Heat

by Ranulph Fiennes

  The colonel aimed to strengthen the Deefa garrison of ‘B’ Company under Patrick Brook by moving my Recce Platoon and also ‘C’ Company, who were at the time camped halfway along the Midway Road between the Salalah Plain and Thumrait.

  Murad made our six Land Rovers ready for the long journey into the mountains and Salim doled out all our Thumrait supply of mortars, grenades and bullets to Ali Nasser, Mohammed of the Beard, the moolah and another Baluchi corporal. Said Salim collected my section’s supply.

  A hundred men from ‘C’ Company in their lorries came to join us at Thumrait. They were singing and looked confident. We followed their dust cloud towards the Yemen, at first on flat gravel plains then climbing via the only drivable track up a dangerous, easily ambushed ramp which led to Deefa. This ramp had been picketed and cleared over the last week with mine sweepers.

  Late on the second day we reached the bare rock of Deefa ridge, with a line of dense scrub immediately to our south. At dusk we came to Deefa Camp, a bald hilltop ringed with shallow trenches and a scattering of khaki tents on its crown.

  Our intention must have been obvious to adoo watchers. There were now over 400 Sultanate soldiers scurrying about, by far the greatest number to have gathered in one spot in Dhofar, probably ever.

  As we later learnt, a warning went out to all the adoo groups in Western Dhofar and to their base at Hauf, just over the Yemeni border. They closed in from all directions onto the region between Deefa and their cave headquarters. Then they waited.

  The colonel sent both ‘B’ and ‘C’ Companies down into the scrub after dusk. Fearing an adoo attempt to take the Deefa Camp in their absence, my forty men, including the drivers, were to defend the hilltop trenches and be ready to respond to any cry for support from the companies.

  We watched and waited through the day in the searing heat. At dusk we laid trip flares, for tongues of mist crept up from the treeline, dulling our vision despite the moonlight.

  From the forests that fell away to the coastline, explosions and long bursts of machine-gun fire echoed up the ravines to our ridge, and soon after dark Patrick Brook called me on the radio. Both companies, he reported, had met fierce adoo opposition long before reaching any signs of an enemy headquarters.

  Patrick’s ‘B’ Company commander had recently been hospitalized due to drinking bad water, and he had been replaced with a newly arrived Royal Marine major, soon nicknamed Taweel (tall) by the men. This man was dogged by bad luck, and his men believed that he was troubled by a djinn (spirit) because the adoo seemed to outwit his every move, which, of course, resulted in dead and wounded soldiers.

  When ‘B’ Company returned on our second day at Deefa, they looked thoroughly downhearted and bereft of the normal Omani good humour.

  Patrick’s upper arm was bandaged where a bullet had passed through between the bones. I made him a coffee in one of the tents and he told me that his men had successfully ambushed a dozen adoo, but on the way back to Deefa through thick scrub they had themselves suffered a close contact ambush. Patrick was leading with his magnetic compass when it happened. ‘The noise was terrifying. Not only the guns in the close confinement of the bush, but the incredible sound of branches splintering all about you and the whine of ricochets from the rocks underfoot.’

  One bullet sliced through Patrick’s left arm and another smashed the radio he carried in his right hip pocket. He then crawled back to the machine gunner behind him. A bullet had passed through that man’s skull and exited behind his ear. Taking the gun, Patrick wriggled back to the next soldier, his sergeant, who was writhing on the ground with one of his eyes removed by a bullet. Passing by a third casualty, Patrick gave the gun to a Baluchi who began to fire back into the bush ahead.

  The enemy faded away unseen, but it took Patrick’s men twelve hours to manhandle their wounded on stretchers back to Deefa. The blinded sergeant died en route.

  On our third night at Deefa, the colonel called us south into the scrub to cover ‘C’ Company’s return. Unlike ‘B’ Company, they looked confident enough though clearly exhausted, for this thorn scrub country was hellishly hot day and night.

  As they passed close by in the semi-dark, we heard the scrabble of rocks and the creak of stretchers. I noticed many shirts and trousers ripped by thorn.

  One man grinned up at me from a stretcher. I met him back in camp awaiting evacuation. A bullet had passed through his upper thigh and his genitals.

