Chapter 1
The man with ten minutes to live was laughing.
The source of his amusement was a story just told him by his personal aide, Monique Jamine who was driving him home that chill, drizzling evening of March 22, 1990, from his office to his apartment.
It concerned a mutual colleague in the Space Research Corporation offices at rue de Stalle, a woman regarded as a real vamp, a man-eater, who had turned out to be gay. The deception appealed to the man's lavatorial sense of humor.
The pair had left the offices in the Brussels suburb of Uccle, Belgium, at ten to seven, Monique driving the Renault 21 estate wagon. She had, some months earlier, sold her employer's own Volkswagen because he was such a rotten driver, she feared he would end up killing himself.
It was only a ten-minute drive from the offices to his apartment in the center building of the three-building Cheridreu complex off rue Francois Folie, but they stopped halfway there at a baker's shop. Both went inside, he to buy a loaf of his favorite pain de campagne. There was rain in the wind; they bowed their heads, failing to notice the car that followed behind them.
Nothing strange in that. Neither was trained in tradecraft; the unmarked car with its two dark-jowled occupants had been following the scientist for weeks, never losing him, never approaching him, just watching; and he had not seen them. Others had, but he did not know.
Emerging from the shop just in front of the cemetery, he tossed his loaf into the back seat and climbed aboard to complete the journey to his home. At ten minutes after seven, Monique drew up in front of the plate-glass doors of the apartment building, set fifteen meters back from the street. She offered to come up with him, to see him home, but he declined. She knew he would be expecting his girlfriend Helene and did not wish them to meet. It was one of his vanities, in which his adoring female staff indulged him, that Helene was just a good friend, keeping him company while he was in Brussels and his wife was in Canada.
He climbed out of the car, the collar of his belted trench coat turned up as ever, and hefted onto his shoulder the big black canvas bag that hardly ever left him. It weighed over fifteen kilograms and contained a mass of papers: scientific papers, projects, calculations, and data. The scientist distrusted safes and thought illogically that all the details of his latest projects were safer hanging from his shoulder.
The last Monique saw of her employer, he was standing in front of the glass doors, his bag over one shoulder, the loaf under the other arm, fumbling for his keys. She watched him go through the doors and the self-locking plate glass swing closed behind him. Then she drove off.
The scientist lived on the sixth floor of the eight-story building. Two elevators ran up the back wall of the building, encircled by the stairs, with a fire door on each landing. He took one of them and stepped out at the sixth floor. The dim, floor-level lights of the lobby came on automatically as he did so. Still jangling his keys, leaning against the weight of his bag, and clutching his loaf, he turned left and left again across the russet-brown carpet and tried to fit his key into the lock of his apartment door.
The killer had been waiting on the other side of the elevator shaft, which jutted into the dimly lit lobby. He came quietly around the shaft holding his silenced 7.65-mm. Beretta automatic, which was wrapped in a plastic bag to prevent the ejected cartridges from spilling all over the carpet.
Five shots, fired from less than a one-meter range into the back of the head and neck, were more than enough. The big, burly man slumped forward against his door and slithered to the carpet. The gunman did not bother to check; there was no need. He had done this before, practicing on prisoners, and he knew his work was done. He ran lightly down the six flights of stairs, out of the back of the building, across the tree-studded gardens, and into the waiting car. In an hour he was inside his country's embassy, in a day out of Belgium.
Helene arrived five minutes later. At first she thought her lover had had a heart attack. In a panic she let herself in and called the paramedics. Then she realized his own doctor lived in the same building, and she summoned him as well. The paramedics arrived first.
One of them tried to shift the heavy body, still facing downward. The man's hand came away covered in blood. Minutes later, he and the doctor pronounced the victim quite dead. The only other occupant of the four flats on that floor came to her door, an elderly lady who had been listening to a classical concert and heard nothing behind her solid timber door. Cheridreu was that kind of building, very discreet.
The man lying on the floor was Dr. Gerald Vincent Bull, wayward genius, gun designer to the world, and more latterly armorer for Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
In the aftermath of the murder of Dr. Gerry Bull, some strange things began to happen all over Europe. In Brussels, Belgian counterintelligence admitted that for some months Bull had been followed on an almost daily basis by a series of unmarked cars containing two men of swarthy, eastern Mediterranean appearance.
On April 11, British Customs officers seized on the docks of Middlesborough eight sections of huge steel pipes, beautifully forged and milled and able to be assembled by giant flanges at each end, drilled to take powerful nuts and bolts. The triumphant officers announced that these tubes were not intended for a petrochemical plant, as specified on the bills of lading and the export certificates, but were parts of a great gun barrel designed by Gerry Bull and destined for Iraq. The farce of the Supergun was born, and it would run and run, revealing double-dealing, the stealthy paws of several intelligence agencies, a mass of bureaucratic ineptitude, and some political chicanery.
Within weeks, bits of the Supergun began popping up all over Europe. On April 23, Turkey announced it had stopped a Hungarian truck carrying a single ten-meter steel tube for Iraq, believed to be part of the gun. The same day, Greek officials seized another truck with steel parts and held the hapless British driver for several weeks as an accomplice. In May the Italians intercepted seventy-five tons of parts, while a further fifteen tons were confiscated at the Fucine works, near Rome. The latter were of a titanium steel alloy and destined to be part of the breech of the gun, as were more bits and pieces yielded by a warehouse at Brescia, in northern Italy.
