by Damien Lewis
For a bare few seconds the Chinook held rock-steady while the quads tore up its ramp, and then it was airborne again and heading for cover. As it sped across the desert low and fast, the Iraqis unleashed hell, heavy bursts of fire chasing the helo through the night skies. But the enemy muzzle flashes gave the F15 aircrew an accurate fix on their position, and with the British force lifted out they were free to mount air strikes without fear of a friendly-fire incident.
The arrow-like form of the jet tore in, and the aircrew unloaded with the nose-mounted M61 six-barrel cannon, a storm of 20mm rounds raking the Iraqi positions. Under cover of that murderous fire the Chinook made it out of there, and M Squadron’s lead element was able to return to their base, alive but decidedly shaken.
‘What’s the ground like?’ Grey asked the Al Sahara airfield blokes, once they’d finished their mission debrief. ‘What’s it like to drive over?’
‘Easy enough,’ one replied. ‘Hard compact gravel and grit, not soft sand dunes.’
‘But it’s bloody cold at night, especially when tearing about on a quad,’ said another. ‘Take your bloody thermals, your duvet jacket and everything in between.’
As they’d reported in on the outcome of their thirty-six-hour mission, the old and the bold within the Squadron had had a distinctly ominous feeling. If Sean Timms had got his tiny force compromised and badly shot up just as soon as they’d crossed the border, what hope was there of getting an entire Squadron inserted covertly hundreds of miles into Iraq?
They’d just put in one small, low-profile and highly-mobile team, only to get it seriously brassed-up. If it wasn’t for the smart footwork by the US warplane, not to mention the RAF Chinook crew, the four-man team might well have never have made it out of there. The only advantage M Squadron would have was a greater degree of firepower, but it would be massively more visible to any watching Iraqi forces.
There was also little reason any more to assume that the 5th Corps was desperate to surrender, especially when the force stationed at Al Sahara airfield had proved so ready to fight. There were a hundred thousand 5th Corps soldiers, complete with light and heavy armour, and they might be just as aggressive and capable as the Al Sahara airfield defenders. If so, the sixty men of M Squadron were going to be toast.
As had been the case with the Bravo Two Zero mission, it looked as if M Squadron was being sent into Iraq on bugger-all usable intel. The only area they had tested for themselves was Al Sahara, and Al Sahara had proven far from ‘relatively benign’. But in a sense, Special Forces soldiering was always like this. They were being sent in to prove the ground truth on what amounted to an offensive recce – and this way you risked a few good men, not an entire army.
Special Forces units only ever tended to trust the intel absolutely when it was delivered by one of their own – ideally a couple of their own blokes in a hide with eyes on the mission objective. And on this occasion the only possible way to get eyes on the Iraqi 5th Corps was to send the Squadron some seven hundred kilometres into Iraq, to find them.
The Al Sahara debrief over, Scruff turned to Grey: ‘Mate, I’ve just thought of the operation codename: Mission Impossible Iraq’.
Grey shook his head and gave a wry smile. ‘Nah, mate – more like Operation No Return.’
CHAPTER SIX
Worryingly, the exact location of the Iraqi 5th Corps still hadn’t been identified. It must have taken days, if not weeks, to move up to a hundred thousand men and arms at night into a place of hiding. But amazingly, that was exactly what the 5th Corps seemed to have done. They had managed to move an entire corps off the face of the earth, and M Squadron seemed to have no option but to go in and root them out.
There was no explicit Plan B, if the Squadron reached the 5th Corps’s position only to find that the Iraqis were less than keen to surrender. If that was the case, every man knew he’d have to go on the run and fight his way out of there, however improbable that might seem.
In truth, most Special Forces operations were defined by such extreme risk and uncertainty. The kind of blokes who made up a force like M Squadron knew the hard realities of such missions. They’d rise to whatever challenges were placed before them, no matter what the uncertainties. That was the kind of mind-set the Squadron fostered, and that was why such soldiers had joined Special Forces – to be part of a unit from which small groups of men went out to achieve the seemingly impossible.
