by Damien Lewis
Patience was a Special Forces virtue, but it was one that many of the blokes weren’t exactly blessed with. They’d joined the military elite thirsting for action, not for long, freezing hours waiting to see if some unfortunate kid blundered onto their place of hiding. It was hard to acquire the patience necessary for such covert, stealthy operations. Luckily, Steve had been in the Squadron longer than just about anyone, and with age had come the ability to watch and to wait.
He was willing the kid to steer his herd in any direction but east, so as to avoid the coming confrontation. He hadn’t seen a weapon on the kid, but he was certain he’d be armed. Firing from a place of hiding and at such close range, Steve had no doubts he’d get the drop on Goat Boy. His real worry – hell, his only worry – was whether he had it in him to shoot an Iraqi kid in cold blood.
Almost as if it could sense the murderous direction Steve’s thoughts were taking, the nearest of the goats – a stubborn-looking billy with a wispy beard – raised its head and stared in Grayling’s direction. Its curved horns gleamed eerily in the moonlight as it pawed the earth a good few times, eyeing him. Then it began to wander over, seemingly making a beeline for his place of hiding. Steve felt the adrenalin kicking in now. His heart began to hammer away like a football ricocheting around in his rib cage. His mouth felt dry and he found it hard to swallow.
A voice was screaming inside his head: Fuck off back the way you came. Fuck off right out of here.
The billy-goat turned and bleated at the rest of the herd. Bleaaahhhh.
Oddly, Steve felt as if he knew what it was saying: Come on, girls, I’ve found the wadi. Let’s get feasting. Oh, and ignore the guy with the weird face paint. I’ve got his number.
The billy turned back to Steve, stepped forward and kept coming. The other goats formed up in a ragged line and began to follow after, the herder bringing up the rear. The billy-goat came to a halt at the very lip of the wadi, practically in spitting distance of the muzzle of Steve’s weapon. It fixed him with the kind of half-demented look only a goat is able to give. Its bulging eyes shone golden-amber in the moonlight, as it stared down at him with dumb curiosity. There was no doubt whatsoever that it had somehow seen or sensed him.
Steve could hear the animal chewing on its cud, the lower jaw moving weirdly from side to side as it worked its way up and down, making a powerful grinding motion to pulp whatever greenery it had found. The acrid stench of a billy-goat in rut, mixed with the sweet-sickly scent of half-chewed and semi-digested vegetation, drifted across to him on the still night air.
Steve’s thumbs tensed on the butterfly trigger, but he realized he faced a new problem now – the goat was standing directly in front of the barrel of the .50-cal and blocking his line of fire. He couldn’t just open up and blast the animal apart, much as he was tempted to. With it and the rest of the herd blocking his line of fire, the kid goat-herder might well escape, and then the entire mission would be blown.
A memory of the Bravo Two Zero mission of the First Gulf War flashed through Steve’s mind at warp speed. An eight-man SAS patrol – call-sign Bravo Two Zero – had been forced to go on the run in Iraq. Three men died, four were captured and only one escaped. They had been compromised when a flock of curious goats had stumbled across their hiding-place.
Steve had a horrible feeling that M Squadron was about to suffer a similar fate right here and right now.
As the billy-goat gave Steve the evil eye, an idea suddenly came to him. With the animal blocking the line of sight between him and the goat-herder, he figured he could risk making the move. He took his right hand off the weapon and brought it around to the left chest pouch on his webbing. He flipped it open and felt around inside. His fingers made contact with the hard cylindrical form of his infrared laser torch. An IR laser torch provides a beam of light that’s invisible to the naked eye. But when using a light amplifier such as night-vision goggles (NVG) the beam becomes visible and acts like a flashlight. Deployed in conjunction with night-vision equipment, it was the perfect covert means by which to see in the dark.
The IR laser was harmless to both humans and animals unless shone at a hypersensitive body part, like the retina. If the beam was concentrated on the eyeball for several seconds it would start to burn the retina, causing severe pain – which was just the kind of thing that Steve had in mind right now.