The Germans came in, with discoveries at Frankfurt and Bremerhaven, also identified as parts of the by now world-famous Supergun.
In fact, Gerry Bull had placed the orders for his brainchild skillfully and well. The tubes forming the barrels were indeed made in England by two firms, Walter Somers of Birmingham and Sheffield Forgemasters. But the eight intercepted in April 1990 were the last of fifty-two sections, enough to make two complete barrels 156 meters long and with an unbelievable one-meter caliber, capable of firing a projectile the size of a cylindrical telephone booth.
The trunnions or supports came from Greece, the pipes, pumps, and valves that formed the recoil mechanism from Switzerland and Italy, the breech block from Austria and Germany, the propellant from Belgium. In all, seven countries were involved as contractors, and none knew quite what they were making.
The popular press had a field day, as did the exultant customs officers and the British legal system, which began eagerly prosecuting any innocent party involved. What no one pointed out was that the horse had bolted. The intercepted parts constituted Superguns 2, 3, and 4.
As for the killing of Gerry Bull, it produced some weird theories in the media. Predictably, the CIA was nominated by the CIA-is-responsible-for-everything brigade. This was another absurdity. Although Langley has, in the past and under particular circumstances, countenanced the elimination of certain parties, these parties have almost always been in the same business--contract officers turned sour, renegades, and double agents. The notion that the lobby at Langley is choked with the corpses of former agents gunned down by their own colleagues at the behest of genocidal directors on the top floor is amusing but wholly unreal.
Moreover, Gerry Bull was not from that back-alley world. He was a well-known scientist, designer, and contractor of artillery, conventional and very unconventional, an American citizen who had once worked for America for years and talked copiously to his U.S. Army friends about what he was up to. If every designer and industrialist in the weapons industry who was working for a country not at that time seen to be an enemy of the United States was to be "wasted," some five hundred individuals across North and South America and Europe would have to qualify.
Finally, Langley has for at least the past ten years become gridlocked by the new bureaucracy of controls and oversight committees. No professional intelligence officer is going to order a hit without a written and signed order. For a man like Gerry Bull, that signature would have to come from the Director of Central Intelligence himself. The DCI at that time was William Webster, a by-the-book former judge from Kansas. It would be about as easy to get a signed hit authority out of William Webster as to burrow a way out of the Marion penitentiary with a blunt teaspoon.
But far and away the league leader in the who-killed-Gerry-Bull enigma was, of course, the Israeli Mossad. The entire press and most of Bull's friends and family jumped to the same conclusion. Bull had been working for Iraq; Iraq was the enemy of Israel; two and two equals four. The trouble is, in that world of shadows and distorting mirrors, what may or may not appear to be two, when multiplied by a factor that may or may not be two, could possibly come out at four but probably will not.
The Mossad is the world's smallest, most ruthless, and most gung-ho of the leading intelligence agencies. It has in the past undoubtedly undertaken many assassinations, using one of the three kidon teams --the word is the Hebrew for bayonet. The kidonim come under the Combatants or Komemiute Division, the deep-cover men, the hard squad. But even the Mossad has its rules, albeit self-imposed.
Terminations fall into two categories. One is "operational requirement," an unforeseen emergency in which an operation involving friendly lives is put at risk by someone, and the person in the way has to be eased out of the way, fast and permanently. In these cases, the supervising katsa, or case officer, has the right to waste the opponent who is jeopardizing the entire mission, and will get retroactive support from his bosses back in Tel Aviv.
The other category of terminations is for those already on the execution list. This list exists in two places: the private safe of the Prime Minister and the safe of the head of the Mossad. Every incoming Prime Minister is required to see this list, which may contain between thirty and eighty names. He may initial each name, giving the Mossad the go-ahead on an if-and-when basis, or he may insist on being consulted before each new mission. In either event, he must sign the execution order.
Broadly speaking, those on the list fall into three classes. There are a few remaining top Nazis, though this class has almost ceased to exist. Years ago, although Israel mounted a major operation to kidnap and try Adolf Eichmann because it wanted to make an international example of him, other Nazis were simply liquidated quietly. Class two are almost all contemporary terrorists, mainly Arabs who have already shed Israeli or Jewish blood like Ahmed Jibril and Abu Nidal, or who would like to, with a few non-Arabs thrown in.
Class three, which might have contained the name of Gerry Bull, are those working for Israel's enemies and whose work will carry great danger for Israel and her citizens if it progresses any further. The common denominator is that those targeted must have blood on their hands, either in fact or in prospect.
If a hit is requested, the Prime Minister will pass the matter to a judicial investigator so secret, few Israeli jurists and no citizens have ever heard of him. The investigator holds a "court," with the charge read out, a prosecutor, and a defender. If the Mossad's request is confirmed, the matter goes back to the Prime Minister for his signature. The kidon team does the rest--if it can.
The problem with the Mossad-killed-Bull theory is that it is flawed at almost every level. True, Bull was working for Saddam Hussein, designing new conventional artillery (which could not reach Israel), a rocket program (which might, one day), and a giant gun (which did not worry Israel at all). But so were hundreds of others. Half a dozen German firms were behind Iraq's hideous poison gas industry, with whose products Saddam had already threatened Israel. Germans and Brazilians were working flat-out on the rockets of Saad 16. The French were the prime movers and suppliers of the Iraqi research for a nuclear bomb.
