Barracuda 945 (2 page)

1

M
AJOR RAY KERMAN
, on his second tour of duty with the Regiment, stared westward out toward the desert city of Beersheba. In the setting sun, the heat still rose shimmering along the foothills of the Dimona Mountains, despite the eternal wind. A long line of Bedouin camels heading for the last oasis north of the river moved symmetrically across the sandy wastes, not 100 yards from the SAS stronghold.

Ray Kerman stood almost in the long shadows of the caravan. He watched the black-hooded men, swaying to the tireless rhythm of the camels, their wide hooves making no sound on the soft desert floor. The nomads of the Negev Desert turned neither right nor left, acknowledging nothing, especially a swarthy broad-shouldered Army officer in an Israeli uniform. But Ray could feel their hard, dark eyes upon him, and he understood he would be forever an intruder to the West Bank Bedouins.

He usually found the tribesmen were different, trading at the Bedouin market in Beersheba, where the hand of friendship was
frequently offered to any prospective buyer. But as his Sergeant, Fred O’Hara, had mentioned, “These blokes would rush up and French-kiss Moshe Dayan if they thought they could sell him a secondhand carrot.”

Ray, however, saw them differently. Before making this first tour of duty to the Near East he had read the works of the important Arabist, Wilfred Thesiger. He had arrived in the Israeli desert filled with an unspoken admiration for the natives of the wide, hot, near-empty Negev Desert…men who could, if necessary, go without food or water for seven days, who could not be burned by the pitiless sun nor frozen by the harsh winter nights. Men who could suffer the most shocking deprivations yet still stand unbowed. They were men who accepted certain death only upon the collapse of their camels.

The English officer had not forgotten the first tribesman he had met in Beersheba, a tall robed nomad, trading goats and sheep in the market. The man had been introduced, and he had stared hard, without speaking, into Ray’s eyes, the traditional manner of contact in the desert.

Finally, he had touched his forehead and gracefully arched his hand downward in the Muslim greeting. Softly, he had said, “
As salam alaikum,
Major. Peace be upon you. I am Rasheed. I am a Bedouin.”

In that split second, Ray Kerman knew what Wilfred Thesiger had meant when he had written about the Bedouin’s courtesy, his courage and endurance, his patience and lighthearted gallantry. “Among no other people,” Thesiger once wrote, “have I felt the same sense of personal inferiority.”

Ray recognized that as high praise. Not only had Thesiger been one of only two white men ever to make the murderous journey across the burning wastes of the “Empty Quarter” in the southeast of the Arabian Peninsula, he had won a boxing Blue at Oxford University, and served in the SAS during the war. More telling yet, the craggy, teak-tough Thesiger had been educated at Eton, England’s school for its highborn, a place which in 560 years had never produced a pupil who felt personally inferior to anyone, never mind a camel driver. Ray knew about Etonians. He
had attended Eton’s “upstart” rival public school, Harrow, alma mater of Sir Winston Churchill, founded as recently as 1571 as a Protestant school in the reign of England’s first Protestant Queen, Elizabeth I.

Ray stood watching the camel train head westward, into the shifting sands, into the silence. He knew they would remain at the oasis overnight, before heading into the market at first light. He held his Heckler & Koch machine gun lightly in his right hand, the barrel downward, and he shook his head as he contemplated tonight’s mission.

He thought,
I really don’t want to end up shooting these people. I wonder if I ever should have accepted this command?

The truth was Major Kerman, with his immaculate SAS record, and inescapably Jewish surname, was not precisely what he seemed. Major Kerman’s parents had both been Iranian, brought up as Muslims, and descended from nomadic Arabs in the southern city of Kerman, on the edge of Iran’s vast southern desert, Dasht-e Lut.

But when the downfall of the ruling Shah appeared to be inevitable, back in the early seventies, the wealthy couple had emigrated with their toddler son, Ravi, to London. And there they began importing from the family’s carpet manufacturing business in their home city.

