Chapter 22
"It's there," said Mike Martin two hours later. "Where?" asked Colonel Beatty with genuine curiosity. "In there somewhere."
In the conference room down the corridor from the Black Hole, Martin was leaning over the table studying a photograph of a larger section of the Jebal al Hamreen range. It showed a square five miles by five miles.
He pointed with his forefinger. "The villages, the three villages--here, here, and here."
"What about them?"
"They're phony. They're beautifully done, they're perfect replicas of the villages of mountain peasants, but they're full of guards."
Colonel Beatty stared at the three villages. One was in a valley only half a mile from the middle of the three mountains at the center of the frame. The other two occupied terraces on the mountain slopes farther out. None was big enough to support a mosque; indeed, they were little more than hamlets.
Each had its main and central barn for the storage of winter hay and feed, and smaller barns for the sheep and goats. A dozen humble shacks made up the rest of the settlements, mud-brick dwellings with thatch or tin roofs of the kind that can be seen anywhere in the mountains of the Middle East. In summer there might be small patches of tilled crops nearby, but not in winter. Life in the mountains of Iraq is harsh in winter, with slanting bitter rain and scudding clouds. The notion that all parts of the Middle East are warm is a popular fallacy.
"Okay, Major, you know Iraq, I don't. Why are they phony?"
"Life-support system," said Martin. "Too many villages, too many peasants, too many goats and sheep. Not enough forage. They'd starve."
"Shit," said Beatty with feeling. "So damn simple."
"That may be, but it proves Jericho wasn't lying, or mistaken again. If they've done that, they're hiding something."
Colonel Craig, commanding officer of the 22nd SAS, had joined them in the basement. He had been talking quietly to Steve Laing. Now he came over. "What do you reckon, Mike?" "It's there, Bruce. One could probably see it--at a thousand yards with good binoculars."
"The brass wants to put a team in to mark it. You're out."
"Bullshit, sir. These hills are probably alive with foot patrols. You can see there are no roads."
"So? Patrols can be avoided."
"And if you run into any? There's no one speaks Arabic like me, and you know it. Besides, it's a HALO drop. Helicopters won't work either."
"You've had all the action you need, so far as I can gather."
"That's crap, too. I haven't seen any action at all. I'm fed up with spooking. Let me have this one. The others have had the desert for weeks, while I've been tending a garden."
Colonel Craig raised an eyebrow. He had not asked Laing exactly what Martin had been up to--he would not have been told anyway--but he was surprised one of his best officers had been posing as a gardener.
"Come back to the base. We can plan better there. If I like your idea, you can have it."
Before dawn, General Schwarzkopf had agreed there was no alternative and given his consent.
In that cordoned-off corner of the Riyadh military air base that was the private preserve of the SAS, Martin had outlined his ideas to Colonel Craig and had been given the go-ahead. Coordination of planning would reside with Colonel Craig for the men on the ground and with General Glosson for the eventual fighter-strike.
Buster Glosson had morning coffee with his friend and superior Chuck Horner. "Any ideas for the unit we'd like to use on this one?" he asked. General Horner thought back to a certain officer who two weeks earlier had advised him to do something extremely rude. "Yeah," he said. "Give it to the Three Thirty-sixth."
Mike Martin had won his argument with Colonel Craig by pointing out--logically--that with most of the SAS soldiers in the Gulf Theater already deployed inside Iraq, he was the senior officer available, that he was commander of B Squadron, which was then on operations in the desert under the command of his number two, and that he alone spoke fluent Arabic. But the clinching argument was his training and experience in freefall parachuting.
The only way into the Iraqi mountains without raising an alarm was going to be a HALO drop--high altitude, low opening--meaning coming out of the aircraft at 25,000 feet and falling free to open the chutes at 3,500 feet. It was not a job for beginners.
The planning of the entire mission ought to have taken a week, but there was no time for that. The only solution was for the various aspects of the drop, the cross-country march, and the selection of the lying-up position to be planned simultaneously. For that, Martin needed men he could trust with his life, which was precisely what he was going to do anyway.
Back at the SAS corner of the Riyadh military air base, his first question to Colonel Craig was: "Who can I have?" The list was short; there were so many away on operations in the desert.
When the adjutant showed him the list, one name sprang out at him. Peter Stephenson--definite. "You're lucky," said Craig. "He came back over the border a week ago. Been resting ever since. He's fit."
Martin had known Sergeant Stephenson when the sergeant had been a corporal and he a captain on his first tour with the regiment as a troop commander. Like himself, Stephenson was a freefaller and a member of the air troop of his own squadron.
"He's good," said Craig, pointing to another name. "A mountain man. I suggest you'll need two of them." The name he pointed to was Corporal Ben Eastman. "I know him. You're right--I'll take him anytime. Who else?" The last selection was Corporal Kevin North, from another squadron. Martin had never operated with him, but North was a mountain specialist and highly recommended by his troop commander.
There were five areas of planning that had to be accomplished simultaneously. Martin divided up the tasks among them with himself in charge overall.
First came the selection of the aircraft to drop them. Without hesitation, Martin went for the C-130 Hercules, the habitual launch pad of the SAS, and there were then nine of them serving in the Gulf. They were all based at nearby King Khaled International Airport. Even better news came with breakfast: Three of them were from the 47th Squadron, based at Lyneham in Wiltshire, a squadron that has years of experience liaising with the SAS freefallers.
Among the crew of one of the three Hercules was a certain Flight Lieutenant Glyn Morris. Throughout the Gulf War, the Hercules transports had been part of the hub-and-spoke operation, shifting cargo that arrived at Riyadh to the outlying bases of the Royal Air Force at Tabuq, Muharraq, Dhahran, and even Seeb in Oman.
Morris had been serving as loadmaster or cargo supervisor, but his real function on this planet was as a PJI, Parachute Jump Instructor, and Martin had jumped under his supervision before. Contrary to the notion that the Paras and the SAS look after their own parachuting, all combat dropping in the British Armed Forces comes under the RAF, and the relationship is based on the mutual trust that each party knows exactly what it is doing.