  At one point in the midst of a labyrinth of thorn bush ravines, ‘C’ Company had run out of water and the Beaver had flown low, at considerable risk from adoo bullets, in order to drop two hundred sackcloth water bags over their exact location. All but three of the bags had split open on impact, so tins full of ice were later dropped. These took a while to thaw, but slaked the soldiers’ great thirst.

  The Sultan’s two jet fighters had been of no help, due to the thick thorn bush cover and the frequent mists.

  The whole operation, planned to last five days and to reach the enemy’s Caves Complex, had to be withdrawn after only three days in order to avoid a major disaster, due to the unexpected strength and efficiency of the adoo and their weaponry.

  Soon after the operation, Deefa Camp was shot up from the nearby treeline and, without enough troops in all of Dhofar, the colonel was forced for a while to withdraw all units from Western Dhofar. Among his post-Deefa operation comments to me while playing poker in a company tent one night were, ‘I noted, Ran, that your Recce men cough a lot less on patrol than the company men.’ I explained that I always left coughers behind in camp as to me they were potential killers for the rest of us. The colonel raised his eyebrows, ‘In that case I’m surprised that you ever have enough active men.’ He believed that generations of malnutrition in Oman had induced a high rate of tuberculosis in our soldiers.

  He did later write that he was ‘amazed how fit the soldiers were’ and that, ‘In spite of the fierce heat of the sun reflecting off the rocks, the soldiers seemed to have no difficulty in saving the water in their bottles. I found thirst the most painful part of the exercise.’

  He had lost the use of one kidney years before and I was full of admiration for him because he was always keen to join operations himself.

  The British had withdrawn from Aden in June 1967, less than two years before our Deefa operation, and already Chinese, Russian and Iraqi-trained, Marxist-indoctrinated, guerrilla troops had overrun all Western and much of Central Dhofar. Soon they would encircle the vulnerable Plain of Salalah and the Sultan’s Palace.

  New manoeuvres by ever-stronger adoo units forced our colonel to reposition his meagre manpower, and I was ordered to drive over the Midway Road from Thumrait to Salalah and to concentrate throughout the imminent monsoon season on laying ambushes along the foothills of the Qara Mountains. The so-called Midway Road was, in fact, a single-lane dirt track which in 1953, when the oilmen first came to Dhofar, the Sultan had sanctioned to be prepared from Thumrait (or Midway, as the oilmen called it) and hacked all the way over the Qara jebel and down to the Salalah Plain. Hundreds of labourers, mostly from Aden, completed the work between two monsoon seasons and without any trouble from the local jebalis.

  On the track between our regimental HQ at Umm al Ghawarif and the RAF station a mile away, the adoo laid mines by night, one of which blew up the Land Rover of my Australian friend Spike Powell (who went by the nickname of Muldoon). He was a professional mercenary who knew all that there was to know about Marxist insurgents and their weaponry. From information gleaned by Tim Landon’s spies, Spike had identified many of the new high-calibre weapons now in Western Dhofar which were poised to be brought into Central Dhofar as soon as the camel caravans needed to haul such unwieldy loads could safely do so without risk of being spotted and obliterated by the Sultan’s two-plane air force. This heavy weapon move would be possible just as soon as the monsoon mists clamped down on the jebel. Katushka rockets and 12.72 Shpagin machine guns were included.

  The downside of t
he monsoon for the adoo was that no camel, even lightly laden, could manage the steeper mountain trails once their surface was coated with glutinous mud. They could only move along the gentler foothill tracks on the northern rim of the Plain of Salalah, and this, the colonel stressed, Recce Platoon must prevent. ‘Ambush the villages where the adoo go to get food and the wells where they drink,’ he said. ‘And always vary your routine or they will get you.’

  So, night after night, we drove towards the mountains without lights and halted out of earshot of the foothills. Then we headed on foot for whichever of the valley mouths we intended to ambush over the next three days and nights.

  Sometimes one of Tim Landon’s guides led us to the mouths of specific wadis. Said bin Ghia was a sheikh of the Bait Qatan tribe and a founder member of the purely nationalist Dhofar Liberation Front (DLF).

