Barracuda 945

by Patrick Robinson

  They were all too frightened to move, and another thunderous explosion, outside in the street, again shook the house.

  The mother tried to regain control, but she was shaking with fear, and she spoke again with difficulty, in Arabic: “Please, please they will kill us if we go outside…. We want to stay here….”

  “What’s your name?” asked Ray Kerman.

  “Shakira.”

  “Listen, Shakira. If we hang around down here, we just might get buried alive.”

  “Well, we may not have long to live, before we go I must pray with my children…. It’s almost midday…. We must pray for my husband….” And then she stared at him, observing his dark eyes and complexion, and she asked, “Are you a Muslim?”

  “Not really,” he replied. Then he blurted out, “But my parents both were.” It was a phrase he had never uttered to anyone, but he was desperate to gain her trust. They had to get out of that cellar.

  “Then you should pray with us, sir. Allah is great.”

  Ray stared back at Shakira. He could see she was slim and even more beautiful now she was standing. She had long dark hair, and an almost-perfect oval face, with the full lips of so many Arab women. Her little boy was holding a toy spaceship and clung to her hand, the daughter, around age five, clutched a teddy bear and was trying to wrap herself in her mother’s robe.

  Ray smiled. “What are their names?”

  “This is Irena. My son is Ravi.”

  Ray’s heart missed about three beats. He was grateful for the noise of the battle, because it gave him time to gather his thoughts.

  “You stay here for a few moments and pray with the children. I’ll go up and find a way to get us all out of here.”

  With that, Major Kerman evacuated the cellar and bolted back up the stairs. Through the open door to the street, he could see running figures, Israeli troops heading back toward the wasteland. Then there was another mighty explosion, maybe forty or fifty yards away, deeper into Palestinian territory.

  Christ, he thought, these crazy bastards will knock down the whole city.

  He headed back to the cellar door and yelled, “Shakira! Get up here! You have to get out. This place could get hit again, any moment.”

  They climbed the stairs, both children crying, Shakira trying hopelessly to comfort them. The body of their father, still holding a submachine gun, hung grotesquely from the ceiling, headfirst, the unseeing eyes gazing upward. Ray shepherded them into a corner, from where they would not see the corpse.

  He knew the Israelis were now systematically clearing the buildings, throwing grenades before entering.

  “Is there a rear entrance?” he asked Shakira.

  “Yes, there is a small yard, then an alley that leads into another street. There’s a way out into the city from there, and it will be quieter. There’s no way from that street to the waste ground.”

  Ray nodded. “Where will you go?”

  “I don’t know. My parents are both in Saudi Arabia, but Mohammed’s parents are in Bethlehem. We might be able to get there. Our car is parked out in the alley.”

  “That sounds good…. But I want you to hide for the rest of the day, away from the fighting. There’s an army cordon around Hebron and Bethlehem.”

  Before she could reply, there was a tremendous flurry of gun-fire outside, two men screamed, and then the massive figure of Sergeant Fred O’Hara came barreling through the open door, followed by Sergeant Charlie Morgan.

  Both SAS men looked up in astonishment at Ray.

  “Christ, sir,” said Fred. “We’ve been looking all over for you. I was beginning to think some fucking towelhead had shot you.”

  “Not me, Fred,” said Ray. “I’m supposed to be in charge.”

  “You’re telling me, sir. Things have been getting right out of hand. These bastards want to kill each other. I’ve never seen anything like it. Officers, men, maniacs. They’re all at it. Fucking guns, bombs, grenades, and Christ knows what. If we don’t get the hell outta here, they’ll be wheeling up heavy artillery. This is no place for us, sir. We have to get the fuck out. There’s no rhyme or reason in this place.”

  Fred’s own reasoning was close to flawless. But Ray now had the added responsibility of Shakira and the children. There was of course no reason why he should have that responsibility. He and the two SAS NCOs could have left and no one would have been any the wiser.

  But there are times in the life of almost every soldier when there is a summons to obey the heart, not the brain, or the training, or the experience. And Ray Kerman knew he faced one of those right now.

  He gestured to the little Arab family, and Sergeant O’Hara swung around, reacting instantly to the movement. Little Ravi held up his toy spaceship and stepped forward, and the big SAS man, who had been shot at too many times in the past hour, flinched away from the sudden move and hit the trigger of his MP5. In about one hundredth of a second there was a line of five neat holes clean across the forehead of Ray Kerman’s namesake.

  Irena screamed and ran toward her brother holding in her right hand her teddy bear. Charlie could see only hand grenades in his mind right now, and he gunned her down in cold blood, fearing yet another explosion.

  For a split second there was silence in the room, and then Shakira screamed and ran at Fred O’Hara, her hands raised like claws at his face. Charlie swung to his right. In a lightning movement he whipped his machine gun toward her face. At that precise moment Major Ray Kerman blew the entire front of Charlie’s head off with a savage burst of fire. No one could kill an SAS men quite like that. Except for another one.

