Michael Asher (8 page)

silent killing. They were not SAS soldiers. Fighting knives and unarmed combat may be part of the public myth of what Special Forces are about, but the reality is more pro-saic. SAS men are issued with a clasp-knife � a multi-purpose tool like a Swiss Army Knife � and a bay-onet. 'I have known a few SAS guys who carried slightly larger knives,' Peter Ratcliffe has written, 'but only for doing ordinary things � not for stabbing people or dogs or slitting sentries' throats.' 21 Although McNab makes great play of what he calls jap-slapping' or unarmed combat in his autobiography, Ratcliffe points out that only the rudiments are taught in the SAS � principally for self-defence against other people armed with knives. The SAS themselves have developed a means of close-quarter battle (CQB) using pistols, which renders knife-fighting and jap-slapping obsolete. After all, not even a black belt can duck a 9mm bullet. As Ratcliffe has explained, 'If you have to kill someone or some animal, in combat, or otherwise, while on active service, then you use your rifle or pistol. There is no unit of the British Army which uses knives � other than bayo�nets � garrottes or cross-bows to dispose of the enemy. Any soldier who asks you to believe differently is either lying or has himself been taken in by some of the nonsense.' 22 Before first light on 26 January the patrol_ lay up in a hollow, where they remained for the rest of the day. That afternoon they were compromised by a shepherd � a harmless, friendly old Bedouin who offered them milk, cheese and dates, and left them in peace. Once again, their lack of Arabic prevented them from gaining what might have been vital information from him. Having moved on a little in case he informed anyone of their position, they halted again and took stock. They all knew now that the weather had become a more fearsome enemy than the Iraqis, and would kill them more quickly and efficiently if they pressed on into the devastating wind. Despite the cold, they were dehydrated, and they knew that water would soon become a serious problem. Although the Syrian border was only twelve hours' march away, McNab probably doubted that Bravo Two Zero could make it intact through another such night as the two they had already endured. On the other hand, there was a main road nearby, and by the sound of it, there were vehicles in plenty. Why not simply take one and make a last, desperate bid for freedom? It would be a risky gambit, but whatever happened, it would be better than freezing slowly to death in the desert. They decided that they would wait until dark, then hijack the first vehi�cle that came along the road from whatever direction. It was no doubt the right decision, but it was ultimately to sign the death warrants of two of McNab's group, and to consign the rest to weeks of torture and incarceration.

CHAPTER eleven FROM THE POINT WHERE THE patrol had split I had the option of following either McNab's or Ryan's route. Though I was still anxious to find out what had happened to Vince Phillips, I decided to go with McNab as far as the place where he and his team were captured or killed, then double back to the point of divergence and follow Ryan, Phillips and Stan. I crossed the ragged, boulder-strewn country to the south of the road, working towards the granite ridge that marked the table-land where both Ryan's and McNab's groups had lain up on 25 January. The MSR itself came as something of a surprise. Both Ryan and McNab repeat the intelligence brief they had received before the operation, declaring that the road was a system of tracks amalgamated together, varying in width from two and a half kilometres to 600 metres. I had followed the MSR as far as Abbas's place already and had found no sign of this vast rural highway: up to that point, at least, it had been a narrow country road, asphalted in places. There was no sign on the map that it ever got any wider, and though it wasn't asphalted where I was now crossing, it seemed extremely unlikely that it had ever been more extensive than it was. Bounded on the northern side by the ridge, it could never have expanded far in that direction, and to the south it ran through flat fields of millions of boulders. Unless these boulders had appeared since 1991, it was inconceivable that the road had been wider in that direction either. Perhaps the MSR might be an amalgam of tracks further west, but here it was an ordinary country track, no more than five metres wide. I wondered where the intelligence report about the road had originated, and why McNab and Ryan had repeated it even though they had been on the ground and must have known the reality. I crossed the MSR and climbed the ridge, finding myself on the stark plateau that lay between here and the second MSR to the north � the road McNab's party had reached by the evening of 26 January. The two roads did not run parallel, but formed sides of a trian�gle, meaning that the plateau was wider the further west you went. According to McNab's intelligence brief, the land did not drop more than fifty metres between here. and the next road, and this at least looked accurate. In fact, the area was mind-bogglingly uniform, so stark and clean that it strained the senses. The occasional blemish on the surface looked grotesque and gigantic, drawing the eye towards it automatically,' while close up it resolved into nothing more than a