Tommo grinned. ‘Okay, mate, got it.’
‘One other thing,’ I added. ‘We’ve lived here with the villagers and become like a part of the place. Tell your blokes they have to shit down at the crappers, over near Taff’s position. Plus we’ll be getting you an early morning water delivery sorted, plus a delivery of bread rolls in the evenings …’
Tommo stared at me for a second. ‘You serious?’
‘I’m serious.’
‘Right, bang on, mate, bang on.’
We ran through the plans in more detail, based on the fact that we expected a tidal wave of rebels. The eleven blokes in the mortar team were fit, robust PARAs, but they weren’t trained to E & E or for jungle survival – hence the plan being that they’d take the Pinzgauer. In an ideal world they’d fire the FPF, collapse the mortar tubes and load them on the wagon, before hitting the road. That way we’d prevent the 81 mms from falling into rebel hands.
But Plan B involved blowing up the mortars, if they had to move real quickly. We used the last of the PE4 to make up three charges, each with a three-minute fuse.
‘If we give you the signal to withdraw and there’s no time to salvage the tubes, you simply light the end of the safety fuse,’ I told them. ‘Pile a dozen HE rounds around the mortar, for some extra umph, and you’ve got three minutes from the point of lighting the fuse to make your getaway.’
Tommo nodded. ‘Got it.’
With the mortar positions and procedures sorted, Tommo and Joe moved up to co-locate with us in the HQ ATAP. That way they could get eyes-on the battlefront to better call in fire, plus they would be the relay between our patrols and the mortar pits. We’d just about got them settled in, when Mojo came to see us bearing an invitation to visit the village chief. We hadn’t seen or spoken to him since the rebel attack, so a chinwag was long overdue.
‘Yeah, we need to talk to him anyway,’ I told Mojo. ‘We need to tell him about the mortars. If they start firing it will be very loud and what we don’t want is for the villagers to think they’re getting hit. They need to know to stay in their huts and to expect some big explosions.’
We wandered over to the chief’s place. Mojo rattled on for a while about the mortars, relaying what we’d just said, and then the chief spoke to Mojo at some length. He was about the most animated that I’d ever seen him.
Mojo turned to us to translate. ‘The chief says he is very grateful to you British. You have saved his people and the village. And he says thank you for helping the girl who was badly injured and for taking her to safety.’
‘We’re here to help you and protect you,’ Grant reassured him. ‘That’s what we’re here for.’
‘And we’re here to stay,’ I added.
The chief thanked us again, and with that we returned to our battle stations. We called the patrol commanders in and briefed them on all the Xray target co-ordinates that we’d sorted with the mortar teams. Pathfinders are trained to call in mortar fire anyway, so this was like second nature to us. I could see this light burning in the blokes’ eyes. It was the extra sense of confidence that three 81 mm mortars, plus an extra bandolier or two of ammo each, brings.
If needed, we knew we could mallet the rebels with 81 mm HE rounds. It’s one thing being shot at by small arms, quite another being plastered with that kind of highly accurate and murderous heavy fire. The 81 mms would be a battle-changer, or so we fucking hoped.
‘They’re coming,’ I warned the blokes, ‘and the hammer will fall hardest here tonight. Any one of you, if you hear or see anything you can call for illume … Be mindful HE will come if you call for it, but there are a lot of civvies out there trying to get in here to safety, so we need to be under rebel fire before we bring in HE. Last thing we need is to drop on the locals and destroy all the goodwill. So, we can’t just call in HE on any movement. It’s not ideal, but we need to be taking fire from a position before we can hit it. Put the call through, and Tommo and Joe will put up the illume, with HE to follow if and when it all goes noisy.’
That was it. Briefing done.
It was around mid-afternoon when Tricky got warning via the Thuraya to expect another set of visitors – only this time it was about as high-up as it could get. Brigadier Richards, the overall force commander, was flying in for a heads-up. I cast my mind back to the promise he’d made several days earlier, to Sierra Leone’s embattled leader, President Kabbah – that the British military would end the war in Sierra Leone by knocking seven bales of shit out of the rebels.
