bottle of water and a small glass took the place of a mini-bar. I used it to clean my teeth each morning, then got the rest of it down my neck before buying another from Reception for the day’s sightseeing.
I shoved my earphones into place and hit the icon that looked like a date and time application. It took a second or two to load, and when it did I tapped in Cody’s number.
There was a long tone, followed by a short break. Cody Zero One was beginning to receive the call. The green padlock icon on his illuminated screen would be telling him it was in secure mode. He wouldn’t have to shove anything in his ear. He’d just press a button and take it on loudspeaker.
Cody Zero One was my new mate in Air Combat Command at Nellis Air Force Base. He was in the CAOC (Combined Air Operations Center) but this was a Coalition operation. The US might be controlling things from Nevada, but it was British boffins at GCHQ who’d contributed the technical and electronics expertise, while the Israelis were providing and flying the weapons-delivery platforms, the F-15s. All three empires were all taking part.
Nellis was about eight miles from the centre of Las Vegas. I knew it well. I’d been there a number of times when I was in the Regiment. We came with RAF Tornado crews to practise splashing targets with lasers so they could come in and bomb them. After a day on the ranges, we’d get down and hit Vegas for as long as we could. Not so much for the gambling - what’s the point? - but for the big bowls of shrimp they gave away free to keep you at the slots and tables.
The tone sounded another two times before a familiar Texan drawl came online. ‘This is Cody Zero One. Identify yourself. Over.’
The signal strength was fine, but sound quality wasn’t that good and there was a delay of about one and a half seconds. He sounded like he was doing lengths in a swimming-pool. The software was very much first-generation. It had to take what I was saying, bounce it off whatever satellite they were using, encrypt it, bounce it down to Cody and back to me once Cody started gobbing off. We had to follow radio voice procedure.
I pictured Cody in his air-conditioned bunker twenty metres under the Nevada scrublands, with his desert camouflage uniform starched to fuck, and his perfect teeth and white walled haircut. Alongside him would be a jug of coffee and a box of Krispy Kremes, and in front of him a set of massive plasma screens projecting real-time satellite pictures of the target about twenty miles from my balcony.
The al-Kibar complex was a nuclear reactor. Specifically, it was a gas-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor, a carbon copy of the Yongbyon plutonium reactor in North Korea. As you’d expect, the Israelis were unhappy about having one of these on their doorstep, especially one that was tooling up to produce nuclear weapons for a country they had technically been at war with for sixty years. To make things worse, North Korea and Iran were both implicated. Iran was going to use al-Kibar as a secondary facility for its own nuclear programme.
Tonight’s operation was going to take less than an hour from start to finish, but it had taken nearly a year to confirm and plan. Luckily for me, it was the UK that had put one of the two final nails into the coffin of al-Kibar. I was holding the shitty end of the stick, but that didn’t matter to me: I was here to fly the Union Jack. Fucking about in another country, getting things done and, more importantly, getting away with it, that was the juice for me.
My iPod earphones sparked up again.
‘This is Cody Zero One. I say again, identify yourself, over.’
‘Cody Zero One, this is James Zero Two. Over.’
I couldn’t wait for the day when the software was so smooth you could just talk.
Cody came back after a couple of seconds. ‘Roger that, James Zero Two. Fifty-nine - I say again, fiver-niner. Over.’
I did a quick calculation to make sure I wasn’t about to fuck up. ‘Roger that. Fifty-nine, fiver-niner. That’s minus fifty. Minus fiver zero. Over.’
I wanted to make sure I got this right first time. I’d only have one chance to confirm it. The password was nine. To get 59, you had to take off 50. If he had said