Chapter 23
The three SAS men marched hard through the rest of the night. They set a pace onward and upward that left Don Walker, who carried no rucksack and thought he was in good physical shape, exhausted and gasping for breath.
Sometimes he would drop to his knees, aware that he could go no farther, that even death would be preferable to the endless pain in every muscle. When that happened, he would feel two steely hands, one under each armpit, and hear the Cockney voice of Sergeant Stephenson in his ear:
"Come on, mate. Only a little farther. See that ridge? We'll probably rest on the other side of it."
But they never did. Instead of heading south to the foothills of the Jebal al Hamreen, where he figured they would have met a screen of Republican Guards with vehicles, Mike Martin headed east into the high hills running to the Iranian border. It was a tack that forced the patrols of the Al-Ubaidi mountain men to come after them.
Just after dawn, looking back and down, Martin saw a group of six of them, fitter than the rest, still climbing and closing. When the Republican Guards reached the next crest, they found one of their quarry sitting slumped on the ground, facing away from them.
Dropping behind the rocks, the tribesmen opened up, riddling the foreigner through the back. The corpse toppled over. The six men in the Guard patrol broke cover and ran forward.
Too late, they saw that the body was a Bergen rucksack, draped with a camouflaged smock, topped by Walker's flying helmet. Three silenced Heckler and Koch MP5s cut them down as they stood around the "body."
Above the town of Khanaqin, Martin finally called a halt and made a transmission to Riyadh. Stephenson and Eastman kept watch, facing west, from where any pursuing patrols must come. Martin simply told Riyadh that there were three SAS men left and they had a single American flier with them. In case the message was intercepted, he did not give their position. Then they pressed on.
High in the mountains, close to the border, they found shelter in a stone hut, used by the local shepherds in summer when the flocks came to the upper pastures. There, with guards posted in rotation, they waited out the four days of the ground war, as far to the south the Allied tanks and air power crushed the Iraqi Army in a ninety-hour blitzkrieg and rolled into Kuwait.
On that same day, the first of the ground war, a lone soldier entered Iraq from the west. He was an Israeli of the Sayeret Matkal commandos, picked for his excellent Arabic.
An Israeli helicopter, fitted with long-range tanks and in the livery of the Jordanian Army, came out of the Negev and skimmed across the Jordanian desert to deposit the man just inside Iraq, south of the Ruweishid crossing point. When it had left him, it turned and flew back across Jordan and into Israel, unspotted.
Like Martin, the soldier had a lightweight, rugged motorcycle with heavy-duty desert tires. Although disguised to look old, battered, dirty, rusted, and dented, its engine was in superb condition, and it carried extra fuel in two panniers astride the back wheel. The soldier followed the main road eastward and at sundown entered Baghdad.
The concerns of his superiors for his security had been overcautious. By that amazing bush telegraph that seems able to outstrip even electronics, the people of Baghdad already knew their army was being crushed in the deserts of southern Iraq and Kuwait. By the evening of the first day, the AMAM had taken to its barracks and stayed there.
Now that the bombing had stopped--for all the Allied airplanes were needed over the battlefield--the people of Baghdad circulated freely, talking openly of the imminent arrival of the Americans and British to sweep away Saddam Hussein.
It was a euphoria that would last a week, until it became plain the Allies were not coming, and the rule of the AMAM closed over them again.
The central bus station was a seething mass of soldiers, most stripped down to singlets and shorts, having thrown away their uniforms in the desert. These were the deserters who had evaded the execution squads waiting behind the front line. They were selling their Kalashnikovs for the price of a ticket home to their villages. At the start of the week, these rifles were fetching thirty-five dinars each; four days later, the price was down to seventeen.
The Israeli infiltrator had one job, which he accomplished during the night. The Mossad knew only of the three dead-letter boxes for getting a message to Jericho that had been left behind by Alfonso Benz Moncada in August. As it happened, Martin had discontinued two of them for security reasons, but the third still operated.
The Israeli deposited identical messages in all three drops, made the three appropriate chalk marks, took his motorcycle, and rode west again, joining the throng of refugees heading that way.
