Chris Ryan (9 page)

large. I tabbed on and on through the moonlight. Now the desert was rolling in gentle undulations, and I believed that the river was going to appear over every rise. Then, away to my right, I heard dogs barking, kids shouting, grown-ups calling. As I went down on one knee to listen, I saw the red tracer of anti-aircraft fire going up in the distance. Obvious�ly there were habitations somewhere close to me, and the people I could hear were watching that nice firework display on the horizon. Then I heard the far-off roar of jets; I couldn't see them, but the sound of their engines was un�mistakable. They must have been miles off, attacking some target, and the red tracer was curving silently up towards the stars. Half an hour later I spotted a glimmer of light ahead. The kite-sight picked out three stationary vehicles, with light coming out of the side. I went down and watched for signs of people on foot, in case a mobile patrol was being deployed to Down To One 115 cut me off. Men on foot could be strung out in an extended line, sweeping the desert ahead of them. After a careful search with the kite-sight, back and forth, I saw nothing more, so I boxed the vehicles and carried on. Again, as I came to the top of a rise, I was convinced that I must find the Euphrates in front of me � but no. The next thing I saw was a set of pylons. I'd been expecting them for some time, because they were marked on my map. Beyond them was an MSR, and some fifteen kilometres beyond that, the river. When I sat down under the power-lines and scanned ahead, I found I could see the road, and a wide-open flat area beyond it � but no water. By then it was two in the morning, and nothing was moving on the highway. Coming down to the MSR, I found this was metalled. By then I was almost on my knees, and when I found a culvert under the road, I crawled into it and stretched out. All I could think was, 'I've got to get my head down,' so I took off my webbing and lay on that. I was also desperate with thirst, and I kept tipping up my two water bottles to see if I could get a drop out of them � but not one. I felt relatively safe in the culvert and closed my eyes � but anxiety was gnawing at me, and so was the cold. Within ten minutes I was shaking all over, too frozen to stay still any longer. On again, then. From the map, I thought that if I crossed the MSR and kept heading north, I must hit the Euphrates, flowing from north-west to south�east. From talking about the river to Jan, I knew that in Biblical times it had been a mighty waterway, and I assumed that it must still be pretty big. But what I hit next was a huge system of dry wadis, with steep walls up to twenty metres high, all made of dead rock. Obviously they'd once been a river bed. Maybe in wet weather flash floods would turn the channels into a rushing river again. I was gagging for want of water, and getting so confused in my mind that suddenly I thought, 'Jesus � I hope this isn't the Euphrates. Surely it can't have dried out since the Bible? If it has, I'm fucked.' Panic was making me walk faster and scrabble down through the tumbled, loose rock. I kept thinking, 'There's 116 The One That Got Away got to be water at the bottom of this.' At its lowest point the river bed seemed to open out, and as I looked down through the kite-sight, I made out a line of palm trees running across my front from left to right. Also, away to my right, I could see the houses of a village � pale, flat-roofed blocks glowing in the moonlight, with a breeze-block wall running down one side, and the shapes of cultivated fields outside it. I still couldn't see any water, but I thought, 'This has got to be the river � the Euphrates at last. Great!' I started walking down towards the trees, which I presumed were growing on the bank. The closer I came, the warmer the air seemed to be � or at least, the atmosphere seemed stiller and calmer. I kept about 300 metres from the breeze-block wall, but dogs came out and started barking. As there was no wind, they could hardly have smelt me. More likely, they had picked up the noise of my feet, first on the rock and then in the dry grass of the fields. The houses were dark; they may have been blacked out, but probably the people in them were asleep. Moving parallel to the boundary wall, I made my way carefully down to the river through oblong fields. No crops were sprouting as yet, but the ground had been well tilled, and the fields were divided up by irrigation ditches, with grass growing on bunds. I tried to keep out of the fields, for fear I would leave footprints in the soft soil. Rather than cross the cultivated areas, I kept to the ditches, which as yet had no water in them. At last, between the trunks of the palm trees, I saw water. Irrigation pumps were working all along the bank: the night was full of their quick, steady beat � boop, boop, boop, boop. I could hear many different pumps working up and down the valley. For