by Shaun Clarke
‘You mean tonight?’
‘Exactly. I want you to pick 40 of your most reliable men and have them ready to be airlifted before midnight. I’m coming with you. Our LZ is an area approximately sixty kilometres south of Baghdad, near the main road that leads to Basra. According to Intelligence, the highest density of Baghdad’s fibre-optic cables are buried there and the ground is relatively easy to dig. We’re going to dig down, remove a sample of cable for analysis, then blow up the rest – so we need a couple of demolition experts. Any questions, Ricketts?’
‘No questions, boss.’
‘I’m delighted to hear it. Have you finished your tea?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then go to it.’
Ricketts grinned, finished his tea, then stood up and left the tent. Heading back to his own lean-to, he was enthralled by the sight of so many tents on the dark plain, under the desert’s starlit sky, but even more thrilled – indeed almost ecstatic – to be back in business at last.
It was what he and most of his mates lived for.
Chapter 4
At approximately midnight, two of the RAF’s CH-47 twin-blade Chinooks lifted Ricketts’s chosen team of 40 men off the airstrip of the FOB and headed through the night sky for the LZ. The men, packed into the gloomy, noisy interior of the helicopter, were wearing the normal beige beret, but without its winged-dagger badge and now camouflaged under a shemagh, or veil, that could also be wrapped around the eyes and mouth to protect them from dust and sand. (The same kind of veil was used to camouflage the standard 7.62mm SLR, or self-loading rifle.) The standard-issue woollen pullover was woven in colours that would blend in with the desert floor and matched the colouring of the high-topped, lace-up desert boots.
‘I feel like an A-rab,’ Geordie said. ‘What do I look like?’
‘Real cute,’ Paddy replied.
‘I always knew you adored me.’
Most of the men were armed either with the ubiquitous semi-automatic SLR or with 30-round, semi- and fully automatic M16s and their many attachments, including bayonets, bipods for accuracy when firing from the prone position, telescopic sights, night-vision aids, and M203 40mm grenade-launchers. Some had Heckler & Koch MP5 30-round sub-machine-guns. A few had belt-fed L7A2 7.62mm general-purpose machine-guns, or GPMGs, capable of firing 800 rounds a minute to a range of up to 1400 metres. All had standard-issue Browning FN 9mm high-power handguns on their hips, capable of firing 13 rounds in a couple of seconds.
These weapons and their bulky ammunition belts, combined with the standard bergens and camouflaging, made the men look awkward and bulky, almost Neanderthal. However, those weapons were only part of their personal equipment, and other, heavier weapons were taking up what little space they had left between them.
In case they were approached by tanks during the operation, the men were also carrying heavy support weapons, including the 94mm light anti-tank weapon, or LAW 80, which fired a high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) rocket and could be used on bunkers as well as armoured vehicles; the portable FIM-92A Stinger anti-aircraft missile system, capable of firing a heat-seeking missile 8000 metres and fitted with a friend or foe identification, or FFI, system; and two different mortars: the 51mm mortar, which, though carried and operated by one man, could launch an HE bomb to a range of 750 metres, and the larger, heavier 81mm mortar, which required three men to carry it, but could fire HE bombs 5660 metres at a rate of eight rounds per minute.
‘Tell me, Alfie,’ Andrew said, bored out of his mind, and deciding to have a bit of sport with Sergeant Alfred Lloyd, who was sitting beside him, ‘how come you’re almost as tall as me, but only half of my weight?’
‘I’m taller than you, fella, by half an inch. I can tell when our eyes meet.’
A dour Leicester man and SAS demolition specialist who had formerly been a Royal Engineer, then an ammunition technician with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, Lloyd had unkempt red hair, a beakish, broken nose, and a lean face veined by booze and scorched by the sun.
‘I’m always willing to give a man the benefit of the doubt,’ Andrew said, ‘so how come, since you’re even taller than me, you only weigh half my size?’
‘I’ve sabotaged ships, aircraft, every type of armoured vehicle, power stations, communications centres, supply depots, railways and roads. It required a lot of climbing and running, which is why I’m still slim.’
Alfie Lloyd was indeed still as thin as a rake, though now heavily burdened like the others and divided from big Andrew by the boxes packed with explosives, charges, detonator caps and the many other tools of his dangerous trade. Andrew stared at them sceptically.