Air Commodore Ian Macfadyen, commanding the RAF in the Gulf, seconded the desired Hercules to the SAS mission the moment it arrived back from stores-dumping at Tabuq, and riggers began to convert it for the HALO mission scheduled for the same night. Chief among the conversion tasks was the construction of an oxygen console on the floor of the cargo bay. Flying mainly at low levels, the Hercules had till that point never needed oxygen in the rear to keep troops alive at high altitude.
Flight Lieutenant Morris needed no training in what he was doing, and he brought in a second PJI from another Hercules, Flight Sergeant Sammy Dawlish. They worked throughout the day on the Hercules and had it ready by sundown.
The second priority was the parachutes themselves. At that point, the SAS had not dropped into Iraq from the skies--they had gone into the Iraqi deserts on wheels--but in the weeks preceding the actual war, training missions had been constant. At the military air base there was a sealed and temperature-controlled safety equipment section, where the SAS had stored its parachutes.
Martin asked for and got an allocation of eight main chutes and eight reserves, although he and his men would only need four of each. Sergeant Stephenson was allocated the task of checking and packing all eight throughout the day.
The chutes were no longer the circular type associated with the airborne units, but the newer design called "squares." They are not really square but oblong and have two layers of fabric. In flight, air is ducted between the layers, forming a semirigid "wing" with an airfoil cross-section, enabling the freefaller to "fly" the chute down like a glider, with greater mobility to turn and maneuver. These are the type normally seen at freefalling displays.
The two corporals got the task of obtaining and checking all the remaining stores that would be needed. These included four sets of clothing, four big Bergen rucksacks, water bottles, helmets, belts, weapons, HVCs--the high-value concentrates, which would be all there was to eat--ammunition, first-aid kits ... the list went on and on.
Each man would be carrying eighty pounds in those Bergens and might need every ounce of them. Fitters and mechanics worked on the Hercules itself in a designated hangar, overhauling the engines and servicing every moving part.
The squadron commander nominated his best aircrew, whose navigator accompanied Colonel Craig back to the Black Hole to select a suitable drop zone, the all-important DZ. Martin himself was taken in hand by six technicians, four American and two British, and introduced to the gizmos he would have to operate to find the target, locate it to within a few square yards, and relay the information back to Riyadh.
When he had finished, his various devices were security-packed
against accidental breakage and taken across to the hangar, where the mountain of gear for the four men grew and grew. For extra safety, there were two of each of the scientific devices, adding again to the weight the men would carry.
Martin himself went to join the planners in the Black Hole. They were bent over a large table strewn with fresh pictures taken by another TR-1 that morning just after dawn. The weather had been clear, and the photos showed every nook and crevice of the Jebal al Hamreen.
"We assume," said Colonel Craig, "that this damn gun must be pointing south to southeast. The best observation point would therefore seem to be here." He indicated a series of crevices in the side of a mountain to the south of the presumed Fortress, the hill in the center of the group within the square kilometer that had been designated by the late Colonel Osman Badri.
"As for a DZ, there's a small valley here, about forty kilometers south. ... You can see the water glinting in a wee stream running down the valley."
Martin looked. It was a tiny depression in the hills, 500 yards long and about 100 wide, with grassy banks strewn with rocks, and the rill trickling its winter water along the bottom of the dip.
"It's the best?" asked Martin. Colonel Craig shrugged. "Frankly, it's about all you've got. The next is seventy kilometers from the target. Get any closer, and they could see you land." On the map, in daylight, it would be a cinch; in pitch darkness, plunging through freezing air at 120 miles per hour, it would be easy to miss. There would be no lights to guide them, no flares on the ground. From blackness into blackness.
"I'll take it," he said. The RAF navigator straightened up. "Right, I'll get going." The navigator would have a busy afternoon. It would be his job to find the way without lights and across a moonless sky not to the drop zone but to a point in space from which, bearing in mind wind drift, four falling bodies could leave his aircraft to find that tiny valley. Even falling bodies drift downwind; his job would be to estimate how much.
It was not until the hour of dusk that all the men met again in the hangar, now banned to everyone else on the base. The Hercules stood ready, fueled. Beneath one wing was the mound of gear the four men would need. Dawlish, the RAF jump instructor, had repacked every one of the eight forty-eight-pound chutes as if he would be using them himself. Stephenson was satisfied. In one corner was a large briefing table.
Martin, who had brought enlarged photographs from the Black Hole with him, took Stephenson, Eastman, and North over to the table to work out their route from the DZ to those crevices where they intended to hole up and study the Fortress for however long it took.
It looked like two nights of hard march, resting in place in the intervening day. There could be no question of marching in daylight, and the route could not be direct. Finally each man packed his Bergen from the bottom up, the last item being the belt order, a heavy webbing belt with numerous pockets that would be unpacked after landing and worn round the waist.
American hamburgers and sodas were brought from the commissary at sundown, and the four men rested until takeoff. This was scheduled for 9:45, aiming for a drop at 11:30 P.M.
Martin always thought the waiting was worst; after the frantic activity of the day, it was like a long anticlimax. There was nothing to concentrate on but the tension, the constant nagging thought that,
despite all the checks and double-checks, something vital had been forgotten. It was the period when some men ate, or read, or wrote home, or dozed, or just went to the lavatory and emptied themselves.
At nine a tractor towed the Hercules out onto the apron, and the crew of pilot, copilot, navigator, and flight engineer began their engine runup 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, have been summoned to Riyadh on thevorders of General Buster Glossen. With him, as ordered, he brought the man he considered his best pilot for low-level ground-attack sorties.
Neither the CO of the Rocketeers nor Captain Don Walker had the faintest idea why they were wanted. In a small briefing room below CENTAF headquarters an hour later, they were told why, and what was needed. They were also told that no one else, with the sole exception of Walker's weapons systems officer, the man flying in the seat behind him, was allowed to know the full details.
