Operation Mayhem

by Steve Heaney MC

  The commanding officer of 1 PARA, Colonel Paul ‘Gibbo’ Gibson, had led the Kosovo mission, winning the DSO for it. He’d made a ballsy move now by launching the deployment to Sierra Leone – getting an entire British battle group, Pathfinders included, under way pretty much on the fly. He’d as good as told us he had no clear authority to move to the Air Mounting Centre, but we were going anyway, ‘cause it got us one step closer to going in.

  ‘Let’s just do it,’ Gibbo had told us. ‘Let’s just go. Get yourselves down there, Pathfinders.’

  I’d barely had time to say goodbye to Ben before we swung out of our Wattisham base and hit the road. Heaping his bowl with dog-biscuits, I’d promised him I’d be back home as soon as, and in truth I’d have loved to be taking him with us. There would have been nothing better than my rock-hard chocolate Lab to give the rebels a good bite on the arse – though I had a sneaking suspicion Ben was more of a lover than a fighter kind of a dog.

  Scores of military vehicles were now en route to the AMC – our open-topped Land Rovers and Pinzgauer all-wheel-drive vehicles amongst them – without anyone knowing we were on our way. Normally, some 800 men at arms undertaking a road move to deploy requires clearance from HQ Land. It requires an escort of Military Police, for live ammo is in transit, and it needs rakes of formal permissions. Colonel Gibson had had to work around all of that. Recognising that hundreds of British citizens were on the verge of getting chopped to pieces or kidnapped, he’d found the means to get the mission under way.

  It was typical Gibbo: decisive action in a very unclear and fast-moving situation.

  Gibbo had his priorities dead right.

  Taking the bull by the horns.

  Respect.

  The colonel was tall, skinny and gaunt, with the physique of a long-distance runner. I’d served under him in Kosovo, and at first I hadn’t warmed to him much. But with time Gibbo had proved that he knew how to play the game, and Kosovo had ended up being very good for all of us. The 1 PARA battle group had acquitted itself well, and I’d developed a grudging respect for the man. He could make gutsy, timely decisions; he was not a ditherer. His calls might be right or wrong, but either way they were timely – which was about all you could ask of a senior commander. Right now he was riding the crest of a wave, and with the Sierra Leone op we were going to have to ride it with him.

  It was dusk by the time we reached South Cerney and we had to bluff our way onto the base. Normally the guard at the main gate would be told what was on its way. But right now a massive military convoy had turned up from out of the blue, and the poor corporal had not the faintest idea of what was happening. We sat in this humongous queue that snaked along a leafy country lane, as the guy tried to make up his mind whether to let us in or not.

  He stood in front of the barrier with one-hundred-plus vehicles ranged before him, pumping out the diesel fumes. By now it was getting dark, and the headlights wound into the distance as far as the eye could see. Gibbo fixed the hapless bloke with a gimlet eye. The corporal quailed under the colonel’s stare, eyes flicking nervously to his clipboard – like somehow he’d missed the fact that an entire battle group was scheduled to come through his gate that very evening.

  ‘Son, open the barrier.’

  No one was about to naysay Gibbo. The convoy was let through.

  South Cerney is only fully staffed when there’s an official air-move under way. Right now it was like a ghost town: there was no one to organise the chaos. The 1 PARA convoy got itself seriously gridlocked on the tarmac that lies between the main hangar and the runway. That done, Gibbo got the 1 PARA lads into the massive hangar and lined up by company: B, C and D in three rows, the blokes’ kit piled beside them. The poor lads from A Company were on exercises in Jamaica, so they were missing out on this mission.

  On the far side was the so-called ‘black hangar’ where we would normally gather in isolation, along with any other elite units that might be mustering. But right now the black hangar was locked, so we parked up on the approach road and kipped down beside the vehicles. I was hoping for a proper briefing on the coming deployment, but it turned out that the British military had no one on the ground in Sierra Leone. The Pathfinders were likely to be first-in, and consequently there wasn’t much that anyone could tell us.

  It’s the Pathfinders’ role to get in on the ground early and establish an intelligence picture – that way you risk sending in a few good men, as opposed to an entire battalion. Even so, it would have been nice to know the basics – the size of the rebel force we were up against, their level of training and operational capability, their weaponry, and their positions in relation to the nation’s capital.

