Michael Asher

by The Real Bravo Two Zero

  CHAPTER sixteen FAYADH ABDALLAH WAS AN illiterate Fellah of about sixty who lived at a former British oil-station called 'Ti', outside Krabilah. His name had been given to me by the police sergeant major, Ahmad, as the man who had dis-covered one of the British commandos on the morning of 27 January 1991 in an irrigation pipe by the Euphrates, not far from the Syrian border. I met Fayadh at the restaurant opposite my hotel in Krabilah for a preliminary chat and found him a simple man, obviously overawed by the occa�sion. His face had been whittled away by years in the sun and wind, his body honed down by hard work, so that only the bare minimum remained. Fayadh confirmed that he had indeed discovered a foreigner in combat dress hidden down by the river on that day, and since I had already accounted for the deaths or capture of Lane, Consiglio, Dinger and Coburn, I knew that the soldier in question could only be McNab. WHILE LEGS AND DINGER WERE making their way painfully to Rummani, McNab writes, he was pressing on towards the border across ice-crusted fields. He was only about four kilometres away from Syria and freedom, but dawn was coming and he knew he would never make it in daylight. Instead, he crawled into an irrigation culvert under a steel plate and lay there in the water, prepared to Wait out the day. Early that morning, as he lay shivering in the pipe, he writes, an old goatherder approached and hung around the culvert for a few moments, allowing McNab to get a glimpse of him. The goatherd disap�peared and McNab thought he hadn't been compromised, but a little later some motor vehicles screeched to a halt nearby. Suddenly men began to scream and shoot off their weapons madly into the steel plate above him and McNab knew the game was up. He was pulled out of the culvert by 'gibbering, jabber�ing' soldiers who were, according to him, in an unbelievable frenzy. They made him kneel and suddenly laid into him brutally, kicking and thumping his body, pulling his hair, screaming at him. They gave him 'thud�ding instep kicks' to his head, and 'telling well-aimed toecap blows' to his kidneys, mouth and ears, until he was coughing up blood. He was thrown into a Land-Cruiser, hit on the head with a rifle butt and exposed to wildly excited crowds who yelled obscenities at him, spat on him, slapped and punched him savagely. This was probably, McNab says, because they held him personally responsible for their dead and wounded friends and fam�ily members. 'There was a gagging stench of unwashed bodies,' he writes. 'It was like a horror film with zombies.' 24 Eventually he was taken to a compound and dragged inside the gate, where he saw Dinger, whose head was swollen to the size of a football and whose equipment was covered in blood. FAYADH TOOK ME TO AN AREA of fields and irri�gated plots on the western side of the Rummani pontoon bridge, not far from the Syrian border. Here, he showed me an irrigation pipe joining two fields, over which ran a mud track. There were modern concrete structures about five hundred metres away to the south, and beyond them, the asphalt road. I examined the pipe, which was half buried and obviously not wide enough to take a human body. `This is not the same pipe that was here then,' Fayadh said. `There was a bigger pipe in the same place, but this area is part of the flood plain in the summer and the pipes get damaged or go rusty. The original pipe has been replaced.' `So this was where you found the British soldier?' `Yes. It was about noon. I was going about my work as usual, clearing out the irrigation ditches. I passed by this pipe and I noticed that there was a man inside it. I was really surprised, because I had never seen anything like that before. I didn't know who it was, whether a bandit or what.' `You didn't know there had been shooting here the night before, and that the police were looking for enemy soldiers?' 'No, I had no idea about that. I didn't know who the stranger was, but I knew something odd was going on and I didn't want the responsibility of dealing with it myself. There was a temporary police post in some tents up there . . .' He pointed south, to a place about five hun�dred metres away. 'And I ran off there as fast as I could. The police came back in their vehicles and pulled the man out. It was a foreigner, not a big man or heavily built, but quite fit-looking, who didn't seem to be suffer�ing much from the cold.' Did the police fire into the pipe from above?' `No. They fired off a few shots in the air in excitement, because they had obviously been looking for him, but they didn't shoot into the ground or into the pipe.' `Did they beat him up � kick him in the head, for instance?' `No. They didn't kick him or beat him at any time while I was present. They made him kneel down, tied his hands and searched him. I think he did have a knife � a bayonet � and they also found some stuff they said was explosives wrapped in brown paper. After that somebody brought him water in a bowl, but he refused to drink, and then 'someone else gave him a cup of tea from a vacuum flask, holding it to his lips. He must have thought it was poison or something, because he kept turning his head away. Someone else sipped it to show him it was all right. He seemed quite nervous. After that the police took him off in their vehicle, but I never saw anyone beat him or, hit him at all.' `Are you absolutely certain