For an instant I wondered what it had to be like stumbling through the darkness, only to get stuck by those bamboo staves. I figured I could almost smell the rebels’ confusion and fear. They were in amongst the punjis – I was sure of it now. And once you’ve stumbled into punjis in the pitch darkness, your greatest fear is you don’t have a clue where to go next. They could be anywhere all around you.
Generally, if you’ve fired more than six to ten rounds you slot on a new magazine, grabbing any spare moment in which to do so. That way you always have a full mag on your weapon. I’d fired off far more than that by now, more like close to a full mag, so I used the momentary lull in close-quarter battle to do a lightning-fast change.
I made a mental note to try to grab a few seconds to recharge my mag from the bandolier of ammo that I had slung around my torso. That way, I’d have as many mags as possible fully bombed up and good to go. But right now I didn’t have a spare moment, for the battle was balanced on the very brink.
I could sense it. Feel it.
Right now, in the next few minutes, we would either win or lose this thing – Operation Kill British vs. Operation Alamo.
Or at least we’d win or lose the first battle in what promised to be a far longer, wider and bloodier war.
All to our front I heard probing bursts of fire, signalling the rebels were back on the offensive again. I had to get my focus off the enemy, danger-close to Cantrill and me, and back on the wider battle and the light. But I felt frozen by indecision: If I put the fucking rifle down, to fire the mortar, I’ll be defenceless – and they’re fucking right on top of us. But if I don’t get the light up, they could creep through our positions unseen and get in amongst the lads, not to mention the village.
For several long moments I kept the SA80 hard in my shoulder, my focus on the rebels barely spitting-distance away. Time seemed to have slowed to an agonising, slowmo loop. A second seemed to last a lifetime, as I scanned the spectral battleground. The night was thick with the scent of adrenaline, blood, hatred, pain, aggression and fear.
If I dropped my weapon and they rushed Cantrill and me, we were done for. But to my left I could hear H rattling through the ammo big time. Beyond him, I could hear Dolly yelling out urgent fire instructions from the direction of his trenches. I figured the rebels were in amongst Fern Gully in serious numbers now. At the same time they’d sent a force forward to hit Cantrill and me and keep us from putting up the illume rounds. The fuckers.
What the hell was I to do? Get up the light?Help the lads conserve the ammo? But I had enemy engaging us in close-quarter-battle. Ammo? Light? CQB? Which was the fucking priority? And where the fuck had the rebels gone to who were right on top of us?
Should I get Cantrill to cover me? Get him under orders. Get your SA80 going and cover me, as I use the mortar.
I was so focused on my weapon I’d almost forgotten he was there. Then I remembered his pitiful lack of ammo. He only had the two mags. That’s what he’d flown in with. No way could I rely on him alone to cover us.
The illume round to our front – the fourth that I’d fired – drifted silently into the trees and went dark. The darkness became thicker, as illume rounds five and six floated earthwards. Soon they would be snuffed out in the thick jungle. Decision time. Either I discarded the SA80, took up the mortar tube and fired more illume, or all along the battlefront it was going very, very dark.
I heard Dolly’s voice screaming fire control orders, his words laced with desperation.
‘Fern Gully! FERN GULLY! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!’
Fuck it, the lads needed the light.
I dropped my rifle, grabbed the mortar tube, brought it up in the aim and punched a hand back to Cantrill.
‘Fucking round!’
He slapped it hard into my palm. With my SA80 resting on my jungle boot I shifted 90 degrees to my left and launched the illume. I was aiming up and out beyond the gully, over the terrain that Dolly’s blokes were hammering the rounds into. That was where they most needed the light.
As the mortar flew to height my mind flashed to the HQ ATAP, and what Tricky, Wag and Grant would have been doing while we were having the fight of our lives out here. I’d left Wag on the Thuraya, so I figured he’d have got a contact report through, while Tricky would have been trying to work his magic on the 319 radio. So even now the QRF should be riding to our rescue in a Chinook.
It was a fine feeling: the cavalry are on their way.
