silent killing. They were not SAS soldiers. Fighting knives and unarmed combat may be part of the public myth of what Special Forces are about, but the reality is more pro-saic. SAS men are issued with a clasp-knife � a multi-purpose tool like a Swiss Army Knife � and a bay-onet. 'I have known a few SAS guys who carried slightly larger knives,' Peter Ratcliffe has written, 'but only for doing ordinary things � not for stabbing people or dogs or slitting sentries' throats.' 21 Although McNab makes great play of what he calls jap-slapping' or unarmed combat in his autobiography, Ratcliffe points out that only the rudiments are taught in the SAS � principally for self-defence against other people armed with knives. The SAS themselves have developed a means of close-quarter battle (CQB) using pistols, which renders knife-fighting and jap-slapping obsolete. After all, not even a black belt can duck a 9mm bullet. As Ratcliffe has explained, 'If you have to kill someone or some animal, in combat, or otherwise, while on active service, then you use your rifle or pistol. There is no unit of the British Army which uses knives � other than bayo�nets � garrottes or cross-bows to dispose of the enemy. Any soldier who asks you to believe differently is either lying or has himself been taken in by some of the nonsense.' 22 Before first light on 26 January the patrol_ lay up in a hollow, where they remained for the rest of the day. That afternoon they were compromised by a shepherd � a harmless, friendly old Bedouin who offered them milk, cheese and dates, and left them in peace. Once again, their lack of Arabic prevented them from gaining what might have been vital information from him. Having moved on a little in case he informed anyone of their position, they halted again and took stock. They all knew now that the weather had become a more fearsome enemy than the Iraqis, and would kill them more quickly and efficiently if they pressed on into the devastating wind. Despite the cold, they were dehydrated, and they knew that water would soon become a serious problem. Although the Syrian border was only twelve hours' march away, McNab probably doubted that Bravo Two Zero could make it intact through another such night as the two they had already endured. On the other hand, there was a main road nearby, and by the sound of it, there were vehicles in plenty. Why not simply take one and make a last, desperate bid for freedom? It would be a risky gambit, but whatever happened, it would be better than freezing slowly to death in the desert. They decided that they would wait until dark, then hijack the first vehi�cle that came along the road from whatever direction. It was no doubt the right decision, but it was ultimately to sign the death warrants of two of McNab's group, and to consign the rest to weeks of torture and incarceration.
CHAPTER eleven FROM THE POINT WHERE THE patrol had split I had the option of following either McNab's or Ryan's route. Though I was still anxious to find out what had happened to Vince Phillips, I decided to go with McNab as far as the place where he and his team were captured or killed, then double back to the point of divergence and follow Ryan, Phillips and Stan. I crossed the ragged, boulder-strewn country to the south of the road, working towards the granite ridge that marked the table-land where both Ryan's and McNab's groups had lain up on 25 January. The MSR itself came as something of a surprise. Both Ryan and McNab repeat the intelligence brief they had received before the operation, declaring that the road was a system of tracks amalgamated together, varying in width from two and a half kilometres to 600 metres. I had followed the MSR as far as Abbas's place already and had found no sign of this vast rural highway: up to that point, at least, it had been a narrow country road, asphalted in places. There was no sign on the map that it ever got any wider, and though it wasn't asphalted where I was now crossing, it seemed extremely unlikely that it had ever been more extensive than it was. Bounded on the northern side by the ridge, it could never have expanded far in that direction, and to the south it ran through flat fields of millions of boulders. Unless these boulders had appeared since 1991, it was inconceivable that the road had been wider in that direction either. Perhaps the MSR might be an amalgam of tracks further west, but here it was an ordinary country track, no more than five metres wide. I wondered where the intelligence report about the road had originated, and why McNab and Ryan had repeated it even though they had been on the ground and must have known the reality. I crossed the MSR and climbed the ridge, finding myself on the stark plateau that lay between here and the second MSR to the north � the road McNab's party had reached by the evening of 26 January. The two roads did not run parallel, but formed sides of a trian�gle, meaning that the plateau was wider the further west you went. According to McNab's intelligence brief, the land did not drop more than fifty metres between here. and the next road, and this at least looked accurate. In fact, the area was mind-bogglingly uniform, so stark and clean that it strained the senses. The occasional blemish on the surface looked grotesque and gigantic, drawing the eye towards it automatically,' while close up it resolved into nothing more than a pebble or a tin can. Here, the Bedouin tents were fewer, and all day I walked on into a shimmering haze. Often I had the familiar feel�ing that I was not making progress at all, just marking time on the same spot while the horizon remained equi�distant before me, and the sky beat out a percussion of unforgiving heat. In such nothingness, even the small details on the surface become meaningful � the track of a lizard or a scorpion, the bones of a dead bird, frag�ments of rope fibre left behind by a shepherd, a circle of stones that was the only trace of a nomad camp. As time passed I began to make out strange shapes before me: humps of earth that stood out unnaturally, reflecting the light in unexpected colours. In the far distance there were pylons whose heads hovered on the skyline; occa�sionally I would spot a moving truck bloated by the distorting shimmer. After about twenty kilometres the land began to furrow and break up a little, and I saw that the strange earth�works to my immediate front were in the centre of some sort of huge installation with a barbed-wire fence running about five kilometres along its periphery. There were out-buildings and watch-towers, and my pace became warier until I realized that the fence was derelict and the place uninhabited and overgrown. It hit me very suddenly that this was an abandoned military installation of some importance and, consulting my map, I noticed that it was marked as a large sealed compound with a road leading to it. Close up, it was obvious that the place was not only abandoned, but totally wrecked. The ziggurats of earth I had seen from way back were the walls of craters, and there were masses of ruined masonry, including entire walls of stressed concrete that had been torn apart and hurled aside like a giant's building bricks. Evidently the installation had been of strategic importance � a command centre, a biological warfare plant, a Scud control centre, even a nuclear plant. Either it had been hit by wave after wave of Allied bombers during the war, or it had been demolished since under UN supervision. It occurred to me suddenly that this must have been the place the anti-aircraft guns McNab saw had been guard�ing � at about fifteen kilometres from Abbas's house, it was also the place to which Abbas would have sent his messenger, which explained why it had taken the military so long to get back to the scene of the firelight. It might also account for the amount of military activity McNab says was evident in the area. The bombing runs that had come in over this region � even those that Abbas said had accidentally killed Bedouin and destroyed buildings nearby � had probably been intended for this place. The installation was huge, and I wondered if that fact might substantiate McNab's statement (in an interview with the BBC in 2000) that there were more than three thousand Iraqi troops in the area: 'effectively two armoured brigades that shouldn't have been there, that intelligence hadn't picked up. They only discovered this four days after we arrived.'23 Judging by the size of it, this compound could easily have contained three thousand troops, but McNab does not make reference to these two armoured brigades in his book. He recalls seeing armoured personnel carriers at various stages, but not the tanks one would expect to comprise an armoured unit (as opposed to a mechanized infantry unit). Since the com�pound is clearly marked on the map, Military Intelligence must h
