by Shaun Clarke
Some of the Arabs behind the rocks, incensed by the deaths of their comrades, leant out recklessly and fired a few shots. The bullets zipped off the sangar walls, splitting chips off the stones and filling the air with choking dust; but even before the dust cleared Dead-eye and Ken were firing again, keeping the Arabs pinned down. While the two were thus engaged, Captain Ellsworth was kneeling on the ground beside Les, who, having made radio contact with Thumier, was looking enquiringly at his CO.
‘You have a link-up?’ Ellsworth asked, shouting above the roaring of the guns from both sangars.
‘Yes, boss. I’ve got Major Williamson on the line.’
Relieved, Ellsworth relayed his request for air support to the SAS second in command at HQ. He then turned back to look over the sangar wall at the lower slopes of the hill, where bullets from the SLRs of Dead-eye and Ken were making soil and sand spit heavenwards between the rocks shielding the guerrillas.
‘You got through?’ Dead-eye asked.
‘Yes.’
‘How long will they take to get here?’
‘Half an hour, I should think,’ Ellsworth replied sardonically. ‘Apart from the time required for the flight, communication won’t be that immediate. First, my message to the SIC at Thumier will have to be amplified by a civilian radio transmitter. It’ll then be relayed by field telephone to the RAF Brigade Air Support Officer in another tent. With a telephone in one hand and a microphone in the other, the Air Support Officer will then repeat my request, with specific fire orders, to the Hawker Hunters at RAF Khormaksar. Add fifteen minutes for take-off and the flight and you have a fair estimate.’
‘I’m encouraged,’ Dead-eye said.
Ellsworth’s estimate was fairly accurate. The first pair of RAF Hawker Hunter F Mark 6 single-seat fighters appeared over the southern horizon about thirty minutes after contact had been made. As more enemy rifle fire struck the sangars from the top of the ridge and the lower slopes below them, the Hunters roared down with guns chattering savagely, wreaking devastation on their positions on the opposite ridge.
The ridge exploded in geysering soil and boiling dust, with foliage, gravel and splintered stones hailing all around the men trying desperately to make their escape. The ground erupted between them, one explosion following another, and soon the summit of the ridge was obscured completely in a dark pall of smoke, falling debris and drifting dust.
The screaming of the wounded reverberated around the hills. Arab voices were shouting frantically, calling to one another to verify who was still alive, who was wounded and how many were dead. When the dust settled down, the surviving guerrillas had fled back down the hill to the comparative safety of the rocks on the lower slopes surrounding the hamlet.
Unable to attack the other guerrillas on the slope directly below Ellsworth’s position, the Hunters flew in low over the sangars, saluting the SAS, then turned back and headed for home.
‘Jesus!’ Ken whispered, taken aback by what he had just seen. Returned to consciousness by the noise, Terry merely looked around him, bewildered, then groaned and closed his eyes again. Ellsworth and Dead-eye, elbow to elbow, stared down the hill.
So violent had been the attack that the dust and smoke over the ridge began drifting down over the hamlet, where the women and children were emerging from their huts to gaze up in fear and awe. At the bottom of the slope, where the other guerrillas were still in hiding, one of them, enraged by the fighter attack, stood up in full view, roared a stream of abuse in Arabic, then raised his rifle to fire.
Dead-eye’s SLR spoke first. The guerrilla was thrown back into the dirt as if floored by an invisible fist. Within seconds a fusillade of rifle fire aimed at the sangars tore the silence apart.
Ellsworth and Dead-eye lowered themselves behind the wall as bullets whistled over their heads and ricocheted off the rocks of the sangar wall, filling the stifling space with flying fragments of rock and choking dust.
‘At least they’ll stay off that ridge,’ Ellsworth said, wiping dust from his eyes and lips, ‘which means they won’t be overlooking us. If they want us, they’ll have to come up the hill, and that won’t be that easy.’
‘It won’t be that hard, either,’ Dead-eye said in his icily realistic way. ‘The survivors from the ridge are joining the others at the bottom of the hill. I think we’re in for a tough fight.’
When a low, choked, moaning sound filled the gloom of the sangar, they all looked down at the single shallow scrape near their feet. Terry was tossing and turning on his groundsheet, deathly white, pouring sweat.