He pulled out the torch, flicked it on and levelled it at the head of the billy-goat. Sighting along its length, he aimed the beam at the goat’s eyes. For several seconds it stared back at him, and he began to wonder if the animal was so brainless as to not feel any pain. All the while the rest of the herd was backing up behind it, and he guessed the Iraqi boy was no more than thirty yards away by now.
Steve was just about to give up when the goat began to shake its head irritably, as if something was troubling it. It blinked several times, big heavy eyelids flicking rapidly up and down, and then it let out a low goaty moan. The head-shaking became more and more vigorous, as it tried to wrestle the pain out of its skull. Again, Steve heard the sound that had first alerted him to the herd’s presence – the jangling of an ancient-looking bell worn on the animal’s collar.
He kept the laser focused directly on the eyes, willing the billy-goat to piss off out of there before the beam sent it totally blind. With a final violent shaking of the head and a clanging of the bell the goat turned and stumbled away, legs quivering in shock as it went. Steve heard it emit a few pained and panicked bleats, and then the rest of the herd turned as one and followed. Their progress became close to a stampede as the billy led them away from this unseen but terrible and agonizing danger. As the herd beat a hasty retreat from the rim of the wadi, Steve slipped the laser torch back into its pouch and swung his weapon back onto target.
His line of sight cleared momentarily, and there was the goat-herder staring hard in his direction. He was bound to know that something had spooked his animals, and he looked torn between coming forward to investigate and hurrying after them. For a second or so the boy seemed rooted to the spot, staring in Steve’s direction, and then he took a few careful steps towards him.
From thirty-odd paces away Steve sensed that the herder’s eyes and his own had suddenly connected. He felt as if the kid was staring right into his hiding-place and right at him. For an instant his thumbs pressed harder on the trigger mechanism, as he tensed to blow Goat Boy away. One second’s worth of pressure, and all that would be left of the kid would be a faint pink mist on the cool desert air.
But an instant later the boy herder turned and hurried after his animals, and the moment had passed.
He was maybe a hundred and fifty yards away when Steve noticed that his line of flight was taking him eastwards, in the direction of Bayji. He was darting this way and that, using his stick to round up his scattered herd. For an instant he turned and threw a fearful glance over his shoulder in Steve’s direction. Grayling figured the Iraqi kid had sensed that some danger – something that could kill – lurked in the wadi. The only thing that he couldn’t be sure of was whether Goat Boy had identified the true nature of the threat.
Now the tiny figure was running and running, driving his herd further into the distance across the empty expanse of the desert. He was maybe three hundred yards away when Steve saw him pause momentarily, and an indistinct voice rang out across the night.
‘Feringhi! Feringhi!’
The word echoing across to Steve sounded like the Arabic for ‘foreigner’.
The .50-cal has an accurate range of some two thousand yards. A few hundred yards was a snip. Steve leaned his weight onto the hand-grips, bringing the muzzle up a fraction, and got the herder pinned in his sights. It would be an easy kill. A few seconds, a few dozen rounds, and it would be done. He’d blast the herd apart, and Goat Boy with it.
His thumbs hovered over the trigger, poised to punch out the rounds.
But was it really ‘Foreigner!’ that the boy had been yelling? Steve’s Arabic was pretty basic. He c
ould have been shouting pretty much anything, and maybe Steve’s mind was playing tricks on him? Maybe Goat Boy was simply yelling at his herd, trying to get it under control again?
How could he have shouted ‘Foreigner!’? There was no one else out here that he could be calling to. Goat Boy had to be shouting at his bloody goats. Nothing else made any sense.
Either way, Steve just didn’t know for certain. He couldn’t be sure. And for that reason he eased off the pressure, and decided not to pull the trigger.
CHAPTER TWO
Two months prior to the start of their Iraq mission, M Squadron had been sent to Kenya in East Africa, to prepare for war. It was January 2003, and over the preceding months the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had been given a series of ultimatums by the United Nations to force him to reveal whether his country had developed weapons of mass destruction. United Nations weapons inspectors were trying to check his WMD arsenal, but they were being blocked and obstructed at every turn.
