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 Gloucestershire 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.
But just before he terminated the conversation, the Brigadier offered one sentence of assistance. "Tell you what, Johnny. You mentioned Hebron, battle of the Jerusalem Road. I did hear we lost a couple of our chaps in that. I expect they were SAS and that will be in the public records. Have a look there." It was a classic backside-covering sentence from a senior official.
John Dwyer replaced the receiver thoughtfully. Don't know how the hell to do that, he thought. Since I don't even know their bloody names. And no one's going to tell me.
He decided the story was beyond his expertise in the field of newspaper sleuthing. But he called his editor with the scant information he had, and the editor, who was equally inept at such down-and-dirty investigations, tipped off his news editor, a bellicose, ex-crime reporter named Tom Howard, from Liverpool, who probably should have been a policeman.
Tom put six men on it. Two at the Public Records Office, checking the death certificates of all serving military personnel from May to July. One at the Hereford County Records Office checking deaths, burials, and funerals. One at Whitehall, to try and pressure the Press Office into revealing all in the public interest, and another in the town of Hereford, checking pubs, garages, and supermarkets for rumors of SAS men who had recently been killed.
They did not succeed in nailing the story down. But they turned up some details, and produced a slightly half-baked, but nonetheless intriguing, story for those interested in such matters:
BRITISH SAS TROOPS MAY HAVE FOUGHT HEBRON BATTLE
The Ministry of Defence last night refused to confirm there had been an official squad of SAS troops serving with the Israeli Defence Forces during the Battle of the Jerusalem Road in Hebron last May.
An MOD spokesman said: "We have had close ties with the Israeli Army for many years, and have assisted them with training since the country's start i
n 1948. However, the MOD never reveals details of SAS operations."
Nonetheless, there is a deep mystery surrounding that battle. Two SAS NCOs are believed to have been killed in the Jerusalem Road action. They were Sergeant Frederick O'Hara and Sergeant Charles Morgan, both of Hereford.
Their deaths are recorded in the official British ROD, and the place of death is listed as Hebron, Israel, on May 14th. Both men were cremated, though the Army declines to say when and where, confirming only that the formalities took place in England.
A far greater mystery concerns the unnamed Commanding Officer of the SAS in that conflict during which 100 people are known to have lost their lives.
SAS personnel stationed in the area have all been recalled, but there is no record of any senior officer accompanying them. A Whitehall spokesman would not confirm or deny that Major Raymond Kerman was the officer in charge, or that he was officially listed "missing in action."
However, sources close to the SAS garrison in Hereford insist he has not returned from the Holy Land.
The military attaché at the Israeli Embassy in London would only say, "We are occasionally requested to provide information on missing service personnel in the Middle East. We have no information on any Major Kerman."
Four days later, a team of London Daily Mail reporters, following up the Telegraph report, cracked the story. The headline announced:
MYSTERY OF THE MISSING SAS MAJOR
North London Shipping Tycoon Accuses MOD of "Lying about my son"
There followed a detailed interview with a "devastated" Richard Kerman and his wife, Naz. Without a qualm, Major Kerman's father outlined every last inquiry by commanders of his son's Regiment, and investigators from the Ministry.
"Our son is missing," he said. "We have heard absolutely nothing from him since he left England last February. The mission was of course classified, and they did not even tell us he had been in Israel until August — three months after he disappeared."
Mr. Kerman pointed out that his wife was "brokenhearted," and it was obvious there was a great deal not being told to them or anyone else. "We don't know if Ray is alive or dead," he said. "That's a terrible burden for any parent to cope with. At the moment we are just living from day to day, hoping for news of our son."
And in that, Mr. and Mrs. Kerman were not alone. British Military Intelligence did not believe him dead. And they very much wanted to know where he was. But for rather different reasons.
Major Ray Kerman knew a great deal too much about British Special Forces in the Holy Land — enough to cause a public outcry if the truth should ever come out. He was also, in his own right, a military treasure to any other government or even a group of dissidents.
Major Kerman was a lethal exponent of unarmed combat, a polished operator in every form of military activity, a man who could turn an armed disorganized rabble into a smooth, efficient force against the West.
Ray Kerman, Harrow educated, star of his year at Sandhurst? That was one thing. Ravi Rashood, former student of the Koran, missing somewhere off the Jerusalem Road in Hebron? That was entirely another. And Britain's innately suspicious Ministry of Defence understood the problem all too well.
No one in Whitehall or Hereford would ever comment on the newspaper stories, but they found their way around the world in short order. Within two hours of publication, the Mystery of Ray Kerman, the Missing SAS Major, was on the Internet.
Shortly after 10 P.M. (Eastern time), the CIA's Middle Eastern desk in Langley, Virginia, electronically fired the Daily Mail's story onto the Duty Officer's desk in the Military Intelligence Division of the National Security Agency (NSA), in Fort Meade, Maryland.
The calculated speed with which the CIA moved on this was revealing. All Western Intelligence Agencies, and their natural allies, Special Forces and Special Agents, are apt to react with horror at the possible defection of one of their own. And the CIA had been tracking the situation for several weeks.
But this new development in the British press, disclosing the Muslim past of the vanished officer, had ratcheted up the entire scenario by several notches. The midnight electronic communication from Langley to Fort Meade was a clear signal the CIA wanted the world's largest and most powerful Intelligence agency to go to work.