‘Those bloody explosives, man, are they safe?’
‘Sure.’
‘I’ve heard that explosives go off real easy.’
‘Bullshit. Most explosives are safe unless they’re deliberately set off. You can hammer TNT into powdered crystals and it still won’t explode. That’s why it can be delivered by parachute. No problem at all.’
‘Mmmmm,’ Andrew murmured, not totally convinced. ‘So what exactly is explosive, man? Give it to me in simple words.’
Alfie thought for a while, wondering how to reply, not being a man of great eloquence and aware that Andrew was a poet, slick with his tongue. Finally he said, ‘You tell me.’
Andrew nodded and beamed.
‘A solid or liquid substance which, under the influence of a certain stimulus, such as an exploding detonator, is rapidly converted into another substance with accompanying high pressure, leading to the outburst of violence and noise known as an explosion. What say you, Sergeant?’
‘Is that fucking Swahili?’
‘I’m from Barbados,’ Andrew replied, ‘where they only speak English.’
‘You could have fooled me,’ Alfie said, shaking his head. ‘I thought I spoke English!’
‘They only think they speak English in Barbados,’ Paddy Clarke said. ‘All that molasses and rum goes to their heads and makes them think they’re white men. We should hand Andrew over to a missionary for a little correction.’
‘The Paddy from Liverpool has spoken,’ Andrew intoned. ‘Let us bow down and throw up.’
‘Can it, the lot of you,’ the RAF Loadmaster barked at them as he materialized from the gloom. He glanced through one of the portholes in the passenger hold and announced: ‘We’re coming in, if we’re lucky, to the LZ, so prepare to offload.’
‘Yes, mother!’ Taff chimed in a high, schoolboy’s voice, though he quickly made a great show of checking his gear when the Loadmaster gave him a baleful stare.
‘Hey, Moorcock’ Paddy said, turning to the new man beside him, eager for a little sport. ‘Where did you say you were located before you were badged?’
‘The Welsh Guards,’ Moorcock answered, giving his kit a great deal of attention.
‘See any action?’ Paddy asked him.
‘A brief tour of Northern Ireland,’ Moorcock said, sliding his arms awkwardly through the webbing of his bergen. ‘Though I didn’t see much there.’
‘Know much about the Iraqis?’
‘No.’
‘They’re fuckin’ murderous bastards. Don’t on any account let yourself be caught. There’s things worse than death, kid.’
‘What’s that, Corporal?’ Trooper Stone asked with a grin, being less impressionable than his friend. Although he, like Moorcock and Gillett, had only recently been badged and was serving his probationary period, he wasn’t about to take any bullshit from the older hands. ‘What’s worse than death, then?’
‘They’ll pull your nails out,’ Paddy said.
‘They’ll gang-bang you,’ Jock added.
‘They’ll chop your cock off and make you eat it with couscous,’ Geordie put in. ‘Then they’ll cut your eyeballs out and make you suck them until you go gaga.’
‘Go fuck yourselves,’ Trooper Stone said.
‘Leave these poor probationers alone,’ threatened Andrew, ‘or I’ll personally chop your cocks of
f and shove them, all shrivelled, up your arses, which will then need some wiping.’
‘Thanks, Sergeant,’ Trooper Moorcock said, tightening the straps on his bergen and looking serious while his two friends, Stone and Gillett, grinned at each other.
‘We’re touching down,’ the Loadmaster said. ‘Hold on to your balls, lads … Three, two, one, zero … Touchdown!’
The transport landed with a lot of bouncing, roaring and metallic shrieking, but otherwise no problems, on an LZ located about half a mile from the main road that ran one way to Basra, 40 miles the other way to Baghdad.
The men disembarked even before the two Chinooks’ engines had gone into neutral, spilling out of the side into dense clouds of sand whipped up by the twin-bladed rotors. When the billowing sand had subsided, the first thing they saw was a fantastic display of fireworks illuminating the distant horizon: immense webs of red and purple anti-aircraft fire, silvery-white explosions, showers of crimson sparks and streams of phosphorus fireflies.
