The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  On the BATT-house roof, Tak Takavesi glanced up from the radio, and told Kealy that Lab had just been chinned, but was all right. Tak asked permission to go and help his oppo. Kealy nodded, and told him to take medical kit. A minute later, the big Fijian burst out of the BATT-house doors, SLR in hand, and started swerving across the rocky ground. Chapman and Wignall worked frantic covering fire. The light was coming on, probing feebly through the film of drizzle. The SAS-men could see the fort and the ground beyond the wire, but the wall of Jebel Samhan was invisible two kilometres away. To the west, Kealy saw the bottle-green waters of the Arabian sea licking an ivory beach. The SAS-men watched, bated-breathed, as the rugby-playing Fijian danced and wove, miraculously dodging 7.62mm short rounds hacking stone chips around his ankles. A minute later he was in the gun-pit and out of sight.

  Cpl. Bob Bradshaw, crouching behind the sandbags with his Armalite, pointed beyond the wire, where a score of figures had glommed out of the haze and were mooching towards the perimeter. The figures broke into a run, Kalashnikovs thwacking rounds. Roger Chapman cut loose fragments of fire, his gun-barrel fizzling in the rain. Kealy saw tracer flexing through the wire, shrapnelling ground, spinning in richochets. The adoo kept coming.

  At the fort gun-pit, Lab was jamming another round into the gun with his jaw siling blood from under the field-dressing he’d slapped on it. The bullet had lopped half his jawbone, and he was in agony, but he kept on working, locking the breech, pounding off rounds point-blank at the wire, ker-blooming fire and smoke. Walid was curled foetus-like in a pool of blood, ashen-faced. Tak squatted against sandbags, lamping rounds at attackers nearing the wire. Labheard missiles cropping air. The fort shuddered, dust and smoke volcanoed, small-arms salvoes clacketed, shellbursts torched scarlet and orange. Grit and debris splattered them.

  On the BATT-house roof, Kealy and his men were scoping the fort open-mouthed. For a minute it seemed to have vanished in a pyre of smoke. Kealy was certain the main attack would be directed there, and ordered Wignall to switch the Gimpie to cover it, while the rest of the team hooked fire at the attackers. The desert beyond the wire was now jumping with adoo, who had pinpointed the BATT-house as the main source of fire. Machine-gun and AK47 rounds skittered into the sangars, but no one was hit. Wignall, snapping-in bursts from the Gimpie, called for more ammo. Kealy, Cpl. Reynolds and Tpr. Tommy Tobin monkeyed down the bamboo ladder to the courtyard, formed a chain, hoisted up ammo-boxes.

  Wignall saw rebels clambering up the wire, hand over hand. Bradshaw clocked a rebel officer in khakis braced on the other side, cool as a cucumber, urging his men on, waving his AK47. Bradshaw sighted-in, pinched off a shot, missed, fired again. On the third shot the officer went down. Other rebels had jumped from the top of the wire and were inside the compound, reeling towards the fort. Chapman traversed the Browning, palpitated fire. He hit one in the leg, another smack in the head. Kealy and Bradshaw potted Arabs climbing the wire. One went limp and hung there, another pitchforked forward, snagged by the legs.

  Kealy had sent a contact report to Salalah earlier, but realized they needed a chopper casevac for Lab, and air-support. He knew that the Sultan’s Air Force Strikemasters couldn’t fly in this mist, but wanted to alert them in case there should be a window later. He safety-catched his Armalite, and slid down the wet ladder into the yard. He braced the long-distance radio, got comms with Salalah. Up on the roof, Bradshaw was trying to talk to Tak or Lab in the gun-pit, but got no response.

  When Kealy climbed back on the roof, Bradshaw told him there was radio silence from the gun-pit. Kealy looked worried, and said he was going to find out what had happened there. As he belted up, Bradshaw and Chapman followed suit. Kealy stopped them, saying he would go alone. For a moment enemy fire was forgotten, and a blazing argument raged. Finally, Kealy agreed to take Tommy Tobin, who was a medic. Bradshaw pointed out that Kealy was still wearing flip-flops. ‘You won’t get far in those,’ he said.

  Kealy yanked on desert boots, and found Tobin waiting for him outside, with Harris, who was adjusting mortar-sights in the ground-level sangar. There was a lull in the shooting, and Kealy reckoned the enemy were bringing up more ammo. Still, instead of going straight across to the fort as Tak had done, he decided they’d work their way round through the wadi. It was shallow and wouldn’t give much cover, but it was better than nothing.

