Gibbo must have realised just what he’d flown into here, and that now was the point of maximum threat. He needed someone out there in the jungle as his early warning, in case the rebels made a rapid move on the airport.
And for better or worse, we were it.
4
We settled into our positions, each of us belly-down under the forest canopy, facing the road. Darkness comes quickly in the jungle. With it, the hordes of biting insects arrive – which right here and now included ravenous mosquitoes, eerily pulsating fireflies, and these giant flying beetles that kept cannoning into our heads, ones that we quickly nicknamed ‘basher-beetles’.
I lay on the dark, musty forest floor in nothing but my combats, the scent of rot and decay seeping into my nostrils. I could feel the mozzies feasting on my blood as they forced their tiny insect jaws through my trousers and shirtsleeves and drilled into me. What made it all the more frustrating was that we’d yet to be issued with any anti-malaria pills. We knew which ones we’d needed, but no one had managed to get their hands on any prior to leaving the UK.
Still, at least we were out on active operations, and it was great to know we were first into the country ahead of any other British force.
‘Any idea what’s happening?’ I whispered to Grant. ‘What we’re looking for?’
‘Not a sausage, mate,’ came the hushed reply.
As the darkness thickened around us even our night vision goggles (NVGs) couldn’t help much. Come sundown the light level beneath the jungle canopy quickly drops to nothing. NVGs work by collecting and boosting ambient light, but with next to no illumination filtering through the vegetation above us they were barely able to function. They offered at best an unclear, wavy, fuzzy vision of the highway – little better than using the mark one human eyeball.
As far as we could tell there was zero movement out on the road anyway. Come last light everything seemed to have stopped. There were no cars, trucks, people, animals or anything. If we could have taken away the deafening beat of the insects – the rhythmic preeep-preeep-preeep of the cicadas above all – it would have been eerily silent. I could only presume that the rebels preferred to operate at night, so everything else stopped during the hours of darkness.
Technically speaking, what we’d formed here was a DPP – a defensive perimeter post – as opposed to a standard OP. An OP is there to observe and report; a DPP is there to observe, report and engage and fight if necessary. If we spotted any rebel movement, doubtless Gibbo would order us to slow them down as much as we possibly could, bearing in mind our tiny number – four patrols of six Pathfinders, so twenty-four men in all – plus our pitiful supply of ammo.
As I lay there in the hot and humid darkness, being eaten alive by the mozzies, I reflected on when any of us lot had last got a good feed. After fried eggs and bread that morning at South Cerney, our only other meal had been a butty box on the Tristar. Mine had consisted of a couple of soggy cheese sarnies, a packet of prawn cocktail flavour crisps, a Kit Kat and a can of Panda Cola – the cornerstones of any British Army nutritional meal. The growling in my stomach would have been audible from the bloody road, were it not for the cacophony of the insects.
Still, I loved being in the jungle. I always have. Generally speaking, it’s love or hate at first sight with such terrain. As Pathfinders we’d done rakes of jungle training, and we’d tailored our tropical kit to just such a theatre of operations as this.
Each of us was wearing a very weird-looking set of headgear. The nearest you’d ever get to it in the civvie world is a beekeeper’s helmet. It’s basically a head-and-neck mozzie net. You pull it on like a giant sock, the fine-mesh netting bagging out around the face and fastening via elastic around the neck. We’d slapped insect repellent cream on any exposed skin, plus our combat trousers were tucked into jungle boots, to stop leeches, ants or other nasties crawling up our legs and doing damage to our manhood.
But none of this could stop the mozzies getting lock-on and chewing through our clothing – and the mosquitoes here in Sierra Leone were monsters. I could see them circling around me like mini Apache gunships, each intent on wreaking blood-sucking, disease-ridden mayhem. It wasn’t as if I could keep swatting whenever I felt a bite. The golden rule of such DPP work is to remain absolutely still and silent, so as to observe the enemy without being seen.
