Eye of the Storm

by Peter Ratcliffe

  In the brief time it took to drive over to the far side of the airfield, where the helicopters were parked, the Boss explained that he had signalled Alpha One Zero’s commander and ordered him to drive to a rendezvous point on the Saudi Arabian side of the border. His signal also read, ‘New 2IC to you.’ This had been worded by the ops officer, dreadfully badly in my opinion, since it would act like a slap in the face to the patrol commander and his 2IC. It should have been worded to read, ‘RSM to your location to act as 2IC,’ or some equally tactful phrase.

  While the vehicle was being lashed down inside the Chinook’s big belly the CO, his signaller and I boarded the chopper and took our seats on the deck behind the pilot. The Boss intended that after his meeting with the OC A Squadron his driver would bring him back to Al Jouf before nightfall. He would not, he assured me, be leaving the patrol commander in any doubt about his position. I was being sent in as 2IC to get the show moving, and to crush any signs of negativeness on the part of the patrol commander or anyone else.

  ‘Anyone else’ included the current 2IC, a staff sergeant named Pat. Based on my very brief acquaintance with him during my visit to the desert-training camp, however, I figured that Pat could be one of the primary causes of any negative thinking in Alpha One Zero.

  He was a large guy, about six foot three, extremely fit and very articulate – clearly a well-educated man, and someone, frankly, one would have expected to be an officer rather than a senior NCO. But at that initial meeting – the A Squadron briefing at the desert-training camp, which was also attended by the CO and the Deputy Director – I had noted that it took him a long time to reach a decision, and that, generally, he came across as being very negative. As curious as it may seem, that was the first time I had ever had dealings with him, and I had been in the Regiment, by then, for nearly twenty years. That can easily happen, as in general we tended to socialize with members of our own squadron or even just our own troop, and rarely mixed with others. On top of that, I had only been RSM for a few weeks and, with all the hullabaloo over the Gulf crisis, had not had the time to get to know everyone in the Regiment.

  The Deputy Director, however, had been Pat’s squadron commander when he was OC A Squadron in the early 1980s, and during our visit to the training camp had casually asked the tall staff sergeant how things were going. Surprising all of us, Pat had replied, ‘Can I be candid, Boss?’ When the Deputy Director nodded, he immediately launched into a whole list of complaints.

  ‘What you are expecting us to do is ridiculous,’ he began. ‘Trying, in ten days, to train men for mobile warfare who are not mobility trained is ludicrous. We are also short of the mounts that the Mk19* sits on, and we are even short of pen-torch batteries.’

  Having seen A Squadron at the camp that day, I had formed a good opinion of their morale and mood, as well as their readiness for action. Listening to Pat’s catalogue of moans, however, I had scarcely been able to believe what I was hearing. I looked across at the CO and shrugged my shoulders. But Pat had been in full spate, and I had stood there, feeling increasingly embarrassed, while he’d reeled off a long list of other personal judgements and petty complaints, before simply walking off.

  ‘Well, he gives a totally different impression to the one I gathered from the rest of the guys today,’ I had told the Deputy Director and the CO. ‘Morale was good. They were full of enthusiasm and in good spirits.’ To which the Deputy Director had casually replied, ‘Well, that’s Pat for you. He’s always been the world’s worst eternal pessimist.’

  I couldn’t help thinking back to that remark, and my own opinion of both Pat and the A Squadron commander, as I waited aboard the Chinook that was to take me to join them in the desert. These two together – the one negative and pessimistic, the other hesitant and indecisive – were a bad mix. Perhaps a good shake-up, as was now being put in hand, would sort them out. Within two hours I would be ramrodding this unit, and whether the squadron commander and his 2IC liked it or not, I was simply not going to tolerate any negative comments from either of them.

