The Fist of God

“Yes, a big silver one, or maybe black, pointing at the sky. Have you ever seen one?”

“No, sayidi,” said the man sadly. “Whenever it rains they all run inside.”

“By Allah the Great,” murmured the officer, “it’s not for the rain, oaf!

It’s for sending messages.”

“An umbrella that sends messages,” repeated the gardener slowly, “I will look for one, sayidi.”

“Get on your way,” said the officer in despair. “And stay silent about what you have seen here.”

Martin pedaled down the road, past the limousine. As he approached, Rahmani lowered his head into the rear seat. No need to let the peasant see the head of Counterintelligence for the Republic of Iraq.

Martin found the chalk mark at seven and recovered the message at nine. He read it by the light from the window of a café—not electric light, for there was none anymore, but a gasoline lamp. When he saw the text, he let out a low whistle, folded the paper small, and stuffed it inside his underpants.

There was no question of going back to the villa. The transmitter was blown, and a further message would spell disaster. He contemplated the bus station, but there were Army and AMAM patrols all over it, looking for deserters.

Instead, he went to the fruit market at Kasra and found a truck driver heading west. The man was only going a few miles beyond Habbaniyah, and twenty dinars persuaded him to take a passenger.

Many trucks preferred to drive by night, believing that the Sons of Dogs up there in their airplanes could not see them in the dark, unaware that by either night or day, battered fruit trucks were not General Chuck Horner’s top priority.

So they drove through the night, by headlights generating at least one candlepower, and at dawn Martin found himself deposited on the highway just west of Lake Habbaniyah, where the driver turned off for the rich farms of the Upper Euphrates Valley.

They had been stopped twice by patrols, but on each occasion Martin had produced his papers and the Russian letter, explaining that he had worked as gardener for the infidel, but they were going home and had dismissed him. He whined about the way they had treated him until the impatient soldiers told him to be quiet and get on his way.

That night, Osman Badri was not far from Mike Martin, heading in the same direction but ahead of him. His destination was the fighter base where his elder brother, Abdelkarim, was the squadron commander.

During the 1980s a Belgian construction company called Sixco had been contracted to build eight superprotected air bases to house the cream of Iraq’s best fighters.

The key to them was that almost everything was buried underground—barracks, hangars, fuel stores, ammunition magazines, workshops, briefing rooms, crew quarters, and the big diesel generators to power the bases.

The only things visible aboveground were the actual runways, three thousand meters long. But as these appeared to have no buildings or hangars associated with them, the Allies thought they were barebones airfields, as Al Kharz in Saudi Arabia had been before the Americans moved in.

A closer inspection on the ground would have revealed one-meter-thick concrete blast doors set into downward-leading ramps at the ends of the runways. Each base was in a square five kilometers by five, the perimeter surrounded by barbed-wire fencing. But like Tarmiya, the Sixco bases appeared inactive and were left alone.

To operate out of them, the pilots would be briefed underground, get into their cockpits, and start their engines there. Only when they were fully run-up, with blast walls protecting the rest of the base from their jet exhaust and diverting the gases upward to mingle with the hot desert air outside, would the doors to the ramps be opened.

The fighters could race up the ramps, emerge at full power, afterburners on, scream down the runway, and be airborne in seconds.

Even when the AWACS spotted them, they appeared to have come from nowhere and were assumed to be on low-level missions originating somewhere else.

Colonel Abdelkarim Badri was stationed at one of these Sixco bases, known only as KM 160 because it was off the Baghdad-Ar-Rutba road, 160 kilometers west of Baghdad. His younger brother presented himself at the guard post in the wire just after sundown.

Because of his rank, a phone call was at once made from the guard hut to the squadron commander’s private quarters, and soon a jeep appeared, trundling across the empty desert, apparently having come from nowhere.

A young Air Force lieutenant escorted the visitor into the base, the jeep rolling down another hidden but small ramp into the belowground complex, where the jeep was parked. The lieutenant led the way down long concrete corridors, past caverns where mechanics worked on MiG

29s. The air was clean and filtered, and everywhere was the hum of generators.

Eventually they entered the senior officers’ area, and the lieutenant knocked at a door. At a command from inside, he showed Osman Badri into the CO’s apartment.

Abdelkarim rose, and the brothers embraced. The older man was thirty-seven, also a colonel and darkly handsome, with a slim moustache. He was unmarried but never lacked for female attention. His looks, his sardonic manner, his dashing uniform, and his pilot’s wings ensured it.

Nor was his appearance a sham; Air Force generals admitted he was the best fighter pilot in the country, and the Russians, who had trained him on the ace of the Soviet fighter fleet, the MiG 29 Fulcrum supersonic fighter, agreed with that.

“Well, my brother, what brings you out here?” Abdelkarim asked.

Osman, when he had sat down and gotten coffee from a freshly perked brew, had had time to study his older sibling. There were lines of strain around the mouth that had not been there before, and weariness in the eyes.

Abdelkarim was neither a fool nor a coward. He had flown eight missions against the Americans and the British. He had returned from them all—just. He had seen his best colleagues shot down or blown apart by Sparrow and Sidewinder missiles, and he had dodged four himself.

The odds, he had recognized after his first attempt to intercept the American strike bombers, were impossible. On his own side, he had neither information nor guidance as to where the enemy was, how many, of what type, at what height, or on which heading. The Iraqi radars were down, the control and command centers were in pieces, and the pilots were simply on their own.

Worse, the Americans with their AWACS could pick up the Iraqi warplanes before they had reached a thousand feet, telling their own pilots where to go and what to do to secure the best attack position.

For the Iraqis, Abdelkarim Badri knew, every combat mission was a suicide quest.

Of all this, he said nothing, forcing a smile and a request for his brother’s news. That news killed the smile.

Osman related the events of the past sixty hours: the arrival of the AMAM troops at their parents’ house at dawn, the search, the discovery in the garden, the beating of their mother and Talat, and the arrest of their father. He told how he had been summoned when the neighboring pharmacist finally got a message to him, and how he had driven home to find their father’s body on the dining-room table.

Abdelkarim’s mouth tightened to an angry line when Osman revealed what he had discovered when he cut open the body bag, and the way their father had been buried that morning.

The older man leaned forward sharply when Osman told how he had been intercepted as he left the cemetery, and of the conversation that had taken place.

“You told him all that?” he asked, when his brother had finished.

“Yes.”

“Is it true, all true? You really built this Fortress, this Qa’ala?”

“Yes.”

“And you told him where it is, so that he can tell the Americans?”

“Yes. Did I do wrong?”

Abdelkarim thought for some while.

“How many men, in all Iraq, know about all this, my brother?”

“Six,” said Osman.

“Name them.”

“The Rais himself; Hussein Kamil, who provided the finance and the manpower; Amer Saadi, who provided the technology. Then General Ridha, who supplied the artillerymen, and General Musuli of the Engineers—he proposed me for the job. And me, I built it.”

“The helicopter pilots who bring in the visitors?”

“They have to know the directions in order to navigate, but not what is inside. And they are kept quarantined in a base somewhere, I don’t know where.”

“Visitors—how many could know?”

“None. They are blindfolded before takeoff and until they have arrived.”

“If the Americans destroy this Qubth-ut-Allah, who do you think the AMAM will suspect? The Rais, the ministers, the generals—or you?”

Osman put his head in his hands.

“What have I done?” he moaned.

“I’m afraid, little brother, that you have destroyed us all.”

Both men knew the rules. For treason, the Rais does not demand a single sacrifice but the extirpation of three generations: father and uncles, so there will be no more of the tainted seed, brothers for the same reason, and sons and nephews, so that none may grow up to carry on the vendetta against him. Osman Badri began quietly to weep.

Abdelkarim rose, pulled Osman to his feet, and embraced him.

“You did right, brother. You did the right thing. Now we must see how to get out of here.”

He checked his watch: eight o’clock.

“There are no telephone lines for the public from here to Baghdad,” he said. “Only underground lines to the Defense people in their various bunkers. But this message is not for them. How long would it take you to drive to our mother’s house?”

“Three, maybe four hours,” said Osman.

“You have eight, to get there and back. Tell our mother to pack all she values into our father’s car. She can drive it—not well, but enough.

She should take Talat and go to Talat’s village. She should seek shelter with his tribe until one of us contacts her. Understood?”

“Yes. I can be back by dawn. Why?”

“Before dawn. Tomorrow I am leading a flight of MiGs across to Iran.

Others have gone before. It is a crazy scheme by the Rais to save his best fighter planes. Nonsense, of course, but it may save our lives. You will come with me.”

“I thought the MiG 29 was a single-seater?”

“I have one trainer version with two seats. The UB model. You will be dressed as an Air Force officer. With luck, we can get away with it. Go now.”

Mike Martin was walking west that night along the Ar-Rutba road when the car of Osman Badri flashed past him, heading toward Baghdad. Neither took any notice of the other. Martin’s destination was the next river crossing, fifteen miles ahead. There, with the bridge down, trucks would have to wait for the ferry, and he would have a better chance of paying another driver to take him farther west.

In the small hours of the morning he found exactly such a truck, but it could take him only to a point just beyond Muhammadi. There he began to wait again. At three o’clock the car of Colonel Badri sped back again. He did not hail it, and it did not stop. The driver was clearly in a hurry. Just before dawn a third truck came along, pulled out of a side road onto the main highway, and paused to take him aboard. Again he paid the driver from his dwindling stock of dinar notes, grateful to whoever had thought to give him the wad of money back in Mansour. By dawn, he assumed, the Kulikov household would complain that they had lost their gardener.

A search of his shack would reveal the writing pad beneath the mattress—an odd possession for an illiterate—and a further search would reveal the transmitter beneath the tiles. By midday, the hunt would be well up, starting in Baghdad but spreading across the country. By nightfall, he needed to be far away in the desert, heading for the border.

The truck in which he rode was beyond KM 160 when the flight of MiG 29s took off.

Osman Badri was terrified, being one of those people with a deep loathing of flying. In the underground caverns that made up the base, he had stood to one side as his brother briefed the four young pilots who would form the rest of the flight. Most of Abdelkarim’s contemporaries were dead; these were youngsters, more than a decade his junior, not long out of training school. They listened with rapt attention to their squadron commander and nodded their assent.

Inside the MiG, even with the canopy closed, Osman thought he had never heard a roar like it as, in the enclosed space, the two RD 33

Soviet turbofans ran up to maximum dry power. Crouching in the rear cockpit behind his brother, Osman saw the great blast doors open on their hydraulic pistons and a square of pale blue sky appear at the end of the cavern. The noise increased as the pilot ran his throttle through the gate and into afterburn, and the twin-finned Soviet interceptor shuddered against her brakes.

When the brakes came off, Osman thought he had been kicked in the small of the back by a mule. The MiG leaped forward, the concrete walls flashed past, and the jet took the ramp and emerged into the dawn light.

Osman shut his eyes and prayed. The rumbling of the wheels ceased, he seemed to be drifting, and he opened his eyes. They were airborne, the lead MiG circling low over KM 160 as the other four jets screamed out of the tunnel below. Then the doors closed, and the air base ceased to exist.

All around him, because the UB version is a trainer, were dials and clocks, buttons, switches, screens, knobs, and levers. Between his legs was a duplicate control column. His brother had told him to leave everything alone, which he was glad to do.

At one thousand feet the flight of five MiGs formed into a staggered line, the four youngsters behind the squadron commander. His brother set course just south of due east, keeping low, hoping to avoid detection and to cross the southern outskirts of Baghdad, losing his MiGs from prying American eyes in the clutter of industrial plants and other radar images.

It was a high-risk gamble, trying to avoid the radars of the AWACS

out over the Gulf, but he had no choice. His orders were formal, and now Abdelkarim Badri had an extra reason for wishing to reach Iran.

Luck was with him that morning, through one of those flukes in warfare that are not supposed to occur but do. At the end of every long shift on station over the Gulf, the AWACS had to return to base and be replaced by another. It was called changing the cab rank. During the cab rank changes, there was sometimes a brief window when radar cover was suspended. The MiG flight’s low passage across South Baghdad and Salman Pak coincided with just such a lucky break.

The Iraqi pilot hoped that by keeping to one thousand feet, he could slip under any American flights, which tended to operate at twenty thousand feet and up. He wanted to skirt the Iraqi town of Al Kut to its north, then head straight for the safety of the Iranian border at its nearest point.

That morning, at that hour, Captain Don Walker of the 336th Tactical Fighter Squadron out of Al Kharz was leading a flight of four Strike Eagles north toward Al Kut, his mission to bomb a major river bridge over the Tigris across which Republican Guard tanks had been caught by a J-STAR heading south for Kuwait.

The 336th had spent much of its war on night missions, but the bridge north of Al Kut would be a “quick fix,” meaning there was no time to lose if Iraqi tanks were using it to head south. So the bombing raid that morning had the coding “Jeremiah directs”: General Chuck Horner wanted it done, and now.

The Eagles were loaded with two-thousand-pound laser-guided bombs and air-to-air missiles. Because of the positioning of the bomb-attachment pylons beneath the wings of the Eagle, the load was asymmetric, the bombs on one side being heavier than the Sparrow missiles on the other. It was called the bastard load. Automatic trim control compensated for this, but it was still not the load most pilots would choose to have hanging underneath them in a dogfight.

As the MiGs, now down to five hundred feet and skimming the landscape, approached from the west, the Eagles were coming up from the south, eighty miles away.

The first indication that Abdelkarim Badri had of their presence was a low warbling in his ears. His brother behind him did not know what it was, but the fighter pilots knew. The trainer MiG was in the lead, the four juniors strung out behind him in a loose V formation. They all heard it too.

The warbling came from their RWR—radar warning receiver. It meant there were other radars up there somewhere, sweeping the sky.

The four Eagles had their radars in the search mode, the beams running out ahead of them to see what was there. The Soviet radar warning receivers had picked up these beams and were telling their pilots.

There was nothing the MiGs could do but keep going. At five hundred feet they were well below the Eagles and heading across the Eagles’

projected track.

At sixty miles, the warbling in the Iraqi pilots’ ears rose to a shrill bleep. That meant the RWRs were telling them: Someone out there has gone out of search mode and is locked onto you.

Behind Don Walker, his wizzo Tim saw the change in his radar’s attitude. From a gentle side-to-side scan, the American radars had gone to lock-on, narrowing their beams and concentrating on what they had found.

“We have five unidentifieds, ten o’clock low,” the wizzo muttered, and engaged IFF. The other three wizzos in the flight did the same.