ave known it existed, and must also have been aware at least of the possibility of its being protected by large numbers of men. If they were there, though, I found no evidence that they contributed to Bravo Two Zero's compromise � the only evidence I had uncovered indi�cated that the patrol had been spotted and shot up by three civilians. Leaving the installation on my right, I started to descend into a deep valley criss-crossed with stripes of yellow wheat. In the distance the pylons suddenly came into clear focus, running across my front only a stone's throw from the road that ran north-west to the towns of Krabilah and al-Qaim on the Syrian border, and south�east to al-Haqlaniya. Somewhere along that road, I knew, McNab and his group had hijacked a car on the evening of 26 January 1991. The plan had been for three of the group to hide in the ditch nearby, while McNab and Consiglio posed as Iraqi soldiers, one of whom was badly wounded. They would flag down a vehicle and, as soon as it stopped, the others would pile out with their weapons and heist the car. McNab and Consiglio were probably assigned the front job because they were both dark � McNab half Greek and Consiglio half Italian � and were more likely to be taken for Iraqis than the others. At last light, the two of them stood on the roadside with some trepidation, knowing that this was the make�or-break gambit. As the sound of an engine came to their ears, heading from the direction of Krabilah, Consiglio lay in McNab's arms, groaning, playing the wounded soldier, while McNab began to flash his torch anxiously at the oncoming lights. The vehicle stopped and, to his amazement, McNab saw that they had halted a full-blown New York Yellow Cab, straight out of a 1950s movie, complete with chrome bumpers and white-walled tyres. As the driver and two passengers climbed out to help, they found themselves staring into the muzzles of automatic weapons produced by three desperadoes in camouflage who had just jumped out of the ditch. One of the passengers, McNab said, was so terrified that he pro.; duced a Madonna and whimpered that he was a Christian, pointing to the driver and repeating, .'Muslim! Muslim!' The driver himself was having hysterics, screaming that the cab was his livelihood and that he couldn't survive without it. Ignoring the bickering, McNab and his team shoved the three Iraqis into the ditch and piled into the car, turning it back towards Krabilah. With McNab himself driving, they screeched off on what they hoped would be the last leg of their escape and evasion route. It was warm in the cab, and luxurious after the condi-tions they had endured for the past few days, and for a moment they felt euphoric. But their triumph was short-lived. On the outskirts of Krabilah they ran into a permanent VCP (vehicle checkpoint), where Iraqi soldiers were checking the traffic. They stopped the car in the queue and waited tensely as a guard made his way up the line of vehicles. Suddenly the man pressed his face against the window on the left-hand side and Legs Lane � in the front passenger seat � fired one round across McNab's body, shattering the glass and dropping the man instantly. The patrol then piled out of the taxi shooting blind towards the VCP as all hell broke loose. Civilian drivers threw themselves into the footwells of their vehicles while two more guards running for cover on the right were cut down in their tracks by bursts from the Minimis The first men across the road put down covering fire until the oth�ers were across, then all five SAS men raced into the desert, followed by a hail of rounds from the VCP and a roar of engines and screaming voices. The entire contact, McNab reckoned, had taken all of thirty seconds. That night I slept without my bivvy-bag on an exposed ridge similar to the one McNab describes, behind a cairn of stones, trying to at least get an idea of what it had been like for them. As an experiment it failed completely � it was so warm that I slept like a log. The next morning there was exciting news. While I had been walking, Nigel Morris had been scouring the entire Anbar region trying to find the hijacked taxicab itself. This was not the needle in the haystack it had first looked like because we knew from the newspaper piece we'd been handed in Baghdad that the vehicle was a commu�nal taxi registered as Anbar 73'. Since the number of such vehicles was obviously limited and since the police kept a record of them all, Nigel had been able to trace it to the town of Rumadi. After some brilliant detective work, he had actually discovered the cab in a garage in the town � on its last legs, he reported, but still running. He had had it sent to Krabilah on a lorry, and I later asked Abbas to go and pick it up. I also enquired if there was any news of Adnan Badawi, the man who had apparently been a passenger in the taxi when it had been hijacked, but Nigel told me the Ministry had been unable to reach him. There was only a brief walk that morning, over undu-lating country, under the line of pylons and out to a high ridge overlooking the main road. As I stood there enjoy�ing the view, a pick-up turned up with local officials, demanding to know what was going on. They were quickly soothed by Ali and our military escort. I descended to the road and walked along it until I had sat�isfied myself that I was at least within the rough area of the hijack. All I had to do now was to wait for Abbas and the taxi to arrive. The road wasn't particularly busy, and few vehicles passed. In the early afternoon, though, I heard the grind of gears and saw a white saloon approaching me from the direction of Krabilah. I stood up as it came nearer and, slowing to a halt, I was astonished to see that Abbas was driving. 'What's this?' I demanded, after we'd greeted each other. `This is the taxi that was hijacked,' Abbas said. 'The one Adnan was riding in. You asked me to bring it for you.' I examined the vehicle carefully. It was not and clearly never had been a New York Yellow Cab. It was a com�mon Toyota Crown, clearly a great deal more than ten years old, and in poor condition. There was a large crack in the front windscreen, but it looked as if it had been made by a stone rather than a bullet, and the window on the driver's side, which McNab said Legs had shot the soldier through, appeared both original and intact. There were no chrome bumpers or white-walled tyres, and no tassels or other decorations in the interior. Finally I checked the registration, which consisted of only two numbers � 73 � exactly as noted in the newspaper report. `But this can't be it,' I said. 'This is a Toyota Crown, and the hijacked car was a yellow New York taxi.' Abbas chuckled. 'There are no yellow taxis in Iraq,' he told me. 'There aren't even any yellow cars. Someone must have been joking with you.' I wondered if the number plate might have been changed, but Nigel later confirmed that this was the orig�inal car registered as Anbar 73', and told me that it had actually changed hands seven times since 1991. For that reason he had not been able to fmd the original driver, Ahmad al-Hitawi, and though Uday had managed to contact Adnan Badawi in Mosul, he had refused to talk to us. I didn't like the sound of this, as it suggested he might be covering something up, but I consoled myself with the fact that we had Abbas, who had heard the story from Adnan first-hand, and also the newspaper cutting. I asked Abbas if he knew the exact spot where the hijacking had taken place, and he told me that he had a very good idea. I got in the car beside him and, as he accelerated, I had to remind myself that this was the actual car McNab and the others had driven off in on that day ten years earlier, even if it wasn't a New York Yellow Cab as McNab had written. The place Abbas drove me to stood in a slight dip in the road, with a machine-made ditch on the northern side � the right-hand side looking towards Krabilah. Abbas confessed that he wasn't absolutely certain that this was the place � he knew the country here like the back of his hand, but was only going on what Adnan had told him ten years earlier. No matter; I was certain from my own map reading that we must be within a kilometre of the spot. Abbas reminded me that we had passed some sort of industrial installation on our way. 'That was where Adnan was stationed,' he told me. 'He was a sergeant in the police, who were guarding that place. That night � 26 January � he was going to al-Haqlaniya to pick up the wages for his men. It was just before sunset, about five o'clock. He told me that he was walking along the road when this taxi came along � it was being driven by a man called Ahmad al-Hitawi who was taking his son, a soldier, back to his camp. Adnan flagged it down and got in, and before they'd gone very far they saw two men in camou�flage uniforms by the side of the road. One was lying on the gro
