to the outskirts of the city. Behind Burgess and Hardcastle sat eighteen delegates from six countries.

‘Most of the people in this team have been selected by their own governments,' Hardcastle confided. ‘Most are high-grade scientists, but some have been selected for reasons I can't fathom. National politics and patronage, I suppose.'

The UN inspection teams had been set up after the expulsion of the Iraqi army from Kuwait in 1991 with the aim of ensuring that never again could Saddam Hussein get his hands on weapons of mass destruction. They'd been successful up to a point. Iraq's nuclear programme had been all but destroyed, huge arsenals of nerve gases and blister agents had been safely disposed of, and the teams and establishments involved in developing the toxins, viruses and bacteria suitable for biological weapons had been put under such close scrutiny as to make them virtually inoperable. The ones that were known about, anyway.

After about ten minutes the coach turned off the highway into a residential area, where the desert was studded with palatial residences surrounded by well-irrigated lawns. Each mansion was protected by fences or walls high enough to ensure the security and privacy of its oil-rich owner. The house where the coach pulled up had a crenellated roof reminiscent of a Crusader fortress.

A uniformed local policeman sitting in the shade of a palm tree leapt to his feet, peered in through the side window of the coach, then gave a signal for the heavy green-painted steel gate to be rolled aside so the bus could enter.

‘Not bad,' murmured Dean Burgess, looking around at the palatial mansion. ‘The UN owns this?'

‘Rented on a long lease. We call this the Gateway,' Hardcastle explained. ‘It's the threshold between the real world and the one ruled by Saddam where nothing is ever the way it seems.'

Burgess noted the antenna farm set up beside the house – an impressive array of satellite dishes.

‘Everything's encrypted of course,' Hardcastle explained. ‘We've got totally secure communications here. One-hundred-and-twenty-eight-bit PGP standard.'

‘Who exactly runs this place?'

‘The UN. But in practice it's the anglophone alliance. Americans, Brits, Canadians, New Zealanders and Australians. Or rather the intelligence professionals of those countries. We run it because we're about the only ones in the UN who fully trust each other,' Hardcastle added, pointedly.

And even that was relative, Burgess reflected. His own trust of the British intelligence record was limited.

Hardcastle stood up from his seat and turned to address the occupants of the bus. As he did so, the driver handed him a microphone.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, if you could listen to me for a moment.'

Not much point for some of them, Burgess thought. He'd been told there were two Russians on board and a Japanese whose knowledge of English was almost non-existent.

‘I'll be able to brief you in about fifteen minutes. There's a couple of things I need to do first. Major Latour will show you where everything is. We spend the morning here, briefing and practising some drills, then have a lunch snack before heading out to the airport for the flight at fourteen hundred. That's it really. See you in about fifteen minutes. There's some coffee if you want it, but maybe it's too soon after breakfast. Up to you.'

He gave the microphone back to the driver and bent close to Burgess's ear.

‘Why don't you come with me,' he suggested. ‘I think you'll find it rather interesting.'

Burgess perked up at the prospect of not having to make small talk with bowing Japanese biologists.

Inside the house Hardcastle marched purposefully through the magnificent entrance hall, the rubber soles of his lightweight hiking boots squeaking on the polished marble floor. The house reminded Burgess of the hotel they'd just left – glittering with gold and cut crystal. A broad corridor extended from the back of the hall, lined with doors. Hardcastle stopped outside one labelled Communications Center. He tapped a code on the keypad next to it, then opened the way to a spacious white-walled room whose windows had been panelled over. In the centre of the room several linked tables provided a surface for printers, scanners and computer terminals. Against one of the flank walls, banks of transmission equipment winked as encoded signals were bounced back and forth to UN headquarters in New York.

‘Well hi! Good to see you again, Andrew!'

A strident-voiced, red-haired woman, her ample chest stretching the fabric of her yellow polo shirt, shook the Englishman vigorously by the hand.

‘And who do we have here?'

Hardcastle introduced Burgess. The red-haired woman was a US Air Force lieutenant colonel from Nebraska. A second female in the room, oval-faced and less forceful, announced she was a British army captain on attachment from a listening post in Cyprus.

‘You want to look at the material we have for you, Andrew?' the redhead asked, glancing uneasily at Burgess.

‘It's all right,' Hardcastle told her. ‘He's got all the clearances.'

‘Okay. If you say so. And you have one message. To call London. A Mr Waddell. Want me to get him for you?'

‘Ah. I'll leave that for a minute, perhaps.' Waddell was SIS. Wasn't sure Burgess should be around when he made that call. ‘Let's see the material first.'

‘Surely. I got a seat for you twos right here.'

The first of the files she placed in front of them contained overhead photographs taken by Keyhole KH11 satellites and the US Air Force U-2 spy plane which UNSCOM had at its disposal. Attached to each picture of buildings and other objects spotted in the desert was a small explanation of what it showed, as interpreted by the photo analysts in New York.

‘They beam all this material in by satellite,' Hardcastle explained with a boyish grin. Burgess was reminded of a small kid showing off his Buzz Lightyear toys. ‘Saw most of these shots in New York, but there's a couple of fresh ones. Look. This is the Haji Animal Feed factory, taken yesterday. As you know, we suspect the place may have had its “use” changed temporarily. They've got fermenters and stuff which we know about, but three weeks ago a U-2 spotted other kit being smuggled into the place in the middle of the night. Not positively identified, but we
think
we know what it was. I'll cover the details in my briefing.' He looked at the new pictures closely. ‘Yes, well . . . All that these new ones show is that the place looks perfectly normal again.'