The Fist Of God Part 16

He blinked and tried again. Slantwise, it was a length of wire a foot long in the gra.s.s. 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 gra.s.s, 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 gra.s.s. 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 gra.s.s 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 a.n.a.lysts 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 gra.s.s seed, sprayed onto the earth, there to root and spread, with bushes and shrubs sown into deeper bowls left in the concrete terraces. The gra.s.s from the previous summer had matted, creating its own bonding network of roots, and the shrubs had sprouted up through the wire and the gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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 gla.s.ses 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 gra.s.s. 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 pa.s.sed 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 k.n.o.b 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. "Compa.s.s," he said. He pushed the rangefinder behind him and took the electronic compa.s.s. 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 b.u.t.ton. The compa.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 compa.s.s 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, pa.s.sing 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 p.r.o.ne, 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 ma.s.sive 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. "b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.lfire," whispered Sergeant Stephenson at his elbow. It was not a bad a.n.a.logy. 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 alt.i.tude 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 pa.s.sed over their heads, and the direction it had fallen. a.s.suming 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: "b.l.o.o.d.y silly time to drop in for tea. Shall we just get the h.e.l.l 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 subbas.e.m.e.nt 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 c.o.c.kney 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 ma.s.s 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 Gemutlich 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 doc.u.mentation that fully and perfectly authenticated him as his father's amba.s.sador, with complete authority to operate the numbered account. Herr Gemutlich had examined the doc.u.ments 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, Fraulein 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 Gemutlich'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, Gemutlich 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 a.s.sault 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 Suss.e.x, 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 Billiere. 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 a.s.sa.s.sin 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 attache 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 pa.s.senger seat pulled up. The driver was in the uniform of the Green Beret Special Forces; the pa.s.senger 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d," said the Green Beret colonel. "Seems he was delayed by a flat tire." "That case," said the G2 officer, pointing at the attache 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 pa.s.sed 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 Aeros.p.a.ce HS-125. Not only that, it was the personal airplane of the British Commander, General de la Billiere. 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 d.a.m.n fast-where the h.e.l.l 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 Billiere 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 gla.s.ses and a collection of miniatures of Scotch. He poured one bottle into each gla.s.s and pa.s.sed 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 ma.s.sive 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 pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.senger 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, pa.s.sed over Eilat after reentering Israeli air s.p.a.ce, 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. a.n.a.lysts able to examine the broad picture would soon see, by the type and quant.i.ty of materials ordered or delivered, whether weapons of ma.s.s 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 a.r.s.enal 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 d.a.m.n close-run thing." What became plain by the end was that for certain tasks in certain places, there is still no subst.i.tute 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 The Fist of G.o.d. He lives outside London.

Bantam Books by Frederick Forsyth

THE DAY OF THE JACKAL.

THE DEVIL'S ALTERNATIVE.

THE DOGS OF WAR.

NO COMEBACKS.

THE ODESSA FILE.

THE FOURTH PROTOCOL.

THE NEGOTIATOR.

THE DECEIVER.

THE FIST OF G.o.d.