When he came to me, I thought he was going to say, 'What are you doing here, Mr Bond?' Instead he grunted, 'What is your purpose here, Mr Winner?'
I rolled out my standard cover story. 'I'm a freelance journalist.'
He stared at my passport. 'What are all these stamps from Africa and the Middle East?'
'Conflict zones. I'm an international correspondent. I travel all over the world.'
It took him a full two hours to go through the whole bus and check everyone's papers. Satisfied we weren't up to anything sinister, he eventually disembarked and waved us on.
We joined the artics in Rijeka and drove south along the relative safety and flat terrain of the Croatian coastal plain, heading to a second UN warehouse near Split. We would go on from there to the bordercrossing town of Metkovic, down near Dubrovnik. There we were planning to turn east into Bosnia. Our route would then take us northeast up past Mostar, Sarajevo, Zenica and on to Tuzla.
The boy soldiers were having a whale of a time. They were as excited as a cage full of canaries. They'd obviously seen too many films. 'Look at me. I'm in a war zone. Wow!' To them it was a romantic adventure. To me it was a deadly serious operation. I was getting more and more concerned by the minute. As we drove along, I'd been evaluating the weather, the maps and the terrain. Not good. Not good at all. I broke the bad news to Orlando.
'We can't go on the main roads through Bosnia. They won't be safe.'
'Never mind that nonsense. We're only carrying humanitarian aid. No one will attack us. Push on! Push on!'
'I can guarantee you the Serbs will have DF'd all the main roads with their artillery. Nobody will be safe.'
'Push on! Push on!'
Orlando missed his calling in life. He should have been a general because he knew how to drive men on no matter what the situation. I attempted to take control again. 'The main roads will be an open invitation to the Serbs to fire on us with tanks and mortars. We'll have to go over the mountain passes instead.'
He agreed to that, but then I gave him the next piece of bad news. 'Hairpin bends. Steep gradients. Snow and ice. Articulated trucks. Not a good combination.'
He was puzzled. He couldn't see where I was leading.
I spelt it out. 'Artics. They're just not made for going over mountains. They're too big and heavy and they haven't got four-wheel drive.'
He raised his voice a few more decibels. 'What do you mean? We've got to PUSH ON.'
'Look,' I insisted. 'We've got to get all this stuff off the artics and onto four-ton trucks with four-wheel drive. Those mountains are fearsome. Worse than the Brecon Beacons where I did selection. We'll never get over them in artics.'
'And how do you propose to do that?'
'We'll grease the locals in Metkovic and get some smaller trucks.'
'Very well. Push on!'
My words of warning had obviously had their effect on Orlando. He must have got worried about negotiating the roads ahead in artics. After an overnight in Split where we met up with David Rieff, the American journalist, he promptly acquired two luxurious Range Rovers. We drove on in convoy with the artics, turned east and soon reached another UN warehouse in Metkovic.
Orlando, his Range Rover and his suitcase went off to scour the town for freelance owners of four-tonners. It's amazing how persuasive a fistful of dollars can be. We eventually amassed a convoy of around fifteen small vehicles. Not only that, but to my amazement up trundled two Warrior APCs from the Cheshire Regiment to escort us over the mountains. That's impressive. I thought. My opinion of Orlando was rising, perhaps I had been too quick to judge. That must have been some gift of the gab to persuade the top brass in the Cheshires to loan us a couple of APCs.
Now all we had to do was transfer the supplies from the artics to the four-tonners. I went off and did a recce. All the aid material was on pallets. We needed a forklift truck to transfer it. I knew I'd find one in the depot somewhere.
But what I didn't expect to find there was my first Walter Mitty of the campaign.
23
Port and Stilton
The Walter Mitties were alive and well in Bosnia! From the moment the SAS exploded across the world's media with the Iranian Embassy siege in 1980, the Walter Mitties have been crawling out of the woodwork, seeking excitement and reflected glory, their deception made that much easier by the Regiment's policy of never commenting on anything. I have met any number of men claiming to have been on the balcony at the Iranian Embassy without knowing who I was. If they'd all been there, the balcony would have collapsed under the sheer weight! Then there are the young thrusters trying to impress the women in the pubs in Hereford, who get themselves a tan in the middle of winter and claim to have just come back from a secret mission abroad with the SAS. These ones are harmless enough. What is more sinister are those who, driven by greed and by the media's ever more demanding requirement for sensational material, exploit a gullible public and publish books and articles telling outright lies and upsetting the families of dead comrades. They show the Regiment in a bad light and make hundreds of thousands of pounds in the process.
The Walter Mitty in Metkovic was one of the harmless ones. I approached the guard on the depot gate. 'Who's in charge of the UN hangar?'
'Go to the office at the end of the line. There's a bloke there'll put you right.'
So I walked into this office and there's this guy. Looked just like a British Army quartermaster – moustache and all! I didn't say who I was, just that I was in charge of the convoy going to Tuzla. I showed him my UN papers and the letter of safe passage from the Mayor of Tuzla, Selim Beslagic. He seemed happy enough with the paperwork. There was a bit of small talk, then I said 'You British Army, are you?'
