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They flew through the night, which was short because they were flying toward the sun at about five hundred miles per hour over the ground. After six hours the sun rose again, and they crossed the coast of Spain, flying north of the African coast to avoid Libya. Approaching Egypt, which was a member of the Coalition forces, the 336th turned southeast, drifted over the Red Sea, and caught its first sight of that huge ochre-brown slab of sand and gravel called the Arabian Desert.

After fifteen hours airborne, tired and stiff, the forty-eight young Americans landed at Dhahran in Saudi Arabia. Within hours they were diverted to their ultimate destination, the air base of Thumrait in the Sultanate of Oman.

For four months, until mid-December, they would live here in conditions on which they would later look back with nostalgia, seven hundred miles from the Iraqi border and the danger zone. They would fly training missions over the Omani interior when their support gear arrived, swim in the blue waters of the Indian Ocean, and wait for whatever the good Lord and Norman Schwarzkopf had in store for them.

In December they would relocate into Saudi Arabia, and one of them, though he would never know it, would alter the course of the war.

Chapter 5

The Dhahran Airport was choked. It seemed to Mike Martin as he arrived from Riyadh that most of the eastern seaboard wanted to be on the move. Situated at the heart of the great chain of oil fields that brought Saudi Arabia her fabulous wealth, Dhahran had long been accustomed to Americans and Europeans—unlike Taif, Riyadh, Yenbo, and the other cities of the kingdom. Even the bustling port of Jeddah was not accustomed to so many Anglo-Saxon faces on the street, but by the second week of August, Dhahran was reeling from the invasion.

Some were trying to get out; many had driven across the causeway into Bahrain to fly out from there.

Others were at the Dhahran airport, wives and families of oil me

n mainly, heading for Riyadh and a connecting flight home.

Others were coming in, a torrent of Americans with their weaponry and stores. Martin’s own civilian flight just squeezed in between two lumbering C-5 Galaxies, two of an almost nose-to-tail air convoy from Britain, Germany, and the United States that was engaged in the steady buildup that would transform northeastern Saudi Arabia into one great armed camp.

This was not Desert Storm; the campaign to liberate Kuwait was still five months away. This was Desert Shield, designed to deter the Iraqi Army, now increased to fourteen divisions deployed along the border and throughout Kuwait, from rolling south.

To a watcher at the Dhahran airport, it might seem impressive, but a more intensive study would reveal that the protective skin was paper-thin. The American armor and artillery had not yet arrived—the earliest sea departures were just clearing the U.S. coastline—and the stores carried by the Galaxies, Starlifters, and Hercules were a fraction of the sort of cargo a ship could carry.

The Eagles based at Dhahran and the Hornets of the Marines on Bahrain, plus the British Tornados that had just arrived at Dhahran and hardly cooled down from their journey from Germany, had enough ordnance between them to mount half a dozen missions before running out.

It takes more than that to stop a determined onslaught of massed armor. Despite the impressive show of military hardware at a few airfields, northeastern Saudi Arabia still lay naked under the sun.

Martin shouldered his way out of the milling throng in the arrivals hall, his tote bag over one shoulder, and caught sight of a familiar face among the crowd at the barrier.

On his first selection course for the SAS, when they had told him they were not going to try and train him but instead try and kill him, they had almost succeeded. One day he had marched thirty miles over the Brecons, some of the crudest terrain in Britain, in freezing rain with one hundred pounds of gear in his Bergen rucksack. Like the others, he was beyond exhaustion, locked into a private world where all existence was a miasma of pain and only the will survived.

Then he had seen the truck, that beautiful waiting truck. The end of the march and, in terms of human endurance, the end of the line. A hundred yards, eighty, fifty; an end to the all-consuming agony of his body crept nearer and nearer as his numbed legs drove him and the Bergen those last few yards.

There had been a man sitting in the back of the truck, watching the rain-streaked, pain-wracked face staggering toward him. When the tail-board was ten inches from Martin’s outstretched fingers, the man rapped on the rear of the cab and the truck rolled away. It did not roll an extra hundred yards; it rolled another ten miles. Sparky Low had been the man in the truck.

“Hi, Mike. Good to see you.”

That sort of thing takes an awful lot of forgiving.

“Hi, Sparky. How are things.”

“Bloody hairy, since you ask.”

Sparky hauled his nondescript four-wheel-drive jeep out of the parking lot, and in thirty minutes they were clear of Dhahran and heading north. It was two hundred miles up to Khafji, a three-hour run, but after the port of Jubail slipped by to their right, they at least had some privacy. The road was empty. No one had any appetite for a visit to Khafji, a small oil community on the border of Kuwait, now reduced to a ghost town.

“Refugees still coming over?” asked Martin.

“Some,” nodded Sparky. “Down to a trickle, though. The main rush has come and gone. Those coming down the main road are mainly women and kids with passes—the Iraqis let them through to get rid of them. Smart enough. If I were running Kuwait, I’d want to get rid of the expatriates too.

“Some Indians get through—the Iraqis seem to ignore them. Not so smart. The Indians have good information, and I’ve persuaded a couple to turn around and go back with messages for our people.”

“Have you got the stuff I asked for?”

“Yep. Gray must have pulled some strings. It arrived in a truck with Saudi markings yesterday. I put it in the spare bedroom. We’ll have dinner tonight with this young Kuwaiti Air Force pilot I told you about.

He claims he has contacts inside, reliable people who might be useful.”

Martin grunted. “He doesn’t see my face. Might get shot down.”