Operation Mayhem

by Steve Heaney MC

  The Nigerian lieutenant’s nickname had stuck so well that Wag had started calling him ‘Mojo’ to his face. I was slipping into the habit too, not that Mojo seemed to mind.

  He remained inscrutable behind his massive Foster Grant shades. ‘This is my post. Those are my orders.’

  There appeared to be nothing we could do to persuade Mojo that staying put in the face of being overrun by the rebels would not be very good for the health or longevity of him and his men.

  The British Army thrives on the concept of ‘mission command’: you are given an order and you do what is necessary to complete that order, but only up to the point when you realise that it needs to be adapted. Individual commanders of Mojo’s rank and higher are given the freedom to make appropriate decisions on the ground. Most other militaries don’t really have that concept, certainly not with their regular forces. As to the Nigerian military … Well, enough said.

  Mojo only ever turned up to speak with us alone. His pride in his dress and appearance plus his educated English set him out as a man apart. The Nigerian military – as with most third world armies – was clearly rigidly hierarchical. In the British military you’d always have the 2iC, and maybe some patrol commanders, sitting in on the kind of briefings we were having. The ability of NCOs to provide ideas and input is unique to the British military, and especially to units like ours.

  I figured we needed to shore Mojo up a little. ‘Don’t worry, mate, it’ll never happen. We’ll never get overrun. We’ve got a QRF on standby at Lungi Airport 24/7. People will be coming to our aid.’

  Mojo forced a smile.

  ‘Mojo, it’s gonna take forty-five minutes for that QRF to get here,’ Wag added. ‘That is how long we need to make a stand.’

  Mojo nodded. ‘Okay, okay, I understand.’

  ‘What kind of ammo do you have for your men?’ I asked.

  ‘Two magazines. Two magazines.’

  Two FN mags should have meant forty rounds per man, but Wag had checked one of their mags and it contained six rounds. So, they’d most likely got a dozen rounds each. Even so, we couldn’t afford to spare them any, for we didn’t have enough ammo ourselves.

  ‘So, if that’s agreed we need to go ask the chief for some work parties,’ I concluded. ‘Lead on, Bonaparte … Onwards and upwards, mate. Off we go.’

  Mojo had woken up now to how much he’d been left to rot and stagnate, abandoned in his jungle outpost with no Intel updates or warning of what was coming. In the nick of time we’d pitched up and he’d learned just how dark and shitty his situation was. We were now talking about planting punji fields, siting Claymores, cutting the bush to clear kill zones and creating interlocking arcs of fire.

  I could see this light in Mojo’s eyes, a kind of realisation: Oh my God, this is how you do it. This is how you fight the rebels. Maybe with these guys we just might get out of this alive.

  He set off like the Pied Piper, taking us to see the village chief. It was pretty much the same routine as before – us standing off to one side not saying a word, while Mojo delivered the briefing. He must have done a great job describing what would happen to the village if we didn’t get the assistance we’d requested, for within a matter of minutes the chief was in.

  Mojo turned to us. ‘Yes, he understands, and he will help you. He will gather the people you need. He will assign a head of the workforce, so you can show him what you want.’

  ‘Top job,’ Wag enthused.

  ‘Mojo, get him to send the head of the workforce to us at the HQ ATAP,’ I said. ‘We’ll brief him there on what we need. And Mojo, we need to start on this asap.’

  We thanked the chief and walked away. It was now 1430 hours on day three of our mission in Lungi Lol, and with the chief’s help we planned to turn this remote African village into Sierra Leone’s version of the Alamo.

  Within the hour this guy pitched up at the HQ ATAP. We were in the midst of having a brew and a snack, and in truth we hadn’t expected chiefy to get his act together so quickly. The new arrival was this incredibly tall and lanky beanpole of a bloke who looked about nineteen or twenty years old. He was dressed in a green T-shirt over a green flower-pattern sarong, plus open-toed sandals, and he had a massive machete dangling from one hand.

  ‘I am Ibrahim,’ he announced. ‘I have been sent by the chief to help the British. What you need?’