Identification Friend or Foe is a sort of transponder carried by all combat airplanes. It sends out a pulse on certain frequencies, which are changed daily. Warplanes on the same side will receive this pulse and reply: “I am a friend.” Enemy aircraft cannot do so. The five blips on the radar screen crossing the track of the Eagles miles ahead and close to the ground might have been five friendlies coming back from a mission—more than likely, since there were far more Allied aircraft in the skies than Iraqis.

Tim questioned the unidentifieds on modes one, two, and four. No response.

“Hostiles,” he reported. Don Walker flicked his missile switches to Radar, muttered, “Engage,” to his other three pilots, dropped the nose, and headed down.

Abdelkarim Badri was at a disadvantage, and he knew it. He knew it from the moment the Americans locked onto him. He knew without any IFF to tell him that these other aircraft could not possibly be fellow Iraqis. He knew he had been spotted by hostiles, and he knew his young colleagues would be no match for them.

His disadvantage lay in the MiG he flew. Because it was the trainer version, the only type with two seats, it was never destined for combat.

Colonel Badri’s radar had only a sixty-degree sweep out of the nose.

He could not see who had locked onto him.

“What do you have?” he barked at his wingman. The reply was breathless and frightened.

“Four hostiles, three o’clock high, diving fast.”

So the gamble had failed. The Americans were bucketing down the sky from the south, intent on blowing them all out of the air.

“Scatter, dive, go to afterburner, head for Iran!” he shouted.

The young pilots needed no second bidding. From the jet pipes of each MiG a blast of flame leaped backward as the four throttles went through the gate, punching the fighters through the sound barrier and almost doubling their speed.

Despite the huge increase in fuel consumption, the single-seaters could keep their afterburners going long enough to evade the Americans and still reach Iran. Their head start on the Eagles meant the Americans would never catch them, even though they too would now be in afterburn.

Abdelkarim Badri had no such option. In making their trainer version, the Soviet engineers had not only fitted a simpler radar, but to accommodate the weight of the student and his cockpit, they had considerably reduced the internal fuel capacity.

The fighter colonel was carrying underwing long-range fuel tanks, but these would not be enough. He had four choices. It took him no more than two seconds to work them out.

He could go to afterburner, escape the Americans, and return to an Iraqi base, there to be arrested and handed over sooner or later to the AMAM for torture and death.

He could engage afterburner and continue for Iran, evading the Americans but running out of fuel soon after crossing the border. Even if he and his brother ejected safely, they would fall among the Persian tribesmen who had suffered so horribly in the Iran-Iraq war from the cargos dropped on them by Iraqi aviators.

He could use the afterburner to avoid the Eagles, then fly south to eject over Saudi Arabia and become a prisoner. It never occurred to him that he would be treated humanely.

There were some lines that came into his head from long ago, lines from a poem he had learned at Mr. Hartley’s school in that Baghdad of his boyhood. Tennyson? Wordsworth? No, Macaulay, that was it, Macaulay, something about a man in his last moments, something he had read out in class.

To every man upon this earth,

Death cometh soon or late.

And how can a man die better

Than facing fearful odds,

For the ashes of his fathers

And the temples of his gods?

Badri pushed his throttle through the gate into afterburner, hauled the MiG Fulcrum into a climbing turn, and went up to meet the oncoming Americans.

As soon as he turned, the four Eagles came into his radar range. Two had scattered, racing down after the fleeing single-seaters, all of them with afterburner engaged, all beyond the sound barrier.

But the leader of the Americans was coming straight down and at him.

Badri felt the shudder as the Fulcrum went supersonic, adjusted the control column a fraction, and went for the diving Eagle ahead of him.

“Christ, he’s coming straight at us!” said Tim from the rear seat.

Walker did not need to be told. His own radar screen showed him the four vanishing blips of the Iraqi aircraft fleeing for Iran and the single glow of the enemy fighter climbing toward him to engage. The rangefinder was unwinding like an alarm clock out of control. At thirty miles, they were hurtling toward each other at a closing speed of 2,200 miles per hour. He still could not see the Fulcrum visually, but it would not be long.

In the MiG, Colonel Osman Badri was totally bewildered. He had understood nothing of what had happened. The sudden thump of the afterburner engaging had hit him in the small of the back again, and the seven-G turn had caused him to black out for several seconds.

“What is happening?” he shouted into his mask, but he was unaware that the mute button was on, so his brother could not hear him.

Don Walker’s thumb was poised over his missile controls. He had two choices: the longer-range AIM-7 Sparrow, which was radar-guided from the Eagle itself, or the shorter-range AIM-9 Sidewinder, which was a heat-seeker.

At fifteen miles he could see it, the small black dot racing up toward him. The twin fins showed it was a MiG 29 Fulcrum—arguably one of the best interceptor fighters in the world in the right hands. Walker did not know he faced the unarmed trainer version. What he did know was that it might carry the AA-10 Soviet missile, with a range as long as his own AIM-7s. That was why he chose the Sparrows.

At twelve miles he launched two Sparrows dead ahead. The missiles flashed away, picking up the radar energy reflected from the MiG and obediently heading straight toward it.

Abdelkarim Badri saw the flashes as the Sparrows left the Eagle, giving him a few more seconds of life unless he could force the American to break off. He reached down to his left and pulled a single lever.

Don Walker had often wondered what it would be like, and now he knew. From the underside of the MiG’s wings came an answering flicker of light. It was like a cold hand gripping his entrails, the icy, freezing sensation of pure fear. Another man had launched two missiles at him. He was staring certain death straight in the face.

Two seconds after he launched the Sparrows, Walker wished he had chosen the Sidewinders. The reason was simple: The Sidewinders were fire-and-forget missiles, they would find the target no matter where the Eagle was. The Sparrows needed the Eagle to guide them; if he broke away now, the missiles, without guidance, would “gimbal,”

or wander off across the sky to fall harmlessly to earth.

He was within a fraction of a second of breaking off when he saw the missiles launched by the MiG tumble away toward the ground. In disbelief he realized they were not rockets at all; the Iraqi had tricked him by releasing his underwing fuel tanks. The aluminum canisters had caught the morning sun as they fell, glittering like the ignited fuel of launching missiles. It was a trick, and he, Don Walker, had damn nearly fallen for it.

In the MiG Abdelkarim Badri realized the American was not going to break off. He had tested the man’s nerve, and he had lost. In the rear seat Osman had found the Transmit button. He could see by looking over his shoulder that they were climbing, already miles above the ground.

“Where are we going?” he screamed. The last thing he heard was the voice of Abdelkarim, quite calm.

“Peace, my brother. To greet our father. Allah-o-Akhbar.”

Walker watched the two Sparrows explode at that moment, great peonies of red flame three miles away, then the broken fragments of the Soviet fighter tumble down to the landscape below. He felt the sweat trickling down his chest in rivulets.

His wingman, Randy Roberts, who had held his position above and behind him, appeared off his right wingtip, the white-gloved hand raised with the thumb erect. He replied in kind, and the other two Eagles, having abandoned their fruitless chase of the remaining MiGs, swam up from below to reform and went on to the bridge above Al Kut.

Such is the speed of events in fighter combat that the entire action, from the first radar lock-on to the destruction of the Fulcrum, had taken just thirty-eight seconds.

The spotter was at the Winkler Bank on the dot of ten that morning,

accompanied by his “accountant.” The younger man bore a deep attaché case containing one hundred thousand American dollars in cash.

The money was actually a temporary loan arranged by the banking sayan, who was much relieved to be told that it would simply be deposited with the Winkler Bank for a while, then retrieved and returned to him.

When he saw the money, Herr Gemütlich was delighted. He would have been less enthusiastic had he noticed that the dollars occupied only half the thickness of the attaché case, and he would have been horrified to see what lay beneath the false bottom.

For the sake of discretion, the accountant was banished to Fräulein Hardenberg’s room while the lawyer and the banker arranged the confidential operating codes for the new account. The accountant returned to take charge of the receipt for the money and by eleven the matter was concluded. Herr Gemütlich summoned the commissionaire to escort the visitors back to the lobby and the front door.

On the way down the accountant whispered something into the American lawyer’s ear, and the lawyer translated it to the commissionaire. With a curt nod the commissionaire stopped the old grille-fronted elevator at the mezzanine floor, and the three got out.

The lawyer pointed out the door of the men’s room to his colleague, and the accountant went in. The lawyer and the commissionaire remained on the landing outside.

At this point there came to their ears the sounds of a fracas in the lobby, clearly audible because the lobby was twenty feet along the corridor and down fifteen marble steps.

With a muttered excuse the commissionaire strode along the corridor until he could see from the top of the stairs down to the hallway. What he saw caused him to run down the marble steps to sort the matter out.

It was an outrageous scene. Somehow three rowdies, clearly drunk, had entered the lobby and were harassing the receptionist for money for more liquid refreshment. She would later say they had tricked her into opening the front door by claiming they were the postman.

Full of indignation, the commissionaire sought to bustle the hooligans outside. No one noticed that one of the rowdies, on entering, had dropped a cigarette pack against the doorjamb so that, although normally self-closing, the door would not quite shut.

Nor did anyone notice, in the jostling and pushing, a fourth man enter the lobby on hands and knees. When he stood up, he was at once joined by the lawyer from New York, who had followed the commissionaire down the stairs to the lobby.

They stood to one side as the commissionaire hustled the three rowdies back where they belonged—in the street. When he turned around, the bank servant saw that the lawyer and the accountant had descended from the mezzanine of their own accord. With profuse apologies for the unseemly melee, he ushered them out.

Once on the sidewalk, the accountant let out a huge sigh of relief.

“I hope I never have to do that again,” he said.

“Don’t worry,” said the lawyer. “You did pretty well.”

They spoke in Hebrew, because the accountant knew no other language. He was in fact a bank teller from Beershe’eva, and the only reason he was in Vienna, on his first and last covert assignment, was that he also happened to he the identical twin of the cracksman, who was then standing immobile in the darkness of the cleaning closet on the mezzanine floor. There he would remain motionless for twelve hours.

Mike Martin arrived in Ar-Rutba in the middle of the afternoon. It had taken him twenty hours to cover a distance that normally would take no more than six in a car.

On the outskirts of the town he found a herdsman with a flock of goats and left him somewhat mystified but quite happy by buying four of them for his remaining handful of dinars at a price almost twice what the herdsman would have secured at the market.

The goats seemed happy to be led off into the desert, even though they now wore halters of cord. They could hardly be expected to know that they were only there to explain why Mike Martin was wandering around the desert south of the road in the afternoon sun.

His problem was that he had no compass—it was with the rest of his gear, beneath the tiles of a shack in Mansour. Using the sun and his cheap watch, he worked out as best he could the bearing from the radio tower in the town to the wadi where his motorcycle was buried.

It was a five-mile hike, slowed by the goats, but they were worth having because twice he saw soldiers staring at him from the road until he was out of sight. But the soldiers took no action.

He found the right wadi just before sundown, identifying the marks scored into the nearby rocks, and he rested until the light was gone before starting to dig. The happy goats wandered off.

It was still there, wrapped in its plastic bag, a rangy 125-cc. Yamaha cross-country motorcycle, all black, with panniers for the extra fuel tanks. The buried compass was there, plus the handgun and ammunition.

He strapped the automatic in its holster to his right hip. From then on, there would be no more question of pretense; no Iraqi peasant would be riding that machine in those parts. If he were intercepted, he would have to shoot and escape.

He rode through the night, making far better time than the Land-Rovers had been able to do. With the dirt bike he could speed across the flat patches and drive the machine over the rocky ridges of the wadis, using engine and feet.

At midnight he refueled and drank water, with some K rations from the packs left in the cache. Then he rode on due south for the Saudi border.

He never knew when he crossed the border. It was all a featureless wasteland of rocks and sand, gravel and scree, and given the zigzag course he had to cover, there was no way of knowing how many miles he had covered.

He expected to know he was in Saudi Arabia when he came to the Tapline Road, the only highway in those parts. The land became easier, and he was riding at twenty miles per hour when he saw the vehicle. Had he not been so tired, he would have reacted faster, but he was half-drugged with exhaustion and his reflexes were slow.

The front wheel of the bike hit the tripwire, and he was off, tumbling over and over until he came to rest on his back. When he opened his eyes and looked up, there was a figure standing over him and the glint of starlight on metal.

“Bouge pas, mec.”

Not Arabic. He racked his tired mind. Something a long time ago. Yes, Haileybury, some unfortunate schoolmaster trying to teach him the intricacies of French.

“Ne tirez pas,” he said slowly. “Je suis Anglais.”

There are only three British sergeants in the French Foreign Legion, and one of them is called McCullin.

“Are you now?” he said in English. “Well, you’d better get your arse over to the command vehicle. And I’ll have that pistol, if you don’t mind.”

The Legion patrol was well west of its assigned position in the Allied line, running a check on the Tapline Road for possible Iraqi deserters.

With Sergeant McCullin as interpreter, Martin explained to the French lieutenant that he had been on a mission inside Iraq.

That was quite acceptable to the Legion: Working behind the lines was one of their specialities. The good news was that they had a radio.

The cracksman waited patiently in the darkness of the broom closet through the Tuesday and into the night. He heard various male employees enter the washroom, do what they came for, and leave.

Through the wall he could hear the elevator occasionally whine its way up and down to the top floor. He sat on his briefcase with his back to the wall, and an occasional glance at his luminous watch told him of the passing hours.

Between half past five and six he heard the staff walking past on their way to the lobby and home. At six, he knew, the nightwatchman would arrive, to be admitted by the commissionaire, who by then would have checked every one of the staff past his desk according to the daily list.

When the commissionaire left just after six, the nightwatch would lock the front door and set the alarms. Then he would settle down with the portable TV he brought every evening and watch the game shows until it was time for his first round.

According to the yarid team, even the cleaners were supervised. They did the common parts—halls, stairways, and washrooms—during the nights of Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, but on a Tuesday night the cracksman should remain undisturbed. On Saturdays they came back to clean the private offices under the eye of the commissionaire, who remained with them at all times.

The routine of the nightwatch was apparently always the same. He made three tours of the building, testing all doors, at ten P.M., at two in the morning, and at five.

Between coming on duty and his first tour, he watched his TV and ate his packed supper. In the longest gap, between ten and two, he dozed, setting a small alarm to tell him when it was two in the morning. The cracksman intended to make his burglary during that gap.

He had already seen Gemütlich’s office and its all-important door. The latter was of solid wood but happily was not alarmed. The window was alarmed, and he had noted the faint outline of two pressure pads between the parquet and the carpet.

