‘You don’t want to bother going there,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing of interest there. Everyone will tell you that.’
The funny thing is, everyone did tell us that. Every person we spoke to seemed pre-programmed to trot out the same line. ‘Nothing to see here, move along …’
Obviously that just made the place more interesting to us.
It took a while to gain access but eventually a gate opened and we were invited into the yard. It was full of people, predominantly young men. Max and John got busy telling everyone that we needed to check their IDs and that seemed to go down okay. There were just a couple of lads, typical Afghan-looking fellas with black hair, black beards, little caps, who seemed agitated by our presence. We got everyone in a line and started the process. Two guys on kit, two guys standing on collapsible ladders checking north and south for movement, the rest standing guard – however docile the scene may seem, you let your guard down at your peril. While that was under way I began mapping the compound and speaking to the owner. Sometimes they would offer you tea. This was not one of those times. When I returned to the line it hadn’t moved. I thought, Bloody hell, they’re taking their time.
‘Come on, lads, speed it up,’ I said. ‘Don’t keep these good people waiting all day.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Matt Kenneally said. ‘We’ve never gone faster.’
‘So why has this guy been at the back for so long?’ It was one of the two I’d identified as acting warily earlier.
Even as the words came out of my mouth I fathomed the answer. I decided to conduct a little test. I memorised who was around him, then turned to talk to someone. When I looked back, the guy in question was still at the rear but those around him were well forward.
The bastard’s moving back along the line.
‘Lads,’ I called out, ‘I reckon this guy’s confusing us with the Afghan police. He seems to think if he keeps changing his place we’ll get bored before we get to him.’
‘Does he now?’ Matt said. ‘Let’s bump him up the queue, shall we?’
The second his DNA hit the machine, it responded, although not in a way the man would notice, so Matt had time to utter the pass code. Suddenly this Afghan had three rifles a foot from his chest. Wordlessly, my lads gestured for him to kneel down, hands behind his back. It went like clockwork. In the thirty seconds it took me to walk over his hands were already cuffed in plastic ties.
‘What have we got?’ I asked.
‘Mohamed Mohamed,’ Matt replied.
‘Original. What’s his story?’
‘Wanted by Bastion. High-value target, it says.’
Certainly the contents of his clothes were high-value. They included fistfuls of local and US currency. He also had a modern mobile phone, as well as a new motorbike.
‘Whatever he’s up to pays well,’ I said. ‘Anyway, let’s get him back.’
There were other tests we could perform at Daqhiqh. We slapped a pair of blacked-out goggles on him and set off. Progress was necessarily slow, but it gave Max time to translate the whirlwind of ICOM.
‘The Americans have him! The Americans have him!’
‘Hold your fire! They have one of ours.’
‘Get the Big Thing ready in case he escapes.’
We managed to get home unscathed, ran the tests on MM, who passed each one of them – if that meant having explosive residue on his hands and clothes and a criminal record going back years. I put in a call to Bastion and said we had a prisoner, quite a big fish I guessed. They said they’d send transport for extraction – the next day.
Obviously I wasn’t going to hang around waiting for that – I got the sense that there was more to be shaken out of Mohamed Mohamed. We managed to find out that he had connections with a petrol garage near Route Cornwall. I thought, Okay, that’s in our new area of responsibility. Let’s see what’s going on there.
And so, for the second time that day, we went out, seven Green Berets plus one translator and the medic. I’ll admit that when he arrived a bit of me was relieved he was indeed a ‘he’. Jenny, whom we’d had before Jonesy, had been fantastic but on some level I suppose I felt a man would be ‘safer’ for everyone. Was it my imagination, though, or did our medical man not seem too keen?
