Eye of the Storm

by Peter Ratcliffe

  Still, I knew that at least one aspect of my arrival was going to cheer up the lads in Alpha One Zero and Two Zero no end. With a lot of pushing from the CO and myself, the RQMS had investigated the local souks (bazaars or markets) and had managed to get his slippery palms on a good supply of burnouses, Arab goatskin overcoats, known to us as ‘bedous’ or ‘Al Jouf coats’. They stank more than a little and were none too elegant, but they were surprisingly warm – which was all that would matter to the men.

  I had taken only a few steps up the ramp when I felt a tug on the yoke of my belt kit, the strap that goes over the shoulder to support the weight of equipment in the belt. It was the CO. As I turned he put an arm around my shoulder and, leaning forward, yelled in my ear, above the noise of the engines, ‘What I have done is a first. What it won’t stand is a major contact in the first twenty-four hours.’

  I could barely hear him. Even so, I knew that what he was telling me, in the nicest possible way, was, ‘Don’t do anything stupid, because at the moment my head is on the block.’ I gave him what I hoped was an encouraging nod, shouted, ‘OK, Boss,’ and strode up the ramp with my mind firmly focused, and my fingers just as firmly crossed.

  Top whack, a Chinook can carry nearly fifteen tons of equipment. This flight was stretching that capacity to the limit, since the aircraft was taking enough fuel, water, rations, ammunition and other equipment to resupply the two Alpha half-squadrons in the field. In addition to the three-man crew, it was reassuring to find an RAF corporal manning the forward pintle-mounted machine-gun should there be a hostile reception committee waiting when we landed. The only others on board were the RAF load master, me, and two SAS SNCOs who were there on my orders. They could help offload equipment at the landing site, but the main reason for their being on the flight was to assist me in case I had trouble with the squadron commander.

  I waited until after we were airborne to tell them what was going on – that I was flying in to take over command of Alpha One Zero. They were even more stunned – ‘gobsmacked’ would be more accurate – by my announcement than I had been when the CO first told me. Their jaws dropped, and they were clearly having a struggle getting their brains to accept the message from their ears.

  ‘You’re joking, Billy,’ one of them finally managed to blurt out. ‘We thought you were just coming along for the ride.’ That dragged a laugh out of me, albeit a cynical one. ‘Do you honestly believe I’m so stupid that I would climb aboard one of these things of my own free will without a good reason?’ I asked them. ‘You may both be daft enough to do it – but I’m not.’ I looked hard at the two of them for a moment, my mind still turning over what might happen when we reached the patrol. Then I gave them their orders. When we landed they were to wait on, or very close to, the helicopter, and be prepared for my call. I paused again, then dropped the bombshell:

  ‘If I decide that it is necessary, you are physically to restrain the OC A Squadron and put him aboard the helicopter, using whatever force is needed, and no matter what he does or says.’

  This time the shock almost bowled them over. I waited a few moments until I thought it had sunk in properly, then confirmed, ‘And also’ – they sat rigid, waiting for further revelations – ‘don’t go shooting your mouths off all over camp when you get back.’

  Now, their looks said, I was the one who was being stupid. They had just had handed to them on a plate the juiciest item of gossip of the war so far. There was nothing in all God’s earth that was going to keep them quiet. Only the chopper crashing on the way back was going to keep this mega story from bursting out. I knew it, and they knew it, but I had to go through the motions.

  The load master was hardly less surprised when I told him what was about to happen. Utterly dependable, Flight Sergeant Jim was a first-rate guy who had been with the RAF’s Special Forces flight for a long time and had operated with the Regiment on many previous occasions. We had built up a good rapport over the years, and got on extremely well.

  The load master of any aircraft is in complete control while it is on the ground – and that means that the pilots, however senior, cannot take off without his say-so. That, of course, was my reason for telling him. Having let Jim know the score, I briefed him on just what I needed from him at Alpha One Zero’s location. It was quite simple: I didn’t want him sanctioning take-off until I had given the all-clear with a thumbs-up signal.

  The first leg of our flight took us to ‘Ar Ar, a Saudi Arabian town on the border with Iraq, where the Americans had established a base. We would land there to refuel before flying on into enemy territory.