  His English was pretty good, and this was clearly the chief’s chosen foreman. Leading him off to Dolly’s position on our left flank, we explained we’d start with vegetation clearance. We wanted the bush cleared back 200 yards to the edge of the jungle. We didn’t need it cleared to ground level: just the taller foliage gone, so we could see the rebels as they advanced, to kill them.

  Wag used a hand-cut gesture to show the kind of thick bush we needed cleared. ‘Get this down. Get this down.’

  Ibrahim nodded enthusiastically. ‘I do! I do!’ He motioned to a palm tree with his machete. ‘And cut this too?’

  ‘Yes, yes – shooting through there.’ Wag made a rifle gesture with his hands, complete with pulling the trigger. ‘Bang, bang. Kill the man through here. Need to see.’

  Wag seemed to have struck up a real rapport with Ibrahim, just as he seemed able to do with any average working bloke from Burnley to Bombay. Next we showed Ibrahim the battle trenches we needed dug. Dolly had scratched out a shallow furrow in the ground using the blade of his machete, marking out two rectangular outlines.

  ‘This wide and this long, and up to here,’ Wag motioned at neck height. ‘Dig ’em so deep.’

  ‘I dig! I dig!’ Ibrahim confirmed, mimicking Wag’s up-to-the-neck height gesture. ‘Up to here.’

  ‘No, no,’ Wag shook his head, laughing. ‘Up to my neck height. Not yours. Ibrahim very tall. Otherwise, men cannot see over top to shoot!’

  We did a repeat performance with Ibrahim all along our front, and we were back at the HQ ATAP by around 1600 hours. The sun was already low in the sky and in two hours it would be completely dark.

  I glanced worriedly at the ragged line of jungle to our front. ‘Nothing much is going to get done tonight, is it?’ I remarked to Wag.

  Wag shrugged. ‘You never know with that Ibrahim bloke. The guy’s a fucking human dynamo.’

  A few minutes later Nathe came up on the radio. ‘Guys, they’re chopping. They’re out front chopping.’

  Grant, Wag and me hurried over to take a look. Out at the front of Nathe’s position around thirty villagers had gathered. Mostly they were women and children. Ibrahim was striding about in their midst, shouting orders as they bent to their task. They wielded whatever tools they had – machetes, hoes and picks. Some were even using their bare hands to rip up the vegetation.

  For several long minutes we stood there under the trees that shaded Nathe’s position, watching in amazement.

  Wag emitted this long, low whistle. ‘Wow. Will you look at that? People power.’

  ‘Take a look at Ibrahim,’ I remarked. ‘He’s the foreman all right. There he goes – look at him chopping …’

  Wag grunted in agreement. ‘Yeah, no-nonsense – he’s the big man now. About as good as it gets.’

  Grant smiled. ‘I guess that’s what you get when you wield the authority of the chief …’

  The villagers would be out there chopping until close to midnight, opening up our first field of fire. They’d clear from the left edge of Nathan’s position – the highway – right across to the right edge of Ginge’s arc of fire, then move on to the next position.

  By the time they were done cutting, 33 Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Delta would be cleared to unleash hell.

  10

  While Ibrahim’s army was busy clearing the bush, Wag and me did a walkabout, brainstorming every possible means of defence with the blokes. Nothing was beyond due consideration, but we were partly in reassurance mode as well.

  ‘This is it, lads, we’re in here for the duration,’ I kept telling them. ‘Everything you’ve ever trained for, every
one of your skills that you’ve honed and honed – this is where they’ll get put to the test.’

  The attitude amongst the guys was fantastic. Feedback was great and the blokes were buzzing. Getting Ibrahim’s army on the job seemed to have given them a real boost. The feeling seemed to be – If the rebels are coming, let’s get it on.

  Walkabout done, Wag and I launched the next stage of ‘Operation Alamo’ – as we’d nicknamed the defence of Lungi Lol: fashioning some DIY Claymores. When manufactured in an armaments factory the Claymore is a rectangular device about eight inches across and five inches deep, with a gentle curve in its face. The casing is packed with a mass of plastic explosive and ball-bearings. When triggered it fires horizontally in a solid wall of destruction, cutting down anything in its path.