Well, I guessed here in Lungi Lol we’d made a decent start.
Brigadier Richards flew in on a Special Forces Chinook, and Grant and me were there to do the meet and greet. He had with him his Military Assistant, Major Mark Mangham, plus his close protection (CP) team. He spent about an hour on the ground chatting with us, plus as many of the lads as he could get around. And he had a good natter to the locals, who couldn’t have made it clearer how happy they were that we’d kicked the rebels’ butts.
The Brigadier confided in us that it had been his ultimate decision to put us this far out and exposed in the jungle, and that he was mightily relieved we’d stood firm in the face of the onslaught. In fact, he’d sited us here deliberately to lure the rebels out, knowing how vital it was that British force gave them a right bloody nose early on – to establish our moral and fighting superiority from the start.
What we’d achieved here was crucial to the Brigadier’s overall game plan in Sierra Leone, and making good on his promise to President Kabbah. It came as a bit of a surprise to learn that we’d been used as the bait in a trap to snare the RUF. Still, all’s well that ends well – not that this was over yet. Far from it …
The Brigadier’s was of necessity a flying visit. With him and his team gone Mojo rocked up at the HQ ATAP. The same cardboard tray as always was balanced on his shoulder. His arrival was pre-announced by the whiff of … freshly baked bread.
‘I have the bread!’ he announced. He glanced at Joe and Tommo. ‘Also, I have for your friends.’
Tommo and Joe were staring at Mojo, like they couldn’t quite believe it. I’d warned them about the bread and water deliveries, but maybe they’d thought it was a wind-up. Tommo was a typical chirpy cockney type, but right now he seemed lost for words.
‘Don’t worry about it, mate,’ I told him, ‘you’re gonna be scoffing on some nice fresh bread.’
Wag loved getting around the blokes doing the bread delivery. The oldest man amongst us, he was like the father figure of the unit. Dad’s here with the bread rolls. I could hear him counting them out in the background.
‘Mate, can you manage up to thirty-seven?’ I needled him.
‘Fuck off, Smoggy … Yeah,’ he confirmed, once he was done counting, ‘all your blokes got bread too.’
Tommo’s grin split his face ear-to-ear. ‘Fucking hell! Diamond geezer, that Mojo.’
Wag counted out the rolls for the mortar teams. ‘’Ere you go – take yours. Take your eleven.’
Tommo eyed the stack of bread. ‘Where the fuck am I gonna put all that?’
‘No idea,’ said Wag.
‘Tell you what, I’ll open me daysack and fucking put it in there,’ Tommo decided.
Leaving Tommo to make his bread delivery, Wag and me headed for Dolly’s position.
‘Yeah, I’ve got the bread,’ Wag announced, as we neared their trenches.
Dolly chuckled. ‘Oh, the bread’s back. We thought the baker had done a runner.’
‘Nope, he’s still here.’
By the time we’d done the rounds of the battle trenches and got back to the HQ ATAP, Jacko had been on the radio with that evening’s Sched. Grant made sure to read out the message to us all, Tommo and Joe included.
‘Fucking standby, standby. Every, every source of info we have is that they’re coming at you with everything they’ve got and most likely tonight.’
After Grant was finished there was a kind of collective rabbit-eyed stare from the blokes.
I broke the silence, doing my best impression of Michael Caine’s accent in the movie Zulu: ‘Zulus, sir.’ ‘How many?’ ‘Fucking thasands of ’em.’
Tommo chuckled. ‘Yeah, fun and games tonight. Fucking going to get busy.’
As darkness descended on Lungi Lol we kept getting hourly updates from Jacko, via the Thuraya. With the rebels using mobile phones to co-ordinate their movements, and with our spooks having cracked the phone intercepts, I figured he was getting a live update on exactly what the RUF commanders were saying.
‘They’re advancing on your position and there are thousands,’ Jacko relayed to us. ‘They are coming to attack in great strength. Be ready for the onslaught.’
We figured every rebel and his dog would be in on this one, minus those we had already killed and wounded. As we stared down our rifle barrels into the gathering darkness, we were readying ourselves to get hit by a dark tidal wave.
