Barracuda 945 (6 page)

They brought in heavy lifting equipment and bulldozers, and avoided another flare-up by announcing they were also searching for Palestinians and would provide medical treatment for anyone found alive.

This of course gave them ample opportunity to conduct a search for more weapons and bomb-making facilities. In three days the area would be as “clean” as it could ever be; even though everyone knew the wily Arabs had been moving military matériel to safe houses on the edge of the city ever since Saturday morning.

Shakira’s house had formally caved in after dark on Friday, burying all five bodies under several tons of debris. They were all unearthed on the following Tuesday afternoon and taken to the morgue in the Israeli section of the city, where thirty-eight IDF troops already lay.

The Palestinian dead, more than sixty-two men, women, and children, were later removed to a converted schoolhouse just west of the Bir Al-Saba Road.

The bodies of Sergeant O’Hara and Sergeant Morgan were the only known casualties among the SAS troops, though Major Ray Kerman was currently listed as missing in action.

As the Commanding Officer of the SAS force garrisoned in the Negev, this was regarded as a most serious matter, as indeed were the deaths of two top NCOs from the Regiment. Hereford Headquarters was immediately informed, and the response was fast.

“Transport Sergeant O’Hara and Sergeant Morgan’s bodies immediately to Israeli Army HQ in Jerusalem, for initial postmortem. Inform soonest any ransom demand for Major Kerman.”
The latter order was routine. Members of the Regiment rarely, if ever, are taken prisoner. They would fight to the death.

Two days later, there was still neither sight nor sound of Major Kerman, but the new SAS Commander in Israel, Acting Major Roger Hill, wore an extremely quizzical look as he read the report of the IDF pathologist.

“Sergeant Charles Morgan died as a result of five bullet wounds, fired from point-blank range into the right side of the head, a straight line of hits, stretching from a point two inches above the temple directly downward to the lower jaw, which was shattered.

All five bullets penetrated right through the brain, the upper four exiting the skull on the left side. The lower bullet was lodged in the jawbone on the left. It was consistent with a shell fired from a Heckler & Koch submachine gun, and has been sent for examination to the Israeli Army forensic laboratory in Tel Aviv.”

Major Hill knew that it would be rare for an Arab freedom fighter to aim a submachine gun so steadily and so accurately. But the report on Sergeant O’Hara was even more perplexing. Big Fred had not been shot, and neither was the cause of death attributable to the collapsed ceiling in the ruins of the house in which he was found.

Sergeant O’Hara had died after receiving a crushing blow with an uneven object to the central skull area between his eyes. The nose bone was lodged three inches into the brain, consistent with a headlong fall into the edge of a table, or an encounter with an unarmed combat expert in the Special Forces of either Great Britain or the United States. The fall possibility was of doubtful merit, since there were no other injuries to the SAS Sergeant’s face.

Major Hill realized very quickly that both men could have been killed by a member, or at least a former member, of one of the world’s Special Forces. And these days there were many such men. No one perhaps quite as efficient as the SAS or the U.S. Navy SEALs. But the Israelis were very good, and so were the Iraqis. The fact was, it looked as if one or more of such trained killers had turned on the two dead SAS men from Hereford, even though they were both still holding their submachine guns under the rubble.

Meanwhile, the search continued for the missing SAS Commander. Israeli investigators were in the area, examining wreckage, questioning known personnel from Hamas. No one knew anything, no one had even seen him, never mind killed him, or taken him prisoner.

The best information available was from the Israeli Forward Commander who confirmed he and Major Kerman had spoken at the height of the battle, and that he had seen the British officer reach the wall and disappear around it. He had glimpsed the Major running in a crouch, up the side of street, next to the now shattered row of Palestinian houses. Israeli troops, however, had found no trace of his body.

One week later the situation was unchanged. Ray Kerman, an officer many believed was destined for the highest Command in the SAS Regiment, had essentially disappeared. Into hot, dusty, and very thin air.

2

L
IEUTENANT COLONEL
Russell Makin, Commanding Officer, 22 SAS, strode through the cold Hereford rain toward his office, carrying beneath his right arm a heavy black plastic file of classified documents. The Colonel, a tall, powerful ex-combat officer in the Falkland Islands War, had, in his time, carried loaded antitank guided-missile launchers, which weighed a darned sight less.

The file had grown weekly since midsummer. On its jacket it just contained the word
SECRET
. On the first page were the words
MAJOR RAYMOND KERMAN
. On the remaining 560 pages was a highly detailed account of how one of the most extensive and secretive investigations of recent years had failed to find one single trace of the missing Major.

Colonel Makin reached his office, removed his rain cape, asked someone to bring him some coffee, and placed the file on the table. He’d been up for four hours, since 5:00
A
.
M
., mostly talking to the investigating chief in the ultrasecret Shin Bet Intelligence Office, in faraway, sunlit Tel Aviv, two time zones and several light-years east of rainswept, foggy Hereford.

The two men spoke often these days, drawn together by the consuming military mystery of the SAS Commanding Officer, who had run, crouching through an embattled street in the middle of Hebron, and never been seen again.

