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.