Chapter 3
Steve Laing returned to Century House by cab in a spirit of some surprise and elation. He had arranged the lunch with the academic Arabist in the hopes of recruiting him for another task, which he still had in mind, and had only raised the matter of Kuwait as a conversational ploy.
Years of practice had taught him to start with a question or a request that the target could not fulfill, then move on to the real matter at hand. The theory was that the expert, stumped by the first request, would be more amenable for his own self-respect to agreeing to the second.
Dr. Martin's surprise revelation happened to answer a query that had already been raised during a high-level conference at Century the previous day. At the time it had been generally regarded as a no-hope wish. But if young Dr. Martin were right ... a brother who spoke Arabic even better than he ... and who was already in the Special Air Service Regiment and therefore accustomed to the covert life ... interesting, very interesting.
On arrival at Century, Laing marched straight in on his immediate superior, the Controller Mid-East. After an hour together they both went upstairs to see one of the two Deputy Chiefs. The Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS--also popularly if inaccurately known as MI-6--remains even in the days of supposed "open" government a shadowy organization that guards its secrecy. Only in recent years has a British government formally admitted that it exists at all. And it was as late as 1991 that the same government publicly named its boss, a move regarded by most insiders as a foolish and short-sighted one that served no purpose other than to force that unfortunate gentleman to the unwelcome novelty of needing bodyguards, paid for at public expense. Such are the futilities of political correctness. The staff of the SIS are listed in no manual but appear if at all as civil servants on the lists of a variety of ministries, mainly the Foreign Office, under whose auspices the Service comes. The budget appears in no accounts, being squirreled away in the budgets of a dozen different ministries.
Even its shabby headquarters was for years supposed to be a state secret, until it became plain that any London cab driver, asked to take a passenger to Century House, would reply, "Oh, you mean the Spook House, guv?" At this point it was admitted that if London's cabbies knew where it was, the KGB might have worked it out. Although much less famous than the CIA, infinitely smaller and more meanly funded, "the Firm" has earned a solid reputation among friend and foe for the quality of its "product" (secretly gathered intelligence).
Among the world's major intelligence agencies, only the Israeli Mossad is smaller and even more shadowy.
The man heading the SIS is known quite officially as the Chief and never, despite endless misnomers in the press, as the Director-General.
It is the sister organization MI-5, or the Security Service, responsible for counterintelligence within the United Kingdom's borders, that has a Director-General.
In-house, the Chief is known as "C," which ought to stand for Chief but does not. The first-ever Chief was Admiral Sir Mansfield Cummings, and the C comes from that long-dead gentleman's last name.
Under the Chief come two Deputy Chiefs and under them five Assistant Chiefs. These men rule the five main departments:
Operations (or Ops, who gather the covert information); Intelligence (who analyze it into a hopefully meaningful picture); Technical (responsible for false papers, minicameras, secret writing, ultracompact communications, and all the other bits of metal needed to do something illegal and get away with it in an unfriendly world); Administration (covering salaries, pensions, staff lists, budget accountancy, Legal Office, Central Registry, and the like); and Counterintelligence (which tries to keep the Service clean of hostile penetration by vetting and checking).
Under Ops come the Controllers, who handle the globe's various divisions--Western Hemisphere, Sov Bloc, Africa, Europe, Mid-East, and Australasia--with a side office for Liaison, which has the ticklish task of trying to cooperate with "friendly" agencies. To be frank, it is not quite that tidy (nothing British is ever quite that tidy), but they seem to muddle through.
That August 1990, the focus of attention was Mid-East, and particularly the Iraq Desk, upon whom the entire political and bureaucratic world of Westminster and Whitehall seemed to have descended like a noisy and unwelcome fan club. The Deputy Chief listened carefully to what the Controller Mid-East and the Director Ops for that region had to say and nodded several times. It was, he thought, or might be, an interesting option. It was not that no information was coming out of Kuwait. In the first forty-eight hours, before the Iraqis closed down the international telephone lines, every British company with an office in Kuwait had been on the phone, the telex, or the fax machines to their local man. The Kuwaiti embassy had been bending the ear of the Foreign Office with the first horror stories and demanding instant liberation.
The problem was, virtually none of the information was of the sort the Chief could present to Cabinet as utterly reliable. In the aftermath of the invasion, Kuwait was one giant "bugger's muddle," as the Foreign Secretary had so mordantly phrased it six hours earlier.
Even the British embassy staff were now firmly locked in their compound on the edge of the Gulf, almost in the shadow of the needlepointed Kuwait Towers, trying to contact by telephone those British citizens on a grossly inadequate list to see if they were all right. The received wisdom from these frightened businessmen and engineers was that they could occasionally hear gunfire. "Tell me something I don't know" was the reaction at Century to such gems of intelligence.
Now a man in on the ground, and a trained deep-penetration, covertops man who could pass for an Arab--that could be very interesting.