  Luckily, when Wag had blagged his pile of swag from Mick, back at the Lungi Airport ammo dump, he’d pulled together the basic raw materials to make some Claymores. First off he’d got the sticks of PE4. The plastic explosive is fairly inert. It can be moulded like Plasticine, and detonation cord – or detcord – is one of the few things that will set it off. Detcord explodes at a rate of 6000 metres a second: in other words, a length 6 kilometres long goes up in one second flat.

  Detcord is highly volatile, and a length slung around a small tree will fell it. But it’s PE4 that actually has the real killer punch behind it. It’s a dynamic high explosive – the sheer magnitude of the blast and the shock wave so created will drive a scything wall of metallic death out of a device like a Claymore.

  Wag had also scrounged ten mixed L1A2 and L2A2 electric detonators, to trigger the detcord, plus 100 metres of electronic firing cable. So all we were lacking were some containers to set the explosives in, plus some ‘shipyard confetti’ – any form of projectile to take the place of the standard ball-bearings.

  Via the chief some empty cooking oil containers were scavenged from around the village. These were about the size of a five-litre fuel can, and made of thick tin-plated steel. They were the right dimensions for us to cut down and mould into shape. After doing so we ended up with a series of shallow tin trays, each eight inches long, six wide, and about two deep.

  Perfect.

  Next, we sent a couple of the blokes to scour the length and breadth of Lungi Lol, searching for shipyard confetti. Ably assisted by the village kids they came back with handfuls of old nails, bolts and screws, broken bits of machinery, old car parts, plus assorted other bits and pieces that could be used as improvised shrapnel. When the metal ran out we could even use shards of razor-sharp bamboo – the offcuts from the punji sticks.

  Then we cut a small hole in the back of each tin tray, and moulded a slab of PE4 into a tennis ball shape. We placed the snowball of plastic explosive in the base of the tin tray over the hole, and kneaded it into a convex dish – so it would have a cone blast effect when detonated. A length of detcord – knotted twice to lend it extra umph – was pushed through the hole into the PE4. It was left hanging out of the rear of the device like a rat’s tail.

  Finally, the shipyard confetti was pressed into the convex face of the PE4. A length of cardboard cut to fit was laid over the front, and sealed in place with gaffer tape. We’d used the same weight of PE4 (about one and a half pounds) as a standard Claymore would be armed with – so we could pretty much rely on our DIY ones having the same kind of kill-range. At the apex of the blast – so fifty metres out from the device – the cone of destruction would be two metres high and fifty metres wide.

  The next challenge was placing them. Claymores have a sixteen-metre back-blast. Anyone caught in that zone could be maimed or killed. We had a limited amount of firing cable, and we had to be able to see the enemy to be able to detonate. We were using Mini Shrikes to do so – a hand-held device about the size of an iPhone. Into that we’d plug the two leads – one black, one tan; a positive and a negative – which make up the firing cable.

  We couldn’t just blow the Claymores as soon as we detected voices or movement out there in the dark. If we triggered them blind we might kill innocent villagers, plus you needed to be sure the enemy would be caught right in the cone of the blast. The guy operating the Mini Shrike had to be able to see both the Claymore and the target, while not getting caught in the back-blast, or shot by the enemy.

  We left it up to the patrol commanders exactly where to position their DIY Claymores. They would only be set in place after last light, so if there were any rebel spies in the village they wouldn’t be able to see where we’d sited them.

  That evening’s Sched contained a crucial Intel update: the word was that the rebels had shifted their objective completely now. Rather than seizing Freetown and laying it waste, their main focus was on joining battle with the British military and capturing some British soldiers. Their push was to be wholly against Lungi Airport, where most of our forces were located.

  Operation Kill British had truly come of age.

  We called the patrol commanders together for prayers, and took a good long look at our situation. Priority one was to defend and hold this position. If we could hit the rebels hard enough and kill enough of them in the first contact, it might be possible to stop them. With the kind of defences the villagers were working on, we might hold out for long enough to turn the rebel tide.

  But if they penetrated our perimeter then we were pretty much done for.