of that?' `Yes.' `Would you swear it by God?' `Yes, I do swear it by God. No one mistreated that man. The police fired in the air, yes, and later when they took him to the car some women ululated � that is our custom � but no one hit him or beat him up. On the contrary, they treated him well and gave him water as I said.' I really had no way of knowing if what Fayadh had told me was true, but I simply could not believe that this emaciated old man could be part of a government con�spiracy. He evidently hadn't even realized there was a war going on at the time. The idea that the Iraqis had brought McNab tea rather than kicking him half to death seemed much more in keeping with what I had seen of their character � indeed, with the Arab character in general as I had experienced it for two decades. My mentor, the great British Arabist and explorer Sir Wilfred Thesiger, who served with David Stirling in the original SAS during World War II, wrote that the Bedouin in particular had such great respect for human dignity that they would rather kill a man than humiliate him. No one can doubt that Saddam Hussein and his cronies in government have been responsible for heinous acts. Even against his own people, Saddam has perpetrated forced relocation and deportation, summary arrest, deprivation, torture, detention, political execution and genocide But the men and women McNab describes were ordinary Iraqis, lineal heirs of a great civilization, who had no need to go on a feeding frenzy over a few for�eign troops in their territory when they had been fighting off invaders since the time of Cain and Abel. If what I had been told was true, Coburn, Lane and McNab had all been shown some small acts of humanity during their capture by the very people McNab says acted like primitive savages. As for the implication that they held him and his patrol responsible for the large number of locals he says they killed or injured, I could find no evi-dence of a single kill, or even an injury inflicted on the citizens of Krabilah by Bravo Two Zero on 26 to 27 January 1991.

  CHAPTER seventeen THE MARKAZ KRABILAH, OR POLICE headquarters, to which Adnan Badawi had reported the five British com�mandos on the evening of 26 January lay not much more than a kilometre away from the place where McNab had been captured. Judging by the short distance he appears to have been taken by vehicle, this is probably where he was held and interrogated for the first 'tactical phase' of his captivity. Though McNab himself describes the place as a `commando camp', Ahmad told me that there were no Iraqi commandos in Krabilah at the time, and that the cap�ture of the enemy troops was purely a police matter. Ryan also says that Dinger was taken to a police station, and since Dinger was almost the first person McNab saw on arrival, it is clear that it was the same place. In any case, the sketch and description of McNab's commando camp in his book are uncannily like the police headquarters in Krabilah. Unfortunately, though, this was where the trail went cold for me. I was sure that somebody in Krabilah must have been present when McNab, Dinger and Coburn were interrogated, but I was denied access to either people or places. Uday, at the Ministry of Information, had told me that this was because the administration had been changed completely since 1991 and the records lost. Although I knew this was true to some extent � no less than eighteen tons of Iraqi records had been captured by
the Kurds in 1992-3, for example � I didn't swallow it. I suspected, rightly or wrongly, that it was because the Iraqis were aware that in their interrogation and treat�ment of the SAS patrol they had breached the Geneva Convention, and did not welcome my prying Mk I eye�ball ten years later. Although McNab says otherwise in his book, Iraq is a signatory of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949), which requires humane treatment of prisoners of war and protection from violence, intimidation, insults and public curiosity. Article 17 of the Convention explicitly prohibits the infliction of physical or mental torture or any other form of coercion on prisoners to secure infor�mation, and prisoners who refuse to provide information may not be threatened, insulted or exposed to unpleasant treatment of any kind. Clearly, however, Iraq did violate the Convention during the war, not only in its treatment of POWs, but also in its murder, rape and torture of Kuwaiti citizens. The Convention is, of course, only a piece of paper � it was regularly violated by the Americans in Vietnam and has been flouted by the Israelis for the past two decades. The SAS are 'prone-to-capture' troops, and every SAS man knows that in the real world he can expect to be tor-tured if captured, and not only by the Iraqis. It is for this reason that a 'resistance to interrogation' component forms part of the Regiment's selection process. In prac�tice, all armies use 'tactical questioning', which involves some type of coercion or 'unpleasant treatment' � among the least pleasant and most effective being sensory depri-vation and deprivation of sleep, rather than pulling out fingernails. I have no doubt that McNab and the other three mem�bers of his patrol who were captured were beaten, deprived, manhandled, insulted, humiliated, abused and disoriented during their weeks in Iraqi jails. I also think it is possible that some of their captors persecuted them for no other reason