I glanced at Grant. ‘Nice here, innit, mate? We’ve got sixty rounds per man, we’re being eaten alive, and our last feed was a butty box back on the Tristars … ’
Grant’s teeth grinned white in the faint moonlight. He eyed me through the fuzz of his mozzie net. ‘They can’t keep us out here forever. If we don’t get eaten to death we’ll bloody starve …’
Come daybreak we’d seen practically nothing, and certainly no movement of armed men out on the road. We needed to get a report radioed into HQ, and dawn was the time to make our first regular ‘Sched’ – scheduled radio call. When out on operations our patrol – headquarters – was supposed to make two daily Scheds, one at dawn and one at dusk. If we missed a Sched, that was the trigger for HQ to consider us compromised and on the run.
Miraculously, our signaller, Neil ‘Tricky’ Dick, managed to get a radio call through to headquarters pretty much on the first attempt. We reported what we’d seen, or rather the lack of it.
It was a marvel that Tricky had got the comms up and running amongst the thick tropical vegetation, but he was pure genius with such kit. The only way to set up our archaic Clansman 319 high frequency (HF) radios was to tie a length of string onto the end of a flexible wire aerial, fix a rock onto the string and hurl it into the treetops. When the forest canopy was up to a hundred feet or more above us that took some doing.
I’d once been on a joint exercise in the US with American elite forces. We’d been inserted via HALO parachute drop alongside a unit of Marine Corps Force Recon operators. Our mission was to mark a drop zone (DZ) for the largest airborne force parachuted by NATO since the Second World War. We’d made the long tab into the DZ, during which one of our sister units, a Navy SEAL team, had a guy badly mauled by an alligator.
When we finally got eyes-on the DZ, we prepared to radio in reports to our respective headquarters. The Force Recon signaller pressed a button on his lightweight radio backpack, flipped out a helix antenna – a collapsible, space-age dish-like aerial – and within a matter of seconds his commander was able to call in his report. By the time he was done Tricky was still trying to hurl his rock into the nearest tree, to snag a branch.
It was all the more reason to be thankful for having a guy like him with us here in Sierra Leone. A trustworthy and totally solid operator, Tricky never let the shit state of the comms kit get to him. It was all just a challenge to his ultimate professionalism.
Tricky hailed from 216 Signals Squadron, a specialist communications unit, so he was an absolute master at his chosen discipline. Pathfinder Selection is open to any soldier regardless of unit or rank. Although 216 Signals isn’t a fighting outfit as such, Tricky was still a hard-as-nails operator. Five-foot-ten and blond, he was good-looking in a tough, Jason Statham-lookalike way. He could drink like a fish, smoke like a chimney and run like the wind. He loved a punch-up, but he was a thinking man’s scrapper. He’d analyse a fight carefully before wading in.
Tricky was cat-like, agile and cool – a float like a butterfly, sting like a bee kind of an operator. No one ever heard or saw him coming. If I was forced to go on the run here in Sierra Leone I’d most likely choose to do so with him. Wag would get you out in the end, but Tricky would do so quickly, stealthily and in style.
Orders from Gibbo were to return to headquarters, for a re-tasking. By the time we got back there, Lungi Airport had become like a mini version of London Heathrow. Hercs were flying a relay of further men and matériel from Senegal. By now we’d got eight flights in, and already they were taking out the NEOs – the first British and allied civilians to be evacuated from the war-torn country.
Those who
’d realised what was about to happen – that Freetown was on the verge of being overrun by thousands of rebels who had the darkest, most savage reputation of any in the world right then – had made their own way to Lungi Airport, planning to jump on whatever flight might be available to anywhere other than here. They were being shovelled onto the Hercs as fast as possible and flown out to Dakar.
To either end of the runway I could see the 1 PARA lads digging in, as they formed proper defensive positions. At the furthest western end of the runway I spotted a small vehicle-mounted unit setting up what had to be a separate, discreet base. I knew instinctively it had to be the lads from the SAS or the SBS, or maybe both of them.
It turned out it was the SAS. I knew a bunch of them, as did some of the other ‘old and bold.’ They drove past us in their Pinkies – lightweight, open-topped Land Rovers, similar to the ones we had been ordered to leave behind in the UK – and there was the odd wave and yelled greeting between us. We’d beaten them into the country, but now the lads from the Regiment were here it was going to be a race to see who got tasked with the first and the best of whatever missions were going.
