Barracuda 945 by Patrick Robinson Read Free Book Online Page A

the skull on the left side. The lower bullet was lodged in the jawbone on the left. It was consistent with a shell fired from a Heckler & Koch submachine gun, and has been sent for examination to the Israeli Army forensic laboratory in Tel Aviv.”
    Major Hill knew that it would be rare for an Arab freedom fighter to aim a submachine gun so steadily and so accurately. But the report on Sergeant O’Hara was even more perplexing. Big Fred had not been shot, and neither was the cause of death attributable to the collapsed ceiling in the ruins of the house in which he was found.
    Sergeant O’Hara had died after receiving a crushing blow with an uneven object to the central skull area between his eyes. The nose bone was lodged three inches into the brain, consistent with a headlong fall into the edge of a table, or an encounter with an unarmed combat expert in the Special Forces of either Great Britain or the United States. The fall possibility was of doubtful merit, since there were no other injuries to the SAS Sergeant’s face.
    Major Hill realized very quickly that both men could have been killed by a member, or at least a former member, of one of the world’s Special Forces. And these days there were many such men. No one perhaps quite as efficient as the SAS or the U.S. Navy SEALs. But the Israelis were very good, and so were the Iraqis. The fact was, it looked as if one or more of such trained killers had turned on the two dead SAS men from Hereford, even though they were both still holding their submachine guns under the rubble.
    Meanwhile, the search continued for the missing SAS Commander. Israeli investigators were in the area, examining wreckage, questioning known personnel from Hamas. No one knew anything, no one had even seen him, never mind killed him, or taken him prisoner.
    The best information available was from the Israeli Forward Commander who confirmed he and Major Kerman had spoken at the height of the battle, and that he had seen the British officer reach the wall and disappear around it. He had glimpsed the Major running in a crouch, up the side of street, next to the now shattered row of Palestinian houses. Israeli troops, however, had found no trace of his body.
    One week later the situation was unchanged. Ray Kerman, an officer many believed was destined for the highest Command in the SAS Regiment, had essentially disappeared. Into hot, dusty, and very thin air.

2
    Eight Months Later
Monday, February 14, 2005
    L IEUTENANT COLONEL Russell Makin, Commanding Officer, 22 SAS, strode through the cold Hereford rain toward his office, carrying beneath his right arm a heavy black plastic file of classified documents. The Colonel, a tall, powerful ex-combat officer in the Falkland Islands War, had, in his time, carried loaded antitank guided-missile launchers, which weighed a darned sight less.
    The file had grown weekly since midsummer. On its jacket it just contained the word SECRET . On the first page were the words MAJOR RAYMOND KERMAN . On the remaining 560 pages was a highly detailed account of how one of the most extensive and secretive investigations of recent years had failed to find one single trace of the missing Major.
    Colonel Makin reached his office, removed his rain cape, asked someone to bring him some coffee, and placed the file on the table. He’d been up for four hours, since 5:00 A . M ., mostly talking to the investigating chief in the ultrasecret Shin Bet Intelligence Office, in faraway, sunlit Tel Aviv, two time zones and several light-years east of rainswept, foggy Hereford.
    The two men spoke often these days, drawn together by the consuming military mystery of the SAS Commanding Officer, who had run, crouching through an embattled street in the middle of Hebron, and never been seen again.
    The one single fact that Colonel Makin knew for certain was that the Shin Bet team, Israel’s ruthless interior Intelligence equivalent of London’s MI5 and Washington’s FBI, had conducted the