the decaying corpse of a goat and prayed. The Iraqi tank crews, anxious to relieve themselves after several hours in their T-55s, had surrounded the berm. The Sabre team were pissed on, they were shat on and Alex's thigh was agonisingly burnt by a discarded cigarette end, but they were not discovered. And eventually, after four ghastly hours, the tanks had rumbled away into the desert.
As soon as the SAS team had judged it safe to move Slater had radioed in the tanks' position and direction of travel, and called in the air strike on al-Anbar. Its purpose was twofold: to destroy the missiles grouped there for transportation to mobile missile launchers and to kill a man known as Marwan.
'Marwan', to the Allied intelligence forces based in Saudi Arabia, had for several weeks been little more than an occasionally occurring code name in the welter of enemy radio traffic. It was thought from the contexts in which he was mentioned that he might be a senior technician of some sort. Then an intercepted transmission between the al-Anbar base and Baghdad command had suggested that 'Marwan' might be a man known to the Allies as 'Guppy' an Iranian scientist who had changed sides during the Iran-Iraq war and now ran the missile research plant at Sa'd 16, in north Iraq. It was the Sa'd 16 team who had developed the alHusayn the long-range version of the Russian Scud that could be fitted with chemical and biological warheads. According to the transmission, 'Marwan' was due at the al-Anbar base that evening, suggesting that the missiles might be about to be checked over and dispersed.
If'Marwan' was indeed 'Guppy', then it was essential that he be killed, just as it was essential that the missiles should be destroyed while they were all in one place. Neil Slater's instructions were to call in the air strike, assess the subsequent damage and ensure that there were no Iraqi survivors.
The air strike was at the same time the most dramatic and the most appalling event Alex had ever witnessed. The Tornados had screamed in, their missiles drawing a deceptively faint diagonal trail, and the Scud jet-propellant had gone up in an eyeball-searing roar of light and heat, hurling vehicles, machinery, weapons and human body parts in all directions. The explosions had been followed by a terrible screaming and by the sight of disjointed figures writhing on the charred ground. And by the smell, the meaty stench of burning human flesh.
'Go!' Neil Slater had screamed.
'Go, go, go!'
And they had gone. Above them the sky was black with smoke, as if a solar eclipse were taking place. Initially Alex had thought that they would encounter little or no resistance, that the entire Iraqi strength had been killed or maimed in the air strike. But this was not the case, as rapidly became clear. As the team advanced, moving in skirmish order across the twilit noon landscape, they came under sustained fire from a slit trench. A group of Iraqis must have been lying up in a bunker and escaped the firestorm unleashed by the Tornados.
The four SAS men hurled themselves into cover behind a Panhard Landcruiser which had been blown on to its side by the blast. From directly in front of them the Iraqi fire team immediately brought a withering hail of 7.62 rounds to bear on the vehicle from their Kalashnikovs. Between the two sides lay the charred, twisted and smoking bodies of the missile support crew, the lingering screams of those who had not yet died cutting through the stinking air. Thirty yards in front of them was an anti-aircraft gun emplacement, surrounded by the bodies of the men who had manned it. To twenty-six-year-old Corporal Alex Temple, who had never been on a full-scale battlefield before, it was a scene straight from hell.
'What range do you reckon?' Neil Slater asked him calmly, as Kalashnikov rounds screamed and ricocheted against the Landcruiser's blackened and twisted flank.
'I'd say fifty metres,' said Alex, struggling to keep his voice steady.
Slater nodded and removed a grenade from his bandolier. The grenade's gold top told Alex that it was the high-explosive type, rather than anti-personnel or white phosphorus.
From the other side of the Landcruiser came the whoomfing crack of a Russian grenade. Hand-thrown, guessed Alex, but not quite far enough.
Calmly Slater checked the sextant sight on his weapon s carrying handle and slid the HE grenade into the 203 launcher tube beneath the barrel of his M16.
'Fifty metres it is,' he said.
'Cover please, lads. Time for a delivery of Gold Top.'