Stacked to one side of the terminal building was a pile of British Army ration packs, so we made sure to grab some of those. That done we got issued with our first operational maps – 1:50,000 scale, showing Lungi Airport and the surrounding terrain. There were only enough for one per patrol, but that didn’t stop the blokes from getting down to some serious map study and ground orientation.
In the Pathfinders, navigation is a collective art. Every man on a patrol has to know exactly where he is at any time, so as to be able to take the initiative if the patrol commander gets hit, or a patrol gets split up. Using the maps we did our first IPB – Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield – noting key ground and vital terrain, defensive positions, routes to and from those defensive positions, likely avenues of enemy approach, possible routes of escape, and ambush points along the way.
That done, Wag, Grant, Donaldson and me got called in for mission briefing. It was given by Lewis Carson, the 1 PARA Operations Officer, and a former 2iC of the Pathfinders. It was no secret that Lewis was angling for Donaldson’s job, once Donaldson had finished his two-year stint. I for one couldn’t wait for him to take over. He’d proved himself a superlative operator when he’d served with us as 2iC, commanding the respect of all the men bar none.
Lewis’s brief was punchy and to the point. If anything it reinforced just how little we knew: the rebels were closing in on Freetown; there was a very real fear of looting, horrific rapes and massacres if they seized the city; all British passport holders and citizens of ‘allied nations’ – Americans, Europeans, Aussies, Kiwis and Canadians – were to be evacuated from the country as soon as.
All of that was pretty much as we knew it. But Lewis did have one vital new element of Intel for us. Apparently, the rebels had heard about the arrival of British forces in-country, and they were determined to ‘take’ Lungi Airport and drive us out – and that meant that our primary objective had to be to hold it.
But for the Pathfinders mission priorities were about to change dramatically. Apparently, no one was available to secure the British Embassy or evacuate its staff – despite that being a classic SAS tasking. Hence we were to be airlifted across to Freetown, on the far side of the Freetown Estuary, in order to do so.
On hearing this we were lit up. It sure beat lying in the jungle starving hungry and getting munched on by ravenous insects, with not a rebel fighter in sight. But for some reason it didn’t seem as if Donaldson shared our joy at the coming tasking.
‘I really can’t see the need for us,’ he announced, from out of nowhere. ‘I’ve spoken to the CO, and I’ve told him I don’t understand the need for the Pathfinders. There’s no real task for us, and we have training commitments back in the UK, and that’s where we should be right now. We’re wasting valuable training time and I’ve told the CO as much.’
Wag and I caught each other’s eye. I could see the disbelief written across his features. Even Grant was struggling to hide his frustration at what he’d just heard. But as usual it was left up to me – mouthy old Smoggy, reliably blunt to the point of rudeness – to voice our collective disquiet.
‘What d’you mean, boss – we should be in the UK, training? We’re on ops here. This is an operational deployment to a war zone. This is what we live, eat, breathe and train for.’
‘Smoggy’s right, boss, we need to stay,’ Wag added. ‘We need to stay ’cause who knows what the next few hours and days may bring.’
Every bloke in the unit knew where we needed to be right now – mixing it here in Sierra Leone. But Donaldson seemed to have his mind set on getting us back to the UK, regardless. He left to go speak with Gibbo some more, leaving Wag, Grant, The White Rabbit and me to talk it over. We agreed to keep a close eye on him. If he tried doing the unthinkable and getting us off this deployment, then Donaldson would have to be stopped.
Two Chinooks from the Special Forces Flight had arrived in-country, after a truly epic journey out from the UK. They’d set out from RAF Odiham under their own steam, the UK military lacking any aircraft large enough to fly them out to theatre (C-17 Globemasters, or the equivalent). The aircrew had flown out, refuelling en route, via France, Spain, North Africa and into West Africa. It was a 4800-kilometre flight, and it would turn out to be the longest self-deployment by helos in British military history.
