Bloody Heroes

by Damien Lewis

  Five minutes later Jamie, Tom and Mucker returned laden down with an assortment of coats, jackets and blankets. Together with Mat they started handing them out to the freezing prisoners. But as Mat went to hand one of them a yellow oilskin, the prisoner raised an objection.

  ‘No, no – not my coats, sir,’ he ventured, nervously.

  ‘You what?’ Mat asked, incredulously.

  ‘Yes, sir, this one is most seriously not my coats, sir. Sir, my jackets is that one, sir, the most excellent, most divine leather ones, sir.’

  ‘Listen, mate, you’ll take what you’re bloody given,’ Mat replied, throwing him the yellow oilskin. ‘That bloke’s got the neck of a giraffe,’ Mat remarked to the others. ‘The bloody cheek of it. Just had the Black Death descend on him and now he’s tryin’ to rob someone else’s jacket.’

  ‘How d’you know it isn’t his, mate?’ Jamie asked.

  ‘“Seriously not my coats, sir,”’ Mat answered, mimicking the prisoner’s Pakistani-sounding accent. ‘“My jackets is the most excellent leather ones, sir.” Would you believe that shit?’

  ‘Still, got to admire his nerve, haven’t you, mate?’ Jamie said, with a grin.

  By now the SBS/SAS assault force were some fifteen minutes into the assault, and sitreps had gone out from all of the fire teams reporting that their target areas had been cleared. As the ship was now secure, the Sea King helicopters started coming in and dropping off the bomb disposal teams and the anti-terrorism experts from Special Branch. A grey-painted HM Customs & Excise vessel pulled alongside the MV Nisha and began shadowing her off the port bow. Shortly, a Royal Navy skeleton crew would be taking over crewing the vessel. The time was fast approaching when the assault force would formally hand over control of the ship to the civilian authorities. But just before they did there was one last remaining task for Mat and his mates inside the ship. Having a celebratory drink on-board.

  Mat, Jamie, Tom, Mucker and several of the other lads made a beeline for the ship’s storeroom. Upon arrival they stuffed as many bottles as they could of ship’s brandy and rum inside their Frizz suits. Next, they headed for the captain’s cabin, which they knew was at the rear of the ship, on deck two. Grabbing a Polaroid camera off the captain’s desk, the lads ripped off their gas masks and lined up for a couple of souvenir photographs, posing with one of the MV Nisha’s lifebuoys. But as they did so, first one and then the rest of the lads started pointing at Mucker’s face and pissing themselves laughing. He seemed to be the only one who wasn’t finding it funny.

  ‘What? What the fuck?’ Mucker asked, angrily. ‘What the fuck is it, you wankers?’

  In answer all Mucker got was a further burst of hilarity and a chorus of piss-taking.

  ‘Blacked up for the mission then, did you, mate?’

  ‘What’s that instant tanning lotion you’re using, mate? I gotta get me some.’

  ‘He’ll fit in better in Bradford now, mind.’

  ‘Someone fetch the Hobbit a mirror.’

  Before the assault force had gone in one of the lads had played a practical joke on Mucker. He’d rubbed boot polish all over the inside of his gas mask. Once Mucker had removed it for the group photo, he had the black polish smeared all over his face. This time, the joke really was on him.

  Barely thirty minutes after hitting the MV Nisha, the SBS/SAS assault team was winched off deck by the two Chinooks and rotated back through the reception point on Thorny Island. During the whole of the ship assault not a single hostile shot had been fired at them. The ship’s crew had been taken by such surprise that if they did have weapons to hand, they’d not had time to use them.

  The only casualties on the assault team’s side were two minor, self-inflicted ones. One of the SAS operators had hurled a ship’s fire extinguisher into a door, in an effort to smash it open. But the door had resisted and the fire extinguisher had rebounded into him, setting itself off and covering the operator in foam. That accounted for Stretch – the mysterious, ghostly figure who’d come rushing past Mat’s team covered in white scum. And one of the SBS operatives had fired a CS round into a door only to discover that it was made of reinforced steel. As the round had bounced back, it had caught him on the thigh, spewing CS gas all over him. Both men had suffered little more than bad bruising. And while there were several injuries among the prisoners, none of them were life-threatening. The assault had been a textbook operation.

  From Thorny Island the assault force made its way back to Yeovilton by Chinook. As they did so Mat, Jamie, Tom and Mucker felt rightfully proud of themselves. Whatever the outcome of the forensic investigations on board that ship, they had pulled off a tough and risky assault in appalling conditions. As far as they were concerned, the mission had been a resounding success: it was the first ever operationally tested DAA against a hostile vessel. And Mat’s worries about the performance of the SAS lads on a maritime assault such as this had proven totally unfounded. They had gone into action alongside their SBS teammates with just the right combination of aggression and professionalism that the mission had required.

