by Damien Lewis
But as Moth swung the wagon round and eased its nose into the steep-sided entry point, Grey spotted Gunner’s quad coming haring back up the incline. The quad was caked in a thick layer of what looked like black dust, and Gunner was yelling and gesticulating wildly for the wagons of Six Troop to stop and do an about-turn.
Moth already had the Pinkie heading down the narrow V-shaped incline. There was nothing he could do to stop. There was no turning room, and the slope was too steep and friable to reverse the heavy wagon out of there. They had no option but to plough onwards and run into whatever trouble might await.
Their wagon hit the bottom of the slope, and Grey could see that it opened out into a flat, circular lake bed some three hundred metres across. At first glance it seemed to be an ideal LUP. Steep walls a good ten feet in height enclosed an expanse of flat, open terrain that was more than large enough to hold all the vehicles. As a bonus, at the far end there was what looked like a second exit point.
But as he looked again, Grey noticed that strung out across the terrain to their front were the vehicles of the Squadron. They were still pretty much in a linear formation, and bunched up close together after the speed-dash across the desert. But very few, if any, of them were moving. As he fixed on the nearest wagon, trying to make out the detail in the darkness, he knew that something was badly amiss: it was sitting far too low on the floor of the lake bed.
An instant later, figures began bailing out of the vehicle. Grey realized that he could barely even see its wheels. Somehow, the wagon had sunk up to its axles in the lake bed, and was hopelessly bogged. The line of Pinkies to the front seemed similarly mired. Only the odd one was still moving, its wheels churning desperately and its engine howling like a banshee, as it tried to haul itself and its occupants out of whatever shit they had stumbled into.
‘FUCKING SLAM HER INTO LOW RATIO!’ Grey screamed at Moth. ‘TURN THE BITCH AROUND AND DON’T STOP UNTIL WE’RE OUT OF HERE!’
The vehicle was supposed to be stationary to change ratios, but right here and right now Moth went to crash it through from high to low without stopping.
For an instant the wagon felt as if it had hit a brick wall as the cogs ground and snarled against one another. And then the gears meshed in low, and the tyres began churning through the mud and the dust with the engine emitting a tortured, high-pitched scream.
‘FUCKING GENTLY DOES IT!’ Grey yelled. ‘GENTLY AS SHE GOES!’
It’s a basic rule of off-road driving that whenever you turn a vehicle, you lose traction. Grey could see that several of the Pinkies ahead of them had tried to turn aside from the line of march, but they were too far into the mire and had turned too sharply to make it back to solid ground.
Because they’d had that warning from Gunner, and they’d seen the plight of the wagons to their front, they’d started to reverse course that much earlier. They were barely thirty yards into the wadi by now, but if Moth turned too violently, the wagon would plough in deep, and die.
To the left and right of him Grey could see the other vehicles of Six Troop likewise doing a series of desperate about-turns. Moth was spooling the steering wheel through his fingers as the Pinkie chewed its way through the hard crust of sun-baked mud. The tyres were spinning wildly and throwing out a solid wave of gunk to their rear, which went splattering over the wagons directly behind them.
It was the weirdest of sensations, as the wagon floated through whatever gloopy crap was under the wheels. She was moving no faster than the speed of a slow-going fishing boat, and there was something of a sickening all-at-sea-like feel about the gliding, sliding progress she was making. Most worrying of all, with every second the wagon’s forward momentum seemed to keep slowing.
The smell had hit Grey’s nostrils almost instantly – that of an evil-smelling, stagnant, gooey swamp. As sod’s law would have it, M Squadron had chosen to go to ground in one of the few dry lake beds in northern Iraq that was actually a quagmire right now. The hard, crusty surface hid below it a slough of dark, fetid mud, and if the Iraqis had wanted to set a better trap for M Squadron, Grey couldn’t think of one.
