Contents
Prologue Captain Ray Kerman was shivering. Frozen half to…
1. Major Ray Kerman, on his second tour of duty with the…
2. Lieutenant Colonel Russell Makin, Commanding…
3. There’s Tension Up Here, even in the quietest…
4. General Ravi Rashood and Shakira Sabah sat in…
5. General Rashood and Commander Ben Badr sat await…
6. The Splash Headline on the front page of last Satur…
7. General Ravi headed back to the cold north of Russia in…
8. Shakira Sabah, at the age of twenty-seven, married the…
9. For Five Days and five nights the Barracuda ran deep…
10. Admiral George Morris left the White House right…
11. By Midnight on that Friday, Admiral Vitaly Rankov had…
12. The Most Powerful electricity generator within a few…
13. The Chinese Ambassador to the United States of…
Epilogue Ravi and Shakira sat companionably with a couple of…
Maps:
Israel—A Place of Divided Loyalties
The Route of the Barracuda from Araguba to the Bering Strait, South of the Polar Ice Cap
The Barracuda’s long voyage around Siberia—to the east lies Alaska
Alaska and the Northwest—the Barracuda’s Principle Target Area
The Panama Canal Pacific Entrance (Bottom Right)—Across the Gatún Lake to the Atlantic Ocean
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise for Patrick Robinson
Also by Patrick Robinson
Copyright
About the Publisher
Cast of Principal
Characters
Senior Command
John Clarke, the President of the United States (Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Armed Forces)
Vice Adm. Arnold Morgan (National Security Adviser)
Gen. Tim Scannell (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs)
Harcourt Travis (Secretary of State)
Robert MacPherson (Defense Secretary)
Jack Smith (Energy Secretary)
National Security Agency
Rear Adm. George R. Morris (Director)
Lt. Comdr. James Ramshawe (Assistant to the Director)
Capt. Scott Wade (Military Intelligence Division)
U.S. Navy Senior Command
Adm. Alan Dickson (Chief of Naval Operations)
Rear Adm. John Bergstrom (Commander, Special War Command [SPECWARCOM])
Rear Adm. Freddie Curran (Commander, Submarine Force, Pacific Fleet [COMSUBPAC])
British SAS
Lt. Col. Russell Makin (Commanding Officer, 22 SAS)
Maj. Ray Kerman (Commanding Officer, Israeli Garrison)
Sgt. Fred O’Hara (Adviser, Israeli Defense Force)
Sgt. Charlie Morgan (Adviser, IDF)
Hamas Terrorists
Gen. Ravi Rashood (Commander-in-Chief, First Battalion, Military Assault Division)
Lt. Comdr. Shakira Rashood (Precision Targeting, Special Navigation Officer, Barracuda 945)
Capt. Ben Badr (Commanding Officer, Barracuda 945)
Lt. Comdr. Ali Akbar Mohtaj (Commanding Officer, Barracuda II)
Lt. Comdr. Abbas Shafii (Senior Submariner, Iranian Navy)
CPO Ali Zahedi (Propulsion)
CPO Ardeshir Tikku (Auxiliary)
Maj. Ahmed Sabah (Freedom Fighter)
International Strategists
Adm. Zhang Yushu (Senior Vice Chairman, People’s Liberation Army/Navy Council, China)
Adm. Vitaly Rankov (Commander-in-Chief, Russian Navy)
Adm. Mohammed Badr (Iranian Navy)
Senior Ayatollahs and Hojjats (Iran)
U.S. Navy SEALs
Lt. Comdr. Bill Peavey (Team Leader Operation, Main Assault Group)
Lt. Patrick Hogan Rougeau (2 I/C Operation, Team Leader Recce Group)
Lt. Brantley Jordan (Bomb-Lashing Chief)
Lt. Zane Green (Overall Command Group)
Lt. Chris Hall (Overall Command Group)
Lt. Brian Slocum (Overall Command Group)
CPO Chris O’Riordan (Diver and Combat SEAL)
PO 2nd Class Brian Ingram (Combat SEAL and bodyguard to Lieutenant Rougeau)
PO Mich Stetter (High Explosives Expert and assistant to Lieutenant Commander Peavey)
PO Joe Little and PO Tony McQuade (Landing Area and Material Security)
Navy Air Wing
Lt. Comdr. Steve Ghutzman (Senior COD [Carrier On Delivery] Pilot)
Close Connections
Kathy O’Brien (Fiancée and Personal Assistant to Vice Adm. Arnold Morgan)
Mr. and Mrs. Richard Kerman (Parents of Maj. Ray Kerman)
Rupert Studley-Bryce, M.P. (School friend of Maj. Ray Kerman)
Prologue
Sunday, February 19, 1995
CAPTAIN RAY KERMAN was shivering. Frozen half to death, he was shaking uncontrollably, lying down on the frigid concrete floor of his cell. He had assumed the fetal position, curled up tightly, striving for warmth, his backside resting in a three-inch-deep puddle of cold water, or worse.