He’s Navy, he’ll be fine. After all, what’s the worst that could happen?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
NOT THE CAVALRY
We walked north up Cornwall for thirty minutes, then crossed through the canal, which was great because that cooled us down. When you’re running on two or three hours’ sleep – more often than not taken in forty-five-minute bursts – keeping your temperature under control gets that bit harder. Then it was up a very steep bank and over the other side into a line of trees. It was the usual formation. Robbie, Matt, then me and Max and so on. After Toki I couldn’t imagine a more combat-tested, more efficient patrol.
I was watching our GPS every second of the way, overlaying it onto the basic map I had of Green 13 and its surrounding area. When we broke through the treeline into the middle of a field, the move was intentional. We could have crossed the canal earlier, where the field started, but that was where the IEDs were more likely to be hidden. With that in mind I plotted a diagonal course. ‘Yes, it will ruin a few crops, but we can pay for that later.’
We were marching in a straight line towards a small wall that hid the road on the other side. The sun was blazing, the birds were singing. There was the occasional engine hum from somewhere behind the trees and the distant noise of day-to-day life. It was serene. In fact, our footsteps landing on the broken-down crops was the loudest thing in the area.
And then that all changed.
We could only have had another 12 metres to go. Twelve metres until we reached a tree-lined road and no longer be exposed in a cornfield that offered no more protection than an ear of corn.
Ten metres away from my point man, head down in my charts, I was slow to see the two young Afghan men rise from behind the perimeter wall. I was slow to acknowledge the threat as they raised their weapons while I dropped my map and swung up my rifle. But I saw the fall-out as quickly as anyone.
Click-click-click.
Click-click-click.
I was still bringing my gun to position when Robbie went down backwards.
Shit, shit, shit!
Five metres behind him Matt Kenneally was already returning fire. By the time I joined him the shooters had dived back behind the wall and we heard the sound of moped engines. To my rear the snake of men, all unsighted from the chaos, were shouting, ‘What’s going on?’
Without taking my eyes off the wall for a second I screamed, ‘Matt? Is Robbie all right?’ At the same time I was radioing a contact report to Shazaad in case another patrol was near by.
I was still on the radio when I heard shots from a different direction. The rear of the snake was being attacked. According to the lads, two more men firing at us. I made another report: more shooters, Robbie down, even our medic is having to return fire – unheard of. It’s not looking great.
Suddenly Robbie begins to move. Not only does he move, he pulls himself up and starts crawling back towards Matt and me.
‘I spotted the shooters, tried to backpedal and tripped,’ he said. He sounded embarrassed.
‘Don’t sweat it,’ I said. ‘That stumble probably saved your life.’
With everyone able-bodied, that changed things. We couldn’t go back because of the shooters. We had to go onwards towards the original threat.
I gave the command to fire and run. The man at the back of the snake would fire and sprint to the front before the new ‘last man’ did the same. I wanted two men returning fire at all times. I wanted half the others looking left and the rest right. We’d already been tapped from two ends. There was no knowing whether the insurgents had anything planned elsewhere.
It requires a vast degree of discipline to run with your back to the target but the lads did it. We all did, including me, Max
and a puffing medic, all with no regard for IEDs. And just as well. We were three metres from the wall when shots started coming in from the left.
And the right.
Which went totally against Western military logic. If you’re at 3 o’clock and your mates are at 9 o’clock you don’t both shoot at a target directly between you for fear of hitting each other – so-called friendly fire. It’s bloody obvious. Not to the Taliban, apparently. They’d clearly skipped class the day that lesson was taught. They weren’t letting up, for suddenly I realised that shots were coming in from a third direction. Now we were on the defensive on three sides.
Max was getting really worried. He’d probably had twice as much sleep as any of us over the last few nights but that was still only four or five hours.
‘I don’t like this, I don’t like this. There are a lot more than three shooters out there.’
‘We need to get to cover,’ I said. It was only a matter of time before we took a casualty, and if we remained exposed as we were now we’d be picked off in no time. I located a nearby compound on the map and pointed the front man in its direction. When we arrived he booted in the metal door and we piled in to find a frightened family cowering in a corner of the yard.