At ten precisely he heard the elevator rumbling upward, bearing the nightwatch to begin his tour of the office doors, starting at the top and coming down floor by floor on foot.

Half an hour later, the elderly man had finished, put his head around the door of the men’s room, flashed on the light to check the wired and alarmed window, closed the door, and returned to his desk in the lobby. There he chose to watch a late game show.

At 10:45 the cracksman, in complete darkness, left the men’s room and stole up the stairs to the fourth floor.

The door of Herr Gemütlich’s office took him fifteen minutes. The last tumbler of the four-lever mortise deadlock tumbled back, and he stepped inside.

Although he wore a band around his head holding a small penlight, he took another, larger flashlight to scan the room. By its light, he could avoid the two pressure pads and approach the desk from its unguarded side. Then he switched it off and resumed by the light only of the penlight.

The locks on the three top drawers were no problem—small brass affairs over a hundred years old. When the three drawers were removed, he inserted his hand and began to feel for a knob, button, or lever. Nothing. It was an hour later, at the rear of the third drawer down on the right-hand side, that he found it. A small lever, in brass, no more than an inch long. When he pushed it, there was a low click, and a strip of inlay at the base of the pillar jumped open a centimeter.

The tray inside was quite shallow, less than an inch, but it was enough to contain twenty-two sheets of thin paper. Each was a replica of the letter of authority that alone would suffice to operate the accounts under Gemütlich’s charge.

The cracksman produced his camera and a clamper, a device of four fold-back aluminum legs that kept the prefocused camera at exactly the right distance from the paper beneath it to get a high-definition exposure.

The top of the pile of sheets was the one describing the operating method of the account opened the previous morning by the spotter, on behalf of the fictitious client in the United States. The one he wanted was the seventh down. The number he already knew—the Mossad had been paying money into Jericho’s account for two years before the Americans took over.

To be on the safe side, he photographed them all anyway. After returning the cachette to its original state, he replaced and relocked all the drawers and withdrew, sealing the office door behind him. He was back in the broom closet by ten past one.

When the bank opened for morning business, the cracksman let the elevator run up and down for half an hour, knowing the commissionaire never needed to escort the staff to their offices. The first client appeared at ten to ten. When the elevator had gone up past him, the cracksman stole out of the men’s room, tiptoed to the end of the corridor, and looked down into the lobby. The desk of the commissionaire was empty; he was upstairs escorting the client.

The cracksman produced a bleeper and pressed twice. Within three seconds the front door bell rang. The receptionist activated her speaker system and asked:

“Ja?”

“Lieferung,” said a tinny voice. She pressed the door-release catch, and a big cheerful delivery man entered the lobby. He bore a large oil painting wrapped in brown paper and string.

“Here you are, lady, all cleaned and ready to rehang,” he said.

Behind him the door slid to its close. As it did so, a hand came around the edge at floor level and inserted a wad of paper. The door appeared to close but the catch did not engage.

The delivery man stood the oil painting on the edge of the receptionist’s desk. It was big, five feet wide and four feet tall. It blocked her whole view of the lobby.

“But I know nothing about—” she protested. The head of the delivery man came around the edge of the painting.

“Just sign for its safe receipt, please,” he said, and put in front of her a clipboard with a receipt form. As she studied it, the cracksman came down the marble steps and slipped out of the door.

“But this says Harzmann Galerie,” she pointed out.

“That’s right. Ballgasse, number fourteen.”

“But we’re number eight. This is the Winkler Bank. The gallery is farther up.”

The puzzled delivery man made his apologies and left. The commissionaire came back down the marble steps. She explained what had happened. He snorted, resumed his seat across the lobby from the reception desk, and returned to the morning paper.

When the Blackhawk helicopter brought Mike Martin into the Riyadh military air base at midday, there was a small and expectant committee to meet him. Steve Laing was there, with Chip Barber. The man he had not expected to see was his commanding officer, Colonel Bruce Craig.

While Martin had been in Baghdad, the deployment of the SAS in the western deserts of Iraq had grown to involve two full squadrons out of Hereford’s four. One had remained at Hereford as the standby squadron, the other was in smaller units on training missions around the world.

“You got it, Mike?” asked Laing.

“Yes. Jericho’s last message. Couldn’t get it out by radio.”

He explained briefly why and handed over the single grubby sheet of paper with Jericho’s report.

“Man, we were worried when we couldn’t get you these past forty-eight hours,” said Barber. “You’ve done a great job, Major.”

“Just one thing, gentlemen,” said Colonel Craig. “If you have finished with him, can I have my officer back?”

Laing was studying the paper, deciphering the Arabic as best he could.

He looked up.

“Why yes, I suppose so. With our sincere thanks.”

“Wait a minute,” said Barber. “What are you going to do with him now, Colonel?”

“Oh, a bunk in our base across the airfield, some food—”

“Got a better idea,” said Barber. “Major, how does a Kansas steak and fries, an hour in a marble bathtub, and a big soft bed grab you?”

“By the balls,” laughed Martin.

“Right. Colonel, your man gets a suite at the Hyatt down the road for twenty-four hours, courtesy of my people. Agreed?”

“Okay. See you this time tomorrow, Mike,” said Craig.

On the short drive to the hotel opposite CENTAF headquarters, Martin gave Laing and Barber a translation of the Jericho message. Laing made verbatim notes.

“That’s it,” said Barber. “The air boys will go in there and blow it away.”

It required Chip Barber to check the soiled Iraqi peasant into the best suite in the Hyatt, and when he was settled, Barber left to cross the road to the Black Hole.

Martin had his hour in the deep, steaming bath and used the complimentary gear to shave and shampoo, and when he came out, the steak and fries were on a tray in the sitting room.

He was halfway through the meal when sleep overtook him. He just managed to make the wide soft bed next door, then he was asleep.

While he slept, a number of things happened. Freshly pressed shorts, trousers, socks, shoes, and shirt were delivered to his sitting room.

In Vienna, Gidi Barzilai sent the operational details of the Jericho numbered account to Tel Aviv, where an identical replica was prepared with the appropriate wording.

Karim met Edith Hardenberg when she left the bank after work, took her for a coffee, and explained that he had to return to Jordan for a week to visit his mother, who was sick. She accepted his reason, held his hand, and told him to hurry back to her as soon as he could.

Orders went out from the Black Hole to the air base at Taif where a TR-1 spy plane was preparing to take off for a mission to the far north of

Iraq, to take further pictures of a major weapons complex at As-Sharqat.

The mission was given a new task with fresh map coordinates, specifically to visit and photograph an area of a range of hills in the northern sector of the Jebal al Hamreen. When the squadron commander protested the sudden change, he was told the orders were classified as “Jeremiah directs.” The protest ended.

The TR-1 took off just after two, and by four, its images were appearing on the screens inside the designated conference room down the corridor from the Black Hole.

There was cloud and rain over the Jebal that day, but with its infrared and thermal imaging radar, the ASARS-2 device that defies cloud, rain, hail, sleet, snow, and darkness, the spy plane got its pictures anyway.

They were studied as they arrived by Colonel Beatty of the USAF and Squadron Leader Peck of the RAF, the two top photoreconnaissance analysts in the Black Hole.

The planning conference began at six. There were only eight men present. In the chair was General Horner’s deputy, the equally decisive but more jovial General Buster Glosson. The two intelligence officers, Steve Laing and Chip Barber, were there because it was they who had brought the target and knew the background to its revelation. The two analysts, Beatty and Peck, were required to explain their interpretation of the pictures of the area. And there were three staff officers, two American and one British, who would note what had to be done and ensure that it was.

Colonel Beatty opened with what was to become the leitmotif of the conference.

“We have a problem here,” he said.

“Then explain it,” said the general.

“Sir, the information provided gives us a grid reference. Twelve figures, six of longitude and six of latitude. But it is not a SATNAV

reference, pinning the area down to a few square yards. We are talking about one square kilometer. To be on the safe side, we enlarged the area to one square mile.”

“So?”

“And there it is.”

Colonel Beatty gestured to the wall. Almost the entire space was covered by a blown-up photograph, high-definition, computer-enhanced, and covering six feet by six. Everyone stared at it.

“I don’t see anything,” said the general. “Just mountains.”

“That, sir, is the problem. It isn’t there.”

The attention switched to the spooks. It was, after all, their intelligence.

“What,” said the general slowly, “is supposed to be there?”

“A gun,” said Laing.

“A gun?”

“The so-called Babylon gun.”

“I thought you guys had intercepted all of them at the manufacturing stage.”

“So did we. Apparently one got through.”

“We’ve been through this before. It’s supposed to be a rocket, or a secret fight-bomber base. No gun can fire a payload that big.”

“This one can, sir. I’ve checked with London. A barrel over one hundred and eighty meters long, a bore of one meter. A payload of over half a ton. A range of up to a thousand kilometers, according to the propellant used.”

“And the range from here to the Triangle?”

“Four hundred and seventy miles, or 750 kilometers. General, can your fighters intercept a shell?”

“No.”

“Patriot missiles?”

“Possibly, if they’re in the right place at the right time and can spot it in time. Probably not.”

“The point is,” interjected Colonel Beatty, “gun or missile, it’s not there.”

“Buried underground, like the Al Qubai assembly factory?” suggested Barber.

“That was disguised with a car junkyard on top,” said Squadron Leader Peck. “Here there’s nothing. No road, no tracks, no power lines, no defenses, no helipad, no razor wire, no guard barracks—just a wilderness of hills and low mountains with valleys between.”

“Supposing,” said Laing defensively, “they used the same trick as at Tarmiya—putting the defense perimeter so far out, it was off the frame?”

“We tried that,” said Beatty. “We looked fifty miles out in all directions. Nothing—no defenses.”

“Just a pure deception operation?” proposed Barber.

“No way. The Iraqis always defend their prize assets, even from their own people. Look—see here.”

Colonel Beatty advanced to the picture and pointed out a group of huts.

“A peasant village, right next door. Woodsmoke, goat pens, goats here out foraging in the valley. There are two others off the frame.”

“Maybe they hollowed out the whole mountain,” said Laing. “You did, at Cheyenne Mountain.”

“That’s a series of caverns, tunnels, a warren of rooms behind reinforced doors,” said Beatty. “You’re talking about a barrel 180 meters long. Try to get that inside a mountain, you’d bring the whole damn thing down on top. Look, gentlemen, I can see the breech, the magazine, all the living quarters being underground, but a chunk of that barrel has to stick out somewhere. It doesn’t.”

They all stared at the picture again. Within the square were three hills and a portion of a fourth. The largest of the three was unmarked by any blastproof doors or access road.

“If it’s in there somewhere,” proposed Peck, “why not saturate-bomb the square mile? That would bring down any mountain on top of the weapon.”

“Good idea,” said Beatty. “General, we could use the Buffs. Paste the whole square mile.”

“May I make a suggestion?” asked Barber.

“Please do,” said General Glosson.

“If I were Saddam Hussein, with his paranoia, and I had one single weapon of this value, I’d have a man in command I could trust. And I’d give him orders that if ever the Fortress came under bombing attack, he was to fire. In short, if the first couple of bombs fell wide—and a square mile is quite a big area—the rest might be a fraction of a second too late.”

General Glosson leaned forward.

“What is your precise point, Mr. Barber?”

“General, if is inside these hills, it is hidden by a deception operation of extreme skill. The only way to be a hundred percent certain of destroying it is by a similar operation. A single plane, coming out of nowhere, delivering one attack, and hitting the target on the button the first and only time.”

“I don’t know how many times I have to say this,” said the exasperated

Colonel Beatty, “but we don’t know where the button is—precisely.”

“I think my colleague is talking about target-marking,” said Laing.

“But that means another airplane,” objected Peck. “Like the Buccaneers marking for the Tornados. Even the target-marker must see the target first.”

“It worked with the Scuds,” said Laing.

“Sure, the SAS men marked the missile launchers, and we blew them away. But they were right there on the ground, a thousand yards from the missiles with binoculars,” said Peck.

“Precisely.”

There was silence for several seconds.

“You are talking,” said General Glosson, “of putting men into the mountains to give us a ten-square-yard target.”

The debate went on for two more hours. But it always came back to Laing’s argument.

First find it, then mark it, then, destroy it—and all without the Iraqis noticing until it was too late.

At midnight a corporal of the Royal Air Force went to the Hyatt Hotel.

He could get no reply from the sitting-room door, so the night manager let him in. He went into the bedroom and shook by the shoulder the man sleeping in a terrycloth robe on top of the bed.

“Sir, wake up, sir. You’re wanted across the road, Major.”

Chapter 22

“It’s there,” said Mike Martin two hours later.

“Where?” asked Colonel Beatty with genuine curiosity.

“In there somewhere.”

In the conference room down the corridor from the Black Hole, Martin was leaning over the table studying a photograph of a larger section of the Jebal al Hamreen range. It showed a square five miles by five miles. He pointed with his forefinger.

“The villages, the three villages—here, here, and here.”

“What about them?”

“They’re phony. They’re beautifully done, they’re perfect replicas of the villages of mountain peasants, but they’re full of guards.”

Colonel Beatty stared at the three villages. One was in a valley only half a mile from the middle of the three mountains at the center of the frame. The other two occupied terraces on the mountain slopes farther out.

None was big enough to support a mosque; indeed, they were little more than hamlets. Each had its main and central barn for the storage of winter hay and feed, and smaller barns for the sheep and goats. A dozen humble shacks made up the rest of the settlements, mud-brick dwellings with thatch or tin roofs of the kind that can be seen anywhere in the mountains of the Middle East. In summer there might be small patches of tilled crops nearby, but not in winter.

Life in the mountains of Iraq is harsh in winter, with slanting bitter rain and scudding clouds. The notion that all parts of the Middle East are warm is a popular fallacy.

“Okay, Major, you know Iraq, I don’t. Why are they phony?”

“Life-support system,” said Martin. “Too many villages, too many peasants, too many goats and sheep. Not enough forage. They’d starve.”

“Shit,” said Beatty with feeling. “So damn simple.”

“That may be, but it proves Jericho wasn’t lying, or mistaken again. If they’ve done that, they’re hiding something.”

Colonel Craig, commanding officer of the 22nd SAS, had joined them in the basement. He had been talking quietly to Steve Laing. Now he came over.

“What do you reckon, Mike?”

“It’s there, Bruce. One could probably see it—at a thousand yards with good binoculars.”

“The brass wants to put a team in to mark it. You’re out.”

“Bullshit, sir. These hills are probably alive with foot patrols. You can see there are no roads.”