They had taken off the hood, but the Captain wore no boots, just ripped, bloodstained socks. His pants and shirt were coated in mud. His warm military jacket had been confiscated. And now the hallucinations were growing worse, and he was drifting along in a no-man’s-land, somewhere between reality and mirage. He could no longer ascertain whether his eyes were open or closed in the icy darkness of the cell.
There was a jug of water somewhere, but he was too afraid to grope around to find it, in case he knocked it over. And so he remained tightly coiled, his mouth parched, his entire body racked by cold so painful he thought it might freeze his heart and cause it to stop beating.
They came for him at two in the morning, dragging him up, shoving him down a corridor, and throwing him into a room. Both of his captors wore the uniform of some eastern European army, and now they aimed an arc light into his eyes. Two young officers marched in, wearing similar foreign uniforms, and one of them cupped his hand under Ray’s chin and said in heavily accented English, “You will tell us your mission and that will save you being beaten half to death…that’s my specialty. I beat sniveling little spies…WHAT WERE YOU DOING OUT THERE ON THE MOOR….?”
“I’m 538624, Captain Ray Kerman…” Number, rank, and name.
The officer moved to the back of the room and returned with a wooden truncheon. “You see this…I’m going to deliver one blow with this…straight across your mouth and you’re never going to look the same again.”
He raised it high across his body and screamed, “TELL ME…OR I’LL REARRANGE YOUR UGLY FACE….”
“I’m 538624, Captain Ray Kerman.”
They kept him there for three hours, alternately threatening and bargaining. Threatening to execute his companions, threatening to jail him for twenty years. Bargaining for his knowledge about the Abbey.
After one hour they dragged him back to his cell, bound him again, and placed the hood over his head. At midnight, he heard the sound of marching feet, then the unmistakable sounds of a man being punched, beaten, the sound of a fist smacking against the flesh of a face. Then thumps of boots slamming into a human body. Moans, then screams, terrible screams, a pleading voice, “Please, no…please, no…please, no.”
Then someone booted his cell door open. And hands grabbed him, and the hood was removed, and someone took him by the hair, firmly but hard. “Right, and now we try something different.”
The screams along the corridor grew louder. And now the unseen man was begging, begging for them not to beat him again.
“I’m 538624, Captain Ray Kerman…”
All through the night,
they kept him awake, firing questions, demanding, threatening, always threatening. The same officer marched about with the truncheon. Another swished a riding crop. They gave him water, but nothing else.
They threatened to torture Andy. They told him it hardly mattered anyway because Charlie had broken down and told them everything. They just wanted his confirmation as the officer. Just the details of the mission on the moor.
“I’m 538624, Captain Kerman…”
They took him back to his cell at seven o’clock. Gave him stale bread. And then awakened him every half hour until midnight, making thirty-four different entries into his cell. Then at midnight, they piped earth-shattering music into the cell, cheap rock and roll. Ray had to sit with his fingers pressed into his ears to lock out the sound.
They changed his cell, and pushed and shoved him down into a cellar with deeper puddles of freezing water. They left him to his misery, and short fitful sleep, for two more hours, then hauled him out again, and poured a bucket of ice-cold water over him, and dragged him back to the interrogation room. Ray was trembling uncontrollably.
