by Shaun Clarke
Ricketts and the others glanced uneasily at one another, then followed Lampton up the lower slopes, behind Parker and the firqats. At first the climb was easy, on a gentle incline, but before long the rise was much steeper, the ground underfoot rougher. As Parker had instructed them – and as he and the Arabs were doing now – they spread well apart and made the climb on the crouch, darting from one outcrop to another, trying desperately not to slip on the loose stones and slide back down the hill. A backbreaking activity, sending pains through every muscle, it was made even more difficult by the flies and mosquitoes that buzzed frantically around their lips and eyes. The rising heat only made it worse and they were soon bathed in sweat.
Tying his shemagh around his mouth to keep out the flies, Ricketts glanced in both directions and saw the many other SAF, firqat, Baluchi and SAS troops, totalling over two hundred, advancing up the lower slopes by the same painfully slow yet effective method. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the camp spread out below, an apparently chaotic collection of tents, hedgehogs and sangars spread around the airstrip and four helicopter LZs on baking earth covered with wind-blown sand. Reflected heat rose up from the ground, distorting the shape of solid objects, making them appear to bend and wobble. The men down there, whether walking or driving, were indistinguishable from their shadows, which also shifted and changed into bizarre shapes in the shimmering heat.
Ricketts looked to the front again just as rifle shots rang out and an SAF soldier was slammed backwards to the ground, then rolled down the hill in a cloud of dust. Even as those around him were crouching low behind outcrops and raising their weapons to return the fire, more bullets kicked up the sand around them and ricocheted off the rocks. The return fire was quick, exploding from many SAF weapons, turning the hill above into an inferno of angrily spitting, jagged lines of sand.
When it died away, however, there was still no sign of the adoo who had killed the SAF soldier.
‘The phantom enemy,’ Andrew whispered. ‘Now we know why they call them that.’
‘Move further apart, you two!’ Lampton snapped, waving his left hand.
‘Yes, boss,’ Andrew replied, again putting a good distance between himself and Ricketts, crouched low, then dashing across open space to drop down behind another outcrop.
Parker and the firqats were up ahead, moving in a north-south arc, away from the main assault force. More adoo sniper fire rang out from even higher above, causing sand to fly all around the firqats. Parker’s head popped up and down as he checked the source of the fire, then he leaned out from the sheltering rocks, taking aim with his Lee Enfield, and snapped up three quick shots in a row before pressing himself back into the rock.
A man came rolling down the hill, limbs akimbo, jellaba flapping and dust billowing up around him, only stopping when he crashed into a large rock near the firqats. He was still alive, groaning and gargling, his body twitching, but one of the Arabs darted across to where he lay, rolled him over and slit his throat with a kunjias.
‘Christ!’ Gumboot said.
‘Keep moving!’ Parker shouted, waving them on with one hand and running uphill, crouched low, as the Arab stripped the dead man of his bandolier and weapons, then divided them among the other tribesmen. Ignoring them, Lampton urged Ricketts and the others up the hill, still crouching low and darting from rock to rock as more bullets thudded into the ground around them or ricocheted off the surrounding rocks.
So it went on for a couple of hours – the men jumping up and down, scurrying from rock to rock, dropping low and then jumping up briefly to fire a shot. Another body rolled down the hill. A firqat was hit, and threw up his arms, his robes billowing behind him, and jerked back to land on the slope with a sickening thud.
Jock had the PRC 319 and called up the medics. While he was doing so, a mortar shell exploded nearby, creating a spiralling column of smoke and sand. The roar of the explosion was followed by screaming in Arabic and another fusillade of fire from the advancing SAF soldiers, though to what effect no one knew.
The adoo were still hard to find. They popped up and down from behind the rocks above, jellabas fluttering, eyes wide above their shemaghs, only to disappear and reappear somewhere else, picking off the SAF troops with daunting accuracy. And yet they were in retreat, backing gradually up the hill, and as more of them were hit and tumbled down in clouds of dust, the remainder, of whom there were clearly many, retreated up the hill even faster.
