Authors: Patrick Robinson
Tags: #Suspense, #Fiction, #Political, #Thrillers, #Weapons industry, #War & Military, #Assassination, #Iraq War; 2003-
Diamondhead (2 page)
And once more Foche’s expression changed. A somewhat sneering cast swept over his face, the whore’s scorn for virtue. “What we are doing,” he said, “is beyond the law, not against it, Olivier. And please remember it would be particularly damaging if you ever decided to go public with your reasons for resignation.”
In that split second, Olivier Marchant realized the danger of his position. Only Foche himself had an equal knowledge of the Diamondhead, its development, its secrets, and the subtleties of its firing and homing mechanisms. Only Foche knew its export routes—especially the one out of the Forest of Orléans and onto the jetties of Saint-Nazaire, the ocean voyage to Chah Bahar, the Iranian Navy’s submarine base, way down east on the northern shore of the Gulf of Oman, close to the Pakistani border. This is a top-secret place, four hundred miles short of the Hormuz entrance to the Persian Gulf. Chah Bahar is the port for unloading illicit cargo, for ultimate distribution of high-tech weaponry to the outstretched hands of the relentless killers of Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban.
Nonetheless, Olivier Marchant stood up and said quietly, “Henri, I will always have the highest regard for you. But I cannot—will not—be associated with flagrant defiance of international law. It cannot be worth it, and my conscience cannot allow it. Good-bye, Henri.”
And with that, he walked resolutely to the doorway, and without a backward look stepped out of the room, right between Marcel and Raymond. But before the door was closed, Henri Foche had the final word: “Good-bye, my old friend. This may be a day you will deeply regret.”
Olivier Marchant knew the stakes were high. And certainly he was aware that Foche’s presidential campaign, conducted from his home region of Brittany, was almost certain to succeed. Foche was correct to state that no one would dare to investigate Montpellier’s missile division, not if Henri himself was president of France.
But Olivier not only had a righteous streak, he also had a timid one, coupled with a highly developed imagination. He suddenly saw himself in an international courtroom, charged with fellow directors of Montpellier with crimes against humanity, in flagrant defiance of a unanimous UN resolution.
He had long recognized Foche as a ruthless chancer, with the morals of an alley cat. But he would not go to the wall for him. Olivier was a wealthy man, with a much younger wife and a nine-year-old daughter. There was no way he was going to jeopardize his way of life, his family and reputation. He would not end up ruined, sharing a cell with a known megalomaniac, as Foche very definitely was.
He walked slowly back to his office, stuffed some personal files into a large briefcase, and called home to his grand residence on the outskirts of the riverside village of Ouzouer. His wife, Janine, was thrilled he would be home for lunch, and even more thrilled to learn he had no plans to return to the rather sinister arms factory in the great Forest of Orléans.
Olivier pulled on his overcoat and vacated his office. He walked along the executive corridor and took the elevator down two floors to the front lobby. Without looking left or right, he stepped out of the building, into bright sunshine, and headed toward the directors’ small parking area.
He had no need to use his remote-control car key because his Mercedes-Benz was never locked. Montpellier was surrounded by a high chain-link fence, and there was only one entrance, patrolled by two armed guards 24/7. Olivier opened the driver’s door and shoved his briefcase onto the passenger seat. Then he climbed in, started the engine, and clipped on his seat belt.
He scarcely saw the garrote that would throttle the life out of him before the thick, cold plastic line was tightening around his throat. In the rearview mirror he caught a glimpse of the expressionless mask of the face of Marcel, and he struggled to grasp the ever-tightening grip of the plastic noose, to try to prize it free from his windpipe.
But Marcel had the jump on him. Olivier tried to scream. And he twisted sideways, lashed out with his foot, and felt his own eyes almost bursting out of their sockets. And now the noose was choking him, and with one final superhuman effort he reared back, and booted out the front windshield, which shattered with just a dull modern popping sound.
It was the last movement Olivier Marchant ever made, before the silent blackness of death was upon him.
CHAPTER
1
1
The American military base, colloquially known as Camp Hitmen in central
Iraq, shimmered under the anvil of the desert sun. No one needed a thermometer to check the temperature, which had hit 104 degrees long before lunch. And no one felt much like moving out of the shade of the bee-huts or the tents.
Iraq, shimmered under the anvil of the desert sun. No one needed a thermometer to check the temperature, which had hit 104 degrees long before lunch. And no one felt much like moving out of the shade of the bee-huts or the tents.
Camp Hitmen derived its name from its proximity to the ancient Iraqi town of Hit, which sits on the west bank of the Euphrates River, 130 miles from Baghdad. This was essentially an overflow military base, constructed by the U.S. Army for Special Forces, the Navy SEALs, Rangers, and Green Berets, the heavy muscle of the U.S. frontline military.
And even as the pitiless sun tried its southern-fried best to drain the energy out of the residents, Camp Hitmen stayed always on permanent high alert. It was a place of hair-trigger readiness, a dust bowl populated by watchful, vigilant U.S. troops, whose training had turned them into coiled springs of aggression and, understandably, vengeance.
The tools of their trade were lined up under canvas shelters wherever possible, anything to reduce the temperature of the metal. The Humvees, armored vehicles, tanks, and desert jeeps were constantly under the attention of mechanics and engineers. Gas tanks were full, oil gauges checked, shells and rockets in place. Every component of the military transportation system was battle ready. Just in case.
The Camp Hitmen complex was surrounded by heavy concrete walls, high, with a walkway just below the ramparts for guards to patrol. Beyond its outer rim was a three-hundred-yard “no-man’s-land” that was glaringly lit at night by sweeping arc lights. In the day it was just a burning flatland of sand and dust, a wide exposed area upon which any intruder would be shot down instantly.