  In addition, I also had a wild card tucked away in the map pocket of the right trouser leg of my DPM (disruptive-pattern material – i.e. camouflage) trousers. Instinctively, perhaps half recalling an occasion during my jungle training when I had lost the code books while crossing a rain-swollen river, I reached to check that the button on the pocket’s flap was secure as the pilot started to wind the engines up to full revs. This ‘failsafe’ was a letter, which the Boss had dictated and ordered to be typed that morning. It authorized me, at my own discretion, to take over full command of the half-squadron whenever I felt it necessary, ‘to ensure that the unit was operating to its maximum efficiency’.

  Unfortunately, one thing that was certainly not operating to maximum efficiency was the Chinook. As the aircraft began to shake preparatory to take-off, the pilot suddenly decided to shut down. The racket and vibration suddenly began to diminish and the rotors began to slow. We looked at each other questioningly, though not for long.

  ‘We have a problem,’ the pilot announced. ‘It’s either a fuel blockage or it’s the hydraulics. If it’s fuel we’ll be thirty minutes. If it’s the hydraulics we’ll be here for at least another two hours. Probably much longer.’

  Since there was not a thing that we could do, the Boss and I climbed down from the chopper and walked off a dozen paces or so to the side of the helipad. He lit up a cigar and I put together a roll-up. We stood there smoking and chatting while the RAF engineers tried to work out what was wrong, peering in remote parts of the machine and muttering technical questions. As we stood there, the CO told me that he, and headquarters, were happy with the progress the two D Squadron units and the other Alpha half-squadron were making. Alpha One Zero we knew about, and we were trying to take steps to get the patrol moving. However, everyone was deeply concerned about the status of Bravo Two Zero, which had failed to make radio contact with RHQ at Al Jouf.

  It is always worrying when a patrol behind enemy lines fails to make radio contact – especially when, as Bravo Two Zero did, they have two separate radio sets with them. Additionally, the reservations we had both felt prior to ‘McNab’s’ patrol going in didn’t make their silence any easier to accept. Our frustration was further increased when the Chinook’s pilot strolled over and told us that the trouble was definitely hydraulic. We wouldn’t be going anywhere for a few hours.

  ‘OK,’ said the CO, ‘we’ll leave it until tomorrow night. Let’s go back to the ops room.’

  Back in the terminal, there was still nothing from Bravo Two Zero. There was a new problem in the form of a signal from Alpha One Zero, however. It was an answer to the CO’s earlier signal, and was a double refusal: ‘Not for us. Not for this location.’ What it meant was that the patrol commander was not even going to attempt to make the rendezvous with the CO. And he was also telling his commanding officer, ‘I’m not accepting a new 2IC.’

  I looked over at the Boss, waiting for his reaction, and thanking whatever fate had caused our helicopter to malfunction just before take-off. If it had not done so, we would have been waiting at the rendezvous like a couple of idiots for an officer who had no intention of showing up. I could tell that the CO was fuming, but whatever the thoughts inside his head, he kept them to himself.

  On the following day, 25 January, the CO was again unable to send me in because of a shortage of helicopters. What he did do, however, was to arrange for Alpha One Zero to rendezvous on the border that night with a certain Major Bill, one of the Regiment’s most experienced officers. In a day when the Iraqis launched eight Scud missiles against Tel Aviv, the CO could no longer tolerate the fact that one of our spearhead units was still swanning about in Saudi Arabia, unable even to cross the border, let alone start knocking out Scud launchers.

  In Israel, the US-donated Patriots had brought down all eight Scuds, but debris from the detonating missiles had killed two civilians and injured sixty-nine, and the Israelis were getting more furious, an
d more belligerent, by the hour. I felt that each Scud attack on their country would be taken by them as evidence that we weren’t doing our job properly. In the case of Alpha One Zero, of course, we weren’t doing it at all.

  Then in his fifties, Major Bill had come up from the ranks. Years earlier he had served in A Squadron, and had then done time with B Squadron. A very experienced member of the Regiment, he had seen active service in the Radfan, Aden, Borneo and Dhofar. In short, he was a no-nonsense, get-up-and-go sort of soldier.

  I can’t say that we got on particularly well, however. But that would not have caused a problem had we had to work together in the Gulf, although as things turned out we never had to try. This was the man the CO had tasked with the job of getting Alpha One Zero over the border and into the war. It was now Friday, and that patrol had been hanging around on the border since Sunday.

