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watched him, waiting for more, but he suddenly, urged me up and called me outside. "There's something I must show you,' he said. Behind the house was a square of one-roomed stone cottages, which were evidently the real living quarters of the house, and a large open-sided barn. There were three vehicles in the barn: a battered truck and two yellow bull-dozers. Abbas led me to the larger of the bulldozers. 'I bought this new back in the 1980s,' he said. 'Imported direct from Japan. In 1991 there was a very cold winter. The wind was terrible. This house is on a hill, as you can see, so one day � it was 24 January; I know the date because a lot happened on that day � I decided to park it down in the wadi, out of the wind. I was afraid the fuel would freeze up. I drove it down there � it only takes a few minutes from the house � and right up to the end of the wadi, where there is a sheltered place. When I got there I saw two armed men peering at me over the rocks, not more than ten metres away, one on the side of the wadi in front of me and one below to my left. They were wearing camouflage jackets and shamaghs over their faces, and I had no idea who they were. They could have been Iraqi commandos, or special troops of the Intelligence Service, or enemy fliers who had crashed. They could have been sheep-rustlers. Whoever they were, I decided to pretend I hadn't seen them. I looked at the ground, avoided eye contact, and reversed the bulldozer out of the wadi-end. Then I just turned it round and drove straight back to the house.' I listened to Abbas, fascinated. Both McNab and Ryan had described a man approaching them on a bulldozer, but I hadn't mentioned it eitherto Abbas or to the youth last night. It had come entirely out of the blue. Now it appeared I had not only found the driver they had written about, but the bulldozer too. McNab recalls that the patrol had heard the sound of a tracked vehicle and, assuming it was an armoured per-sonnel carrier alerted by the herdsboy, had cocked their 66mm rocket-launchers, ready to take it out. When it had come into view and McNab saw that it was just 'an idiot pottering about with a digger' he had relaxed, thinking �rightly, according to Abbas � that it was there quite inno�cently. McNab had been wrong, though, in assuming that `the idiot' hadn't seen them in fact, Abbas's quick think�ing in averting his gaze had probably saved his life. Ryan writes that the patrol knew the man had spotted them, concluding that since the wadi was a cul-de-sac he could only have been coming to find out who was there. This in turn suggested that the shepherd-boy had warned him When I asked Abbas about this, he laughed and pointed at Adil, his nephew 'There's your shepherd-boy,' he said. 'Ask him.' As I turned to him in surprise, Adil explained that he had been out herding sheep (not goats, as McNab and Ryan said) the same afternoon. 'I was about ten years old then,' he said. 'I took the sheep up to the wadi edge, but I didn't go down into it It is true that I looked down into the wadi, but I certainly didn't see any foreign soldiers there. I know now they were there, of course, but I didn't see them at the time, and didn't know anything about it until my uncle told me later.' I was bowled over by Adil's revelation. Here, against all the odds, was the very boy who would remain frozen for all time in McNab's and Ryan's books as the shepherd who had spotted them and ultimately brought about their downfall. And yet, according to the shepherd-boy's own testimony, he had not seen them at all. Couldn't it have been someone else, I insisted? Surely Adil wasn't the only boy herding sheep that day? `If someone else had seen them, they would have come straight to us,' Abbas said, 'as our house is so near to the wadi. One way or another we would have heard about it, at the time, or since. Everyone who lives in the desert here is related to us � this is the tribal area of the Buhayat. There aren't any