Barracuda 945 by Patrick Robinson Read Free Book Online Page B

most painstaking and thorough search of the area west of the Jerusalem Road. They’d used everything from bulldozers and mechanical diggers to microscopes and forensic laboratories.
    They had turned up evidence, compelling evidence. But nothing led to where it was supposed to go. The most important fact was that Sergeant O’Hara had been killed by a member of someone’s Special Forces, professionally and deliberately. Sergeant Morgan had been blown away by an MP5 submachine gun of the precise type carried by Major Kerman and every combat soldier in the IDF, plus God knows how many Palestinians with smuggled weapons.
    They had found the bodies of two children in the same house, one boy, one girl, both killed by bursts of fire from an MP5, and ballistics showed they had been shot by the SAS Sergeants, though neither the IDF nor the SAS would ever reveal this. The time of death, of all four, was approximately identical. Another body in the house had been killed by the blast of a shell that had crashed right through the top floor of the house. The man had been the father of both children.
    The wife, Shakira Sabah, was found living with her brother, a deeply suspected but unproven member of Hamas, and his family, a half mile southeast of her former home, deep in H-1 territory. She had been at a neighbor’s house when her own home was hit, and she was unable to regain entry through the rubble. She knew nothing of any British officer, had seen nothing, cared nothing, and was too upset at the slaughter of her family to be of any further help to anyone. Shin Bet did not believe her.
    None of this brought anyone any nearer to the whereabouts of Ray Kerman. In point of fact, Shin Bet thought they may havefound his combat jacket buried in the debris of the house, but it contained nothing, and was unmarked, and, of course, Israeli. It was also ruined, under the dust and cement of the building.
    It had much in common with the other evidence. The Major could have killed both his colleagues, and it could have been his jacket, and he could be on the run. But from what? And where?
    This was no ordinary SAS soldier, this was Ray Kerman, a decorated officer of impeccable character, training, and background. If he had been killed in the battle, where was his body? If Hamas had him prisoner or hostage, why had they not contacted anyone, either for reward or hostage exchange? Like they always did.
    No answers. No Major.
    Russ Makin, at the age of thirty-eight, a career Officer since Sandhurst, had never encountered anything quite like it. In his twenty years as a Serving Officer he had never even heard of anyone going missing from the SAS. Certainly no one on the order of Major Kerman, who was a very important person, privy to many, many secrets in Great Britain’s most secretive combat regiment.
    In a quiet, irritated way, the Ministry of Defence had been pressurizing him for months. He had been obliged to deal with the Legal Department, the Public Relations Department, the Pensions Department. There had been endless questions from the Next-of-Kin officials, from the Compensation Department. Did he consider the file should be closed under the heading “Missing in Action”?
    But was the Major really missing? And above all, was there anything about Major Kerman that no one knew?
    This last question, Colonel Makin understood, may be answered in the next hour. At half past ten, a special courier was due to arrive from the MOD in Whitehall, bringing with him a classified report, the result of an exhaustive investigation conducted in tandem by the Ministry and by MI5.
    The SAS Chief knew there would be no courier if there was nothing of any interest. And when the document finally arrived, on time, he read it with a sense of real disquiet.
    The parents of Ray Kerman, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Kerman of North London, revealed, with very little prompting, that theywere formerly Mr. and Mrs. Reza Rashood, lately of the city of Kerman in the southeast of