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And they had told him that the cameras of the NRO and the listening ears of the National Security Agency over at Fort Meade could not reveal plans, they could not spy out intentions, they could not go inside a dictator’s head.

So the NRO was taking pictures and the ears of Fort Meade were listening and taping every word on every telephone call and radio message into, out of, and inside Iraq. And still he had no answers.

The same administration, the same Capitol Hill that had been so mesmerized with electronic gadgetry that they had spent billions of dollars developing and sending up every last gizmo that the ingenious mind of man could devise, were now clamoring for answers that the gizmos did not seem to be giving them.

And the men behind the DCI were saying that elint, the name for electronic intelligence, was a backup and a supplement to humint, or human intelligence-gathering, but not a substitute for it. Which was nice to know, but no solution to his problem.

Which was that the White House was demanding answers that could only be given with authority by a source, an asset, a spook, a spy, a traitor, whatever, placed high inside the Iraqi hierarchy. Which he did not have .

“You’ve asked Century House?”

“Yes. Same as us.”

“I’m going to Tel Aviv in two days,” said Chip Barber. “I’ll be seeing Yaacov Dror. Shall I ask him?”

The DCI nodded. General Yaacov “Kobi” Dror was the head of the Mossad, most uncooperative of all the “friendly” agencies. The DCI was still smarting over the case of Jonathan Pollard, who had been run by the Mossad right inside America against the United States. Some friends. He hated to ask the Mossad for favors.

“Lean on him, Chip. We are not messing around here. If he has a source inside Baghdad, we want in.

We need that product. Meanwhile, I’d better go back to the White House and face Scowcroft again.”

On that unhelpful note, the meeting ended.

The four men who waited at the SIS London headquarters that morning of August 5 had been busy most of the night.

The Director of Special Forces, Brigadier J. P. Lovat, had been on the phone for most of it, allowing himself a two-hour catnap in his chair between two and fourA.M. Like so many combat soldiers, he had long since developed the knack of grabbing a few hours whenever and wherever a situation permitted.

One never knew how long it might be until the next chance to recharge the batteries. Before dawn, he had washed and shaved and was ready to go on for another day running on all cylinders.

It was his call to a contact high in British Airways at midnight (London time) that had held the airliner on the ground at Abu Dhabi. The British Airways executive, roused at his home, did not ask why he should hold an airliner three thousand miles away until an extra passenger could board it. He knew Lovat because they were members of the Special Forces Club in Herbert Crescent, knew roughly what he did, and fulfilled the favor without asking why.

At the breakfast hour the orderly sergeant had checked with Heathrow that the Abu Dhabi flight had made up a third of its ninety-minute delay and would land about ten. The major should be at the barracks close to eleven.

A motorcycle messenger had rushed up a certain personal career file from Browning Barracks, headquarters of the Parachute Regiment at Aldershot. The regimental adjutant had pulled it out of Records just after midnight. It was the file that covered Mike Martin’s career in the Paras from the day he presented himself as an eighteen-year-old schoolboy through all the nineteen years he had been a professional soldier, except the two long periods he had spent on transfer to the SAS Regiment.

The commanding officer of the 22nd SAS, Colonel Bruce Craig, another Scot, had driven through the night from Hereford, bringing with him the file that covered those two periods. He strode in just before dawn.

“Morning, J.P. What’s the flap?”

They knew each other well. Lovat, always known as J.P. or Jaypee, had been the man in command of the squad that had retaken the Iranian embassy in London from the terrorists ten years earlier, and Craig had been a troop commander under him at the time. They went back a long way.

“Century wants to put a man into Kuwait,” he said. That seemed to be enough. Long speeches were not his passion.

“One of ours? Martin?” Colonel Craig tossed down the file he had brought.

“Looks like it. I’ve called him back from Abu Dhabi.”

“Well, fuck them. You going to go along with it?”

Mike Martin was one of Craig’s officers, and they too went back a long way. He did not like his men being pinched from under his nose by Century House. The DSF shrugged.

“May have to. If he fits. If they feel like it, they’ll probably go very high.”

Craig grunted and took a strong black coffee from the orderly sergeant whom he greeted as Sid—they had fought in Dhofar together. When it came to politics, the colonel knew the score. The SIS might act diffident, but when they wanted to pull strings they could go as high as they liked. Century House would probably win on this one if it wanted to. The regiment would have to cooperate, even though Century would have overall control under the guise of a joint mission.

The two men from Century arrived just after the colonel, and they were all introduced. The senior man was Steve Laing. He had brought with him Simon Paxman, head of the Iraq Desk. They were seated in a waiting room, given coffee, and offered the two CV files to read. Both men buried themselves in the background of Mike Martin from the age of eighteen onward. The previous evening, Paxman had spent four hours with the younger brother learning about the family background and upbringing in Baghdad and Haileybury public school.

Martin had written a personal letter to the Paras during his last term at Haileybury in the summer of 1971