  Before one ambush briefing he told me his story. In 1964 the DLF leader, Musallim bin Nuffl, had coerced Said into his fledgling group of anti-Sultan Dhofaris. Until then Said had lived his adult life up in Bahrain as head gardener at an American Forces golf course. After training at an Iraqi Army camp in Basrah, ninety DLF warriors, including Said, boldly set out to cross the western sector of the great Empty Quarter desert from Saudi Arabia, whose army rulers gave them their six Dodge power wagons and a healthy supply of weaponry because King Faisal disliked Sultan Said of Oman.

  Said bin Ghia told me about that little-known but remarkable journey through a land where previously only camels had travelled. They had driven through great barriers of sand dunes, their food always gritty with blown sand, often lost and always thirsty.

  Two Dodges had to be towed and a third was repaired by Said battering a metal coffee pot to replace a piston ring. They drank water from the radiators or the stomach juices from gazelles that they shot. They fixed leaking radiators with flour and sand.

  On finally reaching the Saudi-Yemeni border and the Sands of Dakaka, they were betrayed by their own leader’s uncle. One of the Sultan’s aeroplanes then spotted them in the open desert and destroyed all the vehicles. When, soon afterwards, their weapons dump was discovered and seized, Said gave himself up in Salalah and began his work for the Sultan’s Intelligence group who, he admitted, had proved pretty ineffective prior to Tim Landon’s arrival.

  Said was soon trusted by the many army patrols that he led into adoo-held territory. He knew that he was a VIP target for the PFLOAG adoo. He still had family and other contacts in the Qara, and Tim gave him cash to keep him in favour with potential sources of jebali intelligence. Since defecting from PFLOAG, he had grown fat and idle for he was an enthusiastic gourmand from his UAE golf club days, but he was still useful as a guide and interpreter of the jebali tongue. Many of the Qara jebalis hated him as a traitor and they knew that he could tell when they lied to the ‘geysh’ (the army). But they also respected him as a rich man, despite his humble jebel origins, seeing his heavy gold Rolex, his embroidered silk shemagh and the glinting gold khanja at his waist.

  Said visited me in mid-June soon after the monsoon had clamped down over the mountains, the foothills and the plain all the way to the sea. ‘Your men are now in danger,’ he said. ‘Certain adoo groups are currently working out how to trap you. They will ambush one of your ambushes.’

  He explained that two of the Qatan tribe who had been accepting cash and rice from us in return for good information on where best to lay our ambushes had been arrested by an adoo Idaara (execution squad) and taken to a PFLOAG torture and execution site in Hauf, known as The Cage. They had identified our Recce Platoon with our six Land Rovers and noted our ability to move quickly and quietly all over the plain. From the two men, PFLOAG were also aware that our usual ambush strength was a mere two to three dozen soldiers. Luckily one of their number had gossiped to his brother who was paid by Said for news. He had been disgusted by the cruelty of the PFLOAG interrogators at Hauf, whose favourite methods of persuasion all involved heat, especially heated rods applied to eyes, nose and ears.

  This was, of course, nothing new since for centuries burning or boiling people alive has been used as a legitimate punishment. It featured in biblical accounts and during Roman times. Heretics and witches were purged by the power of flames in the Middle Ages in England, while Jews and lepers were burned by the thousand after being blamed for the Black Death in France. The Spanish Inquisition killed countless thousands this way, while Spanish Conquistadors used to subjugate native Indians in South America by ‘cooking’ them on metal pans. The use of fire was a strikingly visual way to demonstrate society’s perceived outrage at a crime while at the same time putting the rest of the population into a state of fear.

  When Mary I came to the English throne in 1553 she tried to impose Catholicism on a country that had been religiously reformed by her father, King Henry VIII. Nearly three hundred Protestants were burned at her behest, including Bishops Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer in Oxford. With admirable courage, Latimer turned to Ridley as the pyre was being lit and said, ‘Be of good courage and play the man; for we shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England as I trust shall never be put out.’

  But there can be little doubt that being burned alive is agony and this quote was probably attributed to Latimer to reinvigorate the faith of surviving Protestants.

  Accounts that survive from the Middle Ages talk about white bones showing up through the flames and flesh falling away like a ‘red raw’ curtain. According to one witness, it took about forty-five minutes for someone to die after the pyres were lit. Only the lucky few would suffocate in the smoke before the blaze reached them.