  Unfortunately, no one seemed to know a thing.

  HMG had been caught with her proverbial pants down.

  In fact, the entire force now preparing to deploy had no maps of any sort – apart from the few that we had managed to grab from our Maps Room. There were no photos of the rebels or their bases, there was no aerial or satellite surveillance, and little info on the enemy’s make-up or likely modus operandi. Worse still, no one had any food rations or even any ammo, because no formal orders had been given to issue any.

  Each of us had packed a ‘follow-on’ bag, one that contained goodies to leave at a forward operating base: books, PT kit, iPods, snacks and so on. We broke out whatever scoff we had in those and got a brew going on our foldable ‘hexy’ stoves – ones that burn solid hexamine fuel blocks similar to firelighters. But there was sod all we could do about the lack of ammo.

  No bullets with which to go to war.

  It was a typical Army SNAFU – Situation Normal All Fucked Up.

  Captain Donaldson, our OC, was in and out of conference with Colonel Gibson. Predictably, the mission was ‘on’, ‘off’, ‘on’, ‘off’ all night long. The rest of us got our heads down as best we could. It was the golden rule of good soldiering – always grab the chance of a feed or a sleep.

  At around dawn The White Rabbit shook everyone awake, telling us there was a scoff-on in the cookhouse. From somewhere the South Cerney boys had managed to rustle up some food and someone to cook it. The queue circled several times around the cookhouse, and we were two hours waiting in line. It was like being on a conveyor belt: fifteen minutes to get as big a plate of fried bread and eggs swimming in grease down you as possible, before you were spat out the door so some hairy-arsed PARA could take your seat.

  Shortly after loading up on the grease and the carbs we were given the news we’d all been waiting for: our lot would be on the first flight to Sierra Leone. We were to go in ‘light order’ – personal weapons, belt kit and Bergens, and no vehicles. And still we hadn’t been issued with any ammo. We joked that maybe it was a good thing. Our main weapon was the SA80, a universally reviled assault rifle of sorts. When loaded, it could pose as much danger to the user as to the enemy.

  The SA80 suffered from any number of horrendous faults. Worst of all was the habit the magazine had of falling off. The SA80-A1 had the magazine release button set just above the magazine housing. Because of the location and the fact that it was raised a good inch, all you had to do was go into a tight fire position and the release button would get accidentally hit, at which moment the magazine would fall to the ground, spewing out the rounds.

  We joked that this was why we hadn’t been issued with any ammo for Sierra Leone – so we couldn’t go wasting it. But in truth, being lumbered with the SA80 wasn’t very funny.

  It was unbelievably prone to rust, especially around the moving parts that force the rounds into the breech. If the air was moisture-laden – if there was fog or mist even – those parts would rust up before your very eyes. Not good when we were about to deploy to a jungle with one of the highest annual rainfalls on earth. With the two main rivals – the M16 and the AK47 – if any dirt or rust got into them it would rarely prevent the internal parts from working. With the SA80 one speck would jam it every time.

  As if that wasn’t enough th
e SA80 had a safety catch that wasn’t fit for purpose: it kept getting knocked one way or the other accidentally. Worse still, the weapon couldn’t be operated left-handed. The cocking handle was positioned so it could only be used by a right-handed person, as opposed to the M16 or AK, which are either-handed. Once we’d been issued with the SA80 all the Pathfinders who were lefties – and we had a good number of ’em – were forced to retrain so they could shoot cack-handed, as far as they saw it.

  From its earliest beginnings our unit had been issued with the M16, the superlative American assault rifle. The M16 knocks the socks off the SA80, as does the AK47. But over time our M16s had become old and worn. When we’d lobbied to get replacements we were told we were getting the SA80 instead. It was just one more example of the downside of not being part of UKSF: the SAS and SBS had a lightweight, gucci variant of the M16. We Pathfinders got lumbered with the SA80.

  The SA80 was designed and built by Royal Ordnance at a cost of £850 per rifle. At the same time the M16 was actually being produced in the UK under licence at £150 a throw, but somehow the MOD had felt it better to saddle us – plus the rest of the British Army – with a costly crock of shit like the SA80.