Apart from some rock-hard real information as to what the hell was going on in there, a chance existed to show the politicians that something was actually being done and to cause William Webster over at the CIA to choke on his after-dinner mints.
The Deputy Chief had had no illusions about Margaret Thatcher's almost kittenish esteem (mutual) for the SAS since that afternoon in May 1980 when they had blown away those terrorists at the Iranian embassy in London, and she had spent the evening with the team at the Albany Street barracks drinking whiskey and listening to their tales of derring-do. "I think," he said at last, "I'd better have a chat with the DSF."
Officially, the Special Air Service Regiment has nothing to do with the SIS. The chains of command are quite different. The active-service 22nd SAS (as opposed to the part-time 23rd SAS) is based at a barracks called Stirling Lines, outside the county town of Hereford in the west of England. Its commanding officer reports to the Director of Special Forces, or DSF, whose office is in a sprawl of buildings in West London. The actual office is at the top of a once-elegant pillared building covered in a seemingly perpetual skin of scaffolding, part of a rabbit warren of small rooms whose lack of splendor belies the importance of the operations planned there.
The DSF comes under the Director of Military Operations (a general) who reports to the Chief of General Staff (an even higher general), and the General Staff comes under the Ministry of Defence. But the Special in the title of the SAS is there for a reason. Ever since it was founded in the Western Desert of Libya in 1941 by Colonel David Stirling, the SAS has operated covertly. Its tasks have always included deep penetration with a view to lying hidden and observing enemy movements; deep penetration with a view to sabotage, assassination, and general mayhem; terrorist elimination; hostage recovery; close protection, a euphemism for bodyguarding the high and mighty; and foreign training missions.
Like members of any elite unit, the officers and men of the SAS tend to live quietly within their own society, unable to discuss their work with outsiders, refusing to be photographed, and rarely emerging from the shadows.
Because the lifestyles of the members of the two secret societies had much in common, the SIS and the SAS knew each other at least by sight and had frequently cooperated in the past, either on joint operations or with the intelligence people, "borrowing" a specialist soldier from the regiment for a particular task. It was something of this kind that the Deputy Chief of the SIS (who had cleared his visit with the Chief, Sir Colin) had in mind when he took a glass of single malt whiskey from Brigadier J. P. Lovat in the covert London headquarters that evening as the sun went down. The unwitting object of such discussion and private musing in London and Kuwait was at that moment poring over a map in another barracks many miles away. For the past eight weeks, he and his team of twelve instructors had been living in a section of the quarters assigned to the private bodyguard unit of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan of Abu Dhabi. It was a task the regiment had undertaken many times before. All up and down the western shore of the Gulf, from the Sultanate of Oman in the south to Bahrain in the north, lies a chain of sultanates, emirates, and sheikhdoms in and out of which the British have been pottering for centuries. The Trucial States, now the United Arab Emirates, were so called because Britain once signed a truce with their rulers to protect them with the Royal Navy against marauding pirates in exchange for trading privileges. The relationship continues, and many of these rulers have princely guard units trained in the finer points of close protection by visiting SAS instructor teams. A fee is paid, of course, but to the Ministry of Defence in London. Major Mike Martin had a large map of the Gulf and most of the Middle East spread out over the mess hall table and was studying it, surrounded by several of his men. At thirty-seven, he was not the oldest man in the room; two of his sergeants topped forty, tough, wiry, and very fit soldiers whom a man twenty years their junior would have been extremely foolish to take on.
"Anything in it for us, boss?" asked one of the sergeants. As in all small, tight units, first names are widely used in the regiment, but officers are normally called "boss" by other ranks.
"I don't know," said Martin. "Saddam Hussein has got himself into Kuwait. Question is: Will he get out of his own accord? If not, will the UN authorize a force to go in and throw him out? If yes, I would think there ought to be something in there for us to do." "Good," said the sergeant with satisfaction, and there were nods from the other six around the table. It had been too long, so far as they were concerned, since they had been on a real, high-adrenaline combat operation.
There are four basic disciplines in the regiment, and each recruit must master one of them. There are the freefallers, specializing in highaltitude parachute drops; the mountain-men, whose preferred terrain is rock faces and the high peaks; the armored scout car men, who drive and operate stripped-down, heavily armored long-base Land-Rovers over open terrain; and the amphibians, skilled in canoes, silent-running inflatables, and subaqua or underwater work. In his team of twelve, Martin had four freefallers, including himself, four scout car men teaching the Abu Dhabis the principles of fast attack and counterattack over desert ground, and because Abu Dhabi lies by the Gulf, four subaqua instructors.
Apart from their own speciality, SAS men must have a good working knowledge of the other disciplines, so that inter-changeability is common. They have to master more besides--radio, first aid, and languages. The basic combat unit consists of only four men. If one is ever out of action, his tasks will be quickly shared among the surviving three, whether they be radio operators or unit medics.
They pride themselves on a far higher educational level than any other unit in the Army, and because they travel the world, languages are a must. Every soldier must learn one, apart from English.