That Bull, his ideas, his designs, his activities, and his progress deeply interested Israel, there is no doubt. In the aftermath of his death much was made of the fact that in the preceding months he had been worried by repeated covert entries into his flat while he was away. Nothing had ever been taken, but traces had been left. Glasses were moved and replaced; windows were left open; a videotape was rewound and removed from the player. Was he being warned, he wondered, and was the Mossad behind it all? He was, and they were--but for a less-than obvious reason.
In the aftermath, the black-jowled strangers with the guttural accents who tailed him all over Brussels were identified by the media as Israeli assassins preparing their moment. Unfortunately for the theory, Mossad agents do not run around looking and acting like Pancho Villa. They were there, all right, but nobody saw them; not Bull, not his friends or family, not the Belgian police. They were in Brussels with a team who could look like and pass for Europeans--Belgians, Americans, whatever they chose. It was they who tipped off the Belgians that Bull was being followed by another team.
Moreover, Gerry Bull was a man of extraordinary indiscretion. He simply could not resist a challenge. He had worked for Israel before, liked the country and the people, had many friends in the Israeli Army, and could not keep his mouth shut. Challenged with a phrase like: "Gerry, I bet you'll never get those rockets at Saad 16 to work," Bull would leap into a three-hour monologue describing exactly what he was doing, how far the project had got, what were the problems, and how he hoped to solve them--the lot. For an intelligence service, he was a dream of indiscretion. Even in the last week of his life he was entertaining two Israeli generals at his office, giving them a complete up-to-the-minute picture, all tape-recorded by the devices in their briefcases. Why would they destroy such a cornucopia of inside information?
Finally, the Mossad has one other habit when dealing with a scientist or industrialist, but never with a terrorist. A final warning is always given; not a weird break-in aimed at moving glasses or rewinding videotapes, but an actual verbal warning. Even with Dr. Yahia El Meshad, the Egyptian nuclear physicist who worked on the first Iraqi nuclear reactor and was assassinated in his room at the Meridien Hotel in Paris on June 13, 1980, the procedure was observed. An Arabic speaking katsa went to his room and told him bluntly what would happen to him if he did not desist. The Egyptian told the stranger at his door to get lost--not a wise move. Telling a Mossad kidon team to perform an impractical act upon themselves is not a tactic approved by the insurance industry. Two hours later, Meshad was dead. But he had had his chance. A year later, the whole French-supplied nuclear complex at Osirak 1 and 2 was blown away by an Israeli air strike.
Bull was different--a Canadian-born American citizen, genial, approachable, and a whiskey drinker of awesome talent. The Israelis could talk to him as a friend, and did constantly. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to send a friend to tell him bluntly that he had got to stop or the hard squad would come after him--nothing personal, Gerry, just the way things are.
Bull was not in the business of winning a posthumous Congressional Medal. Moreover, he had already told the Israelis and his close friend George Wong that he wanted out of Iraq--physically and contractually. He had had enough. What happened to Dr. Gerry Bull was something quite different.
Gerald Vincent Bull was born in 1928 at North Bay, Ontario. At school he was clever and driven by an urge to succeed and earn the world's approval. At sixteen he graduated from high school, but because he was so young the only college that would accept him was the University of Toronto Engineering Faculty. Here he showed he was not just clever but brilliant. At twenty-two he became the youngest-ever Ph.D. It was aeronautical engineering that seized his imagination, specifically ballistics --the study of bodies, whether projectiles or rockets, in flight. It was this that led him down the road to artillery.
After Toronto, he joined the Canadian Armament and Research Development Establishment, CARDE, at Valcartier, a then quiet little township outside Quebec City. In the early 1950s man was turning his face not only toward the skies but beyond them to space itself. The buzzword was rockets. It was then that Bull showed he was something apart from technically brilliant. He was a maverick --inventive, unconventional, and imaginative. It was during his ten years at CARDE that he developed his idea, which would become his life's dream for the rest of his days.
Like all new ideas, Bull's appeared quite simple. When he looked at the emerging range of American rockets in the late 1950s, he realized that nine-tenths of these then impressive-looking rockets were only the first stage. Sitting right on top, only a fraction of the size, were the second and third stages and, even smaller, the tiny nipple of the payload.
The giant first stage was intended to lift the rocket up through the first 150 kilometers of air, where the atmosphere was thickest and gravity strongest. After the 150-kilometer mark, it needed much less power to drive the satellite on into space itself, and into orbit at between 400 and 500 kilometers above the earth. Every time a rocket went up, the whole of that bulky and very expensive first stage was destroyed --burned out, to fall forever into the oceans.
Supposing, Bull mused, you could punch your second and third stages, plus the payload, up those first ISO kilometers from the barrel of a giant gun? In theory, he pleaded with the money men, it was possible, easier, and cheaper, and the gun could be used over and over again.
