Apart from some rock-hard real information as to what the hell was going on in there, a chance existed to show the politicians that something was actually being done and to cause William Webster over at the CIA to choke on his after-dinner mints.
The Deputy Chief had had no illusions about Margaret Thatcher’s almost kittenish esteem (mutual) for the SAS since that afternoon in May 1980 when they had blown away those terrorists at the Iranian embassy in London, and she had spent the evening with the team at the
Albany Street barracks drinking whiskey and listening to their tales of derring-do.
“I think,” he said at last, “I’d better have a chat with the DSF.”
Officially, the Special Air Service Regiment has nothing to do with the SIS. The chains of command are quite different. The active-service 22nd SAS (as opposed to the part-time 23rd SAS) is based at a barracks called Stirling Lines, outside the county town of Hereford in the west of England. Its commanding officer reports to the Director of Special Forces, or DSF, whose office is in a sprawl of buildings in West London. The actual office is at the top of a once-elegant pillared building covered in a seemingly perpetual skin of scaffolding, part of a rabbit warren of small rooms whose lack of splendor belies the importance of the operations planned there.
The DSF comes under the Director of Military Operations (a general) who reports to the Chief of General Staff (an even higher general), and the General Staff comes under the Ministry of Defence.
But the
Like members of any elite unit, the officers and men of the SAS tend to live quietly within their own society, unable to discuss their work with outsiders, refusing to be photographed, and rarely emerging from the shadows.
Because the lifestyles of the members of the two secret societies had much in common, the SIS and the SAS knew each other at least by sight and had frequently cooperated in the past, either on joint operations or with the intelligence people, “borrowing” a specialist soldier from the regiment for a particular task. It was something of this kind that the Deputy Chief of the SIS (who had cleared his visit with the Chief, Sir Colin) had in mind when he took a glass of single malt whiskey from Brigadier J. P. Lovat in the covert London headquarters that evening as the sun went down.
The unwitting object of such discussion and private musing in London and Kuwait was at that moment poring over a map in another barracks many miles away. For the past eight weeks, he and his team of twelve instructors had been living in a section of the quarters assigned to the private bodyguard unit of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan of Abu Dhabi.
It was a task the regiment had undertaken many times before. All up and down the western shore of the Gulf, from the Sultanate of Oman in the south to Bahrain in the north, lies a chain of sultanates, emirates, and sheikhdoms in and out of which the British have been pottering for centuries. The Trucial States, now the United Arab Emirates, were so called because Britain once signed a truce with their rulers to protect them with the Royal Navy against marauding pirates in exchange for trading privileges. The relationship continues, and many of these rulers have princely guard units trained in the finer points of close protection by visiting SAS instructor teams. A fee is paid, of course, but to the Ministry of Defence in London.
Major Mike Martin had a large map of the Gulf and most of the Middle East spread out over the mess hall table and was studying it, surrounded by several of his men. At thirty-seven, he was not the oldest man in the room; two of his sergeants topped forty, tough, wiry, and very fit soldiers whom a man twenty years their junior would have been extremely foolish to take on.
“Anything in it for us, boss?” asked one of the sergeants.
As in all small, tight units, first names are widely used in the regiment, but officers are normally called “boss” by other ranks.
“I don’t know,” said Martin. “Saddam Hussein has got himself into Kuwait. Question is: Will he get out of his own accord? If not, will the UN authorize a force to go in and throw him out? If yes, I would think there ought to be something in there for us to do.”
“Good,” said the sergeant with satisfaction, and there were nods from the other six around the table. It had been too long, so far as they were concerned, since they had been on a real, high-adrenaline combat operation.
There are four basic disciplines in the regiment, and each recruit must master one of them. There are the freefallers, specializing in high-altitude parachute drops; the mountain-men, whose preferred terrain is rock faces and the high peaks; the armored scout car men, who drive and operate stripped-down, heavily armored long-base Land-Rovers over open terrain; and the amphibians, skilled in canoes, silent-running inflatables, and subaqua or underwater work.
In his team of twelve, Martin had four freefallers, including himself, four scout car men teaching the Abu Dhabis the principles of fast attack and counterattack over desert ground, and because Abu Dhabi lies by the Gulf, four subaqua instructors.
Apart from their own speciality, SAS men must have a good working knowledge of the other disciplines, so that inter-changeability is common. They have to master more besides—radio, first aid, and languages.
The basic combat unit consists of only four men. If one is ever out of action, his tasks will be quickly shared among the surviving three,
whether they be radio operators or unit medics.
They pride themselves on a far higher educational level than any other unit in the Army, and because they travel the world, languages are a must. Every soldier must learn one, apart from English. For years Russian was a favorite, now going out of fashion since the end of the cold war. Malay is very useful in the Far East, where the regiment for years fought in Borneo. Spanish is on the increase since the covert operations in Colombia against the cocaine lords of Medellin and Cali.
French is learned—just in case.
And because the regiment had spent years assisting Sultan Qaboos of Oman in his war with Communist infiltrators from South Yemen into the interior of Dhofar, plus other training missions up and down the Gulf and in Saudi Arabia, many SAS men speak passable Arabic. The sergeant who had asked for some action was one of them, but he had to admit: “The boss is bloody amazing. I’ve never heard anyone like him.
He even looks the part.”
Mike Martin straightened and ran a nut-brown hand through jet-black hair.
“Time to turn in.”
It was just after ten. They would be up before dawn for the usual ten-mile run with their charges before the sun became too hot. It was a chore the Abu Dhabis loathed but upon which their sheikh insisted. If these strange soldiers from England said it was good for them, it was good for them. Besides, he was paying for it, and he wanted value for his money.
Major Martin retired to his own quarters and slept quickly and deeply.
The sergeant was right; he
The maternal grandfather of both Martin boys had been a British tea planter at Darjeeling in India. As kids they had seen pictures of him—tall, pink-faced, blond-moustached, pipe in mouth, gun in hand, standing over a shot tiger. Very much the
Then in 1928 Terence Granger had done the unthinkable: He had fallen in love with and insisted on marrying an Indian girl. That she was gentle and beautiful was not the point. It was simply not done.
The tea company did not fire him—that would have brought it out in the open. They sent him into internal exile (that was what they actually called it) to an isolated plantation in faraway Assam.
If it was supposed to be a punishment, it did not work. Granger and his new bride, the former Miss Indira Bohse, loved it there—the wild, ravined countryside teeming with game and tigers, the deep green tea slopes, the climate, the people. And there Susan was born in 1930.
