Heat

by Ranulph Fiennes

  The boy kicked at the adoo corpse and, looking at me for approval as a fly swarm rose from the body’s leg wounds, told me that although he had only a handful of bullets, he had killed this man after his own friend and cousin, Nasir, had been wounded through the stomach.

  ‘I killed two more last night, but they have taken them away back to the hills,’ he said, grinning with pride, quite unaffected by the repulsive sight of the adoo’s face puffed up and split by the heat.

  The adoo had clearly used heavier weapons than ever before, including 3.5mm rockets and 3-inch mortars. Great chunks of masonry had fallen away from the fort’s thick outer walls.

  The askars had done very well. The next time a strong adoo force was to attack the fort, it would take an elite group of the British SAS Regiment to keep them at bay.

  We searched three hundred or more houses in the town for signs of collusion. The mudbrick dwellings were honeycombed with dark cellars. We used the owners’ lamps and our mine detectors. For days afterwards I stank of the house-search odour which clung to my skin and hair. And the heat seemed to increase the maddening itch of bites from fleas and tics.

  The overall smell was a pungent blend of frankincense, tobacco and, mainly, the oomah (dried sardine camel food) which hung on racks in most of the cellars. On the Mirbat beach great piles of sardines dried in their millions, along with boxes of the fishbone fodder for camels and goats which was used once the monsoon grass dried up.

  We searched the equally smelly roofs, from where the waste pipes of crude urinals and squatters led over the edge of the buildings.

  We found three modern rifles, AK47 ammunition supplies, and photos of Arabs in uniform, plus many bundles of official-looking letters. All of these we took to hand over to our botanist intelligence officer.

  Before we left, I waded into the edge of the sea with care, for the monsoon waves lashed the beach with violence. My clothes were soon soaked, but the hundreds of insect bites stung rather than itched, which was an improvement.

  We moved back towards Salalah with great caution knowing that mines had probably been laid to await our return journey. On the second night we heard explosions from the direction of Salalah, and then a message came through that RAF Salalah was under heavy, but so far inaccurate, mortar fire.

  Throwing caution to the winds our convoy speeded up and, through luck, avoided any mines that may have lurked in the hope of blowing our legs off. On arrival at Umm al Ghawarif in a lather and expecting an adoo full-frontal assault to follow up their mortar attack, we were relieved when this anticipated attack turned out to be merely an ambush of a sewage lorry emptying RAF sewage into a cleft close to the foothills. The driver had his legs smashed to pieces, and by the time our company arrived at the burning lorry, there was no trace of the adoo. Bill Prince set up his 81-millimetre mortars and told me to take the platoons forward to check the foothills for signs of the enemy’s recent presence.

  Between the lorry and the line of scrub which fringed the foothills, we advanced in a thin line without a shred of cover. Strangely no birds sang nor rose in alarm as we approached. The acacia bushes ahead shimmered in the rapidly rising morning heat.

  We were some 300 yards from the treeline when all hell was let loose. The weight of automatic fire was intense. It should have been a massacre. We later calculated that over forty adoo were waiting for us to do exactly what we did. So their clever trap was successful in all but its final result.

  As it was, that first salvo of high-velocity bullets went just over our heads, whereupon we dropped instantly to the ground. The signaller beside me fired his rifle blindly, took an inch of skin off my finger and blinded me with dust. I cursed him in English.

  My one thought was to find cover, if only a single football-sized rock or some dead ground, but there was nothing but pebbles and weeds.

  Adoo bullets soon crept lower as the adoo adjusted their sights. If only I had a smoke grenade. I swore that if I survived this event, I would never again patrol in Dhofar without two 38 Phosphorous grenades on my belt to provide instant cover in any ambush.

  The staff sergeant to my right was up and running as he screamed ‘Advance’. Well behind him a couple of his men followed suit.

  Looking left, I shouted at Seramad’s men, ‘Rapid covering fire. 300 yards.’

  Then the staff sergeant dropped with a bullet through his thigh. I took the headsets from my signaller and spoke to Bill Prince just as the first of his mortar bombs exploded in the bushes immediately ahead.

