by Andy McNab
And Nish was going to beat it. He was used to falling in the sitting position with a Bergen hanging off his arse.
'Who's going to finance it? You can't just hitch a ride in a hotair balloon, can you?'
'Harry's got it all sorted. He knows one of the Guinness banking family.' Loel Guinness ran a company called High Adventure, set up to support sportsmen and -women involved in big performance and endurance events like climbing Everest. That must have been how Harry had got to know him.
He turned to me and grinned. Ash fell from the cigarette he still had clamped in his mouth. 'Joe was also the first guy to fly a gas balloon solo across the Atlantic, so I'm really following in his footsteps. Fucking great, eh?'
The cost was going to be massive and he'd need a shit-load of training, but he was up for it. As soon as Saad finished at Georgetown, it was going to become a full-on job. As long as he survived crossing thousands of miles of ocean in a singleengine aircraft first.
He pointed up at the clouds. 'Space ain't that far away, mate. If a car could drive straight up, it'd take less than an hour.'
'Driving the way you do, or legally?'
I got another big grin. 'Wonder if I'll see Frank's boss while I'm up there? He's a vicar now, you know.'
'You heard from him?'
'The odd postcard. Whenever he finds one of a nice busty nun.'
The Robinson shuddered into a hover. We were so low over a clapboard house we were making the shingles flap. A guy in the yard looked up and shook his fist at us.
Nish gave him a cheery wave. 'Shouldn't live there if he can't take a joke.' He gave another wave. We were about to blow the roof off. 'That's where they filmed The Exorcist. Great film. Have you seen it? Directed by William Friedkin.'
He pumped off left and back towards the river. Next stop was the White House, but we didn't stay long. We got a fearsome bollocking on the radio. Seconds later we were back over the river.
'What're all those crosses for, mate?' I pointed at the mass of felt-tip marks on the map. 'Landing sites?'
'There's loads of places to land in the city. But those are where I've scored.'
He'd land by a bar or a restaurant and go in for a Coke. Nine times out of ten, a woman would come up and start chatting because she wanted to go up in his helicopter. He would play the polite but stupid Brit, and they loved it.
I smiled to myself as he waffled away. He really was looking and sounding like he had in the old days. No talk of Hillbilly or Al, just flying, freefalling and women.
Almost the moment we were back in the Saab, it all changed again. He turned to me, his face serious. 'Listen, mate, you be careful in the Gulf. We do things in life that we're never able to forget.'
I nodded, not sure what he was on about. But, just as quickly, he broke into a smile, either to cover up his anxiety or to turn what he'd said into a joke.
87
January 1991
We'd been in Saudi a while, but now the Gulf War was really kicking off. A Chinook helicopter flew us into enemy territory north-west of Baghdad. On board was an eight-man foot patrol under my command. Our radio call sign was Bravo Two Zero.
Our mission was simple: to destroy a fibre-optic cable that ran from Baghdad into the western and north-western deserts, from where Saddam was deploying his Scud missile teams against Israel. His reasoning was simple. If Scuds continued to rain on Tel Aviv and Haifa, the Israelis would be provoked into fighting alongside the anti-Saddam coalition, and the alliance would crumble. There was no way Saudi or the others would countenance being brothers in arms with the Israelis, even if they just did their own thing.
Half-squadron groups from Aand D Squadron were already combing the deserts, but they were up against it. The Scud launchers were small and mobile. Unless they were lucky enough to bump into one, all they could do was wait for a launch, then try to track and destroy it.
At one stage the whole Israeli Air Force was circling Israeli air space, poised to retaliate. George Bush cut a deal with Yitzhak Shamir: the Israelis gave the Coalition a two-week window in which to take out the Scud threat. If we failed, Israel would attack.
All our planning and preparation changed overnight. We'd focused on traditional SAS tasks like the disruption of supply lines and communications, prime-target assassination and industrial sabotage.
We suffered from kit shortages just like everybody else. We had to make our own Claymore anti-personnel mines from nuts and bolts, plastic explosive and ice cream cartons. Everything else we begged, stole and borrowed, even down to ammunition and 40mm grenades for our M23 assault rifles.
And, of course, we were going out there in such a rush that we hardly had any information. Nobody knew exactly where the cable was, let alone how best to destroy it. The mapping consisted of air charts, which only showed major man-made and topographical features. But our attitude was: Fuck it, that's what Special Forces are all about – getting on with what you've got and improvising the rest.
It was nothing new. When the patrols from B Squadron had gone into mainland Argentina to do recces for the attack on the Marines' barracks and the airstrips, all they'd had to get them onto target were the maps in Michelin restaurant guides. There was plenty of detail on the ambience of various Tierra del Fuego eateries and the quality of their steaks but, strangely, absolutely fuck all on the location of the nearest Marines' barracks, its approach roads and defences. But that was all they could get their hands on at the time, so that was what they used.