‘Max, get over there and explain we’re not the enemy.’
I scoured my map for an exit strategy while yelling at Fergie to get bodies on the roof, at Max to ask if there was another way out of the compound, and radioing our new Sunray at Shazaad all at the same time. By the time I got a connection, the men on the roof were already being engaged.
‘We are in serious trouble. There’s only seven of us plus auxiliaries. We’ve got contact from at least three separate directions.’
An explosion interrupted my broadcast.
‘Sergeant? Sergeant? Are you all right?’
I scanned the compound. ‘Grenade, sir. No damage. Shit – another one.’
The big fat wall took the brunt of the blast and shrapnel. Taking advantage of the confusion, I said, ‘Everyone, time to go.’
A back door led directly into a tiny, narrow alley that had ‘disaster’ written all over it. We had no choice.
The lads were at my shoulder, alert but anxious.
‘Rob, what do you want us to do?’
We were all experiencing something we’d never been trained for. We were drilled in how to attack, not retreat. How to find aggressors, not shake them off. How to overpower, not be a Mickey Mouse half-pint force pretending to be a patrol. I was no better equipped than any of them, but the men trusted me to lead them out of this particular hellhole whether I knew how to or not.
‘I’ll tell you what you’re going to do,’ I said. ‘You’re going to clear this shitty old alleyway as quickly as possible because that’s where we’re going.’
Robbie and a couple of others went out, checked it was clear, and we piled up the alleyway, to hell with the snake formation. We just needed to put distance between us and the unseen numbers behind.
We emerged at the other end of the alley into a bit of a metropolis. It was indicated on the map as the top end of Route Devon, but I had no idea how ordinary it would look. There were cars and shops and people going about their day, not in huge numbers, but definitely without a care in the world.
‘You’d think they’d be able to hear the gunshots,’ Matt said.
‘They can hear. They just don’t care.’
I scanned the road. Clear. We began to cross and out of nowhere bullets started pinging off the dusty track. Half the men were on one side of the road, half on the other, and no one had a clue where the shooter was. There was only one option. ‘On my command, rapid fire and we run over.’
We made it intact. Two minutes later we were inside another compound, terrorising another trembling family. It was exactly the same as before. No time to breathe before the first grenade appeared from nowhere. We had no choice, we had to keep moving.
We moved like termites through wood, charging through one compound, then another, then another. But still the grenades and bullets rained down on us. Every time we returned fire we pushed our supplies of ammunition closer to dangerous levels.
One compound backed onto a stream a bit over a metre wide, so in we jumped. According to my map the stream flowed towards the canal.
‘Let’s go.’
It was hard work wading through the water but it provided a welcome respite from the noise of the threat. Information was coming at me from all sides. Max was telling me about the ICOM plotting, Shazaad were relaying messages about five or six motorbikes going up and down Cornwall while Bastion said that air support was thirty minutes away. I should have been petrified but the adrenalin had long taken over.
I passed the intel about Cornwall down to the men. They needed to be prepared. Fergie, his ‘chicken fillet’ ever present in his thoughts, just said, ‘Rob, this isn’t right. I want to get back to camp.’
We continued to follow the river in pure creepy-crawly mode. Max was on my shoulder constantly, saying, ‘There are eight of them, all with guns, all scouring the area for us. It’s only a matter of time.’
I was grateful for the updates but I didn’t really need them. The stream was running parallel with Dorset, and I could hear the mopeds buzzing up and down with my own ears. Occasionally, I even heard one stop, and its rider contact his people by mobile phone.
We eventually got far enough to break cover. By my calculations if we made it into the field which should be opposite we’d be on a straight course of 600 metres back to Daqhiqh. But first we had to cross Devon.
The last time we tried, bullets had appeared out of nowhere and we’d fired back blindly. This time I wanted to level the playing field. I decided to put down some smoke that would obscure our passage across the road. Obviously, however, it would also give away our location.