“So? Patrols can be avoided.”

“And if you run into any? There’s no one speaks Arabic like me, and you know it. Besides, it’s a HALO drop. Helicopters won’t work either.”

“You’ve had all the action you need, so far as I can gather.”

“That’s crap, too. I haven’t seen any action at all. I’m fed up with spooking. Let me have this one. The others have had the desert for weeks, while I’ve been tending a garden.”

Colonel Craig raised an eyebrow. He had not asked Laing exactly what Martin had been up to—he would not have been told anyway—but he was surprised one of his best officers had been posing as a gardener.

“Come back to the base. We can plan better there. If I like your idea, you can have it.”

Before dawn, General Schwarzkopf had agreed there was no alternative and given his consent. In that cordoned-off corner of the Riyadh military air base that was the private preserve of the SAS, Martin had outlined his ideas to Colonel Craig and had been given the go-ahead.

Coordination of planning would reside with Colonel Craig for the men on the ground and with General Glosson for the eventual fighter-strike.

Buster Glosson had morning coffee with his friend and superior Chuck Horner.

“Any ideas for the unit we’d like to use on this one?” he asked.

General Horner thought back to a certain officer who two weeks earlier had advised him to do something extremely rude.

“Yeah,” he said. “Give it to the Three Thirty-sixth.”

Mike Martin had won his argument with Colonel Craig by pointing out—logically—that with most of the SAS soldiers in the Gulf Theater already deployed inside Iraq, he was the senior officer available, that he was commander of B Squadron, which was then on operations in the desert under the command of his number two, and that he alone spoke fluent Arabic.

But the clinching argument was his training and experience in freefall parachuting. The only way into the Iraqi mountains without raising an alarm was going to be a HALO drop—high altitude, low opening—meaning coming out of the aircraft at 25,000 feet and falling free to open the chutes at 3,500 feet. It was not a job for beginners.

The planning of the entire mission ought to have taken a week, but there was no time for that. The only solution was for the various aspects of the drop, the cross-country march, and the selection of the lying-up position to be planned simultaneously. For that, Martin needed men he could trust with his life, which was precisely what he was going to do anyway.

Back at the SAS corner of the Riyadh military air base, his first question to Colonel Craig was:

“Who can I have?”

The list was short; there were so many away on operations in the desert.

When the adjutant showed him the list, one name sprang out at him.

Peter Stephenson—definite.”

“You’re lucky,” said Craig. “He came back over the border a week ago. Been resting ever since. He’s fit.”

Martin had known Sergeant Stephenson when the sergeant had been a corporal and he a captain on his first tour with the regiment as a troop commander. Like himself, Stephenson was a freefaller and a member of the air troop of his own squadron.

“He’s good,” said Craig, pointing to another name. “A mountain man.

I suggest you’ll need two of them.”

The name he pointed to was Corporal Ben Eastman.

“I know him. You’re right—I’ll take him anytime. Who else?”

The last selection was Corporal Kevin North, from another squadron.

Martin had never operated with him, but North was a mountain specialist and highly recommended by his troop commander.

There were five areas of planning that had to be accomplished simultaneously. Martin divided up the tasks among them with himself in charge overall.

First came the selection of the aircraft to drop them. Without hesitation, Martin went for the C-130 Hercules, the habitual launch pad of the SAS, and there were then nine of them serving in the Gulf.

They were all based at nearby King Khaled International Airport. Even better news came with breakfast: Three of them were from the 47th Squadron, based at Lyneham in Wiltshire, a squadron that has years of experience liaising with the SAS freefallers.

Among the crew of one of the three Hercules was a certain Flight Lieutenant Glyn Morris.

Throughout the Gulf War, the Hercules transports had been part of the hub-and-spoke operation, shifting cargo that arrived at Riyadh to the outlying bases of the Royal Air Force at Tabuq, Muharraq, Dhahran, and even Seeb in Oman. Morris had been serving as loadmaster or cargo supervisor, but his real function on this planet was as a PJI, Parachute Jump Instructor, and Martin had jumped under his supervision before.

Contrary to the notion that the Paras and the SAS look after their own parachuting, all combat dropping in the British Armed Forces comes under the RAF, and the relationship is based on the mutual trust that each party knows exactly what it is doing. Air Commodore Ian Macfadyen, commanding the RAF in the Gulf, seconded the desired Hercules to the SAS mission the moment it arrived back from stores-dumping at Tabuq, and riggers began to convert it for the HALO

mission scheduled for the same night.

Chief among the conversion tasks was the construction of an oxygen console on the floor of the cargo bay. Flying mainly at low levels, the Hercules had till that point never needed oxygen in the rear to keep troops alive at high altitude. Flight Lieutenant Morris needed no training in what he was doing, and he brought in a second PJI from another Hercules, Flight Sergeant Sammy Dawlish. They worked throughout the day on the Hercules and had it ready by sundown.

The second priority was the parachutes themselves. At that point, the SAS had not dropped into Iraq from the skies—they had gone into the Iraqi deserts on wheels—but in the weeks preceding the actual war, training missions had been constant.

At the military air base there was a sealed and temperature-controlled safety equipment section, where the SAS had stored its parachutes.

Martin asked for and got an allocation of eight main chutes and eight reserves, although he and his men would only need four of each.

Sergeant Stephenson was allocated the task of checking and packing all eight throughout the day.

The chutes were no longer the circular type associated with the airborne units, but the newer design called “squares.” They are not really square but oblong and have two layers of fabric. In flight, air is ducted between the layers, forming a semirigid “wing” with an airfoil cross-section, enabling the freefaller to “fly” the chute down like a glider, with greater mobility to turn and maneuver. These are the type normally seen at freefalling displays.

The two corporals got the task of obtaining and checking all the remaining stores that would be needed. These included four sets of clothing, four big Bergen rucksacks, water bottles, helmets, belts, weapons, HVCs—the high-value concentrates, which would be all there was to eat—ammunition, first-aid kits ... the list went on and on.

Each man would be carrying eighty pounds in those Bergens and might need every ounce of them.

Fitters and mechanics worked on the Hercules itself in a designated hangar, overhauling the engines and servicing every moving part.

The squadron commander nominated his best aircrew, whose navigator accompanied Colonel Craig back to the Black Hole to select a suitable drop zone, the all-important DZ.

Martin himself was taken in hand by six technicians, four American and two British, and introduced to the gizmos he would have to operate to find the target, locate it to within a few square yards, and relay the information back to Riyadh.

When he had finished, his various devices were security-packed against accidental breakage and taken across to the hangar, where the mountain of gear for the four men grew and grew. For extra safety, there were two of each of the scientific devices, adding again to the weight the men would carry.

Martin himself went to join the planners in the Black Hole. They were bent over a large table strewn with fresh pictures taken by another TR-1 that morning just after dawn. The weather had been clear, and the photos showed every nook and crevice of the Jebal al Hamreen.

“We assume,” said Colonel Craig, “that this damn gun must be pointing south to southeast. The best observation point would therefore seem to be here.”

He indicated a series of crevices in the side of a mountain to the south of the presumed Fortress, the hill in the center of the group within the square kilometer that had been designated by the late Colonel Osman Badri.

“As for a DZ, there’s a small valley here, about forty kilometers south.

... You can see the water glinting in a wee stream running down the valley.”

Martin looked. It was a tiny depression in the hills, 500 yards long and about 100 wide, with grassy banks strewn with rocks, and the rill trickling its winter water along the bottom of the dip.

“It’s the best?” asked Martin.

Colonel Craig shrugged. “Frankly, it’s about all you’ve got. The next is seventy kilometers from the target. Get any closer, and they could see you land.”

On the map, in daylight, it would be a cinch; in pitch darkness, plunging through freezing air at 120 miles per hour, it would be easy to miss. There would be no lights to guide them, no flares on the ground. From blackness into blackness.

“I’ll take it,” he said. The RAF navigator straightened up.

“Right, I’ll get going.”

The navigator would have a busy afternoon. It would be his job to find the way without lights and across a moonless sky not to the drop zone but to a point in space from which, bearing in mind wind drift, four falling bodies could leave his aircraft to find that tiny valley. Even falling bodies drift downwind; his job would be to estimate how much.

It was not until the hour of dusk that all the men met again in the hangar, now banned to everyone else on the base. The Hercules stood ready, fueled. Beneath one wing was the mound of gear the four men would need. Dawlish, the RAF jump instructor, had repacked every one of the eight forty-eight-pound chutes as if he would be using them himself. Stephenson was satisfied.

In one corner was a large briefing table. Martin, who had brought enlarged photographs from the Black Hole with him, took Stephenson, Eastman, and North over to the table to work out their route from the DZ to those crevices where they intended to hole up and study the Fortress for however long it took. It looked like two nights of hard march, resting in place in the intervening day. There could be no question of marching in daylight, and the route could not be direct.

Finally each man packed his Bergen from the bottom up, the last item being the belt order, a heavy webbing belt with numerous pockets that would be unpacked after landing and worn round the waist.

American hamburgers and sodas were brought from the commissary at sundown, and the four men rested until takeoff. This was scheduled for 9:45, aiming for a drop at 11:30 P.M.

Martin always thought the waiting was worst; after the frantic activity of the day, it was like a long anticlimax. There was nothing to concentrate on but the tension, the constant nagging thought that,

despite all the checks and double-checks, something vital had been forgotten. It was the period when some men ate, or read, or wrote home, or dozed, or just went to the lavatory and emptied themselves.

At nine a tractor towed the Hercules out onto the apron, and the crew of pilot, copilot, navigator, and flight engineer began their engine run-up checks. Twenty minutes later, a black-windowed bus entered the hangar to take the men and their gear to the drop plane, waiting with rear doors open and ramp down.

The two PJIs were ready for them, with the loadmaster and chute rigger. Only seven walked up the ramp on foot and into the vast cavern of the Here. The ramp came up, and the doors closed. The rigger had gone back to the bus; he would not fly with them.

With the PJIs and the loadmaster, the four soldiers strapped themselves to the seats along the wall and waited. At 9:44 P.M. the Hercules lifted off from Riyadh and turned her blunt nose to the north.

While the RAF plane rose into the night sky on February 21, an American helicopter was asked to stay to one side before coming in to settle close to the American sector of the air base.

It had been sent to Al Kharz to pick up two men. Steve Turner, the squadron commander of the 336th Tactical Fighter Squadron, had been summoned to Riyadh on the orders of General Buster Glosson. With him, as ordered, he brought the man he considered his best pilot for low-level ground-attack sorties.

Neither the CO of the Rocketeers nor Captain Don Walker had the faintest idea why they were wanted. In a small briefing room below CENTAF headquarters an hour later, they were told why, and what was needed. They were also told that no one else, with the sole exception of Walker’s weapons systems officer, the man flying in the seat behind him, was allowed to know the full details.

Then they were helicoptered back to their base.

After takeoff the four soldiers could unbuckle and move around the hull of the aircraft by the dim red lights overhead. Martin went forward, up the ladder to the flight deck, and sat for a while with the crew.

They flew at 10,000 feet toward the Iraqi border, then began to climb.

At 25,000 feet the Hercules leveled off and crossed into Iraq, seemingly alone in the starlit sky.

In fact it was not alone. Over the Gulf an AWACS had orders to keep a constant eye on the sky around and below them. If any Iraqi radar screen, for some unknown reason not already totaled by the Allied air forces, chose to “illuminate,” it was to be immediately attacked. To this end, two flights of Wild Weasels with antiradar HARM missiles were below them.

In case some Iraqi fighter pilot chose to take to the sky that night, a flight of RAF Jaguars was above and to the left of them, a flight of F-15C Eagles to the right. The Hercules was flying in a protective box of lethal technology. No other pilot in the sky that night knew why. They just had their orders.

In fact, if anyone in Iraq saw any blip on the radar that night, it was assumed the cargo plane was just heading north to Turkey.

The loadmaster did his all to make his guests comfortable with tea, coffee, soft drinks, and crackers.

Forty minutes before Release Point, the navigator flashed a warning light indicating P-minus-forty, and the last preparations began.

The four soldiers put on their main and reserve parachutes, the former across the breadth of the shoulders, the latter lower down the back.

Then came the Bergens, hung upside down on the back beneath the chutes, with the point between the legs. Weapons—a silenced Heckler and Koch MP5 SD submachine gun—were clipped down the left side, and the personal oxygen tank hooked across the belly.

Finally they put on their helmets and oxygen masks before connecting the latter to the center console, a frame structure the size of a large dining table crammed with bottles of oxygen. When everyone was breathing and comfortable, the pilot was informed and began to bleed the air and pressure level inside the hull out into the night until both had equalized.

It took almost twenty minutes. Then they sat again, waiting. Fifteen minutes before Release Point, a further message came from the flight deck into the ears of the loadmaster. He told the PJIs to gesture to the soldiers to switch from main console oxygen to their own personal minibottles. Each of these had a thirty-minute supply, and they would need three to four minutes of that for the drop itself.

At that point only the navigator on the flight deck knew exactly where he was; the SAS team had total confidence that they would be dropped in the right place.

By now the loadmaster was in contact with the soldiers by a constant stream of hand signals, which ended when he pointed both hands at the lights above the console. Into the loadmaster’s ears came a stream of instructions from the navigator.

The men rose and started to move, slowly, like spacemen weighed down by their gear, toward the ramp. The PJIs, also on mobile oxygen bottles, went with them. The SAS men stood in a line in front of the still-closed tailgate door, each checking the equipment in front of him.

At P-minus-four the tailgate came down, and they stared out into 25,000 feet of rushing black air. Another hand signal—two fingers raised by the PJI—told them they were at P-minus-two. The men shuffled to the very edge of the ramp and looked at the lights (unilluminated) on each side of the gaping aperture. The lights went red, goggles were drawn down. The lights went green. ...

All four men turned on one heel, facing into the cavern, and jumped backward, arms apart, faces down. The sill of the ramp flashed beneath their masks, and the Hercules was gone.

Sergeant Stephenson led the way.

Stabilizing their fall position, they dropped through the night sky for five miles without a sound. At 3,500 feet automatic pressure-operated releases jerked open the parachute packs, and the fabric exploded out.

In second position, Mike Martin saw the shadow fifty feet beneath him appear to stop moving. In the same second he felt the vibration of his own main chute opening, then the “square” took the strain and he slowed from 120 miles per hour to fourteen, with hesitators taking up some of the shock.

At one thousand feet each man undid the snap-locks that held his Bergen to his backside and cinched the load down his legs, there to hook onto his feet. The Bergens would remain there all the way down, being released only a hundred feet above the ground, to hang at the full extent of the fourteen-foot nylon retaining line.