Then they were helicoptered back to their base.
After takeoff the four soldiers could unbuckle and move around the hull of the aircraft by the dim red lights overhead. Martin went forward, up the ladder to the flight deck, and sat for a while with the crew.
They flew at 10,000 feet toward the Iraqi border, then began to climb. At 25,000 feet the Hercules leveled off and crossed into Iraq, seemingly alone in the starlit sky.
In fact it was not alone. Over the Gulf an AWACS had orders to keep a constant eye on the sky around and below them. If any Iraqi radar screen, for some unknown reason not already totaled by the Allied air forces, chose to "illuminate," it was to be immediately attacked. To this end, two flights of Wild Weasels with antiradar HARM missiles were below them.
In case some Iraqi fighter pilot chose to take to the sky that night, a flight of RAF Jaguars was above and to the left of them, a flight of F- 15C Eagles to the right. The Hercules was flying in a protective box of lethal technology. No other pilot in the sky that night knew why. They just had their orders.
In fact, if anyone in Iraq saw any blip on the radar that night, it was assumed the cargo plane was just heading north to Turkey.
The loadmaster did his all to make his guests comfortable with tea, coffee, soft drinks, and crackers.
Forty minutes before Release Point, the navigator flashed a warning light indicating P-minus-forty, and the last preparations began.
The four soldiers put on their main and reserve parachutes, the former across the breadth of the shoulders, the latter lower down the back.
Then came the Bergens, hung upside down on the back beneath the chutes, with the point between the legs. Weapons--a silenced Heckler and Koch MP5 SD submachine gun--were clipped down the left side, and the personal oxygen tank hooked across the belly.
Finally they put on their helmets and oxygen masks before connecting the latter to the center console, a frame structure the size of a large dining table crammed with bottles of oxygen. When everyone was breathing and comfortable, the pilot was informed and began to bleed the air and pressure level inside the hull out into the night until both had equalized.
It took almost twenty minutes. Then they sat again, waiting. Fifteen minutes before Release Point, a further message came from the flight deck into the ears of the loadmaster. He told the PJIs to gesture to the soldiers to switch from main console oxygen to their own personal minibottles. Each of these had a thirty-minute supply, and they would need three to four minutes of that for the drop itself.
At that point only the navigator on the flight deck knew exactly where he was; the SAS team had total confidence that they would be dropped in the right place.
By now the loadmaster was in contact with the soldiers by a constant stream of hand signals, which ended when he pointed both hands at the lights above the console. Into the loadmaster's ears came a stream of instructions from the navigator.
The men rose and started to move, slowly, like spacemen weighed down by their gear, toward the ramp. The PJIs, also on mobile oxygen bottles, went with them. The SAS men stood in a line in front of the still-closed tailgate door, each checking the equipment in front of him.
At P-minus-four the tailgate came down, and they stared out into 25,000 feet of rushing black air. Another hand signal--two fingers
raised by the PJI--told them they were at P-minus-two. The men shuffled to the very edge of the ramp and looked at the lights (unilluminated) on each side of the gaping aperture. The lights went red, goggles were drawn down. The lights went green. ...
All four men turned on one heel, facing into the cavern, and jumped backward, arms apart, faces down. The sill of the ramp flashed beneath their masks, and the Hercules was gone.
Sergeant Stephenson led the way. Stabilizing their fall position, they dropped through the night sky for five miles without a sound. At 3,500 feet automatic pressure-operated releases jerked open the parachute packs, and the fabric exploded out. In second position, Mike Martin saw the shadow fifty feet beneath him appear to stop moving. In the same second he felt the vibration of his own main chute opening, then the "square" took the strain and he slowed from 120 miles per hour to fourteen, with hesitators taking up some of the shock.
At one thousand feet each man undid the snap-locks that held his Bergen to his backside and cinched the load down his legs, there to hook onto his feet. The Bergens would remain there all the way down, being released only a hundred feet above the ground, to hang at the full extent of the fourteen-foot nylon retaining line.
The sergeant's parachute was moving away to Martin's right, so he followed. The sky was clear, the stars visible, black shapes of mountains rushed upward on all sides. Then Martin saw what the sergeant had seen: the glitter of water in the stream running through the valley.
Peter Stephenson went down right in the center of the zone, a few yards from the edge of the stream, on soft grass and moss. Martin dropped his Bergen on its line, swerved, stopped in the air, felt the Bergen hit the ground beneath him, and settled gently onto both feet. Corporal Eastman swept past and above him, turned, glided back in, and dropped fifty yards way. Martin was unbuckling his chute harness and did not see Kevin North land at all.
In fact, the mountaineer was the fourth and last in the line, descending a hundred yards away but onto the slope of the hill rather than the grassland. He was trying to close up to his colleagues, hauling down on his static lines, when the Bergen beneath him hit the hill. As it touched the ground, the Bergen was dragged sideways by the drifting man above, to whose waist it was attached. It bumped along the hillside for five yards, then snagged between two rocks.
The sudden yank on the lanyard pulled North down and sideways so that he landed not on his feet but on his side.
There were not many rocks on that hillside, but one of them smashed his left femur in eight places.
The corporal felt the bone shatter with complete clarity, but the jar was so severe, it numbed the pain for a few seconds. Then it came in waves. He rolled over and clutched his thigh with two hands, whispering over and over, No, no, please God, no.
Though he did not realize it because it happened inside the leg, he began to bleed. One of the shards of bone in the multiple fracture had sliced clean through the femoral artery, which began to pump out his life-blood into the mess of his thigh.
The other three found him a minute later. They had all unhitched their billowing chutes and Bergens, convinced he would be doing the same. When they realized he was not with them, they came to look.
Stephenson brought out his penlight and shone it on the leg.
"Oh, shit," he whispered. They had first-aid kits, even shell dressings, but nothing to cope with this. The corporal needed trauma therapy,
plasma, major surgery--and fast. Stephenson ran back to North's Bergen, ripped out a first-aid kit, and began to prepare a jab of morphine. There was no need. With the blood, the pain was fading.
