by Damien Lewis
The Squadron had shaken itself out into a linear formation stretching a good kilometre from end to end. Now that Grey’s wagon was within range, he tuned into the radio chat. Gunner and his quad force were at the tip of the spear, and Grey could hear him banging on about the need to find a new lie-up point (LUP) so as to get out of the line of enemy fire.
The wagons thundered ahead into the darkness, the odd burst of 12.7mm fire chasing them through the night. They’d made about six kilometres when the OC called a halt, and they pulled up in a broadside position. No one dismounted. It was too hot to do so.
They were now strung out in linear fashion, but with the wagons parked side-on to the enemy. It was a perfect position from which to open up on the forces in pursuit, using every gun of the Squadron in synchrony. Grey figured the OC was preparing to brass up the enemy big time. In which case, the OC and the rest were likely oblivious to the fact that there were some seriously heavy firepower coming after them.
There was a quick head count, just to make sure that everyone was present and correct. Grey figured they had to have wounded, but as no one was making a big deal out of that right now it looked as if no one’s injuries could be life-threatening.
There followed a general exchange between vehicles on the radios, so everyone got a heads-up on what the others had seen. Grey shared the news that he’d positively indentified an Iraqi infantry unit, which had presumably been led to the LUP by the Fedayeen force. He described the Iraqi soldiers that he’d seen pouring into the LUP, complete with their monster Kraz 225 trucks, and the glimpse he’d got of their heavy armour.
For a second the radio net fell silent, as the news sank in.
When a Special Force unit was deep behind enemy lines and acting on sketchy intel, the plan had to evolve as it went along. It was continually being adjusted to take account of what each of the men in the unit had witnessed. Grey’s warning about the kind of forces they had coming after them completely altered the game plan. There was no limit to the kind of hardware the Iraqi Army might bring to bear – all except for air power, for the Coalition controlled the skies over Iraq.
Gunner’s voice was the first up on the net: ‘Fuck it, in that case we’ve got to find a new LUP like yesterday!’
As if to stress the point that he’d made, a savage stream of 12.7mm tracer hammered in towards the wagons, groping for a target. The Squadron was clearly a long way from being out of the shit just yet. The OC gave the order to move out. For now at least, any plans to use the broadside to smash the pursuing enemy had been abandoned.
‘Go Four, Five, Six!’ Gunner yelled over the net.
‘Go Four, Five, Six!’ voices echoed. ‘Go Four, Five, Six!’
When in escape and evasion mode, the standard orbat (order of battle) for the Squadron was for Four Troop to lead, with Five following and Six Troop bringing up the rear. Once again it would be Grey’s vehicle last in line, and closest to the pursuing enemy.
It seemed to take an age to get the Squadron on the move as one cohesive linear force. In the seconds they had to stay put as the tail-end Charlies, Grey and his men scanned the silence of the night searching for the enemy. Grey’s mind was churning, as he tried to make sense of exactly who it was had hit them in that LUP.
The enemy had mounted a carefully planned and deliberate attack – there could be no arguing with that. It had involved a strike force of highly mobile Fedayeen, sporting Dushkas. They’d provided covering fire for truck-mounted infantry, and at least one armoured vehicle to move in. All of that had been coordinated in the gathering darkness, so that all units acted in tight partnership with one another and avoided hitting each other with friendly fire.
Grey was gobsmacked: the enemy had achieved a tight and lethal attack, which was absolutely covert in nature until the trap was sprung. If the Squadron had remained in that LUP trading fire with the Dushka gunners for a few minutes more, they wouldn’t have seen the armour, or the Iraqi infantry, until they were right on top of them. It was sheer luck – combined with the OC’s foresight – that had got them out of there. If the Squadron had stayed put in the LUP for only a few minutes more, they’d have been finished. All of the wagons would have been smashed, and the men would have been killed, captured, or forced to go on the run on foot.
To coordinate getting those troops and armour in so swiftly, and all the time keeping the Squadron under such a blistering barrage of fire, required an incredible level of military professionalism. It was a superbly conceived set of attack orders, and brilliantly executed.