than pure pleasure. One cannot help feel�ing that McNab was justified in his threat to 'slot' those Iraqis who mistreated him if he ever ran into them again. No brutal treatment of POWs is acceptable, either morally or under the Geneva Convention, but the ques�tion of the extent of McNab's mistreatment by the Iraqis has already been raised by a fellow detainee, Stan. Speaking during the Auckland trial over Coburn's book Soldier Five, Stan swore under oath that some of the more extreme scenes McNab describes in Bravo Two Zero were fantasy. Having turned up in the Baghdad holding centre only a few days after McNab, Stan must have found out what had happened to him at the time, or discovered it later during the debrief. He specifies in particular that McNab's story that he was burned with a red-hot spoon and had his teeth pulled out during interrogation was incorrect. In McNab's account, the Iraqi dentist � a vet�eran of nine years at Guy's Hospital, London � violates his Hippocratic oath by wrenching his teeth out without anaesthetic, to the cackling of an interrogator who demands, 'Did you really think we're going to help you, you despicable heap of shit?' 25 Yet why should it have been so unlikely that the Iraqis would help him? As McNab himself has one of his captors admit, Coburn received two pints of blood from the Iraqis in the process of having his elbow operated on, and the SAS warrant officer captured with a broken leg had it expertly fixed. One remarkable aspect of McNab's incarceration � and one that must inwardly have convinced him that the Iraqis did not really mean business � was that he was allowed to associate with his colleagues, first Dinger, then, after he had been moved to Baghdad, with Coburn and Stan. As McNab must have known well, this is a big no-no for interrogators, since there is nothing guaranteed to break an individual more quickly than the feeling that he is totally isolated. Allowing the SAS men to congre�gate was certain to raise their morale, and also gave them the opportunity to compare notes and perfect their cover story. One cannot fail to applaud the courage and grit shown by the SAS men who were detained by the Iraqis, but it is worth observing again that all of them survived the experience at least well enough to continue serving with the Regiment. In his autobiography Immediate Action, McNab describes how, during the escape and evasion phase of his selection for 22 SAS, he and his comrades were briefed by a, former female SOE agent who had been captured by the Germans in World War II, had been kept in solitary confinement for weeks in freezing conditions, and was continuously burned, raped and abused by the Gestapo. Another survivor, a former British infantry corporal, had been captured in the Korean war and force-marched across North Korea, was beaten continuously until he lost all his teeth, and had seen scores of his comrades die. Few of the eventualities the SAS feared from the Iraqis arose in practice, and in view of the experiences related by the survivors of ear�lier wars, it has to be said in all fairness, and without excusing them in any sense for their brutality, that in ret�rospect the SAS might have done far worse than to fall into Iraqi hands..If it had been the Provisional IRA into whose clutches they had fallen, it is most unlikely they would have survived. CHAPTER eighteen. THROUGHOUT MY JOURNEY IN Iraq I had been using McNab's and Ryan's books as my guides, and for the most recent phase, in Krabilah, I had relied on McNab almost exclusively. Always, though, it had seemed to me that it was Ryan's account rather than McNab's that had been closer to what I had seen and learned on the ground. Although he might have been mistaken over the fact that Phillips had compromised the patrol, he does admit that they were never really sure if the shepherd-boy had seen them. Adil � the boy himself � had told me that he had seen nothing, which con�trasted sharply with McNab's story that Phillips and Coburn had actually chased after him, but was consis�tent with Ryan's uncertainty. Ryan's revelation that the LUP had been two kilometres away from the drop-off rather than McNab's twenty kilometres was borne out by the evidence I had amassed, and although Ryan's description of the firefight did not tally entirely with what Abbas had told me, the idea that the patrol simply dropped their Bergens and bugged out rang true.. It was, at least, far more in keeping with how I had been trained in the SAS than McNab's rendition of a sort of mini Charge of the Light Brigade against APCs and massed troops, screaming, 'Let's do it!' and hurling grenades. Published in 1995, two years after McNab's book, The One That Got Away presents Ryan as 'the true hero of the Bravo Two Zero mission'. Having not only made one of the most spectacular escape-marches in military history, walking 290 kilometres through enemy territory, mostly alone, in seven days and eight nights, on only two packets of biscuits and limited water, he had also, in the process, destroyed two vehicles, taking out a large num�ber of troops, and had later killed two Iraqi guards, one with a knife and the other with his bare hands. As I left Krabilah behind me and headed back to the place where the patrol had split on the night of 24/25 January 1991, I closed McNab's book and opened Ryan's. RETURNING TO THE MSR, THOUGH, I was once again faced with the mystery of its narrowness compared with Ryan's