The booming British economy during the premiership of Margaret Thatcher was perfect for the family. Mr. and Mrs. Reza Rashood quickly became Mr. and Mrs. Richard Kerman, taking a new name from an old place in the manner of many Middle Eastern families far from home.

While dozens of tribesmen stitched and wove the elegant patterns in the hilly regions north of Bandar Abbas, Richard Kerman opened a string of warehouses in southern England, and then invested in a small shipping line to transport the costly wool and silk floor coverings up through the Suez Canal and on through the Mediterranean to Southampton.

His Iranian carpets led him to expand his importing empire. Richard’s seagoing freighters led him to oil tankers, and to the
gigantic profits that were commonplace during the 1980s. He also began shipping superb Iranian dates out of Bandar Abbas. Tons and tons of them, all grown in another town in the Kerman region, the tree-lined twelfth-century citadel of Bam. Most of the dates were cultivated by his Rashood relatives.

Soon the Kermans owned an expansive gabled house on North London’s fabled Millionaire’s Row, The Bishop’s Avenue, next to the old Cambodian Embassy.

Twin Rolls-Royce Silver Ghosts occupied the garages. Not so far away, fifty-five miles west down the M4 motorway in the Berkshire village of Lambourn, six highly bred thoroughbred flat horses were expensively in training, doing battle during the summer months under Richard Kerman’s jet black and scarlet-sashed silks.

Young Ravi, whose first sight of the world had been the hot, dusty streets of the depressed urban sprawl of his hometown in the desert, was renamed Raymond.

Raymond Kerman, after a six-year junior education in one of the most expensive preparatory schools in London, now owned a British passport and at the age of thirteen, would enter Harrow, known, even by Etonians, as probably the second-best fee-paying school in the country, and a long-established haven for the sons of Middle Eastern ruling families.

On the entry form, Richard Kerman had declared the boy’s religion as Church of England. In the space for birthplace, he had filled out Hampstead, London. No formal birth certificate had been required. Nothing to reveal that Raymond Kerman was really Ravi Rashood, born Iranian from the southeast of that country. It was Richard Kerman’s view that in England it was unwise to be different from the majority. The more patrician tribes of London society found it disquieting.

Indeed by the time young Ray entered Harrow it was assumed he had more or less forgotten anything he ever knew about the religion of Islam. And he had. More or less. But his mother, the former Naz Allam, was a great deal more devout than her husband, and she had, when Ravi was around seven, sent him to a series of private tutorials with a senior imam at a North London
mosque. She would sit quietly with him while he learned simplified rudiments of the Koran, God’s revelations to the Prophet Mohammed, detailed over 114 chapters.

When those lessons had concluded, shortly before Ray began prep school in Knightsbridge, his Muslim groundings came to an end. Richard Kerman took care they did not begin again. Later on, his son Ray attended all church services at Harrow with the vast majority of the school in the Church of England faith. Never once was he a part of the small group of separatists, whose parents, Roman Catholics, Muslim, or Jewish, insisted they remain exclusively within their denominations.

It was widely assumed, within the confines of the great school, that Ray Kerman probably had a Jewish grandfather, or something like that. But Harrow is a bastion of racial equality, and no one ever asked him. In any event, Ray was one of the toughest boys in the history of the school, a thunderous fast bowler (pitcher) on the school cricket team, and a brutally strong front-row forward on the rugby team, which he captained. Those kind of kids
never
had to answer questions.

His application for a scholarship to England’s Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, were prepared by his headmaster, utilizing school records. Ray entered the British Army without a trace of his very early background in the official records. So impressive was his school record, written and signed personally by the Headmaster of Harrow, they never even asked for a formal birth certificate.

He was 2nd Lieutenant Raymond Kerman, first in his year at the Academy, a top sportsman at Harrow School, the son of wealthy, well-known North London parents, heir to the Kerman shipping line. Religion: Church of England.