und, he said, and the other was beckoning to them. Adnan thought they were Iraqis and that one of them was injured � it wouldn't have been surprising if you remem�ber there were air attacks going on all over the country at that time. When they got out to see if they could help, the one lying down got up suddenly, and three others came out of hiding with weapons. Realizing they were enemy soldiers, he told them he was a Christian and talked to them in English. They decided to take him with them, offering him gold to help them, and turned the car round. They just left the other two, and drove off towards Krabilah.' I stopped him. There was a major discrepancy here with McNab's story. McNab was adamant that he had left all three Iraqis in the ditch and that the patrol had driven off on their own, whereas Abbas was telling me that they had taken Adnan with them. If this was true, then Adnan must have witnessed the firelight at the checkpoint outside Krabilah, when a number of Iraqis had been killed. I asked Abbas about this, and he shook his head. 'He didn't mention anything about Iraqis being killed,' he told me. 'He said that they came to the checkpoint outside Krabilah, but he had already told them they would never get through, so they stopped the car before they got there and they all got out � five of them. They asked him to drive the car through the checkpoint without saying any�thing to the guards there, and to pick them up about three kilometres further on. Adnan said he pretended to go along with it and they were happy. As soon as they'd gone he drove to the checkpoint and denounced them to the police.' `He didn't talk about the commandos having shot any�one at the checkpoint?' `Definitely not. He said they left the car before they got near it.' When I thought about it, this seemed a far more reasonable account than McNab's claim to have fought his way out of a checkpoint. After all, checkpoints exist to stop people doing just that, and they are likely to be bristling with gun-emplacements. A far more workable plan � and one more in keeping with SAS principles � would have been simply to leave the car before the VCP, as Abbas described, and disappear into the desert. Staying in the queue would have made a firefight inevitable � there was no way five camouflaged men who hardly knew a word of Arabic between them were ever going to bluff their way through. But was this the truth? It all hinged on whether or not the patrol had really taken Adnan with them in the vehicle. Later, turning to the newspaper interview with Adnan himself, I found that the basic facts tallied largely with what Abbas had reported. What possible reason, there�fore, could he have in refusing to talk to us, I wondered? Did his silence indicate that this was all a set-up � that McNab was correct and that the story that he had been with them in the taxi was a lie? A careful second transla�tion of the newspaper article suggested a possible motive. First of all, Adnan stated that the patrol had offered him a large sum of money, not to help them escape, but to guide them to Iraqi military units stationed in the desert, their objective being, he said, 'to discover the strength of our forces in the area'. He added that the patrol had wanted to kill the owner of the car and his son, but that he had saved their lives by declaring that he would refuse to cooperate with the commandos if they did so. Adnan also claimed that he had warned the SAS that they would not get through the checkpoint, and 'persuaded' them to get out of the car 500 metres short of the VCP, telling them that he would pick them up three kilometres further on. These additions seemed to me to be false. The idea that the exhausted, starving SAS team had demanded to be taken to see Iraqi military units when they were desper-ate to get away from them was ludicrous. And the upstanding Iraqi citizen who had saved the lives of his co-nationalists did not sound much like the man who, according to McNab, had screamed that he was a Christian to preserve his own life, and pointed out that the others were Muslims. If this is true, then he had obvi�ously been terrified by McNab and the others into helping them, and had sought to cover that up by portraying him�self as a more active mover and shaker in the story. He had saved the country by diverting the enemy from their mission and tricking them at the VCP. It was pure specu�lation, of course, but I guessed that he had refused to cooperate with us because he feared we knew the truth. This was a fascinating sideline, but Adnan's pretensions to heroism did not affect the question of whether he had been in the car with the SAS as far as the checkpoint, or if he had been left behind in the desert as McNab wrote. At the end of the article, though, came a clincher that erased any reasonable doubt: Adnan let drop that 'the leader's name was Steven'. Even if he had somehow man�aged to get hold of a copy of Bravo Two Zero, which was not available in Iraq, how, unless he had actually estab�lished some kind of rapport with McNab, could he possibly have known his real name? Ryan corroborates both Adnan's story and my theory that his alleged heroism was a cover for his abject terror. Presumably quoting from what McNab or one of the oth�ers had told him after their return to Britain, Ryan writes that the patrol took one man with them in the car because he looked so terrified that they thought he might help them. He adds that they got out of the car before the checkpoint, having arranged that the Iraqi would pick them up further on, whereupon he promptly shopped them to the police. CHAPTER twelve THE ROAD TO KRABILAH TOOK US through villages of breeze-block shanties standing among the debris of industrial society: goats and sheep nuzzled around dis-carded tyres, engine-blocks, hulks of vehicles and piles of non-biodegradable rubbish. There were run-down mili�tary camps: S60 guns without crews, armoured personnel carriers looking battered and immobile. Parked along the way were dozens of oil-tankers carrying consignments of crude to Jordan. On the outskirts of Krabilah we came to a desolate-looking concrete but on the side of the road. The but was abandoned and ruined, but it had obviously once been part of a vehicle checkpoint. 'This is it,' Abbas told me. 'This is the checkpoint Adnan talked about.' I had found Bravo Two Zero's VCP, but without an eye�witness as to what had happened here on the night of 26 January 1991, it was nothing but an abandoned hut. Whatever had really taken place here, I thought, this point had marked the beginning of the end for McNab's section of the patrol. For two of them � Consiglio and Lane �that taxi ride had been the last real journey of their lives. As we pulled away from the deserted but and into the town I realized that I was sitting in the very seat that Legs Lane had sat in on that day. Krabilah was a one-horse town, a settlement spread thinly along the road to Syria, where we checked into a hotel with rooms like ovens opening off walkways that looked down on an alley. Across the street was a spacious restaurant-cum-teashop where forlorn hunks of lamb hung in the window and an immensely fat youth with balloon biceps could be seen slicing meat for kebabs with a vast blade like a miniature scythe. The owner of the restaurant was a pale, haggard-looking man called al-Haj Nur ad-Din, an engineer who had once worked at a brick factory outside Krabilah that had been destroyed by Allied bombing raids. Though he complained bitterly about the loss of the factory, Nur ad-Din welcomed us with no less courtesy than the other Iraqis I'd met. Over tea and hookah-pipes, he told me that everyone knew the story of the British commandos who had been captured or died here in 1991. Krabilah was a small town � actu�ally not much more than a village � and everything that went on here was common knowledge. It wasn't every day that such a thing happened. I asked him if there was anyone still serving in the army here who had been here in 1991. 