story that it was several kilometres wide at the point where they had crossed. In his book Storm Command, in which Ryan's story is first told, Sir Peter de la Billiere also quotes Ryan as maintaining that the road was two to three kilometres wide at this point, adding, `Chris warned everyone that they would have to make a good push to cross it, to avoid getting caught in the open by a passing vehicle.'26 Ryan himself starts his 'good push' a full seven kilometres from the road � a rather exagger-ated precaution for an exhausted patrol with two injured men, to avoid being compromised crossing a track that was no more than five metres wide. Vince Phillips, who was suffering an agonizing leg injury, may well have been so intent on keeping up with Ryan that he failed to hear McNab's call that he was halting to try the TACBE radio beacon. THE ESCARPMENT TO THE NORTH of the MSR was all buttes, dips and screes of loose rock, making it terrible going, but after a kilometre or so it evened out into the starkest plain imaginable. Not even the Arctic, I thought, could look so relentless and unforgiving as this plateau. Yet people obviously lived here. There were the dark buds of Bedouin tents on the landscape, standing out against the seams of grey-green, and even what looked like per-manent farms not far away to the east. Somewhere within that wilderness ahead of me, Vince Phillips had van�ished, never to be seen alive again. I had come to Iraq specifically to find out where and how he
had died, but in terrain like this I knew that to pinpoint the exact spot would be well nigh impossible � Ryan's text is too vague and ambiguous for precision. I had promised the Phillips family that I would make some sort of memorial to Vince in the desert, but I did not expect to get nearer than the general area. Days before, I had asked Abbas if he had heard of any bodies found up on the plateau at the end of January 1991 and, to my surprise, he told me of two. One corpse, he said, had consisted of little more than hands and a head �the rest of it had been eaten by wolves. The second had been discovered by a relative of his named Mohammed, about nine kilometres from his farm. Of the two cases, it was the dismembered head that interested me most. If Vince Phillips's body had been mutilated by wolves, that might explain why the MOD hadn't allowed Jeff. Phillips to see it, and why Vince's wife hadn't wanted to. But when I discovered that the head had actually been found long after January 1991, I ruled it out. I considered the second corpse a possibility, but at only nine kilometres from the LUP, it seemed too near to have been Vince. Ryan said that they had walked at least twenty kilometres from their LUP of 25 January, when Vince disappeared, and the LUP itself was a four-and-a-half-hour trek north of the MSR. Some simple mental arithmetic based on a pace of six kilometres an hour put the place at least forty-seven kilometres to the north. I had asked Abbas to introduce me to Mohammed any�way, and at mid-morning on my first day back in the field, having covered about four kilometres from the MSR, I saw a Toyota pick-up moving towards me out of the heat haze. I stopped to watch it and as it pulled up I saw that there were two occupants: Abbas, and a tall, rather severe-looking Bedouin in a grey dishdasha and white shamagh. This, Abbas told me, was his relative, Mohammed, who had found the body of a soldier here on the plateau back in 1991. Mohammed was a gravel-voiced chain-smoker with a pronounced cough and rheumy, red-shot eyes who didn't look at all well. As serious and grave-mannered as Abbas was mercurial, he had been brought up here on the plateau, he said, but his father had sent him to school in al-Haqlaniya and he could both read and write. He had his own tent here with a flock of sheep, but he also had a house in al-Haqlaniya where he was employed by an oil company. I asked him if it was true that he had found a dead man here on the plateau in January 1991. `Yes, I did,' he said. 'It was a foreign soldier in a camouflage suit. His name was Flips.' A klaxon sounded in my head � this was simply too good to be true. I must have mentioned Vince's name to Abbas, who had passed it on to his relative, I thought. How else could Mohammed possibly have known the dead man's name was Phillips? For a moment I consid�ered the dog-tags that all soldiers were supposed to wear on active service � these would have given name, rank, number, religion, blood group and date of birth, but they would have been in English, which Mohammed showed no sign of knowing. `How did you know his name?' I enquired, suspi-ciously. `He. had two cards in his pocket,' Mohammed said without hesitation. 