For years Russian was a favorite, now going out of fashion since the end of the cold war. Malay is very useful in the Far East, where the regiment for years fought in Borneo. Spanish is on the increase since the covert operations in Colombia against the cocaine lords of Medellin and Cali. French is learned--just in case.
And because the regiment had spent years assisting Sultan Qaboos of Oman in his war with Communist infiltrators from South Yemen into the interior of Dhofar, plus other training missions up and down the Gulf and in Saudi Arabia, many SAS men speak passable Arabic. The sergeant who had asked for some action was one of them, but he had to admit: "The boss is bloody amazing. I've never heard anyone like him. He even looks the part."
Mike Martin straightened and ran a nut-brown hand through jet-black hair. "Time to turn in."
It was just after ten. They would be up before dawn for the usual tenmile run with their charges before the sun became too hot. It was a chore the Abu Dhabis loathed but upon which their sheikh insisted. If these strange soldiers from England said it was good for them, it was good for them. Besides, he was paying for it, and he wanted value for his money.
Major Martin retired to his own quarters and slept quickly and deeply. The sergeant was right; he did look the part. His men often wondered if he got his olive skin, dark eyes, and deep black hair from some Mediterranean forebears. He never told them, but they were wrong.
The maternal grandfather of both Martin boys had been a British tea planter at Darjeeling in India. As kids they had seen pictures of him--tall, pink-faced, blond-moustached, pipe in mouth, gun in hand, standing over a shot tiger. Very much the pukka sahib, the Englishman of the Indian Raj.
Then in 1928 Terence Granger had done the unthinkable: He had fallen in love with and insisted on marrying an Indian girl. That she was gentle and beautiful was not the point. It was simply not done. The tea company did not fire him--that would have brought it out in the open. They sent him into internal exile (that was what they actually called it) to an isolated plantation in faraway Assam.
If it was supposed to be a punishment, it did not work. Granger and his new bride, the former Miss Indira Bohse, loved it there--the wild, ravined countryside teeming with game and tigers, the deep green tea slopes, the climate, the people. And there Susan was born in 1930. They raised her there, an Anglo-Indian girl with Indian playmates.
By 1943 war had rolled toward India, with the Japanese advancing through Burma to the border. Granger was old enough not to have to volunteer, but he insisted, and after basic training at Delhi he was posted as a major to the Assam Rifles. All British cadets were promoted straight to major; they were not supposed to serve under an Indian officer, but Indians could make lieutenant or captain.
In 1945 he died in the crossing of the Irrawaddy. His body was never brought back; it vanished in those drenched Burmese jungles, one of tens of thousands who had seen some of the most vicious hand-to-hand fighting of the war. With a small company pension, his widow retreated back into her own culture. Two years later, more trouble came. India was being partitioned in 1947. The British were leaving. Ali Jinnah insisted on his Moslem Pakistan in the north, Pandit Nehru settled for mainly Hindu India in the south. As waves of refugees of the two religions rolled north and south, violent fighting broke out. Over a million died. Mrs. Granger, fearful for her daughter's safety, sent her to complete her education with her late father's younger brother, a very proper architect of Haslemere, Surrey. Six months later, the mother died in the rioting.
So at seventeen Susan Granger came to England, the land of her fathers that she had never seen. She spent one year at a girls' school near Haslemere and then two years as a trainee nurse at Farnham General Hospital, followed by one more as a secretary to a Farnham solicitor.
At twenty-one, the youngest permitted age, she applied as a stewardess with the British Overseas Airways Corporation. She trained with the other girls at the BOAC school, the old converted St. Mary's Convent at Heston, just outside London. Her nursing training was the clincher, and her looks and manner an added plus.
At twenty-one she was beautiful, with tumbling chestnut hair, hazel eyes, and skin like a European with a permanent golden suntan. On graduation she was assigned to Number 1 Line, London to India--an obvious choice for a girl speaking fluent Hindi.
It was a long, long trip in those days aboard the four-propeller Argonaut. The route was London-Rome-Cairo-Basra-Bahrain-Karachi- Bombay. Then on to Delhi, Calcutta, Colombo, Rangoon, Bangkok, and finally Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. Of course, one crew could not do it all, and the first crew stopover was Basra in the south of Iraq, where another crew took over.
It was there in 1951, over a drink at the Port Club, that she met a rather shy young accountant with the Iraq Petroleum Company, then owned and run by the British. His name was Nigel Martin, and he asked her to dinner. She had been warned about wolves--among the passengers, the crew, and during the stopovers. But he seemed nice, so she accepted. When he took her back to the BOAC station house, where the stewardesses were quartered, he held out his hand. She was so surprised, she shook it. Then she lay awake in the awful heat wondering what it would be like to kiss Nigel Martin.
On her next stopover in Basra, he was there again. Only after they were married did he admit he had been so smitten that he found out through the BOAC Station Officer Alex Reid when she was due next.
