Chris Ryan (4 page)

down and let someone else go.' `Not a chance,' he replied. 'I'm going.' With two Land-Rover engines running, the back of the Chinook filled with choking diesel fumes. I began to think, 'I wish to hell they'd get out of here.' Then two fingers from the loadie indicated 'Two minutes to landing.' Then one minute. We felt the helicopter decelerate and settle into a landing attitude. All at once, with a bump, we were on the ground. The tailgate went down, the vehicles rolled, and the guys hustled out into the night. That was a tense moment, because it was perfectly possible that enemy were waiting to receive us. The rest of us were at the ready: we had our web�bing on and weapons in hand. If the chopper had come under fire, we'd have burst out and gone to ground. But nothing happened. The tailgate came up. With some of the weight gone, the heli made a normal take-off, and we were away again. Twenty minutes later it was our turn. We grabbed our own kit and dragged it to the edge of the tailgate. Soon the loadie gave us five fingers, then two. We pulled on goggles to keep flying sand and grit out of our eyes. As the chopper hit the deck, the tailgate went down. Cold air and dust came 44 The One That Got Away screaming in; particles bombarded my face, but thanks to the goggles I could still see. We tumbled out, dragging our kit. Above us was a horrendous sight. Two enormous blue fluorescent lights seemed to be blazing above the aircraft. For a moment I couldn't think what the hell was happening. Had we been caught by an Iraqi searchlight? I felt appalled that the illumination must be showing up for miles around. Then I realised that the downdraught from the rotors was raising a storm of grit, and as the grains hit the whirling blades they lit up with a bright blue glow. I thought, 'Bloody hell! Somebody's bound to see this.' The noise was terrible, too: the Chinook makes a dreadfully distinctive clatter � a doo, doo, doo, doo from the blades, backed by the piercing whistle of the engine exhaust. While the racket still covered us, the guys with machine-guns snapped their belted magazines into place. Then in a few more seconds the heli lifted away into the night and was gone. The contrast was extraordinary. For the last couple of hours we'd been in deafening noise. Now suddenly we were thrown into silence. The air was still, the night clear. We lay facing outwards in a circle on the desert floor; as the sound of the engines died into the distance, we heard dogs barking not far off to the east. Obviously they were round some building � and they'd heard us if nobody else had. After the stink of exhaust in the back of the chopper, the air smelt incredibly fresh and sterile. There was no trace of any plant or animal scent. That clarity alone told us we were in the middle of a barren wilderness. With our goggles off, we had all too good a view of our surroundings. We'd landed in the middle of a dry wadi or river bed, maybe 200 metres wide. Scattered clouds were sailing across the moon, and in the clear intervals its light was very bright. It was brighter than I'd expected � altogether too bright. As our eyes adjusted, we could see that the wadi had walls five or ten metres high, apparently with a level plain above them on either side. The MSR was somewhere up ahead of us, to the north, Contact! 45 running roughly east and west across our front. The ground beneath us was dead flat, and consisted of hard-baked clay, but we found we were lying right between a set of tracks made by a vehicle whose tyres had sunk into the dry mud. I realised that the mud was only an inch or two deep, and that under it lay solid rock. There was no loose material with which to fill our sand bags. For what seemed an age Andy just lay there, doing nothing. It's always essential to spend time letting your eyes adjust to night vision, but this was getting ridiculous. It had immediately occurred to me that if any Arabs had seen the chopper, they'd already be running or driving across the flats towards the lip of the wadi without us being able to see them. I had visions of people coming from all directions and suddenly appearing on the rim, against the stars. Looking at Andy, I thought he seemed semi-stunned. Tor fuck's sake,' I whispered, 'let's get some guns on to the high ground.' So we sent out two lads, one on either side, to go up the wadi walls and keep a lookout. Gradually the barking of dogs died away and left us in total silence. Our most urgent need was to get our kit out of sight, and we began dragging or humping it across into the shadow of the moonlight cast by the right-hand or eastern wall. Everything was black and grey, like in an old film. From the middle of the wadi that shadow looked solid and deep � a good place in which to hide. But when we reached it, we found it was an illusion. There was no cover of any kind, and in the daylight the whole river bed would be dangerously open. In heaving and