Eye of the Storm (41 page)

‘What we do is lay Union jacks on the ground, weighted down with stones, so that any aircraft flying over will see we’re British and not mistake us for a disguised mobile Scud-launching site. Let it go for today, but pass the word that tomorrow there will be no cam nets.’

A look of dismay crossed his face. I could almost hear his thoughts out loud, ‘This idiot doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s going to get us all killed.’ But in the end his army training won out and he accepted my order, stomping off without another word.

Later, when I popped my head under the cam net covering one of the pairs of 110s, I found a home from home. The crews had their Peak stoves going with pots simmering away and were sipping their brews, cuddled up out of the wind and cold and feeling nice and cosy. When they saw it was me they all stopped talking and looked rather guilty. I didn’t need to guess who they had been talking about. There’s a strong temptation to get all pally with the men in such circumstances, especially if you’re that rather isolated figure, the RSM. I resisted it. Alpha One Zero had to get back on course, and that meant its members needed gingering up.

‘Well, this is all nice and bloody cosy,’ I said. ‘Enjoy the moment, because there’s going to be a shake-up around here. This patrol is about to find out what it’s really like to be involved in a war.’ I walked off, getting ready for the moment when I would have to address the whole unit.

I called the meeting for 1600 hours that afternoon, by which time every member of the patrol had managed to get some food down him, as well as a few hours’ sleep. Everyone who was not on sentry duty was told to be there, and at the designated time the whole gang, less the four keeping watch, were gathered around my vehicle. I stood facing them with my back to the bonnet, and I gave them a long, hard stare. The afternoon sun did nothing to dispel the arctic cold, and in its harsh, probing glare the group of SAS soldiers gathered around were starkly lit against the desert landscape that surrounded us.

They were a typical bunch – typical for the Regiment, that is: extremely varied in size, and probably the best-trained fighters and saboteurs in the world. A mean-looking, unwashed, unshaven crew, these were the men who would at times piss me off, but who would also fill me with pride, and never more so than when accomplishing the impossible against overwhelming odds.

In short, from a chaotic, badly bungled and almost amateurish beginning, a fighting unit was to emerge that would flamboyantly carry out the most daring Special Forces action behind enemy lines of the entire Gulf War.

These events, and the transformation of Alpha One Zero, still lay ahead when I got up to speak to them that afternoon. What I did know at the time is that a few of them, the most easily influenced, resented my takeover of command. They feared that their safe and comfortable routine was about to be disrupted and that danger – perhaps rather more than some of them were ready for – was to become part of our daily diet.

I was not about to disappoint them.

Chapter Eighteen

D
URING
our stopover to resupply Alpha Three Zero on the flight in the previous night, I had told the OC that I would join him at his patrol’s LUP by the following night, 29/30 January. It meant a 160-kilometre drive over difficult terrain and in poor weather conditions, but I was determined to make it. By now Alpha One Zero had already been behind enemy lines for four days, yet had still to reach its area of operation on Main Supply Route 3, the road from Amman in Jordan to Baghdad, which lay to the north of where Alpha Three Zero was based. The ten days since they should have crossed had been wasted, and Scuds were still threatening Israel and the entire delicate balance of the Coalition. We urgently needed to crack on.

Apart from geeing up the boys and communicating with RHQ at Al Jouf, I had spent most of the 29th trying to get a feel for the ground. There’s nothing mystical about this process. It’s an instinct you have to acquire in order to be fully in command, and comes from experience, a good assessment of your area of operations, and your own and others’ judgement of the enemy’s movements and capabilities. In fact, I found it took only a short while to get a good feeling about being in Iraq. That might sound ridiculous – being seventy clicks inside enemy territory and about to move much deeper into it – but I felt there was nothing immediately life-threatening about our position. It was a rather
Boys’ Own
notion, I suppose, but I knew I had the men, the weapons and, collectively, the ability to cause Saddam’s forces a lot of grief.

With the meeting over, I decided then and there that we would not wait until after dark to move out. By grabbing the last couple of hours of daylight we could make much faster progress. The chances of one of the very rare sorties by Iraqi aircraft coming this way and actually identifying us on the move as an enemy patrol were virtually non-existent.

The men were already drifting away after my little pep talk. I called after the troop sergeants to come back.

‘It’s now fifteen hundred hours,’ I told them. ‘I want you to get everyone packed up and be ready to leave at seventeen hundred. We’ll be pulling out then, and we won’t be stopping until we team up with Alpha Three Zero. It’s a hard push but we can do it.

‘So let’s get cracking.’ Pat hung back as the others went off to join their vehicles, and I turned to address him.

‘Pat, you’ll be in the lead Land Rover again tonight,’ I told him. ‘You did a good job last night. We must get to that rendezvous with Alpha Three Zero by the early hours of the 30th. Then we’ll be in position tomorrow night, finally, to get where we’re supposed to be.’

If you hold a position of some authority, to be talked about behind your back and generally slagged off is a fact of life in most outfits – and especially in the British Army. A part of this is the common human reaction to people in authority; another part is the fact that everyone wants to be promoted, and wants to be in charge. Where the SAS is concerned, with everyone in the Regiment vying for the top job, the more of those ahead of them who drop off the ladder the better they like it, since it means that they have moved one place closer to the top. As a result, there are far more schemers in the SAS than an outsider might think. Guys just hoping you’ll fall, and not at all unwilling to give you that little shove if they can get away with it. They all want to get there – to the top – which is only understandable. It can be quite comical sometimes, though, having seen these characters all slating the guy in charge, because the moment they are put in charge themselves they have to go on the defensive in order to guard their own backs against the pack they have just emerged from. Knowing all this, I expected to take plenty of stick before this war was ended.

