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Only the radio remained unpacked, ready for its next transmission.

In the rear seat of the Eagle, Tim, the wizzo, could see the same information as his pilot. Four minutes to launch, three-thirty, three ... the figures on the HUD counted down as the Eagle screamed through the mountains to its target. It flashed over the small dip where Martin and his men had landed, and took seconds to cover the terrain across which they had labored beneath their packs. “Ninety seconds to launch ...”

The SAS men heard the sound of the engines coming from the south as the Eagle began its loft.

The fighter-bomber came over the last ridge three miles south of the target, just as the countdown hit zero. In the darkness the two torpedo-shaped bombs left their pylons beneath the wings and climbed for a few seconds, driven by their own inertia.

In the three dummy villages the Republican Guards were drowned in the roar of the jet engines erupting from nowhere over their heads, jumped from their bunks, and ran to their weapons. In a few seconds the roofs of the forage barns were lifting away on their hydraulic jacks to expose the missiles beneath.

The two bombs felt the tug of gravity and began to fall. In their noses, infrared seekers sniffed for the guiding beam, the upturned bucket of invisible rays bouncing back from the red spot on their target, the bucket which, once entered, they could never leave.

Mike Martin lay prone, waiting, buffeted by engine noise as the mountains trembled, and held the red dot steady on the Babylon gun.

He never saw the bombs. One second he was gazing at a pale green mountain in the light of the image intensifier; the next, he had to pull his eyes away and shield them as night turned into blood-red day.

The two bombs impacted simultaneously, three seconds before the Guard colonel deep below the hollow mountain reached for his Launch lever. He never made it.

Looking across the valley without the night-sight, Martin saw the entire top of the Fortress erupt in flame. By its glare, he caught the fleeting image of a massive barrel, rearing like a stricken beast, twisting and turning in the blast, breaking, and crashing back with the fragments of the dome into the crater beneath.

“Bloody hellfire,” whispered Sergeant Stephenson at his elbow. It was not a bad analogy. Orange fire began to glow down in the crater as the first explosion flashes died away and a dim half-light returned to the mountains. Martin began keying in his alert codes for the listeners in Riyadh.

Don Walker had rolled the Eagle after the bomb launch, pulling 135 degrees of bank, hauling down and through to find and pursue a reciprocal heading back to the south. But because he was not over flat land and mountains rose all around him, he had to gain more altitude than normal or risk clipping one of the peaks.

It was the village farthest away from the Fortress that got the best shot. For a fraction of a second he was above them, on one wingtip, pulling around to the south, when the two missiles were launched.

These were not Russian SAMs but the best Iraq had—Franco-German Rolands.

The first was low, racing after the Eagle as it dropped out of sight across the mountains. The Roland failed to clear the ridge. The second skimmed the rocks of the peak and caught up with the fighter in the next valley. Walker felt the tremendous shock as the missile impacted into the body of his aircraft, destroying and almost ripping out the starboard engine. The Eagle was thrown across the sky, its delicate systems in disarray, flaming fuel forming a comet’s tail behind it. Walker tested the controls, a soggy pudding where once there had been firm response. It was over, his airplane was dying underneath him, all his fire-warning lights were on, and thirty tons of burning metal were about to fall out of the sky.

“Eject, eject ...”

The canopy automatically shattered a microsecond before the two ejector seats came through, shooting upward into the night, turning, stabilizing. Their sensors knew at once that they were too low and blew apart the straps retaining the pilot into his seat, throwing him clear of the falling metal so that his parachute could open.

Walker had never bailed out before. The sense of shock numbed him for a while, robbed him of the power of decision. Fortunately the manufacturers had thought of that. As the heavy metal seat fell away, the parachute snapped itself open and unfurled. Dazed, Walker found himself in pitch darkness, swinging in his harness over a valley he could not see.

It was not a long drop—he had been far too low for that. In seconds the ground came up and hit him, and he was knocked over, tumbling, rolling, hands frantically scrabbling for the harness-release catch.

Then the parachute was gone, blowing away

down the valley, and he was on his back on wiry turf. He got up.

“Tim,” he called. “Tim, you okay?” He began to run up the valley floor, looking for another chute, certain they had both landed in the same area.

He was right in that. Both airmen had fallen two valleys to the south of their target. In the sky to the north he could make out a dim reddish glow.

After three minutes he crashed into something and banged his knee. He thought it was a rock, but in the dim light he saw it was one of the ejector seats. His, perhaps. Tim’s? He went on looking.

Walker found his wizzo. The young man had ejected perfectly, but the missile blast had wrecked the seat-separation unit on his ejector. He had landed on the mountainside locked into the seat, his parachute still tucked beneath him. The impact of the crash had torn the body from the seat at last, but no man survives a shock like that.

Tim Nathanson lay on his back in the valley, a tangle of broken limbs, his face masked by his helmet and visor. Walker tore away the mask, removed the dog tags, turned away from the glow in the mountains, and began to run, tears streaming down his face.

He ran until he could run no more, then found a crevice in the mountain and crawled in to rest.

Two minutes after the explosions in the Fortress, Martin had his contact with Riyadh. He sent his series of blips and then his message. It was:

“Now Barrabas, I say again, Now Barrabas.”

The three SAS men closed down the radio, packed it, hitched their Bergens onto their backs, and began to get off the mountain—fast. There would be patrols now as never before, looking not for them—it was unlikely the Iraqis would work out for some time how the bombing raid had been so accurate—but for the downed American aircrew.