dragging our kit, we were inevitably leav�ing marks in the baked mud of the wadi floor. But it wasn't long before we realised we were much deeper in the shit than that. From our study of satellite imagery, we had ex�pected the sides of the wadi to be made of sand. Far from it. They were slabs of rock, some smooth, some crumbling, with a jumble of loose lumps at the bottom. There was hardly a grain of sand in the whole area. We were on bedrock. Training in the dunes of the Gulf, we had built 46 The One That Got Away beautiful OPs with the greatest of ease, digging into the sand and filling as many bags as we needed. Here, without sand, our bags were useless, and we couldn't dig an inch. One urgent necessity was to find out exactly where we were. So Mark got out the Magellan and plotted our posi�tion to within a few yards. Then we pulled in our two flanking guys, who reported that the desert on either side of the wadi ran away level in flat plains, without a stitch of cover. Andy went forward with Mark to recce the ground ahead. As the rest of us lay waiting for them to return, we began to realise how cold it was. The wind bit through our DPMs and smocks, which were far too light for the job, in both weight and colour. They gave very little protection against the cold, and were such a pale sandy colour that they shone like beacons in the moonlight. Under mine I was also wearing a dark-green Helly Hansen sweater, but the combination was nothing like enough for the temperature, which can't have been more than a degree or two above freezing. Besides, the wind was producing a high chill-factor. Way down at Victor, several hundred miles further south, a good deal further south, the nights had been warm and the days hot enough to make us sweat. Nobody had thought to warn us that things would be different up here. The dogs started barking again. It was hard to tell what had set them off this time � could they hear us, or was our scent carrying on the wind? We reckoned they were no more than four or five hundred metres away. That figured, because the satellite photos had shown irrigated fields and habitations within about that distance of our drop-off point. We just hoped they didn't come across to suss out what was disturbing them. In twenty minutes Andy and Mark were back. 'Right,' Andy whispered, 'We'll head up here. Get forward up the wadi.' Four of the guys struggled into their bergens and walked forward about 300 metres, then went to ground. We watched them lumber off like pale-coloured bears, their Contact! 47 smocks glowing in the moonlight. As soon as they were settled, the rest of us moved up to join them. Then the first four went back and picked up the rest of their kit, including the jerricans, which were tied together in pairs with tape. Once they'd joined us, we went back � and so it continued for most of the night: shuttling forward, back, forward, back. It was knackering work, but I remember at one point seeing Stan stand up with his bergen on, belt-kit and all, and put two of the jerricans on his shoulders. Off he went, walking upright, with his Minimi held correctly in front of him � an amazing sight. I knew he was a strong guy, but this was in�credible. By 0500 we had moved about two kilometres to the north, and were in the area selected for the OP. The sky in the east was already beginning to lighten. We were still in the wadi, and the walls were still bare rock, so that there was no chance of digging it. We sat around for a minute or two, dis�cussing what to do. We couldn't stay where we were, because the ground was far too open. Then Andy went on round a corner with Stan and found that the wadi came to a dead end in a cul-de-sac no bigger than a good-sized room. The walls were fairly steep, but on the left-hand side, as we faced north, one massive slab of rock had fallen off the side of the ravine. The detached lump was about seven feet high, and lay a couple of feet clear of the wall, with a second, smaller rock near its foot, making some natural shelter. A few feet farther to the south there was an overhang going back under the wall. The floor was of hard-baked clay, with loose rocks and some stunted thorn bushes scattered about. It wasn't a great hiding place, but it was the best we could find. So we went in and packed away all the kit for the OP, the poles and nets, because they were no use to us in this rock desert. We put the jerricans at the bottom, with the thermal sheets, cam nets and empty sandbags on top, to deaden any noise. Some of us sat on the cans, a couple tucked in underneath the overhang, and the rest settled around the rocks at various places. If we wanted to shift about, we went at a crouch or on hands and knees, but all movement was kept to a minimum. 48 The One That Got Away The end of the wadi covered us from the north � the direction of the MSR � and we were reasonably well pro�tected by the sides; but to our rear we were dangerously exposed. If anyone came up the river bed, following our tracks, they'd be bound to walk or drive right on top of us. `This is no bloody good,' somebody muttered. 