It took him another day to reach the border. Here he cut south of the main road into empty desert, crossed into Jordan, recovered his hidden directional beacon, and used it. The bleep-bleep beam was picked up at once by an Israeli aircraft circling over the Negev, and the helicopter returned to the rendezvous to recover the infiltrator.
He did not sleep for those fifty hours and ate little, but he fulfilled his mission and returned home safely.
* * *
On the third day of the ground war, Edith Hardenberg returned to her desk at the Winkler Bank, both puzzled and angry. On the previous morning, just as she had been about to leave for work, she had received a telephone call.
The speaker, in faultless German with a Salzburg accent, introduced himself as the neighbor of her mother. He told her that Frau Hardenberg had had a bad fall down the stairs after slipping on an icy patch and was in a bad way.
She at once tried to call her mother but repeatedly got a busy signal. Finally frantic, she had called the Salzburg exchange, who informed her the phone must be out of order.
Telephoning the bank that she would not be in for work, she had driven to Salzburg through the snow and slush, arriving in the late morning. Her mother, perfectly fit and well, was surprised to see her. There had been no fall, no injury. Worse, some vandal had cut her telephone line outside the flat.
By the time Edith Hardenberg returned to Vienna, it was too late to go in for work.
When she appeared at her desk the next morning, she found Wolfgang Gemuetlich in an even worse mood than she. He reproached her bitterly for her absence the previous day and listened to her explanation in a bad humor.
The reason for his own misery was not long in coming. In the midmorning of the previous day, a young man had appeared at the bank and insisted on seeing him.
The visitor explained that his name was Aziz and that he was the son of the owner of a substantial numbered account. His father, explained the Arab, was indisposed but wished his son to act in his place.
At this, Aziz Junior had produced documentation that fully and perfectly authenticated him as his father's ambassador, with complete authority to operate the numbered account. Herr Gemuetlich had examined the documents of authority for the slightest flaw, but there was none. He had been left with no alternative but to concede.
The young wretch had insisted that his father's wishes were to close down the entire account and transfer the contents elsewhere. This, mind you, Fr鋟lein Hardenberg, just two days after the arrival in the account of a further $3 million credit, bringing the aggregate total to over $10 million.
Edith Hardenberg listened to Gemuetlich's tale of woe very quietly, then asked about the visitor. Yes, she was told, his first name had been Karim. Now that she mentioned it, there had been a signet ring with a pink opal on the small finger of one hand and, indeed, a scar along the chin. Had he been less consumed by his own sense of outrage, the banker might have wondered at such precise questioning by his secretary about a man she could not have seen.
He had known, of course, Gemuetlich admitted, that the account-holder must be some sort of Arab, but he had had no idea that the man was from Iraq or had a son.
After work, Edith Hardenberg went home and began to clean her little flat. She scrubbed and scoured it for hours. There were two cardboard boxes that she took to the large rubbish bin a few hundred yards away and dumped. One contained a number of items of makeup, perfumes, lotions, and bath salts; the other, a variety of women's underwear. Then she returned to her cleaning.
Neighbors said later she played music through the evening and late into the night--not her usual Mozart and Strauss but Verdi, especially something from Nabucco. A particularly keen-eared neighbor identified the piece as the "Slaves' Chorus," which she played over and over again.
In the small hours of the morning the music stopped, and she left in her car with two items from her kitchen.
It was a retired accountant, walking his dog in the Prater Park at seven the next morning, who found her. He had left the Hauptallee to allow his dog to do its business in the park away from the road.
She was in her neat gray tweed coat, with her hair in a bun behind her head, thick lisle stockings on her legs, and sensible flat-heeled shoes on her feet. The clothesline looped over the branch of the oak had not betrayed her, and the kitchen steps were a meter away.
She was quite still and stiff in death, her hands by her side and her toes pointed neatly downward. Always a very neat lady was Edith Hardenberg.
