Zero Six Bravo (8 page)
The OC went on to stress the vital strategic importance of their mission to the entire Iraq war effort. If M Squadron could take the 5th Corps’s surrender, it would constitute a major breakthrough in the coming conflict. In one fell swoop, the entire north of the country would have fallen into Coalition hands. Nothing of this scope and daring had been tried by UKSF for decades, and that, the OC argued, was all the more reason for M Squadron to grab the opportunity by the balls and to make it happen.
“Boss, I hear what you’re saying,” Grey remarked, once the OC had finished his briefing. “But still, several things trouble me. First, there’s a hundred and thirty thousand Turkish troops massed on the border and poised to sweep south to take Kurdistan. Let’s say they don’t take the carrot of EU membership. At that moment, in their troops go, and they’re going to brass up anything in their path, including us.”
Reggie gave his trademark easygoing nod: “Okay, boy, I hear you.”
“Second, we’ve got a hundred thousand troops from the Iraqi 5th Corps to take the surrender of, and there’s sixty of us in a handful of Pinkies. No way can us lot keep tabs on that number—that’s supposing they do want to surrender, which is a big presumption to make.”
Reggie took a long slurp of his brew. “Thanks, buddy. Got it. Good point.”
“Third, we’re supposed to infiltrate into the area covertly overland. By my reckoning that’s a seven-hundred-kilometer drive as
the crow flies, so a lot further once we’ve navigated through, plus dodged around the enemy. From the maps it’s clear that the further north we go, the more heavily irrigated and vegetated it becomes, so we’ll be channeled onto tracks and roads. That makes us highly visible.”
“Okay. Okay, boy. I hear you.” Reggie had a supercool way of responding, and nothing ever seemed to ruffle him.
“For those reasons I’d question the feasibility of the mission, at least as it’s presently constituted,” Grey concluded. “I’m not saying I don’t want us to get in there and do this, boss. I’m just saying there must be a better way to go about achieving our tasking.”
Reggie smiled. “Thanks again, buddy, all points well made. I’ll have a think on that one. We’ll put our heads together in the Head Shed and see where we get. But for now at least, boy, we’ve got to crack on.”
That pretty much silenced Grey’s objections—although he did wonder whether the OC would be quite as laid back about things if the 5th Corps proved somewhat less than keen to surrender when they hit the deserts of northern Iraq.
Sixty against 100,000: it would take a real Ice Man to maintain his cool with the odds so stacked against them.
Briefings followed briefings thick and fast now. The Americans had divvied up the territories in which each Special Forces unit could operate. The British, Aussie, and Kiwi SAS had got the Western Desert, territory with which they were familiar from the First Gulf War. And in getting the north of the country, the SBS had landed either the jackpot or the booby prize, depending on how you looked at it.
The more he learned, the more Grey reckoned that the mission they’d been given was actually a real first. He knew his military history well, and the last time that British—hell, any—Special Forces had embarked upon anything like such a mission so deep behind enemy lines had been in the days of the Second World War.
Back then the SAS and the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) had penetrated the North African desert driving Chevrolet trucks and Vickers jeeps, carrying out recce, capture, and sabotage missions, hitting enemy supply lines, fuel dumps, airfields, and ammunition stores. In September 1942 had launched perhaps their best-known and most epic of missions—Operation Caravan. Seventeen vehicles carrying forty-seven men traveled 1,859 kilometers across the desert. On reaching their objective—the Italian-held Libyan town of Barce—the patrol split up, one half attacking the enemy barracks and the other the airfield. During the airfield assault over
thirty aircraft—mainly three-engine Italian Air Force bombers—were damaged or destroyed, and despite the losses incurred by the raiders the mission was seen as a great success.
If they could only pull it off, M Squadron’s Iraq mission would be up there with such legendary exploits. And when in the entire course of military history had one squadron of elite operators ever taken the surrender of an entire corps? Sure, the mission feasibility left a bit to be desired, as did the intelligence picture, but this was the kind of operation that would get talked about in the officers’ mess for years to come.
It was also going to be a massive personal test for each and every man on the Squadron. Sure, they were burned out after months of back-to-back operations. But equally, they were riding high on the success of the MV
Nisha
assault, not to mention their Afghan ops. So, while Grey had doubts about the specifics of the mission, he had every confidence in the individuals tasked to achieve it.