  On arrival back at their Poole base later that morning, there was no major debrief, no ‘yin yang goo hoo’ as the lads liked to call it. This was largely because the CO of the SBS was away in Afghanistan and everyone else was winding down for Christmas. While the men were deservicing their kit, CSM Gav Tinker just did an informal walk-around of all the fire teams, congratulating them on a job well done. The CSM was one of the old and the bold and had seen it all before. But he was still unable to hide the pride he felt in the way that the lads had performed. They had done exactly what he’d asked of them and made it look so easy.

  The CSM found Mat checking his weapons back into the armoury.

  ‘Mat! Come ’ere, lad,’ he said, throwing an arm around his shoulders. ‘I’m bloody proud of you. You were awesome out there. First down the ropes n’all. Don’t think I didn’t notice, cos I did.’

  ‘Cheers, boss,’ Mat remarked. The CSM rarely gave out any praise, so to hear it now meant one hell of a lot to him. ‘No dramas. There was a couple of times when it was touch and go. But we pulled it off, like.’

  ‘Too bloody right you did,’ Gav Tinker enthused. ‘Listen, lad, you go enjoy that Christmas break. You’ve more than earned it.’

  ‘Don’t mind if I do, mate.’

  ‘And one more thing,’ the CSM added, as he turned to leave. ‘Don’t you go eating too many of them doughnuts. I need you to stay in shape for the next time those bastards try and hit us. Cos mark my words, they will.’

  Predictably, news of the seizure of the MV Nisha leaked out to the press. The day after the assault the story was splashed all over the front pages of the British newspapers. ‘UK HALTS SHIP AFTER TERROR ALERT’, ‘SECURITY ALERT AS CHANNEL SHIP IS SEIZED’, ‘ANTI-TERROR SQUAD SEIZES SHIP’, and ‘AL-QAEDA’S PLAN TO NUKE LONDON’ ran the headlines. The authorities seemed keen to stress that the ship had been boarded in international waters in accordance with international law, and that the speed and success of the assault proved the readiness of the UK’s counter-terrorism forces.

  ‘Even where the risk is only a potential risk, we will not hesitate to take any action we think necessary to investigate a potential threat,’ Prime Minister Tony Blair told the press. While playing down the threat that the ship had posed, he was keen to stress that the MV Nisha assault demonstrated the ‘top-level vigilance of our security services’.

  Pretty quickly, the media moved on to other, more pressing, issues. Within days, the MV Nisha story seemed to have vanished without trace. After the initial investigations carried out on board the ship, the MV Nisha was taken into a mainland port and kept in isolation. Not surprisingly, the main cargo found in the vessel’s hold was raw sugar. But in the ensuing days, scores of scientists came and went on board the ship, and containerloads of materials were taken away for further testing.

  Back at Poole, there were initially rumours that the ship had been a red herring – and that no
thing sinister had been discovered. Then word filtered back to the men that quantities of a deadly nerve agent had been found. But none of the SBS lads knew – or cared that much – which version of events was true. As far as they were concerned, at the end of the day it was mission accomplished.

  It was time to wind down and enjoy the Christmas break. The lads felt they’d earned it, too. After the tension and intense activity of the MV Nisha assault they were shattered. And prior to that they had just spent three months in Afghanistan, hunting down AQT terrorists. They’d faced freezing temperatures, towering mountain ranges and an all-but-impossible mission. Mat’s team had ended up fighting an epic battle that none would ever forget, against a fanatical enemy who wanted nothing more than to kill American and British soldiers – or die in the process.

  Ahmed was a massive bear of a man, with tiny eyes set deep in an imposing, black-bearded face. His skin was cracked and worn by years of fighting in one of the world’s harshest theatres of war. Over several centuries, the armies of the world’s main superpowers had come to grief here, fighting the mujahidin of Afghanistan, and had given up trying to tame the warriors of Afghanistan. And now the Taliban were following in the footsteps of the mighty Afghan mujahidin, or so Ahmed liked to believe.

  By contrast, Ali looked puny besides the giant Taliban fighter. But he’d more than earned Ahmed’s respect several months earlier, when he’d turned up as one in a group of new Taliban recruits. At a training camp somewhere on the Afghanistan border Ahmed had been introduced as their trainer. That first week, he’d started by instructing them in some basic, close-quarter combat, teaching them the quickest ways to kill using only their bare hands. Ahmed demonstrated several lethal moves. One involved driving the palm of the hand into the opponent’s nose with maximum force, so ramming the nose bone up into the brain. It wasn’t necessarily a killer blow, but the damage done would be enough to disable any opponent, whereupon he could be finished off. Ahmed’s real favourite was a savage blow from behind the opponent, using both hands to deliver a karate chop to the base of the neck. The crushing shock wave travelled down the spine, shattering the opponent’s vertebrae and severing the spinal cord. Death was more or less instantaneous.