That autumn of 1951 they played tennis, swam at the Port Club, and walked through the bazaars of Basra. At his suggestion she took a leave and came with him to Baghdad, where he was based. She soon realized it was a place where she could settle down. The swarming throngs of brightly colored robes, the sights and smells of the street, the cooking meats by the edge of the Tigris, the myriad little shops selling herbs and spices, gold, and jewels--all reminded her of her native India. When he proposed to her, she accepted at once.
They married in. 1952 at St. George's Cathedral, the Anglican church off Haifa Street, and although she had no one on her side of the church, many people came from the IPC and the embassy to fill both rows of pews.
It was a good time to live in Baghdad. Life was slow and easy, the boy king Faisal was on the throne with Nuri as Said running the country, and the overwhelming foreign influence was British. This was partly because of the powerful contribution of the IPC to the economy and partly because most of the Army officers were British-taught, but mainly because the entire upper class had been potty-trained by starched English nannies, which always leaves a lasting impression.
In time the Martins had two sons, born in 1953 and 1955. Christened Michael and Terry, they were as unlike as chalk and cheese. In Michael the genes of Miss Indira Bohse came through; he was blackhaired, dark-eyed, and olive-skinned; wags from the British community said he looked more like an Arab. Terry, two years younger, took after his father: short, stocky, pink-skinned, and gingerhaired.
At three in the morning, Major Mike Martin was shaken awake by an orderly. "There is a message, sayidi." It was quite a simple message, but the urgency coding was "blitz," and the signoff meant it came personally from the Director of Special Forces. It required no answer. It just ordered him back to London on the first available plane.
He handed over his duties to the SAS captain, who was on his first tour with the regiment and was his second-in-command for the training assignment, and raced to the airport in civilian clothes.
The 2:55 A.M. for London should have left. Over a hundred passengers snored or grumbled on board as the stewardess brightly announced that the operational reason for the ninety-minute delay would soon be sorted out.
When the doors opened again to admit a single, lean man in jeans, desert boots, shirt, and bomber jacket with a tote bag over one shoulder, a number of those still awake glared at him. The man was shown to an empty seat in business class, made himself comfortable, and within minutes of takeoff tilted back his seat and fell fast asleep. A businessman next to him who had dined copiously and with much illicit liquid refreshment, then waited two hours in the airport and two more on the plane, fed himself another antacid tablet and glowered at the relaxed, sleeping figure beside him. "Bloody Arab," he muttered, and tried in vain to sleep.
Dawn came over the Gulf two hours later, but the British Airways jet was racing it toward the northwest, landing at Heathrow just before ten local time. Mike Martin came out of the customs hall among the first because he had no baggage in the aircraft hold. There was no one to meet him; he knew there would not be. He also knew where to go.
It was not even dawn in Washington, but the first indications of the coming sun pinked the distant hills of Prince Georges County, where the Patuxent River flows down to join the Chesapeake. On the sixth and top floor of the big, oblong building among the cluster that forms the headquarters of the CIA and is known simply as Langley, the lights still burned.
Judge William Webster, the Director of Central Intelligence, rubbed fingertips over tired eyes, rose, and walked to the picture windows. The swath of silver birches that masked his view of the Potomac when they were in full leaf, as they were now, still lay shrouded in darkness. Within an hour the rising sun would bring them back to pale green. It had been another sleepless night. Since the invasion of Kuwait he had been catnapping between calls from the President, the National Security Council, the State Department, and so it seemed, just about anyone else who had his number.
Behind him, as tired as he, sat Bill Stewart, his Deputy Director (Operations), and Chip Barber, head of the Middle East Division. "So that's about it?" asked the DCI, as if asking the question again might produce a better answer.
But there was no change. The position was that the President, the NSC, and State were all clamoring for deep-mined hypersecret intelligence from inside the heart of Baghdad, from the innermost councils of Saddam Hussein himself.
Was he going to stay in Kuwait? Would he pull out under threat of the United Nations resolutions that were rolling out of the Security Council? Would he buckle in the face of the oil embargo and the trade blockade? What was he thinking? What was he planning? Damn it, where was he anyway?
And the Agency did not know. They had a Head of Station in Baghdad, of course. But the man had been frozen out for weeks past. The Agency man was known to that bastard Rahmani who headed Iraqi Counterintelligence, and it was now plain that what had been fed to the Head of Station for weeks had all been bullshit. His best "sources" were apparently working for Rahmani and had been telling him trash.
Of course, they had the pictures--enough pictures to drown in. The satellites, KH-11 and KH-12, were rolling over Iraq every few minutes taking happy snapshots of everything in the entire country. Analysts were working around the clock identifying what might be a poison gas factory, what might be a nuclear facility--or might be what it claimed to be, a bicycle workshop.