How many similar features had the Squadron driven through or holed up in over the past few days? Dozens, that was for sure, and not one of them had been anything other than dry as a bone and solid-bottomed. It had been exactly the right thing to do – to break the line of march, as the OC had decided. And Gunner had led them into exactly the right kind of feature in which to hide – for who was to know it was a treacherous swamp?
The Squadron was in a whole world of shit right now. As far as Grey was concerned, this was seriously bad juju. Thirty seconds earlier he’d believed that by good luck and foresight they’d started to win this one and had shaken off the enemy. Now, in an instant, everything had changed for the sixty men of M Squadron. From what he could see, they had pretty much every wagon in front of their Troop’s bogged in, and even Six Troop’s foremost wagons were unlikely to make it out of there.
Deprived of their mobility and their firepower, and with a bunch of main battle tanks, plus truck-mounted infantry and highly-mobile Fedayeen after them, what the hell were they supposed to do?
Every second was precious, and it was critical that they save at least a few of the wagons. If they did that, maybe they could cram the rest of the blokes aboard the surviving vehicles. They’d be murderously overloaded, and the passengers would block the machine-gun’s lines of fire, so they’d be largely defenceless. But at least they’d not be on the run on foot – for there was no way they could evade and escape from the force that was coming after them if they had to try to leg it.
Wheels spinning crazily, Moth executed a gradual arc with the Pinkie and somehow kept her moving. As the entry point drew closer and closer, Grey urged the wagon onwards: Come on, you bastard, come on.
But still their progress kept slowing, and he was praying that their wagon wasn’t going to sink up to its guts in the swamp.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Grey risked a momentary glance to their rear. Right behind their wagon another was executing the same kind of manoeuvre as they were. It, plus the blokes riding in it, were caked in a thick layer of stinking shit thrown up by the leading wagon’s tyres, making them all but unrecognizable. He figured their vehicle stood about as much chance of making it out of here as he did.
Beyond that a third wagon was still on the move. Grey reckoned it was the unmistakable figure of Scruff in the vehicle commander’s seat. But the fourth of Six Troop’s wagons was clearly a gonner, for already it was up to the tops of its wheels in the shit, and the rest of the Squadron’s transport-cum-firepower seemed to be well and truly finished.
Then he spotted movement to the far end of the lake bed. Two wagons were trying to claw their way up the eastern side of the wadi. From the long antennae Grey could tell that they had to be the command wagons – so it looked as if both vehicles from the HQ Troop were also going to make it out of there.
The HQ Pinkies were something like half a tonne lighter than the rest, for they weren’t loaded down with machine-guns and ammo. It would make sense for them to have fought their way through the quagmire, as they had a far greater chance of floating across its treacherous surface. It looked as if the OC Troop’s wagons at least might survive, complete with all their communications systems.
Moth’s skill with the wagon was breathtaking, as he nursed it through the impossible terrain. For an instant the front wheels ceased their wild spinning, as the tyres found a momentary grip. With solid ground beneath them again, those wheels began to commandeer the lion’s share of the engine’s power and transfer it into traction and forward motion.
Within seconds they had dragged the wagon ahead, and as the rear wheels also found their grip it hauled itself onto firm ground. It was then a forty-metre scramble back the way they had come, before finally they made the lip of the wadi and the high ground. The only other vehicle there was Gunner’s quad, and they were all now equally covered in the thick, black
stinking mud.
‘Nice choice for a bloody LUP!’ Grey yelled.
Gunner stared at him in stunned silence. Grey regretted having made the comment almost instantly, for the quad commander was clearly beating himself up over having led the Squadron into that fateful wadi.
Grey had little idea how Gunner had managed to turn his quad around and get himself out of there, especially as he had been first into the wadi. But he was known for being an ace quad driver, in addition to which the quads boasted a fantastic tyre-surface-to-weight ratio, one far better than the Pinkies’.
The quad was also a more instinctive off-road vehicle. Sitting astride the machine, the driver was closer to and more intimately in touch with the terrain. With a 350cc motor and permanent four-wheel drive, it had the power and the grip to haul itself through the most challenging ground. Still, it was remarkable that Gunner had extricated himself from the gluey mess of that lake bed, and especially since he’d doubled back to the entry point in an effort to warn the rest of the Squadron.