It was his first real brush with politicians and bureaucrats, and he failed, mainly because of his personality. He hated them, and they hated him. But in 1961 he got lucky. McGill University came in because it foresaw some interesting publicity. The U.S. Army came in for reasons of its own; guardian of American artillery, the Army was in a power play with the Air Force, which was battling for control over all rockets or projectiles going above 100 kilometers. With their combined funds, Bull was able to set up a small research establishment on the island of Barbados. The Army let him have a package of one out-of-storage sixteen-inch Navy gun (the biggest caliber in the world), one spare barrel, one small radar tracking unit, a crane, and some trucks. McGill set up a metal workshop. It was like trying to take on the Grand Prix racing industry with the facilities of a back-street garage. But Bull did it. His career of amazing inventions had begun, and he was thirty-three years old: shy, diffident, untidy, inventive, and still a maverick.
He called his research in Barbados the High Altitude Research Project, or HARP. The old Navy gun was duly erected, and Bull began work on projectiles. He called them Martlet, after the heraldic bird that appears on the insignia of McGill University.
Bull wanted to put a payload of instruments into earth orbit cheaper and faster than anyone else. He knew perfectly well that no human could withstand the pressures of being fired from a gun, but he figured rightly that in the future ninety percent of scientific research and work in space would be done by machines, not men. America under Kennedy, goaded by the flight of the Russian Yuri Gagarin, pursued from Cape Canaveral the more glamorous but ultimately rather pointless exercise of putting mice, dogs, monkeys, and eventually men up there.
Down in Barbados, Bull soldiered on with his single gun and his Martlet projectiles. In 1964 he blew a Martlet 92 kilometers high, then added an extra 16 meters of barrel to his gun (it cost just $41,000), making the new 36-meter barrel the longest in the world. With this, he reached the magic 150 kilometers with a 180-kilogram payload.
He solved the problems as they arose. A major one was the propellant. In a small gun the charge gives the projectile a single hard smack as it expands from solid to gas in a microsecond. The gas tries to escape its compression and has nowhere to go but out of the barrel, pushing the shell ahead of it as it does so. But with a barrel as long as Bull's, a special, slower-burning propellant was needed not to split the barrel wide open. He needed a powder that would send his projectile up this enormous barrel in a long, steadily accelerating whoosh. So he designed it.
In 1966, Bull's old adversaries among the Canadian Defense Ministry bureaucrats got him by urging their minister to pull his financing. Bull protested that he could put a payload of instruments into space for a fraction of what it cost Cape Canaveral. To no avail. To protect its interest, the U.S. Army transferred Bull from Barbados to Yuma, Arizona.
Here, in November of that year, he put a payload 180 kilometers up, a record that stood for twenty-five years. But in 1967, Canada pulled out completely, both the government and McGill University. The U.S. Army followed suit. The HARP project closed down. Bull set himself up on a purely consultative basis at an estate he had bought at Highwater that straddled the border of northern Vermont and his native Canada. He called his company Space Research Corporation.
There were two postscripts to the HARP affair. By 1990, it was costing ten thousand dollars to put every kilogram of instruments into space in the Space Shuttle program out of Cape Canaveral. To his dying day, Bull knew he could do it for six hundred dollars per kilo. And in 1988 work began on a new project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The project involved a giant gun, but so far with a barrel only four inches in caliber and a barrel only fifty meters long. Eventually, and at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, it is hoped that a much, much bigger one will be built, with a view to firing payloads into space. The project's name is Super-High Altitude Research Project, or SHARP.
Gerry Bull lived in and ran his complex at Highwater on the border for ten years. In that time he dropped his unfulfilled dream of a gun that would fire payloads into space and concentrated on his second area of expertise--the more profitable one of conventional artillery.
He began with the major problem: Almost all the world's armies based their artillery on the universal 155-mm. howitzer field gun. Bull knew that in an artillery exchange, the man with the longer range is king. He can sit back and blow the enemy away while remaining inviolate. Bull was determined to extend the range and increase the accuracy of the 155-mm. field gun. He started with the ammunition. It had been tried before, but no one had succeeded. In four years Bull cracked it.
In control tests the Bull shell went one and a half times the distance as the same 155-mm. standard gun, was more accurate, and exploded with the same force into 4,700 fragments, as opposed to 1,350 for a NATO shell. NATO was not interested. By the grace of God, neither was the Soviet Union.
Undeterred, Bull plowed on, producing a new full-bore extended-range shell. Still NATO was not interested, preferring to stay with its traditional suppliers and the short-range shell.
But if the powers would not look, the rest of the world did. Military delegations swarmed to Highwater to consult Gerry Bull. They included Israel (this was when he cemented friendships begun with observers in Barbados), Egypt, Venezuela, Chile, and Iran. He also acted as a consultant on other artillery matters to Britain, Holland, Italy, Canada, and the United States, whose military scientists (if not the Pentagon) continued to study with some awe what he was up to.
In 1972, Bull was quietly made a U.S. citizen. The next year, he began work on the actual 155-caliber field gun itself. Within two years he had made another breakthrough, discovering that the perfect length for a cannon barrel is neither more nor less than forty-five times its caliber. He perfected a new redesign of the standard 155-mm. field gun and called it the GC (for gun caliber) 45. The new gun, with his extended-range shells, would outgun any artillery in the entire Communist arsenal. But if he expected contracts, he was disappointed.
Again, the Pentagon stayed with the gun lobby and its new idea for rocket-assisted shells at eight times the price per shell. The performance of both shells was identical.
Bull's fall from grace, when it came, started innocently enough in 1976, when he was invited with CIA connivance to help improve the artillery and shells of South Africa, which was then fighting the Moscow-backed Cubans in Angola.