Anyway, the primary task of Special Forces was to gain information. That was why, nine times out of ten, we went in without any.
Bravo Two Zero deployed, but we never found the cable. We only discovered later that it ran alongside the northern main supply route (MSR) from Baghdad and headed north-west towards the Syrian border. What we did find, at first light the next morning, was a pair of S60 anti-aircraft guns just four hundred metres from our lie-up position (LUP).
This was no big problem. Our most important weapon on this sort of job wasn't an assault rifle, a 60mm rocket or a light machine-gun, it was concealment. We would just lie up in daylight, move out at night and get on with the job. The problem was that our radios didn't work.
Steve 'Legs' Lane and Dinger had been trying everything they could think of to send our sitrep. I liked Legs. He had the longest and skinniest pair I'd ever seen, which made him a bit of a racing snake over the ground, even with a Bergen on his back. He'd started his army life in the Royal Engineers before transferring to the Paras and was still establishing himself after having passed Selection about six months before. Like all newcomers he was a bit on the quiet side, but had become firm friends with Dinger.
It wasn't difficult. Dinger was tall, with wiry blond hair, and he was wild. He was also ex-Para Reg and new to Seven Troop, and had taken up Nish's mantle as our resident smoker and wit. I think they even came from the same part of the world. It probably had something to do with the water. He was a great man to bounce off, just like Nish, and I took to him instantly.
No matter what Regimental HQ tried, we hadn't been able to let them know we were alive and getting on with the mission. But having no comms didn't mean everything stopped: we still had to get on with the job. The most important thing was the mission. Nothing else mattered.
There was a contingency plan in the event of radio failure: an RV with a helicopter the following night. But first I had to take out a four-man recce patrol at last light to try yet again to locate the fibre-optic.
Vince Phillips, my second-in-command, would man the LUP. He'd come from the Ordnance Corps. Aged thirty-seven, he had just under three years' service left with the Regiment. He was a big old boy, and immensely strong – not only in body but also in mind. I valued his honesty, and his realism. His wild, coarse, curly hair, moustache and sideboards made him look like a mad mountain man, which was pretty much what he was. An expert mountaineer, diver and skier, he walked as if he had a barrel of beer under each arm. Most things were either 'shit'
or 'fucking shit', but his main complaint in life was that his time in the Regiment was nearly up.
We were hiding up in a small wadi, waiting for last light. At about 1630, we heard movement about fifty metres away. Akid was taking his goats for a bit of a spin, and the lead animal had a bell. We stood to.
The goat came up and peered over the lip. He gazed at us and chewed away on a bit of old tumbleweed, then his mates came up and they checked us out too. We could hear the kid shouting, and it wasn't long before he was staring down at us, and we were staring up at him. He didn't have a clue what he was looking at, but eight weapon barrels told him it was a drama. He turned and legged it.
Vince scrambled up the wadi, but it was too late. The boy was making a beeline for the S60s. We were compromised.
Even if we'd caught him, we wouldn't have killed him. Special Forces don't roam the countryside with daggers drawn. We wouldn't kill a civilian unless it was absolutely imperative, and that had more to do with self-preservation than morality. If enemy troops rocked up to the outskirts of Birmingham or Manchester and slotted the first kid they bumped into, they wouldn't last five minutes when they were captured.
There were also tactical considerations. We'd have had a dead weight to carry, because everything we took in on the ground, we took out with us when we left. It was called hard routine. We pissed into containers and shat into plastic bags. We didn't cook, smoke – which Dinger hated – or leave anything to show the enemy we'd been there.
If Vince had caught the boy, he'd have found himself tied up out of sight of the S60s, with a stomach full of ration-pack chocolate to keep him happy. He might have OD'd on Yorkie bars, but he'd have been alive.
We had no option but to head for Syria, about 180 kilometres away. The CIA had organized a rat run for downed pilots and people like us, and we'd been told our contact would have a white sheet hanging out of his window in the first village we came to across the border.
After we'd all stopped laughing, we decided we'd give that one a miss and just find a friendly embassy in Damascus.
88
Over the next three days, three of my men died.
Vince went down on the second night. We'd gone out there expecting European spring weather. Instead we got a near- Arctic winter, the worst the area had seen for thirty years. Because we were on hard routine, we didn't have sleeping-bags. We slept in our Gore-Tex, always ready to move. After a contact that ended in hand-to-hand combat, Vince took the fight to the Iraqis, even though he'd badly injured his leg at our LUP. As the temperature plummeted past the freezing point of diesel, he perished from hypothermia.