'It wasn't army busi�ness,' Nur ad-Din said. 'It was all dealt with by the police, and a lot of ordinary citizens were involved, too. There was an alert that foreign commandos were in the area long before they were found here.' Nur ad-Din gave me the name of a police sergeant major who had been stationed in Krabilah since 1991, and the minders obligingly traced him for me. He turned out to be as good an advertisement for the Iraqi police as it would have been possible to find. Ahmad was surpris�ingly young � a tall, slimly built, charming man with film-star good looks � and not in the least grizzled or ser�geant major-like. He wore olive-green fatigues, without a cap, a weapon or rank insignia � nothing but a pin bear�ing the face of Saddam Hussein on his chest. I wondered if it was some sort of medal Ahmad said he had been here in Krabilah on the night of 26 J
anuary 1991, and had been involved in hunting the British commandos and capturing one of them. `It started quite early in the evening,' he said. 'I was on duty at the main police station in Krabilah- town. A man arrived � a police sergeant who I think was a Christian from Mosul � and reported that he had been kidnapped by a group of five British commandos, who were heavily armed and carrying some sort of transmitter � a thing like a tiny computer with a keyboard. He had tricked them, he told us, by dropping them about half a kilo�metre from the checkpoint outside Krabilah and telling them he would pick them up three kilometres further on. He reported it to the police at the checkpoint, and they sent him on to the police in Krabilah.' I took out the newspaper cutting of the interview with Adnan Badawi and showed Ahmad the head and shoul-ders portrait of Adnan himself. 'Is that him?' I asked. He squinted at it and nodded. 'It looks like him,' he said. 'But don't forget it's ten years since then.' I asked if the man who had reported the kidnapping had mentioned any shooting at the VCP. 'No,' Ahmad said. 'He never mentioned shooting at all. He said the commandos just left the car and went off into the desert.' `So there were no police deaths at the checkpoint that night?' `Not at all. Nobody was killed or injured at the check�point. If they had been, I would have known, because I arrived there myself not long afterwards. Everyone was excited about the presence of the foreign commandos, but there definitely hadn't been any shooting at the VCP. The shooting came later.' I asked Ahmad to look at the taxi we had brought from Rumadi, and he confirmed that it was the vehicle Adnan had arrived in that night. Then I asked if he would take me to see where the action had taken place. With Abbas driving again, we motored several kilometres back out of Krabilah down the road we'd come in on. Ahmad stopped us at the same abandoned concrete but Abbas had shown me on the way into town. 'This was the checkpoint,' Ahmad told me, 'and it was perma�nently manned in 1991, by quite a large contingent of police. I arrived here at around eight o'clock with seven other policemen to check out what the man who'd been kidnapped had told us, and I found everything com�pletely okay � no one dead or injured. There was a lot of traffic on the road, and everyone was driving very fast because there were air raids that night. The odd thing, though, was that on our way here we passed two men trying to stop cars on the opposite (south) side of the road. One man was lying on the ground, looking hurt, and the other was flashing a torch at the cars, but no one was stopping � everyone was driving on very fast. The man from Mosul was with me, and I said "Is that them?" and he said "Yes. That's just what they did when they caught me." Anyway, we decided not to approach them and drove past pretending we hadn't seen anything. I don't think they noticed us.' McNab makes no mention in his book of this second attempt to hijack a vehicle. He states that, having legged it into the desert, leaving behind them three Iraqi dead and a confusion of sporadic shooting, screams and revving engines, the patrol regrouped. None of them, McNab said, could actually believe they had survived. A quick fix on the Magellan told them they were only eleven kilometres from Syria and freedom. Judging by their previous speed, they should have been able to cover this in under ninety minutes. McNab knew that they had to make it that night, because there was little chance of the patrol being able to lay up safely here the following day. They set off west at a jogging pace, soon entering an area of habitation where dogs barked and generators hummed. They were near enough to the road to see that it was already being patrolled by armoured personnel carriers, and suddenly the moon came out, making their light-coloured desert camouflage suits stand out like bea�cons. Suddenly, they were spotted. Three or four vehicles screeched to a halt and disgorged soldiers, who began blazing away at them. Anxious to conserve the little ammunition left to them, they ran for it, covering four hundred metres at breakneck speed. Coming over a crest, they saw the lights of Abu Kamal in Syria twinkling tantalizingly in the distance, so near and yet so far away. `I could almost taste the place,' McNab wrote. As they cleared the crest they were highlighted and seen by an anti-aircraft battery, which opened up on them, and they switched north, sprinting across a road and into a built-up area that led down to the banks of the Euphrates. I asked Ahmad if he could remember the place he had seen the SAS men, and he replied that it was easy, because it had been by a road-bridge about three kilome�tres from the VCP. We drove back towards the town until we came to a concrete bridge with iron railings, where Ahmad told Abbas to stop and we jumped out. 'This is where they were when I first saw them,' Ahmad said, `and they were still here when we got back. By that time we had managed to collect about seven vehicles at the checkpoint and about thirty men, some police, some just armed civilians. When the commandos saw so many vehicles together, they must have realized we'd spotted them and they ran off quickly and hid somewhere over there.' He pointed to some undulating folds in the land�scape not more than three hundred metres away and I wandered over there with him. To the west the land fell sharply into the dry bed of a wadi that evidently ran into the Euphrates � hence the bridge, which formed a culvert across the road. On the opposite side of the road, the north side, I could see the lush greenness of the river val�ley, the spiky heads of palm trees and tamarisks, and beyond them clear across to the other bank. To my imme- diate south-west was a line of traditional-looking rural houses, which might have been the habitation McNab mentions. Further west, past the houses, a graded track of some kind appeared to run parallel to the wadi we stood near. Ahmad pointed west, past the houses. 'That was where we stopped,' he said. 'On that track about five hundred metres from here. Rather than attack them, we thought the best bet was to surround them and cut off their escape, so we jumped out of the vehicles over there and spread out along the track. As we did that, they started shooting.' Remembering that McNab said the Iraqis had initiated the firefight as soon as the vehicles came to a halt � and bearing in mind that the SAS were short of ammunition � I quizzed him again over this. 'No, I'm certain it was them who opened fire,' he said. 'Our object was to cap�ture them, not to kill them.' `Were any of your men hit?' `No. No one was hit. They only fired a few shots and we fired back in a salvo. It went on for about ten minutes. They went silent and we thought we might have hit them, but we weren't sure so we didn't come straight across the wadi � we worked our way round the houses in a big cir�cle. When we got here, though, there was no one. They had got away.' I looked at the road to my right, recalling that McNab said they had crossed a road. Surely, I thought, with the bright moonlight and the place full of traffic, that would have been a big risk. Ahmad was reading my thoughts. 