Contrary to what the intel briefings had told them, the Fedayeen and the Iraqi Army clearly did work in close conjunction with one another. Here, they were acting as one well-oiled machine. And contrary to the intel briefings, these were far from being the actions of an enemy that was demotivated and lacking in morale. Not a man amongst that attack force seemed likely to surrender, and Grey was more suspicious than ever now that they were up against the forces of the Iraqi 5th Corps.
In which case, their entire mission had been predicated on a massive intelligence failing, and they’d been sent in here on little less than a lie.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Grey had little time to dwell on such bleak thoughts. A second and a third burst of tracer fire arced out of the night, smashing into the dirt barely yards from their vehicle. Between Grey’s wagon and the enemy lay the void of the night, awash with the thick and drifting smog of the smoke screen. And not a vehicle amongst the Squadron was showing any lights.
In which case, how the hell was the enemy managing to target them? They certainly wouldn’t be able to see the Squadron with the naked eye, or even using night-vision binoculars. The screen of smoke blocked their sight, and even NVG kit wouldn’t allow the enemy to see through that.
Only infrared thermal imaging kit would enable them to pierce the smoke and the darkness and pick up on the Squadron’s heat signatures. Via thermal imaging optics the Iraqis would be able to detect any warm objects just as Predator sees them in the movies. A fire, a warm vehicle engine or a living being would form a distinctive hot white blob.
Even the tracks left by the hot tyres of the Pinkies and quads as they churned across the desert would leave a faint signature. Using thermal imaging kit, the Iraqis would be able to follow those tracks until the Squadron’s rearmost vehicles came into range and right now they’d be picking up the glowing heat of the wagons’ engines and the hot barrels of the machine-guns. Only elite Iraqi units were issued with thermal imaging kit, which made Grey wonder just who the hell it was they were up against?
It took a good sixty seconds for the lead elements of the Squadron to pull out in their order of march, during all of which time Grey’s wagon was taking fire. The maximum range of the Dushka was two thousand yards, so Grey could only assume the enemy were closing fast. As the wagons of Six Troop waited their turn to move, he felt a growing sense of frustration bordering on anger.
‘Fucking speed up at the front,’ Grey yelled over the radio, ‘’cause Zero Six Bravo are getting smashed back here!’
‘Roger that,’ came back Gunner’s reply.
As they waited impatiently for their wagon’s turn to move, the enemy fire intensified, long bursts of tracer tearing out of the smoke to their rear, and ricocheting off the hard, rocky earth. Grey heard the distinctive steel-on-steel howl as a 12.7mm round ripped into the underside of their vehicle. He felt it rock back on its spring with the impact, as further rounds smashed into the bare ground, throwing up a fountain of fire to either side.
He locked eyes with Moth. It was a golden rule of vehicle mobility ops never to break the line of march. If you did, one wagon might see another where it didn’t expect there to be one, and open fire. There was double the risk of such friendly fire when the enemy were driving similar vehicles to their own – light 4WDs with heavy machine-guns mounted in the rear. But it felt like pure murder stuck here at the back taking accurate fire as the rest of the Squadron got itself under way.
All of a sudden Grey saw Moth reach for the cowboy holster that held his weapon, grab it and dive out of the vehicle. Before he could stop him, the young operator had sunk to one knee, grabbed a handful of grenade rounds from out of his webbing, and ratcheted the first 40mm round into the weapon’s under-slung grenade launcher.
He planted the weapon at a 45-degree angle, butt firmly in the sand like a makeshift mortar, and opened fire. Grey stared in amazement as Moth started lobbing grenades high into the air in the direction of the enemy, so as to achieve maximum range. He realised how horrendous it must have been for Moth back at the LUP, sitting at the wagon’s wheel with the engine running and unable to return fire, while he and the Dude unleashed hell.
This was the first time they’d gone static, and they’d got a good idea where the enemy vehicles were. They were just about within range of Moth’s 40mm grenade launcher, when using it as he was now. They weren’t going anywhere until the rest of the Squadron got moving, and so Moth had seized his chance.