Those men displayed skills and courage of the highest order when they were in the deepest shit – which wasn't easy when you were just over five feet tall. Bob Consiglio was of Swiss- Italian extraction and known as the Mumbling Midget. Despite his size he was immensely strong, and immensely stubborn. He insisted on carrying the same load as everyone else. All you could see of him from behind was a bloody great Bergen with two little legs going like pistons.
He'd been in the Royal Marines and lived life at full throttle. When he was out on the town, his favourite hobbies were dancing with and chatting up women a foot taller than he was. Hillbilly would have been proud of him. I certainly was.
The Mumbling Midget was the next to die. The night was a frenzy of death and chaos on both sides. Bob was up front with the Minimi light machine-gun. Everyone else was out of ammo. He ran into yet more Iraqis. As the contact kicked off, he stood his ground to give the rest of us time to escape, screaming at the incoming fire. Then his ammo, too, ran out, and he took incoming. He dropped like liquid. Without him we would all have gone the same way.
The patrol had got scattered, and Legs and Dinger had to swim the Euphrates to dodge their pursuers. Dinger didn't want to, but Legs showed the way and kept them both alive. They were captured the following day. Legs died some time later, almost certainly of hypothermia.
Only one of us made it across the border. Chris, the one with curly brown hair, was originally from the Territorial Army and had joined Mountain Troop about four years before the war while I was away in the Det. This was his first time on operations. He had spent a couple of years in Germany doing mountain stuff, and whatever they'd taught him certainly seemed to work: he continued on his own and finally made it to Damascus.
The other four of us were captured at different points along the Iraqi border on that third day, and spent the next seven weeks in interrogation centres in Baghdad. One of them was the infamous Abu Ghraib. Our hands were cuffed behind our backs and we were blindfolded, stripped naked and repeatedly beaten by the guards on our way into and out of interrogation.
There were two types of interrogator. Some of the military boys had been trained at Sandhurst during their war against Iran. And then there were the secret police; those lads really enjoyed their work.
We were whipped, and burnt with red hot spoons heated over paraffin stoves. We were hit with planks and steel balls swinging from sticks. My teeth had been smashed by toecaps and rifle butts when I was caught within spitting distance of the border, so a dentist was called in. He said he'd worked in Guy's Hospital for nine years, gave a chuckle and yanked out one of my back molars with a pair of pliers.
All of those lads wanted real-time information they could act on there and then. What had we been doing? Where was everybody else, and what would they be up to?
They knew the Regiment was out and about, because the Scuds were getting hit. They wanted information to help them counter those attacks. Our job was to keep that information from them.
The phrase 'prisoner of war' was a load of bollocks. We weren't prisoners of war, we were prisoners at war. We still had a job to do. The simple reason we weren't going to tell them what they wanted to know was that the guys on the ground were our friends. We knew their wives, their kids, even their dogs and cats.
The weeks that followed were all about trying to be the grey man, trying to minimize the number of beatings and make ourselves appear so insignificant we simply didn't matter.
It didn't really work. Baghdad was getting the shit blown out of it from an hour after last light to about two hours before first light. We were even taking incoming at the compound. There was no running water, no electricity, and the families and friends of our guards were getting killed and maimed. Meanwhile, their enemies were right under their noses, handcuffed, naked and in solitary confinement. Not unnaturally, they came in and took it out on us. Those kickings and beatings scared me more than the interrogations. My mind began to go wild.
Things got so bad I even tried talking to God, but He didn't answer. He was probably too busy having his ear bent by Frank.
And then I remembered a lecture by someone who'd had far more experience of this than I hoped I was ever going to get. He was a United States Marines pilot who had flown Phantoms in Vietnam. He was shot down over Hanoi and spent six years in solitary confinement under continuous torture. Every major bone in his body was broken. He never got any medical care. He ended up with no teeth, no hair, no muscle mass. He was a mess, but he was alive. The Regiment invited him to visit. If prone-to-capture troops like us listened to the experiences of others, there might be one sentence that would help if we were ever in the same situation.
My mind was going haywire in my Baghdad cell, but I discovered his words did help me.
Hold on to the memory of those you love and want to see again.
I thought about the lads on the patrol, and particularly the ones I knew were dead. I swelled with pride. I hoped I was their equal. I had no worries about dying. We all knew you started from nothing and you were going to end with nothing. That was part of the deal. I almost felt jealous of Bob Consiglio, who'd gone down fighting; I might just be starved or beaten to death.
I even thought about Frank's tiger and his sheep, and decided the silly fucker had been right all along.