'Pasteurise the fuckers,' whispered Andreas van Rijn, Slater's second-in command
As the three of them poured aimed shots from their Mi6s at the Iraqi position, Slater leaned coolly from cover, glanced down once at the sextant sight and fired.
The egg-shaped grenade hit the ground a few feet beyond the trench, bounced once and exploded noisily but harmlessly on the desert floor, shredding a thorn bush.
Quickly, Slater reloaded. This time the grenade fell short, but close enough to blow a half-hundredweight of sand and scrub into the trench.
The fire from the Iraqi trench intensified, and it was at that moment that the SAS team guessed they were facing elite troops and 'Marwan' was in the enemy trench. This was the only possible explanation for the Iraqi team's failure to surrender, given that they faced almost certain obliteration: they had been ordered to defend the missile scientist with their lives.
A second Russian pineapple grenade bumped laboriously towards the Landcruiser, exploding deafeningly up against it. A spatter of Kalashnikov fire followed.
'Our turn, I think,' said Slater grimly, shaking his head against the blast. This time the gold-top 203 grenade fell straight into the enemy trench and Alex watched as a shattered assault rifle flew into the air alongside the severed arm that, until a moment earlier, had held it.
'Full fat!' murmured Andreas van Rijn appreciatively.
'Full fucking fat!'
The firing did not cease. At least three Iraqi soldiers were still capable of manning a weapon and were bravely continuing to do so, forcing the SAS team to remain flattened behind the wrecked vehicle. At intervals Alex and the others were able to squeeze off a few rounds, but not to great effect. In small-arms terms it was a stalemate. But the SAS had their 203 grenade launchers.
Inexorably Slater reloaded. He had the range now, and dropped a fourth HE grenade into the Iraqi trench. This time the explosion was followed by silence and then a low groaning sound.
With his hand, Slater ordered absolute stillness. The SAS team froze. Nothing, just that long-drawn-out groaning. All of them were uncomfortably aware that sooner or later more Iraqi troops would converge on the place. Probably sooner.
The destruction of al-Anbar would certainly not have passed unnoticed.
Quickly, Alex switched magazines and as he did so his eye caught a blurred movement behind the anti- aircraft emplacement to their left. A fraction of a second later a tall khaki figure was sprinting towards the Landcruiser, holding a Kalashnikov and Alex noted in something like slow motion a pale-green Russian cylinder grenade.
From a kneeling position Alex pulled the heavy M16 203 to his shoulder. The moment seemed to go on and on. He saw the courage and the blazing intention in the Iraqi's eyes, heard his sawing breath and the desperate driving of his feet, dropped his foresight to the oncoming man's chest, saw his upper body half turn to accommodate the grenade throw only twenty-five yards to go now aimed, smoothly exhaled and punched six high-velocity 5.56mm rounds through his sternum.
For a moment, as a little over a pound of bone, muscle and lung tissue leapt from the Iraqi soldier's back, his eyes met Alex's. There was surprise there and perhaps a measure of disappointment, but not much more.
Is that all, Alex asked himself wonderingly? Is that all it is to kill a man?
The volley pitched the Iraqi backwards on to his own grenade, from which he had withdrawn the pin before starting his run. Untypically of the item in question and of exported Russian grenades in general, it worked perfectly, shredding the soldier's heart through his ribs after a delay of exactly four seconds.
A fris son passed through Alex as he clenched and unclenched his toes in the Farlow's boots. He had been in the river outside Widdowes' house for nearly three hours now, his dark-accustomed eyes endlessly quartering and scanning the space ahead of him, his senses pricked for any noise or smell that was in any way foreign to the place. He was cold, but not critically so a layer of body-temperature water lay between his skin and the wet suit's neoprene lining. The stiller he kept, in fact, the warmer he was.
The MI-5 men had played their parts perfectly, pacing loudly around the grounds with cigarettes and torches, announcing their flat-footed presence to any who might be observing. You certainly wouldn't need night sights to