Fine. The analysts of the National Reconnaissance Office, a part-CIA and part-Air Force enterprise, along with the scientists at ENPIC, the National Photographic Interpretation Center, were putting together a picture that would one day be complete. This here is a major command post, this is a SAM missile site, this is a fighter base. Good, because the pictures tell us so. And one day, maybe, they would all have to be bombed back to the Stone Age. But what else did Saddam have? Hidden away, stashed deep underground?
Years of neglect of Iraq were now bearing fruit. The men who were slumped in their chairs behind Webster were old-time spooks who had made their bones on the Berlin wall when the concrete was not even dry. They went back a long way, before electronics had taken over the business of intelligence-gathering.
And they had told him that the cameras of the NRO and the listening ears of the National Security Agency over at Fort Meade could not reveal plans, they could not spy out intentions, they could not go inside a dictator's head. So the NRO was taking pictures and the ears of Fort Meade were listening and taping every word on every telephone call and radio message into, out of, and inside Iraq. And still he had no answers.
The same administration, the same Capitol Hill that had been so mesmerized with electronic gadgetry that they had spent billions of dollars developing and sending up every last gizmo that the ingenious mind of man could devise, were now clamoring for answers that the gizmos did not seem to be giving them.
And the men behind the DCI were saying that elint, the name for electronic intelligence, was a backup and a supplement to humint, or human intelligence-gathering, but not a substitute for it. Which was nice to know, but no solution to his problem.
Which was that the White House was demanding answers that could only be given with authority by a source, an asset, a spook, a spy, a traitor, whatever, placed high inside the Iraqi hierarchy. Which he did not have.
"You've asked Century House?" "Yes. Same as us." "I'm going to Tel Aviv in two days," said Chip Barber. "I'll be seeing Yaacov Dror. Shall I ask him?"
The DCI nodded. General Yaacov "Kobi" Dror was the head of the Mossad, most uncooperative of all the "friendly" agencies. The DCI was still smarting over the case of Jonathan Pollard, who had been run by the Mossad right inside America against the United States. Some friends. He hated to ask the Mossad for favors. "Lean on him, Chip. We are not messing around here. If he has a source inside Baghdad, we want in. We need that product. Meanwhile, I'd better go back to the White House and face Scowcroft again." On that unhelpful note, the meeting ended.
The four men who waited at the SIS London headquarters that morning of August 5 had been busy most of the night.
The Director of Special Forces, Brigadier J. P. Lovat, had been on the phone for most of it, allowing himself a two-hour catnap in his chair between two and four A.M. Like so many combat soldiers, he had long since developed the knack of grabbing a few hours whenever and wherever a situation permitted. One never knew how long it might be until the next chance to recharge the batteries. Before dawn, he had washed and shaved and was ready to go on for another day running on all cylinders.
It was his call to a contact high in British Airways at midnight (London time) that had held the airliner on the ground at Abu Dhabi.
The British Airways executive, roused at his home, did not ask why he should hold an airliner three thousand miles away until an extra passenger could board it. He knew Lovat because they were members of the Special Forces Club in Herbert Crescent, knew roughly what he did, and fulfilled the favor without asking why.
At the breakfast hour the orderly sergeant had checked with Heathrow that the Abu Dhabi flight had made up a third of its ninety-minute delay and would land about ten. The major should be at the barracks close to eleven.
A motorcycle messenger had rushed up a certain personal career file from Browning Barracks, headquarters of the Parachute Regiment at Aldershot. The regimental adjutant had pulled it out of Records just after midnight. It was the file that covered Mike Martin's career in the Paras from the day he presented himself as an eighteen-year-old schoolboy through all the nineteen years he had been a professional soldier, except the two long periods he had spent on transfer to the SAS Regiment.
The commanding officer of the 22nd SAS, Colonel Bruce Craig, another Scot, had driven through the night from Hereford, bringing with him the file that covered those two periods. He strode in just before dawn. "Morning, J.P. What's the flap?" They knew each other well. Lovat, always known as J.P. or Jaypee, had been the man in command of the squad that had retaken the Iranian embassy in London from the terrorists ten years earlier, and Craig had been a troop commander under him at the time. They went back a long way.
"Century wants to put a man into Kuwait," he said. That seemed to be enough. Long speeches were not his passion.
"One of ours? Martin?" Colonel Craig tossed down the file he had brought. "Looks like it. I've called him back from Abu Dhabi." "Well, fuck them. You going to go along with it?"
Mike Martin was one of Craig's officers, and they too went back a long way. He did not like his men being pinched from under his nose by Century House. The DSF shrugged. "May have to. If he fits. If they feel like it, they'll probably go very high."
Craig grunted and took a strong black coffee from the orderly sergeant whom he greeted as Sid--they had fought in Dhofar together. When it came to politics, the colonel knew the score. The SIS might act diffident, but when they wanted to pull strings they could go as high as they liked. Century House would probably win on this one if it wanted to. The regiment would have to cooperate, even though Century would have overall control under the guise of a joint mission.