‘Baghdad,’ Hailsham explained to those nearest to him. ‘The Allies are bombing the hell out of it. Rather them than us.’
As their eyes adjusted to moonlit darkness, they saw the nearest two microwave links, soaring high above the flat plain, about a quarter mile apart, but less than twenty yards from the road. Spreading out and keeping their weapons at the ready, the men hiked across the dusty, wind-blown plain until they reached a point equidistant between the two towers. From here, the road was dangerously close – a mere twenty-odd yards.
‘It’s pretty dark,’ Ricketts said, glancing in every direction, ‘so if anyone comes along the road, we should be OK if we stay low. We need sentries on point in both directions, with the men not being used for digging keeping guard in LUPs.’
‘Right,’ Hailsham said.
Ricketts gave his instructions by means of hand signals. With the Chinooks waiting on the ground a quarter of a mile away, their rotors turning quietly in neutral, the bulk of the men broke into four-man teams, then fanned out to form a circle of LUPs, or lying-up positions, from where they could keep their eyes on the road and defend the diggers and demolition team if anyone came along.
Meanwhile Hailsham and Ricketts accompanied Sergeant Lloyd as he checked the alignment between the two communications towers and gauged where the fibre-optic cable was running between them, hidden under the ground.
‘This is it,’ he said, waving his hand from left to right to indicate an invisible line between the two towers. He turned to the dozen troopers selected to dig. ‘I want a series of four holes about twelve foot apart, each six foot long and as deep as you need to go to expose the cable. That should be about four feet. If you see any transport coming along that road, or if we call a warning to you, drop down into the hole you’re digging and don’t make a move until given clearance. OK, get going.’
The men laid down their weapons, removed spades and shovels from their bergens, and proceeded to dig the holes as required. As they did so, they and the others – now stretched belly-down in LUPs on the dark ground, their weapons at the ready and covering the road in both directions – were able to watch the fantastic pyrotechnics of crimson anti-aircraft tracer fire and silvery bomb bursts over distant Baghdad, which was being bombed by wave after wave of British, American and Saudi jets, as well as Tomahawk Cruise missiles fired from ships in the Gulf, flying in at just under the speed of sound at heights of 50–250 feet, to cause more devastation and death.
‘Wow!’ Andrew whispered, looking at the lights over the distant city. ‘That’s just beautiful, man!’
‘Beautiful from here,’ Hailsham replied. ‘Hell on earth if you’re there.’
‘You men,’ Sergeant Lloyd said to two of his eight sappers, both of whom had various explosives, charges and timers dangling from their webbing. ‘I want you to take out those towers, one to each man. Fix enough explosives to the base to make sure the whole caboodle topples over. Use electronic timers that can be fired from here by remote control. Don’t make any mistakes. When this lot goes up, those towers have to go up at the same time. Understood?’
‘Yes, boss,’ the men nodded.
Then they headed off in opposite directions, towards the tower each had selected, the explosives on their webbing bouncing up and down as they ran.
‘You see that?’ Geordie whispered to Trooper Gillett, having decided to pass the time by winding him up. ‘Those explosives are liable to go off any second, taking us out with him.’
‘Aw, come off it, Geordie!’
‘No, kid, it’s true! I’d be pissing in my pants if I was you. He’ll blow up any minute now.’
‘That’s bullshit, Geordie,’ Trooper Stone retorted. ‘We all heard what Sergeant Lloyd said in the plane – explosives don’t blow up easily.’
‘Besides,’ Trooper Gillett added, ‘that sapper’s practically out of sight already. If the stupid bastard blows himself up, we’re well out of range. Pull the other one, Geordie.’
‘Shut up, you men,’ Sergeant Lloyd said, glancing down at the men digging the holes, ‘these men have to concentrate. If you’ve got nothing better to do, I can always hand you a shovel.’
‘No, thanks,’ Geordie said, edging away. ‘I have to go and stand out on point. Have a nice day!’
‘Fucking nerd,’ Sergeant Lloyd said.