'Yeah.'
A bit more small talk, then I asked, 'What regiment were you in?'
'Special Forces, mate.'
I still didn't say anything. A bit more small talk, then 'Impressive that, Special Forces. Which Special Forces would that be then?'
'Two Two, mate.' He glanced around importantly as if to check no one had overheard the amazing secret he had just revealed.
Got him! I had him hook, line and sinker now. A bit more small talk, then I went on, 'It's amazing, you know. I don't know if you've been in the UK recently, but there's loads of books out on the SAS.' I paused a moment for effect, then 'I've read a couple of them.' He went a bit quiet at this point. There was more small talk, then I said, 'I read in one of these books there are four squadrons. Which one were you in?'
He fell right into the trap. 'Nine Squadron, mate.'
I couldn't believe it! There isn't a Nine Squadron in the SAS of course, but there is a Nine Squadron in the Royal Engineers. It's their Para squadron. He obviously didn't know that I'd been in the RE too. Unbelievable! It took a superhuman effort of willpower to do so, but I had to hold back from laying into him. We needed him, or more precisely we needed his forklift truck. You could not exist without goodwill out there. That's the name of the game in hostile territory. At the end of the day, we got the forklift truck, and got the pallets loaded onto the four-tonners.
Leaving him to his fantasies, we set off for Mostar.
The weather was closing in and the landscape was changing. Grey skies, bare trees, patches of dirty snow, muddy and rutted roads, knocked-out tanks skewed into ditches, roofs with their red tiles blown off, their timbers gaping like wild dogs baring their teeth, smashed homes, and brutalized people wandering along the roadside. In the convoy, the mood had turned sombre. Reality was hitting home. After a few hours, we reached the outskirts of Mostar. I was shocked. This once-proud city, the biggest and most important in Herzegovina, was a complete wasteland. After relentless bombardment, it looked like Stalingrad in the Second World War. Terrible place. I've been in a few war zones, but this frightened even me. It was like entering a nuclear wilderness. The city was completely blasted. As if to welcome us, the first thing we saw was a huge bus depot on our right. There must have been something like two hundred bus
es there. All blasted. Riddled with bullets, they were resting at crazy angles, wheels all shot away. Without a soul in sight, it was an eerie atmosphere.
Then we came to the checkpoint. The surly-looking guards were obviously trigger-happy. They were shifting about, fingering their weapons. We'd come well prepared. We were primed for this. What they wanted was grease. Out came the bottles of Johnnie Walker Black Label. No other brand would do. And not the large bottles either, but cases of miniatures. This was the currency round these parts. That and the Marlboros. They'd got to have Marlboro cigarettes. Must have seen too many adverts. They wanted to strut around the place all macho, posing and smoking Marlboros. We'd been well briefed. It did the trick and they waved us through.
The seriously big mountains loomed up in front of us on the other side of Mostar. I was relieved in many ways. In Bosnia there were constantly shifting lines of conflict. You never knew when you might get caught up in no-man's land between the Muslim and Serb forces. At least we had the advantage of cover on the thickly wooded mountain tracks. We struggled on into the night, grinding up near-vertical passes on nothing more than mud roads. This was going to be a long haul. And a dangerous one. We were in bandit territory. It wasn't safe to stop. Besides, there was nowhere to stop. It was too remote. You don't get too many Travelodge motels in the middle of the Bjelasnica mountain range.
The mountains here towered up to 7,000 feet high and were cut through with steep-sided canyons 1,000 feet deep. Wolves, wild boar and bears roamed freely around. This would have been a seriously difficult area to traverse in the middle of summer. It was now the middle of winter. Orlando was right – we would certainly need to push on here. No stopping. From now we would be rolling twenty-four hours a day, switching drivers to get a few hours' kip. We were on hard routine – going without all normal ablutions. No shaving. No washing. No cleaning your teeth. All water reserved for drinking and making tea.
Eventually, after several days and nights of torturously slow progress over the mountains, we descended down the other side to the Cheshires' forward operating base, the last outpost of the British Army before Tuzla and the front line. Colonel Bob Stewart – 'Bosnia Bob' – was in charge. Orlando bowled up in his Range Rover and, to my amazement, started to unload cases of vintage port and Stilton. That's how he'd managed to get hold of the Warriors for top cover! This was what I call long-range planning. He'd sourced the goodies in London before we left and brought them with us. It was just before Christmas. He'd promised to deliver port and Stilton to the Officers' Mess!
After resting up overnight at the Cheshires' base, we went to the Ops Room for a briefing. The ops officer, a captain in the Intelligence Corps, gave us the bad news. 'Well, boys. That's it. You're on your own now. We have to pull the Warriors off.'
'Oh, charming,' I thought. 'Thanks a bunch.' I asked him why.
'The roads forward of here are DF'd by Serb mortars. We've had a recce patrol up in the hills overlooking the road and we identified the mortar firing positions.'