February 28 was the last day of the ground war. In the Iraqi deserts west of Kuwait, the Iraqi Army had been outflanked and annihilated. South of the city, the Republican Guard divisions that had rolled into Kuwait on August 2 ceased to exist. On that day the forces occupying the city, having set fire to everything that would burn and seeking to destroy what would not, left for the north in a snaking column of halftracks, trucks, vans, cars, and carts.
The column was caught in the place where the highway north cuts through the Mutla Ridge. The Eagles and Jaguars, Tomcats and Hornets, Tornados and Thunderbolts, Phantoms and Apaches hurtled down onto the column and reduced it to charred wreckage. With the head of the column destroyed and blocking the road, the remainder could escape neither forward nor backward, and because of the cut in the ridge could not leave the road. Many died in that column and the rest surrendered. By sundown, the first Arab forces were entering Kuwait to liberate it.
That evening, Mike Martin made contact again with Riyadh and heard the news. He gave his position and that of a reasonably flat meadow nearby.
The SAS men and Walker were out of food, melting snow to drink, and bitterly cold, not daring to light a fire in case it gave away their position. The war was over, but the patrols of mountain guards might well not know that, or care.
Just after dawn, two long-range Blackhawk helicopters loaned by the American 101st Airborne Division came for them. They came from the
fire base camp set up by the 101st fifty miles inside Iraq, after the biggest helicopter assault in history. So great was the distance from the Saudi border that even from the fire base on the Euphrates River, it was a long haul to the mountains near Khanaqin.
That was why there were two of them: The second had even more fuel for the journey home.
To be on the safe side, eight Eagles circled above, giving protective cover as the refueling in the meadow was carried out. Don Walker squinted upward.
"Hey, they're my guys!" he shouted. As the two Blackhawks clattered the way back again, the Strike Eagles rode shotgun until they were south of the border.
They said farewell to each other on a wind-blasted strip of sand, surrounded by the detritus of a defeated army near the Saudi-Iraqi border. The whirling blades of a Blackhawk whipped up the dust and gravel before taking Don Walker to Dhahran and a flight back to Al Kharz. A British Puma stood farther away, to take the SAS men to their own secret cordoned base.
That evening, at a comfortable country house in the rolling downs of Sussex, Dr. Terry Martin was told where his brother had actually been since October and that he was now out of Iraq and safe in Saudi Arabia.
Martin was almost ill with relief, and the SIS gave him a lift back to London, where he resumed his life as a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies.
Two days later, on March 3, the commanders of the Coalition forces met in a tent on a small and bare Iraqi airstrip called Safwan with two generals from Baghdad to negotiate the surrender.
The only spokesmen for the Allied side were Generals Norman Schwarzkopf and Prince Khaled bin Sultan. At the American general's side sat the commander of the British forces, General Sir Peter de la Billi鑢e.
Both the Western officers to this day believe that only two Iraqi generals came to Safwan. In fact, there were three.
The American security net was extremely tight, to exclude the possibility of any assassin reaching the tent in which the opposing generals met. An entire American division encircled the airfield, facing outward.
Unlike the Allied commanders who had arrived from the south by a series of helicopters, the Iraqi party had been ordered to drive to a road junction north of the airstrip. There they left their cars to transfer to a number of American armored personnel vehicles called humvees and be driven by U.S. drivers the last two miles to the airstrip and the cluster of tents where they were awaited.
Ten minutes after the party of generals entered the negotiation tent with their interpreters, another black Mercedes limousine was coming down the Basra road toward the junction. The roadblock there was commanded by that time by a captain of the U.S. Seventh Armored Brigade, all more senior officers having proceeded to the airstrip. The unexpected limousine was at once stopped.
In the back of the car was the third Iraqi general, albeit only a brigadier, bearing a black attach?case. Neither he nor his driver spoke English, and the captain spoke no Arabic. He was about to radio the airstrip for orders when a jeep driven by an American colonel and bearing another in the passenger seat pulled up. The driver was in the uniform of the Green Beret Special Forces; the passenger had the insignia of G2, the military intelligence.
Both men flashed their ID at the captain, who examined the cards, recognized their authenticity, and threw up a salute.
"It's okay, Captain. We've been expecting this bastard," said the Green Beret colonel. "Seems he was delayed by a flat tire."