The two men from Century arrived just after the colonel, and they were all introduced. The senior man was Steve Laing. He had brought with him Simon Paxman, head of the Iraq Desk. They were seated in a waiting room, given coffee, and offered the two CV files to read. Both men buried themselves in the background of Mike Martin from the age of eighteen onward. The previous evening, Paxman had spent four hours with the younger brother learning about the family background and upbringing in Baghdad and Haileybury public school.
Martin had written a personal letter to the Paras during his last term at Haileybury in the summer of 1971 and been offered an interview that September at the depot in Aldershot. He had been regarded by his school as a moderate scholar but a superb athlete. That suited the Paras just fine. The boy was accepted and began training the same month, a grueling twenty-two weeks that brought the survivors of the course to April 1972.
First there had been four weeks of square-bashing, basic weapons handling, basic fieldcraft, and physical fitness; then two more of the same plus first aid, signals, and study of precautions against NBC--nuclear, bacteriological, and chemical warfare.
The seventh week was for more fitness training, getting harder all the time, but not as bad as weeks eight and nine--endurance marches through the Brecon range in Wales, where strong and fit men have died of exposure, hypothermia, and exhaustion.
Week ten saw the course at Hythe, Kent, for shooting on the range, where Martin, just turned nineteen, rated as a marksman. Eleven and twelve were test weeks carried out in open country near Aldershot--just running up and down sandy hills carrying tree trunks in the mud, rain, and freezing hail of midwinter. "Test weeks?" muttered Paxman, turning the page. "What the hell has the rest been?"
After the test weeks, the young men got their coveted red beret and paratrooper smocks before three more weeks in the Brecons for defense exercise, patrolling, and live firing exercise. By then--it was late January--the Brecons were utterly bleak and freezing. The men slept rough and wet without fires.
Weeks sixteen to nineteen were for the basic parachute course at RAF Abingdon, where a few more dropped out, and not just from the aircraft.
After two more weeks devoted to a field exercise called last fence and some polishing of parade-ground drill skills, week twenty-two saw Pass-out Parade, with proud parents at last allowed to see the youths who had left them six months earlier.
Private Mike Martin had long been earmarked as POM--potential officer material--and in May 1972 he went to Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, joining the one-year standard military course. In the spring of 1973, the new Lieutenant Martin went straight to Hythe to take over a platoon in preparatory training for Northern Ireland, and he commanded the platoon during twelve miserable weeks crouching in an observation post called Flax Mill that covered the ultra- Republican enclave of Ardoyne, Belfast. He had been assigned to the Third Battalion, known as Three Para, and after Belfast returned to the depot at Aldershot to command the recruit platoon, putting newcomers through the same purgatory he himself had endured. In the summer of 1977 he returned to Three Para, now based at Osnabr點k as part of the British Army of the Rhine.
It was another miserable time. The Paras were assigned to "penguin mode," meaning that for three years out of every nine, or one tour out of three, they were off parachuting and used as ordinary lorry-borne infantry. All Paras hate penguin mode. Morale was low, fights broke out between the Paras and the Infantry, and Martin had to punish men with whom he thoroughly sympathized. He stuck it out for nearly a year, then in November 1977 he volunteered for transfer to the SAS.
A good proportion of the SAS come from the Paras, perhaps because the training has similarities, though the SAS claim theirs is harder, that they take very fit men and then start to work on them. Martin's papers went through the regiment's Records Office at Hereford, where his fluent Arabic was noted, and in the summer of 1978 Martin did the standard "initial" selection course of six weeks. On the first day a smiling instructor told them all: "On this course, we don't try and train you. We try and kill you." They did too. Only ten percent pass the initial course into the SAS. It saves time later. Martin passed. Then came continuation training, jungle training in Belize, and one extra month back in England devoted to resistance to interrogation. Resistance means trying to stay silent while some extremely unpleasant practices are inflicted. The good news is that both the regiment and the volunteer have the right every hour to insist on an RTU--return to unit--for the volunteer.
"They're mad," said Paxman, throwing down the file and helping himself to another coffee. "They're all bloody mad."
Laing grunted. He was engrossed in the second file; it was the man's experience in Arabia that he needed for the mission he had in mind. Martin had spent three years with the SAS on his first tour, with the rank of captain and role of troop commander. He had opted for A Squadron, the freefallers--the squadrons are A, B, C, and G--which was a natural choice for a man who had jumped while in the Paras with their high-altitude freefall display team, the Red Devils.
If the Paras had no cause to use his Arabic, the Regiment did. In the three years 1979-1981 he had served alongside the Sultan of Oman's forces in western Dhofar, taught VIP protection in two Gulf emirates, taught the Saudi National Guard in Riyadh, and lectured the private bodyguards of Sheikh Isa of Bahrain. There were notations after these listings in his SAS file: that he had redeveloped a strong boyhood bond with Arab culture, that he spoke the language like no other officer in the regiment, and that he had a habit of going for long walks in the desert when he wanted to think a problem through, impervious to the heat and the flies.