Progress was being made, but it was not easy, and by noon, when the hill was like a furnace, with heat shimmering up off the scorched, dusty rocks and even the insects seemingly dazed, Ricketts, feeling as tired as the others looked, was grateful to take five. In fact, the break lasted for an hour, allowing the men to rest up and eat some high-calorie rations, washing them down with water; but then the PRC 319s started crackling and hissing, relaying the order to move, and the men climbed laboriously to their feet and started the whole thing again.
They had another four hours in hell, burning up in its cruel heat, tormented by flies and mosquitoes, by scorpions and centipedes underfoot, while being picked up by the hawk-eyed adoo snipers and, on the odd occasion – when the adoo heavy gun teams forgot the danger to their own men – by the erupting soil and flying shrapnel of mortar explosions. More bodies littered the hillside and were carried away by the sweating medics, but gradually, as the afternoon passed into evening, and the heat died down, they began to force the adoo back over the hill. By now Parker had led his group well away from the main assault force and was moving towards the summit of the hill in the planned north-south arc.
Ricketts saw the levelling summit and the featureless sky beyond; he was exhilarated enough to forget to stay low when he made his next zigzagging run to another outcrop. An adoo sniper fired at him and the bullet, after hitting the stock of his SLR and making the weapon spin out of his hand, ricocheted off the rock he had quickly dropped behind, spraying his face with pulverized stone and temporarily blinding him.
Blinking to clear his eyes, Ricketts saw the adoo sniper running at him, striped jellaba billowing in the breeze, his FN rifle in one hand, a kunjias in the other, the latter reflecting the sunlight as the man held it high.
The SLR was out of reach, still lying where it had fallen, so Ricketts quickly tore his Browning handgun from its holster and swung it up into the two-handed firing position: in line with the centre of his body, locking his arms, his free hand holding the firing hand, and with equal pressure between thumb and fingers as he pressed gently, precisely on the trigger.
A double-tap – two shots fired in quick succession – and the Arab was stopped, staggering back, dropping his knife, then turning aside, as if trying to be polite, before falling face-down in the dirt.
Ricketts lowered the handgun and took a deep breath. After checking that the man was dead, he holstered the weapon, picked up his SLR, noted with relief that it was OK, and then followed the other men up to the summit.
It was a rocky plateau, scorched white by the sun, stretching out quite a distance before falling away again. Beyond the slope of the eastern side of the plateau, the desert stretched out for what seemed to be for ever, though it was merely that the horizon was virtually invisible in the heat haze. The sun, however, was going down, sinking behind the men, casting its light on the hill they had just climbed. In front of them, to the east, the fading light was gradually, magically, bringing the lost horizon back into view, at least before extinguishing it again in the darkness of night.
The Ain watering-hole and Wadi Dharbat, Ricketts surmised, were at the bottom of the eastern hill of the plateau, now safely out of sight. Perhaps for this reason, and knowing that they were to dig in here for the night, in order to call down support from the 25-pounders in the hedgehogs in Jibjat, the men were shaking off their bergens and lowering themselves to the ground, looking forward to slaking their thirst or having a smoke.
They were instantly disillusioned when Lampton and Parker came storming back from the
eastern slopes, the latter saying in his soft-voiced, deadly way, ‘What the hell do you troopers think you’re doing?’
‘Well, Sarge,’ Jock began, ‘we just thought …’
‘That you’d won the fucking hill? You’ve won nothing, Trooper. You sit here on your arse, having a cigarette, and the adoo will come back over that ridge and blow the shit out of you. Now get back on your feet and start picking up rocks and build yourselves a sangar big enough to take all of you and that LAW. Is that understood?’
‘Yes, boss!’ Andrew said, loud and clear.
‘Good,’ Parker replied and started turning away.
‘Just one thing, boss,’ Gumboot said, looking surprisingly clear-eyed.
Parker turned back to face him. ‘Yes, Trooper?’
‘While we’re building our sangar, boss, what will your firqats be doing?’
