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Neither the CO of the Rocketeers nor Captain Don Walker had the faintest idea why they were wanted.

In a small briefing room below CENTAF headquarters an hour later, they were told why, and what was needed. They were also told that no one else, with the sole exception of Walker’s weapons systems officer, the man flying in the seat behind him, was allowed to know the full details.

Then they were helicoptered back to their base.

After takeoff the four soldiers could unbuckle and move around the hull of the aircraft by the dim red lights overhead. Martin went forward, up the ladder to the flight deck, and sat for a while with the crew.

They flew at 10,000 feet toward the Iraqi border, then began to climb. At 25,000 feet the Hercules leveled off and crossed into Iraq, seemingly alone in the starlit sky.

In fact it was not alone. Over the Gulf an AWACS had orders to keep a constant eye on the sky around and below them. If any Iraqi radar screen, for some unknown reason not already totaled by the Allied air forces, chose to “illuminate,” it was to be immediately attacked. To this end, two flights of Wild Weasels with antiradar HARM missiles were below them.

In case some Iraqi fighter pilot chose to take to the sky that night, a flight of RAF Jaguars was above and to the left of them, a flight of F-15C Eagles to the right. The Hercules was flying in a protective box of lethal technology. No other pilot in the sky that night knew why. They just had their orders.

In fact, if anyone in Iraq saw any blip on the radar that night, it was assumed the cargo plane was just heading north to Turkey.

The loadmaster did his all to make his guests comfortable with tea, coffee, soft drinks, and crackers.

Forty minutes before Release Point, the navigator flashed a warning light indicating P-minus-forty, and the last preparations began.

The four soldiers put on their main and reserve parachutes, the former across the breadth of the shoulders, the latter lower down the back. Then came the Bergens, hung upside down on the back beneath the chutes, with the point between the legs. Weapons—a silenced Heckler and Koch MP5 SD

submachine gun—were clipped down the left side, and the personal oxygen tank hooked across the belly.

Finally they put on their helmets and oxygen masks before connecting the latter to the center console, a frame structure the size of a large dining table crammed with bottles of oxygen. When

everyone was breathing and comfortable, the pilot was informed and began to bleed the air and pressure level inside the hull out into the night until both had equalized.

It took almost twenty minutes. Then they sat again, waiting. Fifteen minutes before Release Point, a further message came from the flight deck into the ears of the loadmaster. He told the PJIs to gesture to the soldiers to switch from main console oxygen to their own personal minibottles. Each of these had a thirty-minute supply, and they would need three to four minutes of that for the drop itself.

At that point only the navigator on the flight deck knew exactly where he was; the SAS team had total confidence that they would be dropped in the right place.

By now the loadmaster was in contact with the soldiers by a constant stream of hand signals, which ended when he pointed both hands at the lights above the console. Into the loadmaster’s ears came a stream of instructions from the navigator.

The men rose and started to move, slowly, like spacemen weighed down by their gear, toward the ramp. The PJIs, also on mobile oxygen bottles, went with them. The SAS men stood in a line in front of the still-closed tailgate door, each checking the equipment in front of him.

At P-minus-four the tailgate came down, and they stared out into 25,000 feet of rushing black air.

Another hand signal—two fingers raised by the PJI—told them they were at P-minus-two. The men shuffled to the very edge of the ramp and looked at the lights (unilluminated) on each side of the gaping aperture. The lights went red, goggles were drawn down. The lights went green. ...

All four men turned on one heel, facing into the cavern, and jumped backward, arms apart, faces down.

The sill of the ramp flashed beneath their masks, and the Hercules was gone.

Sergeant Stephenson led the way.

Stabilizing their fall position, they dropped through the night sky for five miles without a sound. At 3,500

feet automatic pressure-operated releases jerked open the parachute packs, and the fabric exploded out.

In second position, Mike Martin saw the shadow fifty feet beneath him appear to stop moving. In the same second he felt the vibration of his own main chute opening, then the “square” took the strain and he slowed from 120 miles per hour to fourteen, with hesitators taking up some of the shock.

At one thousand feet each man undid the snap-locks that held his Bergen to his backside and cinched the load down his legs, there to hook onto his feet. The Bergens would remain there all the way down, being released only a hundred feet above the ground, to hang at the full extent of the fourteen-foot nylon retaining line.

The sergeant’s parachute was moving away to Martin’s right, so he followed. The sky was clear, the stars visible, black shapes of mountains rushed upward on all sides. Then Martin saw what the sergeant had seen: the glitter of water in the stream running through the valley.

Peter Stephenson went down right in the center of the zone, a few yards from the edge of the stream, on soft grass and moss. Martin dropped his Bergen on its line, swerved, stopped in the air, felt the Bergen hit the ground beneath him, and settled gently onto both feet.

Corporal Eastman swept past and above him, turned, glided back in, and dropped fifty yards way.