Grant glanced at Tricky. ‘Tricky?’
‘We stay.’
Despite doing an ace job as my mortar loader, Marine Captain Cantrill didn’t – with all due respect – get to cast a vote.
Grant nodded. ‘Okay, agreed, we stay.’
‘Right, I need to get around the blokes,’ Wag repeated.
‘Coming with you,’ I volunteered. ‘Grant – you good to stay with Tricky and monitor the net?’
Grant confirmed that he was.
Wag and me crept through the trees that surrounded the HQ ATAP. We broke cover and sprinted across the dark void of the track, filtering into the bush on the far side.
Wag let out a yell of warning as we approached Dolly’s position. ‘Dolly, it’s Steve and Wag! Coming in!’
We got the shout back: ‘Okay!’
We scuttled up to the back of their battle trenches and Wag and me knelt down. Dolly turned to face us.
‘We’ve made the decision to stay,’ Wag whispered. ‘You happy to hold your position?’
Dolly looked surprised that the question was even being asked of him. ‘But fuck, yeah. Fucking right I am.’
‘Right, any casualties? Plus what’s your ammo stats?’
‘No casualties. We’re three hundred rounds remaining for the gun. Each bloke has around five full mags including the bandolier.’
‘They were last seen at your location, so the fuckers could be going round the side and back of us,’ Wag continued. ‘They haven’t fucking gone yet, mate. Keep a very close eye.’
Dolly nodded. ‘Yeah. Got it, mate. No worries.’
Dolly had had the rebels practically on top of him, their fighters spewing out of the V-shaped gully to his front. It was amazing that no one had been wounded. We’d been incredibly lucky. It was equally amazing that they’d held the rebels off, yet still had some ammo remaining. There wasn’t a great deal, but maybe enough for one more sustained firefight. Plus Dolly hadn’t fired his Claymore yet, so they had one last layer of defence they could fall back on.
We did the rounds of the other patrols, moving across Nathe’s, Ginge’s and then Taff’s, over at the railway line. As we flitted from one to the other, Wag briefed me in on what had happened with the comms, and the likely status of the QRF. The signaller back at Lungi Airport had been manning the 319 radio when the firefight had kicked off, so Wag’s initial call via the Thuraya hadn’t got an answer.
As a result, Tricky had been forced to radio through the contact report on the dodgy 319, with the added delay of having to encrypt the message (the 319 uses cryptographic coding to make the communications secure). The Thuraya, being a satphone, bounces the message up to an orbiting satellite and back down again pretty much instantaneously. By contrast, the 319 sends an HF signal up into the ionosphere, the idea being that it bounces off that down to the recipient. The transmission is very susceptible to climatic conditions: cloud cover, moisture in the air, and even a wet jungle canopy can stop the message getting through.
Eventually, even via the water-damaged 319, Tricky had got the message through, whereupon both sides had switched to using the Thurayas. In spite of the delays, by my and Wag’s reckoning the QRF should be with us any moment now.
The news from 33 Alpha, 33 Delta and 33 Charlie was that they too were well down on their ammo, but with a bit of cross-decking from one patrol to the other we should be able to hold on for a good while longer. More importantly, none of the patrols had taken any serious casualties. Amazingly, not one single bloke needed casevacing.
It was little short of a miracle.
With the QRF inbound, someone had to get down to the landing zone and clear the Chinook in.
‘We’ll go back via Grant and I’ll make for the LZ,’ I said to Wag.
‘Got it, mate.’
We headed back to the HQ at a crouching run. I told Grant what I was planning, then asked Tricky to get one bloke from each patrol sent across to me, as security. We’d chosen to use a clearing at the far rear of the village – so beyond even Mojo and his men in their trenches – as the LZ for the Chinook to come down on. We’d scoped it out as the safest place to get the QRF into, but with the rebels getting around and behind us maybe it wasn’t any more.
There was just no way of knowing.
I gathered the blokes, then had a final word with Grant. ‘Right, I’m off. We’ll take the Pinz, mate, ’cause I don’t want to head out of the village on foot facing the number of rebels that are out there.’
‘No problem,’ Grant confirmed. ‘Call me if you hit any difficulties.’