'I don't think they went across the road,' he said. 'I think they went through the culvert. They must have known that it led down to the Euphrates, and anyway, that's where we caught them eventually. But at the time we knew we'd lost them and we didn't follow. It was only later that we heard they'd been spotted by other people down by the river. And we threw a cordon round it.' I wondered about McNab's statement that he had seen the lights of Abu Kamal in Syria and since this was, according to Ahmad, the furthest Bravo Two Zero had got west on this side of the road, I asked him if it was possible to see Syria from any place near here. He shook his head. 'It's too fax away,' he said. 'More than ten kilometres. You can't see Abu Kamal from here.' I also quizzed Ahmad about S60s � had any gunners opened fire on the patrol? `There were air raids on that night,' he said. 'And the anti-aircraft batteries did fire at some aircraft going over, but not at the British commandos. That would have been stupid, anyway, because S60s fire explosive shells and it would have endangered the local people � there are plenty of houses here. No, they only fired at the enemy aircraft, I'm sure of that.' In this instance, Ryan backs up McNab's story that S60s opened up on them, no doubt repeating what McNab had said at the debriefing after the war, and says that in fact it was quite helpful for the patrol because it made the Iraqis believe an air raid was on and obliged them to keep their heads down. Could it be that McNab believed the AA guns were firing at his patrol, when in fact they had opened up on enemy aircraft instead? Ryan does, however, desc
ribe the second attempt at a hijacking which Ahmad had told me about, but which McNab does not mention. He says that the patrol made three successive attempts to stop cars, but that the drivers were roaring past 'like madmen'. CHAPTER thirteen AFTER THE POLICE HAD LOST THE SAS men by the road, Ahmad said, reports had come through that they had been spotted down by the Euphrates, and local citizens had been alerted and organized into groups to cordon off the area and prevent their escape. These were not part of any formal militia, he explained, just solid local people who felt it was their duty to help the police. Eater that night Ahmad had been with a group of policemen who had shot and cap�tured one of the British commandos. Since, as far as I knew, Mike Coburn was the only member of the patrol injured in the contacts that night, I assumed he was the one Ahmad was referring to. FOR WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SAS patrol after they had eluded the police that night, we have to rely on McNab's account. When they came under fire by the S60 battery, he says, the patrol crossed a road into a built-up area that led down to the banks of the Euphrates. Passing through the estate as silently as ghosts, they came across cultivation trails that led down to the river about 150 metres away. They holed up in a plantation, and McNab sent two men to fill all the water-bottles in the river, ready for a final push. When they returned, the five of them considered their options. They could withdraw to the east, lie up for the following day and have another crack at the border tomorrow night, or they could head north, crossing the river. They could press on west and make a final play for the border the same night as a patrol, or they could split up and every man take his chance. Pulling back to the east was out, they decided, because the area was too densely populated to hide in for another day. As for the river, it was in spate after the snow and rain, and its edges rimmed with ice: in their debilitated condition they would have lasted about ten minutes in the freezing waters, McNab reckoned. The only other option was to make a last-ditch attempt to reach Syria together that night. They started off, patrolling tactically in file, moving parallel with the Euphrates, seeing headlights streaming over a bridge in the distance. Soon they came across a deep wadi which seemed to curve round to the west, their direction of march. A good twenty-five metres deep, the wadi would protect them from view and, with any luck, would take them as far as the border. McNab left the others spaced out, lying as still as statues, and crawled over the lip of the wadi to recce it. On the opposite side he saw the silhou�ette of a sentry stamping his feet and, behind him, to his astonishment, what appeared to be an enemy command centre: tents, buildings, vehicles, radio antennae, and many soldiers. He made his way back to where Coburn was lying and the two turned to crawl back to the patrol, coming into a semi-crouch position as they made the nearest ditch. At that moment the sentries across the wadi spotted them, and all hell let loose. Coburn hit the deck and fired off bursts from his Minimi at any muzzle-flashes he could see. McNab blasted away with his last 203 grenades and ran, heading desperately back to the banks of the Euphrates, hearing the other three letting rip with their own Minimis and 203s, but not sure where they were. He and Coburn lay in the bushes on the riverbank about ten metres below the ploughed fields. Their backs were to the river, but there was no way they were going to attempt to cross it, McNab said. When four Iraqis came cautiously along the bank towards them, he and Coburn bumped them and legged it west across a ploughed field. From the road to the south there came the sound of yelling and blazing lights. McNab popped his head inquisitively through a hedgerow, only to find himself challenged by an Iraqi, whom Coburn shot to pieces with his Minimi. McNab blatted away with his rifle, covering Coburn as he scrambled through the hedge. They retreated fast, but the area was now buzzing with activity. It was about 0400 hours and only two hours of dark-ness remained. If they did not penetrate the Syrian frontier before first light, McNab knew, they were as good as finished. They shimmied over a six-foot-high chain-link fence and found themselves facing a massive convoy of vehicles: trucks, Land-Cruisers and armoured person�nel carriers, parked along a road. Half the Iraqi army, it must have felt like, had been assigned to kill or capture Bravo Two Zero that night. McNab spotted a five-metre gap between two trucks and they decided to make a dash through it. As they cleared another fence a soldier stuck his head out of a truck window. McNab shot him, then fired a burst into the back of the truck and lobbed an L2 grenade for good measure: 'the sounds of screaming filled the night' was the result. On the opposite side of the road they blasted away until they ran out of ammunition � which lasted 'all of five seconds', McNab says � then dropped their useless weapons and ran off across some garbage pits where small fires smouldered. As they did so, two AK47s opened up on them. Coburn was hit and went down, while McNab raced off to the right, believing that the Kiwi was dead. He was still confident, telling himself that he was now through the last contact and that there were only four kilometres to go. In normal circum�stances he could have run that in twenty minutes. WE DROVE BACK THROUGH Krabilah, taking a right turn down to the river through a patchwork of cul-tivated fields where pumps rattled and thumped turning iron wheels on antique fan-belts to irrigate the reddish earth. Ahmad told Abbas to stop by a muddy field lying on the banks of a wadi which curved east down towards the river. The wadi was a deep one; beyond it I could see the green heads of palms and eucalyptus lining the Euphrates. Ahmad showed me a ditch running along the verge between the road and the field, about a metre deep. 'This is where we were,' he said. 