North opened his eyes, focused on the face of Mike Martin above him, whispered "I'm sorry, boss," and closed his eyes again. Two minutes later he was gone.
At another time, and in another place, Martin might have been able to vent some sign of what he felt at losing a man like North, operating under his command. There was no time; this was not the place. The two remaining NCOs recognized this and went about what they had to do in grim silence. Grief could come later.
Martin had hoped to bundle up the spilled parachutes and clear the valley before finding a rocky crevasse to bury the surplus gear. Now that was impossible. He had North's body to cope with.
"Pete, start getting together everything we bury. Find a hollow scrape somewhere, or make one. Ben, start collecting rocks."
Martin bent over the body, removed the dog tags and machine pistol, then went to help Eastman. Together, with knives and hands, the three men scraped a hollow in the springy turf and laid the body in it. There was more to pile on top: four opened main parachutes, four stillpacked reserves, four oxygen bottles, lanyards, webbing.
Then they began to pile rocks on top, not in a neat shape like a cairn, which would have been spotted, but in a random way, as if the rocks had tumbled from the mountainside. Water was brought from the brook to sluice the rock and the grass of its red stains. Bare patches where the rocks they were using had stood were scuffed with feet, and fragments of moss from the water's edge were stamped into them. The valley had to be made to look as much as possible as it had an hour before midnight.
They had hoped to put in five hours of marching before dawn, but the job took them over three. Some of the contents of North's Bergen stayed inside and were buried with him: his clothes, food, and water. Other items they had to divide between them, making their own loads even heavier.
An hour before dawn, they left the valley and went into SOP--standing operating procedure. Sergeant Stephenson took the role of lead scout, moving up ahead of the other two, dropping to the ground before cresting a ridge to peer over the top in case there was a nasty surprise on the other side.
The route lay upward, and he set a grueling pace. Although a small and wiry man, and five years older than Martin, he could march most men clean off their feet and carry an eighty-pound load while he did it.
Clouds came over the mountains just when Martin needed them, delaying the dawn and giving him an extra hour. In ninety minutes of hard march they covered eight miles, putting several ridges and two hills between them and the valley. Finally the advance of the gray light forced them to look for a place to conceal themselves.
Martin chose a horizontal crack in the rocks under an overhang, screened by sere grass and just above a dry wadi. In the last of the darkness they ate some rations, sipped water, covered themselves with scrim netting, and lay down to sleep. There were three duty watches, and Martin took the first.
He nudged Stephenson awake at eleven A.M. and slept while the sergeant stood guard. It was at four P.M. that Ben Eastman poked Martin in the ribs with a rigid finger. As the major's eyes opened, he saw Eastman with his forefinger to his lips. Martin listened. From the wadi ten feet beneath their ledge came the guttural sounds of voices in Arabic.
Sergeant Stephenson came awake and raised an eyebrow. What do we do now? Martin listened for a while. There were four of them, on patrol, bored with their task of endlessly marching through the mountains, and tired. Within ten minutes he knew they intended to camp there for the night.
He had lost enough time already. He needed to move by six, when darkness would fall over the hills, and he needed every hour to cover the miles to those crevices in the hill across the valley from the Fortress. He might need more time to search for those crevices and find them.
The conversation from the wadi below indicated that the Iraqis were going to search for wood for a campfire. They would be certain to cast an eye on the bushes behind which the SAS men lay. Even if they did not, it might be hours before they would sleep deeply enough for Martin's patrol to slip past them and get away. There was no choice.
At a signal from Martin, the other two eased out their flat, doubleedged knives, and the three men slid over the scree into the wadi below.
When the job was over, Martin flicked through the dead Iraqis' paybooks. All of them, he noticed, had the patronymic Al-Ubaidi. They were all of the Ubaidi tribe, mountain men who came from these parts. All wore the insignia of the Republican Guard. Clearly the Guard had been culled from these mountain fighters to form the patrols whose job was to keep the Fortress safe from intruders. He noted they were lean, spare men, without an ounce of fat on them, and probably tireless in hill country like this.
It still cost an hour to drag the four bodies into the crevice, cut apart their camouflaged tent to form a tarpaulin, and decorate the tarp with bushes, weeds, and grass. But when they were finished, it would have
taken an extremely sharp eye to spot the hiding place beneath the overhang. Fortunately, the Iraqi patrol had had no radio, so they would probably not check in with their base until they arrived back--whenever that might be. Now, they would never get back, but with luck it would be two days before they were missed.
As darkness set in, the SAS men marched on, trying by the starlight to recall the shapes of the mountains in the photographs, following the compass heading toward the mountain they sought.
The map Martin carried was a brilliant confection, drawn by a computer on the basis of the aerial photos by the TR-1 and showing the route between the DZ and the intended lying-up position. Pausing at intervals to consult his hand-held SATNAV positioner and study the map by penlight, Martin could check their direction and progress. By midnight, both were good. He estimated a further ten miles to march.
In the Brecons in Wales, Martin and his men could have kept up four miles an hour over this kind of terrain, a brisk walk on a flat surface for those taking their dogs for an evening stroll without an eightypound 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 nightvision goggles they wore like frogs' eyes on stalks. With the new wideangle version they could see the countryside ahead of them in a pale green glow, for the job of the image-intensifiers was to gather every scrap of natural light in the environment and concentrate it into the viewer's retina.
Two hours before dawn, they saw the bulk of the Fortress in front of them and began to climb the slope to their left. The mountain they had chosen was on the southern fringe of the square kilometer provided by Jericho, and from the crevices near the summit they should be able to look across at the southern face of the Fortress--if indeed it was the Fortress--at an almost equal height to its peak.