The one single fact that Colonel Makin knew for certain was that the Shin Bet team, Israel’s ruthless interior Intelligence equivalent of London’s MI5 and Washington’s FBI, had conducted the most painstaking and thorough search of the area west of the Jerusalem Road. They’d used everything from bulldozers and mechanical diggers to microscopes and forensic laboratories.

They had turned up evidence, compelling evidence. But nothing led to where it was supposed to go. The most important fact was that Sergeant O’Hara had been killed by a member of someone’s Special Forces, professionally and deliberately. Sergeant Morgan had been blown away by an MP5 submachine gun of the precise type carried by Major Kerman and every combat soldier in the IDF, plus God knows how many Palestinians with smuggled weapons.

They had found the bodies of two children in the same house, one boy, one girl, both killed by bursts of fire from an MP5, and ballistics showed they had been shot by the SAS Sergeants, though neither the IDF nor the SAS would ever reveal this. The time of death, of all four, was approximately identical. Another body in the house had been killed by the blast of a shell that had crashed right through the top floor of the house. The man had been the father of both children.

The wife, Shakira Sabah, was found living with her brother, a deeply suspected but unproven member of Hamas, and his family, a half mile southeast of her former home, deep in H-1 territory. She had been at a neighbor’s house when her own home was hit, and she was unable to regain entry through the rubble. She knew nothing of any British officer, had seen nothing, cared nothing, and was too upset at the slaughter of her family to be of any further help to anyone. Shin Bet did not believe her.

None of this brought anyone any nearer to the whereabouts of Ray Kerman. In point of fact, Shin Bet thought they may have
found his combat jacket buried in the debris of the house, but it contained nothing, and was unmarked, and, of course, Israeli. It was also ruined, under the dust and cement of the building.

It had much in common with the other evidence. The Major
could
have killed both his colleagues, and it
could
have been his jacket, and he
could
be on the run. But from what? And where?

This was no ordinary SAS soldier, this was Ray Kerman, a decorated officer of impeccable character, training, and background. If he had been killed in the battle, where was his body? If Hamas had him prisoner or hostage, why had they not contacted anyone, either for reward or hostage exchange? Like they always did.

No answers. No Major.

Russ Makin, at the age of thirty-eight, a career Officer since Sandhurst, had never encountered anything quite like it. In his twenty years as a Serving Officer he had never even heard of anyone going missing from the SAS. Certainly no one on the order of Major Kerman, who was a very important person, privy to many, many secrets in Great Britain’s most secretive combat regiment.

In a quiet, irritated way, the Ministry of Defence had been pressurizing him for months. He had been obliged to deal with the Legal Department, the Public Relations Department, the Pensions Department. There had been endless questions from the Next-of-Kin officials, from the Compensation Department. Did he consider the file should be closed under the heading “Missing in Action”?

But was the Major really missing? And above all, was there anything about Major Kerman that no one knew?

This last question, Colonel Makin understood, may be answered in the next hour. At half past ten, a special courier was due to arrive from the MOD in Whitehall, bringing with him a classified report, the result of an exhaustive investigation conducted in tandem by the Ministry and by MI5.

The SAS Chief knew there would be no courier if there was nothing of any interest. And when the document finally arrived, on time, he read it with a sense of real disquiet.

The parents of Ray Kerman, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Kerman of North London, revealed, with very little prompting, that they
were formerly Mr. and Mrs. Reza Rashood, lately of the city of Kerman in the southeast of Iran, where Ravi Rashood had been born.

“Ravi Rashood! Holy shit!” Colonel Makin muttered. “I had no idea.”

Of course there was nothing illegal about any of it. Thousands of Middle Eastern families had emigrated to England and changed their names to fit in better with the locals. Neither Richard Kerman nor his wife seemed to be hiding anything. They produced Ray’s birth certificate, and the family’s immigration documents, including the official change-of-name papers issued just before Ray’s fourth birthday. This included the boy’s British citizenship conferred upon him when he was five.

They produced his school records, and even made arrangements, through Harrow’s headmaster, for the men from the Ministry to go to the school and conduct whatever further investigations they wished.

The result of these further interviews were contained in a secondary document, which demonstrated how thoroughly concerned Whitehall was at the loss of the SAS Major. They had located two Old Harrovians who had shared studies with Ray during their school years. One of them, now a practicing barrister in London, recalled nothing of note.

The other, a struggling poet in North Wales, recalled that he had once seen a copy of the Koran on Ray’s bookshelf. He remembered having asked his roommate about it, and he even remembered the reply. Ray said it had belonged to his mother and that there were some very beautiful passages in its pages. The poet, named Reggie Carrington, had been interested and in later years purchased a copy he found in a secondhand bookshop. He was pleased to show it to the man from MI5.

Like the headmaster at Harrow, the Chaplain at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst confirmed there had been no instance, to his knowledge, when Raymond Kerman had attended any other service, or Church Parade, other than those of the regular Church of England denomination. A Muslim by birth, of Muslim parents, Ray Kerman had vanished
in Muslim territory. Of that there was no doubt. However, there was not one shred of evidence to suggest he had not quietly converted to the Protestant faith, long before his tenth birthday, and become totally Westernized, before embarking on a career in the British Army, which would see him valiantly follow the creeds of fighting: for God, Queen, and Country.