Over the years Saddam had spent a staggering amount of the nation’s oil wealth on armaments, and the country had long had an active nuclear, biological and chemical warfare programme. Saddam’s forces had used chemical weapons in the war against Iran, and he’d unleashed them on his own peoples, most notably the Kurds. In one terrible incident he’d rained chemical shells onto the Kurdish town of Halabja, causing horrific deaths and injuries, not to mention deformities that would recur over generations.
But while the media were full of stories of the struggle to get Saddam to comply with United Nations resolutions, the men of M Squadron were pretty damn certain they were heading to Iraq. The drums of war were beating fiercely and, as had been the case in the First Gulf War, it would be British Special Forces who led the way. Small teams of determined British and allied elite operators would be first onto the ground, to prepare the way for conventional troops.
It was a little over a year since the 9/11 terror attacks on America, and British Special Forces had already fought one war in the intervening months – to liberate Afghanistan from Taliban (and al-Qaeda) control. Like its sister Special Forces unit the SAS, the Special Boat Service (SBS) had spent months deep in the Afghan mountains, working closely with a loose-knit coalition of Afghan warlords called the Northern Alliance.
In rapid order the Taliban had been driven out of the Afghan capital Kabul, and their forces routed across the wider country. That done, M Squadron had been re-tasked to baby-sit powerful Afghan warlords based in some of the more remote and lawless outposts. The men of the Squadron had lived for weeks on end in decrepit shepherd huts, trying to make sense of the archaic rules that governed the Afghan wildlands.
The Afghan warlords had loved having the M Squadron blokes with them, as had the locals, but it had been exhausting work. They’d returned from Afghanistan hoping for a proper break from operations, but they’d had no such luck. Following the 9/11 terror attacks the world had changed, perhaps for ever, and British Special Forces – like their US and other allies – were facing serious overstretch.
The men of the Special Boat Service had no equals when fighting on, in or under water, as recent operations had so powerfully shown. Immediately following 9/11 the men of M Squadron had been called upon to launch a top-secret mission off the British coast, one that epitomized what these specialist warriors had trained for.
Intelligence had uncovered what appeared to be a terrorist plot to attack London with a devastating chemical weapon, and M Squadron – with a troop of SAS operators in support – had been called into action. The MV Nisha, an unremarkable-looking cargo ship, was fast steaming up the English Channel towards the Thames estuary. In the vessel’s hold was believed to be a poor-man’s chemical weapon – a makeshift nerve agent. Intelligence feared the ship was intending to dock on the approaches to London, whereupon the device would be triggered and a cloud of gas would drift over the city – with catastrophic consequences.
That is, unless she could be stopped.
On a bleak and storm-torn December night in 2001 the Chinooks carrying M Squadron had swept in low over the wind-whipped seas. The men had burst out of the hovering aircraft and plummeted towards the ship via fast-ropes – thick nylon cords that had been thrown out of the helo’s open ramp. They slid down them using their gloved hands to slow themselves, before hitting the vessel’s wildly pitching deck.
Recovering from the jarring impact, they raised their weapons and sprinted for the ship’s bridge, engine room and cargo hold. At the same instant a sister force raised hook-and-pole assault ladders, clambering up from their rigid inflatable boats and surging over the vessel’s sides. Attacking from both sea and air the elite operators swarmed the ship, blasting in doors using pump-action shotguns and hurling flash-bang stun-grenades inside. The bridge was seized immediately and the captain and crew overpowered, leaving the ship firmly in the elite operators’ hands. In a textbook operation, the entire vessel was cleared from bow to stern – a perfect marine counter-terrorism takedown on the high seas.
That was exactly the kind of mission the men of M Squadron had trained for so relentlessly over the years. But now they were headed for Africa and the sweeping, scorched plains of Kenya, where they would learn a completely new way of going to war. In Kenya, they would have to master the use of specialist vehicles to cross hundreds of miles of dry, waterless terrain, so as to penetrate well beyond enemy lines.
It was going to be one hell of a challenge.