We just had to hold on.
The illume burst blinding-white over Dolly’s position.
Almost simultaneously, the enemy redoubled their fire from the jungle directly to the front of us, just to remind H, Nathe, Cantrill and me that they hadn’t gone away. The deafening eruption of violence underlined just how much we needed the QRF. The rounds screamed in, and the night sky above me was rendered into a blinding latticework of tracer.
If they were firing one tracer per five – ‘four bit’; four ball rounds to one tracer, as we would – that meant there was practically a solid wall of bullets whipping past across us. The upsurge of fire was met with an instant response from our side – blokes hammering in short, aimed bursts. Seconds later the fire to our front petered out. I heard the odd pop-pop-pop of an SA80 from our side, before it went completely quiet again, the fire dying down over at Dolly’s position as well.
The eerie silence drew out: ten seconds became twenty … There was the odd single shot from out of the tree line, but not a sniff of return fire from our lads. They were holding their fire, which meant they were keeping great discipline with the ammo.
Eventually, the rebel fire petered out completely.
Silence.
Nothing moving.
Stillness like the grave.
I grabbed the opportunity to yell around for any casualty stats. I figured we had to have injured, but with all the chaos and the deafening noise of the firefight no one had been able to report in via the Clansman 349 radios. If anyone had called ‘Man down!’ on the net, I wouldn’t have had the slightest chance of hearing them.
Nathe yelled across confirmation that all were okay in his trench, but I couldn’t get a sniff of a response from the others.
The seconds dragged into minutes, as the tense silence settled heavy and ominous all around us. The rebels weren’t even making their evil animal cries any more.
Where were they?
And what in hell were they up to?
The silence was deafening. Eerie. Spooky. Unsettling. In a weird way I’d felt happier when we were under fire: at least then we could see the enemy and know where they were trying to hit us.
One minute stretched into two, and still the empty, ringing quiet. For a moment I wondered if that was it: battle over. Maybe we’d given them the shock of their lives, and they’d withdrawn to lick their wounds and count their dead. But something – that failsafe soldier’s sixth sense – told me that wasn’t so. The night was rippling with menace. It pulsed back and forth through the trees, like a palpable evil.
Two minutes became five. Still nothing. For a moment I wondered whether Cantrill and me should pull back, getting ourselves into a position of relative safety. We’d had the enemy charging down our gun barrels. There was nothing to stop them doing so again. Out here we were prime targets for Op Kill British – or rather for getting bound, gagged and dragged off into our worst ever nightmare.
But if we pulled back and my sixth sense was right, the lads would have no light for when the rebels hit again. No: we had to stay put.
I wondered if the rebel commander might have sent his men in covertly, which might account for the quiet. Were they even now belly-crawling through the bush to get right in amongst us? In which case, did I put up some more light? But I only had a limited amount of mortar rounds remaining – and my priority, as with all of the blokes, had to be to conserve our precious supplies of ammo.
Five minutes became ten, or at least it felt that long, what with the weird, otherworldly slowing dow
n of time that comes with ferocious battle and the adrenaline rush of combat. I’d reclaimed my SA80 and I was scanning my arcs all around me, but each second staring down the gun barrel into the silent night felt like an hour.
For a moment I heard this faint rustling and scrabbling in the bush just to my front. My rifle barrel nailed it, finger bone-white on the trigger. Come on – fucking show yourselves. I tensed to unleash hell. Then a centipede the size of a prize-winning Lincolnshire carrot came wriggling out of the vegetation, crossed the dirt in front of me, and slithered away on the far side, moving in the direction of the punjis.
What the hell was that doing scuttling about in the midst of a firefight like this?
As with their snails, they built their insects big here. The giant centipedes came complete with a nasty, venomous bite. They were one of the few species of wildlife Nathe hadn’t got into his cooking pot. Apparently, they were crunchy as hell and the venom wasn’t good for the digestion, or so his trench-digging lads had told him.