Yet right now the sum of M Squadron’s vehicles that had definitely made it out of the wadi was a lone Pinkie plus a quad. With the number of wagons they were losing here, the decision to take the turn into that lakebed was doubtless going to cost them dear.
There was a screaming of diesel engines from behind, and one after the other two further wagons hauled themselves up the incline and onto the high ground. They were so caked in crap as to be almost unrecognizable as Land Rovers, and without their sand goggles Grey figured the drivers would have been blinded by the amount of shit thrown up in their faces. Yet at least they’d done the seemingly impossible and made it out of there.
One of the wagons was that of Scruff’s. The other belonged to Edward ‘Ed’ Smith, the Captain in overall command of Six Troop. An officer pretty much fresh out of the factory, Ed was still seen as very much one of the lads. He was combat-inexperienced, but at the same time he was a down-to-earth bloke with none of the public school attitude that so often rubbed the men up the wrong way.
For a long moment those who’d made it out of the wadi stared at the exit point, willing further vehicles to appear. And then it struck them that there was no more screaming of strained diesel engines coming from that lake bed. It had fallen silent down there, and it didn’t look as if any other wagons were going to make it through.
But right now there was no time to linger on the fate that had befallen those vehicles. A sudden fiery burst of 12.7mm went slamming into the wadi rim, just a few dozen yards to the west of Gunner’s quad. More rounds followed, as the enemy gunners followed the tracer of that first burst, groping towards their target.
Grey searched the horizon to the west, and even with the naked eye the enemy hunter force was well-visible. There was a line of headlights, like pinpricks in the darkness, some three kilometres distant and bearing down on them. Some of those lights were closer to the ground, so he figured they would be the Fedayeen in their Toyota pick-ups. But there were a handful set twice as high, and Grey could just imagine those big Kraz 225 trucks thundering onwards.
Worst of all, here and there a cone of illumination could be seen swinging backwards and forwards across the terrain. It could only be the turret-mounted searchlight of an Asad Babil – a ‘Lion of Babylon’ – and seeing those beams of light groping this way and that was like an invitation to the very pits of hell.
Just to torture himself some more, Grey ran the capabilities of the Asad Babil through his mind. It weighed in at a mighty 41.5 tonnes, more than enough to crush a Pinkie under its tracks. It boasted a 125mm main gun mounted in a turret encased in twelve inches of armour, plus a 12.7mm Dushka and a GPMG-type machine-gun mounted on pivots in the armoured beast’s hull.
‘Whatever you do, don’t return fire!’ Grey yelled at the other wagons.
If they opened up on the enemy they’d signal their exact whereabouts, and they still had dozens of blokes and their vehicles trapped down below.
It was now that voices started coming up on the radios, as teams reported in that they were up to their axles in the mud and abandoning their wagons. But the remarkable thing was that no one seemed to be losing their cool down there. Somehow, the men of M Squadron appeared to be holding their nerve, and holding it together despite the fact that they were becoming ever more hopelessly trapped.
Those mired in the swamp were pretty much bumper to bumper, so they were able to speak across the vehicles. They must have got some kind of communal heads-up amongst themselves, and some very tough decisions must have been made. It was clear to the men on the lip of the wadi that the wagons would have to be blown, but it was another thing entirely to make the call.
‘Right, that’s it, time to blow the vehicles,’ a voice came up on the radio. ‘Rip out all the sensitive kit you can carry, then prep your charges.’
The speaker sounded strangely calm, as if he was giving some kind of an order during an exercise on Salisbury Plain. In truth, the situation M Squadron now found itself in was totally unprecedented. It was a total fluke, the worst kind of bad juju that could ever have befallen an elite force many hundreds of kilometres behind enemy lines.