'If it looks bad in the daylight, we'll have to consider getting on the phone and getting relocated.' Before dawn, we put out two claymore mines, about 50 metres down the wadi, with wires running back to our posi�tion, so that we could blow up anybody who approached along the foot of the eastern wall. Within the patrol, Vince had been nominated as second�in-command, so if anything happened to Andy, he should in theory take over. Once we were on the ground, however, I found that I was emerging as more positive than him, and keener to take decisions. Apart from this, there was no defi�nite command structure. At first light Andy and I crept carefully up a small channel and lay at the top of the bank for a look around. Daybreak revealed that flat, grey-brown plains stretched away into the distance to the east and west. But there, straight ahead, only a couple of hundred metres away, was the MSR, running right and left across our front on a big embankment, like a long ridge. To the left, one harmless-looking civilian truck was parked on the edge of the highway; it had an open back and slatted sides, as if it was used for carrying animals. One or two other lorries rumbled along the road, but on the high ground to our right, another couple of hundred metres away, was something much more sinister: an anti-aircraft position. Through our binoculars we could see the twin bar�rels of guns, which we identified from our manual as SA 60s, poking up above the emplacement, and at least two Ira�qis moving about. The sight gave us a nasty jolt: to see those guns so close to us was bloody frightening, because they could only have been placed there to protect some installation from air-attack, and they showed that we were right on the edge of an Contact! 49 enemy position. We knew we were going to have to be ex�tremely careful. We came back down and let the rest of the guys know that there were enemy within 400 metres of us. In the shelter of the wadi we heard the occasional vehicle go along the road, but we kept our heads down while we conferred in whispers about what to do. Clearly it was too dangerous to spend any length of time where we were, and the vital necessity was to get a message through to base, asking for a relocation or a return. The trouble was, the 319 radio did not seem to be work�ing. It should have been possible for us to communicate instantly with Forest Hero, the base station in Cyprus, and from there messages should have been back in Al Jouf within a couple of minutes. Any message from us would be passed straight to the CO or the Ops officer, whatever the time of day or night. But although Legs patiently tried dif�ferent frequencies and experimented with various aerial arrays, he could not evoke any response. What we didn't realise till much later was that we'd been given the wrong frequencies � so Legs sat there, trying and trying to get through, assuming that this was one of those days (which you often get) when atmosphere conditions are bad, and radios just don't work. For the moment there was no serious worry, because we knew that as a fall-back we had the Lost Comms procedure whereby, if we had not come on air within forty-eight hours, a helicopter would automatically return, either bringing us a new radio set or armed with a plan to shift us elsewhere. We took turns to go on stag, while the others had a meal or a sleep. We did an hour's guard-duty each, holding the clackers for detonating the claymores and watching the wadi. The rest of the guys, having had a sleepless night, were glad to get their heads down. It was so cold that several of them struggled into their NBC suits and lay around in them. We were all more or less hidden, and there was a good chance that if we kept still, even a man looking up the wadi from a distance would not have seen us. 50 The One That Got Away Then, late in the afternoon, we heard voices. A boy of twelve or thirteen, his voice just breaking, began calling out, and a man answered him. Peering cautiously over the west�ern rim, we saw the boy and the man � maybe his father �driving a herd of goats. They were walking across the plain, nearly parallel to the course of the wadi, but heading in towards us as they moved northwards, and calling the goats on as they went. The truck with slatted sides was still parked the far side of the MSR, so it looked as if the goatherds had come out to check their flock, or were about to load the animals up. Either way, they were too close to us for comfort. We grabbed our weapons and lay like stones, hardly breathing, every man with a round up the spout. From the jingling of the goat bells and the voices, we reckoned the flock passed within fifty metres of our hiding place. As the sounds faded into the distance, we kept still, listening. Half an hour later, we crept to the top of the bank again to