several minutes I kept still, watching for any movement. The cultivation seemed to end about ten metres from the edge of the water, and my kite-sight revealed piles of cut bushes, each about two metres square, sticking out from the bank into the stream, one about every fifty metres. At first I couldn't make out what they were for, then it Down To One 117 occurred to me that they were probably makeshift jetties, for men to fish off or to bring boats alongside. In any case, using one for cover, I crept right down to the water's edge. Crouching next to the pile, I got out my water bottles, but found that at the bank the water was only a few millimetres deep � a thin skin over mud. I tried to wade out, but I hadn't taken three steps before my feet plunged deep into silt. In a second I was up to my knees, then up to my bollocks. I thought, 'Jesus, I'm sinking!' I threw my rifle back on to the pile of bushes and dragged myself out, soaked up to the waist and coated in slimy, silty mud. For my next attempt, I crawled out over one of the plat�forms of bushes. As my weight came on to it, the whole structure sank into the stream. I could feel water coming through my clothes at the front � legs, crutch, chest � but I filled both bottles, crawled back out, and drank one down. I swallowed and gasped and choked, trying to stifle the noise. The relief of getting water down my neck was in�credible. I shone my torch beam down the neck of the full bottle, and saw that the water was black and foul-looking, but it tasted quite good. I crawled out to fill the empty bottle again. At that point the river was a couple of hundred metres wide, and I could see no buildings or cultivations on the far bank. In the moonlight the land beyond glowed white, as if it were encrusted in salt. Because there seemed to be no habi�tations over there, it occurred to me that I might swim across and make better progress along the far side. I'm a strong swimmer, but I thought that to go in with my weapon and webbing would be asking for trouble. The water was icy cold, and although the surface was smooth, I could see that a strong current was flowing out in the middle of the stream. If I'd got into difficulties half-way across, that would have been it. By then it was nearly five o'clock, and I needed some�where to basha up for the day. I moved cautiously out between scattered houses, up to a dirt road. Again a dog started barking, so I waited a couple of minutes before going 118 The One That Got Away on up into the dry wadi systems. Once into the rocks I turned on my TACBE and tried speaking into it. Getting no response, I left the beacon on for a while. As I climbed, the rocky channels grew steeper and steeper, and a couple of hundred metres above the road, they came to a dead end. There I found a rock a couple of feet high which was casting a black shadow in the moonlight. I curled up beside it, with my map case beneath my legs, one shamag round them and the other round my head, and lay there feeling relatively secure in that patch of deep darkness. Before settling down, I gave myself the only treat at my disposal: I got out my flask, and took a nip of whisky. The old Lagavulin burnt as it went down into my empty stomach, but it gave me a momentary lift. I was so exhausted that in spite of the cold I kept falling asleep, only to come round with a start a few minutes later, racked by shudders. It was a real pain to be wet again; having spent hours with Stan getting dry, I was now soaked all up the front, with my sodden clothes clinging to me, and the damp intensifying the cold. When first light came, with dawn breaking early under clear skies, I realised that I wasn't really in any sort of cover. At night the shadow of the rock had looked comforting; if someone had walked past in the dark, he wouldn't have seen me. Now I found I was lying out in the open. Looking up on to the north bank of the wadi, I saw a hol�low among some loose rocks. I walked up to it, lay inside it, and piled up a few more rocks at either side to break my out-line. That was the best place I could find in which to spend the day � and that was when it really hit me how much I was on my own. five BOXING CLEVER In the days and nights that followed, there were several moments when morale plunged to rock-bottom � and this was one of them. A wave of loneliness swept over me, as I realised that I was utterly alone. I thought, 'This can't get any worse.' I was hungry, wet, tired, cut off from all com�munication with friends, and still far inside a hostile country. `If things get on top of you,' my mum always used to say, `have a good cry.' So I lay there in the rocks and tried to cry�but I couldn't. Instead my face crumpled up and I started laughing. Dickhead!' I thought. 