"That case," said the G2 officer, pointing at the attach?case of the Iraqi brigadier who now stood uncomprehending by the side of his car, "contains the names of all our POWs, including the missing aircrew. Stormin' Norman wants it, and now."
There were no humvees left. The Green Beret colonel gave the Iraqi a rough shove toward the jeep. The captain was perplexed. He knew nothing of any third Iraqi general. He also knew his unit had recently gotten into the Bear's bad books by having claimed to occupy Safwan when it had not achieved that objective. The last thing he needed was to call down more of General Schwarzkopf's wrath on the Seventh Armored by detaining the list of missing American aircrew. The jeep drove away in the direction of Safwan. The captain shrugged and gestured the Iraqi driver to park with all the others.
On the road to the airstrip the jeep passed between rows of parked American armored vehicles for up to a mile. Then there was an empty section of road, before the cordon of Apache helicopters surrounding the actual negotiation area. Clear of the tanks, the G2 colonel turned to the Iraqi and spoke in good Arabic.
"Under your seat," he said. "Don't get out of the jeep, but get them on--fast."
The Iraqi wore the dark green uniform of his country. The rolled clothes beneath his seat were in the light tan of a colonel of the Saudi Special Forces. He quickly exchanged trousers, jacket, and beret.
Just before the ring of Apaches on the tarmac, the jeep peeled away into the desert, skirted the airstrip, and drove on south. On the far side of Safwan, the vehicle regained the main road to Kuwait, twenty miles away.
The U.S. tanks were on every side, facing outward. Their job was to forbid the penetration of any infiltrators. Their commanders, atop their turrets, watched one of their own jeeps bearing two of their own colonels and a Saudi officer drive out of the perimeter and away from the protected zone, so it did not concern them.
It took the jeep almost an hour to reach the Kuwait airport, then a devastated wreck, gutted by the Iraqis and covered by a black pall of smoke from the oil field fires blazing all over the emirate. The journey took so long because, to avoid the carnage of the Mutla Ridge road, it had diverted in a big sweep through the desert west of the city.
Five miles short of the airport, the G2 colonel took a handcommunicator from the glove compartment and keyed in a series of bleeps. Over the airport a single airplane began its approach.
The makeshift airport control tower was a trailer manned by Americans. The incoming aircraft was a British Aerospace HS-125. Not only that, it was the personal airplane of the British Commander, General de la Billi鑢e. It must have been; it had all the right markings and the right call-sign. The air traffic controller cleared it to land.
The HS-125 did not taxi to the wreckage of the airport building but to a distant dispersal point, where it made rendezvous with an American jeep. The door opened, the ladder came down, and three men boarded the twin-jet.
"Granby One, clearance for takeoff," the traffic controller heard. He was handling an incoming Canadian Hercules with medicines for the hospital on board.
"Hold, Granby One. ... What is your flight plan?"
He meant: That was damn fast--where the hell do you think you're going?
"Sorry, Kuwait Tower." The voice was clipped and precise, pure Royal Air Force. The controller had heard the RAF before, and they all sounded the same--preppy.
"Kuwait Tower, we've just taken on board a colonel of the Saudi Special Forces. Feeling very sick. One of the staff of Prince Khaled. General Schwarzkopf asked for his immediate evacuation, so Sir Peter offered his-own plane. Clearance takeoff, please, old boy."
In two breaths the British pilot had mentioned one general, one prince, and one knight of the realm. The controller was a master sergeant, and good at his job. He had a fine career in the United States Air Force. Refusing to evacuate a sick Saudi colonel on the staff of a prince at the request of a general in the plane of the British commander might not do that career any good.
"Granby One, clear takeoff," he said.
The HS-125 lifted away from Kuwait, but instead of heading for Riyadh, which has one of the finest hospitals in the Middle East, it set course due west along the kingdom's northern border.
The ever-alert AWACS saw it and called up, asking for its destination. This time the pukka British voice came back explaining that they were flying to the British base at Akrotiri in Cyprus to evacuate back home a close friend and fellow officer of General de la Billi鑢e who had been badly wounded by a land mine. The mission commander in the AWACS knew nothing of this, but wondered how exactly he should object. Have it shot down?