check what was hap�pening: the truck had disappeared, and there was no sign of the goats � but where they had gone, we couldn't tell. This place was decidedly bad news. There was so much activity in the area that it could only be a matter of time before we were compromised. Legs, cool as ever and lying in a hollow, redoubled his efforts to get through on the radio. Mark went over to help him, and the pair of them worked on the set, switching frequencies and rigging dif�ferent aerials. Once you get through to base, you always feel better � at least you have contact. But now there was no re�sponse, and people began to grow apprehensive. We were also getting frozen. At one point Andy came up to me and said banteringly, 'I hope your feet are cold.' `Like fucking ice,' I told him. `Good,' he said, 'I'm pleased to hear that � with those bloody boots on.' I had the best boots of anyone in the patrol. One of the guys had ordinary army boots, and a couple were wearing jungle boots. Whatever we had, our feet were numb. Oddly enough, I didn't feel hungry, and all I ate during the day was a bar of chocolate and a packet of biscuits. Contact! 51 As soon as it got dark, we put out a recce party; Andy, Mark, Stan and Dinger decided to take a look round. `We'll leave in this direction,' Andy briefed the rest of us in whispers, 'and we'll come back in the same way. The pass number's the sum of nine. We shouldn't be more than three or four hours. As we come in, the first man will walk down with his arms extended and his weapon held out sideways in his right hand.' If the rest of us heard a contact, he went on, we were to stand-to, wait five or six minutes for the recce group to come through our position, and put fire down on anyone following them. If our own four guys didn't appear, we were to make for the drop-off point, and they would join us there. They left at 2300, hoping that by then all the natives would have got their heads down. With the recce party gone, the rest of us took turns to do an hour's stag. Not a sound broke the silence; the night was utterly still, but not nearly so light as the one before, because the sky was full of clouds. In the event, the recce party returned safely at 0330. They came back to the wadi from the agreed direction, but they were never challenged, because Vince, who was on stag, had fallen asleep. I happened to be awake and saw their black figures appear on top of the bank, against the sky. A moment later Andy was bollocking Vince for not being alert. The recce group had found that the MSR was not a metalled road but a series of dirt tracks running parallel through the desert, and spread out across nearly a kilo�metre. They'd also discovered a single white post standing in the ground, about 300 metres from the LUP, but they could not make out what it was marking. Then they'd checked out a little tented encampment beyond the spot on which the lorry had been parked. It was a second AA posi�tion, with a few vehicles parked round it. When dogs started barking, they pulled off and moved round to see if they could find mounds or ditches or anything marking a fibre-optic line, but there was no sign of one. They also looked for a better position for us to move into � but, again, with no luck. 52 The One That Got Away For what was left of the night they got their heads down, and the rest of us stagged on again. In the morning we at least felt confident that we had got in without anyone know-ing we were there, but we had decided that it was too dicey to stay; there were too many people about, and we were too close to the site that the AA guns were guarding. When I crawled round to where Andy and Dinger were sitting, I found them composing a message. `What are we going to do?' I asked. `We're asking for permission to attack the AA position.' `What the hell's the use of that?' `We might as well do something while we're here. Half of us'll sneak up the back and take the position out while the rest of you guard the kit here. Once it goes noisy, you get on the radio and call in the chopper to lift us out.' As I listened, I was thinking, 'This isn't our mission. If we start messing around, they'll get annoyed back at RHQ' In fact they'd get infuriated; to do something as reckless as that, outside our remit, would constitute a serious offence in regimental terms. It was pretty obvious that the installation which the AA positions were guarding must be manned by a fair-sized force of regular army or militia. Whatever the out�come of an attack, we would have to hustle back to the drop-off point wearing our bergens. With the sandbags and OP kit removed, their weight had come down to about 100 lbs each, so that they were more manageable � but a sudden pull-out such as Andy had outlined would mean leaving all the OP gear behind and giving away what we'd been up to. Until that moment we'd taken great trouble to leave no trace of our presence, pissing into a jerrican and shitting into plastic bags which, in an orderly withdrawal, we would take. with us. Another serious objection to the plan was the erratic be�haviour of our radio. As far as we could tell, there was nothing wrong with it, but if we couldn't get through to base within the next few hours, we would have serious problems. For the moment I didn't say anything. Instead, I went back and sat down beside Vince. When I told him what the others were planning, his eyes bugged out like a frog's. Contact! 