They climbed hard for an hour, their breath coming in rasping gasps. Sergeant Stephenson in the lead cut into a tiny goat track that led upward and around the curve of the mountain. Just short of the summit, they found the crevice the TR-1 had seen on its down-and-sideways camera. It was better than Martin could have hoped--a natural crack in the rock eight feet long, four feet deep, and two feet high. Outside the crack was a ledge two feet across, on which Martin's torso could lie with his lower body and feet inside the rocks.
The men brought out their scrim netting and began to make their niche invisible to watching eyes.
Food and water were stuffed into the pouches of the belt orders, Martin's technical equipment laid ready to hand, weapons checked and set close by. Just before the sun rose, Martin used one of his devices. It was a transmitter, much smaller than the one he had had in Baghdad, barely the size of two cigarette packs. It was linked to a cadmium-nickel battery with enough power to give him more talking time than he would ever need.
The frequency was fixed, and at the other end there was a listening watch for twenty-four hours a day. To attract attention he only had to press the transmit button in an agreed sequence of blips and pauses, then wait for the speaker to respond with the answering sequence.
The third component of the set was a dish aerial, a fold-away like the one in Baghdad but smaller. Though he was now farther north than the Iraqi capital, he was also much higher.
Martin set up the dish, pointing toward the south, linked the battery to the set and the set to the aerial, then pressed the transmit button. One-two-three-four-five; pause; one-two-three; pause; one; pause; one. Five seconds later, the radio in his hand squawked softly. Four blips, four blips, two.
He pressed transmit, kept the thumb down, and said into the speaker: "Come Nineveh, come Tyre. I say again, Come Nineveh, come Tyre."
He released the transmit button and waited. The set gave an excited one-two-three; pause; one; pause; four. Received and acknowledged.
Martin put the set away in its waterproof cover, took his powerful field glasses, and eased his torso onto the ledge. Behind him Sergeant Stephenson and Corporal Eastman were sandwiched like embryos into the crevice under the rock, but apparently quite comfortable. Two twigs held up the netting in front of him, giving a slit through which he slid the binoculars, for which a bird-watcher would have given his right arm.
As the sun seeped into the mountains of Hamreen on the morning of February 23, Major Martin began to study the masterpiece of his old school friend Osman Badri--the Qa'ala that no machine could see.
In Riyadh, Steve Laing and Simon Paxman stared at the sheet handed them by the engineer who had come running out of the radio shack.
"Bloody hell," said Laing with feeling. "He's there--he's on the frigging mountain!"
Twenty minutes later, the news reached Al Kharz from General Glosson's office.
Captain Don Walker had returned to his base in the small hours of the twenty-second, grabbed some sleep in what was left of the night, and begun work just after sunrise, when the pilots who had flown missions
during the night were completing their debriefing and shuffling off to bed.
By midday, he had a plan to present to his superior officers. It was sent at once to Riyadh and approved. During the afternoon the appropriate aircraft, crew, and support services were allocated.
What was planned was a four-ship raid on an Iraqi air base well north of Baghdad called Tikrit East, not far from the birthplace of Saddam Hussein. It would be a night raid with two-thousand-pound laserguided bombs. Don Walker would lead it, with his usual wingman and another element of two Eagles.
Miraculously the mission appeared on the Air Tasking Order from Riyadh, although it had only been devised twelve hours and not three days earlier.
The other three needed crews were at once taken off any other tasking and assigned to the Tikrit East mission, slated for the night of the twenty-second (maybe) or any other night they were ordered. Until then, they were on permanent one-hour standby.
The four Strike Eagles were prepared by sundown of the twenty-second, and at ten P.M. the mission was canceled. No other mission was substituted. The eight aircrew were told to rest, while the remainder of the squadron went tank-zapping among the Republican Guard units north of Kuwait.
When they returned in the dawn of the twenty-third, the four idle aircrew came in for their turn of ribbing.
With the mission planning staff, a route was worked out for Tikrit East that would take the four Eagles up the corridor between Baghdad and the Iranian border to the east, with a turn of course through forty-five degrees over Lake As Sa'diyah and then straight on, northwest to Tikrit.
As he sipped his breakfast coffee in the mess hall, Don Walker was summoned outside by his squadron commander. "Your target marker is in place," he was told. "Get some rest. It could be a rough night."
By the rising sun, Mike Martin began to study the mountain across the steep valley. On full magnification his glasses could pick out individual bushes; pulling the focus back, he could see an area any size he wanted.
For the first hour it looked like just a mountain. The grass grew, as on all the others. There were stunted shrubs and bushes, as on all the rest. Here and there a patch of bare rock, occasionally a small boulder, clung to the slopes. Like all the other hills within his vision, it was of an irregular shape. There seemed nothing out of place.
From time to time he squeezed his eyes tightly to rest them, pillowed his head on his forearms for a while, and started again.
By midmorning, a pattern began to emerge. On certain parts of the mountain the grass appeared to grow in a manner different from that on other parts. There were areas where the vegetation seemed too regular, as if in lines. But there was no door, unless it was on the other side, no road, no track with tire marks, no standpipe venting foul air from inside, no mark of present or previous excavation. It was the moving sun that gave the first clue.
Shortly after eleven, he thought he caught a glint of something in the grass. He brought the glasses back to that patch and went to full magnification. The sun went behind a cloud. When it came out, the glint flashed again. Then he saw the source: a fragment of wire in the grass.
He blinked and tried again. Slantwise, it was a length of wire a foot long in the grass. It was part of a longer strand, green plastic-covered wire, of which a small part had been abraded to reveal the metal beneath.
The wire was one of several he glimpsed, all buried in the grass, occasionally revealed as the wind blew the stems from side to side. Diagonals in the opposite direction, a patch of chain-link wire, underneath the grass.
By midday, he could see it better. A section of mountainside where green wire mesh held the soil to a surface below the earth; the grass and shrubs planted in every diamond-shaped gap between the fencing, growing through the gaps, covering the wire beneath.
