by Chris Ryan
Lights ahead.'
I rode over and came up behind him. There was no need for him to point this time. The first thing I noticed, high in the air, was a single bright-red glare, then below it I saw lights burning faintly across our front, some in a line, others in clusters beyond them.
'Got it!' I said. 'That red thing must be the warning light on the comms tower.'
'I reckon so.'
'How far out are we?'
'Hard to tell. Could be one kilometre.'
'We're close enough, anyway. I'd like to put more ground between us and those bastards behind us, whoever they are. But we can't go any nearer the camp than this. Got to find an LUP site around here. That row of lights must be the perimeter fence, with other installations beyond.'
Everyone went look about, and within a few minutes Pat called to say he had located a good spot, away to our left. Closing on him, we found him in a gully, with sand underfoot and a vertical rock wall about three metres high along one side. There were fissures in the rock, into which we could drive pegs, and the whole area had a fairly rough texture. I saw straightaway, as he had, that if we parked the bikes nose-to-tail along the wall, and slung cam-nets over them at an angle like a sloping roof, it would make as good a hiding-place as we were likely to find.
The time was 0355, and already 1 thought I could detect a faint lightening in the eastern sky. We rolled the trailer in backwards, hitched it to Stew's bike again, and manoeuvred the rest of the quads into line ahead of it, ready for a quick take-off' Then we broke out the gear for the OP and prepared to move forward on foot.
'Final check,' I said quietly when I'd gathered the guys round. The and Tony will spend the day in the OP. Depending on what we find, we may decide that the op should go down tomorrow night. If there's any problem, we may have to wait until the night after.
Either way, we'll want the support party forward soon after dark tomorrow.'
'Tonight,' Tony interrupted.
'As you were. Tonight. I'm talking about tonight, Tuesday. For Christ's sake - I'm losing track of the days.
Cancel all that.'
I pressed the light button on my watch for a check.
'It's now 0400 on Tuesday. If possible, the op Will go down tonight. If everything looks OK, we'll call the three of you forward once it's dark.' I jabbed a finger at Pat, Whinger and Norm. 'Stew, you'll be our backmarker. Hold the fort here. OK?'
'Sure.'
'Whinger, get a sitrep back to the Kremlin as soon as you've got an aerial sorted. Tell them we have eyes on the target area and everything's hunky-dory. And euerybody, go easy on the water. It's going to get hot as hell when.the sun rises, and we don't know how long we're going to be herel OK, all?'
Getting no answer except a couple of grunts, I said, 'Right - we're off. Pat and Norm, you help us carry the stuff forward for the OP. Then back here. Let's go.'
We settled our bergens and rifles on our backs, slung the other bundles about us, and began to move off.
'Give 'em hell,' said Whinger.
'I'll wait till you're in the front line with us,' I told him. 'Then you personally can stand up on top of a dune and fre the first shot to start the battle.'
SEVEN
On the side of a dune facing the camp we found a hollow fronted by a couple of scrubby thorns. By cutting a few more bushes elsewhere and bringing them across to reinforce the natural thicket, we made a small enclosure. At the same time we deepened the hollow by digging, and used bags filled with sand to make walls inside the thorns.
A rectangular gap left in the front wall gave us a view forward into the camp, and a cam-net stretched across the top, with more thorn branches scattered on it, completed the basis of our hide. The dune gave us natural protection from the rear, its disadvantage being that we couldn't see anyone coming from that direction. We reckoned, though, that the little hill was in direct line-of-sight from the LUP, so that the backup party could watch our rear for us.
We'd almost finished building when a sudden noise from the direction of the camp made us freeze. The first blast of it - a kind of screeching groan - lasted such a short time and cut off so abruptly, almost like a dog's bark, that we couldn't make out what had caused it.
'Jesus!' exclaimed Pat. 'What the fuck was that?'
Before anyone could answer the sound came again.
This time it kept going for several seconds, and Tony let out a gasp, half relief, half amusement.
'Not Jesus,' he said. 'Allah. It's the muezzin, giving the first call to prayer.'
We were at least two hundred metres from the perimeter wire, and the sound was coming from somewhere beyond it; yet the volume of the amplified voice was such that it blasted past us like a gale of wind, and we felt sure the guys in the LUP, a kilometre behind us, must be hearing it too. So it proved: they told us later that the grating, metallic, undulating chant of 'Allah akhbar! Allah akhbar!' carried way past them and on into the desert to the south.
'Sounds like he's underwater, poor bugger,' said Pat.
'That's just their crummy electronics,' Tony told him. 'The old mullah'll be up a tower someplace. We'll see the mosque as soon as it gets light.'
'Come on, guys,' I interrupted. 'Don't piss about.
Never mind the mullah. We need to get tidied up here.'
In the eastern sky the dawn glow was coming up fast.