Parker stared steadily at Gumboot, burning up with an inner fire, then smiled, almost in admiration, and said, ‘A fair enough question, Trooper. They’ll be building another sangar, about a thousand metres from here, to the south, and I’ll be with them, keeping in touch with the 319. While you, with Sergeant Lampton’s help, call in grid references for the 25-pounders in Jibjat, we’ll be foraging out over that eastern hill with the intention of bringing back a prisoner. Any problem, Trooper?’
‘With you all the way, boss. No sweat.’
‘Glad to hear that. Start building.’
As Parker walked away to rejoin his Arab fighters, Gumboot let his breath out in a lengthy sigh of relief.
‘I’ve got to hand it to you,’ Andrew said, ‘you’ve got nerves of steel, Gumboot.’
‘I thought I had,’ Gumboot replied, ‘until that cunt looked at me.’
Lampton laughed. He had been standing just behind them. They all stared at him until he quietened down and said, ‘Sorry, lads, but you’re all being paranoid. Dead-eye’s perfectly normal. Come on, let’s build the sangar.’
As usual, they tore the rocks out of the earth with their bare hands and piled them one on top of the other to create a natural wall. It was a semicircle, the open end to the rear, the curved wall overlooking the plateau and the vast, star-filled darkness beyond it. They placed their weapons around the wall, rolled out their sleeping bags – not for sleeping but to sit on – then checked their small-scale maps and button compasses by the light of pencil torches and, combining their readings with eyeball recces of the landscape, radioed back approximate calibrations to the big-gun teams in Jibjat.
All along the great length of the plateau overlooking the Wadi Dharbat and the Ain watering-hole, other OP teams were doing the same. Within minutes, they heard the dull, distant thumping of the big guns, followed seconds later by shells whistling overhead, then by the sound of explosions on the lower slopes of the eastern hill and the flatland beyond, with luck including the wadi and the watering-hole. Though only being targeted on a broad, general front, the big guns could not fail to do extensive damage before the assault force moved out, which would not be until first light the following day.
‘Fucking hell,’ Bill said, covering his ears, ‘that’s one hell of a noise.’
‘No beauty sleep tonight,’ Tom added. ‘We’ll move out deaf and dumb.’
‘Better deaf and dumb than dead,’ said Gumboot. ‘Which is what a lot of those poor fuckers are going to be before first light dawns.’
‘Dead right,’ Andrew said.
When first light came, many hours later, the sky beyond the sunlit plateau was dark with drifting sand, dust and smoke. It was billowing up from the explosions far below, but the men could not see those. They broke the sangar up stone by stone, then began their long march down to the burning plain.
Chapter 15
They had not gone very far across the plateau when they saw Parker coming up over the rim, holding his Lee Enfield sniper rifle across his chest. He was followed by his fierce-looking Arabs, who were dragging an adoo prisoner between them. The latter’s ankles had been tethered with a short length of rope that made it difficult for him to walk. It ran up to his wrists, which were bound in front of him, thus making any other kind of movement just as difficult as walking.
Lampton stopped in front of them, letting Ricketts get a good look at the prisoner. The man had a gaunt, hungry face and darkly blazing, defiant eyes.
‘Ah,’ Lampton said, ‘I see you had a good night.’ Parker just nodded in agreement. ‘Any other contact down there?’ Lampton asked him.
‘We terminated a few,’ Parker said in his oddly disturbing manner, ‘and saw that there’s a lot of them. They were scattered all over the eastern hill, though I think they’re making their way back down to regroup at the watering-hole. I heard a lot of trucks coming and going during the night, accompanied by the sounds of digging, so I think they were laying mines in the flatland leading up to the watering-hole.’
‘Damn!’ Lampton said softly. ‘What about our 25-pounders? Did they do any good?’
‘Yep. I think the shelling was what forced the adoo back down the hill. They were on the move while we were foraging about there. We terminated a few more before first light, taking them out with knives so as not to be noticed, then grabbed this prisoner for the green slime. I’m going to hand him over for questioning, then I’ll come back and join you.’