pebble or a tin can. Here, the Bedouin tents were fewer, and all day I walked on into a shimmering haze. Often I had the familiar feel�ing that I was not making progress at all, just marking time on the same spot while the horizon remained equi�distant before me, and the sky beat out a percussion of unforgiving heat. In such nothingness, even the small details on the surface become meaningful � the track of a lizard or a scorpion, the bones of a dead bird, frag�ments of rope fibre left behind by a shepherd, a circle of stones that was the only trace of a nomad camp. As time passed I began to make out strange shapes before me: humps of earth that stood out unnaturally, reflecting the light in unexpected colours. In the far distance there were pylons whose heads hovered on the skyline; occa�sionally I would spot a moving truck bloated by the distorting shimmer. After about twenty kilometres the land began to furrow and break up a little, and I saw that the strange earth�works to my immediate front were in the centre of some sort of huge installation with a barbed-wire fence running about five kilometres along its periphery. There were out-buildings and watch-towers, and my pace became warier until I realized that the fence was derelict and the place uninhabited and overgrown. It hit me very suddenly that this was an abandoned military installation of some importance and, consulting my map, I noticed that it was marked as a large sealed compound with a road leading to it. Close up, it was obvious that the place was not only abandoned, but totally wrecked. The ziggurats of earth I had seen from way back were the walls of craters, and there were masses of ruined masonry, including entire walls of stressed concrete that had been torn apart and hurled aside like a giant's building bricks. Evidently the installation had been of strategic importance � a command centre, a biological warfare plant, a Scud control centre, even a nuclear plant. Either it had been hit by wave after wave of Allied bombers during the war, or it had been demolished since under UN supervision. It occurred to me suddenly that this must have been the place the anti-aircraft guns McNab saw had been guard�ing � at about fifteen kilometres from Abbas's house, it was also the place to which Abbas would have sent his messenger, which explained why it had taken the military so long to get back to the scene of the firelight. It might also account for the amount of military activity McNab says was evident in the area. The bombing runs that had come in over this region � even those that Abbas said had accidentally killed Bedouin and destroyed buildings nearby � had probably been intended for this place. The installation was huge, and I wondered if that fact might substantiate McNab's statement (in an interview with the BBC in 2000) that there were more than three thousand Iraqi troops in the area: 'effectively two armoured brigades that shouldn't have been there, that intelligence hadn't picked up. They only discovered this four days after we arrived.'23 Judging by the size of it, this compound could easily have contained three thousand troops, but McNab does not make reference to these two armoured brigades in his book. He recalls seeing armoured personnel carriers at various stages, but not the tanks one would expect to comprise an armoured unit (as opposed to a mechanized infantry unit). Since the com�pound is clearly marked on the map, Military Intelligence must have known it existed, and must also have been aware at least of the possibility of its being protected by large numbers of men. If they were there, though, I found no evidence that they contributed to Bravo Two Zero's compromise � the only evidence I had uncovered indi�cated that the patrol had been spotted and shot up by three civilians. Leaving the installation on my right, I started to descend into a deep valley criss-crossed with stripes of yellow wheat. In the distance the pylons suddenly came into clear focus, running across my front only a stone's throw from the road that ran north-west to the towns of Krabilah and al-Qaim on the Syrian border, and south�east to al-Haqlaniya. Somewhere along that road, I knew, McNab and his group had hijacked a car on the evening of 26 January 1991. The plan had been for three of the group to hide in the ditch nearby, while McNab and Consiglio posed as Iraqi soldiers, one of whom was badly wounded. They would flag down a vehicle and, as soon as it stopped, the others would pile out with their weapons and heist the car. McNab and Consiglio were probably assigned the front job because they were both dark � McNab half Greek and Consiglio half Italian � and were more likely to be taken for Iraqis than the others. At last light, the two of them stood on the roadside with some trepidation, knowing that this was the make�or-break gambit. As the sound of an engine came to their ears, heading from the direction of Krabilah, Consiglio lay in McNab's arms, groaning, playing the wounded soldier, while McNab began to flash his torch anxiously at the oncoming lights. The vehicle stopped and, to his amazement, McNab saw that they had halted a full-blown New York Yellow Cab, straight out of a 1950s movie, complete with chrome bumpers and white-walled tyres. As the driver and two passengers climbed out to help, they found themselves staring into the muzzles of automatic weapons produced by three desperadoes in