  So it was that we boarded the ageing RAF Tristars to go to war in Sierra Leone with zero ammo and decidedly dodgy assault rifles. In spite of this our morale was sky-high. Every man amongst us wanted this mission. It was an operational deployment. A combat tasking. It was a chance to get our hands dirty, to put into practice all of our specialist skills and knowledge, and to test ourselves for real against the enemy.

  It was about as good as it got.

  I appreciated what a blinding move Colonel Gibson had pulled here. By getting all of 1 PARA plus a good number of the Pathfinders gathered at South Cerney he’d forced the MOD’s hand. As much as anything else, the force of warriors now boarding the Tristars was Gibbo and the PM’s Trojan Horse. With the rebels poised to chop up a large number of British nationals, the MOD had had no option but to give us the green light. The media would have had a feeding frenzy if it had leaked out that a force such as ours had been poised to fly to the Brits’ aid, but had been stood down by the penny-pinching bean counters at the MOD.

  I was certain the SAS and SBS would also be deploying, though hopefully we would pip them to the post. The Sierra Leone capital, Freetown, was a hub of MI6 activity, from where they were monitoring drug-runners, Al Qaeda operatives and the trade in uncut diamonds. Al Qaeda were known to have a growing interest in so-called ‘conflict diamonds’ – those mined from war zones - for money-laundering purposes, turning their dollar millions into untraceable, raw stones.

  British Embassy staff – and agents from our Secret Intelligence Service – were going to be at risk if the rebels overran the Sierra Leonean capital. US nationals were bound to be working alongside the Brits, and they would be equally threatened. Securing or evacuating the British diplomatic mission was a classic SAS tasking, so the boys from Hereford were bound to deploy. It had now become a race to see which unit would get boots on the ground soonest, and be first into the action.

  After a six-hour flight the Tristar touched down on a sun-blasted runway fringed with dilapidated terminal buildings and feathery palm trees. As yet we still had no ammo, so it was hardly as if we could bomb-burst out of the aircraft ready to unleash hell. In truth, I’d slept most of the flight and as we tumbled down the steps of the Tristar I had no idea where on earth we’d landed, and neither it seemed did anyone else.

  This operation was moving at such a speed we were going faster than the information envelope – not to mention the ammo. We figured the Tristars wouldn’t have put down in the heart of the Sierra Leone jungle, so we were likely in a transit point. But Kenya, Mauritania, Uganda – it could have been just about anywhere in Africa. Then someone spotted a sign above the control tower announcing this to be ‘Dakar Airport’. Someone else figured out that Dakar was the capital of Senegal, a neighbouring West African country of Sierra Leone.

  Senegal: that’s where we were.

  To our left two C-130K Hercules transport aircraft were turning and burning, turbines thrashing in the hot, breathless air. We were ordered to mount up the right-hand side of the two aircraft, so we sprinted across the runway with machetes in one hand and assault rifles in the other – leaving someone else to bring on our Bergens. The C-130 ramp whined closed, the turbines spooled up to speed, and we were airborne once more.

  Still we had no ammo, but at least we’d got a steer as to our next destination. As we’d rushed aboard the Hercules, the aircraft’s loadmaster had told us we were heading for an airfield called Lungi, which was on the coast of Sierra Leone. Other than that we had not the slightest clue what we were flying into here.

  For what felt like an age the C-130 roared across the jungle low and fast, before I finally felt the lurch and the thump as it touched down. The top half of the ramp was already open, and I could see a baking hot stretch of tarmac out of the aircraft’s rear, fringed by a thick, impenetrable-looking wall of green – the jungle.

  The aircraft slowed, and we did a classic tactical air landing operation (TALO) – bursting out of the ramp and peeling off to either side of the still-moving warplane. By the time the twenty-seven of us Pathfinders – plus the forty-odd 1 PARA lads with us – were on the ground, the C-130 was accelerating again and was very quickly airborne.

  It was midday by now, and the heat hit us like a furnace.