The Ministry of Defence had taken every possible step to insure secrecy in its investigation, but it had spread its net widely. The Ministry had plainly been obliged to involve its Israeli colleagues, who had taken it upon themselves to repatriate the bodies of the two NCOs.

The British Embassy in Tel Aviv had also undertaken a great deal of investigation, but had advanced no further than the men from Shin Bet. The CIA in Langley, Virginia, had found out for themselves that “the Goddamned Brits have lost a high-ranking SAS officer,” which was regarded as very bad news indeed.

Using a variety of Arab contacts, the CIA had done as much as it could to assist in the investigation but had succeeded only in finding an Arab member of Hamas who claimed to know the Major was dead. Since there was no body to be found, no one had the remotest idea if he was telling the truth or not.

Colonel Makin sat alone on this rainy day, and read large parts of the report, new stuff and old stuff. Like all senior officers involved in the case, he smelled a gigantic rat. It did not add up. If the Major was dead, they’d have found him. Even if he was a hostage, they would have heard. If he was merely hiding in Hebron with a new lover or something absolutely ridiculous, someone would have seen him.

For the past few months he had dismissed any thoughts that Ray Kerman could have gone over to the other side, as ridiculous. But Ravi Rashood? That was different. All of the Kermans’ apparent respectability could not remove from the CO’s mind, the chilling thought that for the first time in its history, the SAS had harbored a traitor, a traitor he himself had essentially hired and nurtured.

“Holy shit!” said the Colonel, for the second time that morning. He sipped his coffee and waited not terribly enthusiastically
for the inevitable call from MI5 asking what he made of the latest information.

Meanwhile, that morning there had been two, possibly three, inquiries from journalists, direct to SAS Headquarters in Hereford. As ever, the SAS said nothing, referring all inquiries to the Ministry of Defence, whose Press Department immediately claimed to know even less than nothing, if that were possible.

The cordon of secrecy that surrounded the matter was about as secure as a ring of IDF tanks in Hebron. But when an inquiry goes on this long, with more and more people finding things out, it’s just a matter of time before a credible leak interests a reporter, or, more likely, a senior correspondent with Whitehall contacts.

In this case, it happened at a cocktail party at London’s Indian Embassy, a gray, granite building on the south side of London’s Aldwych, up the street from the Law Courts. Anton Zilber, the tall, long-serving French-born editor of the Diplomatic Corps’s magazine,
Court Circular,
was chatting to a slightly drunk Whitehall mandarin he had known for years.

“Busy week, Colin?”

“Matter of fact, it has been, Anton. Damned busy. The bloody Special Forces have mislaid one of their Commanding Officers. Bloody careless of ’em, eh?”

Anton was not a newshound. The
Court Circular
meticulously recorded all the diplomatic events around town…who was at which party, with photographs and captions. It recorded promotions, and farewells to departing Ambassadors, with articles about any new arrival to London. In a sense, it was something of a vanity mag for the Diplomatic Corps. Even its title suggested something of the grandeur of the ancient Court of St. James, the official title for all London Ambassadors. Each one of them is an Ambassador to the Court of St. James, not just London, England.

Never a breath of scandal appeared in the
Court Circular,
nor indeed any news story that might embarrass anyone. Anton Zilber was handsomely paid, with an exclusive beat among lavish parties and dinners. And every Embassy in London sent its glossy copies home to let their Ministers know they were not idling around.

What no one knew was that Anton had a very prosperous little sideline. He never printed a hot story himself, but he had a web of contacts on national newspapers, especially in the society diaries, where ill-connected journalists could hardly wait to hear that Anton had seen a member of the Royal Family or the Government misbehave badly at an Embassy party.

Anton Zilber could stop a busy newspaper diary in its tracks with the conspiratorial opening he always affected…. “Hello, Geoff. Not a word about me of course, but something happened at the Belgian Embassy last night I thought might amuse you….”

At $300 a pop, this was a profitable little business.

“Yes,” he replied, carefully, to the jovial but incredible revelation about the SAS Officer from the man from Whitehall. “That does sound a bit careless. No one we know, I suppose?”

“No one I know, old boy,” chuckled the mandarin. “Some bloody SAS, killer I think. Just a Major, nothing big. But it happened in Hebron during that nasty battle last spring. A lot of people are very exercised about the whole thing. I say, shall we try another glass of that excellent champagne. Say one thing for the Indians…they always push the boat out, eh?”

That was all it took. The following morning Anton Zilber was on the telephone to one of the very senior defense correspondents of London’s
Daily Telegraph,
John Dwyer, a former military man who would have no need of the Press Office at the MOD.

He phoned his oldest friend in the Ministry of Defence, a Brigadier, who had helped him over the years with a variety of difficult stories. But today was different. There was not a semblance of help. John Dwyer, himself a former Colonel in the Gloucester-shire Regiment, ran into a brick wall for a full ten minutes of conversation. The Brigadier claimed to know absolutely nothing about any disappeared SAS Major.