Free Black Storm by David Poyer

reconnaissance is our reason for being. Collecting and confirming the intel data. Being the commander’s eyes and ears. This is a deep reconnaissance mission. End of discussion?”
    â€œEnd of discussion, sir,” he agreed. He sat down again, squatting on the hard concrete, and opened up his notebook.

4
‘Ar‘ar, Saudi Arabia
    They reconvened in the same room after dusk; though since there were no windows and the lights stayed on round the clock, night meant nothing to Gault, who was used to sleeping through the hours of light. When he could sleep at all…this close to the runway, the concrete-block walls hardly muffled the howl and roar of aircraft taking off. So that now and then they had to stop and just look at one another while the ceiling vibrated and no word could be heard over the engines of American vengeance.
    When he came in, he saw someone had liberated a folding table and a handful of chairs. As Gault came to attention Lieutenant Colonel Paulik pointed to one. He took it silently, squared his notebook in front of him, and looked toward where an overhead projector faced one of the unadorned walls.
    The navy was there too, the tall officer who’d arrived that afternoon, and three people he’d never seen before, a women and two men. One of the men was in civvies. The other man and the woman were in battle dress cammies. The guy’s service component tag said US Air Force, the woman’s US Army.
    Paulik cleared his throat. He introduced the female officer as Major Maureen Maddox, from Fort Detrick. The men were Major Anthony Bice and Mr. CharlesProvanzano. “Major Bice is a Middle East specialist from the Defense Intelligence Agency. Mr. Provanzano’s a…civilian advisor to CINCCENT. They’re here to help us plan the mission.”
    Gault said, “Do they know the team leader plans recon missions, sir?”
    â€œWe know that, Gunny. But they have background I think you’ll want to hear.” He waited and, since Gault didn’t say anything else, looked at Bice. “Why don’t you kick off, Major?”
    Bice stood. Gault noted his knife-edged, starched desert battle dress, the brand-new leather boots that would destroy his feet in two days in the field.
    â€œI’m Tony Bice, out of Riyadh. I’ve been asked to come out here and background you on what little we have on this thing. This’ll be top secret.” He slipped transparencies from an envelope and clicked the projector on. The first slide said simply, “985.”
    â€œFor security reasons, the Iraqis give numbers to their weapons development projects. We believe “985” is their Manhattan Project. That is, a highly classified program aimed at production of nuclear weapons.
    â€œSaddam started his effort to develop what he calls ‘Aslihatel dammar ashammel’ —roughly, weapons of mass death—in the nineteen seventies. The Russians refused to help him, but he had more luck with the French. They built the Osirak reactors, later called Tammuz I and II. His plan was to breed plutonium in them. But the Israelis bombed them in 1981. That set the clock back to zero.
    â€œWhen the war with Iran started, Iraqi atomic research stopped. But in 1987 Saddam gave it priority again.
    â€œYou may know there are two ways to get to the bomb: breeding plutonium in a reactor, or enriching uranium to a high concentration of fissionable isotope. This time they decided to produce their own weapons-grade uranium. They bought raw ore using various cover stories. This slide shows where it came from—Brazil, Portugal,and Niger—and how much was in each shipment. The total’s at least six hundred tons. There’s also some domestic mining going on up north, at Sarsenk, close to the Turkish border.
    â€œTurning uranium ore to raw metal’s not that big a deal. But enriching uranium by gas diffusion took us and the Russians and the Chinese enormous