“It’s constant but not heavy,” Shoshana answered. “Only a few casualties.”
“Levy’s Luck,” the medic said.
Shoshana added a mental, I hope so.
The radio rasped with a hard metallic voice warning them of an air attack. Shoshana jumped into the driver’s compartment and gunned the engine, heading for a nearby camouflaged cut a bulldozer had scraped out only hours before. She nosed the APC under the netting with only moments to spare as the first Syrian MiG-23 rolled in. A feeling of utter helplessness captured Shoshana as she watched the fast-moving jet sweep down on them. Two 550-kilogram bombs rippled off and bracketed the APC, stunning her. Then it was deathly silent. She shook her head and slowly sound returned; both she and Hanni had been momentarily deafened by the concussion.
The two women lay on the floor of the crew compartment as more bombs fell, holding on to the old-style tanker helmets they wore in the APC. Again, the radio came to life as warnings to don NBC gear were passed. Now the bombing stopped and they could hear artillery again. Urgent pleas for medics came in and Shoshana started the APC and headed back for the valley to pick up wounded. How much longer would this go on before they attacked? she wondered.
The Syrians and Iraqis were working together to soften up the Israelis and break Levy’s Luck.
Melissa Courtney-Smith escorted the Navy captain into the Oval Office. “Mr. President, Dr. Smithson.”
General Cox rose to leave and nodded at Melissa, his way of saying he approved her handling of the President’s visitors. She turned to follow him out but Pontowski said, “Please stay, Melissa.” Cox closed the door behind him, leaving the three in private.
“Mr. President,” the doctor began, “I’m afraid your wife has suffered a relapse and is much worse.”
Pontowski sat ashen-faced, trying to focus on what the doctor was saying. “… had hoped that she was recovering … very serious … strong-willed … she’s a fighter … it could be hours or days now … need to take her to the hospital.”
Melissa wanted to touch Pontowski, to find the right words to say. But she could only stand there, hating herself for not knowing what to do or say.
Slowly the President straightened. “I’ll go with her to the hospital,” he said. “Melissa, please come with me. Stay with Tosh and call the family. I can’t stay but if you need me, I’ll be in the Situation Room.” The three left the office as Zack Pontowski started on another long and difficult journey.
25
The RC-135 was on its second mission with Bill Carroll on board and had been established in its track along the southern Turkish border for six hours. The surveillance technicians had relaxed into a comfortable routine when they detected no unusual communications activity. The Syrians and Iraqis had not even reacted to the twelve F-15s that had flown in and landed at Diyarbakir, which was less than seventy-five nautical miles from their border.
At the time the F-15s had landed, one of the technicians had told Carroll that the Iraqis and Syrians were accustomed to seeing an RC-135 and the E-3A AWACS patrolling their border and tended to ignore any activity in Turkey. Complacency had given the Americans their first break.
Now a sergeant worked his way to the back of the aircraft, down the narrow aisle and past the crowded consoles and big equipment racks. He almost stumbled over the lump curled up in the sleeping bag. “Colonel,” the sergeant said, “we picked up some radio traffic you should see.” The lump stirred and Bill Carroll stuck his head out. The sergeant handed him a sheet of paper.
“Has this been sent out?” Carroll asked. The sergeant told him no. “Is the AWACS still monitoring heavy-vehicle traffic into the Kirkuk arsenal?” The sergeant said he would check on it and left. Carroll reread the transcript of the intercepted radio transmission. It was a request for a helicopter escort for a truck convoy and they were wanted at the Kirkuk arsenal in four hours.
The sergeant was back. “Colonel, I talked to the AWACS over the Have Quick.” The Have Quick was a secure radiothat used frequency hopping to prevent monitoring and jamming. The RC-135, the AWACS, and the F-15s were all equipped with the radio. “Their radar isn’t picking up any road traffic now,” the sergeant told him. The AWACS’s APY-1 radar had a moving-target indicator that could be adjusted to pick up slow-moving vehicles on roads.
“We need to downlink,” Carroll said. “The Iraqis are going to convoy their nerve gas in four hours.”
Poor radio discipline had given them their second break.
The Situation Room in the basement of the White House is not big, perhaps fifteen by twenty feet in size, and is not impressive. What is impressive are the communications systems that feed into it. One of the transceivers was a highly secure system known to its operators simply as Apple Wave. A civilian with a security clearance so sensitive that only thirty-seven individuals held it was monitoring the Apple Wave when its high-speed printer came to life. He ripped the message off and scanned it for transmission errors. Since it was not garbled, he handed it to the duty officer who would take it into the Situation Room.
Because Apple Wave messages are concerned with intelligence, the duty officer delivered the message to Bobby Burke, the DCI, who was sitting next to the President.
“Mr. President,” Burke said, “the RC-One-thirty-five supporting Trinity has monitored a request for a helicopter escort of a truck convoy leaving the Kirkuk arsenal in three and a half hours. That correlates with the earlier movement of road traffic into the arsenal.” He handed the message to Pontowski.
“The logical assumption,” Pontowski said, “is that they’re moving their nerve gas.” His advisers agreed with him to the man. “The question is, Will they use it?”
“I think that’s a given, Mr. President,” Michael Cagliari, the national security adviser said. “The Israelis are rolling the Arabs up on the Golan Heights and the fighting in Jordan has turned into a rout. Only in Lebanon have the Syrians and Iraqis halted the Israelis. And there’s one hell of a battle going on there right now. Unless Ben David throws in reinforcements, it could go either way.”
“And we can assume he’ll start doing that as he frees up units in Jordan,” Admiral Scovill added. “Unless we can geta cease-fire in place quickly, I belive the Arabs will resort to widespread chemical attacks.”
The discussion continued around the table for a few minutes. Burke was highly skeptical about the Arabs resorting to the use of chemical weapons. “They aren’t that suicidal,” he claimed.
“Consider this,” the secretary of state said. “What if the Arabs believe the Israelis will not use nukes now, given the situation in the Kremlin and the fact they’re winning? So if the Arabs show their resolve to escalate, a cease-fire may be in the offing.”
“Are you saying that the Arabs may think Ben David’s response to a chemical attack will be to agree to a ceasefire?” Cagliari asked. State did have a way of talking around things.
“It’s a possibility,” the secretary of state replied.
“Don’t bet on it,” Cagliari grumbled. “I know Ben David.”
The duty officer slipped quietly through the door and handed Cox a note. He read the note and handed it to Pontowski.
“Please”—Pontowski held up his hand—“enough.” He read the note. “There are too many unknowns here and we are not sure if all the actors are rational. Our problem is simple; we’ve got to keep the Iraqis from using their nerve gas before a cease-fire is negotiated. And we’ve run out of time. There’s only one option open now; we destroy the nerve gas before it is moved.”