All evening the tension rose, as villagers flooded in. It was like a mass influx of refugees now. But by around midnight the movement had died to nothing, and all went quiet. Then we started to hear the noises. It was a repeat performance of the night we were hit – unearthly, spectral screams and screeches echoing across to us. Amidst the ghostly cries we figured we could see fleeting movement, as shadows flickered back and forth across the tree line.
Dolly’s patrol was the first to put out the call. ‘Put up illume over Xray 1-4. Possible movement.’
Tommo and Joe relayed the radio message to their teams: ‘Fire illume Xray 1-4.’
An instant later the first 81 mm mortar went up with a massive thump.
We waited the eight seconds or so it took to climb to the heavens and then: fzzzztttttt! It was like a giant party-popper being unleashed high above us.
The flare hung in the sky like a mini-sun. The cone of blinding light it cast was far wider than that of the puny 51 mm that Cantrill and I had been using. But despite its size and its brightness, we couldn’t hear even the barest hint of the thing fizzing. It was utterly soundless as it drifted, sparked and burned. It struck me how eerie it was that so much light could fall upon us, but in total silence.
Everyone was awake now – those on stag and those not on stag. All of us were on a knife-edge as we waited for the first shots to ring out – signalling the onslaught was upon us. We’d agreed between us only to use ‘maximise’ if we’d clearly seen armed rebels massing, or if we were under fire.
The silence lengthened as the flare floated earthwards, and still no shots hammered out from the tree line. Finally, the flare drifted behind the fringe of jungle and all went dark.
A short message came in from Dolly: ‘Roger, out.’
In other words, nothing seen as yet to justify giving maximise.
The rebels had their own mortars, that we knew. We had to presume they’d brought them forward to hit our positions, plus their 12.7 mm DShKs and their ‘United Nations’ armoured personnel carriers (APCs). Each patrol had a LAW lying at the ready, in anticipation of seeing a rebel gun truck or one of those ex-UN APCs come lumbering out of the jungle.
Next up on the air was Ginge: ‘33 Charlie: put up illume over Xray 1-6.’
Tommo did a repeat relay, and the second 81 mm round went up. It too drifted into darkness with no shots having been fired.
Next, Nathe was on the air: ‘That’s not a fucking animal noise over at Xray 1-7. Get some illume up – let’s have a look.’
Another 81 mm round lit up the heavens, this one to the front of 33 Alpha’s battle trenches. Because the rebels had got so close in the first battle, we wanted to hit them and smash them as early and as far out from the village as we possibly could. We figured they were probing us again now, and testing our reaction times. Either way they seemed determined to keep us awake all night, allowing no one to get a wink of sleep.
Come first light, we’d fired a good twenty illume rounds all along our front. No one moved through the jungle between midnight and 0500 apart from the rebels. None of us had any doubts that they were out there in the cover of the trees, massing in serious strength, as their commanders put the final touches to their plan of attack. Still, sunrise brought a real sense of relief. We didn’t figure they’d hit us during the daylight hours.
We’d had maybe a thousand extra villagers dossing down in Lungi Lol that night. They’d been terrified of what the darkness would bring. Well, tonight at least it had brought them no gunshot wounds, no horror of capture, nor the brutal torture and amputations that would follow. With the rebels’ anger being such as it was, presumably they planned to wreak terrible vengeance. They would know by now how the villagers here were in league with us, and they would torture their very souls.
No ground assault had materialised that night, but it occurred to us that maybe we were being played by the rebels. In the Vietnam War the Vietcong had adopted a tactic designed to exhaust their American enemy: it was to probe and harass a position all night long, night after night after night. They had set up shifts to do so, making sure that the American soldiers got no sleep. Over successive nights the tension and the sleeplessness had proved exhausting, until finally the Vietcong had launched an attack from out of the darkness.
We figured the rebels were doing the same now, hoping that sooner or later they’d catch us napping.
25
There hadn’t been the slightest hint of what was coming. It hit us like a bombshell.