'With his name written in Arabic and English. The name in Arabic was "Flips". The cards offered a lot of money to anyone who helped him. But it was too late for that � he was already dead.' I was caught completely off guard � I had forgotten about the indemnity cards the SAS patrol had been car�rying. They were mentioned in passing in one of the books � whether Ryan's or McNab's, I couldn't even remember. And I was suddenly more excited than I had been since we had met Adil and Abbas: Mohammed's revelation put an entirely new complexion on things. Only an extremely detailed reading of the books could have turned up this detail, which even I had forgotten. Was I really looking at the man who had found Vince Phillips, I wondered? Had another astonishing needle in the haystack turned up? RYAN SAYS IN HIS BOOK THAT the reason for the split was never satisfactorily explained, and states that he did not hear the aircraft for which McNab stopped to use the TACBE radio beacon, even though he can only have been a few metres from the patrol commander at the time. He did not realize that the rest of the patrol had been left behind until he reached the MSR, almost an hour after he had last spoken with McNab. He waited until 0030 hours for the other five to show up, meaning he must have been at the road at about midnight � according to Abbas, just as the first Iraqi troops were rolling up at the site of the fire-fight, only about ten kilometres away. After failing to reach McNab on the TACBE, he decided not to -Wait, but that the remaining three of them should press on across the plateau, stumbling about over loose stones that badly blistered their feet. By Ryan's own reckoning, he was, by now, the only one of the three capable of making decisions. He had caught Phillips ditching ammunition he thought they might need, and had already written him of as untrustworthy. Stan was still so disoriented from his attack of heat exhaustion that he had to be treated like a child and told to lie down whenever they halted, and when Ryan tried to get Phillips to play a part in navigating, the sergeant, he says, just nodded dumbly at anything he said. Walking close together, they continued for another four and a half hours, until the cut-off time of 0500 hours, when they began to look round for an LUP on the featureless plain. They were physically and mentally shattered, having cov�ered at least seventy kilometres since the compromise at about 1600 hours the previous day. The only cover they could find was an old tank berm � an oval pit with six-foot walls designed to camouflage and protect a stationary tank � with deep ruts running into it. The berm was open-ended and gave no protection from the terrible wind, so instead they lay down in the half-metre deep ruts. Here, head to toe and motionless, they lay up for most of the daylight hours of 25 January. As McNab and the other five were finding their knoll somewhere in the desert to the west, day brought the most dreadful conditions imaginable. By early morning it was raining, and all too quickly the rain turned to sleet and snow. Worse, while McNab's section survived by throwing caution to the wind and getting hot brews down them, huddling together for warmth, Ryan and his two comrades could do nothing but lie there. This, he says, was because daylight revealed an enemy position within 600 metres � either a building or a box-shaped vehicle with antennae, and at least two men. Surprisingly, the balance of survival began to change for Stan at this point� the thermal underwear that had almost killed him by dehydration during the frantic night march now kept him relatively warm. and, unlike the oth�ers, he had brought with him wet rations, which he was able to swallow unheated. Vince Phillips's condition, though, started to deteriorate, and he complained contin-ually of the cold. It was during this time, Ryan alleges, that Phillips admitted he had been aware the shepherd-boy had seen him in the LUP. Ryan had always suspected this, of course, and he cursed Vince silently, thinking that if the patrol had known for certain that they had been compromised, they could have got out of the wadi before the man on the bulldozer appeared. They might then have made 'a clean break back to the heli drop-off and been picked up safely. (Ryan did not know at this stage that the heli had not turned up.) Ryan is clearly alleging here that Phillips was directly to blame for Bravo Two Zero's predicament, and it is signif-icant perhaps to note that the last articulate sentences he reports from Vince sound almost like a confession of guilt. By 1600 hours the cold had seeped so completely into their bones that, in spite of the enemy only 600 metres away, they were obliged to cuddle up together for body warmth. When it started to get dark they crawled into the berm and tried to run about to get their circulation going. It was only then that Ryan realized how bad their physi�cal condition was � their hands were so stiff they were unable to hold their weapons properly and Phillips said that he could no longer carry his M16. He handed it over to Stan, who had no weapon, which left Vince with only his 9mm Browning pistol. By the time full darkness had come, they were on their way. Ryan declares that his recollections of the events of the next few hours are hazy because he was suffering from exposure. What he does make clear is that as they marched on through the blizzard, Phillips lagged further and further behind the other two. He began to beg them to slow down, Ryan says, mumbling that he was tired and wanted to go to sleep .� typical symptoms of advanced hypothermia. Alternating between angry retorts and encouragement, Ryan k