His first Regiment was the Devon and Dorsets, an infantry outfit whose soldiers were historically drawn from southwest England. It was from there he had first entered the SAS, fighting his way through the brutal, soul-searching indoctrination process, before serving for four years, with immense distinction, in both the Kosovo Campaign, and then earning the coveted Queen’s Gallantry Medal during an SAS rescue mission in Sierra Leone the following year.

He returned to his Regiment as Captain Kerman, an acknowledged SAS “hard man,” expert in unarmed combat, skilled in the use of explosives and demolition, an efficient satellite communications operator. He was trained in Close Quarter Battle (CQB), short-range missiles, navigation, strategy, and specialized SAS transport over all terrains. Break-ins to enemy compounds were his specialty. The Regiment had him taught Arabic at the secret Army language school in Buckinghamshire. At thirty-four, he had not yet married.

Recalled to the SAS for a second tour of duty in 2002, Ray Kerman had been personally selected to command a small, highly experienced SAS team, training members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in counterterrorism procedures. The operation, highly classified, was funded by the Israeli Government. Ray’s team contained six senior noncommissioned officers, each of them experts on a wide range of military skills and techniques.

One week before they left Hereford, bound for an unidentified Army base in the Negev, Captain Kerman had been summoned to see the SAS Commanding Officer. There he was told the Ministry of Defence had issued a special authorization for his promotion to Major. “I may say, we are all delighted,” the CO had told him. “You’ve earned it.” Ray Kerman had become a very special man in a very special Regiment.

He had been in the desert for several weeks, mostly confined to the wire-surrounded, camouflaged SAS compound, with its custom-built urban area, designed to prepare the Israelis for house-to-house combat in city streets.

The SAS enjoys a towering reputation in the Israeli Army, and Major Kerman, a stern and uncompromising officer, was deadly serious about his job. He was not particularly liked, but he quickly earned a full measure of respect. Like his father, he had little humor, and he possessed the same ruthless streak in his chosen occupation, and this he endlessly tried to drill into the Israeli recruits. He worked them right out on the edge, forcing a supreme fitness upon them, urging them on, driving and cajoling them, hammering home the SAS creed, “Train hard, fight easy.”

Only rarely did he venture into the nearby desert towns, Beersheba to the east and a few miles farther north to Hebron, the volatile flashpoint of so many murderous Arab-Israeli clashes, intensified always by the city’s sacred place in the scriptures of Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike. This is the burial place of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

The city’s holiness has always added fuel to the incendiary atmosphere between its Palestinian and Israeli populations. As long ago as 1929, Muslim extremists massacred the entire Jewish minority in Hebron. Ever since then, both sides have initiated endless bloodshed. In 1994, a Jewish extremist gunned down thirty Muslim worshipers. And nothing much improved after 1997, when the western part of the city (H-1) became a Palestinian autonomous zone. Riots and hard military restrictions continue to dominate the last resting place of Abraham.

Ray’s first visit to ancient Hebron was in fact his first close encounter with an Arab populace. With his tall red-haired Irish Sergeant, Fred O’Hara, he had wandered through the crisscross alleyways of the souk, watching the Palestinian traders, robed men sculpting olive wood, heating and blowing the city’s famous colored glass, selling fruit and vegetables. Ray and Fred both wore civilian clothes, trying hard to blend in as strolling tourists, each of them eating from a bag of pale, sweet Hebron peaches, reputed to be the finest in the world.

The trip was essentially business. The two SAS men were trying to familiarize themselves with the layout of the city, because as ever there were rumors around that the Palestinians were once more stockpiling weapons and bomb-making materials. Ray carried with him a travel guide, and throughout the afternoon he made careful notes inside the little book.

The Major, of course, realized that he too had been born in a similar town, not so steeped in culture, but nonetheless on the edge of a vast desert, among people who wore robes, of the Muslim faith. Like these Hebron Arabs, his own people must have toiled for little in a similar hot, dusty urban trading center. He wondered whether, deep in his subconscious, there was a remembrance of another place, like this, where the toddler Ravi Rashood
had eaten peaches and walked with his mother Naz, wearing her long black chador.