The record showed he returned to the Paras after his three-year secondment to the SAS in the winter of '81 and found to his joy that the Paras were taking part in Operation Rocky Lance during January and February 1982 in, of all places, Oman. So he came back to the Jebel Akdar for that period, before taking leave in March. In April he was hastily recalled--Argentina had invaded the Falklands. Paras Two and Three went to the South Atlantic. They sailed on the liner Canberra, which had been hastily converted for military troopship use, and went ashore at San Carlos Water. Three Para tabbed right across East Falkland in the sleet and rain toward Port Stanley.
Tabbing meant force-marching in foul conditions while carrying 120 pounds of gear. Three Para headquartered themselves at a lonely farm called Estancia House and prepared for the last assault on Port Stanley, which meant first taking the heavily defended Mount Longdon. It was in that vicious night of June 11 that Captain Mike Martin collected his bullet.
It started as a silent night attack on the Argentine positions and turned very noisy when Corporal Milne stepped on a mine that blew his foot off. The Argentine machine guns opened up, the flares lit the mountain like day, and Three Para could either run back to cover or into the fire and take Longdon. They took Longdon, with twenty-three dead and more than forty injured. One of these was Mike Martin, who nursed a slug through one leg and gave vent to a hissed stream of foul invective, fortunately in Arabic.
After most of the day on the mountainside, he was brought out to the advanced dressing station at Ajax Bay, patched up, and helicoptered to the hospital ship Uganda. The Uganda stopped in Montevideo, and Martin was among those fit enough to fly home by civilian airliner to Brize Norton. The Paras then gave him three weeks at Headley Court, Leather-head, for convalescence. That was where he met the nurse, Lucinda, who was to become his wife after a brief courtship. Perhaps she liked the glamour of a husband in the Paras, but she was mistaken. They set up housekeeping in a cottage near Chobham, convenient for her job at Leatherhead and his at Aldershot. But after three years, having actually seen him for four and a half months, Lucinda quite properly put to him a choice: you can have the Paras and your bloody desert, or you can have me. He thought it over and chose the desert.
She was quite right to go. In the autumn of 1982 he had studied for Staff College, gateway to senior rank and a nice desk, perhaps in the Ministry. In February 1983 he fluffed the exam.
"He did it deliberately," said Paxman. "His CO's note here says he could have breezed through if he wanted." "I know," said Laing. "I've read it. The man's ... unusual."
In the summer of 1983 Martin was posted to the job of British staff officer assigned to the Sultan of Oman's Land Forces HQ at Muscat. He went straight into two more years secondment, keeping his Para badge but commanding the Northern Frontier Regiment, Muscat. He was promoted to major in Oman in the summer of '86. Officers who have served one tour in the SAS can come back for a second, but only on invitation. Hardly had he landed back in England in the winter of '87, when his uncontested divorce went through, than the invitation came from Hereford. He went back as a squadron commander in January '88, serving with Northern Flank (Norway), then with the Sultan of Brunei and six months with the internal security team at Stirling Lines at Hereford. In June 1990 he was sent with his team of instructors to Abu Dhabi.
Sergeant Sid knocked and poked his head around the door. "The brigadier asks if you'd care to rejoin him. Major Martin is on his way up."
When Martin walked in, Laing noted the sun-darkened face, hair, and eyes and shot a glance at Paxman. One down, two to go. He looked the part. Now, would he do it, and could he speak Arabic as they said?
J.P. walked forward and took Martin's hand in his bone-crushing grip.
"Good to see you back, Mike." "Thank you, sir." He shook hands with Colonel Craig. "Let me introduce these two gentlemen," said the DSF. "Mr. Laing and Mr. Paxman, both from Century. They have a--er--proposition they would like to put to you. Gentlemen, fire ahead. Would you prefer to have Major Martin in private?" "Oh, no, please," said Laing hastily.
"The Chief is hoping that if anything results from this meeting, it will definitely be a joint operation."
Nice touch, thought J.P., mentioning Sir Colin. Just to show how much clout these bastards intend to exercise if they have to.
All five sat down. Laing talked, explaining the political background, the uncertainty as to whether Saddam Hussein would get out of Kuwait quickly, slowly, or not at all unless thrown out. But the political analysis was that Iraq would first strip Kuwait of every valuable, then stick around demanding concessions that the United Nations was simply not in a mood to concede. One might be looking at months and months.
Britain needed to know what was going on inside Kuwait--not gossip and rumor, nor the lurid stories flying around the media, but rock-hard information: about the British citizens still stuck there, about the occupation forces, and if force had eventually to be used, whether a Kuwaiti resistance could be useful in pinning down more and more of Saddam's otherwise frontline troops. Martin nodded and listened and asked a few pertinent questions but otherwise stayed silent. The two senior officers gazed out the window. Laing concluded just after twelve.
"That's about it, Major. I don't expect an answer immediately, right now, but time is of the essence."