'There were seven or eight of us, all police. We had a couple of Land-Cruisers with us which were parked on the road. We had been alerted that the British commandos had been spotted in this area, and we were ready for them, here in the ditch Suddenly a man came crawling over the lip of the wadi towards us and we shouted at him to stop. He didn't so we opened fire. He was carrying only a bayonet, which he dropped when we started shooting. He screamed out something in English. I told the men to stop firing and I went over to him, followed by a few others. He was badly wounded in the foot and the arm, and blood was pouring out � he had sort of turned over on his side by the time we got there. We searched him to make sure he had no more weapons, then we lifted him up to take him to the vehicle. He was shivering from the cold and shock, and when he was in the Land-Cruiser I wrapped him in a blanket. He said, "Thank you," in English. `We took him straight to the hospital, where the doctor examined him and said he had lost a lot of blood and needed a transfusion. He asked for volunteers. I offered to give blood but I was the wrong blood group. Two of my companions also offered blood and one was accepted. He was given a transfusion and the doctor said it saved his life.' This was interesting because McNab says that Coburn was treated very differently on his way to captivity, stat�ing that the policemen in the vehicles roared with laughter every time the vehicle went over a bump, send�ing crippling pain through his wounded ankle In fact, McNab does not even mention that Coburn was taken to a hospital at all, and denies that he received medical treat�ment at all for his foot, which he says was just left to heal by itself. He says that the Kiwi was chained naked to a bed and left to rot, and that his, captors would regularly torture him by putting pressure on his wounds. I asked Ahmad if the prisoner had been mistreated on the way to the hospital. He shook his head. 'We had very strict orders not to molest prisoners,' he said. 'Not just these men, I mean, but any prisoners. Anyone � certainly anyone who was not an officer � would have got into big trouble if he had touched them without permission. And this man was seriously wounded � he would have died without a transfusion. Of course, I can't say what hap�pened when he left the hospital, but I know he got the best treatment there.' I recalled the story of an SAS warrant officer who had been captured by the Iraqis in a separate operation in the Gulf War. His leg had been badly smashed up by gunshot wounds, but he had been operated on by a British-trained Iraqi surgeon, who had done such a brilliant job on his leg that when he was repatriated he had needed no fur�ther treatment. Ahmad's story of offering blood, and the doctor's anxiousness to save Coburn's life seemed to be
consistent with that, and all the little details � the blanket, the way he was lifted by the police � seemed to ring true. That he was taken to a hospital and given a transfusion was confirmed that night by a man named Zayid, who had been a medical orderly at the hospital on 26 January 1991, and who was introduced to me by al-Haj Nur ad-Din, the teashop-owner who had found me Ahmad. 'It's true he was given a transfusion,' Zayid said. 'And he wasn't mistreated, although I did accuse him of being an Israeli, and he got very angry about that, saying, "No! No! English! English!" But no one beat him up or any�thing. Why would they?' `You might have been angry about the people he and his comrades had killed and injured � your own people.' Zayid looked at me in surprise. 'But no one was killed,' he said, 'and if anyone had been injured they would have been brought to the hospital and I would have known. The only one brought to the hospital was this man.' I asked Ahmad if he could verify this. 'There was no one killed that night,' he confirmed. 'There wasn't anyone injured � nothing. I was at the hospital too, so I also would have known if anyone else had been hurt. The Englishman was the only one injured � one of the commandos was killed, of course, but there were none of our men in the hospital. This is a small place and I knew all the policemen who were on duty that night. I can tell you that not one Iraqi was killed or injured by the commandos, and you can ask anyone you like.' I actually went about in my spare moments over the next two days doing just that. Though almost everyone who had been here ten years previously appeared to know about Bravo Two Zero and the gun-battle, no one recalled any Iraqis having been shot. THAT NIGHT I THOUGHT OVER WHAT Ahmad and the others had told me. I was reluctant to believe that McNab and his men hadn't caused any casualties at all, but again, what would be the profit in the Iraqis lying about it? After all, if your house gets broken into by a burglar who takes your priceless stamp collection, there is little to be gained by claiming that nothing is missing. If this was a propaganda ploy, then surely it had misfired it would clearly have been to the Iraqis' advantage to maintain that Bravo Two Zero had killed even more than they had, in order to justify some of Saddam Hussein's excesses during the war, and certainly they had taken every opportunity to gain the world's sympathy by publi�cizing the deaths of Iraqi civilians and children in the Amiriya Bunker in Baghdad. McNab says in his book that intelligence sources revealed later that his eight-man patrol had accounted for at least 250 Iraqi casualties during their operation, which, for McNab's group, lasted from 22 January to 27 January. In effect, though, the active period ran only between 1600 hours on 24 January and the early hours of 27 January �less than three days. Apart from the alleged shoot-out at the VCP, the only major contacts McNab relates are the firelight near Abbas's farm and the series of gun-battles here in Krabilah between sunset on 26 January and sun�rise the following morning. I tried to apply some simple addition to the process. At the 'Abbas shoot-out' McNab claimed fifteen were killed and many more wounded, so for the sake of argument I assumed that the total count was about forty-five. There were also the three guards at the checkpoint to take into consideration � a theoretical total of forty-eight. Even if these contacts happened just as McNab describes them, and bearing in mind that all the evidence from eyewit�nesses suggested that there were no Iraqi casualties during either incident, the number of deaths still only amounted to about a fifth of the total McNab stated. That meant that in the final encounter at Krabilah � less, of course, anyone Ryan and his group accounted for independently � the SAS must have taken out up to two hundred men. Ryan stated that Consiglio himself came up against twelve men in his contact, so assuming that he hit them all � though there is no evidence that he hit any � that still left about 188 bodies unaccounted for. What troubled me most, though, was the question of ammunition. McNab constantly emphasized how little the patrol had. Half of the original amount had been used up in the initial firefight, and after the second con�tact on 26 January, he himself had about one and a half magazines left and Coburn a hundred rounds of link for the Minimi, a total of about a hundred and forty-five rounds between them. Legs and Dinger had thirty rounds of link for the machine-gun and one magazine � sixty rounds in all. No one knows how many rounds Bob Consiglio had, but let us average it out at fifty: that makes a sum total of about 250 rounds for the whole patrol. Although the SAS may be good shots, even the best marksman in the world cannot hit a target every round in a combat situation. A hit every ten shots is a pretty good average, but the idea that the patrol, weak, exhausted, under extreme pressure and fighting at night, could have hit an Iraqi every 1.25 shots beggars belief. Peter Ratcliffe, for one, has challenged the claim. This veteran of twenty-five years' experience with the Regiment has pointed out that, according to current military theory, it would take a battalion of 500 to destroy an enemy com�pany of one hundred, and at least 1250 men to take out 250. 