I went back to scanning the empty darkness. For a moment my mind drifted. During a lifetime spent soldiering the only time I’d ever remotely felt as on-the-edge as this was on a previous jungle operation – one of my first ever with the Pathfinders. I was a twenty-three-year-old lance corporal, with three years’ experience in the PF, and I was the lead scout of a four-man patrol. We’d been sent to Rideau Camp, in the Belize jungle, to run six weeks’ training for the Gurkhas.
The CO of the Gurkha unit was ex-SAS, and one morning he’d called us in to tell us we were getting retasked. On the remote border with Guatemala a lawless rebel drugs gang was preparing to ship a consignment of heroin from one of their refineries to the US. Our mission was to get inserted by Puma helicopter into the jungle, then trek to a ridge overlooking the drug gang’s operation, where we’d set up an OP. We were to go in with five days’ food, ammo and kit, to get eyes-on the bad guys.
We were issued with live ammo – as opposed to the blanks with which we’d been training – for our M16s, food rations, thermal imaging optics, the works. Our patrol commander was a very capable bloke called Andy Parsons, plus there was a signaller called Bill Basha Barnes and a medic, Johno Smith. Having studied the maps, we chose a clearing for the helo insertion 5 klicks from our intended OP. We got dropped by the Puma, and then began the killer trek through the jungle.
It was typical ‘egg box’ terrain: thick forest and vines cloaking a series of egg box-shaped ridges and gullies. The loads were crushing. As well as oxygen bottles, we had eighteen batteries for the thermal imaging kit, each battery weighing a pound. We couldn’t guarantee there would be any water on the ridge, so we were carrying all of that, plus food, ammo and survival gear. We’d been warned that a Gurkha patrol had been ambushed here by the rebels just a few weeks earlier. They’d got badly shot up and had been forced to go on the run.
The rebels funded their insurgency via drugs, and they didn’t want any pesky British soldiers poking their noses in. It could easily take a whole day to cover 5 klicks moving tactically through such appalling terrain, and we only made the high point – our intended OP – at last light. We prepared to hunker down for the next five days, with the rebel drug-runners’ den in clear sight below us.
Carved out of the forest was this deep-jungle clearing. It contained a dirt street lined with gambling dens and whorehouses, with some massive, warehouse-like buildings that had to be the drugs refineries. Badly distorted Mexican-style music drifted up to us, and with darkness the boozed and drugged-up partying began. Gunshots rang out every few minutes, blending in with the Mex-beat and the put-put of the generators. This was a lawless Wild West Dodge City, financed by a rebel mafia drug-running operation, and we really did not want to be discovered spying on this little operation.
From here mule trains carried the white powder out via the Belize jungle, and then by boat to Miami and the wider USA. We set up the OP, then got to study the place via a tripod-mounted Swift scope. Our first task was to log key points of interest: guards’ posts and numbers; mule-train routes in and out; locations of refineries; vehicles on the move. We were on strict hard routine – so bedded down on the rock, with no washing or hot food or drink allowed. To avoid detection, we were shitting in cling film and pissing in coke bottles, so we could carry it all out with us.
One thing struck us immediately: the place was much bigger than our maps and satphotos indicated. We sketched it out in more detail: it had expanded massively since it was originally mapped, and it was creeping towards the Belizean border. Dodge appeared to be booming, and due to its enlarged size we couldn’t see enough from our elevated position. Andy knew we couldn’t complete the task as given from here. We’d do a 70 per cent job, and 70 per cent wasn’t good enough. He figured we needed to move closer, but that would mean crossing the border into Guatemala.
The CO hadn’t told us explicitly to ‘do whatever it takes’, but that is what lies behind every Pathfinder tasking. This being a very sensitive op, if we did get scarfed up in Guatemala our own people would very likely deny those were our orders, for it would cause a massive political shit storm if they didn’t. No one underestimated the dangers of what Andy was proposing.
We were a four-man patrol, and our heaviest firepower were the 40 mm grenade launchers slung beneath our M16s. Ranged against us were several hundred drug-running rebels, and if they got wise to us we were not trained to wound. The ensuing firefight would be fast and brutal, and for us capture would lead to torture, abuse, death or worse.