  ‘How many of them?’ Bill asked.

  ‘Too many and all well hidden,’ I replied as a bullet dug up earth between me and the radio set.

  ‘I’ve got the fighters coming. Put out your red T.’

  Squirming around, I pulled the ten-foot-long strip of bright red cloth and laid it out beside me pointing directly at the centre of the line of rifle flashes.

  In minutes I heard the Scots accent of the duty pilot and the high whine of his Provost fighter overhead. ‘Three hundred dead ahead of my T. Front edge of bushline,’ I shouted at the headset.

  With impressive accuracy a 250lb fragmentation bomb exploded among the clay anthills just behind the adoo’s position, and metal chunks whistled by.

  The enemy were now shooting up at the Provost as it climbed away for a second run. As we learnt that evening, one bullet jammed the joystick control with the ailerons fully elevated. The plane climbed steeply and, about to stall, the pilot used all his strength to force the joystick forward. Somehow he coaxed the Provost back to a very exciting landing at the RAF strip three miles away.

  As Bill’s mortars found the adoo’s range, they withdrew. I advanced the men in short runs, section by section, and in the bushes we found well-sited sangars for some sixty men (or women?). There were scattered piles of empty brass cases, machine gun clips and bloodstained rags. But no bodies.

  Bill shook his head. ‘We are lucky. Their Soviet weapons are probably new to most of them in their first action. Their shooting can only improve. And their timing. If they had waited a few minutes you’d have all been dead meat.’

  In his palace on the beach, the Sultan clearly heard the din of the battle for the first time. It was enough to make him dig into his oil funds. He ordered 3,000 fully automatic Belgian 7.62 FN rifles and a million rounds.

  That week a transport plane from Bahrain brought thirty men of the RAF Regiment to guard RAF Salalah.

  On 10 August Radio Baghdad announced that the Dhofar War was hotting up. ‘The glorious freedom fighters of the People’s Front have suffered six dead and ten wounded, but they have destroyed a Hawker Hunter and killed forty-nine of the British imperialist troops.’

  The BBC World Service said nothing, for they respected Whitehall’s embargo on the conflict.

  On the last Friday of August 1968, Sultan bin Nashran and I drove to Salalah from Umm al Ghawarif, carefully avoiding the main dirt tracks where a 3-ton Bedford lorry had been blown up by a mine the previous day.

  After buying bananas in the sooq, we bumped along the beach east of the Sultan’s palace to the ruins of Al Bilad, which I had previously seen only when looking down from the Beaver when about to land at the nearby RAF outpost.

  We parked beside a collapsed stone pillar and wandered around gap-toothed ruins, at least the size of a football field, with the roar of the monsoon surf in our ears. Crabs scuttled away, great gulls swooped, and to our south the next landfall was Antarctica.

  I had seen other such ruins along the coast, including a tomb dated AD 1160 close by Mirbat and, closer to Salalah, the semi-excavated ruins of Kohr Rori, once named Abyssapolis by Ptolemy, which included defence towers and storage vats for incense, once the source of great riches for Dhofar’s then rulers. In 1962 Dr Wendell Phillips, an American oilman and archaeologist who had become friends with the Sultan, had spent three seasons digging here before he fell out with the Sultan and ceased further work. He had by then uncovered evidence establishing this cliff-top citadel as a
one-time centre of ancient worship of the Moon god Sin, a place of human sacrifice and incense storage.

  Originally known as Sumhuran, the creek at Kohr Rori had once provided a safe harbour for ships from Mesopotamia and the Far East during the days of the Roman Empire when their gods were worshipped with frankincense, then more valuable than gold and grown only in the natural orchards of Dhofar. To colonize the land of these fabulous trees, the Roman Emperor sent a famous legion into the Saudi deserts twenty-four years before Christ’s birth. But they never reached Dhofar and perished to a man in the waterless wastes north of the Yemen.