The sergeant’s parachute was moving away to Martin’s right, so he followed. The sky was clear, the stars visible, black shapes of mountains rushed upward on all sides. Then Martin saw what the sergeant had seen: the glitter of water in the stream running through the valley.

Peter Stephenson went down right in the center of the zone, a few yards from the edge of the stream, on soft grass and moss. Martin dropped his Bergen on its line, swerved, stopped in the air, felt the

Bergen hit the ground beneath him, and settled gently onto both feet.

Corporal Eastman swept past and above him, turned, glided back in, and dropped fifty yards way. Martin was unbuckling his chute harness and did not see Kevin North land at all.

In fact, the mountaineer was the fourth and last in the line, descending a hundred yards away but onto the slope of the hill rather than the grassland. He was trying to close up to his colleagues, hauling down on his static lines, when the Bergen beneath him hit the hill. As it touched the ground, the Bergen was dragged sideways by the drifting man above, to whose waist it was attached. It bumped along the hillside for five yards, then snagged between two rocks.

The sudden yank on the lanyard pulled North down and sideways so that he landed not on his feet but on his side.

There were not many rocks on that hillside, but one of them smashed his left femur in eight places.

The corporal felt the bone shatter with complete clarity, but the jar was so severe, it numbed the pain for a few seconds. Then it came in waves. He rolled over and clutched his thigh with two hands, whispering over and over, No, no, please God, no.

Though he did not realize it because it happened inside the leg, he began to bleed. One of the shards of bone in the multiple fracture had sliced clean through the femoral artery, which began to pump out his life-blood into the mess of his thigh.

The other three found him a minute later. They had all unhitched their billowing chutes and Bergens, convinced he would be doing the same.

When they realized he was not with them, they came to look.

Stephenson brought out his penlight and shone it on the leg.

“Oh, shit,” he whispered. They had first-aid kits, even shell dressings, but nothing to cope with this. The corporal needed trauma therapy,

plasma, major surgery—and fast. Stephenson ran back to North’s Bergen, ripped out a first-aid kit, and began to prepare a jab of morphine. There was no need. With the blood, the pain was fading.

North opened his eyes, focused on the face of Mike Martin above him, whispered “I’m sorry, boss,” and closed his eyes again. Two minutes later he was gone.

At another time, and in another place, Martin might have been able to vent some sign of what he felt at losing a man like North, operating under his command. There was no time; this was not the place. The two remaining NCOs recognized this and went about what they had to do in grim silence. Grief could come later.

Martin had hoped to bundle up the spilled parachutes and clear the valley before finding a rocky crevasse to bury the surplus gear. Now that was impossible. He had North’s body to cope with.

“Pete, start getting together everything we bury. Find a hollow scrape somewhere, or make one. Ben, start collecting rocks.”

Martin bent over the body, removed the dog tags and machine pistol, then went to help Eastman. Together, with knives and hands, the three men scraped a hollow in the springy turf and laid the body in it. There was more to pile on top: four opened main parachutes, four still-packed reserves, four oxygen bottles, lanyards, webbing.

Then they began to pile rocks on top, not in a neat shape like a cairn, which would have been spotted, but in a random way, as if the rocks had tumbled from the mountainside. Water was brought from the brook to sluice the rock and the grass of its red stains. Bare patches where the rocks they were using had stood were scuffed with feet, and fragments of moss from the water’s edge were stamped into them. The valley had to be made to look as much as possible as it had an hour before midnight.

They had hoped to put in five hours of marching before dawn, but the job took them over three. Some of the contents of North’s Bergen stayed inside and were buried with him: his clothes, food, and water.

Other items they had to divide between them, making their own loads even heavier.

An hour before dawn, they left the valley and went into SOP—standing operating procedure. Sergeant Stephenson took the role of lead scout, moving up ahead of the other two, dropping to the ground before cresting a ridge to peer over the top in case there was a nasty surprise on the other side.

The route lay upward, and he set a grueling pace. Although a small and wiry man, and five years older than Martin, he could march most men clean off their feet and carry an eighty-pound load while he did it.

Clouds came over the mountains just when Martin needed them, delaying the dawn and giving him an extra hour. In ninety minutes of hard march they covered eight miles, putting several ridges and two hills between them and the valley. Finally the advance of the gray light forced them to look for a place to conceal themselves.

Martin chose a horizontal crack in the rocks under an overhang, screened by sere grass and just above a dry wadi. In the last of the darkness they ate some rations, sipped water, covered themselves with scrim netting, and lay down to sleep. There were three duty watches, and Martin took the first.

He nudged Stephenson awake at eleven A.M. and slept while the sergeant stood guard. It was at four P.M. that Ben Eastman poked Martin in the ribs with a rigid finger. As the major’s eyes opened, he saw Eastman with his forefinger to his lips. Martin listened. From the wadi ten feet beneath their ledge came the guttural sounds of voices in Arabic.

Sergeant Stephenson came awake and raised an eyebrow. What do we do now? Martin listened for a while. There were four of them, on patrol, bored with their task of endlessly marching through the mountains, and tired. Within ten minutes he knew they intended to camp there for the night.

He had lost enough time already. He needed to move by six, when darkness would fall over the hills, and he needed every hour to cover the miles to those crevices in the hill across the valley from the Fortress. He might need more time to search for those crevices and find them.

The conversation from the wadi below indicated that the Iraqis were going to search for wood for a campfire. They would be certain to cast an eye on the bushes behind which the SAS men lay. Even if they did not, it might be hours before they would sleep deeply enough for Martin’s patrol to slip past them and get away. There was no choice.

At a signal from Martin, the other two eased out their flat, double-edged knives, and the three men slid over the scree into the wadi below.

When the job was over, Martin flicked through the dead Iraqis’

paybooks. All of them, he noticed, had the patronymic Al-Ubaidi.

They were all of the Ubaidi tribe, mountain men who came from these parts. All wore the insignia of the Republican Guard. Clearly the Guard had been culled from these mountain fighters to form the patrols whose job was to keep the Fortress safe from intruders. He noted they were lean, spare men, without an ounce of fat on them, and probably tireless in hill country like this.

It still cost an hour to drag the four bodies into the crevice, cut apart their camouflaged tent to form a tarpaulin, and decorate the tarp with bushes, weeds, and grass. But when they were finished, it would have taken an extremely sharp eye to spot the hiding place beneath the overhang. Fortunately, the Iraqi patrol had had no radio, so they would probably not check in with their base until they arrived back—whenever that might be. Now, they would never get back, but with luck it would be two days before they were missed.

As darkness set in, the SAS men marched on, trying by the starlight to recall the shapes of the mountains in the photographs, following the compass heading toward the mountain they sought.

The map Martin carried was a brilliant confection, drawn by a computer on the basis of the aerial photos by the TR-1 and showing the route between the DZ and the intended lying-up position. Pausing at intervals to consult his hand-held SATNAV positioner and study the map by penlight, Martin could check their direction and progress. By midnight, both were good. He estimated a further ten miles to march.

In the Brecons in Wales, Martin and his men could have kept up four miles an hour over this kind of terrain, a brisk walk on a flat surface for those taking their dogs for an evening stroll without an eighty-pound rucksack. Marching at that rate was quite normal. But in these hostile hills, with the possibility of patrols all around them, progress had to be slower. They had had one brush with the Iraqis, and a second would be too many.

An advantage they had over the Iraqis was their NVGs, the night-vision goggles they wore like frogs’ eyes on stalks. With the new wide-angle version they could see the countryside ahead of them in a pale green glow, for the job of the image-intensifiers was to gather every scrap of natural light in the environment and concentrate it into the viewer’s retina.

Two hours before dawn, they saw the bulk of the Fortress in front of them and began to climb the slope to their left. The mountain they had chosen was on the southern fringe of the square kilometer provided by Jericho, and from the crevices near the summit they should be able to look across at the southern face of the Fortress—if indeed it was the Fortress—at an almost equal height to its peak.

They climbed hard for an hour, their breath coming in rasping gasps.

Sergeant Stephenson in the lead cut into a tiny goat track that led upward and around the curve of the mountain. Just short of the summit, they found the crevice the TR-1 had seen on its down-and-sideways camera. It was better than Martin could have hoped—a natural crack in the rock eight feet long, four feet deep, and two feet high. Outside the crack was a ledge two feet across, on which Martin’s torso could lie with his lower body and feet inside the rocks.

The men brought out their scrim netting and began to make their niche invisible to watching eyes.

Food and water were stuffed into the pouches of the belt orders, Martin’s technical equipment laid ready to hand, weapons checked and set close by. Just before the sun rose, Martin used one of his devices.

It was a transmitter, much smaller than the one he had had in Baghdad, barely the size of two cigarette packs. It was linked to a cadmium-nickel battery with enough power to give him more talking time than he would ever need.

The frequency was fixed, and at the other end there was a listening watch for twenty-four hours a day. To attract attention he only had to press the transmit button in an agreed sequence of blips and pauses, then wait for the speaker to respond with the answering sequence.

The third component of the set was a dish aerial, a fold-away like the one in Baghdad but smaller. Though he was now farther north than the Iraqi capital, he was also much higher.

Martin set up the dish, pointing toward the south, linked the battery to the set and the set to the aerial, then pressed the transmit button. One-two-three-four-five; pause; one-two-three; pause; one; pause; one.

Five seconds later, the radio in his hand squawked softly. Four blips, four blips, two.

He pressed transmit, kept the thumb down, and said into the speaker:

“Come Nineveh, come Tyre. I say again, Come Nineveh, come Tyre.”

He released the transmit button and waited. The set gave an excited one-two-three; pause; one; pause; four. Received and acknowledged.

Martin put the set away in its waterproof cover, took his powerful field glasses, and eased his torso onto the ledge. Behind him Sergeant Stephenson and Corporal Eastman were sandwiched like embryos into the crevice under the rock, but apparently quite comfortable. Two twigs held up the netting in front of him, giving a slit through which he slid the binoculars, for which a bird-watcher would have given his right arm.

As the sun seeped into the mountains of Hamreen on the morning of February 23, Major Martin began to study the masterpiece of his old school friend Osman Badri—the Qa’ala that no machine could see.

In Riyadh, Steve Laing and Simon Paxman stared at the sheet handed them by the engineer who had come running out of the radio shack.

“Bloody hell,” said Laing with feeling. “He’s there—he’s on the frigging mountain!”

Twenty minutes later, the news reached Al Kharz from General Glosson’s office.

Captain Don Walker had returned to his base in the small hours of the twenty-second, grabbed some sleep in what was left of the night, and begun work just after sunrise, when the pilots who had flown missions during the night were completing their debriefing and shuffling off to bed.

By midday, he had a plan to present to his superior officers. It was sent at once to Riyadh and approved. During the afternoon the appropriate aircraft, crew, and support services were allocated.

What was planned was a four-ship raid on an Iraqi air base well north of Baghdad called Tikrit East, not far from the birthplace of Saddam Hussein. It would be a night raid with two-thousand-pound laser-guided bombs. Don Walker would lead it, with his usual wingman and another element of two Eagles.

Miraculously the mission appeared on the Air Tasking Order from Riyadh, although it had only been devised twelve hours and not three days earlier.

The other three needed crews were at once taken off any other tasking and assigned to the Tikrit East mission, slated for the night of the twenty-second (maybe) or any other night they were ordered. Until then, they were on permanent one-hour standby.

The four Strike Eagles were prepared by sundown of the twenty-second, and at ten P.M. the mission was canceled. No other mission was substituted. The eight aircrew were told to rest, while the remainder of the squadron went tank-zapping among the Republican Guard units north of Kuwait.

When they returned in the dawn of the twenty-third, the four idle aircrew came in for their turn of ribbing.

With the mission planning staff, a route was worked out for Tikrit East that would take the four Eagles up the corridor between Baghdad and the Iranian border to the east, with a turn of course through forty-five degrees over Lake As Sa’diyah and then straight on, northwest to Tikrit.

As he sipped his breakfast coffee in the mess hall, Don Walker was summoned outside by his squadron commander.

“Your target marker is in place,” he was told. “Get some rest. It could be a rough night.”

By the rising sun, Mike Martin began to study the mountain across the steep valley. On full magnification his glasses could pick out individual bushes; pulling the focus back, he could see an area any size he wanted.

For the first hour it looked like just a mountain. The grass grew, as on all the others. There were stunted shrubs and bushes, as on all the rest.

Here and there a patch of bare rock, occasionally a small boulder, clung to the slopes. like all the other hills within his vision, it was of an irregular shape. There seemed nothing out of place.

From time to time he squeezed his eyes tightly to rest them, pillowed his head on his forearms for a while, and started again.

By midmorning, a pattern began to emerge. On certain parts of the mountain the grass appeared to grow in a manner different from that on other parts. There were areas where the vegetation seemed too regular, as if in lines. But there was no door, unless it was on the other side, no road, no track with tire marks, no standpipe venting foul air from inside, no mark of present or previous excavation. It was the moving sun that gave the first clue.

Shortly after eleven, he thought he caught a glint of something in the grass. He brought the glasses back to that patch and went to full magnification. The sun went behind a cloud. When it came out, the glint flashed again. Then he saw the source: a fragment of wire in the grass.

He blinked and tried again. Slantwise, it was a length of wire a foot long in the grass. It was part of a longer strand, green plastic-covered wire, of which a small part had been abraded to reveal the metal beneath.

The wire was one of several he glimpsed, all buried in the grass, occasionally revealed as the wind blew the stems from side to side.

Diagonals in the opposite direction, a patch of chain-link wire, underneath the grass.

By midday, he could see it better. A section of mountainside where green wire mesh held the soil to a surface below the earth; the grass and shrubs planted in every diamond-shaped gap between the fencing, growing through the gaps, covering the wire beneath.

Then he saw the terracing. One part of the mountainside was made up of blocks, presumably concrete, each set back three inches from the one below it. Along the horizontal terraces thus created were runnels of earth out of which the shrubs grew. Where they sprouted, they were in horizontal lines. At first it did not look so, because they were of different heights, but when he studied their stems only, it became clear they were indeed in lines. Nature does not grow in lines.

He tried other parts of the mountain, but the pattern ended, then began again farther to his left. It was in the early afternoon that he solved it.

The analysts in Riyadh had been right—up to a point. Had anyone attempted to gouge out the whole center of the hill, it would have fallen in. Whoever had done this must have taken three existing hills, cut away the inner faces, and built up the gaps between the peaks to create a gigantic crater.