It would,have been good to carry on working and perfect our camouflage, but time had run out. From previous stints near the equator I knew how quickly the light would strengthen as the sun rose. The Libyans might have eyes on the desert, and I wasn't going to risk any movement after dawn.
'Away you go,' I told Pat and Stew. 'You don't want to be caught with your pants down.'
'R.ight then. Good luck.'
'Same to you. We'll see you tonight.'
Off they went, walking backwards round the side of the dune and whisking away their tracks with strips of hessian. A few minutes later they called on the radio to say that they were back in the LUP, and that they had eyes on the back of our mound.
Tony and I settled down for a day of observation. For me, breakfast consisted of cold spaghetti in tomato sauce, washed down by a brew of powdered lemonade.
Tony had his favourite corned beef hash and pineapple slices, eaten together. We'd been planning to work alternate shifts - two hours on, two off- but found that, despite the fact that we'd had practically no sleep, neither of us felt tired. Our excitement supercharged us, and we both watched eagerly as dawn revealed the secrets of our objective.
The perimeter fence was just as the CIA man had described it: three metres of weldmesh, topped by an outward-sloping overhang of barbed wire. Every hundred metres there was a floodlight atop a slender pole, but several of the bulbs were out of action, and useful pools of darkness lay between the illuminated stretches. The goon-towers - built into the fences several hundred metres apart - might have been run up for a film about some German prison camp in World War Two: primitive wooden boxes on stilts, once painted white but now peeling, with wide-eaved flat roofs to give shade and the sides open to the air. There was one at the corner of the wire, slightly to our left, and another in the middle of the south fence to our right. This second tower stood beside a wide gate, also made of mesh, and the rough track Gus had indicated ran away from it towards the range in the southeast.
The important thing for us was our discovery that the towers weren't manned. Nor was there any patrol on the wire. With our binoculars we scanned every tower for signs of infra-red lamps or microwave dishes or TV cameras, but saw nothing; the whole system looked too primitive for any such high-tech devices.
'As the guy told us,' I said, 'they're not expecting any threat coming out of the sand.'
We'd positioned ourselves opposite the office cure accommodation block, and our binos gave us a brilliant view of it: a scruffy, off-white building, two storeys tall, with patches of discoloration staining its walls, air- conditioning units under every window, and long, dirty, tapering streak
s beneath them where condensation had been dripping doyen over the years. The front entrance was in the middle of the wall facing us, a flight of five or six semi-circular steps leading up to its plain porch.
The door we became more interested in was at the side, to the left as we looked. Soon after six o'clock it opened from the inside, and some kind of jingli, or servant, began going in and out. The guy, who was quite old and had frizzy grey hair, wore a khaki shirt and trousers, but no shoes.
'Could be our best entry point,' said Tony quietly.
'Out of sight of most of the camp. Besides, the perimeter light opposite it is down.'
'Just thinking that. The tradesman's entrance.'
The window of the room in which our target was supposed to work was at the top left of the building.
When we had arrived on site the room had been dark but that was hardly surprising, as it was already four o'clock by then.
As the light strengthened the perimeter lights went out, but the single red lamp on the comms tower continued to glow. Then, at about six-thirty, the sun came over the eastern horizon and low rays blazed across the camp from our right. From the scribbled notes and plans I'd made during our brief in London, I soon identified the compound's main features: the approach road coming in from the north, the guardroom, the headquarter block, the tall mast marking the comms centre, the armoury, wired offiri its own secure enclosure inside the perimeter, the fuel station, down- near the wire to our right, and the mosque, gleaming white, with an onion dome and huge loudspeakers sprouting from the corners of a balcony round its tower.
Far offto the right, in a little compound of its own, we could see the comms facility that Gus had given us as a secondary target. The white dish aerial was pointing nearly straight up.
'That damn thing's farther off than he reckoned,' I said.
'What did he tell you?' Tony asked.
'He said two-fifty metres from the wire. It's got to be three-fifty at least. It's still in range, but not by much.
Anyway, it's non-essential. We'll see what happens when the time's ripe.'
As the camp came slowly to life, Tony's earlier tour in Abu Dhabi proved invaluable, because he was able to interpret all the small events we witnessed. Apart from the jingli, the earliest arrivals on the scene were bread and milk vans, which pulled up by the guardroom on the far side from us and then, after long delays, drove in to various buildings which were obviously messes.
'What's all the fuss on the barrier about?' I asked.
'Typical,' Tony replied. 'The guys on duty have to assert themselves somehow and show they're superior to the ignorant drivers. So they give them a hard time, even though they see them every day. You watch in a minute, when the rank and file arrive. But, Jesus... look at this.'
'What is it?'
'See that long building with the green roof? Look right over the top of it.'
'Got it. motor blades.'
'Yep. There's a goddamn chopper parked there.'
'Let's hope it's gone u/s. We don't want that bloody thing overhead.'