  When we put down I strolled about a hundred yards away to enjoy a quiet cigarette – smoking is never allowed on RAF flights. Still contemplating the immediate future, I felt apprehensive, not knowing quite what to expect. Finally I stubbed the half-smoked fag out on the tarmac with the heel of my boot and headed back to the helicopter. Even my favourite tobacco seemed to have acquired a bitter taste. I suppose the tension was beginning to have its effect.

  Within minutes of taking off again we were over Iraq, flying near the Chinook’s maximum speed of 188 mph only 50 feet above the undulating desert terrain. The ground below, clearly visible in the bright moonlight, looked barren, cold and inhospitable.

  I was sitting on top of a pile of the goatskin burnouses, idly looking out of the window and trying to relax, when there was a sudden, dazzling red flash outside and off to the right. ‘Shit, we’re being attacked,’ I thought, as I grabbed a rail on the side of the fuselage and braced myself for impact. My other hand went immediately to my rosary beads in the breast pocket of my windproof. At that moment there came another bright flash close to the helicopter and we banked violently to the left. As my body thudded violently into the fuselage wall the aircraft banked even more sharply to the left. Had I not been hanging on I would have been hurled across the cargo bay into a stack of lashed-down jerry cans on the opposite side.

  Convinced that we were about to be shot down, my heart was pounding wildly as I clung on. I am not a good passenger on aircraft at the best of times, but now I was facing one of my worst nightmares turned into reality. I have an absolute horror of being burned to death, the kind of not always rational fear that sometimes brings panic attacks in the dead of night. Rigid with dread, and powerless to prevent what might be about to happen, I held on to the rail as the machine levelled out. My mind turned over images of enemy jets stalking us, missiles hurtling towards us, locked on to this fat, slow, juicy chopper, radar-controlled ground batteries waiting for the right moment to send a stream of tracer into our flying deathtrap …

  Minutes passed, but nothing else happened and I began to breathe more easily. After fifteen minutes, however, just as my heart had resumed a normal beat and I was beginning to relax my grip on the rail, exactly the same thing happened again: two incredibly bright flashes outside, followed by violent banking to the left and right. This time I wasn’t quite so surprised. Not quite – but still too rattled to be able to sit back comfortably and enjoy the rest of the flight. At least the flashes and violent manoeuvres took my mind off the coming takeover of Alpha One Zero, though.

  Shortly after the second incident we made our first landing on enemy turf – a rendezvous with Alpha Three Zero. I immediately went up to Jim, the load master, and asked him what the hell was going on. He looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘All the flares and swerving about the sky,’ I yelled. ‘What do you think I mean?’

  Jim actually laughed. ‘You poor sod,’ he grinned, looking most unapologetic, ‘I’d forgotten. You weren’t wearing a headset were you?’ I shook my head and he went on, ‘We got locked on by a couple of F-16s. What happens is they send down a message to the chopper and the chopper sends back an automatic answer so they know we’re one of the good guys, and the plane goes away. That’s the theory.

  ‘In practice, and to be on the safe side just in case the nasty F-16 didn’t receive our friendly code, we tak
e all the action necessary to prevent a missile ramming us up the backside.

  ‘We fire off magnesium flares and duck about a bit, the general idea being that if there are any heat-seeking missiles coming at us with evil intent they will happily chase our fireworks and not us.’

  By now I’d calmed down a bit, so I thanked him for the lesson, but couldn’t resist adding that I wished I had known all that before it had happened, since then I might not have been so concerned – if ‘concerned’ is the right word for having been almost paralysed with dread.

  At that first rendezvous I advised the commander of Alpha Three Zero that I was about to take over the other Alpha patrol from its officer. He was visibly shaken by the news, but accepted the deal without asking questions. Then, as the supplies were unloaded from the Chinook, I stood with him inside the aircraft, bringing him up to date on Bravo Two Zero. It was now five days since ‘McNab’ had taken his patrol in and we hadn’t heard a peep out of him. We knew that they had with them several surface-to-air rescue beacons, known as TACBEs, a piece of equipment weighing only half a pound which is used to make direct contact with aircraft flying overhead. The pilot then relays the coordinates for the position from which the TACBE signal has come to HQ, which can then take action to rescue the man or men who sent the signal. Extremely dependable, TACBE had several times saved the lives of SAS men who had got into difficulties in the jungle. The fact that Bravo Two Zero had not used it to summon help looked bad for the safe outcome of the mission, we concluded.