Bull was nothing if not politically naive--to an amazing degree. He went, found he liked the South Africans, and got on well with them. The fact that South Africa was an international outcast for its apartheid policies did not worry him. He helped them redesign their artillery along the lines of his increasingly sought-after GC-45 long-barreled long-range howitzer. Later, the South Africans produced their own version, and it was these cannon that smashed the Soviet artillery, rolling back the Russians and Cubans.
Returning to the United States, Bull continued to ship his shells. In 1977, however, the United Nations imposed an arms embargo on South Africa, and when Jimmy Carter became president, Bull was arrested and charged with illegal exports to a forbidden regime. The CIA dropped him like a hot potato. He was persuaded to stay silent and plead guilty. It was a formality, he was told; he would get a slap on the wrist for a technical breach.
On June 16, 1980, a U.S. judge sentenced Bull to a year in prison, with six months suspended, and a fine of $105,000. He actually served four months and seventeen days at Allenwood prison in Pennsylvania. But for Bull that was not the point.
It was the shame and the disgrace that got to him, plus the sense of betrayal. How could they have done this to him? he asked reasonably. He had helped the United States wherever he could, taken her citizenship, gone along with the CIA appeal. While he was in Allenwood, his company, Space Research Corporation, went bankrupt and closed down. He was ruined.
On emerging from jail he quit the United States and Canada forever, emigrating to Brussels and starting all over again in a one-room walkup with a kitchenette. Friends said later that he was changed after the trial, was never the same man again. He never forgave the CIA, and he never forgave America; yet he struggled for years for a rehearing and a pardon.
He returned to consultancy and took up an offer that had been made to him before his trial: to work for China on the improvement of its artillery. Through the early and mid-1980s Bull worked mainly for Beijing and redesigned their artillery along the lines of his GC-4S cannon, which was now being sold under world license by Voest- Alpine of Austria, which had bought the patents from Bull for a onetime payment of two million dollars. Bull always was a terrible businessman, or he would have been a multimillionaire.
While Bull had been away in China, things had happened elsewhere. The South Africans had taken his designs and improved greatly upon them, creating a towed howitzer called the G-5 from his GC-45 and a self-propelled cannon, the G-6. Both had a range with extended shells of forty kilometers. South Africa was selling them around the world. Because of his poor deal with the South Africans, Bull got not a penny in royalties.
Among the clients for these guns was a certain Saddam Hussein of Iraq. It was these cannon that broke the human waves of Iranian fanatics in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, finally defeating them in the Fao marshes. But Saddam Hussein had added a new twist, especially at the battle of Fao. He had put poison gas in the shells.
Bull then worked for Spain and Yugoslavia, converting the old Yugoslav Army's Soviet-made 130-mm. artillery to the new 155-mm. cannon with the extended-range shells. Though he would never live to see it, these were the guns, inherited by the Serbs on the collapse of Yugoslavia, that were to pulverize the cities of the Croats and Muslims in the civil war. And in 1987 he learned that the United States would, after all, research the payloads-into-space cannon--but with Gerry Bull firmly cut out of the deal.
That winter he received a strange phone call from the Iraqi embassy in Bonn: Would Dr. Bull like to visit Baghdad as Iraq's guest?
What he did not know was that in the mid-1980s, Iraq had witnessed Operation Staunch, a concerted American effort to shut off all sources of weapons imports destined for Iran. This followed the carnage among American Marines in Beirut when Iranian-backed Hezbollah fanatics attacked their barracks.
Iraq's reaction, although they benefited in their war with Iran from Operation Staunch, was: If the Americans can do that to Iran, they can do it to us. From then on, Iraq determined to import not the arms but wherever possible the technology to make their own. Bull was first and foremost a designer; he interested them.
The mission to recruit him went to Amer Saadi, who was number two at the Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization, known as MIMI. When Bull arrived in Baghdad in January 1988, Amer Saadi, a smooth, cosmopolitan diplomat/scientist speaking English, French, and German as well as Arabic, played him beautifully.
The Iraqis, he said, wanted Bull's help with their dream of putting peaceful satellites into space. To do this, they had to design a rocket that could put the payload up there. Their Egyptian and Brazilian scientists had suggested that the first step would be to tie together five Scud missiles, of which Iraq had bought nine hundred from the Soviet Union. But there were technical problems, many problems. They needed access to a supercomputer. Could Bull help them?
Bull loved problems--they were his raison d'etre. He did not have access to a supercomputer, but on two legs he himself was the nearest thing. Besides, he told Amer Saadi, if Iraq really wanted to be the first Arab nation to put satellites into space, there was another way--cheaper, simpler, faster than rockets starting from scratch. Tell me all, said the Iraqi. So Bull did.
For just three million dollars, he said, he could produce a giant gun that would do the job. It would be a five-year program. He could beat the Americans at Livermore to the punch. It would be an Arab triumph. Dr. Saadi glowed with admiration. He would put the idea to his government and recommend it strongly. In the meantime, would Dr. Bull look at the Iraqi artillery?
By the end of his one-week visit, Bull had agreed to crack the problems of tying five Scuds together to form the first stage of a rocket of intercontinental or space-reaching performance; to design two new artillery pieces for the Army; and to put a formal proposal for his payload-into-orbit Supergun.
