The Fist of God (78 page)

The blips on the radio had meant “seven minutes to bomb launch,” and from then on Martin was not to move the red spot by an inch.

“About time,” muttered Eastman. “I’m bloody freezing in here.”

“Not long,” said Stephenson, cramming the last bits and pieces into his Bergen. “Then you’ll have all the running you want, Benny.”

Only the radio remained unpacked, ready for its next transmission.

The Fist of God

In the rear seat of the Eagle, Tim, the wizzo, could see the same information as his pilot. Four minutes to launch, three-thirty, three ...

the figures on the HUD counted down as the Eagle screamed through the mountains to its target. It flashed over the small dip where Martin and his men had landed, and took seconds to cover the terrain across which they had labored beneath their packs. “Ninety seconds to launch

...”

The SAS men heard the sound of the engines coming from the south as the Eagle began its loft.

The fighter-bomber came over the last ridge three miles south of the target, just as the countdown hit zero. In the darkness the two torpedo-shaped bombs left their pylons beneath the wings and climbed for a few seconds, driven by their own inertia.

In the three dummy villages the Republican Guards were drowned in the roar of the jet engines erupting from nowhere over their heads, jumped from their bunks, and ran to their weapons. In a few seconds the roofs of the forage barns were lifting away on their hydraulic jacks to expose the missiles beneath.

The two bombs felt the tug of gravity and began to fall. In their noses, infrared seekers sniffed for the guiding beam, the upturned bucket of invisible rays bouncing back from the red spot on their target, the bucket which, once entered, they could never leave.

Mike Martin lay prone, waiting, buffeted by engine noise as the mountains trembled, and held the red dot steady on the Babylon gun.

He never saw the bombs. One second he was gazing at a pale green mountain in the light of the image intensifier; the next, he had to pull his eyes away and shield them as night turned into blood-red day.

The two bombs impacted simultaneously, three seconds before the Guard colonel deep below the hollow mountain reached for his Launch The Fist of God

lever. He never made it.

Looking across the valley without the night-sight, Martin saw the entire top of the Fortress erupt in flame. By its glare, he caught the fleeting image of a massive barrel, rearing like a stricken beast, twisting and turning in the blast, breaking, and crashing back with the fragments of the dome into the crater beneath.

“Bloody hellfire,” whispered Sergeant Stephenson at his elbow. It was not a bad analogy. Orange fire began to glow down in the crater as the first explosion flashes died away and a dim half-light returned to the mountains. Martin began keying in his alert codes for the listeners in Riyadh.

Don Walker had rolled the Eagle after the bomb launch, pulling 135

degrees of bank, hauling down and through to find and pursue a reciprocal heading back to the south. But because he was not over flat land and mountains rose all around him, he had to gain more altitude than normal or risk clipping one of the peaks.

It was the village farthest away from the Fortress that got the best shot.

For a fraction of a second he was above them, on one wingtip, pulling around to the south, when the two missiles were launched. These were not Russian SAMs but the best Iraq had—Franco-German Rolands.

The first was low, racing after the Eagle as it dropped out of sight across the mountains. The Roland failed to clear the ridge. The second skimmed the rocks of the peak and caught up with the fighter in the next valley. Walker felt the tremendous shock as the missile impacted into the body of his aircraft, destroying and almost ripping out the starboard engine. The Eagle was thrown across the sky, its delicate systems in disarray, flaming fuel forming a comet’s tail behind it.

Walker tested the controls, a soggy pudding where once there had been firm response. It was over, his airplane was dying underneath him, all The Fist of God

his fire-warning lights were on, and thirty tons of burning metal were about to fall out of the sky.

“Eject, eject ...”

The canopy automatically shattered a microsecond before the two ejector seats came through, shooting upward into the night, turning, stabilizing. Their sensors knew at once that they were too low and blew apart the straps retaining the pilot into his seat, throwing him clear of the falling metal so that his parachute could open.

Walker had never bailed out before. The sense of shock numbed him for a while, robbed him of the power of decision. Fortunately the manufacturers had thought of that. As the heavy metal seat fell away, the parachute snapped itself open and unfurled. Dazed, Walker found himself in pitch darkness, swinging in his harness over a valley he could not see.

It was not a long drop—he had been far too low for that. In seconds the ground came up and hit him, and he was knocked over, tumbling, rolling, hands frantically scrabbling for the harness-release catch. Then the parachute was gone, blowing away down the valley, and he was on his back on wiry turf. He got up.

“Tim,” he called. “Tim, you okay?” He began to run up the valley floor, looking for another chute, certain they had both landed in the same area.

He was right in that. Both airmen had fallen two valleys to the south of their target. In the sky to the north he could make out a dim reddish glow.

After three minutes he crashed into something and banged his knee.

He thought it was a rock, but in the dim light he saw it was one of the ejector seats. His, perhaps. Tim’s? He went on looking.

Walker found his wizzo. The young man had ejected perfectly, but the The Fist of God

missile blast had wrecked the seat-separation unit on his ejector. He had landed on the mountainside locked into the seat, his parachute still tucked beneath him. The impact of the crash had torn the body from the seat at last, but no man survives a shock like that.

Tim Nathanson lay on his back in the valley, a tangle of broken limbs, his face masked by his helmet and visor. Walker tore away the mask, removed the dog tags, turned away from the glow in the mountains, and began to run, tears streaming down his face.

He ran until he could run no more, then found a crevice in the mountain and crawled in to rest.

Two minutes after the explosions in the Fortress, Martin had his contact with Riyadh. He sent his series of blips and then his message.

It was:

“Now Barrabas, I say again, Now Barrabas.”

The three SAS men closed down the radio, packed it, hitched their Bergens onto their backs, and began to get off the mountain—fast.

There would be patrols now as never before, looking not for them—it was unlikely the Iraqis would work out for some time how the bombing raid had been so accurate—but for the downed American aircrew.

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 Fist of God

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?”

* * *

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.”

The Fist of God

“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 The Fist of God

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 The Fist of God

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 The Fist of God

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.