Fifteen minutes later, the HS-125 left Saudi air space and crossed the border of Jordan.
The Iraqi sitting in the back of the executive jet knew nothing of all this but was impressed by the efficiency of the British and Americans.
He had been dubious on receiving the last message from his paymasters in the West, but on reflection he agreed it would be wise to quit now rather than wait for later and have to do it on his own, without help. The plan outlined to him in that message had worked like a dream.
One of the two pilots in RAF tropical uniforms came back from the flight deck and muttered in English to the American G2 colonel, who grinned.
"Welcome to freedom, Brigadier," he said in Arabic to his guest. "We are out of Saudi air space. Soon we'll have you in an airliner to America. By the way, I have something for you."
He withdrew a slip of paper from his breast pocket and showed it to the Iraqi, who read it with great pleasure. It was a simple total: the sum lodged in his bank account in Vienna, now over $10 million.
The Green Beret reached into a locker and produced several glasses and a collection of miniatures of Scotch. He poured one bottle into each glass and passed them around.
"Well, my friend, to retirement and prosperity."
He drank; the other American drank. The Iraqi smiled and drank.
"Have a rest," said the G2 colonel in Arabic. "We'll be there in less than an hour."
After that, they left him alone. He leaned his head back onto the cushion of his seat and let his mind drift back over the past twenty weeks mat had made his fortune.
He had taken great risks, but they had paid off. He recalled the day he had sat in that conference room in the Presidential Palace and heard the Rais announce that at last Iraq possessed, in the nick of time, her own nuclear bomb. That had come as a genuine shock, as had the sudden cut-off of all communications after he had told the Americans. Then they had suddenly come back, more insistent than ever, demanding to know where the device was stored.
He had not had the faintest idea, but for the offered bounty of $5 million, it had clearly been the time to stake everything. Then it had been easier than he could have imagined.
The wretched nuclear engineer, Dr. Salah Siddiqi, had been picked up on the streets of Baghdad and accused, amid the sea of his own pain, of betraying the location of the device. Protesting his innocence, he had given away the site of Al Qubai and the camouflage of the car junkyard. How could the scientist have known that he was being interrogated three days before the bombing, not two days after it?
Jericho's next shock had been to learn of the shooting down of the two British fliers. That had not been foreseen. He desperately needed to know whether, in their briefing, they had been given any indication as to how the information had arrived in the hands of the Allies.
His relief, when it became plain they knew nothing beyond their brief and that as far as they knew the place might be a store of artillery ammunition, had been short-lived, when the Rais insisted there must have been a traitor. From then on Dr. Siddiqi, chained in a cell beneath the Gymnasium, had had to be dispatched, which he was with a massive injection of air into the heart, causing a coronary embolism.
The records of the time of his interrogation, from three days before the bombing to two days after it, had been duly changed.
But the greatest of all the shocks had been to learn that the Allies had missed, that the bomb had been removed to some hidden place called
Qa'ala, the Fortress. What fortress? Where? A chance remark by the nuclear engineer before he died had revealed that the ace of camouflage was a certain Colonel Osman Badri of the Engineers, but a check of records showed the young officer was a passionate fan of the President. How to change that view? The answer lay in the arrest on trumped-up charges and messy murder of his much-loved father. After that, the disillusioned Badri had been putty in Jericho's hands, during the meeting in the back of the car following the funeral.
The man called Jericho, also nicknamed Mu'azib the Tormentor, felt at peace with the world. A drowsy numbness crept over him, the effect perhaps of the strain of the past few days. He tried to move but found his limbs would not function. The two American colonels were looking down at him, talking in a language he could not understand but knew was not English. He tried to respond but his mouth would not frame any words.
The HS-125 had turned southwest, dropping across the Jordanian coast and down to ten thousand feet. Over the Gulf of Aqaba the Green Beret pulled back the passenger door, and a rushing torrent of air filled the cabin, even though the twin-jet had slowed almost to the point of stall.