'Actually,' Ratcliffe added wryly, 'it is a great pity that McNab was captured and Ryan escaped, because otherwise � at the rate they were killing Iraqis � the war might have been over in a week.' CHAPTER fourteen THE CONTACT WITH THE SENTRIES at McNab's `command centre' was the point at which the patrol finally fragmented into three: McNab and Coburn, Dinger and Lane, and Consiglio. I had accounted for the capture of one of them � Coburn � and now I began to look for eyewitnesses who could tell me about the others. Al-Haj Nur ad-Din, the engineer turned teashop-owner, told me that he knew of at least two men who had been involved in the capture of one of the British commandos on Rummani, an island in the Euphrates facing Krabilah. This immediately rang true, because I knew that Lane and Dinger had swum across the Euphrates to an island, unnamed in either Ryan's or McNab's texts, where they had taken refuge in a pump-house. Nur ad-Din said that he knew the actual pump-house involved and offered to take me across to Rummani and show it to me. SINCE DINGER HAS PRODUCED NO public record of the events of that night, we have to rely once again on Ryan and McNab. After the contact at the deep wadi, McNab says, Dinger and Legs, now separated from the others, realized that they could never fight their way through with their limited ammunition. Although they had previously rejected the idea of crossing the river, it was now their only option. At the water's edge they tried, with no success, to unchain a small boat, so instead they launched themselves into the icy waters of the Euphrates. The water was so cold it took their breath away, but they swam about a hundred metres across to a sand spit, where they lay quaking and gasping for a long time. The only way off the spit was past a pontoon bridge, about 250 metres to their west, on which they could see a roadblock. From the south bank there came sporadic fir�ing and the play of flashlights on the water. Their camouflage suits were already freezing on them, and if they remained where they were, they would soon be dead. There was no choice but to try and breast the main river, which was about five hundred metres across. They found a polystyrene box, which they broke up and stuffed into their smocks, then they waded out into the water and started to swim. The cold sapped their energy, and they let their weapons slip out of their hands. By the time they touched bottom on the other side, they had been carried a kilometre and a half downstream, and Legs was inca�pable of wading ashore. Dinger found a small pump-house on the bank and dragged his friend into it. He began to heat some water with his last Hexamine block, but it was too late � Legs was no longer compos mentis and he knocked the mug of steaming liquid aside. At first light, Dinger pulled his comrade into the sun-light. The fields by the river were already full of Fellahin, the sedentary peasants of the Euphrates and Tigris val-leys, and according to both Ryan and McNab, Dinger deliberately surrendered to one of them, who locked them in the hut. When the man ran off to tell others, Dinger broke out and made off, only to run into a big gang of local people, who surrounded him, knocked him down and tied him up. One of the men pulled a knife and threatened to cut off his ear, but at this point Dinger brought out his gold sovereigns, which the crowd fought over. He was rescued from them by a group of soldiers, who had evidently, McNab said, had orders to capture him alive. He was taken acr
oss the river in a convoy and delivered to a camp, where he was severely beaten. While he was there, Legs was brought in on a stretcher and put into an ambulance. He was completely motionless, and Dinger feared that his comrade was dead. That was the last he ever saw of him. This must be the account Dinger gave at the debrief afterwards, for Ryan's version is virtually identical, except for a few details � significantly, in view of what Ahmad had told me, that it was the police rather than the army who took him away, and a police station rather than a camp in which he last saw Legs. NUR AD-DIN GUIDED ME THROUGH the streets of Krabilah, turning off on a road which led down to the pontoon bridge which is mentioned at least twice in McNab's account. Slightly east of the bridge was a landing-place where several ancient and battered-looking boats were moored, and I wondered if it was one of these same vessels that Dinger and Legs had tried to cut loose that night. Standing at the water's edge, I saw that the bridge was about 250 metres west of the landing-place. At first I concluded that this must have been where they set off from, but when Nur ad-Din reminded me that the river had been much higher in January 1991, I guessed that the landing-place itself must have been the spit of land on which they had lain freezing in the darkness. Ahmad told me that a weapon, still loaded, had been recovered from the river the day after the incident, a little downstream from here, confirming that the SAS men had indeed let go of their firearms. I was later able to see that weapon � a Minimi light machine-gun � in Baghdad. After a great deal of bargaining, we managed to hire a steel canoe from one of the friendly but dishevelled boat�men at the landing-place, and pushed off downstream towards Rummani. The Euphrates bore little resem�blance to the fearsome torrent it must have been in January 1991. It was deep blue and utterly tranquil, bor�dered by lush thickets of phragmites reeds and tussocks of halfa grass, where egrets and herons roosted and pied kingfishers hovered. The current was strong and I could feel the water pulling at the vessel as the boatman fought to swing it round towards the shore of Rummani. Suddenly Nur ad-Din pointed to a squat cabin of grey breeze-blocks standing a good fifty metres from the shore-line on a rise among clumps of high bushes. 'That's it!' he told me. 'That's the place.' The boatman looped around, surfing the current, and brought us in to the swampy shore. In January 1991, of course, the waterline would have been much higher and nearer to the cabin. It was only a few minutes' walk to the hut, a crudely built structure with a gaping hole in the wall through which I could see a greasy pump-engine �now silent � attached to a pipe that obviously fed water into a catch-basin outside, from where it was chanelled to fields of wheat and apricot orchards beyond. There was a thin steel door at the back and I entered, crouching on the oil-saturated floor to spend a few minutes in silent medi�tation for Steven Lane, a courageous British soldier who had spent his last hours here. I knew I must be the first of Lane's own tribe to visit the place since his death. There was no one about, but Nur ad-Din led me across a field of golden wheat to an orchard, where children began to gather excitedly round us, showing us a gigantic � and poisonous � green snake they had just killed. We asked if there were any adults around and eventually a thickset old man appeared, a tremendously powerful-looking individual in a ragged dishdasha and knotted shamagh. I told him that I was interested in the British soldiers who had hidden in the pump-house ten years ago and he nodded vigorously. 'I remember that morning,' he said. 'I was with some others and we saw a foreigner lurk�ing in the bushes. Someone fired a shot over his head and he gave himself up. He was unarmed except for a knife �I think he had some grenades with him � and we tied his arms behind his back and took him off to the police head-quarters in Krabilah on a tractor.' `Was he beaten up?' I asked. `No, not at all. We pushed him down on his knees, tied him and searched him for weapons � he was carrying a bayonet and two grenades. But nobody touched him apart from that.' `Did anyone threaten to cut off his ear?' `No, of course not.' Did he give you any gold?' `I know nothing about gold.' `What about the other man � the one in the pump-house?' `He was dying of cold when they found him. He was still alive when they took him away, though.' I cross-questioned the old man, whose name was Mohammed, carefully over the next hour, but he stuck resolutely to his story, that Dinger had not been beaten by his captors. In the end I was satisfied he was telling the truth about this, although I wasn't certain about the gold sovereigns � he shifted niftily away from the subject whenever I came back to it Finally, I asked him if he would swear by God that Dinger was not beaten. The great British Arabist Gertrude Bell wrote that the Fellahin of Iraq traditionally placed great store in oaths by God, which were considered blasphemy if the swearer were not telling the truth. 