The digging alone took forty-five minutes. During that time two vehicles, about half an hour apart, came along the road, heading away from Baghdad, their headlights cutting a swathe through the darkness but not picking out the men who were concealed in LUPs, guns at the ready, only twenty yards or so away. The first vehicle was a Mercedes saloon filled with white-robed Arabs; the second was a soft-topped army truck packed with Iraqi soldiers. Both passed by and disappeared into the night, their drivers and passengers, probably fleeing from the air attacks on Baghdad, not knowing how close to death they had come in what they thought was an empty, safe area.
About twenty minutes after the army truck had passed by, one of the men uncovered a fibre-optic cable.
‘That’s it,’ Sergeant Lloyd said, glancing down into the hole as the trooper who had reached the first cable wiped sweat from his brow. ‘I want that whole stretch of cable cleared, Trooper, so get back to your digging.’
‘Right, Sarge,’ the trooper said. He continued his digging. When the length of cable running across the bottom of the hole was completely exposed, he jumped out to let Lloyd jump in. Ricketts glanced left and right, checking the road in both directions, but there was no sign of any more movement. Satisfied, he knelt beside the hole in which Lloyd, unpacking his boxes, was already at work.
‘Cable!’ a trooper called from the next hole.
‘Me, too!’ someone else called, to be followed by a third, then a fourth.
‘Tell them to clear the whole length of cable,’ Lloyd told Ricketts, ‘then get out of the holes. My men will do the rest.’
‘Right,’ Ricketts said, then stood and went from hole to hole, passing on Lloyd’s orders.
‘I’ve reached mine,’ a man in the fifth hole told him. ‘There it is,’ said a man in the sixth hole, looking down and pointing.
By the time Ricketts had passed on Lloyd’s instructions, the first men had completely uncovered their cables and were clambering gratefully out of the holes to wipe the mud off their hands and have a drink of hot tea from a vacuum flask. As they did so, Lloyd’s assistants, all former sappers, jumped down into the holes to fix explosive charges to the cables.
Major Hailsham was kneeling on the rim of Lloyd’s hole, looking down as Lloyd worked, so Ricketts, just as interested, knelt beside him.
Even as Iraqi MiGs and Mirage F-ls flew overhead, heading away from the battered airfields of a spectacularly illuminated Baghdad, Sergeant Lloyd and his men coolly continued what they were doing. With Hailsham and Ricketts looking on, Lloyd sliced through a cable and slipped a piece into his bergen, to be shipped back to England for examination. He then packed C3/C4 plastic explosi
ve around and between the exposed cables, fixed it in place, and attached a non-electrical firing system with a time fuse connected to a blasting cap in a thin aluminium tube, which he embedded carefully in the explosive charge. To the blasting cap he attached a detonating cord of reinforced prima-cord – a small, high-explosive core protected by half a dozen layers of material – which in turn was taped together with two primers and a detonator fixed to a timing device. He glanced up at Hailsham.
‘Give us twenty minutes to get back to the choppers,’ Hailsham said. ‘That’s all we need.’
‘The other five started after me,’ Lloyd replied, ‘so I’ll add on ten minutes.’
‘Right,’ Hailsham said, then turned to Ricketts as Lloyd set his timer. ‘Signal the men to break up the LUPs and head back to the choppers.’
‘Right, boss.’ Ricketts used hand signals to convey Hailsham’s instructions. From where he was standing, he saw nothing but dark emptiness, but then the men started appearing, rising up from the flat earth, silhouetted either by stars or the fireworks display over distant Baghdad. After strapping their bergens to their shoulders and picking up their weapons, they lumbered like misshapen beasts back towards the Chinooks, whose rotors were still spinning, though silently, their engines in neutral.
As the men retreated from the area, being swallowed up in darkness, Lloyd and his other demolition specialists emerged one by one from their separate holes, wiping the mud from their hands. While they were packing up their equipment, the other sappers returned and reported that they had placed the explosives and remote-control timing devices on the soaring communications towers. Satisfied, Sergeant Lloyd nodded, then led them all across the windswept plain, hurrying after the others.
Hailsham and Ricketts brought up the rear, the latter keeping his eye on the road. He saw nothing and finally turned away, walking faster to catch up with his men. When they reached the Chinooks, hazy behind the dust clouds swirling under the rotors, they gathered together to look back at the stretch of earth between the two towers. When Ricketts saw Hailsham and Lloyd checking their watches, he did the same. The whole job had taken ninety minutes so far.