  Boiling alive was less commonly used as a punishment, but it was nonetheless legalized in 1532 by Henry VIII to punish one criminal in particular. Richard Roose was a cook found guilty of poisoning the porridge of his boss, the Bishop of Rochester. He was judged to have committed treason and was boiled alive, roaring ‘mighty loud’, according to one chronicle. Women who watched the protracted death fainted, while men admitted that they would prefer to see the headsman in action. That English law was repealed in 1547.

  In 1675 Sikh martyr Bhai Dayal Ji was boiled to death in India after refusing to convert to Islam. He is said to have died peacefully quoting from Sikh scriptures. Once again the account of his composure may be religiously motivated to give solace to the faithful. Modern accounts from people who have suffered significant scalds by water talk of intense pain before falling into a coma.

  It was a punishment used across Europe, and as late as 1687 a man was boiled in oil in Bremen for assisting coin forgers. These barbaric practices largely ended with the age of Enlightenment. Although it didn’t signal the end of capital punishment, rational thinkers did set about limiting the suffering of the condemned.

  At the time of writing, Islamic State terrorists have used the Internet to publicize their horrific video of burning alive a Jordanian fighter pilot inside a metal cage. Plus ça change.

  In order to make ready their major plan to overwhelm the Sultan’s Army in Dhofar by the end of the year, PFLOAG needed to consolidate their big weapons along the northern edge of the Plain and in the deep forested wadis debouching onto the Plain. This they could do without fear from any of the three companies that made up the entire army presence in Dhofar because all three were bottled up in their separate camps with their every move under adoo observation. Only our Recce Platoon, which moved silently and only by night with an unpredictable ambush pattern, could therefore upset the overall adoo plan of the great PFLOAG leader, Ahmad al Ghassani, in Hauf.

  ‘The only current task of certain adoo commandos is to eliminate your unit.’ Said was echoing what Tim Landon, following information from other sources, had already warned me about.

  That week we had no guide and only sixteen active men (those without monsoon coughs, the sound of which during an ambush could give away our presence). Our target was the village of Darbat.

  In less troubled times the Sultan had married a local Darbat wo
man of the Bait Maashani tribe. Their son, the Sultan’s only heir, was Qaboos, educated in England, militarily trained and commissioned as a British regular officer in the Cameronians until his early twenties, when he returned to Salalah where the Sultan kept him under close supervision (for their family had a history of internal strife and coups). The village of Darbat, situated in the fertile mouth of the Darbat Valley, sprawled around a lake immediately above a vertical 800-foot cliff-face known as the Abyss of Dahaq, a place rich in local legends of human sacrifice and oracles. Also, during the rainy season, it was the site of the greatest waterfall in Arabia. The Dahaq cliffs stretched west–east for a mile between two peaks, Jebel Darbat and Jebel Nasheeb.

  Said Salim was the only member of Recce who had, two years before on his first posting to Dhofar, been to Darbat at a time when it was known to be free of any adoo influence. Sergeant Mohammed had, therefore, appointed him as our guide. I don’t know of anybody I have ever met who was more suitable to earn the description of ‘ninja’ than was Said. He could move with cat-like stealth, was acutely observant and was given to wearing a sheathed stiletto-like knife, which was against army regulations, but I could foresee circumstances where he could, with a silent knife, be uniquely useful. So, unless soldiers from outside Recce were present, Said could wear his ninja knife openly. He was at all times beside me on patrols, as was Hamed Sultan, a powerful Zanzibari machine gunner.

  By this time and over a campfire in a desert area, Said, Ali Nasser and the Beard had decided to dispense with the traditional ‘Sahib’ (Sir) when addressing me away from non-Recce folk. They determined, after much laughter and debate, to call me Bakheit bin Shemtot bin Samra, which translates roughly as John of-the-ragged-clothes, son of the Thorn Tree (due to my unkempt appearance, they explained). So from then on I was simply Bakheit to the men of Recce.

  Meanwhile, back at Salalah headquarters and always keen on code names, Patrick Brook and the Colonel had chosen my nickname as ‘Fiend’, so Recce became Fiend Force and individual Recce soldiers ‘Fiendeen’.