  Inscriptions revealed by Phillips tell the story of the creek in 100 BC. At that time King Eleazus of the Yemen invaded Dhofar, took over its incense trade and built the city of Sumhuran. Graffiti in the ruins confirm that the Plain of Salalah was in those days known as the Land of the Sachalites, that they worshipped the Moon god Sin and that their aim as colonizers of Dhofar was to control the incense trade, then the most expensive commodity in the world.

  I was no archaeologist, but I had long been an avid reader of Rudyard Kipling and secretly fancied myself as the discoverer of fabulous lost cities and remote gold mines where no man had been for centuries.

  Al Bilad was not as impressive as I had found Kohr Rori, but that was partly because I had first seen the latter during our retreat by night from Mirbat when it was outlined by moon shadows racing across a starlit sky.

  My studies of Dhofar history, threadbare though they were, had identified Al Bilad as Salalah’s one-time harbour inlet. Sultan pushed his way past fallen pillars half-buried in sand and overgrown with snake-infested scrub – we saw four serpents of different sizes within a few minutes – until below us stretched a silted up lagoon which I knew had once hosted trading ships from China and the Indies. Marco Polo had called in here in the thirteenth century and described Al Bilad as ‘a great, noble and fine city’ from which many horses were traded to India and frankincense was sent to markets all over the world.

  ‘Far greater even than Al Bilad,’ Sultan told me, ‘was the incense centre of Ubar, built like Paradise with pillars of gold, as described in the Koran. God destroyed Ubar for the people were evil. He turned them into monkeys with three toes on each foot.’

  ‘Where is this Ubar now?’ I asked. He waved a banana north towards the mountains and then west towards the Yemen.

  ‘Will you take me there, Sultan?’

  ‘Insha’Allah,’ he said, smiling. ‘One day.’

  Back in my room at Umm al Ghawarif, I wrote to Ginny that we could together find the golden pillars of a great lost city somewhere in the hottest deserts on Earth.

  My month on loan to the Northern Frontier Regiment over, I said goodbye to Seramad, Bill Prince and the men of the company, and flew back to Muscat.

  Unrest stirred even in the heart of Oman. Arms caches were discovered, and there were strikes by previously contented workers. The heat that summer was formidable.

  On the plus side, in a situation where good Intelligence can prevent trouble before it happens, a brilliant young Canadian, serving as a captain in the British Army until he joined the Muscat Regiment as one of my Recce Platoon predecessors, had recently signed on as one of a handful of ‘Int-men’ for the Sultan. He proved a brilliant linguist, even speaking the weird jebali lingo of the Dhofar mountain men. He was about to take over Dhofar Intelligence from the botanist, which, in retrospect, can be seen to have happened at the most critical period of the Marxist threat to the Sultanate. His name was Tim Landon. At Sandhurst he had become a close friend of the Sultan’s son and heir, Qaboos, who, after being educated in England and the Royal Military Academy, was commissioned into the Cameronians where, in Germany, he had risen to the rank of captain before returning to Dhofar, the home of his mother, to live in the palace at Salalah with his father.

  On arriving in Bidbid, I asked to see the colonel as I intended to put in my resignation, if such were to prove possible within the terms of my short-service commission.

  Sergeant Abdullah heard that I was back and came to my room. We clasped shoulders. ‘The men have prepared a hafla [party] for you,’ he announced. ‘Come now.’

  The men were all there, even the two sour-faced bedu. I shook all their hands and tried to comprehend the welcome-back speech made by little Corporal Ali Nasser, which was oft interrupted by Mohammed of the Beard. I did understand the gist of it and realized that my brief stint in the war zone had taught me more than had the entire language course at Beaconsfield. At one point Ali Nasser provoked much mirth, even with the moolah and his Baluchis, when he gave a wild version, clearly from second-hand gossip, of the ‘Battle of the Sewage Truck’.

  The Beard ended the peroration by saying that the platoon was glad that I was back and now they would become the best Recce Platoon in Oman.

  The warmth of their greeting seemed so genuine that I was embarrassed by my decision to resign and maybe let down ‘my men’ by doing so. I walked down to the nearby Wadi Fanjah with Abdullah and told him of my intention and my rationale.

