by Geoff Wolak
They plodded off north kicking up sand.
Morten closed in on me, in a few of my lads lugging kit for the medics; one lady nurse, three men. I shook his hand. ‘Go back down the edge of the runway till you find the French, two hundred yards down, ask where the underground room is, then claim it as your doctor’s surgery. Unpack, get ready, but then get some food on.’
They turned about, heavy kit lugged, Max stood there puffing, his kit at his feet. I helped him move it off the runway, and I told him to dig in next to us as a C160 made contact and touched down.
Out the rear came a familiar 1st Battalion captain, and I walked down to meet him, halting his men, all with heavy backpacks, rifles held, more kit items dumped on the side of the runway. And he had brought twenty-four men.
We shook, his ride powering off, men cursing – but in French, and grabbing caps. With the warm sandstorm abating, I said, ‘Go back down the runway, find the Americans at the end, past them you dig in like here, rest and food, aim south over the runway, we talk after sun up.’
He nodded, shouted instructions, and led his men off. Since I could not hear any circling aircraft I figured that was it, for now.
When my phone went it was Captain Harris. ‘Planes down?’
‘Yeah, but no British Paras.’
‘Their plane turned back with a fault.’
‘Schedule them for tomorrow, same time, no big deal. We have lots of men and lots of supplies.’
‘Quiet around here now, but more men on the way to provide standby teams.’
‘Chat later.’
Lights knocked off, I patrolled the line, handing out corned beef and explaining to the various teams that we had plenty of water. Morten had grabbed a generator and it was whirring away on the sand, lights coming from within the subterranean medical bay.
I stepped down into it, finding a tall light just touching the grey concrete ceiling. ‘Home from home.’
‘Got some cover from mortars, and space to work and live, so it’s a good place,’ Morten enthused.
‘Grab a Jerry can or two of water, tins of meat, and then – when you’re not busy here – we have flour, salt and sugar, so anyone good at making bread?’
‘I can make bread,’ the lady nurse offered with a cheery smile.
‘It’s not rocket science,’ Morten told me.
‘We have a goat as well, but it won’t be ready for eating for about two years.’
‘Two years?’
I went and fetched it, the lads having been feeding it.
‘Aw my god, it’s so cute,’ the lady nurse said as she grabbed it off me.
‘Not much meat on it,’ Morten complained.
‘May be others around, like the kid’s parents.’
‘Good one: the kid’s parents,’ Morten commended. ‘I haven’t heard that since school.’
‘It was not intentional,’ I told him.
I got a few hours sleep, and as the dawn came up I sat with a cup of tea, back against the sand piled up, eye level to the runway. Few people were stirring, and then just to go pee in the sand.
The grey hues adopted and amber tinge, and the desert slowly turned into a respectable sandy colour from the drab grey it offered at dawn. A few men stirred, food on. I left Swifty to sleep as I patrolled the line, a good look south, but the horizon was clear.
The RAF Regiment had GPMGs set-up on the edge of the runway facing south, boxes of ammo ready, a few men awake and on stag, nods exchanged. Some of the Wolves were on stag, a pair cooking.
Back the other way I stopped to peer down at the medics but they seemed to be asleep on camp beds. I had a look at the steel frame cages left abandoned on the runway, two water bogeys sat there with slight drips evident. Moving them over the sand would be difficult.
Boxes and canvas bags littered the sand, and I had no idea what was in them.
A few of the French were awake, food being cooked, a man spooning out corned beef, a smile and a nod given to me as I passed. Two of the Greenies were awake, steaming mugs in hand, nods given, and beyond them a few of the 1st Battalion were up and pissing into the sand, no cover for modesty here.
I walked back, the light improving all the time, and at the supplies area I had a nose into bags. Further on, I woke Echo and French Echo since they had benefitted from time to sleep before the rest of the teams got here, as well afterwards for a few hours.
Cookers were soon going, tea being made, men emerging from the underground bunker Slider had opened up and now stretching. I got some food on with Swifty, corned beef enjoyed. I felt quite full, and we sat enjoying the brew for a while.
With the sun high, most everyone was awake and moving around. I sent runners, for each officer and senior man to come join me.
It took fifteen minutes for them all to walk in, including the “B” Squadron troop sergeant, and we stood chatting as we waited.
When they were all gathered I began, ‘OK, first I want all senior men on my radio frequency, but around here it’s OK to shout instructions down the line, we’re not too worried about being heard. Americans, try and get my frequency as I transmit.’ They got it eventually, so too the French and the RAF Regiment, and the Wolves NCOs.
