The Fist Of God Part 15

fries, an hour in a marble bathtub, and a big soft bed grab you?" "By the b.a.l.l.s," 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 TR1 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 cla.s.sified 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 a.n.a.lysts 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 a.n.a.lysts, 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 lat.i.tude. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 sh.e.l.l?""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 a.s.sembly 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 a.s.sets, 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 d.a.m.n 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 the Fist of G.o.d 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 b.u.t.ton 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 b.u.t.ton 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."

"s.h.i.+t," said Beatty with feeling. "So d.a.m.n 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 bas.e.m.e.nt. 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 bra.s.s wants to put a team in to mark it. You're out."

"Bulls.h.i.+t, 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 c.r.a.p, 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 alt.i.tude, 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 Wilts.h.i.+re, 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, s.h.i.+fting 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 alt.i.tude. 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 a.s.sociated 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 TR1 that morning just after dawn. The weather had been clear, and the photos showed every nook and crevice of the Jebal al Hamreen. "We a.s.sume," said Colonel Craig, "that this d.a.m.n 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 gra.s.sy 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 s.p.a.ce 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 ap.r.o.n, 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 F15C 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 a.s.sumed 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 s.p.a.cemen 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.sland. 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 b.u.mped 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 G.o.d, 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, s.h.i.+t," he whispered. They had first-aid kits, even sh.e.l.l 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 creva.s.se 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 sc.r.a.pe 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s. 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 compa.s.s 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 sc.r.a.p 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-andsideways 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 b.u.t.ton 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 b.u.t.ton. 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 b.u.t.ton 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 gla.s.ses, 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. "b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l," 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-s.h.i.+p 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 a.s.signed 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 subst.i.tuted. 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 gla.s.ses 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s. He brought the gla.s.ses 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 gra.s.s.