I jumped in. 'Why didn't you take them out?'
He stepped back in shock and horror. 'Take them out! We're NATO. We're UN peacekeepers. We can't take anybody out. We're non-aggressors.'
'So what you're telling me is that we've got to go down that road and face those Serb mortars with no covering fire from you?'
'Precisely.'
The world's gone mad, I thought. Wrong kind of war again. Because of tip-toeing around political sensitivities, the lives of our convoy were going to be put at unnecessary risk. I felt the heavy weight of responsibility on my shoulders. It's a lonely place to be when there's only you to make the life-or-death decision. We couldn't turn round now. We'd come too far. Retreating isn't exactly in the DNA of the SAS. The trouble was, I didn't have any backup. In the Regiment, I'd have half a squadron of SAS behind me. Now I was it! I'd get the blame if it all went pear-shaped and lives were lost. I could just see the headlines now: 'Pete Winner, ex-SAS, fucked it all up.'
I came to a decision. It was all about mitigation, about managing the situation as best I could. I can assure you, if you want to miss a mortar you have to be going at speed. So I got hold of a guy from the REME. 'These trucks of ours,' I said. 'They're diesel. They've got governors on the fuel injection pumps. They'll only do fifty miles an hour. That's way too slow. We'll be sitting ducks. Can you take the governors off so we can put our foot down?'
'No problem, mate.'
The governors were fixed and I came up with a plan of action. The convoy would be split into twos and threes and released at ten-minute intervals. Much smaller targets for a start, and with the governors off we could get up to 65mph, maybe even 70mph at a pinch. At least we stood a fighting chance now. I decided to go in the last truck so if there were any casualties I could sort it out.
The convoy set off. It was only a few miles to Tuzla, but the journey was going to be a complete nightmare. I was dreading the tell-tale 'pop' sound that signalled a mortar was incoming. Nothing happened. We were down to the last two trucks to go. Oh no, I thought, they're saving it for the last two. Still nothing. We blasted along the road as best we could. The terrain was flattening out here, so we managed to keep up a decent speed. Two miles. Three miles. So far so good. Then in the distance I saw mortar splashes on the road ahead. Oh no! Time to get the prayer book out. It was a DF position. I thought, 'Here we go. They've got our range and position. That's the place!' The trouble is when you're in a truck roaring along with the engine straining to the limit you can't hear the mortars 'popping'. All you hear is the explosion that kills you. As we got closer, you could even see the ten-finned mortar tails sticking out of the tarmac. Dozens of them. I thought, 'All these years I've got away with it and this is how it's going to end.'
We kept our foot down and blasted along the road, swerving around the mortar splashes to prevent the fins and bits of shrapnel puncturing our tyres. Every nerve strained for signs of attack. Nothing. I'll never know how, but we got away with it. Maybe the Serb forces were tied up elsewhere, on another front. Maybe it was simply a lack of discipline in their ranks. Whatever the reason, it was a minor miracle in my book. Another few hours of gut-wrenching tension, more rusting and burnedout tanks at the side of the road, more houses with their roofs blown off, more ethnically cleansed homes with timbers and tiles strewn into the road, some with bodies still lying stiffly and silently across the rubble, more slithering along the snow and ice, more threatening grey skies. Then, mercifully, we came round a bend and there it was before us. Tuzla. We'd managed to get through and somehow we were still in one piece.
We were the first Western agency to reach Tuzla since the war began. What state did we find the people in? Proud. Resilient. In surprisingly good shape considering their dire circumstances. They were used to it. A lot of the older folk had survived occupation under the Nazis in the Second World War. That they were hugely grateful for the humanitarian supplies we brought goes without saying. They couldn't have survived much longer on their own. What struck me, though, was how dignified they were as the aid was being doled out.
The town itself was less orderly. A bit like the Wild West. That's where we met these couple of clowns – Geordies, ex-Army, freelance zappers. Mad as a bag full of frogs. They were tooled up with AK-47s and spent most of their time down in Sarajevo holed up in deserted blocks of flats taking on the Serb snipers just for the hell of it. Like a rifle range at the fair. They were living off charity and buckshee scoff. To them, it was just like playing darts at the weekend. As they explained in their near-impenetrable Geordie accents, 'Just havin' a bit of fun, like.' Unbelievable! You'd think they were talking about going off to shoot a few rabbits. Crazy place, Bosnia. Full of crazy people.
Anyway, at least I could relax a bit now. Or so I thought. Tuzla wasn't the end of the story. It was just the beginning.
Just beyond Tuzla was where I nearly became a millionaire.
24
My Kingdom for a Stinger
With
the aid we had delivered, things, at least in the short term, had improved greatly for the inhabitants of the city. Not for us, though. This was the point when it all started going wrong. Our orders were quite clearly to 'Deliver the aid to the besieged city of Tuzla'. But Orlando had other ideas. He sidled up to me as we were unloading the convoy. 'Pete, I want a word. Keep five trucks back. Numbers one, five, seven, eleven and fifteen.'
Soldier I Page 35