  While they were still running up the wadi, Roger Chapman saw a heli riding in on sea-mist, and realized it must be the casevac-flight. He stuffed red and green flares into his belt, left the house, and sprinted two hundred metres to the helipad near the sea. The adoo were still holding fire, and Chapman judged it safe for the chopper to come in. He lobbed a green flare, watched green smoke-coils rearing like fingers. Then, just as the aircraft drifted in, there was a reprise of fire – 12.7mm Shaogin rounds whipped up dirt across the helipad. Chapman grabbed a red flare and chucked it. The heli hived off in the nick of time, angling back across the bare water.

  Kealy and Tobin hadn’t seen the helicopter come in. When the enemy started shooting again they were still trotting up the wadi. Adoo rounds seared air, chocked up sand, and they flung themselves down. They started pepperpotting forward, one man humping fire, the other jogging and zigzagging, lurching into cover. They made it to the fort without a scratch. Tobin slithered into the gun-pit by Lab, Kealy dived into the ammo-pit behind. He saw the dead gendarme. The other was pressed against the sandbags, eyes bugged out, too terrified to move.

  Tobin found that Tak had been wounded three times, and was losing blood, but still shooting. Lab was blood-smeared and gimlet-eyed but remained on his feet. Tobin judged Walid the worst off, and rigged up a drip, jagged a needle into his arm. Lab shimmied across into the ammo-pit to report to Kealy. His big face looked shapeless and his mouth was clogged with blood. He mumbled through the shell-dressing, telling Kealy that Tak had been hit. A bomb lumped into the rim of the pit and zapped apart, whopping them both against the sandbags. Grit fragments lacerated their skin. Enemy rounds clicked and rasped over them. They jabbed their weapons over the parapet, pitapatted double-taps. The enemy were through the wire on the right, rushing the fort. Lab crawled back to the gun, traversed it right, ramped off a shell. The gun thundershocked fire, the barrel jerked back. Lab worked like a madman, ejected the shell-case, loaded another, rammed shut the breech. A round whizzed into his skull, and he tottered and treed over the gun carriage.

  Behind him, Kealy thought the final assault was coming. A grenade splatted nearby. He jerked up, saw an Arab drawing a bead on him. He slingshotted Armalite rounds at point-blank range. The Arab hit the wall of the fort, leaving a smear of blood. Another guerrilla edged in from behind the angle in the wall, and Kealy’s Armalite burped again. Shell-cases sang. Stone chips zipped. The Arab vanished.

  In the gun-pit, Tobin shifted Lab’s body off the gun and pulled the firing lever. A twenty-five-pound shell spitfired, smoke whoffed. Tobin ratcheted the breech-handle, dropped the hot case, laid another shell, fired again. Enemy bullets zizzed into the pit. A 7.62mm slug sliced off Tobin’s jaw, sawed bone-chips, spritzed blood. Kealy saw him go down, and stopped shooting. He grabbed the radio, knowing his only option was to bring both machine guns and the mortar to bear on the gun-pit.

  At the BATT-house, Bradshaw had good news – he’d just got through to Salalah, and learned that the Strikemasters were coming in despite the low cloud. He heard Kealy’s voice crackle on the short-range radio headset, rogered his orders to swing both guns to covering fire, and told him that the aircraft were on their way. Bradshaw instructed Chapman and Wignall to zero-in near Kealy’s position, then lit off down the ladder to talk to Harris in the mortar-pit. He knew that at five hundred metres the fort was too near for the mortar’s maximum elevation, and the only way was to lift it manually. He grabbed the big tube, cradled the bipod between his thighs, bent backwards until he judged the angle right. Harris slipped a bomb, and the mortar bopped. Bradshaw took the recoil braced back against the s
andbags. The bomb whistled, scraped air.

  Kealy heard it bump earth a few metres ahead of him, clocked a V-shaped whoosh of rock and dust, and ducked. He heard Browning and Gimpie rounds ravage dirt, shaving sandbags. Just then another grenade plopped down next to him, and Kealy pressed against the side, waiting for shrapnel to gouge his body. It never happened: the grenade failed to explode. Hardly able to believe it, Kealy popped up to spliff the thrower, and felt a slug part his hair. That was twice in seconds he’d narrowly escaped getting stitched.

