The Hit List by Chris Ryan

novel. 'While you've got your pen out,' he said, 'would you mind signing this?'
    Rushdie stared at him in amazement. 'Now how the hell. . .'
    'I never could resist a good book.'
    With the clothes-shopping completed they had lunch in a pub in Beauchamp Place, where Rushdie questioned Slater about the Gulf War. 'What was your worst moment?' he asked.
    Slater considered. 'Well, the most frightening moment was probably during an anti-Scud mission.'
    'Go on,' said the novelist, forking Branston pickle on to his cheese roll.
    Slater sipped at his Coke. 'Well, we'd got satellite pictures in, showing activity near a place called al Anbar, west of Baghdad. The theory from the intelligence people was that a number of missiles were being grouped there before moving them on to their mobile launchers. They didn't know how long they'd all be in one place, so the word was we had to check them out fast and if possible help knock them out.
    Tour of us went in. They dropped us off by helicopter at night and got out as quickly as possible. Al-Anbar was surrounded by anti-aircraft batteries, there were tanks in the area, and there were rumours of a concealed airbase. It was also fantastically cold. We'd been expecting the Costa del Sol, but we found
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    : coldest January for thirty years. Snow was expected
    the wind-chill was murderous. I'We moved up on the target. Air-reconnaissance Etures had shown there was a small berm -- a kind of ked-up dugout - a couple of hundred yards from There we thought the Scuds were, and the theory was this was for the ground-crew to shelter behind Jien the missiles were fired. It was a risk, but we ided to make the berm our observation post. ^*It took a lot longer than we thought. We knew prisoners we'd interrogated that all the sentries Uuld have night sights, so we couldn't take any ices. The trouble was there was no cover, just bare t, and we were like flies on a table-top. In the end made it to the berm about an hour before dawn, at that point it began to pour with rain. By then, jugh, we'd been able to confirm via our own night its that there were definitely Scuds on the base. key were well concealed, but they were there. |'I radioed through the confirmation to the base in and we were ordered to sit tight. The air attack juld come after dark that night. Between now and en we were to dig in and observe any movement. |>'It got light. The Scuds and the trucks had been ted up for the day and were pretty much invisible. be only sign of life was two low, camouflaged tents ich we guessed housed the missile and antiaircraft 6ws. So we just hunkered down in the berm with ie man on stag and the rest trying to sleep. There was ling else to do. If any sentries had come along we'd
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    have been dead, but none did, and gradually we got a bit of warmth back in our bones. By eleven o'clock we were beginning to think we might even make it through to nightfall. And then everything changed.
    'I was on stag. There had been no movement for an hour. And then, on the horizon, I saw a dust-trail. It was moving towards us, and soon I could make out a pair of Panhard landcruisers. Landcruisers usually meant someone important, and twenty-four hours earlier the intelligence people in Saudi had intercepted a message announcing that the al-Anbar base was due to be visited by some high-up code-named Marwan. No one was quite sure of Marwan's identity, but the popular theory was that he was an Iranian scientist who had defected during the Iran-Iraq war and was now running the missile research plant at Sa'd 16, up in the north. If this theory was right then he was a real prize: it was the Sa'd 16 team who had designed the al Husayn -- the long-range version of the Soviet Scud that you could fit with chemical and biological weapons.
    'And then I saw that the dust-trail was more than a couple of visiting high-ups in landcruisers. Behind them, over the horizon came this vast convoy of T-55 tanks. They were heading