  The CO had simply told Major Bill, ‘Pick the right spot and get them over.’ Bill had set out at once, travelling to the border to RV with our stalled patrol. His choice of crossing place was beautifully simple. He picked an old border post watched over by a medieval fort garrisoned by about a dozen Saudi Arabian regulars. On the Iraqi side there were probably half that number of troops holed up in a watchtower-like structure more than a quarter of a mile away across the border. Being Major Bill, he probably assumed, and almost certainly correctly, that the Iraqis would be asleep after midnight – the time at which he would send Alpha One Zero across.

  And that was exactly what he did. On the morning of the 26th we heard, finally, that Alpha One Zero had successfully crossed the border and was heading north. Less happily, that morning – three days after they had been flown in – there was still no contact from Bravo Two Zero. The CO therefore ordered a helicopter to go in after dark to try to locate his missing men.

  That night, an RAF Chinook lifted off from Al Jouf to begin the search. It was accompanied by a US Air Force helicopter fitted with sophisticated electronic and other equipment for locating people in the dark. But despite flying a search pattern around the spot where Bravo Two Zero had been dropped off, the choppers didn’t pick up so much as the whisper of a trace of anyone. It was as though the patrol had vanished into thin air. Either ‘McNab’ and his men were moving very fast and covering a lot of ground, which told me that they had already ditched most of their equipment and were racing for the border, or they had been captured or killed. If they were trying to get back, however, we had no way of knowing until we could establish radio contact – if we ever did.

  As for me, I seemed to have been left in some kind of limbo. There was no way that I could get forward to join Alpha One Zero in Iraq, even if that were still thought necessary, because the CO now needed every available Special Forces helicopter for searches. Then, early the following morning, I was again summoned to the Boss’s ‘office’ – still a desk on the luggage conveyor belt in what would one day be the baggage-reclaim area of the terminal building. ‘I’ve seen the sitrep,’ I told him at once. A report from Alpha One Zero, now over the border at last, explained that they had established their first LUP in enemy territory, in the midst of an Iraqi division’s position in Wadi ’Ar Ar.

  ‘You’re going in tomorrow,’ said the CO, without preamble. ‘Definitely. Have you got that?’

  I nodded, then added, ‘OK Boss,’ for good measure. I was still carrying the letter he had written for me to give the patrol commander in my pocket, and my gear was still packed and ready to go. There was nothing else to say. The die was cast.

  Or at least it seemed to have been, until four o’clock that afternoon, when I walked into the ops room and found the CO standing there with a broad smile on his face.

  ‘What the hell’s going on? Is the war over?’ I asked.

  ‘Better than that,’ he chortled. ‘We’ve had our first contact with the enemy.’ Contact meant a firefight, and from the CO’s antics it looked as though it had been a successful one.

  ‘That’s great,’ I said, then added ‘Any casualties?’

  ‘Not on our side. But guess who had the contact?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ I replied – after all, we had a fair number of patrols out there. ‘Share the big secret.’

  ‘It’s Alpha One Zero,’ he said. And as he gave me the details I knew straight away that I would not be going out to join them. Three enemy killed and one captured meant success; indeed, they had even captured intact the enemy soldiers’ vehicle, a Russian-built Gaz jeep. The contact indicated that the patrol commander had found his feet and had started to get his act together. The patrol was some fifty kilometres north of the border, and they would soon be heading for their designated area of operation. That, of course, was the logical assumption, and the CO agreed. ‘It might just work after all,’ he murmured. ‘Let’s see how they get on.’

  We didn’t have long to wait. Half an hour later a message came in from Alpha One Zero: ‘Moving south towards the border. Will advise rendezvous location in morning for prisoner pickup and resupply.’

  I thought the CO, who was always ultra-cool, was going to explode. This time he completely lost his rag, and his comments about Alpha One Zero and its commander, though extremely succinct, didn’t make pretty listening. He ended his outburst by telling me, ‘There’s no question about it, Billy. You will definitely be going in tomorrow evening.’