'Here you are, deep in the shite, and all you can do is laugh!' But somehow it did the trick; it let go the tension and sorted me out. I daydreamed wistfully about the glorious puddings my mum used to make � particularly her rice pudding, with its thick, sweet, creamy inside, and its crust baked to a crisp golden brown. I could have done with a helping of that, there and then. But from that point I wasn't bothered about being alone. I seemed to have made a transition into feeling that I'd been on my own for the whole trip. I was used to it now � all I had to do was get on with heading for the border. It was the morning of Sunday 27 January, my third day on the run. I would have liked to let my feet breathe, but that would have involved too great a risk. I had to be ready to leg it at any minute: so it was one boot off, one sock off, check that foot, and get sock and boot back on. Then the other foot. The blisters looked bad; they had long since burst, and the underlying skin was raw and bleeding. My toenails had started lifting, and there were blisters under my toes. I had no means of treating them, and could only hope that my feet would hold out until I reached the border. 120 The One That Got Away With my boots back on, I devoted the best part of an hour to cleaning my weapon. Again, I took care not to make any noise that would carry. If you release the working parts of a 203 normally, they snap forward with a sharp crack, but if you handle them gently, you need make scarcely a sound. Once I had everything squared away, I lay back with my belt undone but my webbing still in place, straps over my shoulders, so that I could make a rapid getaway if need be. Even down there, almost on the level of the Euphrates, the air was still icy cold, and I shivered continuously. I lay on one side, with my hands between my legs, tucked in under one big rock, with smaller rocks pulled into position shielding my head and feet, and bare rock beneath me. From time to time I dozed off, but always I woke with a start a few minutes later, shaking all over. It was my body's defence to bring me round like that: if I hadn't kept waking, I would have drifted off and been gone for ever. Aching from contact with the rock, I would shift about, trying to find a more comfortable position. There was always a pebble or bump of rock digging into some part of me, and the pres�sure-points on the outside of my knees, hips and spine had already begun to rub sore. The drink had made me feel better in one way; the trouble was, the intake of all that cold water had given me the shivers, and all I wanted to do was press on again, so that I could warm up. The hardest thing was to keep still in day�light. The urge to start walking, to make progress towards the border, was almost overwhelming. Below me, the wadi dropped towards the river in a V-shape, snaking left and right. Its flanks consisted of tum�bled grey-brown rock, devoid of vegetation, but the bottom of the channel, where water would run after rain, had smoother sides. There was nothing whatever alive to keep me interested: no bird or animal, nothing moving. Boredom soon became another powerful enemy: it took all my will�power to resist the urge to move on, or even just to have a look round. The day was quiet: I never heard voices or traffic move�ment, but now and then the wind would stir among the rocks Boxing Clever 121 and I would come fully alert, looking round, wondering if a person or an animal had shifted. From where I lay I could see what looked like the remains of an ancient viaduct, jut�ting out from the bank of the river into the water. There were three tiers of pale yellow arches on top of each other, and they looked as though they were made of stone. I'd spotted the structure when I was getting water, and now, if I lifted my head, it was still in sight. I wondered how old the remains of the bridge were, and whether they could date back as far as the Romans. Round the base of the arches the water was obviously deep, for through my binoculars I could see the current swirling fast. The river was brown with silt, a strong contrast with the salty-looking land on the far bank. What kept my spirits up was the thought that I must be close to the Syrian border � within no more than thirty or forty kilometres. Looking at the map again and again, I worked out that I was much farther west than I had thought I was. I reckoned I was within one night's march, possibly two, of safety. Until then, the longest I'd ever gone without food was four days, on combat survival training in Wales. Even then, an agent had brought me one slice of bread or a little piece of cheese every twenty-four hours � but I remembered feeling pretty weak at the end. The furthest I'd ever walked in one march was 65 kilometres � the final march on Selection. Now, I reckoned, I'd covered about 150 kilometres in three nights, and already it was five days since I had had a proper meal � the big blow-out at Al Jouf. With my biscuits finished, I inevitably began to worry about how long my strength would hold out. How long could I go on walking? Would I slow right down, or even be unable to keep going