ept him moving, but was pulled up short at one point when Phillips claimed that his hands had turned black. Thinking it was frostbite, Ryan examined them, only to find that Phillips was wearing black leather gloves. The sergeant's behaviour became increasingly erratic as the hours passed, and at another time he began screaming out loud, risking compromise by anyone within several hundred metres. Stan told him to shut up. Ryan was acting as scout, marching on a bearing directed by Stan behind him who guided him left or right, though they were meandering badly. They stopped for a short break and realized suddenly that Phillips was no longer with them. They shouted out his name and when there was no answer they backtracked, following their own footprints, which were easy to spot where the snow had piled up. After twenty minutes, Ryan says, he recog�nized that the task was useless. Vince Phillips had gone, and whether he had walked off east, west, or south, or just lain down and drifted off to sleep in a hollow, they were never going to find him. Ryan decided that they should simply turn around and go on without him � if they spent any more time looking in these conditions, then they would soon both be dead. So, 'With heavy hearts,' Ryan says, 'we turned round and cracked on again and left Vince on his own.' n Those last words suggest that at this point Ryan was, to some extent, optimistic about Phillips's chances of sur�vival. They obviously exclude the idea that Phillips was anything but alive when Ryan last saw him. This uncer�tainty was reflected in the information given to the Phillips family back in Britain, when they were told that Vince was lost in the Gulf rather than missing, presumed dead, and is confirmed by a letter the CO of 22 SAS sent Vince's wife, in which he speaks of a foreboding of Vince's death which was only proved right when his body arrived back in Hereford. The CO's foreboding indicates clearly that there was no official presumption of Vince's death, and this uncertainty can only have originated from the people who last saw him alive � either Ryan or Stan, or both. According to McNab, though, when he and Stan encountered each other in the Baghdad holding centre, McNab enquired about Vince, only to be told, 'Vince is dead. Exposure.' Clearly Stan, for one, does not seem to have been in any doubt about Vince's fate. I ASKED MOHAMMED IF HE COULD show me where he had found the body. `Yes, of course,' he said. 'It isn't far from here.' We all piled into the pick-up and Mohammed wheeled round and headed east. Although he slowed down a cou-ple of times, he never erred from his course, and as he drove I noticed that his eyes flicked constantly from the ground to the horizon and back � just as I had seen Bedouin guides and trackers do for years. But while most deserts have at least some landmarks � a knoll, a ridge, a sequence of dunes � this place appeared to be as homog-enous as an ocean. Suddenly he stopped the car and we got out. 'This is it,' he said, pointing to a patch of ground that looked exactly like all the other patches of ground. `This is where I found him.' It seemed so impossible that I was tempted to laugh. I knew from experience, of course, that some Bedouin were brilliant trackers. I had known Bedouin who could ride their camels a thousand miles navigating by sun and stars and never vary more than two degrees from true. I had heard of famous Arab guides who were totally blind, but could navigate with perfect precision by the direction of the wind on their faces and by feeling the varying tex�tures of the desert surface, for which there are scores of different adjectives in Arabic. I had met Bedouin who could not only tell you almost everything about a camel from its tracks, including to whom it belonged, where it was going and when, but who could also remember every camel track they had ever seen in their lives. I knew that there was nothing mystical about this. Power of observa�tion was a quality prized by the Bedouin � it was something that they began to learn naturally as small children and which was reinforced by years upon years of familiarity I had travelled with Egyptian caravaneers who had been bringing back rock salt from the same oasis in the Sudan three or four times a year since they were ten years old. By the time they were forty they had covered hundreds of thousands of miles by camel in the same area, and literally knew every stone and every bush of a region that, to outsiders, looked as hostile as Mars. While this plateau was a wilderness to us, for people like Abbas and Mohammed, it was familiar. They had grown up here, and their ancestors had lived here back countless generations to those Amorites who had wandered this plateau before the pyramids were built in Egypt. There was not a single square foot of this desert that had not once been the site of a Bedouin tent � a home where, over the centuries, tens of thousands of men and women had been born, lived out their lives and died. What the Bedouin saw when they looked at this desert was not emptiness, but a land littered with memories and peopled with ghosts. Despite knowing all this, Mohammed's certainty amazed me. I scanned the horizon, wondering how he could be so sure. The Bedouin farms I had seen before now stood to the south of us, and to the east there were a few limestone boulders. Apart from that there was noth�ing � only the endless desert and the sky. `How can you be so certain this is the place?' I asked him. 'It looks like everywhere else.' He shrugged. 'I know this plateau,' he said. This was the clincher. I was aware that when a Bedouin said he 'knew' a place, he didn't mean, as we might, that he had visited it once or twice. He meant much more what a London taxi driver means when he says he knows the city, only more so. It meant that he knew every inch of the place � every pebble, burrow and blade of grass �so well, indeed, that he could find his way around it on a pitch-dark night. I surveyed Mohammed's grave face and I knew instinctively that he was telling the truth: against all the odds, I had found the actual spot in the desert where Vince Phillips had died. 