The five of us ran for the Pinzgauer. As we scurried through the predawn village the square was a mass of confusion, with groups of shadowy figures screaming and wailing. I could see a body lying on the ground, surrounded by weeping women. Clearly, we had dead or injured amongst the villagers, but we had zero time to deal with that now.
We reached the Pinz and I told Marky – the guy who’d driven Donaldson when he’d bugged out – to get behind the wheel. I jumped into the passenger seat and the others climbed into the rear. The Pinz had been parked for days with the keys in the ignition, but thankfully it fired up first time. We screamed down the track heading west out of the village, passed by our rear battle trenches and there was Mojo in position with his men.
They’d got there … eventually.
We pushed on for another 250 yards, heading for the dark fringe of jungle, then came to a halt. We parked up and went into all-around defence, lying prone at the side of the track. I found myself looking back at the village, with the faintest hint of breaking dawn on the distant horizon. A tinge of fiery pink was just starting to touch the high clouds.
Bring it on, I told myself.
With sunrise the advantage would shift to us big time.
I told the guys to listen out for any noises from the jungle. If, as I suspected, the rebels were moving to outflank us, now was when we’d detect the signs of their presence.
We lay there in utter silence, straining our ears for the faintest hint of any movement in the tree line. It was quiet. Deathly quiet. It reminded me of the seconds before the firefight had first kicked off, when the air had been thick with the tension of the coming battle. If we had a major contact here, we’d have to jump back in the Pinz and head hell-for-leather back to the village, and abort the landing.
I readied my night-time air-marker – an infrared strobe – to guide the helo in, and scanned the skies to the southwest of us. We’d yet to have a helo land on this HLS, so it was crucial I steered them in. I warned the blokes to keep focused on the jungle.
Last thing we needed right now was to get jumped, and just before we got the QRF landed.
20
We’d been waiting for ten edgy, nervous minutes when we heard the distinctive, juddering thwoop-thwoop-thwoop of a Chinook inbound. Oh yeah. There is no feeling like knowing the cavalry are on their way. The beat of that helo’s rotor blades was the most welcome sound any of us had ever heard.
I spotted the helo silhouetted against the faint blush the coming sunrise had thrown across the heavens. Getting to my feet, I switched the IR strobe to pulse mode. I knew immediately that the pilot had spotted my marker – flying on NVG as he would be, my IR strobe would beat out like a lighthouse. He banked hard to starboard and swung the helo’s nose around to my heading.
I brought the pilot in front-on to me, backing down the track away from the Pinz to give him room to land. He came in at real speed, and dropped the helo to treetop height with the aircraft’s nose fifteen feet away from me. As it settled into the clearing, the thrashing rotor blades clipped the trees and the thick vegetation on either side. I could see the two pilots in the cockpit, the weird green light of their NVG casting their faces in a ghostly glow.
Going down on one knee, I switched off the IR firefly, and saw the pilot drop the arse-end of the helo onto the ground. There was a loud bang as it made contact. Orientated like this, the PARAs would be able to pile off the rear, a
nd remain shielded from any enemy that were still to the east of us. But if we had rebels in the jungle around here now, the PARAs would be disgorging right into their line of fire.
I saw the ramp go down and waited for the surge. But nothing. I was thinking they should be off by now, so why hasn’t the helo gone? After thirty seconds or so I ducked under the forward rotors, hurrying down the side of the Chinook to try to find out what was causing the delay. By rights, thirty seconds was more than enough time to get a platoon of PARAs off a helo.
I came around the back and glanced into the Chinook’s dark hold. I spotted two lonely figures inside. One was the Chinook’s loadie, the other was Captain Chris James, a guy I knew well. He was a former Second-in-Command of the Pathfinders. I’d taken him through Selection and for a while I’d had him in my patrol. He was now serving as 1 PARA’s Adjutant.
I had one thought, and one only, crashing through my head right now: Where the fuck are the fucking PARAs?
Clambering aboard I closed in, so I could have words in Chris’s ear. ‘What the fuck is going on?’ I yelled above the deafening whine of the turbines. ‘Where’s the fucking QRF?’