at all? I knew from weight-training, and books about the sub�ject, that when the body is under stress it starts to burn its own muscle, trying to preserve fat for emergencies. I was carrying very little fat anyway � so the only realistic prospect was that my muscles would deteriorate quite quickly, espe�cially as I was burning yet more energy by shivering all the 122 The One That Got Away time. In lectures on combat survival we'd been told that a man lost in the desert can only survive for a day without water � but this wasn't by any means a typical desert, and the temperature, far from dangerously high, was threateningly low. Of course I kept wondering about the rest of the patrol. I greatly feared that Vince was dead, and in a way I felt re�sponsible. Lying all day by the tank berm had undoubtedly contributed to his collapse, and it was I who had decreed that we should follow SOPs and stay there. If we'd been a bigger, more heavily-armed party, we might have risked moving to somewhere warmer in daylight � and that might have saved him, at any rate for the time being. Then, in the night, I should have tied him to me. As a qualified mountain guide, I could have handled the situation better. But at the time I'd had a lot on my mind. I myself was going down with exposure, and not thinking as clearly as I might have. Vince had been fit, but he had carried no surplus weight. Taller than me � maybe 5' 11" � he was skinny, with the build of a runner. In fact, as we'd sat discussing what might happen if things went wrong, he'd told me he reckoned that if he stripped down, he could run and walk thirty miles in the night, so that he should make Syria in two nights at most. The trouble was that, like the rest of us, he hadn't reckoned with the cold. Exposure can catch people in different ways. Even when I started to go down, and was slipping back and forth between feelings of drunkenness and being clear�headed, I still knew what was happening to me. I don't think Vince did; he was deteriorating so fast. What about Stan? It seemed certain that he'd been cap�tured, and I could only hope he wasn't having too bad a time. As for the other five � I reckoned that the chopper must have come back and lifted them out. I felt sure that the aircraft had been inbound towards our original position, following normal Lost Comms procedure, and that it would have flown around until the guys made contact with the pilot. 'By now,' I thought, 'those lucky sods are sitting back in base, pissing themselves with laughter.' Boxing Clever 123 Trying to concentrate on pleasant subjects, I thought about my family � about Sarah and Jan, and, before Jan, Susan. During my time with 23 SAS, I was engaged to a pretty, tall, blonde woman called Susan who lived in the same village. I met her while I was still at school, and for seven years we went everywhere together, even on holidays. She had a job as receptionist for a firm of lawyers in Newcastle. We'd meet for lunch, and often she'd come back from work to stay the night at my home. In the evenings I wasn't interested in doing anything except listening to Morse code or reading through my technical manuals, but she'd sit around patiently enough. My mum kept saying that I was too young to get married �and I was certainly too inexperienced. What she was trying to tell me, but couldn't in so many words, was that I ought to go out and sleep with other women, and live life a little rather than tie myself down with the only girl I'd ever known. 'You're a man now,' she'd say, 'and you've got to get around a bit.' I couldn't understand what she was on about �but now I see how right she was. I was extremely naive, having been strictly brought up never to drink or smoke, and my horizons were very limited. When my selection course for 22 SAS was in the offing, Susan and I planned to get married and move south � pro�vided I passed. Once in the regular SAS, I'd be on a good wage, and everything would be all right. Or so I thought. In fact, with my own move south all that went by the board. Suddenly I was thrown into the company of guys of thirty, who were constantly going out humping and drinking, and it was a real eye-opener for me. Hereford was alive with young, single girls, all determined to latch on to the guys in the Regiment. With a new intake, especially, their behaviour became outrageous. Rapidly I saw the other side of the coin. My long-standing engagement seemed like a big mistake, and I started to play the field like everyone else. The difficulty was to break the news to Susan. After re�turning from the Parachute Company to the Squadron, I did 124 The One That Got Away a couple of short exercises, and then went on a three-month trip to Botswana. Immediately after that I joined the SP team, which meant that for nine months I was on thirty minutes' notice to move, and couldn't leave Hereford. The result was that I didn't visit home for more than a year. Susan and I did talk on the