At one thousand feet each man undid the snap-locks that held his Bergen to his backside and cinched the load down his legs, there to hook onto his feet. The Bergens would remain there all the way down, being released only a hundred feet above the ground, to hang at the full extent of the fourteen-foot nylon retaining line.
The sergeant’s parachute was moving away to Martin’s right, so he followed. The sky was clear, the stars visible, black shapes of mountains rushed upward on all sides. Then Martin saw what the sergeant had seen: the glitter of water in the stream running through the valley.
Peter Stephenson went down right in the center of the zone, a few yards from the edge of the stream, on soft grass and moss. Martin dropped his Bergen on its line, swerved, stopped in the air, felt the Bergen hit the ground beneath him, and settled gently onto both feet.
Corporal Eastman swept past and above him, turned, glided back in, and dropped fifty yards way.
Martin was unbuckling his chute harness and did not see Kevin North land at all.
In fact, the mountaineer was the fourth and last in the line, descending a hundred yards away but onto the slope of the hill rather than the grassland. He was trying to close up to his colleagues, hauling down on his static lines, when the Bergen beneath him hit the hill. As it touched the ground, the Bergen was dragged sideways by the drifting man above, to whose waist it was attached. It bumped along the hillside for five yards, then snagged between two rocks.
The sudden yank on the lanyard pulled North down and sideways so that he landed not on his feet but on his side.
There were not many rocks on that hillside, but one of them smashed his left femur in eight places.
The corporal felt the bone shatter with complete clarity, but the jar was so severe, it numbed the pain for a few seconds. Then it came in waves. He rolled over and clutched his thigh with two hands, whispering over and over, No, no, please God, no .
Though he did not realize it because it happened inside the leg, he began to bleed. One of the shards of bone in the multiple fracture had sliced clean through the femoral artery, which began to pump out his life-blood into the mess of his thigh.
The other three found him a minute later. They had all unhitched their billowing chutes and Bergens, convinced he would be doing the same. When they realized he was not with them, they came to look.
Stephenson brought out his penlight and shone it on the leg.
“Oh, shit,” he whispered. They had first-aid kits, even shell dressings, but nothing to cope with this. The corporal needed trauma therapy, plasma, major surgery—and fast. Stephenson ran back to North’s Bergen, ripped out a first-aid kit, and began to prepare a jab of morphine. There was no need. With the blood, the pain was fading.
North opened his eyes, focused on the face of Mike Martin above him, whispered “I’m sorry, boss,”
and closed his eyes again. Two minutes later he was gone.
At another time, and in another place, Martin might have been able to vent some sign of what he felt at losing a man like North, operating under his command. There was no time; this was not the place. The two remaining NCOs recognized this and went about what they had to do in grim silence. Grief could come later.
Martin had hoped to bundle up the spilled parachutes and clear the valley before finding a rocky crevasse to bury the surplus gear. Now that was impossible. He had North’s body to cope with.
“Pete, start getting together everything we bury. Find a hollow scrape somewhere, or make one. Ben, start collecting rocks.”
Martin bent over the body, removed the dog tags and machine pistol, then went to help Eastman.
Together, with knives and hands, the three men scraped a hollow in the springy turf and laid the body in it. There was more to pile on top: four opened main parachutes, four still-packed reserves, four oxygen bottles, lanyards, webbing.
Then they began to pile rocks on top, not in a neat shape like a cairn, which would have been spotted, but in a random way, as if the rocks had tumbled from the mountainside. Water was brought from the brook to sluice the rock and the grass of its red stains. Bare patches where the rocks they were using had stood were scuffed with feet, and fragments of moss from the water’s edge were stamped into them.
The valley had to be made to look as much as possible as it had an hour before midnight.
They had hoped to put in five hours of marching before dawn, but the job took them over three. Some of the contents of North’s Bergen stayed inside and were buried with him: his clothes, food, and water.
Other items they had to divide between them, making their own loads even heavier.
An hour before dawn, they left the valley and went into SOP—standing operating procedure. Sergeant Stephenson took the role of lead scout, moving up ahead of the other two, dropping to the ground before cresting a ridge to peer over the top in case there was a nasty surprise on the other side.
The route lay upward, and he set a grueling pace. Although a small and wiry man, and five years older than Martin, he could march most men clean off their feet and carry an eighty-pound load while he did it.
Clouds came over the mountains just when Martin needed them, delaying the dawn and giving him an extra hour. In ninety minutes of hard march they covered eight miles, putting several ridges and two hills between them and the valley. Finally the advance of the gray light forced them to look for a place to conceal themselves.