‘This is bad,’ Ken whispered.
11
As the guerrillas flushed out from the devastated ridge moved east to join those hiding on the slopes of the southern hill, it became obvious to Ellsworth and Dead-eye that this conflict was not over by a long shot. In fact, as the first two Hunters disappeared over the horizon, heading back to Khormaksar, the growing numbers of guerrillas behind the rocks below began to spring up and fire rapid single shots, targeting anything they could see moving between the camouflaged poncho sheets and the top of the sangar walls.
The Arabs were good, and though they scored no direct hits, they repeatedly sent fragments of shattered stone into the faces of the SAS men whenever one of them attempted to peer over the sangar wall. After half an hour, both sangars were filled with choking dust and no man had escaped being bruised or cut. Their situation was made all the worse by the growing heat and the buzzing, whining insects, oblivious to the exploding rocks and thickening dust.
Each time a fresh round hit their position, the men in the two sangars would call out to one another, checking that everyone was all right. They also joked to keep up their sinking spirits. But, try as they might, they found it hard to see just where the shots were coming from, as by now the Arabs, more numerous every minute, were running to and fro, changing positions, and only popping up long enough to get off another round. The SAS men were encouraged when a second pair of Hunters appeared overhead. Guided down by the identification panels originally intended for the DZ and now spread out on the ground between the sangars, they wheeled and dived repeatedly on strafing runs that raised a maelstrom of dust, sand and debris around the Arabs, yet, amazingly, failed to dislodge them from their hiding places, from where they continued to fire single shots up the hill.
‘Tenacious bastards,’ Ken murmured, then raised himself slightly, squinted down through his Trilux sight, and fired off a couple of bursts of his SLR. He had the satisfaction of seeing an Arab throw up his arms in a convulsion of dust raised by the bullets, then drop his rifle and fall back behind the rock.
While the sniping match continued, with Dead-eye and Ken doing the shooting from the larger sangar, Terry continued to writhe in fever, unconscious but groaning. Captain Ellsworth, through Les, concentrated on getting messages to the Hunters, correcting their course during the run-ins to strafe the guerrillas.
‘You’re doing a good job there, boss,’ Ken said.
The captain nodded his gratitude as he squinted intently at the strip of silvery-blue sky visible through the gap between the poncho and the top of the wall. Yet even as the RAF fighters were pounding the guerrillas below, Dead-eye saw more of the enemy coming over the ridge and making their way down through the smoke-filled hamlet, where the women and children were still outdoors, watching the fight as if at a fair. Once through the hamlet, the guerrillas made their way up the southern slope to join the others behind the rocks.
The rifle fire from below was becoming more intense, though Ben and Taff, in the smaller sangar, were keeping most of the Arabs pinned down with a ceaseless fusillade from the Bren gun, supported by Jimbo and Larry’s SLRs.
‘It’s not enough,’ Dead-eye observed. ‘Those Arabs below are too close to us to be bombed, but we must stop any more guerrillas coming over that ridge. There must be a camp on the other side.’
‘Artillery support?’ Ellsworth asked.
‘I think so,’ Dead-eye said. ‘I’d
also ask for some more Hunters to locate the enemy camp on the other side of that ridge and give it a pounding.’
‘Will do,’ Ellsworth said.
The artillery strike was called up in the early afternoon and the explosions soon turned the sunlit ridge and the area beyond it into a hell of boiling smoke streaked with crimson and yellow flames. Even as a great mushroom of smoke was forming over the ridge, another couple of Hunters were flying above it to wheel and dive repeatedly on the camp they had obviously found at the other side. The noise of the explosions, combined with the savage chatter of the guns of the fighters, was deafening and nerve-racking, making the guerrillas further down the slope stop firing to look up in fearful awe at the ridge.
The SAS men cheered. Enraged by this, the guerrillas behind the rocks opened fire once more with their rifles, now determined more than ever to get the accursed Englishmen off the hill. But though the Hunters continued to fly in on strafing runs against the snipers, they were becoming less effective as the sun set and the guerrillas were gradually coming closer, making their way, rock by rock, up the hill. As the sun sank low in the sky, the shadow of the east side of Jebel Ashqab crept over the sangars, then over the boulders below, where the guerrillas were sheltering. It would soon be dark.