camouflage who had just jumped out of the ditch. One of the passengers, McNab said, was so terrified that he pro.; duced a Madonna and whimpered that he was a Christian, pointing to the driver and repeating, .'Muslim! Muslim!' The driver himself was having hysterics, screaming that the cab was his livelihood and that he couldn't survive without it. Ignoring the bickering, McNab and his team shoved the three Iraqis into the ditch and piled into the car, turning it back towards Krabilah. With McNab himself driving, they screeched off on what they hoped would be the last leg of their escape and evasion route. It was warm in the cab, and luxurious after the condi-tions they had endured for the past few days, and for a moment they felt euphoric. But their triumph was short-lived. On the outskirts of Krabilah they ran into a permanent VCP (vehicle checkpoint), where Iraqi soldiers were checking the traffic. They stopped the car in the queue and waited tensely as a guard made his way up the line of vehicles. Suddenly the man pressed his face against the window on the left-hand side and Legs Lane � in the front passenger seat � fired one round across McNab's body, shattering the glass and dropping the man instantly. The patrol then piled out of the taxi shooting blind towards the VCP as all hell broke loose. Civilian drivers threw themselves into the footwells of their vehicles while two more guards running for cover on the right were cut down in their tracks by bursts from the Minimis The first men across the road put down covering fire until the oth�ers were across, then all five SAS men raced into the desert, followed by a hail of rounds from the VCP and a roar of engines and screaming voices. The entire contact, McNab reckoned, had taken all of thirty seconds. That night I slept without my bivvy-bag on an exposed ridge similar to the one McNab describes, behind a cairn of stones, trying to at least get an idea of what it had been like for them. As an experiment it failed completely � it was so warm that I slept like a log. The next morning there was exciting news. While I had been walking, Nigel Morris had been scouring the entire Anbar region trying to find the hijacked taxicab itself. This was not the needle in the haystack it had first looked like because we knew from the newspaper piece we'd been handed in Baghdad that the vehicle was a commu�nal taxi registered as Anbar 73'. Since the number of such vehicles was obviously limited and since the police kept a record of them all, Nigel had been able to trace it to the town of Rumadi. After some brilliant detective work, he had actually discovered the cab in a garage in the town � on its last legs, he reported, but still running. He had had it sent to Krabilah on a lorry, and I later asked Abbas to go and pick it up. I also enquired if there was any news of Adnan Badawi, the man who had apparently been a passenger in the taxi when it had been hijacked, but Nigel told me the Ministry had been unable to reach him. There was only a brief walk that morning, over undu-lating country, under the line of pylons and out to a high ridge overlooking the main road. As I stood there enjoy�ing the view, a pick-up turned up with local officials, demanding to know what was going on. They were quickly soothed by Ali and our military escort. I descended to the road and walked along it until I had sat�isfied myself that I was at least within the rough area of the hijack. All I had to do now was to wait for Abbas and the taxi to arrive. The road wasn't particularly busy, and few vehicles passed. In the early afternoon, though, I heard the grind of gears and saw a white saloon approaching me from the direction of Krabilah. I stood up as it came nearer and, slowing to a halt, I was astonished to see that Abbas was driving. 'What's this?' I demanded, after we'd greeted each other. `This is the taxi that was hijacked,' Abbas said. 'The one Adnan was riding in. You asked me to bring it for you.' I examined the vehicle carefully. It was not and clearly never had been a New York Yellow Cab. It was a com�mon Toyota Crown, clearly a great deal more than ten years old, and in poor condition. There was a large crack in the front windscreen, but it looked as if it had been made by a stone rather than a bullet, and the window on the driver's side, which McNab said Legs had shot the soldier through, appeared both original and intact. There were no chrome bumpers or white-walled tyres, and no tassels or other decorations in the interior. Finally I checked the registration, which consisted of only two numbers � 73 � exactly as noted in the newspaper report. `But this can't be it,' I said. 'This is a Toyota Crown, and the hijacked car was a yellow New York taxi.' Abbas chuckled. 'There are no yellow taxis in Iraq,' he told me. 