As with South Africa, he was able to block his mind to the nature of the regime he was about to serve. Friends had told him of Saddam Hussein's record as the man with the bloodiest hands in the Middle East. But in 1988 there were thousands of respectable companies and dozens of governments clamoring to do business with big-spending Iraq.
For Bull, the bait was his gun, his beloved gun, his life's dream, at last with a backer who was prepared to help him bring it to fulfillment and join the pantheon of scientists.
In March 1988, Amer Saadi sent a diplomat to Brussels to talk to Bull. Yes, said the gun designer, he had made progress on the technical problems of the first stage of the Iraqi rocket. He would be glad to hand them over on signature of a contract with his company, once again the Space Research Corporation. The deal was done. The Iraqis realized that his offer of a gun for only three million dollars was silly; they raised it to ten million but asked for more speed.
When Bull worked fast, he worked amazingly fast. In one month he put together a team of the best available free-lancers he could find. Heading the Supergun team in Iraq was a British projects engineer called Christopher Cowley. Bull himself christened the rocket program, based at Saad 16 in northern Iraq, Project Bird. The Supergun task was named Project Babylon.
By May, the exact specifications of Babylon had been worked out. It would be an incredible machine. One meter of bore; a barrel 156 meters long and weighing 1,665 tons--the height of the Washington Monument.
Bull had already made plain to Baghdad that he would have to make a smaller prototype, a Mini-Babylon, with a 350-mm. bore weighing only 113 tons. But in this he could test nose cones that would also be useful for the rocket project. The Iraqis liked this--they needed nosecone technology as well.
The full significance of the insatiable Iraqi appetite for nose-cone technology seems to have escaped Gerry Bull at the time. Maybe, in his limitless enthusiasm to see his life's dream realized at last, he just suppressed it. Nose cones of very advanced design are needed to prevent a payload from burning up from friction heat as it reenters earth's atmosphere. But orbiting payloads in space do not return; they stay up there.
By late May 1988, Christopher Cowley was placing his first orders with Walter Somers of Birmingham for the tube sections that would make up the barrel of Mini-Babylon. The sections for full-scale Babylons 1, 2, 3, and 4 would come later. Other strange steel orders were placed all around Europe.
The pace at which Bull was working was awesome. Within two months he covered ground that would have taken a government enterprise two years. By the end of 1988, he had designed for Iraq two new guns--self-propelled guns, as opposed to the towed machines supplied by South Africa. Both pieces would be so powerful, they could crush the guns of the surrounding nations of Iran, Turkey, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, who purchased theirs from NATO and America.
Bull also managed to crack the problems of tying the five Scuds together to form the first stage of the Bird rocket, to be called Al-Abeid, "the Believer." He had discovered that the Iraqis and Brazilians at Saad 16 were working on faulty data, produced by a wind tunnel that was itself malfunctioning. After that, he handed over his fresh calculations and left the Brazilians to get on with it.
In May 1989 most of the world's armaments industry and press, along with government observers and intelligence officers, attended a great weapons exhibition in Baghdad. Considerable interest was shown in the mock-up prototypes of the two great guns. In December, the Al-Abeid was test-fired to great media hoopla, seriously jolting Western analysts.
Heavily covered by Iraqi TV cameras, the great three-stage rocket roared off from the Al-Anbar Space Research Base, climbed away from the earth, and disappeared. Three days later, Washington admitted that the rocket did indeed appear capable of putting a satellite into space.
But the analysts worked out more. If Al-Abeid could do that, it could also be an intercontinental ballistic missile. Suddenly, Western intelligence agencies were jerked out of their assumption that Saddam Hussein was no real danger, years away from being a serious threat.
The three main intelligence agencies, the CIA in America, the Secret Intelligence Service--SIS--in Britain, and the Mossad in Israel, came to the view that of the two systems, the Babylon gun was an amusing toy and the Bird rocket a real threat. All three got it wrong. It was the Al-Abeid that did not work.
Bull knew why, and he told the Israelis what had happened. The Al-Abeid had soared to twelve thousand meters and been lost to view. The second stage had refused to separate from the first. The third stage had not existed. It had been a dummy. He knew because he had been charged with trying to persuade China to provide a third stage and would be going to Beijing in February.
He did indeed go, and the Chinese turned him down flat. While he was there, he met and talked at length with his old friend George Wong. Something had gone wrong with the Iraqi business, something that was worrying the hell out of Gerry Bull, and it was not the Israelis. Several times he insisted he wanted out of Iraq, and in a hurry. Something had happened inside his own head, and he wanted out of Iraq. In this decision he was entirely right, but too late.
***
On February 15,1990, President Saddam Hussein called a full meeting of his group of inner advisers at his palace at Sarseng, high up in the Kurdish mountains.
He liked Sarseng. It stands on a hilltop, and through its triple-glazed windows he could gaze out and down to the surrounding countryside, where the Kurdish peasants huddled through the bitter winters in their shacks and hovels. It was not many miles from here to the terrified town of Halabja, where for the two days of March 17 and 18 in the year 1988, he had ordered the seventy thousand citizens to be punished for their alleged collaboration with the Iranians.
When his artillery had finished, five thousand Kurdish dogs were dead and seven thousand maimed for life. Personally, he had been quite impressed with the effects of the hydrogen cyanide sprayed out from the artillery shells. The German companies that had helped him with the technology to acquire and create the gas--along with the nerve agents Tabun and Sarin--had his gratitude. They had earned it with their gas, similar to the Zyklon-B which had so properly been used on the Jews years before and might well be again.