In filling the gaps, the builder had followed the contours of the real hills, stepping his rows of concrete blocks backward and upward, creating the miniterraces, pouring tens of thousands of tons of topsoil down from the top.

The cladding must have come later: sheets of green vinyl-coated chain-link wire presumably stapled to the concrete beneath, holding the earth to the slopes. Then the grass seed, sprayed onto the earth, there to root and spread, with bushes and shrubs sown into deeper bowls left in the concrete terraces.

The grass from the previous summer had matted, creating its own bonding network of roots, and the shrubs had sprouted up through the wire and the grass to match the undergrowth on the original hills.

Above the crater, the roof of the fortress was surely a geodesic dome, so cast that it too contained thousands of pockets where grass could grow. There were even artificial boulders, painted the gray of real rocks, with streaks where the rain had run off.

Martin began to concentrate on the area near the point where the rim of the crater would have been before the construction of the rotunda.

It was about fifty feet below the summit of the dome that he found what he sought. He had already swept his glasses across the slight protuberance fifty times and had not noticed.

It was a rocky outcrop, faded gray, but two black lines ran across it from side to side. The more he studied the lines, the more he wondered why anyone would have clambered so high to draw two lines across a boulder.

A squall of wind came from the northeast, ruffling the scrim netting around his face. The same wind caused one of the lines to move. When the wind dropped, the line ceased to move. Then Martin realized they were not drawn lines but steel wires, running across the rock and away into the grass.

Smaller boulders stood around the perimeter of the large one, like sentries in a ring. Why so circular, why steel wires? Supposing someone, down below, jerked hard on those wires—would the boulder move?

At half past three he realized it was not a boulder. It was a gray tarpaulin, weighted down by a circle of rocks, to be twitched to one side when the wires were jerked downward into the cavern beneath.

Under the tarp he gradually made out a shape, circular, five feet in diameter. He was staring at a canvas sheet, beneath which, invisible to him, the last three feet of the Babylon gun projected, from its breech two hundred yards inside the crater up into the sky. It was pointing south-southeast toward Dhahran, 750 kilometers away.

“Rangefinder,” he muttered to the men behind him. He passed back the binoculars and took the implement offered to him. It was like a telescope.

When he held it to his eye, as they had shown him in Riyadh, he saw the mountain and the tarp that hid the gun, but not with any magnification.

On the prism were four V-shaped chevrons, the points all directed inward. Slowly he rotated the knurled knob on the side of the scope until all four points touched each other to form a cross. The cross rested on the tarpaulin.

Taking the scope from his eye, he consulted the numbers on the rotating band. One thousand and eighty yards.

“Compass,” he said. He pushed the rangefinder behind him and took the electronic compass. This was no device dependent on a dish swimming in a bowl of alcohol, nor even a pointer balanced on a gimbal. He held it to his eye, sighted the tarpaulin across the valley, and pressed the button. The compass did the rest, giving him a bearing from his own position to the tarpaulin of 348 degrees, ten minutes, and eighteen seconds.

The SATNAV positioner gave him the last thing he needed—his own exact location on the planet’s surface, to the nearest square fifteen yards by fifteen.

It was a clumsy business trying to erect the satellite dish in the confined space, and it took ten minutes. When he called Riyadh, the response was immediate. Slowly Martin read to the listeners in the Saudi capital three sets of figures: his own exact position, the compass direction from himself to the target, and the range. Riyadh could work out the rest and give the pilot his coordinates.

Martin crawled back into the crevice, to be replaced by Stephenson, who would keep an eye open for Iraqi patrols, and tried to sleep.

At half-past eight, in complete darkness, Martin tested the infrared target marker. In shape it was like a large flash lamp with a pistol-grip, but it had an eyepiece in back.

He linked it to its battery, aimed it at the Fortress, and looked. The whole mountain was as clearly lit as if bathed in a great green moon.

He swung the barrel of the image intensifier up to the tarpaulin that masked the barrel of the Babylon and squeezed the pistol-trigger.

A single, invisible beam of infrared light raced across the valley, and he saw a small red dot appear on the mountainside. Moving the night-sight, he settled the red dot on the tarpaulin and kept it there for half a minute. Satisfied, he switched it off and crawled back beneath the netting.

The four Strike Eagles took off from Al Kharz at ten forty-five P.M. and climbed to twenty thousand feet. For three of the crews, it was a routine mission to hit an Iraqi air base. Each Eagle carried two two-thousand-pound laser-guided bombs, in addition to their self-defense air-to-air missiles.

Refueling from their designated KC-10 tanker just south of the Iraqi border was normal and uneventful. When they were topped up, they turned away in loose formation, and the flight, coded Bluejay, set course almost due north, passing over the Iraqi town of As-Samawah at 11:14.

They flew in radio silence as always and without lights, each wizzo able to see the other three aircraft clearly on his radar. The night was clear, and the AWACS over the Gulf had given them a “picture clear”

advice, meaning no Iraqi fighters were up.

At 11:39, Don Walker’s wizzo muttered:

“Turning point in five.”

They all heard it and understood they would be turning over Lake As Sa’diyah in five minutes.

Just as they went into the forty-five-degree turn to port, to set the new heading for Tikrit East, the other three aircrew heard Don Walker say quite clearly:

“Bluejay Flight Leader has ... engine problems. I’m going to RTB.

Bluejay Three, take over.”

Bluejay Three was Bull Baker that night, leader of the other two-plane element. From that transmission onward, things began to go wrong, in a very weird manner.

Walker’s wingman Randy “R-2” Roberts closed up with his leader but could see no apparent trouble from Walker’s engines, yet the Bluejay leader was losing power and height. If he was going to RTB—return to base—it would be normal for his wingman to stay with him, unless the problem was minimal. Engine trouble far over enemy territory is not minimal.

“Roger that,” acknowledged Baker. Then they heard Walker say:

“Bluejay Two, rejoin Bluejay Three, I say again, rejoin. That is an order. Proceed to Tikrit East.”

The wingman, now baffled, did as he was ordered and climbed back to rejoin the remainder of Bluejay. Their commander continued to lose height over the lake; they could see him on their radars.

At the same moment they realized he had done the unthinkable. For some reason—confusion caused by the engine problem, perhaps—he had spoken not on the Have-quick coded radio, but “in clear.” More amazingly, he had actually mentioned their destination.

Out over the Gulf, a young USAF sergeant manning part of the battery of consoles in the hull of the AWACS plane summoned his mission commander in perplexity.

“We have a problem, sir. Bluejay Leader has engine trouble. He wants to RTB.”

“Right, noted,” said the mission commander. In most airplanes the pilot is the captain and in complete charge. In an AWACS the pilot has that charge for the safety of the airplane, but the mission commander calls the shots when it comes to giving orders across the air.

“But sir,” protested the sergeant, “Bluejay Leader spoke in clear. Gave the mission target. Shall I RTB them all?”

“Negative, mission continues,” said the controller. “Carry on.”

The sergeant returned to his console completely bewildered. This was madness: If the Iraqis had heard that transmission, their air defenses at Tikrit East would be on full alert.

Then he heard Walker again.

“Bluejay Leader, Mayday, Mayday. Both engines out. Ejecting.”

He was still speaking in clear. The Iraqis, if they were listening, could have heard it all.

In fact, the sergeant was right—the messages had been heard. At Tikrit

East the gunners were hauling their tarpaulins off their triple-A, and the heat-seeking missiles were waiting for the sound of incoming engines. Other units were being alerted to go at once to the area of the lake to search for two downed aircrew.

“Sir, Bluejay Leader is down. We have to RTB the rest of them.”

“Noted. Negative,” said the mission commander. He glanced at his watch. He had his orders. He did not know why, but he would obey them.

Bluejay Flight was by then nine minutes from target, heading into a reception committee. The three pilots rode their Eagles in stony silence.

In the AWACS the sergeant could still see the blip of Bluejay Leader, way down over the surface of the lake. Clearly the Eagle had been abandoned and would crash at any moment.

Four minutes later, the mission commander appeared to change his mind.

“Bluejay Flight, AWACS to Bluejay Flight, RTB, I say again RTB.”

The three Strike Eagles, despondent at the night’s events, peeled away from their course and set heading for home. The Iraqi gunners at Tikrit East, deprived of radar, waited in vain for another hour.

In the southern fringes of the Jebal al Hamreen another Iraqi listening post had heard the interchange. The signals colonel in charge was not tasked with alerting Tikrit East or any other air base to approaching enemy aircraft. His sole job was to ensure none entered the Jebal.

As Bluejay Flight turned over the lake, he had gone to amber alert; the track from the lake to the air base would have taken the Eagles along the southern fringe of the range. When one of them crashed, he was delighted; when the other three peeled away to the south, he was relieved. He stood his alert down.

Don Walker had spiraled down to the surface of the lake until he levelled at one hundred feet and made his Mayday call. As he skimmed the waters of As Sa’diyah, he punched in his new coordinates and turned north into the Jebal. At the same time he went to LANTIRN, with whose aid he could look through his canopy and see the landscape ahead of him, clearly lit by the infrared beam being emitted from beneath his wing.

Columns of information on his Head-Up Display were now giving him course and speed, height, and time to Launch Point.

He could have gone to automatic pilot, allowing the computer to fly the Eagle, throwing it down the canyons and the valleys, past the cliffs and hillsides, while the pilot kept his hands on his thighs. But he preferred to stay on manual and fly it himself.

With the aid of recon photos supplied by the Black Hole, he had plotted a course up through the range that never let him come above the skyline. He stayed low, hugging the valley floors, swerving from gap to gap, a roller-coaster zigzag course that carried him upward into the range toward the Fortress.

When Walker made his Mayday call, Mike Martin’s radio had squawked out a series of preagreed blips. Martin had crawled forward to the ledge above the valley, aimed the infrared target marker at the tarpaulin a thousand yards away, settled the red dot onto the dead center of the target, and now kept it there.

The blips on the radio had meant “seven minutes to bomb launch,” and from then on Martin was not to move the red spot by an inch.

“About time,” muttered Eastman. “I’m bloody freezing in here.”

“Not long,” said Stephenson, cramming the last bits and pieces into his Bergen. “Then you’ll have all the running you want, Benny.”

Only the radio remained unpacked, ready for its next transmission.

In the rear seat of the Eagle, Tim, the wizzo, could see the same information as his pilot. Four minutes to launch, three-thirty, three ...

the figures on the HUD counted down as the Eagle screamed through the mountains to its target. It flashed over the small dip where Martin and his men had landed, and took seconds to cover the terrain across which they had labored beneath their packs. “Ninety seconds to launch

...”

The SAS men heard the sound of the engines coming from the south as the Eagle began its loft.

The fighter-bomber came over the last ridge three miles south of the target, just as the countdown hit zero. In the darkness the two torpedo-shaped bombs left their pylons beneath the wings and climbed for a few seconds, driven by their own inertia.

In the three dummy villages the Republican Guards were drowned in the roar of the jet engines erupting from nowhere over their heads, jumped from their bunks, and ran to their weapons. In a few seconds the roofs of the forage barns were lifting away on their hydraulic jacks to expose the missiles beneath.

The two bombs felt the tug of gravity and began to fall. In their noses, infrared seekers sniffed for the guiding beam, the upturned bucket of invisible rays bouncing back from the red spot on their target, the bucket which, once entered, they could never leave.

Mike Martin lay prone, waiting, buffeted by engine noise as the mountains trembled, and held the red dot steady on the Babylon gun.

He never saw the bombs. One second he was gazing at a pale green mountain in the light of the image intensifier; the next, he had to pull his eyes away and shield them as night turned into blood-red day.

The two bombs impacted simultaneously, three seconds before the Guard colonel deep below the hollow mountain reached for his Launch lever. He never made it.

Looking across the valley without the night-sight, Martin saw the entire top of the Fortress erupt in flame. By its glare, he caught the fleeting image of a massive barrel, rearing like a stricken beast, twisting and turning in the blast, breaking, and crashing back with the fragments of the dome into the crater beneath.

“Bloody hellfire,” whispered Sergeant Stephenson at his elbow. It was not a bad analogy. Orange fire began to glow down in the crater as the first explosion flashes died away and a dim half-light returned to the mountains. Martin began keying in his alert codes for the listeners in Riyadh.

Don Walker had rolled the Eagle after the bomb launch, pulling 135 degrees of bank, hauling down and through to find and pursue a reciprocal heading back to the south. But because he was not over flat land and mountains rose all around him, he had to gain more altitude than normal or risk clipping one of the peaks.

It was the village farthest away from the Fortress that got the best shot.

For a fraction of a second he was above them, on one wingtip, pulling around to the south, when the two missiles were launched. These were not Russian SAMs but the best Iraq had—Franco-German Rolands.

The first was low, racing after the Eagle as it dropped out of sight across the mountains. The Roland failed to clear the ridge. The second skimmed the rocks of the peak and caught up with the fighter in the next valley. Walker felt the tremendous shock as the missile impacted into the body of his aircraft, destroying and almost ripping out the starboard engine. The Eagle was thrown across the sky, its delicate systems in disarray, flaming fuel forming a comet’s tail behind it.

Walker tested the controls, a soggy pudding where once there had been firm response. It was over, his airplane was dying underneath him, all his fire-warning lights were on, and thirty tons of burning metal were about to fall out of the sky.

“Eject, eject ...”

The canopy automatically shattered a microsecond before the two ejector seats came through, shooting upward into the night, turning, stabilizing. Their sensors knew at once that they were too low and blew apart the straps retaining the pilot into his seat, throwing him clear of the falling metal so that his parachute could open.

Walker had never bailed out before. The sense of shock numbed him for a while, robbed him of the power of decision. Fortunately the manufacturers had thought of that. As the heavy metal seat fell away, the parachute snapped itself open and unfurled. Dazed, Walker found himself in pitch darkness, swinging in his harness over a valley he could not see.

It was not a long drop—he had been far too low for that. In seconds the ground came up and hit him, and he was knocked over, tumbling, rolling, hands frantically scrabbling for the harness-release catch. Then the parachute was gone, blowing away down the valley, and he was on his back on wiry turf. He got up.

“Tim,” he called. “Tim, you okay?” He began to run up the valley floor, looking for another chute, certain they had both landed in the same area.

He was right in that. Both airmen had fallen two valleys to the south of their target. In the sky to the north he could make out a dim reddish glow.

After three minutes he crashed into something and banged his knee.

He thought it was a rock, but in the dim light he saw it was one of the ejector seats. His, perhaps. Tim’s? He went on looking.