Then he saw the terracing. One part of the mountainside was made up of blocks, presumably concrete, each set back three inches from the one below it. Along the horizontal terraces thus created were runnels of earth out of which the shrubs grew. Where they sprouted, they were in horizontal lines. At first it did not look so, because they were of different heights, but when he studied their stems only, it became clear they were indeed in lines. Nature does not grow in lines.
He tried other parts of the mountain, but the pattern ended, then began again farther to his left. It was in the early afternoon that he solved it. The analysts in Riyadh had been right--up to a point. Had anyone attempted to gouge out the whole center of the hill, it would have fallen in.
Whoever had done this must have taken three existing hills, cut away the inner faces, and built up the gaps between the peaks to create a gigantic crater. In filling the gaps, the builder had followed the contours of the real hills, stepping his rows of concrete blocks backward and upward, creating the miniterraces, pouring tens of thousands of tons of topsoil down from the top.
The cladding must have come later: sheets of green vinyl-coated chainlink wire presumably stapled to the concrete beneath, holding the earth to the slopes. Then the grass seed, sprayed onto the earth, there to root and spread, with bushes and shrubs sown into deeper bowls left in the concrete terraces.
The grass from the previous summer had matted, creating its own bonding network of roots, and the shrubs had sprouted up through the wire and the grass to match the undergrowth on the original hills.
Above the crater, the roof of the fortress was surely a geodesic dome, so cast that it too contained thousands of pockets where grass could grow. There were even artificial boulders, painted the gray of real rocks, with streaks where the rain had run off.
Martin began to concentrate on the area near the point where the rim of the crater would have been before the construction of the rotunda.
It was about fifty feet below the summit of the dome that he found what he sought. He had already swept his glasses across the slight protuberance fifty times and had not noticed.
It was a rocky outcrop, faded gray, but two black lines ran across it from side to side. The more he studied the lines, the more he wondered why anyone would have clambered so high to draw two lines across a boulder.
A squall of wind came from the northeast, ruffling the scrim netting around his face. The same wind caused one of the lines to move. When the wind dropped, the line ceased to move. Then Martin realized they were not drawn lines but steel wires, running across the rock and away into the grass.
Smaller boulders stood around the perimeter of the large one, like sentries in a ring. Why so circular, why steel wires? Supposing someone, down below, jerked hard on those wires--would the boulder move?
At half past three he realized it was not a boulder. It was a gray tarpaulin, weighted down by a circle of rocks, to be twitched to one side when the wires were jerked downward into the cavern beneath.
Under the tarp he gradually made out a shape, circular, five feet in diameter. He was staring at a canvas sheet, beneath which, invisible to him, the last three feet of the Babylon gun projected, from its breech two hundred yards inside the crater up into the sky. It was pointing south-southeast toward Dhahran, 750 kilometers away.
"Rangefinder," he muttered to the men behind him. He passed back the binoculars and took the implement offered to him. It was like a telescope.
When he held it to his eye, as they had shown him in Riyadh, he saw the mountain and the tarp that hid the gun, but not with any magnification.
On the prism were four V-shaped chevrons, the points all directed inward. Slowly he rotated the knurled knob on the side of the scope until all four points touched each other to form a cross. The cross rested on the tarpaulin.
Taking the scope from his eye, he consulted the numbers on the rotating band. One thousand and eighty yards.
"Compass," he said. He pushed the rangefinder behind him and took the electronic compass. This was no device dependent on a dish swimming in a bowl of alcohol, nor even a pointer balanced on a gimbal. He held it to his eye, sighted the tarpaulin across the valley, and pressed the button. The compass did the rest, giving him a bearing from his own position to the tarpaulin of 348 degrees, ten minutes, and eighteen seconds.
The SATNAV positioner gave him the last thing he needed--his own exact location on the planet's surface, to the nearest square fifteen yards by fifteen.
It was a clumsy business trying to erect the satellite dish in the confined space, and it took ten minutes. When he called Riyadh, the response was immediate. Slowly Martin read to the listeners in the Saudi capital three sets of figures: his own exact position, the compass direction from himself to the target, and the range. Riyadh could work out the rest and give the pilot his coordinates.
Martin crawled back into the crevice, to be replaced by Stephenson, who would keep an eye open for Iraqi patrols, and tried to sleep.
At half-past eight, in complete darkness, Martin tested the infrared target marker. In shape it was like a large flash lamp with a pistol-grip, but it had an eyepiece in back.
He linked it to its battery, aimed it at the Fortress, and looked. The whole mountain was as clearly lit as if bathed in a great green moon. He swung the barrel of the image intensifier up to the tarpaulin that masked the barrel of the Babylon and squeezed the pistol-trigger.
A single, invisible beam of infrared light raced across the valley, and he saw a small red dot appear on the mountainside. Moving the nightsight, 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 twothousand-pound laser-guided bombs, in addition to their self-defense air-to-air missiles.
Refueling from their designated KC-10 tanker just south of the Iraqi border was normal and uneventful. When they were topped up, they turned away in loose formation, and the flight, coded Bluejay, set course almost due north, passing over the Iraqi town of As-Samawah at 11:14.
They flew in radio silence as always and without lights, each wizzo able to see the other three aircraft clearly on his radar. The night was clear, and the AWACS over the Gulf had given them a "picture clear" advice, meaning no Iraqi fighters were up.
At 11:39, Don Walker's wizzo muttered:
"Turning point in five."
They all heard it and understood they would be turning over Lake As Sa'diyah in five minutes.
Just as they went into the forty-five-degree turn to port, to set the new heading for Tikrit East, the other three aircrew heard Don Walker say quite clearly:
"Bluejay Flight Leader has ... engine problems. I'm going to RTB. Bluejay Three, take over."
Bluejay Three was Bull Baker that night, leader of the other two-plane element. From that transmission onward, things began to go wrong, in a very weird manner.
Walker's wingman Randy "R-2" Roberts closed up with his leader but could see no apparent trouble from Walker's engines, yet the Bluejay leader was losing power and height. If he was going to RTB--return to base--it would be normal for his wingman to stay with him, unless the problem was minimal. Engine trouble far over enemy territory is not minimal.