M Squadron also had an ideal opportunity to prove itself in Iraq. In the First Gulf War the SBS had never really got a look in, whereas the SAS had got decidedly down and dirty. This time around, the SAS was going to get similar taskings to the previous war—scouring the Western Desert for units that might be preparing to lob chemical weapons at U.S. and British forces massing in Kuwait. By contrast, M Squadron had just landed a deep-penetration mission, one that would entail covering vast tracts of enemy territory to achieve an epic end.
As if to reinforce the hunger of the young guns to get going on this mission, Moth showed Grey a makeshift adaptation that he’d made to their Land Rover. Using bungee grips, gaffer tape, and camouflage material, he’d cobbled together a cowboy-type sling for his Colt assault rifle. It lay to the right-hand side of the steering wheel, so the weapon was held barrel downward against the dash.
Moth demonstrated how he could reach for the weapon’s butt, draw it one-handed, and aim and engage the enemy out of the front of the vehicle while keeping his other hand on the steering wheel. His Colt had an M203 grenade launcher attached beneath it, and in
theory he could lob off 40mm grenade rounds single-handedly as he drove with the other.
Grey smiled indulgently. He appreciated Moth’s keenness to engage with the enemy, but he reckoned the cowboy-style holster would be about as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike once they got going in Iraq.
“Mate, it looks supercool,” Grey told him. “But don’t worry about it too much. Just concentrate on your driving.”
With each man in the Squadron tasked with taking the surrender of over sixteen hundred Iraqi troops, it made sense to get some basic Arabic into them. This was going to be Sebastian’s baby. Trouble was, Sebastian had just been issued with a brand-new SBS beret, and no one seemed to have told him that you had to shape the distinctive headgear with hot—some argued boiling—water, so as to give it its distinctive, right-side-down skull-hugging profile.
When he walked in to the mess tent for the Squadron’s first Arabic lesson, there was a chorus of “Fuck me, I didn’t know the chefs did Arabic!”
But somehow Sebastian seemed able to take all the piss-taking in his stride. It was like water off a duck’s back, and he certainly didn’t let it lessen his enthusiasm for banging some Arabic into the men of the Squadron.
He began by handing out some crib cards that he’d got printed up. They contained a list of common Arabic words and sentences, though oddly enough the phrase “Would you like to surrender?” appeared to be absent.
Sebastian was like a human dynamo as he talked the men through the basics of the language. He kept hopping about from foot to foot, and there was something about his boyish enthusiasm that was strangely infectious.
“Now,
here’s
one you may have heard of—
Insh’Allah
, pronounced ‘Insha-a-lah.’” He beamed. “It means ‘God willing,’ and absolutely everything is
Insh’Allah
in Arabic-speaking countries. Don’t you just love the sound of it? Try it, all of you, now:
Insh’Allah
.
Insh’Allah
—really rolls off the tongue, don’t you think?”
Seb was clearly playing to his audience and playing up to the fact that all thought him to be some kind of mad, eccentric Englishman. “Try it, Raggy, try it!” he enthused as Raggy wandered in—his trademark five minutes late. “
Insh’Allah
.
Insh’Allah
. That’s it. Fantastic, Raggy! Marvelous, isn’t it?”
At the end of that first Arabic session Sebastian sidled up to Grey as they joined the queue for some tea. “So, erm, what do you think?” he ventured, a little self-consciously.
At first Grey figured he wanted some feedback on his Arabic teaching, but then he realized Seb was indicating the beret perched proudly atop his head. What on earth was there that he could say? He did some quick thinking. “Mate, I dunno if you’ve noticed, but no one’s wearing their berets much around here. OPSEC, mate.
Operational security
. We don’t want to risk anyone getting a photo of us, and rumor has it there are a few press types around the base. If they get a pic of any of us lot in the beret, well, they’ll know SF types are off to Iraq, won’t they?”
“Ahhh . . .” Seb looked a little crestfallen. He whipped the beret off his head and folded it into one of his pockets. “Oh, well, waz-oh. Don’t want to blow it that we’re off on a spot of foreign adventure, do we?”