telephone, but in the end she wrote saying, 'This is no good, and I think it's best if we finish.' So I took the easy way out, rang her, and said I agreed. At least the break meant that I was unattached when I met Jan. That was in 1986, when she was serving in Queen Alex�andra's Royal Army Nursing Corps, and working as matron in charge of the hospital at Airport Camp in Belize. I was out there on a three-month deployment with a troop called F Company, which organised jungle training courses for the resident British battalion, and also gave guys new to the SAS their own first jungle experience. One of my jobs was to run a range, and when I saw this gorgeous blonde walk past our accommodation on her way from the hospital to the officers' mess, I immediately decided to invite her up for some pistol shooting. The only slight difficulty was that I didn't know her name � so I decided to cast my net wide. The sergeant in charge of the hospital was a bit of an SAS groupie, always snivelling round the guys, so I asked him if he'd like to bring his staff up to the range. He made en-quiries and reported that his people were keen. When I asked who was coming, he gave me a list of names � but this still didn't tell me what I wanted to know, as it just said `Major This' and 'Captain That'. `Have you got a woman in there?' I asked � knowing full well there was one. `Oh yes � that's Captain James, the matron.' `Well � invite her too.' He went round and asked her, and the answer was that she'd be along as well. We set the ranges up, and I had all the guys detailed off so that I'd be free to grab the matron and give her some Boxing Clever 125 personal instruction. Alas, she failed to appear, and I stumped off in dudgeon. But just as I set off across the foot�ball field, I saw her coming in the opposite direction. `Damn!' I thought, 'I've screwed this up.' As we passed each other, I said 'Hello,' and when I saw her reach the range, I ran back, pretending I'd been to fetch something. Then I grabbed her and took her to one side, inviting her for a drink. Back in England we met up again, and we saw a good deal of each other when I did my training to become a medic. For a month I was attached to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, where she also had trained, and as she was stationed at Wroughton, only an hour's drive to the west, she would come up in the car to collect me whenever I had time off. We got engaged in September 1987, and married the following summer. My medical training was thorough and lengthy. It began with an intensive six-week course in Hereford, where we learnt about anatomy and physiology, and the role of drugs. Then I picked a hospital � the John Radcliffe � to which I was posted for four weeks. My introduction to the place was breathtaking. The day I arrived, the sister � who came from Hereford and knew who I was � introduced herself and im�mediately said, 'Would you like to see something interesting?' `OK,' I agreed cautiously. `Get your white coat on, then, and go through those double doors.' Inside was the resuscitation room of the emergency theatre. I thought I was going in to watch a video or listen to a lecture. Not at all. As I walked through the doors, there was a lump of meat screaming on the table, with two doctors and three or four nurses working on it. The man, a road casualty, had compound fractures of the legs and arms, as well as big gashes in his face and on his chest. After that brisk introduction, I was partnered off with a house doctor and put into the Accident and Emergency room. I'd go into the little cubicle with my mentor, and be 126 The One That Got Away introduced to the patient as another doctor or a consultant. I'd watch and listen as the proper doctor made his diagnosis; then, after we'd come out, he'd ask me what I thought ought to be done. If I produced the right answer, he'd say, 'OK �go in and do that,' but if I was wrong, he'd make alternative suggestions. It was excellent hands-on training, and we had at least one serious road casualty every week, so that I got plenty of practice. Another useful ally was the matron in charge of the maternity ward. Often she would make sure that the mother-to-be didn't mind a colleague being present, and then bleep me so that I could go in to watch the birth, whether it was natural or Caesarean section. I was put to live in the nurses' accommodation block, where three bedrooms, a bathroom and kitchen were arranged as a kind of flat. When we arrived, someone said, `Oh, good, here's our bouncers for the next four weeks.' When I asked what she meant, it turned out that at least once a week a nurse would be attacked, probably by a patient. Sure enough, one night a drunk came in with his wrist and hand badly cut after punching his fist through a kebab shop window. A nurse began cleaning his wounds, taking splinters of glass out of his hands. Suddenly he went for her, yelling out that she had hurt him. He got her by the neck and slammed her up against a wall, trying to strangle her. An�other of the girls came screaming into my room. I pulled on my white coat and ran. It was a horrendous sight. The nurse was up against the wall, with blood all over her face and neck and down the front of her uniform. I thought the guy was murdering her, so I dragged him off and hit him. He looked amazed and said, 'You can't do that. You're a doctor.' lust watch this, then.' Wham! I smacked him again, and put him down with a kind of anaesthetic quite new to him. All the time another of the nurses was crying out, 'Don't hurt him! It's all right.' `Come on!' I said. 