by Damien Lewis
More worrying still, what had happened to the blokes who’d been operating those vehicles? Had they failed to trigger the charges because the enemy had somehow overrun them? The nightmare scenario right now was a couple of teams being taken alive.
The Iraqis would torture them to secure intelligence on the nature of the mission, parade them before the world’s media to prove how the Coalition was far from invincible, and by doing so they’d torture the blokes’ families in turn.
It would be a massive propaganda victory for the enemy, not to mention a disaster for British and allied forces operating here. And all before the ground war proper had really even started.
Unbeknown to the scattered forces of M Squadron, that very night British and American troops would begin their push across the border from Kuwait into southern Iraq. At any moment now the ground offensive would begin, the opening sortie of which would be an air-mobile assault by British Royal Marines to take the Al Faw peninsula, the southernmost territory of Iraq.
But right now, the course of the wider war was an irrelevancy to the men of M Squadron. Right now, their every fibre was focused on the desperate struggle to escape from and evade an enemy who were faster, more mobile, better equipped, better armed and far more numerous than the scattered forces of M Squadron.
The three wagons were crawling away from the wadi, making no more than fifteen kilometres an hour, when Grey sensed a pop in the sky high above them. Suddenly, the landscape all around was lit up by a brilliant white light. He glanced skywards, and high above him he could see a blinding globule of fire floating gently to earth, like a giant candle flame.
He recognized it instantly as an illume round – a flare suspended beneath a parachute. His first thought was: Fucking hell, they’re managing to get illume rounds above us while moving through the desert and hunting us down. His second thought was: What the hell kind of weapon is managing to put up those illumes?
Judging by the height at which they were bursting and the size of the flares, Grey reckoned that these were monster illume rounds – 81mm minimum, perhaps larger. They’d light an area two to three kilometres across, so the wagons would be just within the enemy’s visual range. He had to hope and pray the bastards didn’t spot them.
It couldn’t be the Fedayeen SUVs or the Iraqi Army trucks firing those flare rounds, because neither carried a weapon that could handle that calibre of ordnance. He looked west, and in the intense white light he could see scores of vehicles moving in line abreast, combing the desert terrain.
There were dozens of white Fedayeen SUVs, and in the centre of that force were the hulking forms of half a dozen Kraz 225s. The Iraqi Army was clearly working hand in hand with the Fedayeen, using their light and mobile SUVs like a pack of dogs to hunt their prey.
He caught the flare of a muzzle firing further to the west, and a stab of flame belched skywards. In the light of the muzzle flash he thought he’d seen the silhouette of enemy armour. An instant later a second flare round burst high above. In its harsh glare Grey was suddenly very certain: to the rear of the Fedayeen those cursed T-72s were churning their way forward, and it was the tanks that were putting up the illume rounds.
Pinned under that burning white light, Grey felt horribly exposed. He was also starting to feel punch-drunk. How the hell had the enemy been so quick off the mark?
They’d legged it from their first LUP just in the nick of time, but the Iraqis had scanned the surrounding terrain with their thermal imaging kit and found them. Then the Squadron had broken track by executing a ninety-degree turn, and ended up in the wadi of death and been forced to blow the vehicles.
They’d managed to salvage a handful of wagons and bug out of there, but the enemy had clearly checked out the wadi of death pretty quickly. They’d have debussed a bunch of their infantry, and just as soon as they’d realized there were a bunch of wagons bogged in and blown, they’d scanned the surroundings with their thermal imaging kit. By sheer luck, Grey and his fellow vehicles were a good distance beyond the range of such kit, but at that stage the enemy had decided to put up flares, to light up the wider terrain and nail them.
It was now that Gunner started to really earn his pay on the quad. He kept beetling backwards and forwards, recce-ing a route that would hide them from the enemy, then returning to check on the wagons. It was great to have the quad still with them. It was their only remaining means of fast and agile mobility, and it was perfect for checking out the ground ahead and to the flanks for the enemy.