The smoke canister makes a hell of a noise when it detonates. But, thirty seconds after it goes up, you’ve got a dense pea-souper that Superman would struggle to see through. Even so, I put two men on the side of the road, one facing north, one south, before I ran over. Immediately I covered the south from that side, the guy who followed behind me took the north, and everyone else piled over.
I said, ‘That was easy.’
‘Too easy,’ Fergie muttered.
Now we just had a few fields to cross to get back on to Route Cornwall and the canal, 600 metres north of our camp. I started to feel a bit more positive. We set off, jumping into the various nasty irrigation ditches along the way for cover. Eventually, we got eyes on Cornwall. We were metres away from the raised straight road back home.
That’s when the shots started coming again.
Click-click-click.
Click-click-click.
We all dived down into the field. I checked my perimeter. There were no dust clouds from bullets anywhere near me.
‘Where’s it coming from?’ I demanded. ‘Anyone have eyes on the shooters?’
A lad at the back of the snake, some thirty-odd metres from me, said the threat was behind him. He was returning fire.
‘It’s from our left,’ someone else behind me said.
I couldn’t support because I couldn’t see either target. They were too far away down the snake. Then Robbie said, ‘There’s one in front of me.’
That one I was close enough to see.
Christ, it’s another triple assault. Our ammo is low already.
‘Fergie, can you do anything?’ I asked. He was our mortar man.
‘I thought you’d never ask.’
He shouted some co-ordinates into his radio, and back at the mortar line at Daqhiqh they were translated into action. Less than a minute later there was a godawful explosion to the rear of our snake. I didn’t know whether the mortar round had caused any casualties – at the end of the day it’s a fairly crude weapons system – and the odds of a direct hit were low, but one set of shooters stopped.
‘What about the bastards in front of us? If we don’t get back to camp
we’re cooked.’
‘I’m on it,’ Fergie replied.
‘He sent off the fresh co-ordinates. Our man at Daqhiqh confirmed the order. Suddenly there was a new voice on the line. It was the HQ in Shazaad.
‘Request for mortar denied,’ the man said. ‘There’s a chance it could hit a native compound.’
‘What about us?’ I snapped. ‘There’s a damn sight better chance we won’t make it home alive without help.’
I used to be a signaller. That is not how you speak to a command centre on the radio. But it is when you’re operating on four hours’ sleep in the last forty-eight hours, in 55-degree heat and 70 per cent humidity. Nothing more came.
We were all firing somewhere. Depending on where you were in the line the target could be in any of three directions. Even above the symphony of click-click-clicks I was suddenly aware of a commotion to my rear. I didn’t dare take my sights off the threat in front but the noise got louder. Suddenly our medic burst past me, screaming, ‘I’ve just killed a man! I’ve just killed a man.’
‘Get back to your position!’ I shouted.
‘I’m out of ammo!’
Jesus! One damn thing after another.
I threw him several magazines from my own belt. That left me dangerously exposed. Worse, the guy was getting beyond my control. I wasn’t sure I could keep him with us voluntarily; I certainly didn’t want him with us. It was no good, we had to move or risk the enemy picking us off.
I radioed Mac back at the CP. ‘Mate, we are so light on ammo we’re going to make a dash for it.’
‘We’ll provide cover,’ he said. ‘Ready when you are.’
‘Cover’ meant fire from our snipers in the super-sangar plus Mac himself. Any number of weapons from Daqhiqh. All trained on our adversaries.
I gathered the lads. ‘We’ve been lucky today but if we’re going to make it we’ll need that luck to continue. We’ve got no choice but to bolt.’
On my command we moved. At pace. Upwards. The earth that had been excavated to build the canal meant that Cornwall was raised 1.5 metres above ground level. I felt sick to my stomach as we emerged from the cover of the field to the exposed raised ground. Up there we were about as camouflaged as the bride and groom dolls on a wedding cake.
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