Soon after seven o'clock, a stream of ordinary cars and land cruisers began rolling down the approach road and on to a big car park outside the wire. By then a man with a mill-board was scuttling about, trying to reserve the spaces nearest the fence, and evidently taking flak from the drivers he chased away.
'See that?' said Tony. 'The bastards are so idle they won't walk a step if they don't have to.'
'Why don't their drive in, though?'
'Against the rules. Bad security. Nobody trusts anybody. I mean, any of these guys might have a bomb in his vehicle and park it next to the headquarter block.
One of them might try to top the colonel.'
Within twenty minutes some sort of physical training was taking place. A long straggle of men in shots and trainers came trotting round the track inside the perimeter, with one instructor leading and another trying in vain to drive on the laggards at the back. The front dozen or so were actually running, but everyone else was walking. A few of the guys were mock- fighting, hitting out and kicking at each other, but most of them were simply chit-chatting as they ambled along.
'What tossers!' I cried. 'What a fucking shower!'
'They are,' Tony agreed. 'But if you quizzed any of them they'd swear they.run a marathon every morning.'
At ten past eight, after that virtuoso display, the camp went dead as everyone disappeared indoors for showers and breakfast. By eight-thirty our active night had begun to tell on us. The sun, striking into the OP from our right, was already seriously hot, and, with no action to watch, we both felt tiredness attack.
'Get your head down while there's nothing happening,' I told Tony. 'If any action starts up I'll wake you. '
He shaped to argue but I more or less ordered him to sleep, and in a couple of minutes he was 6ut, lying along our right-hand wall. Looking down at his dark Puerto R.ican complexion, I thought that in an emergency he might pass for an Arab, especially at night.
When I squinted up at the sky through our roof of cam-net and thorns, I wished we'd been able to create something more solid in the way of a sun-shade. The best remedy was to tie my sweater horizontally to the underneath of the net, but even in the shade I could feel the sweat going out of me like steam, and I wanted to drink all the time. We'd each brought two belt-bottles full of water, and a gallon can as a back-up, and I knew we were going to need strict discipline to stop us running out.
At nine-twenty people started drifting on to the drill square, apparently for some sort of parade. Jinglis carried out armchairs and set them in position on a dais under a pointed wooden roof, and various slovenly-looking characters drifted about.
I was just thinking there was no point in waking Tony until the show began, when suddenly I saw something that grabbed my attention. Out of the front door of the accommodation block came four armed men, obviously guards, who formed up, two either side of the entrance. A moment later a big, heavy fellow in white drill shirt and trousers appeared, carrying a peaked cap in his hand. If he'd had the hat on his head I might not have recognised him. As it was, I gave Tony a kick and cried, 'Eh! Eh! Eh! Look at this!'
He was up beside me in a second, binos glued to his eyes. 'Shitface!' he exclaimed.
'Christi' I felt my heart pounding with a surge of adrenalin. 'If we had the sniper rifle we could drop him here and now without ever going through the wire.'
'Yeah - but the marathon runners would be out after us.
'I don't think they'd catch us. But if they got the heli airborne, we'd be deep in the shit.'
We watched fascinated as Khadduri smirked to right and left, apparently making small talk to his bodyguards.
Then he settled his cap on his head and set offalong the front of the building, heading for the parade.
'Doesn't change, does he?' said Tony. 'Great sense of humour. Remember how he used to laugh when he was hitting you on the arm?'
'Will I forget it?'
Soon the parade had formed up, but we never had a clear view of it because a thick heat-haze had begun to shimmer and shudder above the ground. Through the fuzz we saw the officers take their places in the arm chairs, with Khadduri in pole position at the right-hand end of the line. In front of them the rank and file sat on the deck in rows, cross-legged; and a tall man in white robes, who could only be the mullah, moved up and down the ranks bellowing into a microphone, his torrent of abuse outrageously magnified by the loudspeakers.
'What's he bollocking them for?' I asked.
'Anything he can think of- being late, not saying their prayers enough… Look how they're cringing.'
As the priest advanced on each man, shaking his fist and roaring insults, the guy would bow his head in submissiol until it touched the ground. It was like an amazingly hammy theatre show, and I was loving every minute of it, when a call on the radio jerked me back to the task in hand.
'Watch yourself, Geordie.' It was Pat.
'What's the problem?'
'Is there anybody with them?'
'Can't tell yet. They're streamed out over hundreds of meters. We can't see the back often.'
'What are they doing, running?'
'No, no -just grazing on. Stand by till we see the end of the line.'
I looked at Tony. He was pointing at his bergen, asking with his eyebrows if he should stuff everything into it. I shook my head and whispered, 'Not yet. This must be the lot we passed in the dark, when Whinger smelt that fire.'
If we got compromised, all we could do was to leg it back to the LUP, jump on the quads and scoot away into the desert, having called for immediate helicopter evacuation. But that would be a disaster - the end of the operation.