"Roger that," acknowledged Baker. Then they heard Walker say:
"Bluejay Two, rejoin Bluejay Three, I say again, rejoin. That is an order. Proceed to Tikrit East."
The wingman, now baffled, did as he was ordered and climbed back to rejoin the remainder of Bluejay. Their commander continued to lose height over the lake; they could see him on their radars.
At the same moment they realized he had done the unthinkable. For some reason--confusion caused by the engine problem, perhaps--he had spoken not on the Have-quick coded radio, but "in clear." More amazingly, he had actually mentioned their destination.
Out over the Gulf, a young USAF sergeant manning part of the battery of consoles in the hull of the AWACS plane summoned his mission commander in perplexity.
"We have a problem, sir. Bluejay Leader has engine trouble. He wants to RTB."
"Right, noted," said the mission commander. In most airplanes the pilot is the captain and in complete charge. In an AWACS the pilot has that charge for the safety of the airplane, but the mission commander calls the shots when it comes to giving orders across the air.
"But sir," protested the sergeant, "Bluejay Leader spoke in clear. Gave the mission target. Shall I RTB them all?"
"Negative, mission continues," said the controller. "Carry on."
The sergeant returned to his console completely bewildered. This was madness: If the Iraqis had heard that transmission, their air defenses at Tikrit East would be on full alert. Then he heard Walker again.
"Bluejay Leader, Mayday, Mayday. Both engines out. Ejecting."
He was still speaking in clear. The Iraqis, if they were listening, could have heard it all.
In fact, the sergeant was right--the messages had been heard. At Tikrit East the gunners were hauling their tarpaulins off their triple-A, and the heat-seeking missiles were waiting for the sound of incoming engines. Other units were being alerted to go at once to the area of the lake to search for two downed aircrew.
"Sir, Bluejay Leader is down. We have to RTB the rest of them."
"Noted. Negative," said the mission commander. He glanced at his watch. He had his orders. He did not know why, but he would obey them.
Bluejay Flight was by then nine minutes from target, heading into a reception committee. The three pilots rode their Eagles in stony silence.
In the AWACS the sergeant could still see the blip of Bluejay Leader, way down over the surface of the lake. Clearly the Eagle had been abandoned and would crash at any moment. Four minutes later, the mission commander appeared to change his mind.
"Bluejay Flight, AWACS to Bluejay Flight, RTB, I say again RTB." The three Strike Eagles, despondent at the night's events, peeled away from their course and set heading for home. The Iraqi gunners at Tikrit East, deprived of radar, waited in vain for another hour.
In the southern fringes of the Jebal al Hamreen another Iraqi listening post had heard the interchange. The signals colonel in charge was not tasked with alerting Tikrit East or any other air base to approaching enemy aircraft. His sole job was to ensure none entered the Jebal. As Bluejay Flight turned over the lake, he had gone to amber alert; the track from the lake to the air base would have taken the Eagles along the southern fringe of the range. When one of them crashed, he was delighted; when the other three peeled away to the south, he was relieved. He stood his alert down.
Don Walker had spiraled down to the surface of the lake until he levelled at one hundred feet and made his Mayday call. As he skimmed the waters of As Sa'diyah, he punched in his new coordinates and turned north into the Jebal. At the same time he went to LANTIRN, with whose aid he could look through his canopy and see the landscape ahead of him, clearly lit by the infrared beam being emitted from beneath his wing.
Columns of information on his Head-Up Display were now giving him course and speed, height, and time to Launch Point. He could have gone to automatic pilot, allowing the computer to fly the Eagle, throwing it down the canyons and the valleys, past the cliffs and hillsides, while the pilot kept his hands on his thighs. But he preferred to stay on manual and fly it himself.
With the aid of recon photos supplied by the Black Hole, he had plotted a course up through the range that never let him come above the skyline. He stayed low, hugging the valley floors, swerving from gap to gap, a roller-coaster zigzag course that carried him upward into the range toward the Fortress.
When Walker made his Mayday call, Mike Martin's radio had squawked out a series of preagreed blips. Martin had crawled forward to the ledge above the valley, aimed the infrared target marker at the tarpaulin a thousand yards away, settled the red dot onto the dead center of the target, and now kept it there.
The blips on the radio had meant "seven minutes to bomb launch," and from then on Martin was not to move the red spot by an inch.
"About time," muttered Eastman. "I'm bloody freezing in here."
"Not long," said Stephenson, cramming the last bits and pieces into his Bergen. "Then you'll have all the running you want, Benny." Only the radio remained unpacked, ready for its next transmission.
In the rear seat of the Eagle, Tim, the wizzo, could see the same information as his pilot. Four minutes to launch, three-thirty, three ... the figures on the HUD counted down as the Eagle screamed through the mountains to its target. It flashed over the small dip where Martin and his men had landed, and took seconds to cover the terrain across which they had labored beneath their packs. "Ninety seconds to launch ..."
The SAS men heard the sound of the engines coming from the south as the Eagle began its loft.
The fighter-bomber came over the last ridge three miles south of the target, just as the countdown hit zero. In the darkness the two torpedoshaped bombs left their pylons beneath the wings and climbed for a few seconds, driven by their own inertia.
In the three dummy villages the Republican Guards were drowned in the roar of the jet engines erupting from nowhere over their heads, jumped from their bunks, and ran to their weapons. In a few seconds the roofs of the forage barns were lifting away on their hydraulic jacks to expose the missiles beneath.
The two bombs felt the tug of gravity and began to fall. In their noses, infrared seekers sniffed for the guiding beam, the upturned bucket of invisible rays bouncing back from the red spot on their target, the bucket which, once entered, they could never leave.
Mike Martin lay prone, waiting, buffeted by engine noise as the mountains trembled, and held the red dot steady on the Babylon gun. He never saw the bombs. One second he was gazing at a pale green mountain in the light of the image intensifier; the next, he had to pull his eyes away and shield them as night turned into blood-red day.