Even so, from all that they had heard, the OAB of M Squadron figured there was a very different way of construing the Iraqi 5th Corps’s make-up and intentions. Northern Iraq was Saddam’s homeland. In Bayji and Tikrit – the cities just to the east of M Squadron’s intended line of march – you had Saddam’s tribal stronghold and his birthplace. If – when – Baghdad fell, Saddam would very likely retreat to this area, to make his last stand. That being the case, the 5th Corps – which made up as much as a third of Iraq’s standing army – could well be Saddam’s choice of men-at-arms for his last-ditch battle. Far from being ill-disciplined, ill-motivated, underfed and underpaid, these could be the boys that Saddam was relying on to fight to the last man.
There were two other significant forces in the area. First was the Iraqi Security Organization (ISO), Saddam’s feared secret police. The ISO were fiercely loyal to the Great Leader, but they weren’t considered a major combat unit. The second force – the Iraqi Fedayeen – was an entirely different matter. The Fedayeen was a combat militia that worked directly to Saddam’s orders. They were recruited very young, and made to idolize Saddam and to show blind loyalty. The Fedayeen were equipped with fast, Toyota-type four-wheel-drive vehicles fitted with heavy machine-guns. They were constituted as a highly mobile, fluid, guerrilla-type army, and were probably the most feared of all fighters in the country.
The Iraqi Republican Guard – the nearest Saddam had to elite forces – would be better-trained, but they weren’t manic, diehard lunatics like the Fedayeen.
M Squadron was shown a Fedayeen recruitment video. It pictured these very young men and boys running around in robes and red-and-white checked headscarves, doing combat drills and yelling oaths of allegiance to Saddam and to the mother country. The highlight of the video was those young trainees slaughtering a goat with a knife, then drinking its blood and eating its flesh raw. It all looked very fanatical, hardcore and messed-up.
There were also some particularly gruesome stories of what the Fedayeen did to their own people if they ever suspected them of harbouring any resistance to Saddam’s rule. Clearly, if M Squadron ran into any Fedayeen there was no way they would be taking their surrender. If they did come up against those brainwashed fanatics it would be a brutal fight to the death – on both sides.
As the Squadron began to load up the C130s for their onward deployment, Grey ran into Sebastian en route to the armoury. More or less everyone had been avoiding the Squadron’s newest member, but not Grey. Grey had more than warmed to the bloke. He found him hilarious and oddly fascinating.
‘How’s it going then, mate?’ he asked.
‘Guess what?’ Sebastian replied, excitedly. ‘I’m going to be getting a gun! And guess what else? I’m going to be getting just a spot of training. From that chap you introduced me to – what’s his name? Gunner. Yah, from him.’
Grey couldn’t help but crack up laughing. Sebastian sounded like he was about to go on a pheasant shoot on the estate. It was priceless. For an instant he wondered if Seb was actually taking the piss. But he clearly wasn’t. He was just a genuine, nice bloke who didn’t try to hide who he was, or his lack of experience or his fallibilities.
Grey smiled. ‘Well done, mate. I’m glad you’re getting a gun. The Iraqis will be quaking in their boots.’
‘Waz-oh! I say, d’you think I’ll have to shoot anyone?’
Gunner was renowned for being a hard and merciless weapons instructor. He and Sebastian were the proverbial chalk and cheese. What Grey wouldn’t give to sit in on that weapons-training session – but unfortunately,
there was a mission to prepare for.
Following the failure to seize the Al Sahara airfield, the HQ Troop had rejigged M Squadron’s operational plan. A combined force of British and Australian SAS had pushed into the far Western Desert of Iraq. There, they’d had far better success than M Squadron had achieved at Al Sahara. The British and Aussie force had seized the ‘G2’ and ‘G3’ airfields – Iraqi oil pumping stations that doubled as airstrips.
Under cover of darkness the SAS force had assaulted the deep desert locations – which lie just across the Jordanian border – using fleets of desert patrol vehicles and the Aussies’ six-wheeled version of the standard open-topped Land Rovers. From out of the night they’d hit the guard towers like a whirlwind, then moved in to clear the large hangars and office buildings one by one.
