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Stopping at the outer door to the Situation Room, Kennedy punched her code into the cipher lock and said, "Don't worry, no one's going to be burned at the stake." Kennedy pulled open the heavy door and said, "I promise I'll be able to tell you something by tonight. And trust me, until then it's better that you don't know what's going on." Kennedy let the door close behind her and opened the first door on her left.
The secure conference room was packed. General Flood was there with four of his aides, Secretary of Defense Culbertson was present, Casey Byrne, the deputy secretary of state, was there as well as Michael Haik, the NSA. The President was at the head of the table in his usual spot. He looked over his shoulder to see who had entered the room. When he saw it was Kennedy he immediately stood.
"Irene, great job. You handled Jetland like a pro."
"Thank you, sir. We've bought ourselves a little time, but I'm afraid not much. What's the status on the operation?"
"Take a seat here." The President grabbed a chair and wheeled it over to the corner of the table. They both sat. Kennedy was seated between General Flood and the President. Flood had a phone in each hand, one to his left ear and the other poised to be held against his right.
The President pointed to one of three large screens on the wall. "That's a live image from an AWACS patrolling over northern Saudi Arabia." The screen showed most of Iraq, Kuwait, the northern part of the Persian Gulf and the northern and eastern part of Saudi Arabia. The image was being fed via satellite from an E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System. These were the air force's big Boeing 707's with the large rotodomes mounted above the fuselage. "The advance element is on the ground." Hayes pointed at the screen. "See the blue triangle just south of Baghdad?"
Kennedy squinted to make sense of the jumble of electronic markings on the screen. After a moment she located the site just west of the Tigris River. "Yes."
"They arrived less than five minutes ago. They've secured the area, and we've given the green light for the assault team to go in."
"That's the assault team there?" Kennedy pointed to four blue triangles closely grouped about halfway between Baghdad and the Saudi border.
"Correct."
"Have any of our allies called to ask what's going on?"
"I just got off the phone with the British PM. I called him. I didn't tell him about the nukes, but I said something serious was up. I'm going to call King Fahd just before it starts, as well as the Russian President, then after that it's a long list."
"So no leaks so far?"
"No. "The President rapped his knuckles on the table twice.
The secrecy involving the operation had been amazing, thanks to two factors. The first was the short time period between receiving the information and launching the operation. The entire thing had been put together in just six days' time, a true testament to the readiness of the military. The second factor was entirely unintended. Thanks to Congressman Rudin's appearance on Meet the Press, Washington and much of the world was focused on the scandal. The President had cleared his schedule and spent the entire day in the Situation Room, an action that would normally set off warning bells in capitals all over the world. But today the foreign intelligence officers who normally paid attention to such things assumed President Hayes had dropped everything to try to salvage the Kennedy nomination.
Kennedy's eyes drifted beyond the airspace around Baghdad and noticed the massive air armada that was forming up over northern Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf. She knew the battle plan by heart. They'd gone over it from top to bottom this morning. The blue triangles that were massing on the Iraqi borders were U. S. jets that were suckling up to big KC-135 tankers and topping off their tanks. Closer to the border were formations of ah-64 Apache attack helicopters that would be led into battle by air force MH-53J Pave Lows. Air force JSTAR ground surveillance radar planes had given them pinpoint locations of surface to-air missile sites that the Iraqis had hidden throughout the desolate terrain south and west of Baghdad.
In the northern Persian Gulf the Independence Battle Group was on station twenty-five miles off the Kuwaiti coast. The carrier's planes were in the air and were bolstered by two squadrons of Marine Corps F/A-18 Hornets flying out of Kuwait. In the opening salvo of the operation the battle group's surface ships would launch more than 100 cruise missiles. In addition, a flight of B-52's out of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean were forty minutes away from being in position to launch a payload of eighty-four cruise missiles.
With so many planes in the air questions were bound to be asked, so in an effort to keep a lid on things, earlier in the day, U. S. military attaches in embassies around the Persian Gulf informed their host countries that the U. S. would be holding a surprise readiness exercise commencing at 1900 local time. The Pentagon ran readiness exercises like this several times a year to keep the troops sharp and to keep Saddam guessing. General Flood hung up both phones and said, "Mr. President, the flight off-111's are airborne, refueled, and can be over the target twenty minutes after you give the word."
The military planners had decided that eight F-111's would create enough redundancy to ensure the destruction of the target. They were confident that they could achieve total destruction with just two planes and were hoping to use the remaining six to visit some other targets that they had carefully chosen. The eight F-111's were all carrying a single Deep Throat, GBU-28/B super penetrator bomb. If Rapp and the Delta Team failed, the hospital would be leveled.
The President didn't want to think of that option right now. "What's the status on the ground team?"
"Everything looks good so far. They're proceeding without incident, and the advance element has reported the area secure."
The President looked over at the center screen for a moment. "Give me the time frame again."
"They should touch down in," Flood looked at the screen, "approximately seven minutes. It takes them a minute or two to unload the ca
rs, and then it's almost a mile to the main gate of the facility. From there it's three miles to reach Route 144, the main road between Karbala and Baghdad. After that it's a straight shot, thirty-two and a half miles to the hospital. If they don't run into any trouble, it's supposed to take them twenty-six minutes to get to the hospital from the time they reach Route 144."
"They should be at the hospital in about forty minutes," Kennedy offered.
"And they want the bombs to start falling just after they get to the hospital?" asked a skeptical President.
Yes. That's Mitch's idea."
"Why?"
"I don't know, but he said he can handle it either way, he'd just prefer if the bombs started falling about a minute after they've arrived."
The President was having difficulty understanding the reasoning behind Rapps rationale. The entire thing was looking more and more complicated to him. He was sticking his neck out further than he'd ever intended. If Rapp and the Delta team failed, he was done. The combination of the Kennedy scandal and dead American troops would be his death knell.