A kilometre further on Gunner pulled his quad to a halt, the rest of the vehicles following suit. They’d taken no incoming fire, so for now at least they had to assume the enemy hadn’t seen them. They’d left behind the cone of light thrown off by the illume rounds, and edged into the night’s welcome embrace, which meant they could afford a few seconds to deal with the overriding priority right now – which was doing an accurate head count.
The wagons drew in close so they could speak to each other without dismounting. Normally, doing a head count would be a simple task of asking the Troop leaders to check that all their men were present. But right now that didn’t cut it, because the Troops had been split left, right and centre.
Ed, Scruff and Grey got the names and call-signs of all the blokes on their vehicles, Ed scribbling a list of them in his notebook. The results confirmed how the Squadron had been scattered. There were a total of twenty-six blokes with the three Pinkies, plus the two on the quad. With the Squadron numbering some sixty blokes, that meant there was an equal number out there somewhere unaccounted for.
They’d got most of those from Five Troop and half from Four Troop clinging onto their wagons. They’d lost one of the Six Troop Land Rovers plus every one of their quads. Grey had no idea where the fourth man of his team, Mucker, had got to, or even if his quad had made it out of the wadi. Instead, they had Gunner from Four Troop with them, driving their only quad.
No one had much of an idea where the OC might have got to, or even whether his Troop was mobile. There had been no comms from the HQ Troop, and the OC hadn’t responded to Ed’s repeated radio calls, which had to mean that wherever the HQ Troop might be right now they were out of range of the radios.
But their overriding concerns were for the third group, which had been perched on the northern rim of the wadi. They were pretty certain the wagons of HQ Troop had made it out of there. Sure, they’d be deprived of the protection of the Squadron’s heavy weapons, but so what? The three wagons right here could hardly use their machine-guns, and at least the HQ Troop should be reasonably mobile in their lighter vehicles.
By contrast, the lone Pinkie and the handful of quads on the northern rim of the wadi could be in a seriously shit state. If most of the missing blokes had headed for their position, they’d be hopelessly overloaded with the extra bodies. But the alternative scenario was even more desperate: if the missing men hadn’t made it to those vehicles, they would be scattered across the Iraqi desert on the run on foot.
Ed had one of the Six Troop signallers with him in his wagon. He got him to try to raise UK Special Forces Headquarters via the vehicle-mounted satcom. They didn’t have a second to fuck around here, but it was just possible that the other elements of the Squadron had reported in to SFHQ, in which case they could get confirmation that all the blokes were accounted for. They might even get a workable RV – a rendezvous point where the Squadron could gather together.
Ed spoke into the handset. ‘Zero, this is OC Six Troop. Zero, this is OC Six Troop. Contact status report. Come on – come on – answer!’
The air was thick with tension as he waited for a response. Then: ‘OC Six Troop, this is Zero. Go ahead.’
‘Zero, OC Six Troop – sitrep: Squadron bogged down in wadi, blown six to eight wagons, split up and forced to go on the run. We are now a mixed unit of blokes, with three LRs and one quad, facing a superior enemy force.’
‘Give casualties and head count,’ came the tense reply.
‘Twenty
-eight present with my force. No serious casualties.’
‘Give call-signs.’
Ed passed across the call-signs of all present in his group. ‘We need air support,’ he continued. ‘Repeat: we need air. Plus we need a grid for a hot extraction.’
Ed began to add something else, but there was a hollow thud and a hiss and a dazzling flash in the sky to the west, as the enemy put up another illume. It was too distant to light them up completely, but with each flare they were creeping closer. The noise of its bursting drowned out much of what Ed was saying.
‘We’ve had six vehicles disappear from Blue Force Tracker,’ came the call from Headquarters. ‘What’s happened to them?’
‘Understand the situation: we got bogged down,’ Ed repeated. ‘We blew the bogged-in vehicles. Those guys cross-decked to other wagons. That’s why we’re three LRs and one quad with twenty-eight blokes.’
‘Will get helos on standby for a forty-min flight time to your position. Stand by for a grid. Repeat: stand by for a grid.’
Ed came off the air, wiping an exhausted hand across his mud-stained features. ‘Zero’s finding us a grid. Plus they’re getting together some close air support for us. For now, keep heading south. Grey, you got the next map?’
