When the thirsty Chinooks set down on the road, the tanker crews went to work until the helicopters were again brimming with fuel.
Taking off, they headed up the road in the direction of Jordan, keeping low to avoid the Iraqi radar situated across the border.
Just beyond the Saudi town of Badanah, approaching the spot where the borders of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Jordan converge, the Chinooks set down again. There were two more tankers waiting to refuel them, but it was at this point they unloaded their cargoes and their passengers.
If the American aircrew knew where the silent Englishmen were going, they gave no sign, and if they did not know, they did not inquire. The loadmasters eased the sand-camouflaged trucks down the ramps and onto the road, shook hands, and said, “Hey, good luck, you guys.” Then they refueled and set off back the way they had come. The tankers followed them.
The eight SAS men watched them go, then headed in the other direction, farther up the road toward Jordan. Fifty miles northwest of Badanah they stopped and waited.
The captain commanding the two-vehicle mission checked his position. Back in the days of Colonel David Stirling in the Western Desert of Libya, this had been done by taking bearings of the sun, moon, and stars. The technology of 1990 made it much easier and more precise.
In his hand the captain held a device the size of a paperback book. It was called a Global Positioning System, or SATNAV, or Magellan.
Despite its size, the GPS can position its holder to a square no bigger than ten yards by ten yards anywhere on the earth’s surface.
The captain’s hand-held GPS could be switched to either the Q-Code or the P-Code. The P-Code was accurate to the ten-by-ten-yard square, but it needed four of the American satellites called NAVSTAR to be above the horizon at the same time. The Q-Code needed only two NAVSTARs above the horizon but was accurate only to a hundred yards by a hundred.
That day there were only two satellites to track by, but they were enough. No one was going to miss anyone else a hundred yards away in that howling wilderness of sand and shale, miles from anywhere between Badanah and the Jordanian border. Satisfied that he was on the rendezvous site, the captain switched off the GPS and crawled under the camouflage nets spread by his men between the two vehicles to shield them from the sun. The temperature gauge said it was 130 degrees Fahrenheit.
An hour later, the British Gazelle helicopter came in from the south.
Major Mike Martin had flown from Riyadh in an RAF Hercules transport to the Saudi town of Al Jawf, the place nearest to the border at that point that had a municipal airport. The Hercules had carried the Gazelle with its rotors folded, its pilot, its ground crew, and the extra fuel tanks needed to get the Gazelle from Al Jawf to the Tapline Road and back.
In case of watching Iraqi radar even in this abandoned place, the Gazelle was skimming the desert, but the pilot quickly saw the Very starshell fired by the SAS captain when he heard the approaching engine.
The Gazelle settled on the road fifty yards from the Land-Rovers, and Martin climbed out. He carried a kitbag over his shoulder and a wicker basket in his left hand, the contents of which had caused the Gazelle pilot to wonder if he had joined the Royal Army Air Corps—or some branch of the Farmers Union. The basket contained two live hens.
Otherwise, Martin was dressed like the eight SAS men waiting for him: desert boots, loose trousers of tough canvas, shirt, sweater, and desert-camouflage combat jacket. Round his neck was a checkered
The pilot wondered why the man did not die of heat in all that gear, but then, he had never experienced the chill of the desert night.
The SAS men hauled from the rear of the Gazelle the plastic gasoline cans that had given the little reconnaissance chopper its maximum all-up weight, and they refilled the tanks. When he was full up again, the pilot waved good-bye and took off, heading south for Al Jawf, the ride back to Riyadh, and a return to sanity from these madmen in the desert.
Only when he was gone did the SAS men feel at ease. Though the eight with the Land-Rovers were D Squadron men—light-vehicle experts—and Martin was an A Squadron freefaller, he knew all but two. With greetings exchanged, they did what British soldiers do when they have the time: they brewed up a strong pot of tea.
The point where the captain had chosen to cross the border into Iraq was wild and bleak for two reasons. The rougher the country they were running over, the less chance there would be of running into an Iraqi patrol. His job was not to outpace the Iraqis over open ground but to escape detection completely.
The second reason was that he had to deposit his charge as near as possible to the long Iraqi highway that snakes its way from Baghdad westward across the great plains of desert to the Jordanian border crossing at Ruweishid.
That miserable outpost in the desert had become very familiar to television viewers after the conquest of Kuwait, because it was where the hapless tide of refugees—Filipinos, Bengalis, Palestinians, and others—were wont to cross after fleeing the chaos that the conquest had caused.
In this far northwestern corner of Saudi Arabia, the distance from the border to the Baghdad road was at its shortest. The captain knew that to his east, from Baghdad down to the Saudi border, the land tended to be flat desert, smooth as a billiard table for the most part, lending itself to a fast run from the border to the nearest road heading for Baghdad.
But it was also likely to be occupied by Army patrols and watching eyes. Here in the west of Iraq’s deserts, the land was hillier, cut by ravines that would carry flash floods during the rains and that still had to be carefully negotiated in the dry season but were virtually empty of Iraqi patrols.
The chosen crossing point was fifty kilometers north of where they stood, and beyond the unmarked border only another hundred to the Baghdad-Ruweishid road. But the captain decided he would need a full night, a layup under camouflage nets during the next day, and the night after, in order to deliver his charge to a point within walking distance of the road.
They set off at four in the afternoon. The sun still blazed, and the heat made driving seem like moving past the door of a blast furnace. At six the dusk approached, and the air temperature began to drop—fast. At seven it was completely black, and the chill set in. The sweat dried on them, and they were grateful for the thick sweaters that the Gazelle pilot had mocked.
In the lead vehicle the navigator sat beside the driver and ran a constant series of checks on their position and course. Back at their base, he and the captain had spent hours poring over a series of large-scale, high- definition photographs, kindly provided by an American U-2 mission out of their Taif base, which formed a picture better than a mere map.
They were driving without lights, but with a penlight the navigator kept track of their swerving passage, correcting every time a gully or defile forced them to divert several kilometers east or west.
Every hour, they stopped to confirm position with the Magellan. The navigator had already calibrated the sides of his photographs with minutes and seconds of longitude and latitude, so that the figures produced by the Magellan’s digital display told them exactly where they were on the photos.
Progress was slow because at each ridge one of the men had to run forward and peer over, to ensure that there was no unpleasant surprise on the other side.
An hour before dawn, they found a steep-sided wadi, drove in, and covered themselves with netting. One of the men withdrew to a nearby prominence to look down on the camp and order a few adjustments until he was satisfied a spotter plane would practically have to crash into the wadi to see them.
During the day they ate, drank, and slept, two always on guard in case of a wandering shepherd or another lonely traveler. Several times they heard Iraqi jets high overhead, and once the bleating of goats ranging a nearby hill. But the goats, which seemed to have no herdsman with them, wandered off in the opposite direction. After sundown they moved on.
There is a small Iraqi town called Ar-Rutba that straddles the highway, and shortly before four A.M. they saw
