Sergeant Stephenson had taken a bearing on the flaming jet as it passed over their heads, and the direction it had fallen. Assuming it had careered on for a while after the ejections, the aircrew, had they survived, ought to be somewhere along that heading. The SAS men moved fast, just ahead of the Ubaidi tribesmen of the Guard, who were then pouring out of their villages and heading upward into the range.
Twenty minutes later, Mike Martin and the two other SAS men found the body of the dead weapons systems officer. There was nothing they could do, so they moved on.
Ten minutes afterward, they heard behind them the continuous rattle of small-arms fire. It continued for some time. The Al-Ubaidi had found the body too and in their rage had emptied their magazines into it.
The gesture also gave their position away. The SAS men pressed on.
Don Walker hardly felt the blade of Sergeant Stephenson’s knife against his throat. It was light as a thread of silk on the gullet. But he looked up and saw the figure of a man standing over him. He was dark and lean; there was a gun in his right hand pointing at Walker’s chest; and the man wore the uniform of a captain in the Iraqi Republican Guard, Mountain Division. Then the man spoke:
“Bloody silly time to drop in for tea. Shall we just get the hell out of here?”
* * *
That night General Norman Schwarzkopf was sitting alone in his suite on the fourth floor of the Saudi Defense Ministry building.
It was not where he had spent much of the past seven months; most of that time he had been out visiting as many combat units as he could, or down in the subbasement with his staff and planners. But the large and comfortable office was where he went when he wanted to be alone.
That night he sat at his desk, adorned by the red telephone that linked him in a top-security net to Washington, and waited.
At ten minutes before one on the morning of February 24, the other phone rang.
“General Schwarzkopf?” It was a British accent.
“Yes. This is he.”
“I have a message for you, sir.”
“Shoot.”
“It is: ‘Now Barrabas,’ sir. ‘Now Barrabas.’ ”
“Thank you,” said the Commander-in-Chief, and replaced the receiver. At 0400 hours that day, the ground invasion went in.
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.