  We made for the shallow ditches that flanked either side of the runway. I’d gone left and found myself facing a mass of brooding, tangled vegetation some fifty yards away. Wag had gone right, so towards the dilapidated and sagging airport terminal building. With bugger all ammo there was precious little we could do if the rebels were poised to smash us, but at least we looked the part.

  The second Hercules came in tight on the back of us, disgorging an extra sixty PARAs. All of C Company, 1 PARA, was now on the ground, plus us lot.

  I scanned the airport. There was the odd African soldier wandering about, wearing the light blue beret of a United Nations peacekeeper, plus one or two airport officials dripping in braid. There was even the one civvie airliner crouched on the baking hot runway, with passengers preparing to board. This was Sierra Leone’s main hub, it seemed, and it was still in use by those trying to flee the rebel advance.

  Colonel Gibson marched over to the terminal building and took command. The locals were staring at him with this slack-jawed expression, like he’d just beamed down from the Planet Zog. The airport terminal was a mass of drooping fans, broken conveyor belts and sagging plastic chairs. Gibbo seized the annexe to the fire station as his ops and briefing room, one of the few vaguely clean and functioning parts of the airport.

  Within thirty minutes he had things up and running. Wag, The White Rabbit, Grant, Donaldson and me – the Pathfinders’ head-shed – joined him. Gibbo ordered us to fan out onto the main tracks leading through the jungle, to get eyes-on possible routes of rebel advance. Luckily, a C-130 had just landed with a – very limited – supply of ammo, and each Pathfinder was to grab his allotted share: two mags, so sixty rounds per man.

  It left us with nothing for our secondary weapons – our Browning pistols – or for our heaviest firepower, the GPMGs. But some ammo was better than no ammo at all. From somewhere a white United Nations Toyota pick-up truck had been requisitioned, to ferry us into the jungle.

  ‘The truck will drop patrols at positions no more than two kilometres out,’ Donaldson briefed us, putting some flesh on Gibbo’s basic orders. ‘I need Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Delta at points west to northeast on the northern side of the runway. If the rebels are out there, that’s the direction from which they’ll try to hit us.’

  The UN vehicle ferried us out of the airport and into the jungle. Donaldson, The White Rabbit and Wag were staying put to form our HQ element, so I set out with Grant plus four others, to form our command patrol in the field. After leaving the airport by the southern gate,
we hit a dirt track lined with ramshackle stalls selling bunches of bananas, mangoes, battered cans of Fanta and sun-bleached packs of Winston cigarettes.

  We drove for a good few minutes, skirting the southern edge of the runway, and the habitation petered out. We turned north into the deserted bush, following a dirt track maybe ten feet wide, hemmed in on both sides by a thick wall of jungle. We followed that track until we hit the main road leading north from the capital city, Freetown, into the country’s interior. This was the Sierra Leonean equivalent of the M1, but it consisted of little more than a hard-packed gravel road maybe fifty feet wide.

  We were the last patrol out and it was approaching dusk by the time we were dropped at our destination. After waiting for the UN vehicle to leave, we pushed into the jungle until we were one hundred metres or so off the main highway. From there we could get eyes-on the dirt road without being seen.

  The highway had been carved out of the virgin jungle – a sandy-yellow slash cut right through it. Our mission as delineated by Gibbo was to report on any movement seen – but what movement exactly? No one doubted that the capital was under threat of rebel mayhem, but right now life seemed to be continuing pretty much as normal. There would doubtless be goat-boys, cow-herders, market traders and others moving on the road, and we had zero idea of how to differentiate the civvies from the rebels.

  Colonel Gibson had only C Company plus us lot in-country, so around 125 lightly-armed soldiers. He was at his most vulnerable, for C Company had not yet had the chance to dig in and get fully armed-up, or to form any meaningful defensive positions around the airport. With an entire battalion scheduled to fly in, Gibbo would get 600 1 PARA blokes on the ground, plus 125 from 2 PARA who were coming in alongside them.

  That would be a force to be reckoned with.

  But right now he had 125 British soldiers in-country, and the rebels were rumoured to number in their thousands. None of us had the slightest idea what they looked like, or what might mark them out as rebels. Did they wear any form of uniform, such as armbands, a rebel flash, a badge, a logo, or any specific type of headgear?