‘We’ll lose our air support completely at last light,’ Dead-eye reminded Captain Ellsworth. ‘Those guerrillas haven’t given up on us; they’re just biding their time. Given the bashing they’ve taken and the destruction of their camp, they’ll have a few debts to collect. They don’t intend letting us escape. They’re just waiting for darkness.’
But they did not wait. About half an hour later, clearly still angry at the bombing and frustrated that they could not dislodge the English soldiers, a group of guerrillas sprang out from behind their shelters and began a serious attempt to climb the hill, sprinting from one rock to the other, firing on the move, and covered by a murderous hail of fire from those still in hiding. So intense was the covering fusillade that both sangars became alive with exploding pieces of rock and dust, the men inside scarcely able to pop up long enough to return a single shot. All of them, including the delirious Terry, were cut by pieces of stone and choked by the dust. But Ken was the first to be actually wounded by a bullet, instinctively letting loose a cry of pain and clutching at his left leg.
‘Shit!’ he muttered, swiftly regaining control of himself and gritting his teeth. He examined his leg, saw his trouser leg soaked in blood, explored tentatively with his fingers, winced twice, then said: ‘Fuck it. I’ve got two bullets in my left thigh. What a bloody mess!’
The Bren gun roared from the smaller sangar, cutting a swath through the advancing guerrillas, bowling quite a few over, and eventually forced the others to go to ground once more. Just as it stopped roaring, however, to enable Taff to put in another belt, Ben called out to Captain Ellsworth: ‘I’ve been hit, boss!’
‘Ben’s been hit as well!’ Ken echoed mockingly, despite his own pain.
‘Shit!’ Ben cried out in fear and shock through a lull in the firing, ignoring Ken’s remark. ‘My back stings like hell!’
‘The round crossed his back,’ Larry explained encouragingly to Captain Ellsworth, also shouting between the two sangars, ‘leaving a wound like a whiplash. It’ll hurt, but he’s OK. What about you, Corp’?’
‘Two bullets in the fleshy part of the left thigh,’ Ken bellowed above the renewed noise. ‘It’s bleeding a lot.’
It was also hurting badly, but he did not mention that fact. He examined the wounds carefully, his fingers soaked in blood and torn pieces of flesh, pressing here, pinching there, grimacing with pain, but still trying to discover just how bad the wound was.
‘I think I’ve been lucky,’ he said to the concerned Captain Ellsworth while Dead-eye jumped up to fire at a running Arab. ‘The bullets are .303-inchers, but they’re actually refills.’
‘Pardon?’ Ellsworth asked as Dead-eye’s single shot made the running Arab stop, jerk upright, drop his weapon and fall back heavily into the dust.
‘Refills,’ Ken repeated, removing his dripping fingers from the sticky mess visible through his torn OGs. ‘Old shell cases filled with a homemade charge. The velocity isn’t great enough to penetrate bone. These wounds are pretty bad, but at least they’re only flesh wounds. I’m not finished yet, boss.’
‘Good man.’ Ellsworth patted Ken on the shoulder, then glanced down the hill where another Arab was at that moment jerked off his feet by another single shot from Dead-eye’s SLR. The guerrillas had settled down again and their covering fire had tapered off temporarily.
‘Corporal Brooke!’ Larry called out from the smaller sangar.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m going to throw over some extra field dressing weighted with a stone. Make sure someone catches it. Can you bandage yourself?’
‘Yes.’
‘Here it comes.’
As the extra dressing sailed through the air, from one sangar to the other, Les jumped up and grabbed it, and dropped down again beside Ken.
‘Nice catch,’ Ken said. He took the bandage from Les, examined it, then shouted over the sangar wall: ‘Is this the best you can do after that expensive stint at the US Army Training School in Houston?’
‘Any more remarks like that and I’ll come over there and cut off that leg.’
‘Sincere apologies, Lance-Corporal.’ Tearing away the blood-soaked, torn cloth from the two bullet wounds, Ken studied the blood-filled holes with a cool eye. ‘Not nice,’ he murmured.
Sliding down beside him to examine the wound, Dead-eye said: ‘You’ll need a tourniquet as well as a bandage. Those wounds are bleeding too much.’