After acquiring some Arabic, the other key priority was getting the NBC (nuclear, biological, and chemical) warfare defenses sorted for the Squadron. Iraq had produced various chemical warfare agents over the years, including mustard, sarin, tabun, and even VX—one of the most deadly nerve gases known to man—and the area the Squadron would be moving through was believed to harbor an underground chemical weapons plant.
Saddam had used chemical weapons extensively in the north of Iraq, both against both the Kurds and the Iranians, and the threat was seen as being very real. It was the avowed reason that the West was going to war. But it didn’t make NBC defense any more of a popular a topic amongst the men. Compared to Sebastian’s Arabic lessons, rehashing NBC drills was like watching paint dry.
The soldiers had to learn the effects individual agents had on a victim so as to recognize the symptoms and know when someone
had been hit. They had to learn to suit up in all-enveloping gloves, suit, and mask. They had to learn to use a special “sniffer” device that sampled the air for deadly droplets, and how to employ fuller’s earth—a talcum-powder-like decontaminant—to soak up and neutralize an agent. And, somehow, they had to work out how the overloaded Pinkies were going to carry the bulk of all the NBC defensive equipment.
The procedure that the Squadron hit upon for dealing with an NBC attack was designed to balance workability with defense. In truth, the British NBC suits made you look and feel like an oven-ready version of the Michelin Man. They were suffocatingly hot and impossibly bulky. Trying to operate vehicles or to move on foot was next to impossible while wearing one, let alone under a burning Iraqi sun. As for using a weapon, forget it.
The men would operate dressed as they saw fit, which meant T-shirts and combat pants for the most part. The NBC suits and masks would be stowed on the wagons, ideally somewhere within reach. If a cloud of agent was spotted heading toward the Squadron, or if someone was seen going down with symptoms, the alarm would be raised via the radios. The first priority was to suit up and to save the lives of those not affected.
A chemical cloud would contaminate everything it touched, including the vehicles, and there was no way they could be decontaminated in the field. If the Squadron was hit, the entire mission would have to be aborted, and the wagons rigged with explosives and blown. The surviving men would radio for extraction by Chinooks, hopefully getting pulled off the ground and decontaminated safely at a forward mounting base.
The prospect of being hit by a chemical agent was not a pleasant one, and the men did their best to force it to the back of their minds—especially those who were going to be first on the ground in Iraq.
It was March 7, 2003 when Reggie, the OC, decided on the Squadron’s initial probing insertion into Iraqi territory. Using satellite photographs, the HQ Troop had identified a remote airfield at
Al Sahara, way out in the western desert of Iraq. It looked to be largely deserted, and it offered an ideal forward mounting base—a stepping-stone—into the territory of northern Iraq.
The intel assessment on Al Sahara was that there were a couple of Iraqi Army trenches to either side of a dirt airstrip, but they were either unoccupied or ill-maintained by whatever force might be stationed there. The plan was to fly a lead element into the open desert some thirty clicks offset from the airfield, from where they would drive in under cover of darkness to recce and secure it. That done, the remainder of the Squadron would be ferried in by C-130 Hercules transport aircraft, and the mission to take the 5th Corps’s surrender would be well and truly under way.
If M Squadron were simply to drive across the Iraq border, the nearest point at which they could do so was from Jordan, to the west of Iraq. That would place them south of the main impediment to the Squadron’s move into the north of the country—the mighty Euphrates River. The Euphrates runs from Syria southeast toward Baghdad, and the few bridges that crossed it would be heavily guarded. There was no easy way across the river, and it represented a major block to M Squadron’s move overland.
But if they could seize Al Sahara, they could leapfrog the Euphrates and shave a good 250 kilometers off their journey. And in taking a working airstrip, they could get the big C-130 transport aircraft to fly in the entire Squadron, as opposed to using the far smaller Chinooks. There weren’t enough of the heavy-lift helicopters to ferry in an entire Squadron in one go, and Al Sahara offered them the only quick and covert way of getting onto the ground.
The team chosen to insert into Al Sahara consisted of Sean Timms, the sergeant major of Four Troop, with three highly experienced soldiers under him. Like Grey, Timms had been attached to the SAS for two years, learning surveillance and recce ops, which made him an obvious choice for the job. All four men would be mounted on quad bikes for maximum stealth, speed, and maneuverability.
