"Go!" Neil Slater had screamed.
"Go, go, go!"
And they had gone. Above them the sky was black with smoke, as if a solar eclipse were taking place. Initially Alex had thought that they would encounter little or no resistance, that the entire Iraqi strength had been killed or maimed in the air strike. But this was not the case, as rapidly became clear. As the team advanced, moving in skirmish order across the twilit noon landscape, they came under sustained fire from a slit trench. A group of Iraqis must have been lying up in a bunker and escaped the firestorm unleashed by the Tornados.
The four SAS men hurled themselves into cover behind a Panhard Landcruiser which had been blown on to its side by the blast. From directly in front of them the Iraqi fire team immediately brought a withering hail of 7.62 rounds to bear on the vehicle from their Kalashnikovs. Between the two sides lay the charred, twisted and smoking bodies of the missile support crew, the lingering screams of those who had not yet died cutting through the stinking air. Thirty yards in front of them was an anti-aircraft gun emplacement, surrounded by the bodies of the men who had manned it. To twenty-six-year-old Corporal Alex Temple, who had never been on a full-scale battlefield before, it was a scene straight from hell.
"What range do you reckon?" Neil Slater asked him calmly, as Kalashnikov rounds screamed and ricocheted against the Landcruiser's blackened and twisted flank.
"I'd say fifty metres," said Alex, struggling to keep his voice steady.
Slater nodded and removed a grenade from his bandolier. The grenade's gold top told Alex that it was the high-explosive type, rather than anti-personnel or white phosphorus.
From the other side of the Landcruiser came the whoomfing crack of a Russian grenade. Hand-thrown, guessed Alex, but not quite far enough.
Calmly Slater checked the sextant sight on his weapon s carrying handle and slid the HE grenade into the 203 launcher tube beneath the barrel of his M16.
"Fifty metres it is," he said.
"Cover please, lads. Time for a delivery of Gold Top."
"Pasteurise the fuckers," whispered Andreas van Rijn, Slater's second-in command
As the three of them poured aimed shots from their Mi6s at the Iraqi position, Slater leaned coolly from cover, glanced down once at the sextant sight and fired.
The egg-shaped grenade hit the ground a few feet beyond the trench, bounced once and exploded noisily but harmlessly on the desert floor, shredding a thorn bush.
Quickly, Slater reloaded. This time the grenade fell short, but close enough to blow a half-hundredweight of sand and scrub into the trench.
The fire from the Iraqi trench intensified, and it was at that moment that the SAS team guessed they were facing elite troops and "Marwan' was in the enemy trench. This was the only possible explanation for the Iraqi team's failure to surrender, given that they faced almost certain obliteration: they had been ordered to defend the missile scientist with their lives.
A second Russian pineapple grenade bumped laboriously towards the Landcruiser, exploding deafeningly up against it. A spatter of Kalashnikov fire followed.
"Our turn, I think," said Slater grimly, shaking his head against the blast. This time the gold-top 203 grenade fell straight into the enemy trench and Alex watched as a shattered assault rifle flew into the air alongside the severed arm that, until a moment earlier, had held it.
"Full fat!" murmured Andreas van Rijn appreciatively.
"Full fucking fat!"
The firing did not cease. At least three Iraqi soldiers were still capable of manning a weapon and were bravely continuing to do so, forcing the SAS team to remain flattened behind the wrecked vehicle. At intervals Alex and the others were able to squeeze off a few rounds, but not to great effect. In small-arms terms it was a stalemate. But the SAS had their 203 grenade launchers.
Inexorably Slater reloaded. He had the range now, and dropped a fourth HE grenade into the Iraqi trench. This time the explosion was followed by silence and then a low groaning sound.
With his hand, Slater ordered absolute stillness. The SAS team froze. Nothing, just that long-drawn-out groaning. All of them were uncomfortably aware that sooner or later more Iraqi troops would converge on the place. Probably sooner.
The destruction of al-Anbar would certainly not have passed unnoticed.
Quickly, Alex switched magazines and as he did so his eye caught a blurred movement behind the anti-aircraft emplacement to their left. A fraction of a second later a tall khaki figure was sprinting towards the Landcruiser, holding a Kalashnikov and Alex noted in something like slow motion a pale-green Russian cylinder grenade.
From a kneeling position Alex pulled the heavy M16 203 to his shoulder. The moment seemed to go on and on. He saw the courage and the blazing intention in the Iraqi's eyes, heard his sawing breath and the desperate driving of his feet, dropped his foresight to the oncoming man's chest, saw his upper body half turn to accommodate the grenade throw only twenty-five yards to go now aimed, smoothly exhaled and punched six high-velocity 5.56mm rounds through his sternum.
For a moment, as a little over a pound of bone, muscle and lung tissue leapt from the Iraqi soldier's back, his eyes met Alex's. There was surprise there and perhaps a measure of disappointment, but not much more.
Is that all, Alex asked himself wonderingly? Is that all it is to kill a man?
The volley pitched the Iraqi backwards on to his own grenade, from which he had withdrawn the pin before starting his run. Untypically of the item in question and of exported Russian grenades in general, it worked perfectly, shredding the soldier's heart through his ribs after a delay of exactly four seconds.
A fris son passed through Alex as he clenched and unclenched his toes in the Farlow's boots. He had been in the river outside Widdowes' house for nearly three hours now, his dark-accustomed eyes endlessly quartering and scanning the space ahead of him, his senses pricked for any noise or smell that was in any way foreign to the place. He was cold, but not critically so a layer of body-temperature water lay between his skin and the wet suit's neoprene lining. The stiller he kept, in fact, the warmer he was.
The MI-5 men had played their parts perfectly, pacing loudly around the grounds with cigarettes and torches, announcing their flat-footed presence to any who might be observing. You certainly wouldn't need night sights to know that the Thompson Twins were in town.
But of the Watchman there had been no sign. A heron, broad-winged and graceful, had lowered itself from the sky a little after nine o'clock and taken up residence among the reeds close to where Alex expected the Watchman to exit the river. The perfect early warning system, thought Alex. Not even Joseph Meehan could shimmy past a heron without disturbing it.
He'd felt nothing at the Iraqi's death. And nothing afterwards, when they'd killed all of those still alive. In most cases the double taps that they had delivered had represented a merciful release from the terrible burns caused by the Tornado's incendiary missiles and the exploding Scud propellant.
They'd found a man who might or might not have been "Marwan' in the trench, dead from shrapnel wounds to the head and blast injuries. He'd been unarmed and wearing khaki overalls of a different design from the others. In his pockets they had found a Tandy calculator, an ID card and a wallet containing pictures of his family. All these, along with a half melted Toshiba laptop computer found near the anti-aircraft emplacement, had been bagged and returned to base. The operation had been judged a one hundred per cent success.
Alex had felt nothing and thought he'd got away unscathed.