The two colonels eased him up, unprotesting, limp and helpless, trying to say something but unable to. Over the blue water south of Aqaba, Brigadier Omar Khatib left the airplane and plunged to the water, there to break apart on impact. The sharks did the rest.
The HS-125 turned north, passed over Eilat after reentering Israeli air space, finally landing at Sde Dov, the military airfield north of Tel Aviv. There the two pilots stripped off their British uniforms and the colonels their American dress. All four returned to their habitual Israeli ranks. The executive jet was stripped of its Royal Air Force livery, repainted as it used to be, and returned to the air charter sayan in Cyprus who had loaned it.
The money from Vienna was transferred first to the Kanoo Bank in Bahrain, then on to another in the United States. Part was retransferred to the Hapoalim Bank in Tel Aviv and returned to the Israeli government; it was what Israel had paid Jericho until the transfer to the CIA. The balance, over $8 million, went into what the Mossad calls The Fun Fund.
* * *
Five days after the war ended, two more long-range American helicopters returned to the valleys of the Hamreen. They asked no permission and sought no approval.
The body of the Strike Eagle's weapons systems officer. Lieutenant Tim Nathanson, was never found. The Guards had torn it apart with their machine-gun bursts, and the jackals, foxes, crows, and kites had done the rest.
To this day his bones must lie somewhere in those cold valleys, not a hundred miles from where his forefathers once toiled and wept by the waters of Babylon.
His father received the news in Washington, sat shiva for him and said kaddish, and grieved alone in the mansion in Georgetown.
The body of Corporal Kevin Norm was recovered. As Blackhawks stood by, British hands tore apart the cairn and recovered the corporal, who was put in a body bag and flown first to Riyadh and thence home to England in a Hercules transport.
In the middle of April a brief ceremony was held at the SAS headquarters camp on the outskirts of Hereford.
There is no graveyard for the SAS; no cemetery collects their dead. Many of them lie in fifty foreign battlefields whose very names are unknown to most.
Some are under the sands of the Libyan Desert, where they fell fighting Rommel in 1941 and 1942. Others are among the Greek islands, the Abruzzi mountains, the Jura, and the Vosges. They lie scattered in Malaysia and Borneo, in Yemen, Muscat and Oman, in jungles and freezing wastes and beneath the cold waters of the Atlantic off the Falklands.
When bodies were recovered, they came home to Britain, but always to be handed to the families for burial. Even then, no headstone ever mentions the SAS, for the regiment accredited is the original unit from which the soldier came to the SAS--Fusiliers, Paras, Guards, whatever.
There is only one monument. In the heart of the Stirling Lines at Hereford stands a short and stocky tower, clad in wood and painted a dull chocolate brown. At its peak a clock keeps the hours, so the edifice is known simply as the Clocktower.
Around its base are sheets of dull bronze, on which are etched all the names and the places where they died.
That April, there were five new names to be unveiled. One had been shot by the Iraqis in captivity, two killed in a firefight as they tried to slip back over the Saudi border. A fourth had died of hypothermia after days in soaking clothes and freezing weather. The fifth was Corporal Kevin North.
There were several former commanders of the regiment there, that day in the rain. John Simpson came, and Viscount Johnny Slim and Sir Peter. The Director of Special Forces, J. P. Lovat was there, and Colonel Bruce Craig, then the CO. And Major Mike Martin and a few others.
Because they were now at home, those still serving could wear the rarely seen sand-colored beret with its emblem of the winged dagger and the motto "Who Dares Wins."
It was not a long ceremony. The officers and men saw the fabric pulled aside, the newly etched names stood out bold and white against the bronze. They saluted and left to walk back to the various mess buildings.
Shortly after, Mike Martin went to his small hatchback car in the park, drove out through the guarded gates, and turned toward the cottage he still kept in a village in the hills of Herefordshire.
He thought as he drove of all the things that had happened in the streets and sands of Kuwait; and in the skies above; and in the alleys and bazaars of Baghdad; and in the hills of the Hamreen. Because he was a secretive man, he was glad at least of one thing: That no one would ever know.