'I think you had better tell me from the beginning,' I said. CHAPTER nineteen `ALL RIGHT,' MOHAMMED BEGAN. 'It was January 1991 � ten years ago, during the war. I don't remember the exact day, but it was near the end of the month, and I remember it was unusually cold � the cold of death. I was coming from al-Haqlaniya to visit my relatives on the plateau; driving my pick-up, the same red pick-up I have now I was coming from the north towards this spot and I saw something lying in the desert from some way off. I could tell it wasn't a sheep or a cow, and I knew it must be a human being. That was strange because it was so cold that no one would go out on foot. When I got up close and stopped I saw that it was a foreign soldier in camouflage. I realized what he was at once, because I had heard about the shooting down at Abbas's house a day or so earlier so I was sort of on the lookout.' `Can you describe the man you found?' `Yes. He was a strong-looking man, very tall, with long legs. To give you an idea how tall he was, I had to bend his body to get it into the back of my pick-up. He had curly hair and a moustache that curled round his mouth, and he was wearing camouflage, with boots, and on his head a big shamagh with the ends crossed over his chest. He was also wearing gloves � black leather gloves with sleeves of grey wool up his arms, and a military belt with pouches on it.' I took out my copy of Bravo Two Zero, which included mugshots of the three dead members of the patrol, Consiglio, Lane and Phillips. 'Is the man you found here?' I asked Mohammed. He peered at the pictures. It must have been difficult, for all three photos were the same size, and all three men were dressed in camouflage and had moustaches and stubbled jaws. Finally he pointed at the picture of Vince. `It was him,' he said. `Okay,' I said. 'What did you find on him apart from the cards?' `In his belt he had two grenades, a bayonet, some bis�cuits in transparent paper and some jam in a tube. He had a water-bottle with some water in it, a mug and a pair of small binoculars. In his pockets I found two glass phials of what must have been medicine, a wallet with seventy dollars and some Saudi money, a compass and a photo of a woman � I suppose his wife � and two children.' I stopped him there, aware that this was a crucial point. The items Mohammed had listed as being on Vince up to now had been to some extent predictable to anyone famil�iar with the SAS, but a photograph was not. It was strictly against standard operating procedures for anyone on patrol behind enemy lines to carry such a photo, as it could be used as a lever by interrogators in the event of capture. But what was most interesting was that while Mohammed had said two children, Ry
an had written incorrectly in his book that Vince had had three children, and McNab had not mentioned the number at all � or even that Vince was married. I knew, of course, that Vince did have two children, but this was certainly a fact no one could have found out simply by reading the books. `Were the children boys or girls or one of each?' I asked. Mohammed thought for a moment. 'It seemed to me they were both girls,' he said. Correct. Vince had had two daughters, Sharon and Lucy, aged six and four at the time of his death. `You say you searched him,' I went on. Did you find any marks on his body � anything to indicate how he'd died?' `There were no bullet wounds, if that's what you mean. No blood. Like I said, I didn't take his clothes off, but there was nothing visible to me. I assumed that he'd died of the cold. It was horrendously cold here during those few days � I mean absolutely deadly cold. Why, even a Bedouin died up here around the same time. He was returning home one night when his car broke down and he tried to walk back. Froze to death on the way. And he knew the country and was wearing a really warm sheep�skin coat � no wonder a foreigner who didn't know the desert should die of cold. By God, he must have been incredibly tough just to get this far with no shelter and dressed like he was.' As we had been talking, groups of local Bedouin had wandered over in pick-ups and trucks from the nearby cluster of farms to see what was going on. Bearded, earthy-looking men in dishdashas and red-speckled headcloths, they listened gravely to what Mohammed had to say, but were evidently familiar with the story � another reason to believe it, I thought. Remembering that Ryan had men-tioned a possible building not far from the berm where the SAS had spent 25 January, I wondered if he might have mistaken the farms of these Bedouin for an enemy position. They told me, though, that the farms � actually it was a sin�gle farm with several buildings � had been built since 1991, and that there had been nothing on the same site previously. I turned my attention back to Mohammed and asked what he had done with Vince's body. 'I put it in the back of the pick-up as I said,' he told me. 