‘I got it,’ Grey confirmed. He’d done a map change just as soon as they’d left the wadi of death, for they’d hit the edge of one 45-kilometre-square sheet.
For a few moments Grey and Ed studied the map together, searching for some open, flat terrain where they might call in a couple of Chinooks to carry out a hot extraction. A patch of possible ground sorted, they prepared to move out.
‘Any news on the others?’ Grey asked.
‘Nope,’ Ed replied, his voice thick with worry. ‘There’s been nothing from HQ Troop, and the third group hasn’t come up on comms.’
‘What about Blue Force Tracker? Surely, they can track their position on those?’
‘Zero says they’ve been trying to, but it’s total bloody confusion right now.’
Each of the wagons was fitted with a BFT (Blue Force Tracker) system – a small gizmo housed in a black box that worked via a satellite antenna. BFT was designed to send data to Headquarters on the location of each of the vehicles. In the operations room, each wagon would show up as an individual icon displayed on a giant computer screen. Each BFT unit sent a signal unique to the wagon’s call-sign, so each vehicle could be tracked individually.
The BFT system also had an emergency button, which sent a message akin to a Mayday call. Apparently, some of M Squadron’s Mayday buttons had been pressed. In fact, Headquarters had received Mayday calls from wagons scattered dozens of kilometres apart – which was how they’d first realized that M Squadron was in serious trouble.
But without a sitrep from anyone in the Squadron, those Mayday calls had caused total confusion at Headquarters. How could they be coming from vehicles scattered so far apart? Had some of the wagons been captured by the Iraqis, who were now tearing about in them and messing with the BFT systems? Or – as unlikely as it might seem – had an entire Squadron somehow been scattered across the Iraqi desert?
To make matters worse, half -a-dozen of the BFT systems had suddenly gone off air, as the wagons in the wadi of death had been blown. Understandably, that had caused chaos at Headquarters, for it seemed to show that six wagons had just been taken out by the enemy, and pretty much in one go.
As they had begun to wake up to what was happening to M Squadron, the SF Ops Room had been transformed into a whirlwind of activity. Ed’s sitrep had shed some welcome light on the situation, but the word from Headquarters hadn’t made things look a great deal more positive, for neither the HQ Troop nor the third force had come up on comms.
As impossible as it might seem, right now they might have lost half of the entire Squadron.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
From the wagon to his left, Grey heard a voice start banging on about the need to split up. He didn’t recognize who it was, so it was probably a bloke from Four or Five Troop. With sixty men to the Squadron there were some you’d barely know by name, let alone be able to recognize from a few words uttered across the tense darkness.
Due west eighty kilometres or so lay the border with Syria. For most of their journey the Squadron had been paralleling it. Their final option, if all else failed, would be to try to make a run for that border, as the lads from the Bravo Two Zero patrol had done, back in 1991. But lying between the M Squadron operators and their escape route was the Iraqi hunter force – so it had to be a total non-starter right now.
Just as soon as they’d been compromised by the Iraqi goat-herder, the B2Z boys had headed for Syria, but only one of them had made it. En route, the rest of the patrol had been shot up, killed or captured. Plus the one patrol member who had made it into Syria on foot had hardly been welcomed. He was arrested, beaten and interrogated before the British government pressurized the Syrians into handing him over.
Even if the remnants of M Squadron could reach Syria, it would offer only very dubious sanctuary. The Syrian regime was no friend to the West, and it would hardly welcome half a British Special Forces squadron piling across into its territory. In spite of this, that same voice kept going on about the need to split up: ‘We’ve got to split up, like they did in Bravo Two Zero. It’s the only way. We’ve got to split up.’
Finally, Grey lost it. ‘That’s the last fucking thing we need to do. We need to stick together. We need to stick together and find the rest of the Squadron. There are blokes missing out there, including the OC, and who knows what kind of shit they’re in. We need to stick together and find them, so let’s get fucking sparking.’