During the First Gulf War in 1991, the SAS had led the way, highly mobile units roaming the Western Desert of Iraq hunting for Scud missiles and other targets of opportunity. One SAS unit had gone in on foot and got badly shot up, then captured – the Bravo Two Zero patrol. But other teams had gone in by vehicle, and they had largely achieved their mission objectives and come out unscathed.
Special Forces patrols sent in on foot were deprived of the heavy firepower the vehicles could offer, and lacked any means of rapid mobility. The lessons from the First Gulf War were well learned: in 2003 elite units would be heading into Iraq on vehicle-borne missions. And so it was that M Squadron was off to Kenya, tasked with learning the intricate craft of vehicle-based mobility operations.
Fortunately, a great deal of expertise was on hand to help with their training. Recently Major Reginald ‘Reggie’ Field had been brought in from the SAS to command M Squadron. Though the Squadron was an SBS unit, it was made up of operators from both outfits. Nowadays, ancient rivalries had largely been put aside so the SBS and SAS could better serve as one united fighting force, and the unit even included a sprinkling of blokes from foreign Special Forces outfits.
In spite of his somewhat grandfatherly appearance – he liked mooching around in a cardigan back at the Squadron lines – Reggie, the OC, was rumoured to be a closet dagger-between-the-teeth type of a bloke. Steve, for one, was glad to have him commanding the Squadron, for he brought bags of operational experience into the unit. Captain Andy Smith, Reggie’s second in command, was a veteran operator with the SAS.
M Squadron had also secured the assistance of a four-man SAS team, plus a unit from the equivalent American Special Forces outfit, for the Kenyan training.
The four American operators on loan to the Squadron were in their mid-thirties, and bore all the appearance of grizzled veterans of operations. Likewise, the four-man SAS unit embedded in the Squadron was made up of some of the Regiment’s best. With six weeks of intensive ‘beat-up’ training ahead of them – full-immersion exercises in preparation for war – the men of M Squadron couldn’t have wished for a better group of soldiers from which to learn vehicle-based combat.
There was one other factor that served to ease the Squadron’s transition from a maritime counter-terrorism force to one of land-based mobility ops. There were a handful of veterans in the Squadron who had fought side by side with the SAS, during which time they’d learned their vehicle mobility skills well. They would act as mentors to the younger blokes, and guide them through the coming land-based miss
ions.
One of those ‘old and bold’ was Steve Grayling. Many in the Squadron viewed Grayling as a cantankerous and cynical old bastard. He was tall and lean but with a rock-hard muscular physique, one honed by years of training for ship and oilrig assaults – which required clambering out of the freezing sea in full scuba gear and laden with weaponry, to scale the decks high above and launch an attack. In his early forties, Grayling was too old to worry about promotion, and he had zero interest in rising above the rank of sergeant. Unsurprisingly, he took no shit from anyone, regardless of rank. Renowned for speaking his mind, he wasn’t a particular favourite with the SBS’s top management. At one point in the past they’d shunted him sideways into the SAS, which had got him well out of the way for a couple of years.
But now that the Squadron was preparing for war in Iraq, having Grayling in their number had an unexpected upside: he was one of the most experienced at vehicle-borne ops, and so could take the less experienced under his wing. While he was renowned for not suffering fools gladly, he was also known as a safe pair of hands to handle the younger blokes, which was something of a relief if you were placed on his team.
Grayling was known to all simply as ‘Grey’ – a nickname that suited his no-shit kind of persona. A while back he’d suffered a bad accident while on an SBS deep-water mission, and he was still using painkillers to deal with the long-term effects of the injuries. Many argued that that accounted for his up-front, devil-may-care attitude.
M Squadron deployed to Kenya as three Troops – Four, Five and Six Troop – and Grayling was a vehicle commander in Six Troop. Each Troop consisted of teams driving specially adapted, open-topped Land Rovers designed for penetration missions deep behind enemy lines. In addition to those, each Troop had a similar number of powerful quad-bikes, ones that acted as an outrider force to scout for the enemy.