But even so, what Moth was doing right now was likely to get them all killed, especially as big nasty tracer rounds kept sparking all around him. He was crouching there without even the protection of body armour, for no one on Grey’s wagon had had the time or opportunity to pull any on. They’d been too busy returning fire, or running from the enemy.
Grey saw the faint flashes of detonations in the distance, as Moth’s grenade rounds exploded, and the dull thud of the blasts drifted back to them through the smoke. From this distance he had next to zero chance of hitting the enemy.
‘GET THE FUCK BACK IN THE FUCKING WAGON!’ Grey screamed. ‘They fucking blow your legs off, we’re finished! GET BACK IN HERE, NOW!’
He heard the characteristic thwup-thwup-thwup as Moth unleashed a last burst of grenade rounds. Then he turned and leapt for the wagon. He made the driver’s seat, slapped his smoking grenade launcher back into its makeshift holster, and glanced at Grey.
‘I thought I’d hold ’em off!’ he yelled. ‘Buy the rest of the lads some time—’
‘The rest of the lads!’ Grey roared. ‘What about fucking us?’
‘Yeah, us ’n’ all.’
‘Well fucking nice one, John Wayne,’ Grey snorted. ‘You almost got us all—’
His last words were lost as a violent explosion lit the horizon to the west. It was just about where Moth’s grenades had been landing. It looked as if one of those 40mm rounds must have hit its target, and very likely ruptured the enemy vehicle’s fuel tank. It had gone up in a tower of flame, the blast punching through the blanket of smoke like a mini nuclear explosion.
Before Grey could think of a fitting remark, the vehicle to their front roared into motion, and Moth floored the accelerator and powered after it. In spite of the unorthodoxy of what he’d just done with his grenade launcher, it was great to see Moth sparking, and especially when the Squadron was getting smashed from all sides. Any worries Grey might have had about the quiet man on his team – the mysterious, wild-card operator – were fast going out the window.
Almost as soon as Moth got the wagon motoring forwards, a savage burst of 12.7mm went smashing into the ground to their front. He gunned the engine, at the same time wrenching the steering wheel round to avoid the incoming fire. M Squadron had been stationary for no more than a couple of minutes, and there was no doubt that the enemy gunners were red-hot.
As the Squadron pushed east the enemy kept bouncing fiery streams of 12.7mm tracer off the desert to either side. It was horribly close, especially for Grey, Moth and Dude in the rearmost vehicle. Rounds were slamming into the deck not ten feet away from them, and Moth had to keep weaving the wagon to left and right in an effort to avoid being hit.
Still the enemy fire kept coming. They saw 12.7mm rounds smashing into the convoy up ahead, and there was no doubt that some of those shots had to be finding their targets. Either the enemy had night-vision kit or they were using thermal imaging gear, most likely a combination of the two. There was no other way they could keep following the line of fast-moving British vehicles, and targeting them so quickly.
The Iraqis were chasing after a fast moving target heading through pitch-black terrain, and yet still they were managing to shoot effectively while doing so. That was the ultimate skill to master when it came to vehicle-based mobility combat, and it was one that it was very hard to train for and perfect.
The Squadron was going back over the same ground that it had driven in on. It was 1900 hours by now. They had been under attack and returning fire for a good ninety minutes, and there was still not the slightest sign of them shaking off the enemy.
As they pushed through the bullet-torn night, Grey marvelled that their wagon was still functioning and that none of his team had yet taken a hit. One of the great things about the Pinkie was its aluminium shell. On the downside it provided zero protection from fire, but the upside was that it offered near-zero resistance to an enemy bullet. You could take a hammer and punch a nail through the alloy shell without too much effort.
The 12.7 mm rounds would be punching holes clean through the wagon’s bodywork, the bullets taking no damage at all from the impact. They’d pass straight through without fragmenting into deadly shards of shrapnel. So unless a 12.7 mm round hit a solid steel component – the engine, transmission, gearbox or the chassis – the Pinkie could keep on taking hits and only suffer cosmetic damage.