‘OK, if there’s a panic I’ll contact you by radio, you should also all have sat phones, and Captain Harris should have given you a page of numbers. Yes?’ They all had. ‘Excellent, we’re making progress.
‘Right, as you will have noticed we’re all on this side of the runway because I expect an attack from the south. If they attack from the south and get pushed back they’ll come around the sides. There are men in the small ridge north already, and as you can see ... we have a reasonable field of fire in all directions.’
They laughed.
‘Now, yesterday, when my men dug down, they found spaces under the runway, great for hiding in when mortars are coming in, but we also found a drain – yes a drain, despite no water, and it’s a bit damp, so there is moisture. Today I want that dug out, and if it gives us access under the runway then we can use it when under fire. I reckon there are probably more drains, so we’re going to try and find them.
‘We also have a concrete bunker with our medics in, and wounded men will be treated in it, all safe from incoming rounds and mortars. But thinking long term, we need this runway, and as you can see ... there’s sand on it, but we can still land aircraft. If that sand was further out onto the runway it could be an issue.
‘One solution is to dig down a few feet on the edge, the northern edge, because the clever people tell me that the wind here mostly blows north to south. So if we dig down and move sand back, less sand blows onto the runway, but a few months down the line whoever is stationed here would have to do it again.
‘I’ll also get a fence, a type that airports use in this part of the world, strips of rubber that bend in the wind and collect sand. The air goes up and over, the sand drops. We’ll get a few hundred yards of it, at some point.
‘So, first off I want a few men watching the horizon, not many, the rest digging away the sand from the northern edge, already a fair bit moved, and that drain dug out by men in rotation.
‘A few men, who know how to use those two small bulldozers, I want sent to me, and we’ll use them to make some deep trenches on the north side, places to hide from mortars. And assuming that no one attacks us today, those are the priorities, but assign a few men to dig the existing sand off the runway please.
‘Mister Morten here -’ I pointed. ‘- is our doctor, and he has three nurses and some good kit. Any wounded, to him in his bunker. Mister Morten, you are – when not stitching wounds – in charge of stores, so grab a few men and drag all the stores closer to you, then inventory it. Get the bulldozers digging down, and then put the stores in the holes so that someone south of us will not see a high profile on the horizon.
‘And before anyone asks what a well qualified doctor is doing in a place like this, risking his life, his wife’s family are visiting back in the UK.’
>
They laughed at Morten.
‘You’ve not met them,’ he told us as way of explanation.
‘Ginger, you see those metal cages down the runway. Try and make something tall that a man can stand on, rope supports maybe, and put a man up on it with binoculars.
‘All of you, look south.’ They spread out. ‘In the middle of the runway are tyre tracks leading south, the way in and out, and we think that maybe the sand either side is too soft for vehicles. So we’ll dig a trench to stop vehicles flanking us, at least we’ll slow them down a bit.
‘If the drain comes out near there, I’ll dig trenches diagonal, big enough for men to move down bent-double, and we’ll have teams positioned over there. My thinking ... is that they’ll drive up that track, not leopard crawl fifteen hundred yards. We can create ambush points over there.
‘In the meantime, if we get company before we’re ready we’ll use these shell scrapes. We have RPGs and Russian box-fed in the factory wrapping paper, we’ll break them out when we need them. OK, in your teams, rotate food breaks, and we all sleep midday till 3pm to save water and energy, always one man from each team on stag, but they should be sat down for a lower profile.
‘Captain Moran, grab some men and make a start on the water well, pipes and kit are on the side of the runway. Any questions?’
The Greenie lieutenant, Trapper, asked, ‘Local intel?’
‘We have no movement so far in the area.’
‘What do they have that we need to worry about?’
‘Some old APC perhaps, none seen within two hundred miles anytime recently, mounted fifty cal, mortars.’
‘No aircraft?’
‘They have access to smugglers aircraft, they could fly over and take a look, perhaps an old Mi8 on loan, but we’re talking about village militias here, not an army.’
‘And the objective here?’ he asked.
I took in their faces. ‘In a few short days the bad boys will get a tip-off that we’re here, in particular that there are Americans here. They will come out to play. And the objective ... is to kill as many as possible, rotate out, rotate some fresh men in, kill some more. The objective is to thin out the armed men around here so that they’re busy focused on us, not kidnapping, not setting off bombs or attacking the Nigerian Army.’