Walker found his wizzo. The young man had ejected perfectly, but the missile blast had wrecked the seat-separation unit on his ejector. He had landed on the mountainside locked into the seat, his parachute still tucked beneath him. The impact of the crash had torn the body from the seat at last, but no man survives a shock like that.

Tim Nathanson lay on his back in the valley, a tangle of broken limbs, his face masked by his helmet and visor. Walker tore away the mask, removed the dog tags, turned away from the glow in the mountains, and began to run, tears streaming down his face.

He ran until he could run no more, then found a crevice in the mountain and crawled in to rest.

Two minutes after the explosions in the Fortress, Martin had his contact with Riyadh. He sent his series of blips and then his message.

It was:

“Now Barrabas, I say again, Now Barrabas.”

The three SAS men closed down the radio, packed it, hitched their Bergens onto their backs, and began to get off the mountain—fast.

There would be patrols now as never before, looking not for them—it was unlikely the Iraqis would work out for some time how the bombing raid had been so accurate—but for the downed American aircrew.

Sergeant Stephenson had taken a bearing on the flaming jet as it passed over their heads, and the direction it had fallen. Assuming it had careered on for a while after the ejections, the aircrew, had they survived, ought to be somewhere along that heading. The SAS men moved fast, just ahead of the Ubaidi tribesmen of the Guard, who were then pouring out of their villages and heading upward into the range.

Twenty minutes later, Mike Martin and the two other SAS men found the body of the dead weapons systems officer. There was nothing they could do, so they moved on.

Ten minutes afterward, they heard behind them the continuous rattle of small-arms fire. It continued for some time. The Al-Ubaidi had found the body too and in their rage had emptied their magazines into it. The gesture also gave their position away. The SAS men pressed on.

Don Walker hardly felt the blade of Sergeant Stephenson’s knife against his throat. It was light as a thread of silk on the gullet. But he looked up and saw the figure of a man standing over him. He was dark and lean; there was a gun in his right hand pointing at Walker’s chest; and the man wore the uniform of a captain in the Iraqi Republican Guard, Mountain Division. Then the man spoke:

“Bloody silly time to drop in for tea. Shall we just get the hell out of here?”

That night General Norman Schwarzkopf was sitting alone in his suite on the fourth floor of the Saudi Defense Ministry building.

It was not where he had spent much of the past seven months; most of that time he had been out visiting as many combat units as he could, or down in the subbasement with his staff and planners. But the large and comfortable office was where he went when he wanted to be alone.

That night he sat at his desk, adorned by the red telephone that linked him in a top-security net to Washington, and waited.

At ten minutes before one on the morning of February 24, the other phone rang.

“General Schwarzkopf?” It was a British accent.

“Yes. This is he.”

“I have a message for you, sir.”

“Shoot.”

“It is: ‘Now Barrabas,’ sir. ‘Now Barrabas.’ ”

“Thank you,” said the Commander-in-Chief, and replaced the receiver.

At 0400 hours that day, the ground invasion went in.

Chapter 23

The three SAS men marched hard through the rest of the night. They set a pace onward and upward that left Don Walker, who carried no rucksack and thought he was in good physical shape, exhausted and gasping for breath.

Sometimes he would drop to his knees, aware that he could go no farther, that even death would be preferable to the endless pain in every muscle. When that happened, he would feel two steely hands, one under each armpit, and hear the Cockney voice of Sergeant Stephenson in his ear:

“Come on, mate. Only a little farther. See that ridge? We’ll probably rest on the other side of it.”

But they never did. Instead of heading south to the foothills of the Jebal al Hamreen, where he figured they would have met a screen of Republican Guards with vehicles, Mike Martin headed east into the high hills running to the Iranian border. It was a tack that forced the patrols of the Al-Ubaidi mountain men to come after them.

Just after dawn, looking back and down, Martin saw a group of six of them, fitter than the rest, still climbing and closing. When the

Republican Guards reached the next crest, they found one of their quarry sitting slumped on the ground, facing away from them.

Dropping behind the rocks, the tribesmen opened up, riddling the foreigner through the back. The corpse toppled over. The six men in the Guard patrol broke cover and ran forward.

Too late, they saw that the body was a Bergen rucksack, draped with a camouflaged smock, topped by Walker’s flying helmet. Three silenced Heckler and Koch MP5s cut them down as they stood around the

“body.”

Above the town of Khanaqin, Martin finally called a halt and made a transmission to Riyadh. Stephenson and Eastman kept watch, facing west, from where any pursuing patrols must come.

Martin simply told Riyadh that there were three SAS men left and they had a single American flier with them. In case the message was intercepted, he did not give their position. Then they pressed on.

High in the mountains, close to the border, they found shelter in a stone hut, used by the local shepherds in summer when the flocks came to the upper pastures. There, with guards posted in rotation, they waited out the four days of the ground war, as far to the south the Allied tanks and air power crushed the Iraqi Army in a ninety-hour blitzkrieg and rolled into Kuwait.

On that same day, the first of the ground war, a lone soldier entered Iraq from the west. He was an Israeli of the Sayeret Matkal commandos, picked for his excellent Arabic.

An Israeli helicopter, fitted with long-range tanks and in the livery of the Jordanian Army, came out of the Negev and skimmed across the Jordanian desert to deposit the man just inside Iraq, south of the

Ruweishid crossing point.

When it had left him, it turned and flew back across Jordan and into Israel, unspotted.

Like Martin, the soldier had a lightweight, rugged motorcycle with heavy-duty desert tires. Although disguised to look old, battered, dirty, rusted, and dented, its engine was in superb condition, and it carried extra fuel in two panniers astride the back wheel.

The soldier followed the main road eastward and at sundown entered Baghdad.

The concerns of his superiors for his security had been overcautious.

By that amazing bush telegraph that seems able to outstrip even electronics, the people of Baghdad already knew their army was being crushed in the deserts of southern Iraq and Kuwait. By the evening of the first day, the AMAM had taken to its barracks and stayed there.

Now that the bombing had stopped—for all the Allied airplanes were needed over the battlefield—the people of Baghdad circulated freely, talking openly of the imminent arrival of the Americans and British to sweep away Saddam Hussein.

It was a euphoria that would last a week, until it became plain the Allies were not coming, and the rule of the AMAM closed over them again.

The central bus station was a seething mass of soldiers, most stripped down to singlets and shorts, having thrown away their uniforms in the desert. These were the deserters who had evaded the execution squads waiting behind the front line. They were selling their Kalashnikovs for the price of a ticket home to their villages. At the start of the week, these rifles were fetching thirty-five dinars each; four days later, the price was down to seventeen.

The Israeli infiltrator had one job, which he accomplished during the night. The Mossad knew only of the three dead-letter boxes for getting a message to Jericho that had been left behind by Alfonso Benz Moncada in August. As it happened, Martin had discontinued two of them for security reasons, but the third still operated.

The Israeli deposited identical messages in all three drops, made the three appropriate chalk marks, took his motorcycle, and rode west again, joining the throng of refugees heading that way.

It took him another day to reach the border. Here he cut south of the main road into empty desert, crossed into Jordan, recovered his hidden directional beacon, and used it. The bleep-bleep beam was picked up at once by an Israeli aircraft circling over the Negev, and the helicopter returned to the rendezvous to recover the infiltrator.

He did not sleep for those fifty hours and ate little, but he fulfilled his mission and returned home safely.

On the third day of the ground war, Edith Hardenberg returned to her desk at the Winkler Bank, both puzzled and angry. On the previous morning, just as she had been about to leave for work, she had received a telephone call.

The speaker, in faultless German with a Salzburg accent, introduced himself as the neighbor of her mother. He told her that Frau Hardenberg had had a bad fall down the stairs after slipping on an icy patch and was in a bad way.

She at once tried to call her mother but repeatedly got a busy signal.

Finally frantic, she had called the Salzburg exchange, who informed her the phone must be out of order.

Telephoning the bank that she would not be in for work, she had driven to Salzburg through the snow and slush, arriving in the late morning. Her mother, perfectly fit and well, was surprised to see her.

There had been no fall, no injury. Worse, some vandal had cut her telephone line outside the flat.

By the time Edith Hardenberg returned to Vienna, it was too late to go in for work.

When she appeared at her desk the next morning, she found Wolfgang Gemütlich in an even worse mood than she. He reproached her bitterly for her absence the previous day and listened to her explanation in a bad humor.

The reason for his own misery was not long in coming. In the midmorning of the previous day, a young man had appeared at the bank and insisted on seeing him.

The visitor explained that his name was Aziz and that he was the son of the owner of a substantial numbered account. His father, explained the Arab, was indisposed but wished his son to act in his place.

At this, Aziz Junior had produced documentation that fully and perfectly authenticated him as his father’s ambassador, with complete authority to operate the numbered account. Herr Gemütlich had examined the documents of authority for the slightest flaw, but there was none. He had been left with no alternative but to concede.

The young wretch had insisted that his father’s wishes were to close down the entire account and transfer the contents elsewhere. This, mind you, Fräulein Hardenberg, just two days after the arrival in the account of a further $3 million credit, bringing the aggregate total to over $10 million.

Edith Hardenberg listened to Gemütlich’s tale of woe very quietly, then asked about the visitor. Yes, she was told, his first name had been Karim. Now that she mentioned it, there had been a signet ring with a pink opal on the small finger of one hand and, indeed, a scar along the chin. Had he been less consumed by his own sense of outrage, the banker might have wondered at such precise questioning by his secretary about a man she could not have seen.

He had known, of course, Gemütlich admitted, that the account-holder must be some sort of Arab, but he had had no idea that the man was from Iraq or had a son.

After work, Edith Hardenberg went home and began to clean her little flat. She scrubbed and scoured it for hours. There were two cardboard boxes that she took to the large rubbish bin a few hundred yards away and dumped. One contained a number of items of makeup, perfumes, lotions, and bath salts; the other, a variety of women’s underwear.

Then she returned to her cleaning.

Neighbors said later she played music through the evening and late into the night—not her usual Mozart and Strauss but Verdi, especially something from Nabucco. A particularly keen-eared neighbor identified the piece as the “Slaves’ Chorus,” which she played over and over again.

In the small hours of the morning the music stopped, and she left in her car with two items from her kitchen.

It was a retired accountant, walking his dog in the Prater Park at seven the next morning, who found her. He had left the Hauptallee to allow his dog to do its business in the park away from the road.

She was in her neat gray tweed coat, with her hair in a bun behind her head, thick lisle stockings on her legs, and sensible flat-heeled shoes on her feet. The clothesline looped over the branch of the oak had not betrayed her, and the kitchen steps were a meter away.

She was quite still and stiff in death, her hands by her side and her toes pointed neatly downward. Always a very neat lady was Edith Hardenberg.

February 28 was the last day of the ground war. In the Iraqi deserts west of Kuwait, the Iraqi Army had been outflanked and annihilated.

South of the city, the Republican Guard divisions that had rolled into Kuwait on August 2 ceased to exist. On that day the forces occupying the city, having set fire to everything that would burn and seeking to destroy what would not, left for the north in a snaking column of halftracks, trucks, vans, cars, and carts.

The column was caught in the place where the highway north cuts through the Mutla Ridge. The Eagles and Jaguars, Tomcats and Hornets, Tornados and Thunderbolts, Phantoms and Apaches hurtled down onto the column and reduced it to charred wreckage. With the head of the column destroyed and blocking the road, the remainder could escape neither forward nor backward, and because of the cut in the ridge could not leave the road. Many died in that column and the rest surrendered. By sundown, the first Arab forces were entering Kuwait to liberate it.

That evening, Mike Martin made contact again with Riyadh and heard the news. He gave his position and that of a reasonably flat meadow nearby.

The SAS men and Walker were out of food, melting snow to drink, and bitterly cold, not daring to light a fire in case it gave away their position. The war was over, but the patrols of mountain guards might well not know that, or care.

Just after dawn, two long-range Blackhawk helicopters loaned by the American 101st Airborne Division came for them. They came from the fire base camp set up by the 101st fifty miles inside Iraq, after the biggest helicopter assault in history. So great was the distance from the Saudi border that even from the fire base on the Euphrates River, it was a long haul to the mountains near Khanaqin.

That was why there were two of them: The second had even more fuel for the journey home.

To be on the safe side, eight Eagles circled above, giving protective cover as the refueling in the meadow was carried out. Don Walker squinted upward.

“Hey, they’re my guys!” he shouted. As the two Blackhawks clattered the way back again, the Strike Eagles rode shotgun until they were south of the border.

They said farewell to each other on a wind-blasted strip of sand, surrounded by the detritus of a defeated army near the Saudi-Iraqi border. The whirling blades of a Blackhawk whipped up the dust and gravel before taking Don Walker to Dhahran and a flight back to Al Kharz. A British Puma stood farther away, to take the SAS men to their own secret cordoned base.

That evening, at a comfortable country house in the rolling downs of Sussex, Dr. Terry Martin was told where his brother had actually been since October and that he was now out of Iraq and safe in Saudi Arabia.

Martin was almost ill with relief, and the SIS gave him a lift back to London, where he resumed his life as a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Two days later, on March 3, the commanders of the Coalition forces met in a tent on a small and bare Iraqi airstrip called Safwan with two generals from Baghdad to negotiate the surrender.

The only spokesmen for the Allied side were Generals Norman Schwarzkopf and Prince Khaled bin Sultan. At the American general’s side sat the commander of the British forces, General Sir Peter de la Billière.

Both the Western officers to this day believe that only two Iraqi generals came to Safwan. In fact, there were three.

The American security net was extremely tight, to exclude the possibility of any assassin reaching the tent in which the opposing generals met. An entire American division encircled the airfield, facing outward.

Unlike the Allied commanders who had arrived from the south by a series of helicopters, the Iraqi party had been ordered to drive to a road junction north of the airstrip. There they left their cars to transfer to a number of American armored personnel vehicles called humvees and be driven by U.S. drivers the last two miles to the airstrip and the cluster of tents where they were awaited.

Ten minutes after the party of generals entered the negotiation tent with their interpreters, another black Mercedes limousine was coming down the Basra road toward the junction. The roadblock there was commanded by that time by a captain of the U.S. Seventh Armored Brigade, all more senior officers having proceeded to the airstrip. The unexpected limousine was at once stopped.

In the back of the car was the third Iraqi general, albeit only a brigadier, bearing a black attaché case. Neither he nor his driver spoke English, and the captain spoke no Arabic. He was about to radio the airstrip for orders when a jeep driven by an American colonel and bearing another in the passenger seat pulled up. The driver was in the uniform of the Green Beret Special Forces; the passenger had the insignia of G2, the military intelligence.