'There aren't even any yellow cars. Someone must have been joking with you.' I wondered if the number plate might have been changed, but Nigel later confirmed that this was the orig�inal car registered as Anbar 73', and told me that it had actually changed hands seven times since 1991. For that reason he had not been able to fmd the original driver, Ahmad al-Hitawi, and though Uday had managed to contact Adnan Badawi in Mosul, he had refused to talk to us. I didn't like the sound of this, as it suggested he might be covering something up, but I consoled myself with the fact that we had Abbas, who had heard the story from Adnan first-hand, and also the newspaper cutting. I asked Abbas if he knew the exact spot where the hijacking had taken place, and he told me that he had a very good idea. I got in the car beside him and, as he accelerated, I had to remind myself that this was the actual car McNab and the others had driven off in on that day ten years earlier, even if it wasn't a New York Yellow Cab as McNab had written. The place Abbas drove me to stood in a slight dip in the road, with a machine-made ditch on the northern side � the right-hand side looking towards Krabilah. Abbas confessed that he wasn't absolutely certain that this was the place � he knew the country here like the back of his hand, but was only going on what Adnan had told him ten years earlier. No matter; I was certain from my own map reading that we must be within a kilometre of the spot. Abbas reminded me that we had passed some sort of industrial installation on our way. 'That was where Adnan was stationed,' he told me. 'He was a sergeant in the police, who were guarding that place. That night � 26 January � he was going to al-Haqlaniya to pick up the wages for his men. It was just before sunset, about five o'clock. He told me that he was walking along the road when this taxi came along � it was being driven by a man called Ahmad al-Hitawi who was taking his son, a soldier, back to his camp. Adnan flagged it down and got in, and before they'd gone very far they saw two
men in camou�flage uniforms by the side of the road. One was lying on the ground, he said, and the other was beckoning to them. Adnan thought they were Iraqis and that one of them was injured � it wouldn't have been surprising if you remem�ber there were air attacks going on all over the country at that time. When they got out to see if they could help, the one lying down got up suddenly, and three others came out of hiding with weapons. Realizing they were enemy soldiers, he told them he was a Christian and talked to them in English. They decided to take him with them, offering him gold to help them, and turned the car round. They just left the other two, and drove off towards Krabilah.' I stopped him. There was a major discrepancy here with McNab's story. McNab was adamant that he had left all three Iraqis in the ditch and that the patrol had driven off on their own, whereas Abbas was telling me that they had taken Adnan with them. If this was true, then Adnan must have witnessed the firelight at the checkpoint outside Krabilah, when a number of Iraqis had been killed. I asked Abbas about this, and he shook his head. 'He didn't mention anything about Iraqis being killed,' he told me. 'He said that they came to the checkpoint outside Krabilah, but he had already told them they would never get through, so they stopped the car before they got there and they all got out � five of them. They asked him to drive the car through the checkpoint without saying any�thing to the guards there, and to pick them up about three kilometres further on. Adnan said he pretended to go along with it and they were happy. As soon as they'd gone he drove to the checkpoint and denounced them to the police.' `He didn't talk about the commandos having shot any�one at the checkpoint?' `Definitely not. He said they left the car before they got near it.' When I thought about it, this seemed a far more reasonable account than McNab's claim to have fought his way out of a checkpoint. After all, checkpoints exist to stop people doing just that, and they are likely to be bristling with gun-emplacements. A far more workable plan � and one more in keeping with SAS principles � would have been simply to leave the car before the VCP, as Abbas described, and disappear into the desert. Staying in the queue would have made a firefight inevitable � there was no way five camouflaged men who hardly knew a word of Arabic between them were ever going to bluff their way through. But was this the truth? It all hinged on whether or not the patrol had really taken Adnan with them in the vehicle. Later, turning to the newspaper interview with Adnan himself, I found that the basic facts tallied largely with what Abbas had reported. What possible reason, there�fore, could he have in refusing to talk to us, I wondered? Did his silence indicate that this was all a set-up � that McNab was correct and that the story that he had been with them in the taxi was a lie? A careful second transla�tion of the newspaper article suggested a possible motive. First of all, Adnan stated that the patrol had offered him a large sum of money, not to help them escape, but to guide them to Iraqi military units stationed in the desert, their objective being, he said, 'to discover the strength of our forces in the area'. He added that the patrol had wanted to kill the owner of the car and his son, but that he had saved their lives by declaring that he would refuse to cooperate with the commandos if they did so. Adnan also claimed that he had warned the SAS that they would not get through the checkpoint, and 'persuaded' them to get out of the car 500 metres short of the VCP, telling them that he would pick them up three kilometres further on. These additions seemed to me to be false. The idea that the exhausted, starving SAS team had demanded to be taken to see Iraqi military units when they were desper-ate to get away from them was ludicrous. And the upstanding Iraqi citizen who had saved the lives of