Martin chose a horizontal crack in the rocks under an overhang, screened by sere grass and just above a dry wadi. In the last of the darkness they ate some rations, sipped water, covered themselves with scrim netting, and lay down to sleep. There were three duty watches, and Martin took the first.
He nudged Stephenson awake at elevenA.M. and slept while the sergeant stood guard. It was at four P.M. that Ben Eastman poked Martin in the ribs with a rigid finger. As the major’s eyes opened, he saw Eastman with his forefinger to his lips. Martin listened. From the wadi ten feet beneath their ledge came the guttural sounds of voices in Arabic.
Sergeant Stephenson came awake and raised an eyebrow. What do we do now? Martin listened for a while. There were four of them, on patrol, bored with their task of endlessly marching through the mountains, and tired. Within ten minutes he knew they intended to camp there for the night.
He had lost enough time already. He needed to move by six, when darkness would fall over the hills, and he needed every hour to cover the miles to those crevices in the hill across the valley from the Fortress. He might need more time to search for those crevices and find them.
The conversation from the wadi below indicated that the Iraqis were going to search for wood for a campfire. They would be certain to cast an eye on the bushes behind which the SAS men lay. Even if they did not, it might be hours before they would sleep deeply enough for Martin’s patrol to slip past them and get away. There was no choice.
At a signal from Martin, the other two eased out their flat, double-edged knives, and the three men slid over the scree into the wadi below.
When the job was over, Martin flicked through the dead Iraqis’ paybooks. All of them, he noticed, had the patronymic Al-Ubaidi. They were all of the Ubaidi tribe, mountain men who came from these parts.
All wore the insignia of the Republican Guard. Clearly the Guard had been culled from these mountain fighters to form the patrols whose job was to keep the Fortress safe from intruders. He noted they were lean, spare men, without an ounce of fat on them, and probably tireless in hill country like this.
It still cost an hour to drag the four bodies into the crevice, cut apart their camouflaged tent to form a tarpaulin, and decorate the tarp with bushes, weeds, and grass. But when they were finished, it would have taken an extremely sharp eye to spot the hiding place beneath the overhang. Fortunately, the Iraqi patrol had had no radio, so they would probably not check in with their base until they arrived back—whenever that might be. Now, they would never get back, but with luck it would be two days before they were m
issed.
As darkness set in, the SAS men marched on, trying by the starlight to recall the shapes of the mountains in the photographs, following the compass heading toward the mountain they sought.
The map Martin carried was a brilliant confection, drawn by a computer on the basis of the aerial photos by the TR-1 and showing the route between the DZ and the intended lying-up position. Pausing at intervals to consult his hand-held SATNAV positioner and study the map by penlight, Martin could check their direction and progress. By midnight, both were good. He estimated a further ten miles to march.
In the Brecons in Wales, Martin and his men could have kept up four miles an hour over this kind of terrain, a brisk walk on a flat surface for those taking their dogs for an evening stroll without an eighty-pound rucksack. Marching at that rate was quite normal. But in these hostile hills, with the possibility of patrols all around them, progress had to be slower. They had had one brush with the Iraqis, and a second would be too many.
An advantage they had over the Iraqis was their NVGs, the night-vision goggles they wore like frogs’
eyes on stalks. With the new wide-angle version they could see the countryside ahead of them in a pale green glow, for the job of the image-intensifiers was to gather every scrap of natural light in the environment and concentrate it into the viewer’s retina.
Two hours before dawn, they saw the bulk of the Fortress in front of them and began to climb the slope to their left. The mountain they had chosen was on the southern fringe of the square kilometer provided by Jericho, and from the crevices near the summit they should be able to look across at the southern face of the Fortress—if indeed it was the Fortress—at an almost equal height to its peak.
They climbed hard for an hour, their breath coming in rasping gasps. Sergeant Stephenson in the lead cut into a tiny goat track that led upward and around the curve of the mountain. Just short of the summit, they found the crevice the TR-1 had seen on its down-and-sideways camera. It was better than Martin could have hoped—a natural crack in the rock eight feet long, four feet deep, and two feet high. Outside the crack was a ledge two feet across, on which Martin’s torso could lie with his lower body and feet inside the rocks.
The men brought out their scrim netting and began to make their niche invisible to watching eyes.
Food and water were stuffed into the pouches of the belt orders, Martin’s technical equipment laid ready to hand, weapons checked and set close by. Just before the sun rose, Martin used one of his devices.
It was a transmitter, much smaller than the one he had had in Baghdad, barely the size of two cigarette packs. It was linked to a cadmium-nickel battery with enough power to give him more talking time than he would ever need.