Both men flashed their ID at the captain, who examined the cards, recognized their authenticity, and threw up a salute.

“It’s okay, Captain. We’ve been expecting this bastard,” said the Green Beret colonel. “Seems he was delayed by a flat tire.”

“That case,” said the G2 officer, pointing at the attaché case of the Iraqi brigadier who now stood uncomprehending by the side of his car,

“contains the names of all our POWs, including the missing aircrew.

Stormin’ Norman wants it, and now.”

There were no humvees left. The Green Beret colonel gave the Iraqi a rough shove toward the jeep. The captain was perplexed. He knew nothing of any third Iraqi general. He also knew his unit had recently gotten into the Bear’s bad books by having claimed to occupy Safwan when it had not achieved that objective. The last thing he needed was to call down more of General Schwarzkopf’s wrath on the Seventh Armored by detaining the list of missing American aircrew. The jeep drove away in the direction of Safwan. The captain shrugged and gestured the Iraqi driver to park with all the others.

On the road to the airstrip the jeep passed between rows of parked American armored vehicles for up to a mile. Then there was an empty section of road, before the cordon of Apache helicopters surrounding the actual negotiation area.

Clear of the tanks, the G2 colonel turned to the Iraqi and spoke in good Arabic.

“Under your seat,” he said. “Don’t get out of the jeep, but get them on—fast.”

The Iraqi wore the dark green uniform of his country. The rolled clothes beneath his seat were in the light tan of a colonel of the Saudi Special Forces. He quickly exchanged trousers, jacket, and beret.

Just before the ring of Apaches on the tarmac, the jeep peeled away into the desert, skirted the airstrip, and drove on south. On the far side of Safwan, the vehicle regained the main road to Kuwait, twenty miles away.

The U.S. tanks were on every side, facing outward. Their job was to forbid the penetration of any infiltrators. Their commanders, atop their turrets, watched one of their own jeeps bearing two of their own colonels and a Saudi officer drive out of the perimeter and away from the protected zone, so it did not concern them.

It took the jeep almost an hour to reach the Kuwait airport, then a devastated wreck, gutted by the Iraqis and covered by a black pall of smoke from the oil field fires blazing all over the emirate. The journey took so long because, to avoid the carnage of the Mutla Ridge road, it had diverted in a big sweep through the desert west of the city.

Five miles short of the airport, the G2 colonel took a hand-communicator from the glove compartment and keyed in a series of bleeps. Over the airport a single airplane began its approach.

The makeshift airport control tower was a trailer manned by Americans. The incoming aircraft was a British Aerospace HS-125.

Not only that, it was the personal airplane of the British Commander, General de la Billière. It must have been; it had all the right markings and the right call-sign. The air traffic controller cleared it to land.

The HS-125 did not taxi to the wreckage of the airport building but to a distant dispersal point, where it made rendezvous with an American jeep. The door opened, the ladder came down, and three men boarded the twin-jet.

“Granby One, clearance for takeoff,” the traffic controller heard. He was handling an incoming Canadian Hercules with medicines for the hospital on board.

“Hold, Granby One. ... What is your flight plan?”

He meant: That was damn fast—where the hell do you think you’re going?

“Sorry, Kuwait Tower.” The voice was clipped and precise, pure Royal Air Force. The controller had heard the RAF before, and they all sounded the same—preppy.

“Kuwait Tower, we’ve just taken on board a colonel of the Saudi Special Forces. Feeling very sick. One of the staff of Prince Khaled.

General Schwarzkopf asked for his immediate evacuation, so Sir Peter offered his-own plane. Clearance takeoff, please, old boy.”

In two breaths the British pilot had mentioned one general, one prince, and one knight of the realm. The controller was a master sergeant, and good at his job. He had a fine career in the United States Air Force.

Refusing to evacuate a sick Saudi colonel on the staff of a prince at the request of a general in the plane of the British commander might not do that career any good.

“Granby One, clear takeoff,” he said.

The HS-125 lifted away from Kuwait, but instead of heading for Riyadh, which has one of the finest hospitals in the Middle East, it set course due west along the kingdom’s northern border.

The ever-alert AWACS saw it and called up, asking for its destination.

This time the pukka British voice came back explaining that they were flying to the British base at Akrotiri in Cyprus to evacuate back home a close friend and fellow officer of General de la Billière who had been badly wounded by a land mine. The mission commander in the AWACS knew nothing of this, but wondered how exactly he should object. Have it shot down?

Fifteen minutes later, the HS-125 left Saudi air space and crossed the border of Jordan.

The Iraqi sitting in the back of the executive jet knew nothing of all this but was impressed by the efficiency of the British and Americans.

He had been dubious on receiving the last message from his paymasters in the West, but on reflection he agreed it would be wise to quit now rather than wait for later and have to do it on his own, without help. The plan outlined to him in that message had worked like a dream.

One of the two pilots in RAF tropical uniforms came back from the flight deck and muttered in English to the American G2 colonel, who grinned.

“Welcome to freedom, Brigadier,” he said in Arabic to his guest. “We are out of Saudi air space. Soon we’ll have you in an airliner to America. By the way, I have something for you.”

He withdrew a slip of paper from his breast pocket and showed it to the Iraqi, who read it with great pleasure. It was a simple total: the sum lodged in his bank account in Vienna, now over $10 million.

The Green Beret reached into a locker and produced several glasses and a collection of miniatures of Scotch. He poured one bottle into each glass and passed them around.

“Well, my friend, to retirement and prosperity.”

He drank; the other American drank. The Iraqi smiled and drank.

“Have a rest,” said the G2 colonel in Arabic. “We’ll be there in less than an hour.”

After that, they left him alone. He leaned his head back onto the cushion of his seat and let his mind drift back over the past twenty weeks mat had made his fortune.

He had taken great risks, but they had paid off. He recalled the day he had sat in that conference room in the Presidential Palace and heard the Rais announce that at last Iraq possessed, in the nick of time, her own nuclear bomb. That had come as a genuine shock, as had the sudden cut-off of all communications after he had told the Americans.

Then they had suddenly come back, more insistent than ever, demanding to know where the device was stored.

He had not had the faintest idea, but for the offered bounty of $5 million, it had clearly been the time to stake everything. Then it had been easier than he could have imagined.

The wretched nuclear engineer, Dr. Salah Siddiqi, had been picked up on the streets of Baghdad and accused, amid the sea of his own pain, of betraying the location of the device. Protesting his innocence, he had given away the site of Al Qubai and the camouflage of the car junkyard. How could the scientist have known that he was being interrogated three days before the bombing, not two days after it?

Jericho’s next shock had been to learn of the shooting down of the two British fliers. That had not been foreseen. He desperately needed to know whether, in their briefing, they had been given any indication as to how the information had arrived in the hands of the Allies.

His relief, when it became plain they knew nothing beyond their brief and that as far as they knew the place might be a store of artillery ammunition, had been short-lived, when the Rais insisted there must have been a traitor. From then on Dr. Siddiqi, chained in a cell beneath the Gymnasium, had had to be dispatched, which he was with a massive injection of air into the heart, causing a coronary embolism.

The records of the time of his interrogation, from three days before the bombing to two days after it, had been duly changed.

But the greatest of all the shocks had been to learn that the Allies had missed, that the bomb had been removed to some hidden place called

Qa’ala, the Fortress. What fortress? Where?

A chance remark by the nuclear engineer before he died had revealed that the ace of camouflage was a certain Colonel Osman Badri of the Engineers, but a check of records showed the young officer was a passionate fan of the President. How to change that view?

The answer lay in the arrest on trumped-up charges and messy murder of his much-loved father. After that, the disillusioned Badri had been putty in Jericho’s hands, during the meeting in the back of the car following the funeral.

The man called Jericho, also nicknamed Mu’azib the Tormentor, felt at peace with the world. A drowsy numbness crept over him, the effect perhaps of the strain of the past few days. He tried to move but found his limbs would not function. The two American colonels were looking down at him, talking in a language he could not understand but knew was not English. He tried to respond but his mouth would not frame any words.

The HS-125 had turned southwest, dropping across the Jordanian coast and down to ten thousand feet. Over the Gulf of Aqaba the Green Beret pulled back the passenger door, and a rushing torrent of air filled the cabin, even though the twin-jet had slowed almost to the point of stall.

The two colonels eased him up, unprotesting, limp and helpless, trying to say something but unable to. Over the blue water south of Aqaba, Brigadier Omar Khatib left the airplane and plunged to the water, there to break apart on impact. The sharks did the rest.

The HS-125 turned north, passed over Eilat after reentering Israeli air space, finally landing at Sde Dov, the military airfield north of Tel Aviv. There the two pilots stripped off their British uniforms and the colonels their American dress. All four returned to their habitual Israeli ranks. The executive jet was stripped of its Royal Air Force livery, repainted as it used to be, and returned to the air charter sayan in Cyprus who had loaned it.

The money from Vienna was transferred first to the Kanoo Bank in Bahrain, then on to another in the United States. Part was retransferred to the Hapoalim Bank in Tel Aviv and returned to the Israeli government; it was what Israel had paid Jericho until the transfer to the CIA. The balance, over $8 million, went into what the Mossad calls The Fun Fund.

Five days after the war ended, two more long-range American helicopters returned to the valleys of the Hamreen. They asked no permission and sought no approval.

The body of the Strike Eagle’s weapons systems officer. Lieutenant Tim Nathanson, was never found. The Guards had torn it apart with their machine-gun bursts, and the jackals, foxes, crows, and kites had done the rest.

To this day his bones must lie somewhere in those cold valleys, not a hundred miles from where his forefathers once toiled and wept by the waters of Babylon.

His father received the news in Washington, sat shiva for him and said kaddish, and grieved alone in the mansion in Georgetown.

The body of Corporal Kevin Norm was recovered. As Blackhawks stood by, British hands tore apart the cairn and recovered the corporal, who was put in a body bag and flown first to Riyadh and thence home to England in a Hercules transport.

In the middle of April a brief ceremony was held at the SAS

headquarters camp on the outskirts of Hereford.

There is no graveyard for the SAS; no cemetery collects their dead.

Many of them lie in fifty foreign battlefields whose very names are unknown to most.

Some are under the sands of the Libyan Desert, where they fell fighting Rommel in 1941 and 1942. Others are among the Greek islands, the Abruzzi mountains, the Jura, and the Vosges. They lie scattered in Malaysia and Borneo, in Yemen, Muscat and Oman, in jungles and freezing wastes and beneath the cold waters of the Atlantic off the Falklands.

When bodies were recovered, they came home to Britain, but always to be handed to the families for burial. Even then, no headstone ever mentions the SAS, for the regiment accredited is the original unit from which the soldier came to the SAS—Fusiliers, Paras, Guards, whatever.

There is only one monument. In the heart of the Stirling Lines at Hereford stands a short and stocky tower, clad in wood and painted a dull chocolate brown. At its peak a clock keeps the hours, so the edifice is known simply as the Clocktower.

Around its base are sheets of dull bronze, on which are etched all the names and the places where they died.

That April, there were five new names to be unveiled. One had been shot by the Iraqis in captivity, two killed in a firefight as they tried to slip back over the Saudi border. A fourth had died of hypothermia after days in soaking clothes and freezing weather. The fifth was Corporal Kevin North.

There were several former commanders of the regiment there, that day in the rain. John Simpson came, and Viscount Johnny Slim and Sir Peter. The Director of Special Forces, J. P. Lovat was there, and Colonel Bruce Craig, then the CO. And Major Mike Martin and a few others.

Because they were now at home, those still serving could wear the rarely seen sand-colored beret with its emblem of the winged dagger and the motto “Who Dares Wins.”

It was not a long ceremony. The officers and men saw the fabric pulled aside, the newly etched names stood out bold and white against the bronze. They saluted and left to walk back to the various mess buildings.

Shortly after, Mike Martin went to his small hatchback car in the park, drove out through the guarded gates, and turned toward the cottage he still kept in a village in the hills of Herefordshire.

He thought as he drove of all the things that had happened in the streets and sands of Kuwait; and in the skies above; and in the alleys and bazaars of Baghdad; and in the hills of the Hamreen. Because he was a secretive man, he was glad at least of one thing: That no one would ever know.

THE END.

A Final Note

All wars must teach lessons. If they do not do so, they were fought in vain and those who died in them did so for naught.

The Gulf War taught two clear lessons, if the powers have the wit to learn them.

The first is that it is madness for the thirty most industrially developed nations of the world, who dispose between them of ninety-five percent of high-tech weaponry and the means for its production, to sell these artifacts to the crazed, the aggressive, and the dangerous for short-term financial profit.

For a decade the regime of the Republic of Iraq was allowed to arm itself to a frightening level by a combination of political foolishness, bureaucratic blindness, and corporate greed. The eventual destruction, in part, of that war machine cost vastly more than its provision.

A recurrence could easily be prevented by the establishment of a central register of all exports to certain regimes, with draconian penalties for nondisclosure. Analysts able to examine the broad picture would soon see, by the type and quantity of materials ordered or delivered, whether weapons of mass destruction were in preparation.

The alternative will be a proliferation of high-tech weaponry that will make the years of the cold war seem like an age of peace and tranquillity.

The second lesson concerns the gathering of information. At the end of the cold war, many hoped this could safely be curbed. The reality shows the opposite.

During the 1970s and 1980s technical advances in the gathering of electronic and signals intelligence were so impressive that governments of the Free World were led to believe, as the scientists produced their expensive miracles, that machines alone could do the job. The role of “humint,” the gathering of information by people, was downgraded.

In the Gulf War the full panoply of Western technical wizardry was brought to bear and, partly because of its impressive cost, presumed to be virtually infallible.

It was not. With a combination of skill, ingenuity, guile, and hard work, large parts of Iraq’s arsenal and the means of its production had been hidden or so disguised that the machines could not see them.

The pilots flew with great courage and skill, but often they too were deceived by the cunning of those who had devised the replicas and the camouflage.

The fact that germ warfare, poison gas, or the nuclear possibility was never employed was, like the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo, “a damn close-run thing.”

What became plain by the end was that for certain tasks in certain places, there is still no substitute for the oldest information-gathering device on earth: the human eyeball, Mark One.

About The Author

FREDERICK FORSYTE is the author of nine bestselling novels: The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Dogs of War, The Shepherd, The Devil’s Alternative, The Fourth Protocol, The Negotiator, The Deceiver, and . He lives outside London.