For night after night now we’d been probed by the rebels, and night after night we’d put up the 81 mm rounds to deter them. We’d pushed out foot patrols during the day into the jungle, and found all the usual signs that the rebels had been there massing to attack, but still the expected onslaught hadn’t come.
After so many sleepless nights we’d more or less lost track of how long we’d been here. We were counting out the days in bread and water deliveries. But of one thing we had been certain: we were here for the duration. No rebels were fucking us out of Lungi Lol, or wreaking havoc on this village.
Not our village.
Not on our watch.
Not while we still had ammo and men to fight.
We’d been expecting a normal evening’s Sched: rebels are poised to hit you; be ready; stand firm. I could see Tricky beavering away with his notepad as he scribbled down an extra-long message, so I guessed we’d got some extra-juicy Intel in.
He stopped scribbling and stared hard at what he’d written for several seconds. Then he turned and handed it to Grant, his face like death.
‘Fucking hell, mate,’ he muttered, ‘you’d better read that …’
This wasn’t Tricky. He wasn’t the melodramatic type. He was calm, cool, collected and laid-back to the point of horizontal. We were all sat up now, listening hard.
Grant ran his eye over the message: ‘Fuuuuuck …’
Me and Wag both said it at once. ‘Fucking hurry up and read it, then.’
Grant stared at us for a long moment. Then he flicked his eyes down, and started to read: ‘PF withdrawal, plus 1 PARA, DTG 250800MAY00. Full stop. Resupply HLS. Full stop. No relief in place.’
‘Read it again,’ I rasped.
Grant repeated it word for word. Twice. Then he glanced up at me. ‘Basically, from the resupply HLS at 0800 tomorrow we’re all to withdraw. There will be no relief. Isn’t that what it means?’
We sat there staring at each other.
For ages.
In utter silence.
Finally, Grant repeated the question: ‘Isn’t that what it means? Or am I missing something? So what are your thoughts on that?’
‘I’ll tell you what my thoughts are on that, Grant, mate: it means we’re being pulled out, and no fucker’s coming in to take our place.’
The reality of what this meant was just starting to hit us. ‘But d’you really think … D’you really think they can just … ?’ Grant’s words petered into silence.
‘Look at it this way, mate: for us to be relieved, some other blokes would have
to come in to do a handover, like we half-did with Cantrill. They’d need to get boots on the ground and scope out our positions, and only once they were in would we pull out. That’s how a RIP works. There’s no way we’re getting on a helo tomorrow and when we’ve left the village unoccupied a bunch of Marines will fly in and reoccupy. It just doesn’t work that way.’
Grant was ashen-faced. ‘But …’
‘Steve’s right,’ Wag cut in. ‘It looks like they’re pulling us out and no fucker is coming in. We bail out. Village abandoned. End of.’
Grant shook his head, disbelievingly. ‘No. No. They wouldn’t just pull us out? After so many days manning these positions and with the threat still out there, surely they’d put someone back in?’
‘Well, maybe all units are being pulled out of country,’ I suggested. ‘Op over. Endex. Or maybe we’re being pulled out onto another task. You never know.’
‘Yeah, but they wouldn’t just pull us out and leave the village unoccupied,’ Grant repeated. ‘Surely they wouldn’t do that?’
‘Yeah, ’cause that’s pretty much leaving the village unprotected. Undefended,’ Tricky added.
Wag nodded. ‘And especially now we’ve poked a stick into the hornet’s nest big time.’
Grant glanced around at our faces. ‘They wouldn’t, would they? Surely?’
For twenty-odd minutes this went around and around and around. At the end we decided that based on the scanty information provided we had no option but to conclude the unthinkable: we were being pulled out of Lungi Lol, and no force was coming in our place.
We called the patrol commanders in to brief them. I didn’t envy Grant’s position as he stood up to face the blokes.
‘Right, guys, we’ve just got orders over the net,’ Grant began. ‘Us lot and the 1 PARA mortar lads are being pulled out tomorrow morning at 0800. We’re heading back to Lungi Airport.’ Long, heavy pause. ‘At the moment I have no more info on whether it’s a retasking. All I do know is that right now there’s no RIP by the Marines.’
Operation Mayhem Page 30