'All who hear the oath,' she wrote, 'know beyond question that if the speaker is foresworn, his temerity will bring upon him within the year a judgement greater and more inexorable than that of man.' Mohammed swore quite readily in front of the large crowd that had collected around us. When I had finished the interview, he brought me a huge dish of fresh apricots. I stayed on Rummani until the evening, reluctant to return to the noise and dust of Krabilah. It felt like a world left behind by the modern age, a small enclave of tradition, a haven of peace. For the Fellahin who lived here � the settled, farming tribes of the Euphrates � life cannot have changed much since Babylonian times. They live in the same mud-built houses, use the same tools and live by much the same laws as they did in the days of Hammurabi. The influence of the rivers � the Tigris and the Euphrates � is dominant in the lives of these peasants, and throughout the millennia they have been exposed to the incursions of invaders from the deserts. Their history is one of unending struggle against nature and against outsiders � to them, with six thousand years' uninter�rupted existence along this shore, the SAS must have been no more than just another bunch of 'barbarian invaders'. I sat by the pump-house until the sun turned the sky transparent gold and the blue waters of the river became oil-black, watching fishing smacks drifting lazily on the current and kingfishers hovering and diving. By evening, a considerable number of Fellahin had collected, anxious to find out what was happening, and many of them appeared to know the story of Legs and Dinger. It had become a local legend � even children who weren't born then had heard the tale. I found one young man, Farraj, a solid-looking, articulate youth of about twenty, who told me he had been with the men who had captured Dinger, and had seen Legs in the pump-house. 'I was only a boy then,' he said. Tut I remember it like yesterday. It was mid-morning, I think, when they spotted this man in the fields wearing camouflage, and someone fired over his head with an AK47. He stopped at once and put his hands up and we surrounded him and tied his hands behind his back. He didn't try to fight, and he wasn't car�rying any weapons, except maybe a knife � or a bayonet � and some grenades. There were no policemen involved. We put him on a tractor and took him across the river to the police station � it had to be a tractor because it was the only vehicle that could cross the ford.' `Were the men here already looking for him? Did they know the hunt was on for these commandos?' `No, we only knew about it afterwards.' `Then how come someone was walking around with an AK47?' `Everyone here has weapons � it's illegal, but nobody bothers. When they spotted the man someone just went into his house and got his rifle.' Tut didn't you hear a lot of firing the previous night?' `No, nothing.' `Was the man beaten up when he was captured?' `Not at all. They forced him down on his knees and tied his hands, but nothing more.' `What about the other commando � the one in the pump-house?' `I was with the group who went to get him and I saw him lying in the hut. He was in a bad way, you could tell, and his eyes were totally lifeless. The men I was with car- tied him out of the but and lit a fire, hoping that it would save him, but he cringed away from the flames, probably thinking they meant to burn him. He was put on a stretcher and taken across the river, but I am sure he was still alive at that time.' CHAPTER fifteen LIKE THE ARMY OF ANCIENT SPARTA, an SAS patrol is built on a complement of pairs � the buddy-buddy system � which is one of the reasons David Stirling reduced the basic patr
ol unit from his original concept of five to four. Bravo Two Zero was essentially two four-man patrols welded together for a single job. When the patrol ran into a wall of fire at the wadi on the night of 26 January, the instinct was to fragment into pairs, leaving Bob Consiglio, who was last man, or tail-end Charlie, on his own. Later, Legs and Dinger heard several contacts going on � one of them an extended fire-fight with a Minimi, followed by silence, which they assumed was Bob's last stand. McNab says that Bob went forward and tried to fight his way out of a contact, but was hit in the head by a round that came out of his stomach and ignited a phosphorus grenade in his web�bing, dying instantly. Ryan reports that Bob held off the Iraqis for thirty minutes single-handedly, and assumes that he took out many Iraqis before he finally ran out of ammunition and was killed. AHMAD TOLD ME THAT ON THE morning of 27 January, he had seen the body of one of the British com-mandos, badly burned, lying in the middle of a track that led down to the Euphrates. He said that there was a local citizen, a lawyer named Subhi, who had been present at the time the SAS man had been shot. In fact, Subhi was one of those who had shot him. Subhi turned out to be the very opposite of the gracious Ahmad. Small, power�ful and tight-lipped, he spoke in a sibilant whisper and looked like everyone's idea of a villain out of. The Arabian Nights. Nevertheless, he was frank and articulate and I had no reason to believe he was telling me anything but the truth. He and Ahmad took me to the place where Bob had been shot. The track meandered through some ancient ruins � a shapeless and unidentifiable mound of baked mud � and turned sharply at right angles past a narrow feeder canal down to a few mud-brick houses and a grove of trees at the water's edge. The Euphrates was near �perhaps two hundred metres away � but that winter it must have been much higher. Ahmad demonstrated how the commando had been lying, face-up, in the middle of the track. This surprised me, because I had imagined Bob dying surrounded by the corpses of the enemies he had felled. While Ryan definitely gives this impression, McNab merely says that Bob fought his way aggressively out of a contact, and that seemed to be nearer to the facts � at least as indicated by the site of his body. `It was about two o'clock on the morning of 27 January,' Subhi told me, 'when we saw this man running towards us down the track. I was one of seven local citi�zens, most of us armed, who had been collected to help the police encircle this area. The foreign soldiers had been seen down here and the police were trying to cut them off. We were in that copse of trees over there by the building, quite near the water's edge, and we saw this fig�ure running towards us down the track. We shouted out to him to stop, and he shouted back something in a weak voice. Then he turned as if to go back and we opened fire. Some bullets hit him and he fell down on the track. We opened fire again. One of the rounds must have hit a grenade he had in his equipment, because it exploded and continued to burn, and all the time he was screaming words in English. He might have been trying to surrender, but none of us knew English and we weren't sure. To tell you the truth, we were a bit nervous. The rambling went on for about a quarter of an hour and then it stopped. We didn't go near him, though, until it was light. Then the police came and took the body away. It was badly burned, especially around the chest, and his equipment was burned too. He had taken a bullet in the mouth, which had probably spun him round, and another bullet had probably ignited the grenade in his pouch.' `How did you feel about shooting him?' `I was doing what I was asked to do by the government, and no one told those soldiers to enter our country. On the other hand, I was sorry, because I felt he might have been trying to surrender and we were really too nervous to take chances.' I had to bite my lip at this. Bob had died a brave man's death � a hero's death � but had it really been necessary? After all, four of the patrol were captured by the Iraqis, and though they went through interrogation and torture, all of them had lived to tell the tale, to see their families, and even to soldier on in the Regiment. Once McNab's group had hijacked the taxi, they had been drawn into an impenetrable net of roads and checkpoints and habita�tions from which it was virtually impossible to escape as a group. McNab's best move, probably, would have been to surrender at the VCP. Of course it is easy to be wise with hindsight, but the tremendous imperative not to get captured was, as it turned out, misplaced. It was partly pure chauvinism, partly fear engendered by Allied propaganda about Iraqi interrogation methods and the use of 'human shields', which proved to be exaggerated. McNab says that the SAS dreaded the idea of being captured by the Iraqis and says he had read reports of atrocities they had carried out against POWs in the Iran�Iraq war, including flogging, electrocution and partial dismemberment. Though no one can dispute the courage of those who endured the Iraqi jails, at least all the prisoners survived.
Michael Asher Page 5