his co-nationalists did not sound much like the man who, according to McNab, had screamed that he was a Christian to preserve his own life, and pointed out that the others were Muslims. If this is true, then he had obvi�ously been terrified by McNab and the others into helping them, and had sought to cover that up by portraying him�self as a more active mover and shaker in the story. He had saved the country by diverting the enemy from their mission and tricking them at the VCP. It was pure specu�lation, of course, but I guessed that he had refused to cooperate with us because he feared we knew the truth. This was a fascinating sideline, but Adnan's pretensions to heroism did not affect the question of whether he had been in the car with the SAS as far as the checkpoint, or if he had been left behind in the desert as McNab wrote. At the end of the article, though, came a clincher that erased any reasonable doubt: Adnan let drop that 'the leader's name was Steven'. Even if he had somehow man�aged to get hold of a copy of Bravo Two Zero, which was not available in Iraq, how, unless he had actually estab�lished some kind of rapport with McNab, could he possibly have known his real name? Ryan corroborates both Adnan's story and my theory that his alleged heroism was a cover for his abject terror. Presumably quoting from what McNab or one of the oth�ers had told him after their return to Britain, Ryan writes that the patrol took one man with them in the car because he looked so terrified that they thought he might help them. He adds that they got out of the car before the checkpoint, having arranged that the Iraqi would pick them up further on, whereupon he promptly shopped them to the police. CHAPTER twelve THE ROAD TO KRABILAH TOOK US through villages of breeze-block shanties standing among the debris of industrial society: goats and sheep nuzzled around dis-carded tyres, engine-blocks, hulks of vehicles and piles of non-biodegradable rubbish. There were run-down mili�tary camps: S60 guns without crews, armoured personnel carriers looking battered and immobile. Parked along the way were dozens of oil-tankers carrying consignments of crude to Jordan. On the outskirts of Krabilah we came to a desolate-looking concrete but on the side of the road. The but was abandoned and ruined, but it had obviously once been part of a vehicle checkpoint. 'This is it,' Abbas told me. 'This is the checkpoint Adnan talked about.' I had found Bravo Two Zero's VCP, but without an eye�witness as to what had happened here on the night of 26 January 1991, it was nothing but an abandoned hut. Whatever had really taken place here, I thought, this point had marked the beginning of the end for McNab's section of the patrol. For two of them � Consiglio and Lane �that taxi ride had been the last real journey of their lives. As we pulled away from the deserted but and into the town I realized that I was sitting in the very seat that Legs Lane had sat in on that day. Krabilah was a one-horse town, a settlement spread thinly along the road to Syria, where we checked into a hotel with rooms like ovens opening off walkways that looked down on an alley. Across the street was a spacious restaurant-cum-teashop where forlorn hunks of lamb hung in the window and an immensely fat youth with balloon biceps could be seen slicing meat for kebabs with a vast blade like a miniature scythe. The owner of the restaurant was a pale, haggard-looking man called al-Haj Nur ad-Din, an engineer who had once worked at a brick factory outside Krabilah that had been destroyed by Allied bombing raids. Though he complained bitterly about the loss of the factory, Nur ad-Din welcomed us with no less courtesy than the other Iraqis I'd met. Over tea and hookah-pipes, he told me that everyone knew the story of the British commandos who had been captured or died here in 1991. Krabilah was a small town � actu�ally not much more than a village � and everything that went on here was common knowledge. It wasn't every day that such a thing happened. I asked him if there was anyone still serving in the army here who had been here in 1991. 'It wasn't army busi�ness,' Nur ad-Din said. 'It was all dealt with by the police, and a lot of ordinary citizens were involved, too. There was an alert that foreign commandos were in the area long before they were found here.' Nur ad-Din gave me the name of a police sergeant major who had been stationed in Krabilah since 1991, and the minders obligingly traced him for me. He turned out to be as good an advertisement for the Iraqi police as it would have been possible to find. Ahmad was surpris�ingly young � a tall, slimly built, charming man with film-star good looks � and not in the least grizzled or ser�geant major-like. He wore olive-green fatigues, without a cap, a weapon or rank insignia � nothing but a pin bear�ing the face of Saddam Hussein on his chest. I wondered if it was some sort of medal Ahmad said he had been here in Krabilah on the night of 26 January 1991, and had been involved in hunting the British commandos and capturing one of them. `It started quite early in the evening,' he said. 