‘I reckoned that,’ Ken replied.
Dead-eye offered a rare, fleeting grin. ‘Can you do it yourself?’
‘Yes, Sarge. No sweat.’
‘They’re coming up the hill again!’ Jimbo bawled from the other sangar.
The Bren gun roared into life again as Captain Ellsworth and Dead-eye glanced down through the slit between the poncho above them and the top of the wall. Again, the guerrillas at the front – at least a dozen of them – were making their way up the hill by darting from rock to rock under the covering fire of their comrades lower down, now lost in the gathering dusk. As Ellsworth glanced automatically at Les’s radio, instinctively thinking of air support, Dead-eye poked the barrel of his SLR through the slit and began picking the guerrillas off one by one.
‘Damn!’ Ellsworth said, glancing back down the slope to confirm that darkness was falling rapidly. ‘It’s too late for air support.’
‘Correct,’ Dead-eye replied, still squinting through the sight of his SLR and felling the running guerrillas with unerring accuracy.
With no immediate need for the radio, Les picked up his SLR and started rising to his knees to join Ellsworth and Dead-eye at the firing slit. At that moment, the rifles giving covering fire to the guerrillas roared in a sustained burst. A couple of bullets penetrated the sangar and ricocheted from one side of it to another. Les yelped and collapsed, clutching at his right leg. Twisting around, he saw that he had been hit in the thigh, like Ken, but with only one bullet. Although the pain gave way to numbness almost immediately, blood spurted from the wound with the force of water from a burst pipe. Les quickly covered it with his hand, while reaching into the survival belt with the other for a bandage.
‘Bloody ‘ell!’ he exclaimed softly, tentatively touching the red-fringed hole with his fingers and feeling nothing at all. ‘Welcome to the club.’ Ken, propped up against the sangar wall beside Ellsworth and Dead-eye, covered in dust and pieces of gravel and stone, with his wounded leg stretched out in front of him, grinned at the remark. Grinning back, trying to make light of their common situation, Les expertly bandaged his own wound, then tried moving his leg. ‘Can’t feel it, can’t move it,’ he said. ‘No use at all.’
Dead-eye stopped firing at the guerrillas long enough to glance back over his shoulder at Les, who
was tentatively pressing the foot of his wounded leg against the wall.
‘I can’t support myself on this,’ Les said.
‘That could be fatal,’ Dead-eye replied in his pragmatic way. ‘If you can’t make that leg function by dusk, you’ll stay here as dead meat.’
‘Thanks a lot, Sarge!’
‘Get it working, Lance-Corporal. Keep exercising it. Don’t stop until you get feeling and strength back into it. If feeling comes back into it, it’ll hurt, but you’ll just have to ignore that. Either you march out of here or you stay here and die. So get exercising.
Desperate to have the leg working before the patrol moved on, Les lay there and started pressing his foot against the wall, over and over, while bullets flew off the sangar wall and filled the air inside with a fog of dust.
Within minutes another bullet whizzed from one side of the sangar interior to the other and grazed the inside of Les’s good leg, making him yelp with pain again.
‘Christ!’ he burst out, examining the slight graze. ‘Nearly lost my balls that time!’
Ken chuckled as he sat upright against the wall, testing his own wounded leg and becoming confident that he could walk on it, no matter how painful.
‘Your voice went up a few octaves there,’ he said. I thought you had lost your balls.’
‘That’s just jealousy and wishful thinking, mate. It’s just a graze. I’m all right. At least this leg is. It’s the right one that bothers me.’
As the battle raged, Les kept testing his leg against the sangar wall. Gradually, feeling returned, bringing excruciating pain with it.
‘Christ, it hurts!’ he muttered.
‘At least now you know you’ve got it,’ Ken replied. ‘Thank the Lord for small mercies.’
Wincing with pain, Les picked up his SLR and turned to the front. At that moment the guerrillas attempted to rush the sangar. In the half light of dusk, partially obscured by the dust kicked up by their running feet, and with their futahs and shemaghs flapping, they looked like ghosts. They were real enough, though, as was proven when they screamed, quivered and fell, cut down by the Bren gun and sustained small-arms fire of the SAS.