‘Steve, I’ve been sent to have a look,’ he yelled back. ‘I’ve been sent to do a recce.’
I exploded. ‘A fucking recce! Mate, we have just been in a fucking horrendous contact, we have no idea where they fucking are now, we’re down to our last mags of ammo and there’s no fucking QRF ? What the fuck?’
‘I hear you, mate, but I’ve been sent to have a look, to assess things.’
‘Assess this, Chris: I don’t give a fuck what you’ve been sent to look at, you need to get the fucking QRF in – NOW.’
I backed away in a seething cloud of rage, but he reached out and stopped me.
‘Steve, we’ll fly around and take a look! Fly over the village.’
‘Mate, I don’t give a fuck where you fucking fly – just get the QRF sorted.’
I stormed off the back. The red mist had well and truly come down. I felt waves of frustration and anger washing over me. We’d been promised a QRF on thirty-five minutes’ standby. Those were the conditions on which we’d gone in. Instead, we’d just had possibly the entire RUF try to rush us, and they were very likely still out there getting us surrounded – and now this.
The Chinook took off.
I ordered my blokes back to the wagon. ‘On the fucking Pinz! Let’s go!’
The guys stared at me, confusedly.
‘Steve, where’s the QRF?’ Marky queried.
‘They ain’t fucking coming,’ I snapped. ‘Let’s go!’
We drove back in a taut silence. Not a single word was said. I had blokes in their early twenties with me, and I could sense their frustration and their anger. But what the hell was I supposed to say? Yeah, lads, I know you’ve just given your all facing odds of 100–1, and we’re running out of ammo, and we were promised a QRF and no one’s fucking turned up; but wrong decisions get made; shit happens.
That was about the truth of it, but it wouldn’t exactly help much to give voice to any of that.
Above us the Chinook climbed to altitude, then followed the track out over the village, pushing east across the terrain from where the rebels had first hit us. It flew a circuit over that area, as I sat in the speeding Pinz trying to get my temper under some form of control. But fuck me, Chris hadn’t even brought us any resupply of ammo …
We parked up the Pinz and I ordered the guys back to their patrols.
As I headed for the HQ ATAP a local woman ran over and tried to accost me. In Pidgin English she started yelling: ‘Ma dauter – she been shot! She been shot! She …’
The woman was trying to drag me towards the village square. I got both my hands up and forced her away: ‘Get back! Away! Away!’
With no QRF having materialised, I couldn’t deal with this kind of shit right now.
I stormed over to the HQ ATAP. I had had steam practically coming out of my ears. The four of them – Grant, Wag, Tricky, Cantrill – were staring at me in amazement. I got lock-on with all four, and from a dozen yards away I yelled out the good news.
‘There’s no fucking QRF!’
I could see the looks of total disbelief on their faces. They had these blank expressions, as if they couldn’t comprehend what I’d just told them; as if this couldn’t be for real. They’d heard the helo come in. They’d expected me to come storming back with thirty paratroopers in my wake. And now this. It just didn’t compute.
Tricky held up his hands, almost in a gesture of surrender. ‘Mate, I fucking sent the contact report. I got confirmation …’
‘What, they think we sent a contact report ’cause we were fucking homesick?’ Wag snarled. ‘Wankers!’
‘When you say there’s no QRF, d’you mean it’s delayed or it’s never coming?’ Grant asked. The voice of reason, he’d posed the million-dollar question.
‘No fucking idea. It was fucking Chris James on the helo, and he’d been sent out to take a look.’
‘A look!’ Wag exploded. ‘A look at fucking what?’
I held my hands wide. ‘I have no idea, Wag, mate, no fucking idea.’
Right at that moment you could cut the atmosphere with a knife.
I tried to get my anger under control. I tried telling myself that wrong decisions did get made at all levels of the chain of command. God knows, I’d made a good few in my time. The strength of a unit like the Pathfinders lay in how we responded to such bad decision-making. If we sat and stewed in our anger, spitting vitriol at whoever had fucked up, we’d fester and spoil. What we had to do now was deal with it, get over it and get sparking.
‘Right, what the fuck do we do now?’ Grant prompted.
