Michael Reagan - The Devil's Handshake

“What’s the crack, Stevie?” asked the Commander of Charlie Three Zero, who at first glance, looked more like a local Bedouin tribesman with his dark long matted hair and scraggy long beard rather than an officer of the British Army.

“The fucking RSM wants to call a staff meeting at the pickup point!” said the Liverpudlian Corporal shaking his head as he disconnected the call from the encrypted radio.

The man smiled at the statement, the RSM who apart from being the Special Air Services (SAS) Regimental Sergeant Major also doubled as the Commander of Alpha One Zero always had a dry sense of humor.

The young officer was just twenty-seven, well-built and possessing a set of deep brown eyes that could look into one’s soul, was in the second year of his secondment as a language expert to the SAS from the Royal Gurkhas Rifles asked what the RSM wanted to discuss. Figuring it was more than likely something to do with the new intelligence from the Yanks that they had received on their prime objective—the location and destruction of Scud missiles in the western corridor of Iraq.

“Boss, you don’t want to know,” answered the young Trooper, a title given to enlisted men of British Army elite fighting force that is comparable in status to the United States Navy ‘SEAL’ or ‘Operator’ in its DELTA force.

The young officer’s look told him otherwise.

“The fucking new furniture for the dining room in Hereford!” replied Stevie, rolling his eyes.

“Typical,” the old sage of the unit a Staff Sergeant called Richard “Taffy” Jones muttered in his rich Welsh accent before continuing, “I’m telling you!”

“Tommy,” he said to the young officer, using his first name as rank titles were never used in the Regiment when it’s members spoke to one another. “The RSM is fucking cracked!”

Thomas smiled at the Trooper. He took the request for what it was: a morale booster, something the Regiment certainly needed having just got the news they had lost four of their own men on a mission last week.

“I think you might find, Stevie,” Thomas replied. “That’s the RSM’s way of sticking two fingers up at Saddam,” he continued in an attempt to support a man who wasn’t present to defend himself as he looked at his Casio G-SHOCK watch on his wrist.

“FUCK THAT!” answered the Staff Sergeant who wasn’t the RSM’s greatest fan even at the best of times.

Ignoring the banter of his No. 2 for the moment, Thomas refocused his mind on the mission they had been given: The location and destruction of a very special Scud Al-Hussein missile launcher and its payload.

It wasn’t going to be easy. The terrain was rugged and flat and after being dropped in by a Chinook helicopter, it had taken them a day to make their Lay Up Point (LUP) as they were overloaded with the equipment they needed to destroy the rocket launcher. Nevertheless, Thomas tried to make his mind relax as he lay in a depression in the ground.

The American Intelligence officer who had operational command of this mission wanted a “hit and run” night raid that echoed the days of the North African campaign of World War II. This was in order to make it look as if a routine patrol had stumbled onto the launcher in spite of the mission being anything but that.

When Thomas had asked the man in front of RSM and the Colonel as to why they were sure that the square building with a massive antenna and satellite dishes surrounding it was housing the missile launcher and why didn’t they just call in an air strike and destroy it all, he was given an answer that had shocked him.

“Captain, we understand the Scud missiles are carrying Anthrax,” the man, whom Thomas had ascertained was of Pakistani origin despite his New York accent, had said.

“Is this a school?” the RSM had asked while pointing at the map to a small building by the side of the one that intelligence had assumed contained the hidden missile. Grimly, it had dawned on Thomas and those around the table why an air strike wasn’t possible. If an air strike hit its intended target, then the most likely collateral damage would be the deaths of the children the Iraqis were using as a human shield. The ensuing propaganda generated for Saddam would be: a) the Americans had destroyed a school and b) they had used chemical weapons—a spurious claim that, although it would be denied by the coalition, would gain useful political capital in striking a wedge between the fragile partnership of the Western and Arab nations. Worse still and the most likely result was something the Colonel had confirmed to all around the table in his stiff tone as “It would be impossible to keep Israel out of the conflict as they would argue that the missile could be the first of many that be directed in the direction of Tel Aviv.”

“How many of these blighters are in operation?” the Colonel had asked, referring to the missile launcher.

“Our intelligence informs us so far this is the only one,” the American-Pakistani had responded. Thomas had looked at him disbelievingly for a second but didn’t comment further. It wasn’t his job to question the intelligence.

“I understand,” Thomas had answered.

“Unfortunately, we don’t have any confirmed intelligence on the number of troops guarding the Scud,” the American had continued. “But intelligence points to them as almost certainly being members of the Brigade of Mukhabarat, an elite group from the Iraq Intelligence Services (IIS) that reports directly to Saddam,” the man had explained

“Don’t worry. I am sure we be able to handle them!” Thomas had answered proudly.

“Of that, I have no doubt Captain,” the American had replied. With Thomas’s mind finally starting to shut down for a couple of hours, he was about to find out if his bold statement was going to be true or not.

“David, I have briefed the SAS team who is going to be handling the operation,” The CIA Officer had said to his line officer, on the encrypted telephone link to Riyadh just two days before the team had gone in.

“Your assessment of them?” the Virginian had asked.

“The Captain is young and capable,” the officer had answered. “He speaks Arabic like a native and moreover looks like one,” he had added, with a hint of admiration. “Mackintosh calls him one of his best,” he had further added, referring to the colonel of the regiment.

“Good.”

“We can’t allow that missile to be missed,” the voice at the end of the phone had declared.

The CIA Officer, an American-Pakistani called Ali Mansoor, did not need his boss to tell him that. If that missile landed anywhere in Israel, then the President would not be able to keep the Coalition together. He knew the risks better than anybody.

This intelligence was as good as it got. It had come from a source deep inside the PLO who had visited the site with Yasser Arafat earlier in the year and just four months before Saddam had invaded Kuwait. As was usual in human intelligence, the information was treated with skepticism because up to that point it was believed that the Iraqis hadn’t mastered the fuse technology and trigger mechanism that would be needed to detonate a warhead. That had quickly changed though when the Scuds started their reign of terror.

“Come on Walid,” Ali had said to the asset in the small Tunis café over a cup of sweet coffee. “Why would Saddam show Yasser such an important place and risk operational security?” “Because he is desperate, Habib,” Walid had replied before going on to explain to Ali that the Iraqi leader needed Arafat to join him politically when he made his move against the Kuwaitis, who, as Iraq’s biggest creditor, had begun putting international pressure on Iraq to pay back the eighty billion dollars he had borrowed from Kuwait to act as a security buffer against Iran.