As to taking injuries, Grey figured they must have wounded men on the wagons up front. But there was bugger all they could do about that right now. They were hardly about to stop and administer first aid with the Iraqis hot on their tail. Each bloke in the Squadron carried a couple of emergency dressings in his webbing pouches, and it would be up to the injured man to patch up his own wounds as best he could, at least until they’d shaken off the enemy.
Straining his eyes to scan the dark terrain to their rear, Grey figured he’d caught the silhouette of a main battle tank. It was a frightening vision – a massive, squat black form churning ahead, the long finger of the main cannon swinging from side to side as it sought targets. All around them was open, trackless desert, so there were no Iraqi farmsteads or villages for the enemy forces to worry about hitting. It was a shooting gallery – a free fire zone – with M Squadron bang out in the midst of it.
Grey felt his shoulders tense in anticipation of the crump of a heavy gun firing at their backs, and the scream of an incoming shell, as the tank lobbed a round into the rear of their wagon turning them into a mush of shredded Pinkie mixed with pulverized flesh and gore. Instead, there was a squelch of static on the radio and the OC’s voice came up on the radio.
‘All call-signs, Zero. We have at least three main battle tanks to our rear. They’ve got to be using IR thermal imaging kit so as to hit us with their 12.7 mm. Gunner’s taking us into a new LUP, so be ready for a sharp turn to the north and a new line of march.’
The OC sounded remarkably calm. Grey couldn’t imagine why. The Squadron had just escaped getting trapped and smashed, and by the skin of its teeth. They now had the hunter force from hell on their tail. Worse still, there was nothing they could do against the Iraqi tanks. Unless they could hide themselves very bloody effectively and very bloody quickly, the tanks would find them and tear them to pieces.
The vehicles had made a good three kilometres from their static position when the lead element turned sharp left and started to veer northwards. Just off their southeasterly line of march Gunner had spotted a narrow wadi-like depression, and that was what he was making for.
By making this turn at right-angles to their present line of march, the Squadron was ‘breaking track’ – making a ninety-degree turn to get them out of the enemy’s line of fire. The aim now was to achieve a major burst of speed, and to let the dark night swallow them. By the time they made it into the wadi, they’d have gone to earth below ground and out of sight.
It was a fine move by Gunner to have brought them thus far, and if they could get into that w
adi unseen they might just lose their pursuers. But if they went to ground only to have a force of main battle tanks roar over the wadi’s edge and swamp them, then they were pretty much done for. After all, that was exactly what the enemy had tried to do when ambushing them at their first LUP.
Within seconds of making that ninety-degree turn, Gunner must have opened his throttle to the max. Behind him the rest of quad force did likewise, and the lead elements of the Squadron threw caution to the wind as they got their wagons flying across the landscape. The entire Squadron was hammering across the desert towards the wadi, Grey’s wagon practically shaking itself to pieces as it raced along in the rear.
From his position in the Pinkie’s front Grey found the noise deafening. It was the tortured sound of an overloaded and half-shot-up Land Rover being thrashed across the hard, rocky terrain. There was the smashing together of heavy ammo tins in the rear, the sharp crump of the suspension bottoming out as the wagon hit rough ground, the worrying shriek of bodywork that was about to tear itself apart, not to mention the thud-like punch to the stomach as the sump-guard hit a large rock below.
By the time they reached the entrance to the wadi, the wagons were bunched up far closer than was optimal. In classic desert mobility ops the squadron OC would have sent the quads forward to recce the wadi before the wagons entered, and they wouldn’t follow right on each other’s heels. But there was no time for that now. Right now, the priority was to get the entire force below ground and well hidden before the enemy spotted them.
As the first wagons rumbled down the steep and rocky slope that led into the dry lake bed, Grey felt Moth ease off the gas a little. He’d learned his vehicle mobility craft well, and he was putting a fraction more space between him and the wagon in front as they prepared to enter the depression.
Up ahead, Grey saw Six Troop’s foremost wagon swing into the entranceway and slide out of view. He felt a massive sense of relief as those wagons disappeared from sight. One thing was for sure: the lake bed was deep enough to hide the Squadron’s Pinkies. Maybe their luck had turned. Maybe they were starting to win this one, after all.