"Do you mind if we have a few words with our colleague in private?" asked J.P. "Of course not. Look, Simon and I will trot back to the office. You have my desk number. Perhaps you'd let me know this afternoon?" Sergeant Sid showed the two civilians out and escorted them down to the street, where he watched them hail a taxi. Then he climbed back to his aerie under the roof beams behind the scaffolding.
J.P. went to a small fridge and extracted three cold beers. When the tabs were off, all three men took a swig. "Look, Mike, you know what's what. That's what they want. If you think it's crazy, we'll go along with that."
"Absolutely," said Craig. "In the Regiment you get no black marks for saying no. This is their idea, not ours." "But if you want to go with them," said J.P., "walk through the door, so to speak, then you're with them till you come back. We'll be involved, of course. They probably can't run it without us. But you'll be under them. They'll be in charge. When it's over, you come back to us as if you'd been on leave." Martin knew how it worked. He'd heard of others who had worked for Century. You just ceased to exist for the Regiment until you came back. Then they all said, "Good to see you again," and never mentioned or asked where you had been.
"I'll take it," he said. Colonel Craig rose. He had to get back to Hereford. He held out his hand. "Good luck, Mike." "By the way," said the brigadier, "you have a lunch date. Just down the street. Century set it up." He handed Martin a slip of paper and bade him farewell.
Mike Martin went back down the stairs. The paper said his lunch was at a small restaurant four hundred yards away, and his host was Mr. Wane Al-Khouri.
Apart from MI-S and MI-6 the third major arm of British intelligence is the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, a complex of buildings in a guarded compound outside the staid town of Cheltenham in Gloucestershire.
GCHQ is the British version of America's National Security Agency, with which it cooperates very closely--the listeners whose antennae eavesdrop on almost every radio broadcast and telephone, conversation in the world if they so wish.
Through its cooperation with GCHQ, the American NSA has a number of outstations inside Britain, apart from its other listening posts all over the world, and GCHQ has its own overseas stations, notably a very large one on British sovereign territory at Akrotiri in Cyprus.
The Akrotiri station, being closer to the scene, monitors the Middle East, but it passes all its product back to Cheltenham for analysis. Among the analysts are a number of experts who, although Arabs by birth, are cleared to a very high level. Such a one was Mr. Al-Khouri, who had long before elected to settle in Britain, naturalize, and marry an English wife.
This genial former Jordanian diplomat now worked as a senior analyst in the Arabic Service of GCHQ where, even though there were many British scholars of Arabic, he could often read a meaning behind the meaning of a taped speech by a leader in the Arab world. It was he who, at the request of Century, was waiting for Mike Martin at the restaurant.
They had a convivial lunch that lasted two hours and spoke nothing but Arabic. When they parted, Martin left and strolled back toward the SAS building. There would be hours of briefings before he was ready to leave for Riyadh with a passport he knew Century would by then have ready, complete with visas in a false name.
Before he left the restaurant Mr. Al-Khouri called a number from the wall phone by the men's room. "No problem, Steve. He's perfect. In fact, I don't think I've ever heard anyone like him. It's not scholar's Arabic, you know; it's even better, from your point of view. Street Arabic, every swearword, slang, piece of jargon. ... No, not a trace of an accent. ... Yes, he can pass all right ... on just about any street in the Middle East. No, no, not at all, old chap. Glad to be of assistance." Thirty minutes later, Mike Martin had retrieved his rental car and was on the M4 heading back to Cheltenham. Before he entered the headquarters, he also made a call, to a number just off Gower Street.
The man he was calling picked up the phone, since it was in his office in the SOAS, where he was working over papers on an afternoon that called for no lectures. "Hullo, bro. It's me."
The soldier had no need to introduce himself. Since they had been at prep school together in Baghdad, he had always called his younger brother "bro." There was a gasp at the other end of the line.
"Mike? Where the hell are you?" "In London, in a phone booth." "I thought you were somewhere in the Gulf." "Got back this morning. Probably leave again tonight." "Look, Mike, don't go. It's all my fault. ... I should have kept my bloody mouth shut--" His elder brother's deep laugh came across the line. "I wondered why the buggers suddenly got interested in me. Take you to lunch, did they?" "Yes, we were talking about something else. It just cropped up, sort of slipped out. Look, you don't have to go. Tell them I was mistaken."
"Too late. Anyway, I've accepted." "Oh God. ..." In his office, surrounded by erudite tomes on medieval Mesopotamia, the younger man was almost in tears. "Mike, look after yourself. I'll pray for you." Mike thought for a moment. Yes, Terry had always had a touch of religion. He probably would. "You do that, bro. See you when I get back." He hung up. Alone in his office, the ginger-haired scholar who hero-worshiped his soldier brother put his head in his hands.
When the British Airways 8:45 P.M. flight for Saudi Arabia lifted off from Heathrow that night, right on time, Mike Martin was on it with a fully visa-ed passport in another name. He would be met just before dawn by Century's Head of Station at the Riyadh embassy.