  Alpha Three Zero was the most northerly of our mobile patrols, and we had therefore flown to resupply it first. Now it was time to fly southwards for our rendezvous with Alpha One Zero and, for me, an appointment with my own immediate destiny. Once more the engines roared and the airframe vibrated as the Chinook lifted off in a cloud of sand and turned on to its heading. Within thirty minutes we had reached the RV point. We approached the landing site only some twenty feet above the ground, and were still moving fast as the pilot deliberately overshot before banking round and setting us down on the hard desert surface. I grabbed my rifle, left my seat and made for the rear of the aircraft. Nothing would be served by hesitating now.

  As I walked down the tail ramp I found myself buffeted by a strong wind that had sprung up from the north and which, because of the wind-chill factor, had sent the temperature plummeting well below zero. I could see at once why the men running down the nearby slope towards the Chinook didn’t look much like the crack desert patrol I had last seen in Victor. They were mostly wrapped in their chemical-warfare suits with extra jackets on top, and had shemaghs, Arab headdress of the kind favoured by Yasser Arafat, wound around their heads and the lower parts of their faces. The noise from the two rotors, which continued to turn and had formed twin dust halos from the sand being sucked up from the desert floor, was almost deafening. RAF aircrew never switch off their engines during a supply run or insertion into hostile territory, in case they come under attack and have to make a quick getaway.

  I grabbed one of the men as he trotted past, put my mouth close to where I thought his ear should be beneath the shemagh, and yelled, ‘Where’s the OC?’ He pointed up the slight incline down which they had come and shouted something I couldn’t make out. I set off in the direction he had indicated, and on the way passed a strange-looking vehicle that had been parked with a couple of its wheels in a kind of natural ditch. It was giving off an awful stench which I vaguely recognized, but which I didn’t have the time to investigate right then.

  At the crest of the slope I came across another small gang of troopers gathered around two Land Rovers. They looked amazed suddenly to see the RSM, but I didn’t give them time to ask me what I was doing there. Without preamble, I said, ‘One of you go and find the OC and bring him here to me.’

  A few minutes later the commander appeared. He looked at me quizzically, but before he could say anything I said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and handed him the CO’s letter. There was enough moonlight for him to read it without a torch. When he’d finished he looked up, his face working with some powerful emotion which he somehow managed to keep bottled up. Then he walked away. I set off back for the chopper, wondering what he would do.

  I needn’t have worried. He fetched his bergen and rifle and joined me at the tail ramp of the helicopter. The unloading had been completed. The Iraqi officer the patrol had captured the previous day was brought down and I went across and walked with him over to the helicopter. I could guess what he must be feeling, especially after seeing three of his fellow officers killed, and even felt a pang of sympathy for him.

  While this was happening the outgoing OC had located his number two, Pat, and was explaining to him that he had been relieved of his command. Then the two men hugged each other as though they were brothers.

  The worst part of my job was over. The pilots needed to get on their way as soon as possible, and I wanted to get started. Recognizing that there was no point in wasting more time, I hustled the patrol’s former OC aboard the helicopter and gave Jim the thumbs-up signal. Now the handover was complete I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the departing major. He had accepted the order without argument, and his behaviour had been impeccable.

  Moments later the tail ramp winched shut, and with enough racket to wake every Arab – not to mention his goats, dogs and camels – within three miles, the engines wound up to full power and the Chinook was away into the star-studded sky.

  As soon as the noise had dwindled sufficiently so that you could speak without shouting, I went back to Pat. I had no intention of wasting time or words on long explanations.

