Barracuda 945

by Patrick Robinson

  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 photograph
s 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.

  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 in 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 des
k 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.