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strangers around and no one herds sheep here except our family. All I can say is if there was another boy who saw the commandos, then he certainly didn't tell anyone.' It made sense: this was a remote desert region, not a busy city street full of nameless faces. I knew from exper�ience how efficient and precise the Bedouin grapevine could be � if another herdsboy had seen Bravo Two Zero, Abbas and his family would certainly have known. I remembered McNab had written that the boy might have gone running off to tell the anti-aircraft gunners, and I asked Abbas if there had been any S60s in the area at the time. He pointed to the high ridge running along the road about four hundred metres away. 'There was an anti-aircraft post up there,' he said. 'But with only a few soldiers. We had nothing to do with them at all.' The nearest military base was about fifteen kilometres away across the plateau. The soldiers up there had no vehicles � they were dropped off and picked up by vehicles from the base, and they wouldn't have left their post anyway. Why would Adil go to the anti-aircraft guns � even assuming he had seen the commandos in the wadi, which he hadn't � instead of coming to his family? He was only a small boy. It doesn't make sense. I asked Abbas to take me in the bulldozer to reconstruct the short journey of that day ten years ago, and as we trundled up the narrow, steep-sided wadi to the LUP, I experienced a deep thrill. Here I was, seeing not what McNab and Ryan had seen as they peered through the sights of their 66s and Minimi light machine-guns that day, but, incredibly, what the 'idiot in the digger' had seen, sitting on the same bulldozer with the man himself. Both McNab and Ryan had written that the bulldozer had stopped 150 metres from their position, but on the ground I could see this was clearly a mistake, because the LUP was tucked behind a bend in the wadi. Unless the patrol had left their LUP, then they could not have seen the vehicle at such a distance, and indeed, both texts suggest they saw the bulldozer only when it came round a corner. Abbas showed me where he had stopped �almost close enough to the LUP to spit � and pointed out where the two men had been. As we drove back to the house, bumping over the stones, I wondered if Abbas and Adil were telling the truth. I knew that Bedouin do not lie, but under enough pressure from the government, they might have had no choice. Yet no one in the government had known I was coming here to this particular spot, and no one had sug-gested it. If I had followed Ali's advice, we would have ended up somewhere completely different � even Uday at the Ministry of Information had told me it was highly unlikely I would find eyewitnesses. Any campaign of dis-information would have involved deliberately putting me off-guard with a Machiavellian system of feints and double-bluffs, insisting I would find no witnesses, but with success dependent on the notion that I would find them anyway. And for Abbas, from his Bedouin's point of view, what would be the point of lying? Why, in a culture where the cult of reputation rules supreme, should Abbas deny that his nephew had spotted the patrol if it were the truth, and why should Adil connive in that lie? On the other hand, whether Adil had seen the patrol or not was crucial to my purpose � one I had not even revealed to the Bedouin. If the boy had not spotted anyone, as he claimed, then Vince Phillips could not have compromised the patrol as Ryan and the classified report suggest.
    CHAPTER seven AFTER ABBAS HAD RETURNED his bulldozer into the barn, I asked him to explain what had happened on 24 January 1991 after he had spotted the British patrol. In reply, he led me back down towards the site of the LUP, with Hayil and Adil following on. As we walked across the slightly undulating landscape, Abbas hobbling on his crippled ankle, I began to glimpse the desert as they saw it. The area Bravo Two Zero had chosen to lie up