We got our heads together for our second Chinese parliament of the morning. Decisions had been made in the first one based on the assumption that we only had to hold out until the QRF got here, with bucket-loads of fighting men and extra ammo. Grant laid it out for us how things had changed.
‘Right, we have to work on the assumption there may be no QRF. They may not be coming.’ He paused, letting the words sink in. ‘On the upside, it’s nearly first light and we can already see a good way into the jungle. This being the case, what do we do? What are our options?’
This was it now: life or death decision time. We’d had no further information from headquarters, and not the slightest hint that any help might be on its way. We had to call this for ourselves: do we stay or do we go?
‘Option one is to stay and defend,’ I volunteered, ‘in the knowledge there may be no QRF at all. In my opinion, okay – there’s no QRF. But on the ground nothing’s really changed. We’ve got the same number of blokes, same ammo stats, the same defensive positions. We just readjust the plan. We’ve got the added advantage of daylight, plus no serious casualties. Let’s stay and do this.’
Wag nodded. ‘I’ve got a good handle on the ammo situation, so I can get it redistributed across the patrols.’
‘For me we stay and defend this place,’ I reiterated.
‘Agreed, I reckon we stay,’ said Wag.
Tricky nodded. ‘I say we stay.’
Grant eyed the three of us for a long moment. ‘Okay, I’m happy with that.’
I turned to Cantrill. I figured he’d earned the right to have a say, now we had no QRF heading our way any time soon.
‘Mate, you’ve really got nowhere else to go, other than staying with us lot. But you’ve earned a say. What d’you reckon?’
Cantrill managed a thin smile. ‘All I know is I’m safer with you lot than I am on my own.’
‘So, we’re unanimous,’ Grant concluded. ‘We stay.’
Wag shared ammo stats. We could cross-deck ammo to H, Dolly and Nathe’s positions, and even things up a little. But we were still on the cusp of being two-thirds down across the entire unit. One more probing attack like the one we’d just suffered and the ammo would be exhausted, and we’d very likely get swamped.
But there wa
s also a kind of logic to staying, warped though it might sound. We had great cover in the trenches. The rebels did not. Come sunup we’d be able to see properly to ensure one round made one kill. With a hundred-plus rounds per man, that still gave us a good 2000 potential kills. And in the next few hours we were sure to get some sense out of headquarters in terms of ammo resupply and reinforcements.
Tricky got on the radio and called in the patrol commanders. Apart from the crying and wailing from the direction of the village square, it was quiet as the grave out there. Even the moaning of the rebel wounded out in no man’s land had died down to nothing. Either the RUF had pulled back taking their injured with them, or their injured were now very dead.
I told Tricky about the wounded on the village square, and he radioed for Bryan Budd, our lead medic, to get over there to see what he could do to help. The villagers’ thin-walled huts would have offered no protection from small arms and machine gun fire, and for all we knew some of the RPGs unleashed by the rebels might have taken out entire buildings.
We got the patrol commanders in for prayers. They’d heard the Chinook come in, so they knew we’d got a helo down, but no QRF seemed to have materialised. We had to nip this in the bud, and get everyone’s focus back on the task in hand.
‘As you’ve probably realised, there hasn’t been the response from Lungi that we expected,’ Grant started. ‘No QRF has come in. That being the case, we’ve got to make the best of a bad job. The decision here is that we stay: we stay and defend the village.’
There were grunts of agreement all around.
Nathe: ‘Fucking right we stay.’
Dolly: ‘Yeah, we stay.’
Ginge: ‘I’m for staying.’
Taff: ‘Yeah, bud, that’s it.’
It was around 0600 hours, and the course of action had just been endorsed by all.
Decision made, I heard a yell from our front ringing through the half-light. ‘Steve! Steve! Steve!’
It was the unmistakable voice of H. I ran forward in a low hunch until I reached his trench. H pointed north up the track. In the dim light I could just make out three bodies lying there, maybe forty yards away from us, with a fourth in the ditch beside the road. H had killed them with his first burst of fire. That was how close the rebels had got – crawling through the ditches that lined the roadway – before H had opened up on them.
Operation Mayhem Page 25