'He was trying to throttle her.' Another phase of our medical training was to watch post- Boxing Clever 127 mortems being carried out in the mortuary at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, and to practise for live operations by doing things like putting in chest-drains or carrying out tra-cheotomies on the corpses. Again, my first exposure to this peculiar world was a bit of a shock. One day our instructor said, 'OK � there's some bodies you can work on.' There were four old people, one middle-aged man who had hanged himself, another man in his thirties, and a boy of nine or ten, who'd fallen downstairs through a window, so that a piece of glass had pierced the top of his skull. Other�wise there wasn't a mark on him, but strangely enough, there was a rush for the older bodies � nobody wanted to touch the kid. Another day the pathologist brought out the body of a man who'd been in the Thames for three weeks. His skin and clothes were all the same colour � a slimy green � and all round the corpse was a solid wall of stench. Back at Hereford, I sat various written and practical tests, and so became a qualified medic � though I had to re-qualify by doing a short refresher course every year . . . Jan and I were married in Hereford during the summer of 1988, and our first child was due early in 1989. But during December, because Jan's blood-pressure kept falling, she was taken into hospital. Being a theatre-sister herself, she knew the score pretty well, and about three weeks before the baby was due she asked for it to be induced, because she knew I'd be leaving the country early in the New Year and she wanted to have it while I was still around. The doctor declined absolutely; but her blood pressure continued to rise and fall, and while she was in for a check during the morning of 21 December, the surgeon told her she must go for surgery immediately, because the baby's umbilical cord was being twisted and compressed, and cutting off the blood supply. At 9a.m. she rang me at home and said she had to go for a Caesarian section straight away. In the background I could hear the surgeon saying, `If he wants to be in at the birth, 128 The One That Got Away he'd better get down NOW, because you're going straight in. I was still in bed, recovering from a late night. I leapt up, threw on the first clothes I could find, jumped into the car and raced through Hereford with headlights and flashers blazing. As I ran into the hospital I saw Jan being wheeled past on a trolley. The surgeon asked if I'd done the medical course, and when I said I had, he said, 'Come with me, then.' He took me into a room and got me dressed up in green theatre clothes. Then we went through and found Jan already on the operating table. They'd given her a spinal anaesthetic, which left her numb from the waist down but fully con�scious, and she was keeping up a running discussion with the surgeons. `What layer are you going through now?' she asked. I kept looking at her and saying, 'Please shut up!' But she was determined to talk the surgeon through his task. Then sud-denly she said to me, 'Just watch your feet. Stand back a bit, or your wellies are going to fill.' I stepped back, and a few seconds later the surgeon cut through the amniotic sac, so that the fluid flowed out. All I remember after that is this thing like a little alien being pulled out of Janet's belly, screaming. The baby, a girl, was all but full-term, and perfect � but if it hadn't been for the hospital's prompt action, we might have lost her. We had decided that if we got a boy, he would be Stephen, and a girl would be called Sarah. So Sarah she became. Although Jan was in real pain the next day, she came home a couple of days later, and recovered quickly. After little more than a week at home with her, I had to leave to go on the German guides' course � which meant that I was away for three months at a time, and could only come back for a week or 10 days before leaving again. The result was that there wasn't much bonding between myself and Sarah until I finished the course. It was sad, because although I had a daughter, she meant little to me. But then, in May 1990, I came home for six months, and after a couple Boxing Clever 129 of weeks Sarah suddenly latched on to me. Belatedly I realised what I had, and we became