Fifteen minutes later, the HS-125 left Saudi air space and crossed the border of Jordan.
The Iraqi sitting in the back of the executive jet knew nothing of all this but was impressed by the efficiency of the British and Americans.
He had been dubious on receiving the last message from his paymasters in the West, but on reflection he agreed it would be wise to quit now rather than wait for later and have to do it on his own, without help. The plan outlined to him in that message had worked like a dream.
One of the two pilots in RAF tropical uniforms came back from the flight deck and muttered in English to the American G2 colonel, who grinned.
“Welcome to freedom, Brigadier,” he said in Arabic to his guest. “We are out of Saudi air space. Soon we’ll have you in an airliner to America. By the way, I have something for you.”
He withdrew a slip of paper from his breast pocket and showed it to the Iraqi, who read it with great pleasure. It was a simple total: the sum lodged in his bank account in Vienna, now over $10 million.
The Green Beret reached into a locker and produced several glasses and a collection of miniatures of Scotch. He poured one bottle into each glass and passed them around.
“Well, my friend, to retirement and prosperity.”
He drank; the other American drank. The Iraqi smiled and drank.
“Have a rest,” said the G2 colonel in Arabic. “We’ll be there in less than an hour.”
After that, they left him alone. He leaned his head back onto the cushion of his seat and let his mind drift back over the past twenty weeks mat had made his fortune.
He had taken great risks, but they had paid off. He recalled the day he had sat in that conference room in the Presidential Palace and heard the Rais announce that at last Iraq possessed, in the nick of time, her own nuclear bomb. That had come as a genuine shock, as had the sudden cut-off of all communications after he had told the Americans.
Then they had suddenly come back, more insistent than ever, demanding to know where the device was stored.
He had not had the faintest idea, but for the offered bounty of $5 million, it had clearly been the time to stake everything. Then it had been easier than he could have imagined.
The wretched nuclear engineer, Dr. Salah Siddiqi, had been picked up on the streets of Baghdad and accused, amid the sea of his own pain, of betraying the location of the device. Protesting his innocence, he had given away the site of Al Qubai and the camouflage of the car junkyard. How could the scientist have known that he was being interrogated three days before the bombing, not two days after it?
Jericho’s next shock had been to learn of the shooting down of the two British fliers. That had not been foreseen. He desperately needed to know whether, in their briefing, they had been given any indication as to how the information had arrived in the hands of the Allies.
His relief, when it became plain they knew nothing beyond their brief and that as far as they knew the place might be a store of artillery ammunition, had been short-lived, when the Rais insisted there must have been a traitor. From then on Dr. Siddiqi, chained in a cell beneath the Gymnasium, had had to be dispatched, which he was with a massive injection of air into the heart, causing a coronary embolism.
The records of the time of his interrogation, from three days before the bombing to two days after it, had been duly changed.
But the greatest of all the shocks had been to learn that the Allies had missed, that the bomb had been removed to some hidden place called
Qa’ala, the Fortress. What fortress? Where?
A chance remark by the nuclear engineer before he died had revealed that the ace of camouflage was a certain Colonel Osman Badri of the Engineers, but a check of records showed the young officer was a passionate fan of the President. How to change that view?
The answer lay in the arrest on trumped-up charges and messy murder of his much-loved father. After that, the disillusioned Badri had been putty in Jericho’s hands, during the meeting in the back of the car following the funeral.
The man called Jericho, also nicknamed Mu’azib the Tormentor, felt at peace with the world. A drowsy numbness crept over him, the effect perhaps of the strain of the past few days. He tried to move but found his limbs would not function. The two American colonels were looking down at him, talking in a language he could not understand but knew was not English. He tried to respond but his mouth would not frame any words.
The HS-125 had turned southwest, dropping across the Jordanian coast and down to ten thousand feet. Over the Gulf of Aqaba the Green Beret pulled back the passenger door, and a rushing torrent of air filled the cabin, even though the twin-jet had slowed almost to the point of stall.
The two colonels eased him up, unprotesting, limp and helpless, trying to say something but unable to. Over the blue water south of Aqaba, Brigadier Omar Khatib left the airplane and plunged to the water, there to break apart on impact. The sharks did the rest.
The HS-125 turned north, passed over Eilat after reentering Israeli air space, finally landing at Sde Dov, the military airfield north of Tel Aviv. There the two pilots stripped off their British uniforms and the colonels their American dress. All four returned to their habitual Israeli ranks. The executive jet was stripped of its Royal Air Force livery, repainted as it used to be, and returned to the air charter
The money from Vienna was transferred first to the Kanoo Bank in Bahrain, then on to another in the United States. Part was retransferred to the Hapoalim Bank in Tel Aviv and returned to the Israeli government; it was what Israel had paid Jericho until the transfer to the CIA. The balance, over $8 million, went into what the Mossad calls The Fun Fund.
Five days after the war ended, two more long-range American helicopters returned to the valleys of the Hamreen. They asked no permission and sought no approval.
The body of the Strike Eagle’s weapons systems officer. Lieutenant Tim Nathanson, was never found. The Guards had torn it apart with their machine-gun bursts, and the jackals, foxes, crows, and kites had done the rest.
To this day his bones must lie somewhere in those cold valleys, not a hundred miles from where his forefathers once toiled and wept by the waters of Babylon.
His father received the news in Washington, sat shiva for him and said
The body of Corporal Kevin Norm
In the middle of April a brief ceremony was held at the SAS
headquarters camp on the outskirts of Hereford.
There is no graveyard for the SAS; no cemetery collects their dead.
Many of them lie in fifty foreign battlefields whose very names are unknown to most.
Some are under the sands of the Libyan Desert, where they fell fighting Rommel in 1941 and 1942. Others are among the Greek islands, the Abruzzi mountains, the Jura, and the Vosges. They lie scattered in Malaysia and Borneo, in Yemen, Muscat and Oman, in jungles and freezing wastes and beneath the cold waters of the Atlantic off the Falklands.
When bodies were recovered, they came home to Britain, but always to be handed to the families for burial. Even then, no headstone ever mentions the SAS, for the regiment accredited is the original unit from which the soldier came to the SAS—Fusiliers, Paras, Guards, whatever.
There is only one monument. In the heart of the Stirling Lines at Hereford stands a short and stocky tower, clad in wood and painted a dull chocolate brown. At its peak a clock keeps the hours, so the edifice is known simply as the Clocktower.
Around its base are sheets of dull bronze, on which are etched all the names and the places where they died.
That April, there were five new names to be unveiled. One had been shot by the Iraqis in captivity, two killed