The two bombs impacted simultaneously, three seconds before the Guard colonel deep below the hollow mountain reached for his Launch lever. He never made it.
Looking across the valley without the night-sight, Martin saw the entire top of the Fortress erupt in flame. By its glare, he caught the fleeting image of a massive barrel, rearing like a stricken beast, twisting and turning in the blast, breaking, and crashing back with the fragments of the dome into the crater beneath.
"Bloody hellfire," whispered Sergeant Stephenson at his elbow. It was not a bad analogy. Orange fire began to glow down in the crater as the first explosion flashes died away and a dim half-light returned to the mountains. Martin began keying in his alert codes for the listeners in Riyadh.
Don Walker had rolled the Eagle after the bomb launch, pulling 135 degrees of bank, hauling down and through to find and pursue a reciprocal heading back to the south. But because he was not over flat land and mountains rose all around him, he had to gain more altitude than normal or risk clipping one of the peaks.
It was the village farthest away from the Fortress that got the best shot. For a fraction of a second he was above them, on one wingtip, pulling around to the south, when the two missiles were launched. These were not Russian SAMs but the best Iraq had--Franco-German Rolands.
The first was low, racing after the Eagle as it dropped out of sight across the mountains. The Roland failed to clear the ridge. The second skimmed the rocks of the peak and caught up with the fighter in the next valley. Walker felt the tremendous shock as the missile impacted into the body of his aircraft, destroying and almost ripping out the starboard engine. The Eagle was thrown across the sky, its delicate systems in disarray, flaming fuel forming a comet's tail behind it.
Walker tested the controls, a soggy pudding where once there had been firm response. It was over, his airplane was dying underneath him, all his fire-warning lights were on, and thirty tons of burning metal were about to fall out of the sky.
"Eject, eject ..."
The canopy automatically shattered a microsecond before the two ejector seats came through, shooting upward into the night, turning, stabilizing. Their sensors knew at once that they were too low and blew apart the straps retaining the pilot into his seat, throwing him clear of the falling metal so that his parachute could open.
Walker had never bailed out before. The sense of shock numbed him for a while, robbed him of the power of decision. Fortunately the manufacturers had thought of that. As the heavy metal seat fell away, the parachute snapped itself open and unfurled. Dazed, Walker found himself in pitch darkness, swinging in his harness over a valley he could not see.
It was not a long drop--he had been far too low for that. In seconds the ground came up and hit him, and he was knocked over, tumbling, rolling, hands frantically scrabbling for the harness-release catch. Then the parachute was gone, blowing away down the valley, and he was on his back on wiry turf. He got up. "Tim," he called.
"Tim, you okay?" He began to run up the valley floor, looking for another chute, certain they had both landed in the same area.
He was right in that. Both airmen had fallen two valleys to the south of their target. In the sky to the north he could make out a dim reddish glow.
After three minutes he crashed into something and banged his knee. He thought it was a rock, but in the dim light he saw it was one of the ejector seats. His, perhaps. Tim's? He went on looking.
Walker found his wizzo. The young man had ejected perfectly, but the
missile blast had wrecked the seat-separation unit on his ejector. He had landed on the mountainside locked into the seat, his parachute still tucked beneath him. The impact of the crash had torn the body from the seat at last, but no man survives a shock like that.
Tim Nathanson lay on his back in the valley, a tangle of broken limbs, his face masked by his helmet and visor. Walker tore away the mask, removed the dog tags, turned away from the glow in the mountains, and began to run, tears streaming down his face.
He ran until he could run no more, then found a crevice in the mountain and crawled in to rest.
Two minutes after the explosions in the Fortress, Martin had his contact with Riyadh. He sent his series of blips and then his message. It was:
"Now Barrabas, I say again, Now Barrabas."
The three SAS men closed down the radio, packed it, hitched their Bergens onto their backs, and began to get off the mountain--fast. There would be patrols now as never before, looking not for them--it was unlikely the Iraqis would work out for some time how the bombing raid had been so accurate--but for the downed American aircrew.
Sergeant Stephenson had taken a bearing on the flaming jet as it passed over their heads, and the direction it had fallen. Assuming it had careered on for a while after the ejections, the aircrew, had they survived, ought to be somewhere along that heading. The SAS men moved fast, just ahead of the Ubaidi tribesmen of the Guard, who were then pouring out of their villages and heading upward into the range.
Twenty minutes later, Mike Martin and the two other SAS men found the body of the dead weapons systems officer. There was nothing they could do, so they moved on.
Ten minutes afterward, they heard behind them the continuous rattle of small-arms fire. It continued for some time. The Al-Ubaidi had found the body too and in their rage had emptied their magazines into it. The gesture also gave their position away. The SAS men pressed on.
Don Walker hardly felt the blade of Sergeant Stephenson's knife against his throat. It was light as a thread of silk on the gullet. But he looked up and saw the figure of a man standing over him. He was dark and lean; there was a gun in his right hand pointing at Walker's chest; and the man wore the uniform of a captain in the Iraqi Republican Guard, Mountain Division. Then the man spoke: "Bloody silly time to drop in for tea. Shall we just get the hell out of here?"
* * *
That night General Norman Schwarzkopf was sitting alone in his suite on the fourth floor of the Saudi Defense Ministry building.
It was not where he had spent much of the past seven months; most of that time he had been out visiting as many combat units as he could, or down in the subbasement with his staff and planners. But the large and comfortable office was where he went when he wanted to be alone. That night he sat at his desk, adorned by the red telephone that linked him in a top-security net to Washington, and waited.
At ten minutes before one on the morning of February 24, the other phone rang.
"General Schwarzkopf?" It was a British accent.
"Yes. This is he."
"I have a message for you, sir."
"Shoot."
"It is: 'Now Barrabas,' sir. 'Now Barrabas.' "
"Thank you," said the Commander-in-Chief, and replaced the receiver. At 0400 hours that day, the ground invasion went in.