The NSA employs almost 39,000 people. It is more a city than a government agency, a vast complex of glass modern buildings, glowering behind razor-wire fences, patrolled by hundreds of armed police and bomb-sniffing dogs. It makes Beijing's old Forbidden City look like open house. The NSA is known as Crypto City.
Behind those gleaming bulletproof walls stand battalions of supercomputers with databases of septillion operations per second (that's a 1 followed by forty-two zeroes). In here they don't do seconds. They do femtoseconds — one quadrillionth of a second. This is military micromanagement gone berserk. Fort Meade sits at the center of a gigantic global listening network, connected to the satellites, intercepting, eavesdropping, hearing all, saying nothing beyond its prohibited ramparts. The NSA provides training for its linguists in ninety-five different languages, plus every possible dialect of Arabic, including Iraqi, Libyan, Syrian, Saudi, Jordanian, and Modern Standard Arabic. In this world it is virtually impossible to communicate across borders from one military operation to another without being heard, with immense clarity and understanding, by the electronic interceptors at Fort Meade.
The vast compound covers 325 acres, with thirty-two miles of roads. There are more than 37,000 cars registered in Crypto City. Its own private Post Office delivers 70,000 pieces of a mail per day. Its annual budget runs into billions of dollars, making it probably the largest municipality in the state of Maryland. Crypto City has never appeared as a city on any map.
The NSA, with seven hundred active armed cops, has a twenty-four-hour command, control, and communications center. Under any kind of threat, it activates immediately a machine-gun-toting Emergency Reaction Team to "battle stations" covering all gates. A million-to-one fluke might allow an intruder inside the compound, but the chances of such a person ever being seen or heard from again are remote.
The Executive Protection Unit mounts a twenty-four-hour armed bodyguard on the NSA's Director. And up on the eighth floor of the massive one-way glass walls of the OPS-2B Building, Admiral George R. Morris was still at his desk when the Duty Officer from the Military Intelligence Division, Army Captain Scott Wade, nodding cheerfully to the two policemen on duty outside the door, tapped softly and let himself in.
" 'Evening, sir," he said. "We just got a communication in from Langley. About that British SAS Officer gone missing in Israel. I thought you might want to see it right away."
The two men were very familiar to each other, and the Admiral looked up from his desk. "Hello, Scotty," he said. "Did they find him?"
"No, sir. No, they did not. And there's been no hostage demand. They seem to have written that off as a possibility."
"Hmmmmm," replied Admiral Morris, reading the Daily Mail's account with interest. "They sure as hell didn't find him. Jesus Christ! The guy's a Muslim."
"Well, at least he used to be, sir. I'm not sure about that changing-religions bullshit. I always thought once a Muslim always a Muslim."
"I guess that was the intention of the Prophet, Scotty," said the Admiral, smiling. "But lemme ask you something. You spend most of your life looking at situations like this. And I guess we've suspected Major Kerman may have gone over to the other side, even if the Brits have confirmed nothing. But have you seen any evidence, or any signs at all, in the hundreds of pages of reports, that Major Kerman has defected to some Islamic Fundamentalist group?"
"Not really, sir. And no one's ever actually said he did. At least not for sure. It's only been speculation."
"Yeah. I know. But just take a look at the treatment this big national newspaper in London has given this story. It's cross-referenced on the front page, and inside they run this damn great tabloid spread, big headlines, pictures of Ray Kerman at school in Ha
rrow, pictures of his parents, pictures of this Iranian dust hole he was born in. Christ, they got about five guys covering this.
"I'm telling you, Scotty, someone over in England thinks this really matters. Not someone on the newspaper, they're just guessing, hoping to be right. But someone in Whitehall has alerted them. The Defence Ministry was concerned enough to quietly tip them off.
"Jesus, look at this coverage. There's a clear implication this Kerman character gunned down two of his colleagues, SAS NCOs. Professionals. That makes him very dangerous indeed."
"I agree with you, sir. I just wonder what group could have recruited him. I mean, this story implies he was in line possibly to command the entire SAS. Everyone thought so highly of him, and he had no money worries. Looks like his dad was going to give him a dozen oceangoing freighters when he finished with the Army."
"People do some goddamned weird things, Scotty," replied the Admiral thoughtfully. "Goddamned weird things."
George Morris was a deceptive character, a big man, with a kind of lugubrious manner, deliberately slow in his responses, deliberately ponderous in his-thinking, but rock steady in his judgments, and wryly amused at his ability to convey the impression he was a bit slow-witted.
Vice Admiral George Morris was in fact lightning-witted. A former Commanding Officer of the massive John C. Stennis Carrier Battle Group (CVBG), he had ruled his flotilla of twelve warships, eighty-four fighter-bomber aircraft, and thousands of men with a quiet certainty that was admired throughout the U.S. Navy. No one gets to command a modern CVBG without an intellect hovering close to genius level.
At the conclusion of his seagoing days he had been hand-picked by the Big Man himself to move into the NSA. Then, one year ago, Vice Admiral Arnold Morgan had announced that George Morris would succeed him as Director, when Arnold Morgan moved to the White House.
Most new National Security Advisers to the President recommended things. Arnold Morgan did not recommend. He ordered. And when he ordered, people jumped. Sometimes on all five continents.
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