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.
Miraculously the mission appeared on the Air Tasking Order from Riyadh, although it had only been devised twelve hours and not three days earlier.
The other three needed crews were at once taken off any other tasking and assigned to the Tikrit East mission, slated for the night of the twenty-second (maybe) or any other night they were ordered. Until then, they were on permanent one-hour standby.
The four Strike Eagles were prepared by sundown of the twenty-second, and at ten P.M. the mission was canceled. No other mission was substituted. The eight aircrew were told to rest, while the remainder of the squadron went tank-zapping among the Republican Guard units north of Kuwait.
When they returned in the dawn of the twenty-third, the four idle aircrew came in for their turn of ribbing.
With the mission planning staff, a route was worked out for Tikrit East that would take the four Eagles up the corridor between Baghdad and the Iranian border to the east, with a turn of course through forty-five degrees over Lake As Sa’diyah and then straight on, northwest to Tikrit.
As he sipped his breakfast coffee in the mess hall, Don Walker was summoned outside by his squadron commander.
“Your target marker is in place,” he was told. “Get some rest. It could be a rough night.”
By the rising sun, Mike Martin began to study the mountain across the steep valley. On full magnification his glasses could pick out individual bushes; pulling the focus back, he could see an area any size he wanted.
For the first hour it looked like just a mountain. The grass grew, as on all the others. There were stunted shrubs and bushes, as on all the rest.
Here and there a patch of bare rock, occasionally a small boulder, clung to the slopes. like all the other hills within his vision, it was of an irregular shape. There seemed nothing out of place.
From time to time he squeezed his eyes tightly to rest them, pillowed his head on his forearms for a while, and started again.
By midmorning, a pattern began to emerge. On certain parts of the mountain the grass appeared to grow in a manner different from that on other parts. There were areas where the vegetation seemed too regular, as if in lines. But there was no door, unless it was on the other side, no road, no track with tire marks, no standpipe venting foul air from inside, no mark of present or previous excavation. It was the moving sun that gave the first clue.
Shortly after eleven, he thought he caught a glint of something in the grass. He brought the glasses back to that patch and went to full magnification. The sun went behind a cloud. When it came out, the glint flashed again. Then he saw the source: a fragment of wire in the grass.
He blinked and tried again. Slantwise, it was a length of wire a foot long in the grass. It was part of a longer strand, green plastic-covered wire, of which a small part had been abraded to reveal the metal beneath.
The wire was one of several he glimpsed, all buried in the grass, occasionally revealed as the wind blew the stems from side to side.
Diagonals in the opposite direction, a patch of chain-link wire, underneath the grass.
By midday, he could see it better. A section of mountainside where green wire mesh held the soil to a surface below the earth; the grass and shrubs planted in every diamond-shaped gap between the fencing, growing through the gaps, covering the wire beneath.
Then he saw the terracing. One part of the mountainside was made up of blocks, presumably concrete, each set back three inches from the one below it. Along the horizontal terraces thus created were runnels of earth out of which the shrubs grew. Where they sprouted, they were in horizontal lines. At first it did not look so, because they