'I was on duty at the main police station in Krabilah- town. A man arrived � a police sergeant who I think was a Christian from Mosul � and reported that he had been kidnapped by a group of five British commandos, who were heavily armed and carrying some sort of transmitter � a thing like a tiny computer with a keyboard. He had tricked them, he told us, by dropping them about half a kilo�metre from the checkpoint outside Krabilah and telling them he would pick them up three kilometres further on. He reported it to the police at the checkpoint, and they sent him on to the police in Krabilah.' I took out the newspaper cutting of the interview with Adnan Badawi and showed Ahmad the head and shoul-ders portrait of Adnan himself. 'Is that him?' I asked. He squinted at it and nodded. 'It looks like him,' he said. 'But don't forget it's ten years since then.' I asked if the man who had reported the kidnapping had mentioned any shooting at the VCP. 'No,' Ahmad said. 'He never mentioned shooting at all. He said the commandos just left the car and went off into the desert.' `So there were no police deaths at the checkpoint that night?' `Not at all. Nobody was killed or injured at the check�point. If they had been, I would have known, because I arrived there myself not long afterwards. Everyone was excited about the presence of the foreign commandos, but there definitely hadn't been any shooting at the VCP. The shooting came later.' I asked Ahmad to look at the taxi we had brought from Rumadi, and he confirmed that it was the vehicle Adnan had arrived in that night. Then I asked if he would take me to see where the action had taken place. With Abbas driving again, we motored several kilometres back out of Krabilah down the road we'd come in on. Ahmad stopped us at the same abandoned concrete but Abbas had shown me on the way into town. 'This was the checkpoint,' Ahmad told me, 'and it was perma�nently manned in 1991, by quite a large contingent of police. I arrived here at around eight o'clock with seven other policemen to check out what the man who'd been kidnapped had told us, and I found everything com�pletely okay � no one dead or injured. There was a lot of traffic on the road, and everyone was driving very fast because there were air raids that night. The odd thing, though, was that on our way here we passed two men trying to stop cars on the opposite (south) side of the road. One man was lying on the ground, looking hurt, and the other was flashing a torch at the cars, but no one was stopping � everyone was driving on very fast. The man from Mosul was with me, and I said "Is that them?" and he said "Yes. That's just what they did when they caught me." Anyway, we decided not to approach them and drove past pretending we hadn't seen anything. I don't think they noticed us.' McNab makes no mention in his book of this second attempt to hijack a vehicle. He states that, having legged it into the desert, leaving behind them three Iraqi dead and a confusion of sporadic shooting, screams and revving engines, the patrol regrouped. None of them, McNab said, could actually believe they had survived. A quick fix on the Magellan told them they were only eleven kilometres from Syria and freedom. Judging by their previous speed, they should have been able to cover this in under ninety minutes. McNab knew that they had to make it that night, because there was little chance of the patrol being able to lay up safely here the following day. They set off west at a jogging pace, soon entering an area of habitation where dogs barked and generators hummed. They were near enough to the road to see that it was already being patrolled by armoured personnel carriers, and suddenly the moon came out, making their light-coloured desert camouflage suits stand out like bea�cons. Suddenly, they were spotted. Three or four vehicles screeched to a halt and disgorged soldiers, who began blazing away at them. Anxious to conserve the little ammunition left to them, they ran for it, covering four hundred metres at breakneck speed. Coming over a crest, they saw the lights of Abu Kamal in Syria twinkling tantalizingly in the distance, so near and yet so far away. `I could almost taste the place,' McNab wrote. As they cleared the crest they were highlighted and seen by an anti-aircraft battery, which opened up on them, and they switched north, sprinting across a road and into a built-up area that led down to the banks of the Euphrates. I asked Ahmad if he could remember the place he had seen the SAS men, and he replied that it was easy, because it had been by a road-bridge about three kilome�tres from the VCP. We drove back towards the town until we came to a concrete bridge with iron railings, where Ahmad told Abbas to stop and we jumped out. 'This is where they were when I first saw them,' Ahmad said, `and they were still here when we got back. By that time we had managed to collect about seven vehicles at the checkpoint and about thirty men, some police, some just armed civilians. When the commandos saw so many vehicles together, they must have realized we'd spotted them and they ran off quickly and hid somewhere over there.' He pointed to some undulating folds in the land�scape not more than three hundred metres away and I wandered over there with him. To the west the land fell sharply into the dry bed of a wadi that evidently ran into the Euphrates � hence the bridge, which formed a culvert across the road. On the opposite side of the road, the north side, I could see the lush greenness of the river val�ley, the spiky heads of palm trees and tamarisks, and beyond them clear across to the other bank. To my imme- diate south-west was a line of traditional-looking rural houses, which