  Charlie’s MP5 had fired two shells in the instant of his death. A measure of Ray’s speed was that both bullets headed downward, one of them cutting a deep groove on the outside of Ray’s left thigh, which immediately started to bleed like hell.

  For a few heartbeats, nothing happened. Then Sergeant O’Hara, eyes wide, turned to his CO. “Sir, did you just kill Charlie?” he asked, blankly.

  Ray’s brain raced. The word “murder” flew through his mind. Then “court martial.” Then “jail.” Then “firing squad.”

  Then he looked again at the two lifeless bodies on the floor, Shakira, whimpering, cradling Ravi’s head while the blood spilled down her robe, reaching out with her right hand to Irena. But the little girl was unreachable.

  Fred stepped forward, anxious to ensure she carried no weapons. “GET UP!” he shouted. Those two rough and heartless words ended his life.

  Ray Kerman wheeled left, picked up a small rock, and slammed it into the space between Fred’s eyes, breaking that part of the skull like a walnut. Then he crashed the butt of his gloved right hand with all of his strength right into the nostril end of Fred’s nose. The force rammed the nose bone deep into Fred’s brain, and he was dead before he hit the floor, felled by the classic SAS unarmed combat blow.

  Two dead children. Two dead SAS men. It was a biblical conclusion, in a biblical city, to a vicious two minutes. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.

  Ray turned to Shakira, who was plainly in shock. Her tears had stopped, as if she had nothing left, except a broken heart.

  “Did you just save my life, sir?” she asked, softly.

  “I think so,” replied Ray.

  “Then I just wish you hadn’t.”

  Nonetheless, Shakira appreciated the situation with near-military coldness. With her family dead, in the dust and rubble of her home, her own situation remained desperate, especially with the bodies of two SAS men both in Israeli uniforms lying on the floor of her living room.

  She had been a fleeting second away from death herself, and, through her devastation, she knew somehow she had to save herself. She had to get away, and she had to get this British officer away for several obvious reasons.

  But first she went to a cupboard and pulled out a soft rug, and laid it over her two children.

  Ray found himself saying, almost automatically, as if the words must be someone else’s: “They a
re both in…in the arms of Allah now.”

  The words of the North London mullah came rushing back, and he remembered the stories of paradise, and the promises to the martyrs who die in the name of Allah.

  Finally, Shakira stood up and faced him. “Where will you go?” she asked, aware of the impossibility of his position.

  He glanced down at the dead bodies of Sergeant O’Hara and Sergeant Morgan. “I’m not quite sure what to do right now. But I can’t return to the IDF.”

  “Would they find out it was you?”

  “I don’t know. They might. But my problem is greater than that,” Ray said. How could he explain it? Ever since he had arrived here he felt a surprising sympathy for the Palestinians. With his family’s deep roots in the Middle East, it was clear something in him had changed. To rampage among innocent people, killing and destroying families, how could he be a part of that?

  He looked at little Irena and Ravi, just children, gunned down by his soldiers. What if they had been his children? My God, he thought, how could I do this anymore?

  Shakira could see his tears now, streaming down the Major’s face, this stranger who had saved her life. She walked across to him, put her arms around him, and held him closely. The blood of little Ravi stained his uniform, and the blood from his own thigh ran onto her chador, and their tears mingled together.

  Outside the blasts continued, and Ray sensed the Israeli tanks were finding their range, shelling the street. Shakira went to the downstairs cupboard and came back with a full-length white robe (hobe), and a white-and-black patterned headdress (ghutra), complete with the double-stranded cord (aghal).

  Ray ripped off his Israeli combat jacket as she wrapped bandages around Ray’s cut thigh. He pulled the robe over his head. Shakira fitted the headdress and arranged the cloth around his neck in such a way he could cover the lower half of his face if necessary.

  Then she found a clean robe for herself, and said quietly, “We must go now, before the Israelis come.” And she took his hand, murmuring “Insh’Allah,” as God wills, leading him to the back door of her devastated home.

  They ran through the yard, leaving behind them five bodies in the house. They could see smoke and rising dust in the street to the rear, but in front it was all clear.

  “Should we take the car?” asked Ray.

  “I don’t think so. We must get to the headquarters of Hamas. My brother Ahmed will be there. They will take care of you.”

  “You sure they won’t kill me?” said Ray, tightening his grip on his MP5, and running hard on his wounded leg to keep up with Shakira.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I don’t want you to die, and that will be good enough.”

  Tuesday, May 18, 2004

  A steel cordon of Israeli tanks now surrounded the entire area where the battle of the Jerusalem Road had been fought the previous Friday. With hard-eyed efficiency the IDF troops had evacuated the area, moving Arab families temporarilty farther to the west while they searched the rubble for casualties and bodies.

  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

  Eight Months Later

  Monday, February 14, 2005

  LIEUTENANT 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. O
n 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.