Nothing’s impregnable. But Camp Hitmen was just about as secure as any outpost could ever be in a polarized land, where the population cannot make up its mind whether to hate or welcome those of a different branch of their Muslim faith—never mind a foreign army trying to keep a semblance of order on a lawless Middle Eastern frontier.
And there were still Islamic extremists whose hatred of the Americans was so severe they would willingly sacrifice their own lives just for the chance to murder or maim members of the U.S. and British militaries, serving personnel who were essentially trying to help the country rejoin the international community. Every night they came, trying to fire rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs, into the complex, trying to rig cars and trucks with explosives, trying to send in their suicide bomb squads to breach the complex before the American guards gunned them down.
It was a deadly environment, and everything was a struggle. The air conditioners struggled, the generators permanently had their backs to the wall, and the electricity supply was under constant surveillance. Men were always on edge. No one walked between the tents. Instead, all personnel wore hard combat hats, and raced over the sunbaked sand, crouched low, ready to hit the deck, at the distant scream of a rocket-propelled grenade. Or indeed the sight of the telltale white smoke that signaled the grenades of the Holy Warriors were coming in from across the far side of no-man’s-land.
No one went anywhere unarmed; every day there were missions, and every day there were armored convoys growling out onto the hot, dusty roads, dealing with trouble spots in the treacherous nearby towns of Fallujah, the notorious enclave of the insurgents, or, more likely, ar-Ramadi, often said to be the most dangerous place on earth. Sorties into Habbaniya, which lies between the two, were less frequent but just as dangerous.
There was a large reinforced concrete bunker inside the complex. This housed the main Command Center and the Military Intelligence Center. Like all U.S. military outposts where the main objective is to locate terrorists and insurgents, the entire operation at Camp Hitmen ran on information, gathered either electronically or firsthand. In the latter case, the information was either voluntarily offered or obtained by force.
Either way, it made no difference to the sun-bronzed warriors of the Camp Hitmen garrison. Their task on a daily basis was to round up the diabolical forces of al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and either capture or kill them, wiping out or imprisoning their commanders. Any damn thing necessary to stop the crazy pricks from taking another shot at a big American skyscraper.
We need to take ’em out, or pin ’em down, either right here or in Afghanistan. That way those suckers aren’t going anywhere else. That’s the plan. And it’s a plan that works.
The creed of the United States Special Forces was that simple. And every man understood it. They knew the risks, and were trained to take those risks. Which did not, however, make it any less dangerous or scary. It just made everyone better prepared, and angrier when things occasionally went wrong.
And during the past six months, there had been a new trend among the car bombers, booby-trap operators, and suicide killers that was causing the utmost concern among U.S. commanders—all of them, SEALs, Rangers, and Green Berets. The insurgents in Iraq seemed to have laid hands on a missile, fired from a handheld launcher, that could actually penetrate a tank or a heavily armed vehicle. And that was something to which no one was accustomed.
Powerful roadside bombs and various RPGs could certainly inflict heavy damage on a Humvee or a jeep, and some damage on an armored vehicle. But those brawny U.S. battlefield tanks could always take a hit and keep coming.
In the past six months the game had changed, though. Suddenly, there were instances of a tank-buster missile being launched by terrorists—a high-speed weapon that could rip through the fuselage of a tank, and decimate any other vehicle it hit. Americans were dying. They were being burned alive by this new enemy: not in large numbers, but sufficient to cause stern protests by Western nations about a missile that threatened to turn modern warfare into a horror scene from the Dark Ages.
One month ago the Security Council of the United Nations had categorically banned it, in a unanimous motion that declared the use of the missile “a crime against humanity.” With the support of Russia, China, India, and the European Union, this seemed a solid-enough UN edict to calm everyone’s fears about a new modern napalm outrage. The pictures of U.S. tank commanders burning alive from a chemical that could not be extinguished had shaken historians, politicians, and even journalists worldwide. And happily the ban was now in place.
However, as always, things looked very different out on the burning, sand-strewn highways of Iraq. Because someone had what seemed like an endless supply of this confounded missile. The Arab television station al-Jazeera referred to it as “the Diamondhead.” And the goddamned Diamondhead kept smacking into American armored vehicles and burning U.S. servicemen alive.
They did not, of course, all hit their targets. But two days ago, one of them, fired from the eastern side of the Euphrates, had slammed into a U.S. tank that was transporting an elite Navy SEAL team to a classified mission. None of the four Americans survived. Neither did the tank’s crew. No one could put out the fires that swiftly engulfed them.
The SEALs were seething with fury, and not just at the insurgents who had fired it. They were enraged by the Iranians who had supplied the now-illegal missile. That much was known, and never denied. But the SEALs were especially enraged at the arms corporation that manufactured the Diamondhead. The U.S. high command believed it was French, but could not pinpoint the factory. Unsurprisingly.
The Pentagon decreed the missile had been developed in its early stages by the vast European arms-producing network MBDA, a conglomerate made up of the top guided-missile corporations in Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. MBDA has ten thousand employees, and many subsidiaries. It is without question the world’s number-one maker of guided weapons systems. Its major shareholders are the European Aeronautic and Space Company, which in turn includes Aerospatiale-Matra Missiles of France.
So far as the head honchos in the Pentagon were concerned, the part that mattered was MBDA’s Euromissile, based in Fontenay-aux-Roses in France, home of the MILAN medium-range antitank weapon, godfather of the Diamondhead.
The latest MILAN packs one hell of a wallop. Within a two-mile range it can penetrate a thousand millimeters of Explosive Reactive Armor, or more than three meters of reinforced concrete. It has fantastic antijamming systems, weighs only forty-five kilograms, and can be handled by a two-man crew, the gunner to carry the firing post and the loader to carry the two missiles.
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