‘But if we split into smaller groups we’re less visible,’ the bloke continued. ‘We split up and head for the Syrian border—’
‘If we split up we can’t coordinate the hot extraction, ’cause some wagons don’t have satcom,’ Grey cut him off. ‘Plus if we go in three directions, who’s heading back the way we’ve come? ’Cause that’s the suicide option. And who’s going east, further into Iraq? And even fucking west towards Syria we know there’s a shedload of enemy. Think about it. It just doesn’t fucking add up. We keep together and head south on a bearing for a hot extraction.’
‘Grey’s right: no one’s splitting up,’ Ed cut in. ‘We keep together as one unit, and make for a hot-extraction grid.’
That seemed to shut the bloke up.
Ed turned to Grey. ‘I need you to plot a course that gets us out of here and into the open desert – somewhere we can hide, in case we can’t make an extraction grid. Double-check your map-reading, ’cause we need to know exactly where we are at all times. Your wagon will take the lead. And budge up, ’cause I’ll get someone riding shotgun with you to help with the mapping.’
Ed got the rupert from Five Troop to squeeze himself into the seat beside Grey – which meant that the front of their wagon was like the proverbial sardines in a tin, especially as they still had Raggy sprawled across the bonnet. Luckily, the Five Troop officer was a skinny shrimp of a bloke, which left Moth just about enough free space still to use the gearstick.
‘Two heads are better than one,’ Ed explained. ‘If we’re going to get the helos in for a hot extraction, we need to make fucking sure we don’t mess up on the mapping.’
Grey figured it was a fair one. But as the Pinkie pulled away he was struggling with the map sheets – and with the rupert practically perched on his lap. It wasn’t going to make the task of navigating any the bloody easier.
‘Head south,’ he told Moth. ‘For now, make for the Southern Cross. I’ll check the maps as we go.’
The Southern Cross is a bright bluish constellation of stars lying in the heart of the Milky Way, and it’s a rough pointer for south. Grey figured if they headed due south, then sooner or later they’d hit the Ninawa Desert, which should give them the space and the terrain in which to lose the enemy. If they lost their pursuers they could contact Headquarters, radio i
n their position and act as an RV for the remainder of the Squadron. Hell, they might even be able to head out in a couple of the Pinkies and bring the missing blokes in.
As they pushed ahead at little more than a crawl, a thought struck Grey from out of the night. An image had come unbidden into his head: it was of Reggie, the Squadron OC. He was his super-cool self, mug of coffee clasped in the one hand: Okay, boy, okay, thanks for that, buddy … I’ll have a think on that one. Would he still be keeping his famous cool, Grey wondered, with his Squadron scattered to the four corners, and stuck in a hole as he now had to be?
Grey bloody hoped he would. The last thing they needed right now was the OC getting captured. For a British Special Forces Major and SAS veteran to fall into the hands of the enemy would be a propaganda victory par excellence for the Iraqis. Not only that, the OC would be privy to all the bigger-picture intelligence about the wider war effort. He might well be a quiet, dagger-between-the-teeth kind of a bloke, but the Iraqis had ways of making even the toughest talk.
It was then that he remembered Sebastian. A spot of foreign adventure, indeed. Their poor bloody terp must have realized by now that he’d bitten off a massive hunk of foreign adventure, far more than he had ever bargained for. Sebastian would be with the HQ Troop sharing whatever fate had befallen them, and if the Iraqis got hold of him Grey dreaded to think what they might do to him.
Moth was struggling to pick a route through the rough landscape. The night was black as hell and it made for impossible driving, especially with a wagon as overburdened as theirs. But on one level, that was the least of their worries right now. Suddenly, there was the howl of an incoming round. Right in the path of the vehicle out front – Gunner’s lone quad – was an almighty great explosion.
For an instant, Grey saw Gunner and the officer riding pillion silhouetted against the white-hot blast. He figured with the next shell the both of them would be pulverized. But an instant later Gunner had spun the quad into a crazed turn to the right, to get them out of the line of fire. Moth followed his lead, the blokes hanging onto the rear of the wagon practically being thrown off as he ramped it into a screaming turn.