  The feelings amongst the men cut both ways now. On the one hand Colonel Gibson and Brigadier Richards had shown absolute faith in our ability to make a stand here – and above any other force at their disposal. That alone was gratifying. But on the other hand it was becoming ever more clear what a massive barrel of shit we’d been dropped into. If we failed to stop the rebels and were forced to go on the run, the wounded would be piled onto the lone Pinzgauer, which would make a mad dash for Lungi Airport. The rest of us would attempt to E & E through the jungle on foot, but no one particularly rated our chances.

  As if to reinforce the sense of impeding doom, the trickle of villagers who had started arriving the previous night had swollen into a veritable flood. We’d figured then that we had maybe two hundred sleeping on the square, ranged mostly around the edges. By midnight on our third day in Lungi Lol the open space was packed from end to end. Several hundred people, mainly women and children, were there – and all of them seeking the sanctuary provided by twenty-six Pathfinders.

  With darkness the jungle came alive. There were sounds tonight that we didn’t seem able to recognise. My mind was a swirl of thoughts. Were the rebels out there, lurking unseen in the fringes of the forest, getting eyes-on our positions and readying themselves to strike? Had they been in amongst us during the day, counting us and sketching out our whereabouts?

  As the darkness thickened two blokes from each patrol crept forward of their positions, trailing out the electrical firing cable. On the far west of the village Dolly set one of his DIY Claymores to cover a V-shaped gully that ran from the dark fringe of jungle almost to the brink of his trenches. Thinking like the enemy, that was the point via which he would launch an attack, getting his men as close as possible before breaking cover.

  To the front of H and Nathe’s position, their target for the improvised Claymores was clear: it was the dirt track itself. Any rebel vehicles advancing on our position had to come that way. The Claymores were powerful enough to shred any soft-skinned trucks or pick-ups, but would have little effect against armour. If the rebels came forward in their captured United Nations APCs, we’d have to rely on our shoulder-launched LAW 94 mm rockets to smash them.

  To the south lay perhaps our greatest threat after the dirt road – the railway track. Moving through thick jungle at night is noisy, slow work, even for those as highly trained as Pathfinders. That railroad offered a silent means of advance right up to the very edge of the village. Taff laid out his own roll of firing cable, setting his DIY Claymore to cover that point of silent ingress – the steel tracks.

  The night passed. Long hours on sentry dra
gged by as tired eyes stared out into a dark, featureless mass of jungle. Sleep snatched here and there in two-hour chunks is never enough. The blokes were building up a sleep deficit, and fatigue was becoming a real issue. Crouched in the damp earth of the trenches, with every crawling-slithering-sliding thing dropping in on us, sentry duty was a shitty business – but that pretty much went with the territory.

  But tonight was different. Every one of us could feel it in our bones: a hostile force was out there in the darkness, probing, watching and waiting to strike. The rebel commanders would know for sure there were just over two dozen British soldiers – plus a dodgy Nigerian UNAMSIL contingent – holding the village. With a couple of thousand rebel fighters under their command, their options in terms of how to launch the attack would be legion.

  No matter how good we were, twenty-six blokes couldn’t mow down hundreds of fast-moving targets at night, and the drugs and voodoo would drive their fighters forwards. But our real worry was that the rebel commanders would be far more capable than that. If they mounted a feint – a move to draw our fire, to mask the real thrust of their attack – we had no force in reserve to deal with it.

  No rebel assault materialised during that dark night of tension, but none of us doubted that it was coming. It was only a matter of when the RUF commanders decided they were ready to smash us.

  Just after first light the unmistakable figure of Ibrahim reappeared. ‘I am ready. We good? We start?’

  ‘Ibrahim, you happy?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, very happy.’

  ‘Ibrahim, today we finish?’

  ‘Yes, today we finish.’

  ‘Ibrahim, very important we finish today cutting the bush and digging the trenches.’

  ‘Yes. Today I do. I do.’

  He was very enthusiastic and definite. I didn’t doubt him for a moment, either.

  ‘We’ve got one more thing on the to-do list, though,’ I added.