We mounted up those newly-arrived Chinooks and were whisked across the water to the nation’s ramshackle capital, Freetown. We touched down at the Mammy Yoko Hotel, which had been designated the rallying point for all civilians seeking to get evacuated from the country. The Mammy Yoko looked like a classic run-down, white-walled colonial-era establishment. The gardens were grand but tired and ill-kept, pretty much reflecting the look and feel of the hotel itself.
The main advantage of the Mammy Yoko was its flight facilities. Set on the ocean front the hotel has a flat, oval, gravelled area facing the sea: a helipad. It came complete with two massive refuelling bowsers, the hotel being one of the UN’s main centres of operations in the country. As we’d flown in we’d noticed two massive Soviet-era Mil Mi-8 (named HIP by NATO) transport helicopters sitting on the helipad, painted in white and with ‘UN’ emblazoned in massive black lettering on their sides.
While the Chinooks were tasked with all military movements around the country, the HIPs were ferrying the civilians out to Lungi Airport, for onward evacuation.
From the Mammy Yoko we sent out an eight-man patrol en route to the British Embassy. It was led by Corporal Sam ‘Dolly’ Parton, the commander of patrol 33 Bravo. His position of patrol command had come about by dint of his natural leadership abilities. The average face in a crowd, Dolly was married with two kids. He was a softly-spoken, quiet family man and an utterly solid operator. After Nathe and H’s patrol, Dolly’s was my next most capable unit, and they constituted a great backstop to 33 Alpha.
Once Dolly’s patrol had got the Embassy staff relocated to the Mammy Yoko Hotel, we’d airlift them out to Lungi Airport and onto a waiting C-130 Hercules. In the meantime, we settled ourselves in as best we could. A path from the helipad led to the centre of the hotel grounds, where there were some tennis courts, surrounded by twelve-foot-high chain-link fencing. The courts were overlooked by the hotel’s bar and swimming pool, one that was built in an abstract kind of a splodge shape.
Set some seventy yards back from the pool was the hotel building itself. It looked to be about a dozen floors high, with a curved facade facing the sea. The rooms had to offer an amazing view over the Freetown Estuary, not that I figured there were many guests with the time or inclination to enjoy it. Right now, anyone with any money or sense and the right passport was getting the hell out of Freetown.
Colonel Gibson had also shipped himself over to the Mammy Yoko, and he had seized one of the hotel suites as his ops room. Donaldson disappeared to liaise with the colonel, the r
est of us setting up a makeshift camp. By now our Bergens had reached us, so we were able to rig up ponchos lashed to the chain-link fence – making a series of waterproof lean-tos, which lined the edge of the tennis courts.
Our ponchos were US Army issue, for the British military didn’t possess such kit. We had to buy rakes of our own equipment, including boots, rucksacks, torches, waterproofs, ammo pouches and the ponchos. The British Army doss-bag weighed in at 10 pounds. It was fine for a Regular Army unit, for their Bergens would be brought up to their lines by vehicle. For us it was 8 pounds overweight. Accordingly, every Pathfinder had a civvie sleeping bag, one that weighed in at 2 pounds and stuffed down to nothing.
If I stood every man of our force in line, I figure 10 per cent of our kit would have been standard British Army issue. Each bloke carried around £1500-worth of personalised gear, and all bought with his own money. It was a powerful testament to their dedication to the unit that each had made such an investment, and most on a private’s wage of some £650 month.
Camp set, we broke open the twenty-four-hour ration packs, got a scoff-on and waited for some kind of an update from Donaldson. I killed time chatting with Wag. We were determined that Donaldson would deliver the right kind of an update – that we were staying, and that we were getting ourselves a peachy tasking. The Embassy job was clearly an interim kind of a mission. Time was ticking, and we needed something we could really get our teeth into.
Our determination to stay was just about to get a huge boost, as we got our first detailed briefing on the rebels. A military intelligence specialist gave us a good talking to in the hotel grounds. The rebels were known as the Revolutionary United Front, or RUF for short. Led by an ex-Sierra Leonean Army (SLA) sergeant, Foday Sankoh, they espoused no coherent political or other ideology. Their sole aim seemed to be to spread terror and mayhem across the country, and in that they had been spectacularly successful.
Operation Mayhem Page 6