  Chapman was scoping the sea, and saw a Strikemaster scoring in under cloud-cover. He tuned to air-force wavelength on the SARBE, and started talking the pilot in on the fort. In the ammo-pit, Kealy heard the blast of aircraft engines, and cannon-fire wedging. He whipped the recognition-panel from his belt, laid it over the corpse of the gendarme. A dark shadow flitted over him. A second Strikemaster followed up, rolling in at roof height with cannons spitting, riddling adoo. The enemy stopped shooting and legged it to the nearest cover – the same wadi Kealy had run up. The first aircraft banked over the wadi and pitched a five-hundred-kilo bomb. Kealy couldn’t see the action from his position, but at the BATT-house the boys saw the bomb drop, heard the crunch, saw dark smoke bell up and ochre sand pancake down.

  Bradshaw took the Sarbe from Chapman and directed the aircraft to the picket-post on Jebel ‘Ali. The Strikemasters flipped and reeled, lapped in for another run, straight on the jebel. The adoo stayed put, blattered out machine-gun and automatic fire. Adoo tracer tracked air, punched fuselage, but the planes didn’t shift a centimetre. Cannon-fire gnashed, twenty-mil shells chewed dirt, notched stones, etched adoo flesh. The Strikemasters bellied up and wheeled back under the mist towards Salalah.

  It was 0800 hours. At Umm al-Gawarif, men of G Squadron were mustering after breakfast ready to test-fire weapons. They’d only arrived from the UK that morning, and most of the senior NCOs and troop officers were up in the jebel, relieving B Squadron pickets. The group left for the test-firing numbered only twenty-three, but had with them almost all the squadron’s General Purpose Machine-Guns, and four M79 grenade-launchers. Before they moved to the range, though, the Squadron OC, Major Alistair Morrison, was handed a signal from the emergency ops-centre set up at Salalah airfield. The group was needed urgently to relieve the team at Mirbat. Morrison told them to forget the test-firing. They would shift at once to the airfield, where three helis were waiting to lift them. They would go into action in two ten-man groups, deploying all the GPMGs.

  At Mirbat, the pressure was off the fort and the gun-pit. Fire was still popping out from Jebel ‘Ali, but the enemy were mostly back behind the wire. Kealy had time to tend the wounded – he wasn’t a medic, but Tak talked him through. Labalaba was past help. Tobin and Walid were dying. Takavesi was plastered in blood, but still on his feet. Kealy remembered that there was a Land Rover inside the fort, and told Tak to crawl over to the gate and get the gendarmes to open up, so they could use the vehicle to move the casualties out. It was a dicey move, as they didn’t know if the gendarmes still held it – the wall might have been breached on the opposite side, and the place full of adoo. When Tak called out to the gendarmes in Arabic to open, they refused. They thought it was an adoo trick.

  Kealy paced down to the wadi to find out if any of the rebels had survived the bombing. While he was there, the helis carrying the G Squadron troop slooped in, wheels skimming the sea. They scooped across the beach, droning over the landing zone like giant wasps. The G Squadron men bobbed out, going straight into action, skirmishing forward, one group moving, the other firing, hashing out an overwhelming volume of ordnance from their nine Gimpies. They juggernauted into five adoo holding a ridge by the Wali’s house, near the beach, spurling a weft of fire. The Arabs took hits, keeled over, snuffled dust and grit. They fell back. On the opposite side of the gendarmes’ fort, beyond the wire, the handful of Firgat-men left in the town were inching in on the enemy, who were now caught in a pincer between two advancing forces. Minutes later, the whirlybirds whipped in again, landing a platoon of the Northern Frontier Regiment. Soon the rebels were in full retreat.

  Kealy, shattered, and black with blood and dirt, was by now in the fort. He’d at last persuaded the gendarmes to open the door, only to find that the Land Rover had been battered by shrapnel, and was useless. As he was talking to the gendarme officer, the first G Squadron trooper arrived at the gun-pit with a Gimpie slung over his shoulders. He surveyed the carnage, saw Tobin, Walid and Tak stretched out in sand soggy with blood, the dead gendarme, the dead Labalaba, the slug-sheared sandbags, the field-gun smattered with blood, the piles of spent cases. He ate the smells of blood, dust and gunsmoke. ‘Jesus wept!’ he said.

  A casevac heli swept in to pick up the wounded as Kealy crossed the wire and recced forward to Jebel ‘Ali to see if he could spot the Firgat troop that had been out on the plain. He felt responsible for them, as he’d sent them out to follow a rebel patrol seen crossing the area two days earlier. Visibility was still down to three hundred metres, and he saw no sign of them.