The frequency was fixed, and at the other end there was a listening watch for twenty-four hours a day.
To attract attention he only had to press the transmit button in an agreed sequence of blips and pauses, then wait for the speaker to respond with the answering sequence.
The third component of the set was a dish aerial, a fold-away like the one in Baghdad but smaller.
Though he was now farther north than the Iraqi capital, he was also much higher.
Martin set up the dish, pointing toward the south, linked the battery to the set and the set to the aerial, then pressed the transmit button. One-two-three-four-five; pause; one-two-three; pause; one; pause; one.
Five seconds later, the radio in his hand squawked softly. Four blips, four blips, two.
He pressed transmit, kept the thumb down, and said into the speaker:
“Come Nineveh, come Tyre. I say again, Come Nineveh, come Tyre.”
He released the transmit button and waited. The set gave an excited one-two-three; pause; one; pause; four. Received and acknowledged.
Martin put the set away in its waterproof cover, took his powerful field glasses, and eased his torso onto the ledge. Behind him Sergeant Stephenson and Corporal Eastman were sandwiched like embryos into the crevice under the rock, but apparently quite comfortable. Two twigs held up the netting in front of him, giving a slit through which he slid the binoculars, for which a bird-watcher would have given his right arm.
As the sun seeped into the mountains of Hamreen on the morning of February 23, Major Martin began to study the masterpiece of his old school friend Osman Badri—the Qa’ala that no machine could see.
In Riyadh, Steve Laing and Simon Paxman stared at the sheet handed them by the engineer who had come running out of the radio shack.
“Bloody hell,” said Laing with feeling. “He’s there—he’s on the frigging mountain!”
Twenty minutes later, the news reached Al Kharz from General Glosson’s office.
Captain Don Walker had returned to his base in the small hours of the twenty-second, grabbed some sleep in what was left of the night, and begun work just after sunrise, when the pilots who had flown missions during the night were completing their debriefing and shuffling off to bed.
By midday, he had a plan to present to his superior officers. It was sent at once to Riyadh and approved. During the afternoon the appropriate aircraft, crew, and support services were allocated.
What was planned was a four-ship raid on an Iraqi air base well north of Baghdad called Tikrit East, not far from the birthplace of Saddam Hussein. It would be a night raid with two-thousand-pound laser-guided bombs. Don Walker would lead it, with his usual wingman and another element of two Eagles.
Miraculously the mission appeared on the Air Tasking Order from Riyadh, although it had only been devised twelve hours and not three days earlier.
The other three needed crews were at once taken off any other tasking and assigned to the Tikrit East mission, slated for the night of the twenty-second (maybe) or any other night they were ordered. Until then, they were on permanent one-hour standby.
The four Strike Eagles were prepared by sundown of the twenty-second, and at tenP.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 gli
nt flashed again. Then he saw the source: a fragment of wire in the grass.
He blinked and tried again. Slantwise, it was a length of wire a foot long in the grass. It was part of a longer strand, green plastic-covered wire, of which a small part had been abraded to reveal the metal beneath.
The wire was one of several he glimpsed, all buried in the grass, occasionally revealed as the wind blew the stems from side to side. Diagonals in the opposite direction, a patch of chain-link wire, underneath the grass.
By midday, he could see it better. A section of mountainside where green wire mesh held the soil to a surface below the earth; the grass and shrubs planted in every diamond-shaped gap between the fencing, growing through the gaps, covering the wire beneath.
Then he saw the terracing. One part of the mountainside was made up of blocks, presumably concrete, each set back three inches from the one below it. Along the horizontal terraces thus created were runnels of earth out of which the shrubs grew. Where they sprouted, they were in horizontal lines. At first it did not look so, because they were of different heights, but when he studied their stems only, it became clear they were indeed in lines. Nature does not grow in lines.
He tried other parts of the mountain, but the pattern ended, then began again farther to his left. It was in the early afternoon that he solved it.
The analysts in Riyadh had been right—up to a point. Had anyone attempted to gouge out the whole center of the hill, it would have fallen in. Whoever had done this must have taken three existing hills, cut away the inner faces, and built up the gaps between the peaks to create a gigantic crater.
In filling the gaps, the builder had followed the contours of the real hills, stepping his rows of concrete blocks backward and upward, creating the miniterraces, pouring tens of thousands of tons of topsoil down from the top.
The cladding must have come later: sheets of green vinyl-coated chain-link wire presumably stapled to the concrete beneath, holding the earth to the slopes. Then the grass seed, sprayed onto the earth, there to root and spread, with bushes and shrubs sown into deeper bowls left in the concrete terraces.