‘The green slime have set up in a tent in Jibjat, so you’ll have to take him all the way back.’
‘I’ll send him with an escort of troopers and be with you in no time.’
‘OK, Dead-eye. Excellent.’ Lampton raised his right hand and waved it in a forward motion, indicating that the men should follow him.
They marched past Parker’s group, heading across the plateau, towards where the ground sloped away to form the eastern hill. Once at the slope, they found themselves looking down on the broad stretch of desert leading to the watering-hole and the Wadi Dharbat. Both the lower slopes of the hill and the flatland at the bottom were covered in a pall of smoke and a lazily drifting cloud of sand and dust. The hill was strewn with rocks and littered with black shell holes. No dead bodies were visible.
‘The adoo have removed their dead,’ Lampton said. ‘I respect them for that.’
Glancing in both directions, they saw other SF troops, including SAS, also crossing the plateau, weapons at the ready, and beginning their careful descent of the hill towards the flat plain. Ricketts saw the glint of water between curtains of smoke – the Ain watering-hole – surrounded by what looked like another horseshoe-shaped series of hills and ridges, forming a natural, presently ghostly amphitheatre.
‘That’s where the adoo will be waiting for us,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Lampton said. ‘Let’s go.’
Moving parallel with the others, they continued downhill, stepping carefully around the shell holes and scorched, blackened boulders while keeping their eyes peeled for signs of mines or adoo snipers.
The big guns were still firing at regular intervals as the men advanced. However, given new calibrations from the forward observers, they were firing on a much higher trajectory, dropping the shells on the flatland just short of the watering-hole, trying to force the adoo out of there and into the wadi.
Shells were exploding all over the flatland as the assault force made its way down the hillside. With no big guns of their own, the adoo were withholding fire until their targets were within range of their 81mm mortars, Shpagin heavy machine-guns, GPMGs and Katushka 122mm recoilless rocket launchers.
This was not something to contemplate with much enthusiasm, but Ricketts took some comfort from the softening-up barrage of the 25-pounders and assumed that his friends were doing the same.
There were no adoo snipers on the hill, nor were land-mines encountered. The men reached the bottom in thirty minutes and kept marching across the flat desert plain. In no time at all they left the bright sunlight of morning and found themselves advancing into the dense smoke and drifting dust created by the exploding shells. It was always nerve-racking i
n the smoke, with visibility reduced to zero, impossible to see land-mines or booby-traps and easy to become disorientated.
The range of the adoo’s Katushkas, Ricketts knew, was almost 11,000 metres, which meant that another five minutes’ marching would put him and the other SAF troops within range. He was worrying about this and the possibility of mines when he saw a jagged flash well ahead, accompanied by an explosion, a dreadful scream of agony, the clashing of different voices bawling warnings or commands, some in Arabic, others in English, then the gradual grinding to a halt of the men around him.
‘Land-mine!’ someone bellowed up ahead. ‘Don’t move! Land-mine!’ That fearful call was followed by, ‘Medic!’
Pierced by a bolt of fear that had to be contained, Ricketts froze where he was, but glanced about him, seeing the others as barely recognizable, shadowy forms in the murk, all standing dead still just like him. Their presence was a comfort, though a residual fear nagged at him, and he knew that he would not have felt so bad had it happened in clear light. As it was, trapped in the fog of smoke, spiralling sand and drifting dust, his feeling of helplessness was greatly increased. But it was lucky at least, he told himself, that they were still out of range of the enemy’s Katushka rocket launchers.
‘What the fuck happens now?’ Gumboot asked, standing beside Ricketts and talking just to hear the sound of a human voice.
‘The SAF have a team of mine detectors spread out across the plain at the head of the column,’ Lampton said, positioned ahead of them and glancing back over his shoulder. ‘They’ll have to advance slowly, checking for more mines, and the assault force will break up into as many single files as are required to follow the men with the mine detectors. When I move, get into single file behind me and follow in my footsteps. Don’t deviate one inch.’
