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.