  He sprinted back across the perimeter, and returned to the BATT-house to find that the G Squadron men had laid out thirty-eight adoo bodies. The SAS had lost Labalaba and Tobin dead, and Takavesi badly wounded. The Sultan’s Armed Forces had lost two killed and one seriously hurt. Kealy discovered later that the enemy patrol reported two days earlier had been a feint. He’d fallen into the trap by sending out the Firgat after it. In fact his SEPs ran into the retreating rebels on their way back to Mirbat, and lost four men killed.

  The defence of Mirbat was the most significant defensive action the SAS Regiment had fought since Termoli, a generation earlier. It changed the course of the Oman campaign. The adoo had been hoping for a tit-for-tat show of force to counter the success of Jaguar, and had failed spectacularly. The tide of the battle had been turned by the Strikemasters, arriving just at the crucial moment when the gun-pit was on the point of being overrun by the adoo. It was consolidated by the arrival of G Squadron. Neither of these factors can detract from the sheer professionalism and grit of the BATT-team in Mirbat, who had fought to the death.

  Kealy was awarded the first DSO the Regiment had won since the Jebel Akhdar, a dozen years before. Tobin was awarded a posthumous DCM, and Bradshaw an MM. These awards had been well and truly deserved, but Labalaba received only a posthumous MID, when, as almost everyone in the Regiment recognized, he deserved the VC.

  The final death-toll among the enemy was reckoned to be over eighty, and the DLF/MPFLOAG cause was seriously weakened. The rebels began to lose control of the hill tribes so badly that they were obliged to resort to terror. This had the effect of pushing the fence-sitters into the hands of the government. In August and September 1972, a record number of former-DLF fighters surrendered to Sultan Qabus.

  82. ‘Close with the terrorists and kill them’

  On Friday 8 September, three months after the battle at Mirbat, Lt. Col. Peter de la Billière was about to quit Bradbury Lines for the weekend when the telephone rang in his office. On the line was Major-General Bill Scotter, Director of Military Operations. Scotter told him that he had just had a call from Prime Minister Edward Heath, who’d asked about the army’s capacity for handling terrorism. The inquiry had been sparked off by an incident that had occurred three days earlier – the murder of eleven Israeli athletes by Black September guerrillas in Munich, during the Olympic Games. The massacre, which had also resulted in the deaths of five Arabs and a German policeman, had ruthlessly exposed the inadequacy of civil police to deal with determined terrorists armed with automatic weapons. It had initiated similar queries in almost every country in Europe.

  De la Billière, who had taken command of 22 SAS from Johnny Watts the previous January, already had a plan for this contingency. One of his first actions as commanding officer had been to commission a young troop-officer, Capt. Andrew Massey, to write a proposal for setting up a counter-terrorist force. De la Billière thought
Massey’s plan fitted the bill, but the paper had vanished quietly into the maw of the Ministry of Defence. Now, Scotter wanted to know how long it would take to develop the unit Massey had proposed.

  De la Billière’s first question was how much cash would be available. The DMO astonished him by saying that money was no object – a phrase de la Billière had scarcely if ever heard uttered previously in relation to the British army. He was so taken aback that he told Scotter the force would be ready in five weeks.

  The estimate was not as ambitious as it sounded. 22 SAS had already created a counter-revolutionary warfare (CRW) cell, though it currently consisted of only one officer, responsible for monitoring terrorism world-wide. The Regiment had been practising VIP protection and bodyguard techniques for years, and had covered most of the groundwork needed for anti-terrorist duties. In May, some of these skills had been put into action on a joint SAS/SBS mission. A team had dropped by parachute into the Atlantic ocean, to search the liner QE2, in response to an anonymous telephone call claiming she’d been rigged with explosives. The call turned out to be a hoax, but the exercise provided valuable experience. The Regiment was already geared to terrorist ops: all that was required was the necessary organization and transport.

  The project was designated ‘Op Pagoda’. De la Billière put it in the hands of Massey, who selected twenty SAS-men from all four sabre-squadrons, and housed them together in a separate block at Bradbury Lines, on constant stand-by. They were supplied with four Range Rovers straight off the production line, and four black Austins. Known initially as the ‘Special Projects’ team, they were trained in hostage-rescue drills in the Killing House, where the new focus was on distinguishing hostage from kidnapper, and taking out multiple opponents. The team practised for hours every day with live ammunition until they were capable of operating in all conceivable circumstances. ‘Our aim was to instil so much precision and drill into them,’ de la Billière said, ‘that in emergencies the chances of emotion and fear influencing their judgement was reduced to a minimum.’1