'I had to open the tailgate and bend him over to get him in. I took him to the police HQ at Rumadi, but they said they had no vehicles and asked me to take the body to Habbaniya where there was a proper morgue with a refrigeration plant. I took him there after I had handed the cards and the other things over to the Rumadi police. I was tempted to keep the money, but I looked again at the photo of his wife and children and I felt guilty and didn't. I kept the binoculars, though, because after all they were no good to him any more and I knew they would be useful in the desert. I still have them, but they're broken � my children played with them, you know.' `Could I see them?' I asked. `Yes, certainly, but they are at my house. I'll have to bring them later.' Turning my mind to objects, I suddenly realized that there was something I had missed � or rather, several things. Mohammed had never mentioned the pistol Vince had been carrying, nor any ammunition. Neither had he mentioned twenty gold sovereigns, or Vince's dog-tags. When I asked him about the pistol and ammunition, he began to cough nervously. 'I never found any weapon or bullets,' he snapped. `Come on,' I said. 'This man was a soldier. He must have had a weapon and ammunition.' `I said there weren't any.' His manner had changed so abruptly that I knew he was hedging. The more I pressed him, the more aggressive he became, and he began look-ing around for a way of escape. I sensed that he knew about the pistol; in fact I guessed he had kept it and did�n't want to tell me. I decided that it would do no good to press him further about it and turned instead to the dog-tags and the gold. He heaved an audible sigh of relief. He hadn't found any gold on Vince, he, told me, neither had he found any dog-tags. His voice had regained conviction and I was inclined to believe him this time. After all, he had admitted keeping Vince's binos, because they were no good to him any more, but had returned his money out of guilt. In any case, he hadn't stripped Vince's body and since the sovereigns were concealed around his waist, it was perfectly possible he hadn't found them. The dog-tags would have been around his neck, though, and easy to find. They would have had no value to Mohammed, and therefore there would have been no motive for his denying that he'd found them. Yet he insisted Vince had not been wearing dog-tags. The dog-tags remained a mystery, but the pistol did not. That evening, Abbas took me aside and told me, `Mohammed has the pistol. I know he has because I have seen it. He took the pistol and the ammunition, but he didn't want to admit it.' `Why?' I asked. 'He admitted taking the binoculars.' `Yes, but that was different. He doesn't want to admit in front of government people that he took a firearm, which would be illegal.' It made sense, but though I subsequently tried to per�suade Mohammed to show me the pistol privately, he declined. By the time I had finished questioning Mohammed, there were at least eight or nine Bedouin around us, which made my next proposal rather awkward. I was sat�isfied now that I really had found the spot where Vince had died, and I wanted to carry out my undertaking to the Phillips family to build some kind of memorial here. The obvious thing was a cairn � a fairly common feature in most deserts � but I wondered how these locals would react to the idea of building a memorial in their back gar�den to an enemy soldier who had also been a Christian. When I explained what I wanted to do, there was silence for a moment. `Why not?' Abbas said. 'He deserves it.' `Yes,' one of the Bedouin agreed. 'He was a very brave man to come here far from his own country.' `They were all brave,' another said. 'They were real men, those soldiers, to have endured the conditions here in winter. Heroes every one.' The rest of the Bedouin mumbled in agreement and I felt humbled. McNab had called them ragheads, but I knew this was as fine a tribute to the SAS as I was ever likely to hear. There were no stones in the place I wanted to build the cairn, but the Bedouin knew where to get them. We jumped into Mohammed's pick-up and drove about a kilometre to the outcrop of limestone I had seen from some distance away. The Bedouin helped me pile the stones into the back of the truck and soon we were roar ing back to the site of Vince's death. Before building the cairn itself, I had one more task to perform. I took out a small can of Guinness I had brought from Britain �Vince's favourite tipple � and while the Bedouin watched in surprise, I buried it in the earth, where the cairn was going to be. Then the men helped me pile the rocks and boulders over it and stood back. For a moment no one spoke. The sun was going down: a vast globe of lemon light balanced on the world's edge. A slight breeze flut�tered the Bedouins' dishdashas, but the desert was utterly silent. This place has already become a sacred site, I thought, and thanks to all the Bedouin who had gathered here, the story of Vince Phillips would blend into local tradition, becoming part of the landscape, a legend that would be handed down among the desert people for gen�erations. Just as the spirits of their ancestors still lived here among them, so Vince's voice would be here for ever, in the wind that drifted across the plateau. Building this cairn had been a simple act, but a satisfying one. I had proved to my own satisfaction that Vince had not compromised the Bravo Two Zero patrol. He had done his job, and no one could ask for more. I hoped this cairn would itself become part of the landscape and remain here for ever in memory of a brave British soldier who had given his life for his country � Sergeant- Vincent David Phillips, of A Squadron, 22 SAS.