53 Then, after half an hour, I decided, `Ah, bollocks. We can't do this.' So I went back round the corner and told Andy it wasn't on. 'If there's something big there,' I told him, 'we're going to end up in the shit. Especially if that chopper doesn't come and get us. We're banking everything on that. If we can't raise base on the radio, or the heli can't get in, we're going to be screwed. Judging from what's hap�pened so far, our comms are screwed anyway, so we're not going to get through.' Dinger said, 'Yeah � you're probably right. We'll cancel that one.' `And besides,' I told him, 'it isn't our mission to go and take out an AA position. Our mission's here, in the OP. Ifwe can't stay here, we'd better go back.' The others continued to fart around, and it wasn't until 1400 that they decided to drop the idea of attacking the AA site and go for a relocation. Having spent hours encoding a long message about the plan, they began to make up a new signal. But we still couldn't get through on the radio; by then the ionosphere had dropped, and contact was impossible. We also tried using our Satcom telephone. We didn't want to speak for long on it, because we'd been told that it threw off an enormous electronic splash, and that any call which lasted more than twenty seconds was liable to be picked up by direction-finding apparatus. So we switched the set to listening-wait, hoping to hear a call from base. Then occa�sionally we would come up on the call-sign with a quick request for a comms check: 'Hello Zero Alpha, this is Bravo Two Zero, radio check, over' � but nothing happened. It looked as though we were going to have to rely on our Lost Comms procedure. That would mean pulling back down the wadi to the drop-off point, and being there when the chopper came in at midnight. Naturally we hoped that it would lift us out to somewhere more favourable, but, more likely, it would bring us a new radio: the CO would be advised that our set had gone U/S, and he would naturally want us to continue our mission. Either way, after dark the whole patrol was going to move back, and we sat there think�ing what a pain in the arse it would be to walk that distance 54 The One That Got Away humping our kit, and then hump it all the way back, just to pick up a new radio. We weren't looking forward to making the effort. Then, about four in the afternoon, everything went to rat-shit. Once again we heard the herder boy calling his bloody goats. This time he sounded closer, and coming directly for us. I'd been talking to Andy and Dinger about the radio, and I was under the overhang when the boy started shouting, from a point directly above my head, but some way out behind me. The three of us lay rigidly still � but when I looked across at Vince, on the other side of the rock, he was craning his head to see if he could spot the boy. Mouthing at him furiously, and giving tiny, frantic movements of our fingers, we tried to make him keep his head down. If we'd all stayed still, we might have been OK. Nine times out of ten, if hidden people don't move, they get away with it. What betrays them is shape, shadow, shine, and above all movement. It's the same with birds and animals in a wood: as long as they keep still, you don't see them, but the instant one moves, that's it. It was Vince who moved. At the time he didn't admit it, but later he came clean. Overcome by the temptation to see what was happening, he eased his head up until the boy caught sight of him. At the time we weren't sure what had happened. All we knew was that the shouting stopped. There was no particu�lar cry of alarm, but the sudden silence itself was ominous. It was pretty obvious that the boy had run off. I crawled round to Vince and hissed, 'Did he see you?' `No, no, no,' he answered. 'We're OK.' I left it at that, but I didn't believe him. Things were get�ting scary: there wasn't exactly a panic, but we knew we were about to be rumbled. I felt fear starting up in my stomach. Legs was still at the radio, trying to get through. 'What's happening?' I demanded. `I'm trying,' he said. 'I'm trying.' `Have you been on the guard net?' I asked him. `No.' Contact! 55 `Well, get on the guard net and start tapping Morse.' The guard net sends out new frequencies, and I knew that if we came up on it, we would compromise its entire operation for the current twenty-four-hour period. But in this emergency such a procedure was justified. Legs started working on the text for a burst transmission. 