  Alpha One Zero’s actions had become not just erratic, but increasingly ludicrous, almost like something from a comedy sketch. Now, after days of delay, they seemed to be running around the Iraqi desert like headless chickens. Having had time to mull it over, I didn’t reckon the Boss’s idea of sending me in as 2IC was going to work. Not now. Time was short, however, so I told him there and then that I wasn’t happy with my brief.

  ‘I don’t want to add to your problems at this stage, Boss, but I don’t think I can operate like this. Not in the way you want. I don’t need all this aggro that’s being lined up.

  ‘I can’t go in as 2IC knowing that I can take over full command at any time just by producing your letter from my pocket. I can stage a mini-coup whenever I want if I have this joker. That’s exactly what it’s like – having a wild card that will trump everyone else’s hand.

  ‘The patrol commander is obviously getting very negative advice from somebody – and I have a good idea who that person is. Whatever I advise as 2IC, the OC is going to have this bloke telling him the opposite, and he’s going to end up like a piggy in the middle. And at that point I play my joker – and ship him out.

  ‘I can’t work like that. I could never expect to have the men’s confidence and trust after pulling that kind of stroke.’

  The CO may have been angry, but he had lost none of his decisiveness. He looked at me for a moment, then said, ‘You’re absolutely right. Give me the letter back.’

  Reaching down, I unbuttoned the map pocket on my trousers, pulled out the letter and handed it to him. He went over immediately to where the staff assistant was sitting at a nearby desk and dictated a new letter, which he signed as soon as it had been typed. He brought it back and handed it to me.

  ‘Read it,’ he said.

  Looking down at the paper, I scanned the brief message. It was addressed to the A Squadron commander, and read:

  You are to comply with this order. You are to hand over your command to the RSM. He can take whatever action is necessary to ensure that you leave your present location. You are to get on board the helicopter. You are to speak to no one and report to me directly on your return.

  It was signed ‘Commanding Officer, 22 SAS’.

  When I had read it, I sealed it in its envelope and slipped it into my map pocket, buttoning the flap. I would go in on the following night, 28 January, in the Chinook that was scheduled to make the first resupply delivery to two of our four mobile fighting units.

  Against all my expectations, I was going to war.

  * A fully automatic weapon, not unlike a machine-gun, that fires different types of 40mm grenades. It is usua
lly mounted on a 110, and, with its high rate of fire, is a very effective weapon. Also referred to as an M19.

  Chapter Seventeen

  AS I approached the gaping rear doors of the huge, twin-engined, twin-rotor Boeing Chinook, I was acutely aware that I was about to become the central character in a piece of regimental history. This was the first time ever that an SAS squadron commander had been relieved of his command in the field, and also the first time that the RSM had been sent in on active service to replace an officer.

  Unsurprisingly, I had spent most of that day killing time before my flight, turning over in my mind what was likely to happen when I reached Alpha One Zero. I would, I think, have to have been rather less than human if I had not wondered about my takeover of the patrol, although I knew that no amount of thinking before the event could possibly prepare me for the reality.

  Furthermore, my destination lay behind enemy lines, so quite apart from any problems that might arise with men whose patrol commander I was to replace, or with informing that officer that, in effect, his career was in tatters, I was also having to adjust to the recognition that, from this night on, every move I made could lead to an incident that might well become a matter of life or death. Nor was it just my life or death; I was about to become responsible not only for the successful outcome of a vital mission, but also for the lives and wellbeing of thirty-three soldiers, most of whom were married and had children.

  On the Chinook’s tail ramp I paused and took a look around me. It was an impressive scene. The two great rotors were already spinning and shimmering, turning silvery in the bright moonlight. The sky was clear, the night dry but bitterly cold. We had heard that day from the weather men that this was the coldest winter ever recorded in Iraq. Perhaps the meteorologists should have forewarned the Intelligence donkeys back in the UK who had briefed us to expect mild, even warm weather. As a result of this advice, a lot of the guys hadn’t even bothered to bring sleeping bags.