This time there were four lights aimed at his eyes. And two men, one obsequious, reasonable, bargaining, the other, an unshaven monster, threatening violence and torture. He kept hold of Ray’s chin, staring at him, insulting him, yelling at him.
Ray just kept saying over and over, “I’m 538624, Captain Kerman…”
Now he had no idea whether it was night or day. He no longer had a grip on time. He had no idea what day it was, where he was, whether he was. Stripped of his dignity and most of his clothes, starving hungry, shaking with the cold, no longer with any grip on his words or actions, he knew he was on the verge of breakdown.
All he had left was defiance. Obdurate, hard-nosed, stubborn defiance. They could not beat it out of him. But they kept trying, marching him to the interrogation room. Shouting and screaming, taking him back to the cellar, throwing him down in the water, which seemed unaccountably deeper. There was nowhere dry to sit, and he just lay there, shivering, trying to sleep, trying to ignore the screams of the tortured men, the ones who now ventured into his dreams.
He thought it was dark when the two interrogators came clumping down the stairs and booted the door open. But he could not tell, and they manhandled him to his feet, dragged him up the stairs, and stripped off his hood. He found himself facing the senior officer, crisp in a different uniform.
Hallucinating quite badly now, he answered instinctively, unaware of whether he was in a dream or reality, muttering, “I’m 538624, Captain Kerman…”
To his amazement, the officer held out his hand. “Hello, Ray,” he said. “Welcome to the SAS…and will someone turn off those bloody recordings out there….?
“Now, Ray. Come on down to the officers’ mess. It’s 0500. You can have a bath, and some breakfast, and then sleep for the day. We have a clean uniform ready for you, and I thought we’d fly back to Hereford at around 1630.
“You’ve done very well…very well indeed…but I regret it was not a vintage intake…of the eighty men who applied, only five made it.”
Ray could barely gather his thoughts but managed to ask, “Anyone I know?”
“Yes. That young Paratroop Officer you started with, Lieutenant James, stuck it out. So did that Corporal you were on the moor with, Charlie Rider…. we lost a lot of chaps towing them across the moor behind the jeep. Your other pal, the Sergeant, Bob, I think, cracked about two hours ago under interrogation.”
“Jesus, you guys know how to put someone through hell….”
“We also know what we’re looking for. And no one pretends that courage on this scale is all that common.”
“No, sir…I suppose not.”
10 A.M. Monday, February 20, 1995
CO’s Office, Stirling Lines, Hereford
Captain Ray Kerman stood to attention in front of Lieutenant Colonel Russell Makin, the Commanding Officer of 22 SAS. “It is my very great pleasure to welcome you to this Regiment, Captain Kerman. I see from your record that you won The Sword at Sandhurst a few years back, so you are used to excelling. And I am sure you will find ample outlets for your undoubted talents here in the Special Air Service.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You have seen from your training and indoctrination process what we demand. And I hope it will be of some reassurance that every single man here has passed the courses that you have just undergone. We are not like other Regiments, but when the bugle sounds, for our style of warfare, I think you will find yourself working among the supreme practitioners of our profession.”
“Yes, sir. I am sure that is so.”
The Colonel then stepped forward and handed to Captain Ray Kerman the distinctive, coveted beige beret of the SAS. On the front was the cloth badge of the Regiment, the upright winged dagger. Beneath it were the words WHO DARES,WINS.
Thus at four minutes after ten on that Monday morning, Captain Raymond Kerman was accepted into one of the two top fighting military units in the world, the other being the U.S. Navy SEALs, four members of which were in residence at Hereford when Ray wore the beret for the first time.
He saluted the Colonel, made an about turn, and left the room. No one else had been present to see the little ceremony, and only those who had served in the SAS would have understood its significance—but a soldier’s own soul is an iron taskmaster, and there was a smile on the face of Ray Kerman.
1
7 P.M. Wednesday, May 12, 2004
SAS Training Camp (Counterterrorist)
Southern Israel (Location: Classified)
MAJOR 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.
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