G2 lay to the north of the Iraqi settlement of Shab-al-Hiri and was the more northerly of the two airbases, but it was still the wrong side of the Euphrates River for M Squadron’s purposes. Even so, it did offer the Squadron the ability to insert into Iraq via C130 Hercules, shaving a good hundred kilometres off their mission.
The strategy that had been adopted for the Squadron’s insertion was complex, and a lot could go wrong, but if all went to plan it would get them over the Euphrates and well into northern Iraq. The entire Squadron was to be flown into G2 over one night, using a fleet of C130 Hercules operated by highly trained Special Forces aircrew from a unit that specialized in dropping elite forces deep behind enemy lines. From there they would be airlifted north by Chinooks.
Due to the shortage of available helos, it would take three nights to ferry M Squadron into their remote LZ (landing zone). But crucially, that LZ was situated to the north of the Euphrates, so enabling the force to leapfrog that mighty river.
Grey and his team had scrutinized the intended LZ particularly closely, for they were scheduled to be first onto the ground. Using maps and aerial photos, a patch of terrain to the east of Sabkhat Abu Chars – a dry lake bed – had been indentified.
The Iraqi sabkhats – sand flats – were known to be treacherous, with subterranean water making them boggy and impassable. But the plateau to the east of Sabkhat Abu Chars seemed empty of human habitation and solid as a rock. It was a vast stretch of hard, barren land, with here and there the odd sprinkling of sand. As an added bonus, it was some seventy kilometres from end to end and at its northern extremity it merged into the Ninawa Desert – the bone-dry, lifeless wilderness that would take the Squadron most of the way to their objective. The LZ was about as far north as the Chinook pilots could afford to take them, bearing in mind the need to fly six runs with the helos over three nights so as to complete the infil.
But in spite of the rigorous planning, the risks involved in the coming insertion were legion. The G2 airfield was a stretch of dirt runway surrounded by open desert. A fleet of Hercules would need to land during the hours of darkness and offload the Squadron vehicles, more than likely kicking up a violent dust storm. The wagons would somehow have to cross-deck from the C130s to the waiting Chinooks in next-to-zero visibility. That alone had all the makings of a disaster.
In 1980, US Special Forces had flown into deep trouble on a similar type of mission. Six helicopters had rendezvoused with a C130 Hercules in the depths of the Iranian desert. The helos were carrying US Delta Force operators, and their intent was to launch an assault on the US Embassy in Tehran so as to rescue fifty-two American hostages being held there. But one of the helicopters had crashed in a dust storm, and another had damaged its hydraulic systems.
The decision was made by the then US President, Jimmy Carter, to abort the mission, which was codenamed Eagle Claw. But as the aircraft prepared for take-off from their remote desert location, one of the helos crashed into a C130, which was loaded with men and fuel. A massive fire engulfed the two aircraft, in which eight US servicemen lost their lives. A further five helicopters had to be abandoned, and were subsequently captured by the Iranians.
In short, Eagle Claw – one of the first missions ever undertaken by Delta Force – was seen as an unmitigated disaster. And the two-stage airborne insertion for Operation No Return – as the old and the bold had started to call M Squadron’s Iraq mission – was a similarly risk-laden undertaking.
*
In mid-March the entire Squadron flew out of their base on a fleet of C130 Hercules to a remote base deep in the deserts of Jordan. There, the first of the teams to be lifted onwards to G2 prepared to get airborne. Each Land Rover was loaded up with all the ammo, weaponry, personal kit, NBC and other gear the three men using it – plus their quad-biker – might need, with enough fuel, rations and water for a good week or more of operations.
Each man carried twelve 30-round STANAG mags for their personal weapon, the Diemaco C7 assault rifle, making 360 rounds in all. The Diemaco is a modified, ruggedized lightweight version of the standard M16 assault rifle, and it’s the weapon of choice for Special Forces. The M Squadron operators also carried a secondary weapon, a Sig Sauger 9mm pistol with a 13-round magazine, plus rakes of spare ammo.
High-explosive and smoke grenades were placed around each wagon in easy reach of the occupants, plus there were extra grenades stuffed into the men’s Bergens. A one-use LAW (light antitank weapon) 66mm rocket-launcher was strapped across the bonnet of each Pinkie, for use against larger buildings and light armour.