  He listened until he was sure that I had finished. Then he clasped both my shoulders and looked me in the eye as a father would an errant son.

  I will not go in depth into the detail of his argument, but the gist was that Oman now had to make a choice. On one side was the old boss they knew well who had, years ago, put a stop to the civil strife and feuds which had for centuries bedevilled Oman so that, with peace, life had improved for a great many Omanis. The Sultan had done this with the help of his British friends who had never interfered with the Omanis’ way of life nor their religion.

  The alternative, if you believed in the wonderful dream-life talked of by the shooyooeen (communists), came at the cost of a Marxist revolution.

  He lowered his voice conspiratorially. ‘It is said that Prince Qaboos will rule in a while and, with the oil that will soon bring money, he will, thanks be to God, give us all that the communists now promise but without changing our religion.’

  He propped his hands together as in the position of prayer. ‘If you British leave before that can happen, then the communists will take over without a doubt. They will force us to leave Islam or they will kill us.’

  I met and talked to Tim Landon when he stayed in Bidbid for a while and I came away convinced that Abdullah was right. It was a straightforward question of some 2,000 Dhofari fighters, subjectively indoctrinated in foreign lands, attempting to bring atheistic communism to over half a million people, much against their will and against their basic character. Stories increasingly emanating from Dhofar told of horrendous torture, intimidation and rape among the jebal tribes, perpetrated by PFLOAG bands demanding instant conversion to Marxism. Tales of old folk with hungry families being burnt and boiled for refusing to hand over their precious meat, milk and honey to the Marxist adoo. Those jebalis refusing to switch from their Islamic ways were being executed in large numbers.

  I knew that I must serve my full time in SAF and make a good job of it.

  CHAPTER 5

  Up North

  ‘At night we saw Muscat whose vast and horrid mountains no shade but Heaven doth hide, though they cover the city with a horrid one, reflecting thence the heat, scorching us at sun setting aboard the ship.’

  —A New Account of East-India and Persia, J. FRYER (1698)

  During my first week back at Bidbid Camp, I spent many hours in the Recce Platoon barrack block drinking sweet black coffee with Sergeant Abdullah, Driver Murad and the dozen or so other serving Recce Platoon members.

  John Cooper sent us on various patrols with specific missions to different areas of northern Oman, which served to give me an idea of the countryside, the people and my own Recce men. We travelled in three of our Land Rovers with five of us to each vehicle. We camped by the side of tracks or called in at the nearest SAF camp with spare beds. I borrowed books from Peter Southward-Heyton about the history of Arabia and its few noted explorers.

  Our first patrol
involved driving through the Wadi Jizzi to the Buraimi Oasis and thence to Dubai. My job was to petition a specific officer of the Trucial Oman Scouts, then the armed force of what is now the United Arab Emirates (UAE), to stop sending his TOS soldiers on leave to their Dhofar homes with their rifles, because they were suspected of using them to kill our soldiers down there.

  The Emirates consists of seven Arab tribal states on the southern coastline of what Omanis called the Arabian Gulf (but which was more widely known as the Persian Gulf). Running from west to east, these states are Abu Dhabi, by far the richest, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm al Qawayn, Ras al Khaimah and Al Fujairah. Most of their landmass is barren, low-lying desert which, known previously as the Trucial States, formed protective Treaties with Britain early in the nineteenth century.

  Further west along the Gulf coastline lie the independent states of Qatar and Bahrain, where Gulf oil was first found in 1926. By 1965, three years before I visited the area, Bahrain’s annual income was £6 million, whereas Kuwait, always a tempting target for Iraq, garnered £200 million annually.

  Today, the current rulers of the Gulf States are just as at home in the London Savoy wearing Savile Row suits and discussing oil matters with the chairman of BP or Shell as they are in their palaces back home wearing traditional Arab dress. But a few generations back the forefathers of these same Sheikhs were often pirate chiefs and slaving moguls, with the piracy capital of the Gulf situated at Ras al Khaimah.

  Two hundred years ago the night skies of the Trucial Coast would have been lit very often by fires in the villages raided by pirates rather than by the flames from burnt-off gas at oilfields.