  ‘I’m in charge now, and that means a whole new ball-game,’ I began. I paused to let that sink in, then continued, ‘I’m going to let you lead in the front vehicle on what’s left of tonight’s run because I’m a bit rusty on mobility tactics and I’m told you’re one of the best. But by first light I want to be fifty kilometres north-east of here. That’s where we’ll make our next LUP.’

  Pat could be stubborn, especially when it came to procedures. He looked at me sullenly and said, ‘We can’t make that far.’ I had been expecting a negative answer, and was ready to jump on it.

  ‘You’re not listening to me, Pat. Understand one thing: I’m not asking you for an opinion, I’m telling you. And what I’m telling you, if you need reminding, is fifty kilometres north-east.

  ‘Opinions are like arseholes – we all have them. I’m not here to listen to yours. I’m here to tell you what to do, and you’re here to do it. Is that plain enough?’ He nodded. ‘Good. Now tell me, what’s the strange vehicle in the ditch up the slope?’

  ‘That’s the Iraqi soldiers.’

  ‘What Iraqi soldiers?’

  ‘The ones we shot yesterday. The dead ones.’

  ‘What the hell are they doing here?’ I asked.

  ‘One of the guys drove them here.’ I guessed from Pat’s attitude that, with me now breathing down his neck, bringing the truck and its grisly load all this way no longer struck him as such a good idea. Now I knew why I remembered that foul stink. It was the smell of putrefying flesh.

  ‘I can’t believe you would actually drive three stinking corpses all this way,’ I said.

  ‘Well, we didn’t want to be compromised,’ he muttered.

  ‘What does it matter about being compromised?’ I asked him. ‘This is not Northern Ireland, this is Iraq. We are behind the enemy’s lines. What were you planning to do with them now?’

  ‘I thought we could blow them up and destroy their vehicle,’ he said.

  ‘No you won’t – we’re not in the game of blowing up people and scattering their remains all over the desert. We haven’t got time to bury them now. We’d be here all night if we did that, and then we’d never make our fifty kilometres.’ I thought for a moment, then said, ‘Right. Get all the burmoils left over from the resupply which we’re not taking with us and put them around that vehicle, and then have Mugger come here. We’ll cremate the bodies, a
nd their jeep at the same time.’ (Burmoils are steel 45-gallon drums used for fuel.)

  Mugger, who had driven the patrol’s former commander and would now drive me, was an expert demolitionist – one of the best in the unit. He arrived a few minutes later – Pat had made himself scarce – and I briefed him on what was needed. He suggested an incendiary device wired up to a thirty-minute fuse, which would effectively cremate the three Iraqi corpses, their vehicle – a Russian-built four-wheel-drive Gaz, not unlike a jeep, though with a closed cab and body – and the leftover burmoils. Some of these still had plenty of fuel sloshing about inside, which I ordered poured into and over the Gaz.

  ‘Leave it to me, Billy,’ said Mugger. ‘It’ll only take a few minutes.’

  I left him to apply his special kind of magic to the truck and its gruesome cargo and made sure my own gear had been stowed aboard what was now my Land Rover. As I did so a figure suddenly emerged from the darkness and shook me by the hand.

  ‘Thank God you’ve arrived, Billy, it’s been a night-mare,’ came a voice I recognized. It was Des, the troop staff sergeant of Mountain Troop, who, like Mugger, was one of the few members of A Squadron I knew. What he said next, however, confirmed my worst fears about Alpha One Zero, even if it didn’t altogether surprise me.

  ‘I was about to take off with my guys and our own four vehicles,’ he confided. Des was one of the most reliable and experienced men in the half-squadron patrol, but as I gathered from the outburst that followed, he had been excluded from the decision-making process. Further-more, he had, from the sound of things, heartily disapproved of the course of action so far adopted by the patrol’s former commander and Pat. Yet I didn’t have time to listen to everyone’s gripes – we had fifty kilometres to make before first light, across pretty inhospitable terrain. So I put a hand on his shoulder and told him quietly, ‘It’s good to see you, Des. We’ll have a chance to go through all of this tomorrow, I promise you. But for the moment I can tell you that there are going to be some major changes around here. As I told Pat, it’s a new ballgame now – and we have to be positive.’