Each Troop had also been issued with a highly experimental SLAR (shoulder-launched assault rocket) – an 85mm rocket launcher that fires an enhanced blast warhead, more commonly known as a thermobaric device. The fuel–air explosive creates a firestorm at the point of impact, followed an instant later by a vacuum that collapses just about any object it hits.
The SLAR’s thermobaric warhead had been developed by America’s Naval Surface Warfare Center, a military technology development site based just north of Washington DC. M Squadron was very lucky to have got one SLAR per Troop, for it was still in the experimental phases of the weapon’s development, and everyone wanted to get the chance to fire one.
Armed and outfitted as they were, the one thing the Squadron wasn’t equipped to take on was the Asad Babil – the ‘Lion of Babylon’ battle tank. The Asad Babil boasts a 125mm main gun, a 12.7mm DShK anti-aircraft cannon, plus a GPMG-type machine-gun. Its armour is twelve inches thick, and it can maintain 50 kilometres per hour off-road. Being chased by a squadron of Asad Babils wouldn’t be much fun, especially as the heavily laden Pinkies weren’t capable of going a lot faster and even more so when moving across rough terrain.
No doubt about it, that kind of armoured beast was best avoided.
The first C130 flight into G2 had four Pinkies packed into it, one of which was Grey’s wagon, plus a bunch of quads perched on the tail ramp. As the C130 roared through the darkened heavens, Grey sat in the shadowed interior wondering what the days ahead might hold, and how the young lads on his team were going to cope with whatever might lie ahead of them.
Grey had a massive admiration for the C130 aircrew – guys who were basically flying into a patch of dirt deep in hostile territory, trusting absolutely that those on the ground had chosen a safe landing zone. The pilots would have to put the C130 down with total trust on a night-dark patch of desert, knowing that one rock the size of a laptop could seriously mess up their landing.
If the SAS boys had missed just the one loose boulder, it could flip up and smash into the turbines. Worse still, the tip of a rock anchored in the desert could rip the guts out of the aircraft’s tyres, causing no end of mayhem.
Over the years Grey had got to know some of those RAF Special Forces pilots passably well. They were fellow mavericks who were well aware that going into a Special Forces flight would rarely win them promotion. They were the guys who didn’t give a toss about rank or status, and who loved flying by the seat of their pants. They were fellow can-do rebels, which made them a natural part of the SF brotherhood.
In a standard air force set-up, an aircraft can’t normally get airborne i
f so much as a flock of seagulls menaces the runway. By contrast, these guys would fly through all weather and just about any level of threat, to put down on just about any vaguely usable piece of terrain – as their landing at G2 was hopefully about to prove.
The Hercules arrived above the Iraqi airstrip, and began a tactical descent towards the darkened earth so as to avoid being targeted by enemy fire. The SAS had thrown a ring of steel around G2 to enable M Squadron’s safe insertion, but that wouldn’t prevent an Iraqi surface-to-air missile team from targeting the C130 from out in the open desert.
Once the vehicles had dismounted from the aircraft, the C130 surged back into the sky leaving in its wake a thick and seething dust bowl. Grey, Moth and Dude found themselves marooned in a blinding, choking cloud of fine sand. To their left and right were the half-obscured silhouettes of their fellow Pinkies, but no one had a clue in which direction the waiting Chinooks lay. The plan was for the wagons to move off the C130’s ramp straight into the waiting helicopter’s hold, but not a thing could be seen of them. If they set off blind they risked suffering another Eagle Claw.
‘Hold stationary!’ Grey yelled at Moth, above the roar of the departing C130. ‘Don’t make a fucking move until all this shit has settled.’
Moth gave a grunt in the affirmative.
They gazed all around, wondering what the hell to do next. Grey tried flipping up his sand goggles and strapping on his NVG, to check if the enhanced night-vision kit might somehow cut through the dust cloud. But all it served to do was to drive some grains of wind-blown dust into his eyes.
He muttered a string of curses. ‘Fuck that for a game of soldiers.’ Here they were, finally in Iraq, and marooned in a brownout of a dust storm.