He stood before the windows of his dressing room and gazed down that morning. He had been in power, undisputed power, for sixteen years, and he had been forced to punish many people. But much also had been achieved.
A new Sennacherib had risen out of Nineveh and another Nebuchadnezzar out of Babylon. Some had learned the easy way, by submission. Others had learned the hard, the very hard way and were mostly dead. Still others, many others, had yet to learn. But they would, they would.
He listened as the convoy of helicopters clattered in from the south, while his dresser fussed to adjust the green kerchief he liked to wear in the V above his combat jacket to hide his jowls. When all was to his satisfaction, he took his personal sidearm, a gold-plated Beretta of Iraqi make, bolstered and belted, and secured it around his waist. He had used it before on a cabinet minister and might wish to again. He always carried it.
A flunky tapped on the door and informed the President that those he had summoned awaited him in the conference room.
When he entered the long room with the plate-glass windows dominating the snowy landscape, everyone rose in unison. Only up here at Sarseng did his fear of assassination diminish. He knew that the palace was ringed by three lines of the best of his presidential security detail, the Amn-al-Khass, commanded by his own son Kusay, and that no one could approach those great windows. On the roof were French Crotale antiaircraft missiles, and his fighters ranged the skies above the mountains.
He sat himself down in the throne-like chair at the center of the top table that formed the crossbar of the T. Flanking him, two on each side, were four of his most trusted aides. For Saddam Hussein there was only one quality he demanded of a man in his favor: loyalty. Absolute, total, slavish loyalty. Within this quality, experience had taught him, there were gradations. At the top of the list came family; after that the clan; then the tribe. There is an Arabic saying: "I and my brother against our cousin; I and my cousin against the world." He believed in it. It worked.
He had come from the gutters of a small town called Tikrit and from the tribe of the Al-Tikriti. An extraordinary number of his family and the Al-Tikriti were in high office in Iraq, and they could be forgiven any brutality, any failure, any personal excess, provided they were loyal to him. Had not his second son, the psychopathic Uday, beaten a servant to death and been forgiven?
To his right sat Izzat Ibrahim, his first deputy, and beyond was his son-in-law, Hussein Kamil, head of MIMI, the man in charge of weapons procurement. To his left were Taha Ramadam, the Prime Minister, and beyond him Sadoun Hammadi, the Deputy Premier and devout Shi'a Moslem. Saddam Hussein was Sunni, but his one and only area of tolerance was in matters of religion. As a non-observer (except when it suited), he did not care. His Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, was a Christian. So what? He did what he was told.
The Army chiefs were near the top of the stem of the T, the generals commanding the Republican Guard, the Infantry, the Armor, the Artillery, and the Engineers. Further down came the four experts whose reports and expertise were the reason he had called the meeting.
Two sat to the right of the table: Dr. Amer Saadi, technologist and deputy to his son-in-law, and beside him Brigadier Hassan Rahmani, head of the Counterintelligence wing of the Mukhabarat, or Intelligence Service. Facing them were Dr. Ismail Ubaidi, controlling the foreign arm of the Mukhabarat, and Brigadier Omar Khatib, boss of the feared Secret Police, the Amn-al-Amm, or AMAM.
The three secret service men had clearly denned tasks. Dr. Ubaidi conducted espionage abroad; Rahmani counterattacked foreign mounted espionage inside Iraq; Khatib kept the Iraqi population in order, crushing all possible internal opposition through a combination of his vast network of watchers and informers and the sheer, stark terror generated by the rumors of what he did to opponents arrested and dragged to the Abu Ghraib jail west of Baghdad or to his personal interrogation center known jokingly as the Gymnasium beneath the AMAM headquarters.
Many had been the complaints brought to Saddam Hussein about the brutality of his Secret Police chief, but he always chuckled and waved them away. It was rumored that he personally had given Khatib his nickname Al-Mu'azib, "the Tormentor." Khatib, of course, was Al-Tikriti and loyal to the end.
Some dictators, when delicate matters are to be discussed, like to keep the meeting small. Saddam thought the opposite; if there was dirty work to be done, they should all be involved. No man could say: "I have clean hands, I did not know." In this way, all around him would get the message: "If I fall, you fall."
When all had resumed their seats, the President nodded to his son-inlaw Hussein Kamil, who called on Dr. Saadi to report. The technocrat read his report without raising his eyes. No wise man raised his eyes to stare Saddam in the face. The President claimed he could read into a man's soul through his eyes, and many believed it. Staring into his face might signify courage, defiance, disloyalty. If the President suspected disloyalty, the offender usually died horribly.
When Dr. Saadi had finished, Saddam thought for a while.
"This man, this Canadian. How much does he know?"
"Not all, but enough, I believe, to work it out, sayidi."
Saadi used the honorific Arabic address equivalent to the Western sir, but more respectful. An alternative acceptable title was Sayid Rais, or "Mr. President."
"How soon?"
"Soon, if not already, sayidi."
"And he has been talking to the Israelis?"
"Constantly, Sayid Rais," replied Dr. Ubaidi. "He has been friends of theirs for years. Visited Tel Aviv and given lectures on ballistics to their artillery staff officers. He has many friends there, possibly among the Mossad, though he may not know that."