Andy wasn’t about to order us to go in, especially as Basha was totally against it. He reckoned the risks were too great. I said I’d back Andy, and Johno went with the flow. It was three against one, and so the decision was made. We stashed our gear, and at last light we headed down through the jungle, crossing into another sovereign nation’s territory and past the point of no return. Johno remained behind as our backstop, 100 metres into the forest, and we laid a string from there to the edge of the canopy, where we left Basha as our fire support.
Andy and I headed out into Dodge, under the glare of the floodlights that ringed the place. Every inch of our exposed flesh was blacked-up, so as not to catch the light. The only way to penetrate further unseen was by the cover of these drainage ditches that ran around the base. We slid into the first: it was three-foot deep and full of stinking, stagnant water. I was on point. As I belly-crawled in, unidentified slithering and sliding things went ‘plop’ and ‘sploosh’ all around us.
We crawled onwards for three nightmarish hours, covering a good five hundred yards. Dodging guards by keeping submerged in the festering water, we got to a point where we could see and hear just about everything. Andy opted to take the people as his targets, me the buildings. Wriggling forward, we did our close-target recces, our faces barely peeping from the stinking swamp water. We were trying to imprint everything on our minds, for we couldn’t write anything down.
We were right in the chaotic heart of the place: gunshots kept ringing out on all sides and there were open street brawls. I could see the front gate that led into Dodge, and the path heading off into the jungle, which had to be the mule-train route. I counted the big, metal-roofed structures that had to be the refineries. The drug-runners were dressed in a mixture of combats and local dress. They were armed with AR15 assault rifles – the predecessor of the M16 that the Americans used in Vietnam – and they looked serious and businesslike enough.
We’d reached Dodge Central around midnight. By now we’d discovered just how many leeches had got into our combats and were feasting away on our blood. Scores had worked their way into my groin area. They’d got lock-on and were making themselves very comfortable. But there was nothing we could do to fend them off: one false move and we’d be spotted.
We lay in the fetid murk getting drained of our blood, trying to keep bodies and minds sharp as a razor blade, as we waited for the rebels to show us what we really needed to see: a mule train laden with bales of drugs, reveali
ng just what kind of gear they were refining, and smuggling out of here.
We’d lain unmoving in the swamp in the very heart of Dodge and we’d waited to get the killer shot … For how long were the rebels going to make us wait here in Lungi Lol, I wondered? How long before they showed themselves? How long before they made their killer move?
I flicked my eyes away from the stark metal sights of my SA80 to the horizon towards the east. Was I just imagining it, or did I detect the faintest skein of light – just the barest hint of the coming dawn? First light was what – maybe sixty minutes away? A lot could happen in that time, but come sunup the advantage shifted to our side – to the village defenders.
I got my answer about the rebels’ intentions pretty quickly now. As if on one word of command from their leader, the enemy just seemed to open up on us with everything they’d got. After the long and deafening silence, the sudden eruption of violence was stunning in its intensity. The incoming fire was fearsome, yet now it was coming from one main direction and was concentrated pretty much on one single target.
Our far left flank.
Dolly’s position.
33 Bravo.
To the north of us, the lads at 33 Bravo’s trenches were taking a massive pounding. Dolly’s lot were getting totally smashed, tracer like a solid stream of flame scorching into them. It was like a dragon was perched at the jungle fringe due east of 33 Bravo, mouth open and streaming fire into their battle trenches. During the long minutes of silence the rebel commander must have shifted hundreds of his fighters that way, in preparation for his final big killer push.
I dropped the rifle and rose on one knee, mortar gripped in hand. But I didn’t need to yell out any fire instructions any more. Instead, the response from the lads was instantaneous. I saw this sustained volume of rounds smashing back from our side and tearing into the enemy. But our rate of fire was really scaring me now: it was too much, too fast. Keep this up and pretty soon we’d be down to fighting them with our pistols, machetes and bare hands.
Operation Mayhem Page 23