I spent the rest of the time before we pulled out on the radio to HQ at Al Jouf. That was the worst thing about being in command – the length of time that had to be spent on communications, encoding and sending signals or receiving and decoding them. The radio systems we were using were supposed to be state-of-the-art, but in fact they were nothing like it. We operated on a ‘burst-transmission’ system, which was at best inefficient. Under this method we sent our encrypted messages by ‘bursting’ them into the ether, which allowed the receiver at the other end to pick them up at any time; in effect, either to pluck them in straight away, or leave them floating about in limbo for up to several days.

The same system was used for HQ’s messages to us. Sometimes at the end of a night drive the counter on the radio set in my vehicle would advise that I had four or five messages waiting to be ‘sucked in’, as it were. These had to be taken in order, first one first, second one second, and so on. Since some of the codes were very complex it could take four or five hours to decode all our waiting messages, of which the last one, almost inevitably, would prove to be the most relevant.

What we really needed was a mobile phone, but the Royal Corps of Signals, which has a unit at Hereford attached to the Regiment, is obsessed with, even paranoid about, electronic warfare (EW), whereby an enemy using direction-finding techniques and equipment can locate your position by getting a fix on your transmission. This is understandable where a large formation like a battalion or armoured unit is concerned, but we were small, fast-moving patrols operating behind enemy lines. What should also have been taken into account was the fact that Iraqi radio-defence systems were made inoperable within a few days by American jamming operations.

We had satcoms, which gave us direct voice-to-voice access to Al Jouf, but initially we had been ordered not to use them except in dire emergency. After a short while, however, we knew that we had the upper hand over the Iraqis, and could safely use our more efficient, and far easier to operate, satellite equipment, which saved us from spending many tedious and unnecessary hours on exchanging and decoding a few simple messages.

Eventually the time came for our departure, and in the weak, late-afternoon sunlight we set off. We made slow but steady progress over the rocky desert during the night. It was still bitterly cold, but we were spared further rain and snow.

Once again there was little conversation in my Land Rover. Because of the constant noise it was next to impossible to exchange any but the briefest shouted comments with Harry, the rear gunner, while my driver, Mugger, wasn’t strong on chat himself. If he and I talked at all it was usually about the extension he planned to build on to his house, or what he intended doing after he left the army. Mugger had a marvellous temperament and manner for an SAS sergeant – calm, easy-going and humorous, he was a good counterweight to more volatile and temperamental members. A big, fair-haired man, over six feet tall and well-built with it, his nickname came from his days as a boxer, and although he had given up fighting he had kept in great shape.

Besides Mugger’s natural quietness, though, there were other barriers to our nattering away like some of the other lads. One was that I was of a different generation, having joined the SAS ten years before he went through Selection. The second, and probably more telling, hurdle was that I was the RSM. Chit-chatting with the boss can be hard going in any job, and soldiering is no exception. Mugger probably felt that he had drawn the short straw in having to sit next to me night after night, although he never let it show in his manner. He was an out-and-out professional, and I came to rely on him completely as the mission unfolded.

Personally, I was equally happy not having to make small talk. I had a lot on my mind, and was to spend most of our long night rides making plans for the following day. During the whole of our four weeks together I rarely exchanged small talk with the men, and they, wary of my rank, equally rarely tried to initiate a conversation. Since I preferred it that way, I was glad of their reticence.

Eventually, after eleven solid hours of driving, we arrived in the vicinity of Alpha Three Zero’s temporary base. It was 0400 hours on 30 January, and we had been on the go since 1700 the previous afternoon. We had averaged just 15 kilometres an hour, which is as good an indicator as any of what night driving over that sort of terrain was like.

As we had agreed earlier over the radio, the 2IC of Alpha Three Zero, Captain Guy, had walked south about a kilometre from their base to rendezvous with us. When he made his first sighting of Guy and two of his men, Pat had stopped our convoy and sent a message back to me with one of the motorcyclists that we had a possible enemy contact. Even though we had an arranged rendezvous and were in the designated area, he was right to be cautious. I told Mugger to close up on Pat’s Land Rover ahead and kill the engine. Looking through the MIRA, the thermal-imaging device mounted on top of the Milan on the roll bar, we could clearly make out three people on the brow of a small mound about two kilometres ahead of us. They were in the right place and at the right time to be ours, but just the chance that they could be the enemy sent the adrenalin racing through our veins and sharpened our senses.

Now halted alongside Pat’s 110, I told him, ‘I’m going to take us in about another click, then I want you to lie up with all the vehicles while I go ahead on foot and check them out.’

We took the convoy to a point about halfway from where we had spotted the figures, and stopped again. I got out, selected three men from another crew, and went forward with them on foot. The party ahead must have been watching us as we had been watching them, for when we were about three hundred metres away I spotted the prearranged signal we had agreed over the radio. I immediately sent our reply. Minutes later I was standing face to face with Captain Guy. He grinned a greeting and said, ‘Nice to see you again so soon, Billy.’

We had last met at Victor, when I had waved him off on one of the C-130s that took the squadrons to Al Jouf. But I had spoken with his OC less than thirty hours earlier when I had landed at their position in the resupply Chinook. Everything we had needed to discuss had been said then, and there was no reason to hang about now.