‘We brought a flag, as asked.’
I pointed him at the flag pole. ‘Got a bugle?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you know what to do at dawn and dusk each day. One more thing. We have a journalist with us, and there are more on the way. Be careful what you say, but these men know not to print names, not to photograph faces. I can say that the British guy is on our side, those coming ... yet to be seen, but they have been checked out.
‘A word of warning on the rules of engagement. The men that will come here to attack us are not soldiers, there’s no Geneva Convention, no white flags or truces. They’re terrorists and gunmen, driven by ideology, here to kill us because we’re British, French and American Christian infidels, and given half the chance they’ll slice us up slowly.
‘We shoot to kill, we don’t go forwards to give first aid because we’d have men killed and wounded, and this is a bad spot to be wounded. If there are wounded gunmen in no-man’s land and we ignore them then we could come in for some criticism from the liberal left back home.
‘As officers and senior men, you have a duty of care to your men, you don’t send them on suicide missions, you don’t throw away their lives. If you can see a wounded man, and there’s no journalist at your elbow, do what you think is necessary, never admit to it. We do not finish off wounded men, that would see us court martialled.
‘Warn all your men about what I’ve just outlined, think up answers for the press, they may ask. And if the journalist criticises you for not walking out into no-man’s land and giving first aid ... hand him your first aid kit and tell him to go do it himself.’
An hour later I assisted turning the drilling wheel, and we had placed the man-handled drill fifty yards north of Slider’s damp hole. Two sections of pipe had been fixed so far, both now below ground as water was poured in the top, wet sand squeezed out of the top as we turned the wheel.
A third and fourth pipe, and we halted to test our results. Head fitted to the top of the pipe, water poured in, the hand pump was cranked by men in turn, watery sand emerging. After fifteen minutes hard work the watery sand turned brown and muddy, so we were getting close.
More manic hand cranking, and the water was more liquid and less mud. Moran had the instructions, and so sampled the water with special paper, like litmus paper, and he read the chart.
‘It’s not deadly poisonous according to this, just ... brown.’ He sniffed the water, tasted it and spat. ‘We’re supposed to fill the tank, let it settle, take water off the top with the filters they provided.’
The lads made a start on a deep hole for the rubber tank as Moran checked the filters and the pipes.
Sat with my team at 4pm, food on, the place now looking more organised - in that it looked cleaner, Mitch idly asked, ‘Will they come, after you tip them off?’
‘Well ... I may have done more than just tip them off. That Saudi killed in Zurich, I may have sent his relatives a rude note, telling them that the men who killed their favourite nephew are sat right here having a sing-a-long about the camp fire.’
Moran lifted his gaze and made eye contact, squinting in the bright light. ‘Did you kill him?’ he asked me, not sounding too concerned, as if asking about sugar in tea.
‘No, but I would have loved to pull the trigger on him. I may yet do that to his in-laws. And the real objective here has nothing to do with the local unruly tribesmen, this is a proxy war, a true and genuine proxy war in the original sense of the word.
‘I have men in place out there, we have listening kit in place, we have satellite systems hacked ready, phone systems hacked ready. We’re hoping ... that the Saudis take the bait and plan attacks on us. Because if and when they do we’ll get the intel.
‘I have the gun runners prepped ready, the gun suppliers, the intermediaries and the middle men, the pilots and the crewmen, the guy washing the windscreens of their jeeps. The hope here - that you will not repeat - is that the paymaster gets angry, frustrated, pissed off at us. By doing so he’ll reveal his hand, his network, his people.
‘And not just here, this is not about Nigeria, I hope to get some detail of pipelines in Somalia, Eritrea, and the Middle East. I want the paymaster to throw a tantrum and to get sloppy, and we’ll be observing that tantrum.
‘This is similar to Djibouti, but over there we shot the rocket crews and got some hostages, not a care nor thought about the paymaster, the intermediary, the weapons guy, the transport guy. In Djibouti we did the job, but we sure as hell weren’t thinking of the big picture. I now have excellent intel links, I have friends, and friends of friends who’ll pass me information. I have the big picture in great detail now.’
I stared out to the flat horizon. ‘And, when the time right and we have a full picture, we take the war to them, more than just a mortar over the wire.’
Swifty asked, ‘We got time for a cuppa before the war starts?’
Author’s note: If you have got this far in the story then hopefully you are enjoying it. Please leave a review on Amazon.
Geoff Wolak: [email protected], also on Facebook