"Could we finish the project without him?" asked Saddam Hussein.
Hussein Kamil cut in. "He is a strange man. He insists on carrying all his most intimate scientific paperwork around with him in a big canvas bag. I instructed our counterintelligence people to have a look at this paperwork and copy it."
"And this was done?" The President was staring at Hassan Rahmani, his Counterintelligence chief.
"Immediately, Sayid Rais. Last month during his visit here. He drinks much whiskey. It was doped, and he slept long and deep. We took his bag and photocopied every page in it. Also, we have taped all his technical conversations. The papers and the transcripts have all been passed to our comrade Dr. Saadi."
The presidential stare swiveled back to the scientist.
"So, once again, can you complete the project without him?"
"Yes, Sayid Rais, I believe we can. Some of his calculations make sense only to himself, but I have had our best mathematicians studying them for a month. They can understand them. The engineers can do the rest."
Hussein Kamil shot his deputy a warning look: You had better be right, my friend.
"Where is he now?" asked the President.
"He has left for China, sayidi," replied Dr. Ubaidi. "He is trying to find us a third stage for the Al-Abeid rocket. Alas, he will fail. He is expected back in Brussels in mid-March."
"You have men there, good men?"
"Yes, sayidi. I have had him under surveillance in Brussels for ten months. That is how we know he has been entertaining Israeli delegations at his offices there. We also have keys to his apartment building."
"Then let it be done. On his return."
"Without delay, Sayid Rais." Dr. Ubaidi thought of the four men he had in Brussels on arm's-length surveillance work. One of them had done this before: Abdelrahman Moyeddin. He would give the job to him.
The three intelligence men and Dr. Saadi were dismissed. The rest stayed. When they were alone, Saddam Hussein turned to his son-in-law.
"And the other matter--when will I have it?"
"I am assured, by the end of the year, Abu Kusay."
Being family, Kamil could use the more intimate title "Father of Kusay." It reminded the others present who was family and who was not. The President grunted.
"We shall need a place, a new place, a fortress; not an existing place, however secret. A new secret place that no one will know about. No one but a tiny handful, not even all of us here. Not a civil engineering project, but military. Can you do it?"
General Ali Musuli of the Army Engineers straightened his back, staring at the President's midchest.
"With pride, Sayid Rais."
"The man in charge--your best, your very best."
"I know the man, sayidi. A colonel. Brilliant at construction and deception. The Russian Stepanov said he was the best pupil in maskirovka that he had ever taught."
"Then bring him to me. Not here--in Baghdad, in two days. I will commission him myself. Is he a good Ba'athist, this colonel? Loyal to the party and to me?"
"Utterly, sayidi. He would die for you."
"So would you all, I hope." There was a pause, then quietly: "Let us hope it does not come to that."
As a conversation-stopper, it worked. Fortunately that was the end of the meeting anyway.
Dr. Gerry Bull arrived back in Brussels on March 17, exhausted and depressed. His colleagues assumed his depression was caused by his rebuff in China. But it was more than that.
Ever since he had arrived in Baghdad more than two years earlier, he had allowed himself to be persuaded--because it was what he wanted to believe--that the rocket program and the Babylon gun were for the launch of small, instrument-bearing satellites into earth orbit. He could see the enormous benefits in self-esteem and pride for the whole Arab world if Iraq could do that. Moreover, it would be lucrative, pay its way, as Iraq launched communications and weather satellites for other nations.
As he understood it, the plan was for Babylon to fire its satellitebearing missile southeast over the length of Iraq, on over Saudi Arabia and the south Indian Ocean, and into orbit. That was what he had designed it for.
He had been forced to agree with his colleagues that no Western nation would see it that way. They would assume it was a military gun. Hence, the subterfuge in the ordering of the barrel parts, breech, and recoil mechanism.
Only he, Gerald Vincent Bull, knew the truth, which was very simple--the Babylon gun could not be used as a weapon for launching conventional explosive shells, however gigantic those shells might be.
For one thing, the Babylon gun, with its 156-meter barrel, could not stay rigid without supports. It needed one trunnion, or support, for every second of its twenty-six barrel sections, even if, as he foresaw, its barrel ran up the forty-five-degree side of a mountain. Without these supports, the barrel would droop like wet spaghetti and tear itself apart as the joins ripped open.
Therefore, it could not raise or depress its elevation, nor traverse from side to side. So it could not pick a variety of targets. To change its angle, up or down or side to side, it would have to be dismantled, taking weeks. Even to clean out and reload between discharges would take a couple of days. Moreover, repeated firings would wear out that very expensive barrel. Lastly, Babylon could not be hidden from counterattack.
Every time it fired, a gobbet of flame ninety meters long would leap from its barrel, and every satellite and airplane would spot it. Its map coordinates would be with the Americans in seconds. Also, its reverberation shock waves would reach any good seismograph as far away as California. That was why he told anyone who would listen, "It cannot be used as a weapon."
His problem was that after two years in Iraq, he had realized that for Saddam Hussein science had one application and one only: It was to be applied to weapons of war and the power they brought him and to nothing else. So why the hell was he financing Babylon? It could only fire once in anger before the retaliatory fighter-bombers blew it to bits, and it could only fire a satellite or a conventional shell.
It was in China, in the company of the sympathetic George Wong, that he cracked it. It was the last equation he would ever solve.