During their Kenya exercises they’d rehearsed their ‘actions-on’ – the measures to be taken for each forseeable eventuality – including losing a vehicle, or having a vehicle-load of wounded. With the seats on every wagon occupied, there was zero fat in the Squadron system, and the Pinkies weren’t designed to carry more than three men. The wagons of the HQ Troop had each been loaded with a stretcher, and if they did take several wounded they’d have to put the injured men on those, and lash them to the Pinkies.
But now the decision had been made to blow any number of vehicles. That being the case, it was crucial to remove as much of the top-secret and sensitive kit as possible. Each Pinkie was fitted with specially shaped explosive charge designed to provide a larger explosive surface than a conventional saucer-shaped mine, so there was a greater chance of a tank hitting it. It was equally useful as a makeshift demolition charge when laid crossways in a Pinkie, just to the rear of the front seats.
The charges in the Pinkies were fitted with an improvised fuse system, so they could be triggered manually. But the fuse lasted for only ninety seconds, so crucially all the mines would need to be triggered at the same time. Otherwise, you’d have vehicles blowing at different moments, and blokes were bound to get caught in the blast.
In the precious few moments left before triggering the charges, the men were in a whirlwind of fevered activity trying to decide what the hell to strip from the wagons.
But on the lip of the wadi it had all gone very quiet. Apart from the odd, probing burst of incoming fire, the overriding sound was the cries of shouted instructions from below, plus the noise of a bits of kit being torn out of the vehicles.
To the west of them they could hear the faint but throaty growl of engines moving through the night. The enemy were clearly working their way through the smoke screen left by the Squadron, and tracing the tracks they had left across the desert. Even if they missed the ninety-degree turn made by the wagons, one sweep with their thermal imaging kit and they’d detect the hot engines of the three Pinkies perched on the rim of the lake bed.
Grey sensed it was only a matter of moments before they got seriously whacked. He glanced around at their position. They were perched atop a mound of rock that gave them a slight vantage point. It was the only position from which they could be seen from the lake bed, so that those abandoning their vehicles would know which way to come.
Grey was torn between trying to keep a watch for blokes emerging from the wadi, and scanning the darkness to the west for the enemy, plus he was also trying to get a glimpse of where the HQ Troop’s wagons might have got to. It was hard to see how things could get any worse, but it sure as hell wouldn’t help if the Squadron got split up and Grey and those with him got cut off from the OC.
One thing was clear: only the wagons on the lip of that lake bed could provid
e covering fire for those bugging out on foot, if and when the enemy came thundering out of the void of the night. Without some kind of force to defend them, those on foot would be mown down like so much summer hay, as they staggered out of the quagmire laden down with gear.
Grey swept the darkness with his weapon, as he prepared to defend the majority of the Squadron, who were dismounted and bereft of their heavy machine-guns. It was clear to all that their position offered zero cover and that they had negligible firepower compared to what was coming. Yet somehow, they had to hold this ground.
‘We’re in a totally shit position,’ he grunted, ‘but the lads below are in a shittier one. Prepare to fucking mallet any enemy that get near us.’
In response, he heard a sharp clack-clack as the Dude double-checked that he had a round chambered in the .50-cal. As for Moth, he reached forward and unhooked his assault rifle cum grenade launcher from its holster, and punched in a 40mm grenade round. Grey figured it was a fair one. Desperate situations called for desperate measures.
A voice drifted across to them from one of the other wagons. ‘They’ve got onto us every bloody time.’ It was Scruff. ‘Sooner or later they’ll do the same here. They’ll see us through the smoke.’
‘Yep,’ Grey replied. ‘I reckon we’ll get opened up on, any second now—’
‘You heard the fucking score on the air power?’
‘Nope. Must have missed it in all the carnage.’
‘There is none. At least not right now. Fucking what wouldn’t you give for a pair of A10s?’
‘The sky’s the fucking limit, mate.’
The A10 Warthog is an American ground-attack aircraft, and a superlative tank-busting warplane. Its nose-mounted, seven-barrel Gatling-type cannon would make short work of even an Iraqi Asad Babil, so more the pity there was no air power available.