'High possibi�lity compromise. Request relocation or expel,' his message read; but just as he was tapping it in, we heard the roar of a heavy engine and the squealing and grinding of what we thought were tank-tracks, approaching up the wadi. That was when the adrenaline started to flow. There wasn't any more creeping about. We were all buzzing round. Wild thoughts raced through my mind: the damage a tank could do with one round into the end of the wadi � it would destroy us all. There's a form of anti-personnel round like a huge shotgun; if they whipped one of them up there, that was us finished. `Get the 66s open,' somebody shouted, and we cocked our rocket launchers. The guys had spread out round the end of the wadi, lying behind whatever cover they could find. Dinger chose that moment to light up one of his filthy, home-rolled fags, amid strong protests. There we were, waiting for this tank to come into view round the corner. Every second the squealing and grinding got louder. We were stuck, pinned like rats in the dead-end of the ravine. We couldn't tell what else might be coming at us over the flat ground above. The chances were that the Iraqis were deploying behind us, too; even at the moment, they were probably advancing on our position. A couple of hand grenades tossed over the edge would make a nice mess of us. Even so, if the tank came into view and levelled its gun on us, we'd have no option but to run up on to the plain, and chance it with the AA positions on the high ground. By then it was 1700 hours, but still full daylight. Someone said, 'Let's get some water down our necks, fellers,' and everyone started drinking, because we knew that if we had to run for it, we'd need the liquid inside us. Other guys began frantically repacking their kit, pulling off the warm jackets 56 The One That Got Away they'd been wearing and stuffing them into their bergens. A couple of the lads struggled out of their NBC suits and stowed them. No one gave any orders about what to do. We just decided that if a tank or armoured personnel carrier came round the corner, we'd try to take it out, and then go past it down the wadi, using the dry watercourse as our escape-route. The rockets wouldn't have been much use against a tank, but they might have disabled it by blowing off a track. So there we were, getting water down our necks and having something to eat. Then I looked round at the tail ends of the rocket launchers in front of me and said, 'Hey, fellers � watch the fucking back-blast on these things. I don't want my face burned.' When a 66 is fired, the danger area behind the tube extends for twenty metres. There was silence for a minute. Then, suddenly, out of fear and ten�sion, everyone started laughing. They couldn't stop. I thought, 'This is bloody ridiculous. There's a tank coming round the corner, and here we all are, giggling like school�girls.' Dinger pointed at my German Army cap and shouted, `Hey, Chris, you look like Rommel.' `Fuck off, Dinger,' I yelled back. He was dragging des�perately on his fag. 'Put that fucking thing out!' `Ah � fuck the SOPs,' he said, and everyone laughed some more. I checked my 203 magazines again, tapping them on the bottom to make sure the lip was properly engaged in the breech. I had the mags taped together in pairs, head to toe, so that I could load the second instantly by turning the empty one upside down. Each could hold thirty rounds, but I'd only loaded them with twenty-eight, to leave the springs a bit looser and cut down the chance of a stoppage. The spares were in my left-hand lower pouch. Then suddenly round the corner came . . . not a tank, but a yellow bulldozer. The driver had the blade high up in front of him, obviously using it as a shield; he looked like an Arab, wearing a green parka with the hood up. We all kept still, Contact! 57 lying or crouching in firing positions, but we knew the man had seen us. He was only 150 metres away when he stopped, stared, and reversed out of sight before trying to turn round. Obviously a local, he must have known that the wadi came to a dead-end, and his only purpose in coming up it had been to find out who or what was in there. We held our breath as the squealing and grinding gradually died away. For a minute or two we felt more relief than anything else. Then it was, 'Get the radio away, Legs,' and everyone was saying, 'We've got to go. We've got to go.' Dinger lit another fag and sucked on it like a dying man. Now we felt certain that the local militia must be deploying behind us, and one or two of the lads were being a bit slow, so it was 'Get a fuck�ing move on' all round. We'd already decided to ditch the surplus kit we couldn't carry, but we pulled our bergens on and were ready for the off. As we were about to leave, I called, 'Get your shamags round your heads.' So we all wrapped our heads in shawls, in case we could bluff our way and pass as Arab soldiers, even for a few minutes. As soon as Legs was ready,