  A week into the training Ahmed had asked for a volunteer to fight him. Understandably, no one was that keen to do so. So, Ahmed had picked on Ali. Ali was the only Westerner in the whole of his unit, and this, he knew, made him something of an oddity. There were hardly any Afghan recruits here – as this camp was for the international jihad brigade, the foreign fighters. But there were scores of other nationalities – Yemenis, Saudis, Egyptians, Sudanese, Chechens, several Europeans of Pakistani origin and a couple of Muslims from the Balkans. But what really set Ali apart was that he was from Britain and he was black – his great-grandparents had come from Africa – and there were no other black Britons in the training camp.

  Britain was the foremost ally of the Great Satan, America, the arch-enemy of all the fighters drawn to the Afghan jihad. So Ali really felt that he had to prove himself. But he could deal with that. Ever since childhood he’d always felt that he had to prove himself – because he was a black man living in a white man’s country. As a kid he’d lived in a London suburb that was predominantly white. At school he’d learned to fight first and ask questions later if ever he suspected that someone might be ‘dissing’ him. By the age of twelve he was carrying a knife and ‘doing’ drugs. He’d flunked school and drifted into a life of crime, women and alcohol. It was only when a distant uncle had taken him to a mosque in his late teens that his life had taken a drastic new turn.

  Five years later and Ali was a twenty-three-year-old devout Muslim, with a successful career in IT. But he’d still felt that his life in Britain was empty. Since first finding Islam, he’d become increasingly religious and had memorised vast tracts of the Koran. He’d also learned a deep hatred for the non-Muslim West – a society that Ali believed was in terminal decline. It was a society that Ali felt had rejected him, a society that he believed was rotten to the core with immorality and decadence. And, worst of all in Ali’s eyes, it was a society that had turned its back on the word of God. Ali had no wife or children to tie him down, and he had ample savings. Eventually, he had decided to head for Afghanistan, where the Taliban were fighting to build a pure Islamic state.

  Three months later and Ali found himself in this training camp, being challenged by a veteran mujahidin to trial by unarmed combat. Realising that he had no choice but to accept Ahmed’s invitation to fight and make good account of himself, Ali calmly stepped forward. As he and Ahmed squared up to each other, the rest of the brothers formed a ring around them to watch. There was no betting who the other recruits believed was going to win. But Ali just kept reminding himself that back home in London he had accounted for himself well in the training sessions at his local mosque. Before leaving for Afghanistan he’d earned himself a black belt in karate. And he’d beaten guys this big, and bigger, before. Insh’Allah – God willing – he would prevail.

  ‘So,’ shouted a grinning Ahmed, as he prepared to jump Ali, ‘ready yourself for shihada – martyrdom – brother, and for the fruits of Paradise that will then await you!’

  Ahmed was speaking English, the lingua franca of the foreign Taliban in Afghanistan. As many of the brothers were non-Arabic speakers – from Europe, the Balkans, South-East Asia and Africa – he spoke Arabic words only where they were commonly used in Islam. And whenever he used an Arabic expression, he was careful to give the English translation, to help the new recruits learn their Islamic phraseology in Arabic, the original language of the Koran.

  The two men began circling each other now, slowly, watchfully, each waiting to see who would be the one to make the first move.

  Suddenly Ahmed sprang forward and made a grab for Ali, throwing his whole weight behind the charge. As he did so Ali performed a dancing sidestep, and the big Taliban commander lunged past, completely missing his target. In a lightning move Ali grabbed Ahmed’s shoulder, spun him off balance and using all of the big man’s momentum and body weight he hurled him on to the ground. A huge bear of a man, Ahmed fell hard. The ground shook and threw up a big cloud of dust, and Ahmed lay flat out where he’d fallen. There was a moment of deathly silence before Ali swooped down over Ahmed’s prostrate form and made a dummy jab to his nostrils, in a blow that would have driven the nose bone up into the eyes and brain. He did so just to demonstrate his point – just to show that he could have used one of Ahmed’s favourite moves to kill him.

  ‘Allahu Akhbar!’ Ali yelled as he did so. ‘Allahu Akhbar! God is Great! And if you were an infidel you’d be dead by now, which is more than such a godless dog deserves.’

  Calming himself a little, Ali reached down to make sure that Ahmed was all right. Luckily, he’d had his black turban wound tightly around his head, and that is what saved his skull from cracking when it hit the rocky earth. After checking him over, Ali helped the big man to his feet. But he was groggy and unsure of himself for a good few minutes afterwards.

  ‘I knew you were going to fall hard, brother,’ Ali remarked. ‘So I’m glad you’re still with us and not in the land of Paradise yourself. Big guys like you are strong, but you move slowly, and that’s your weak point. It’s the small, quick ones that are more difficult to fight.’

  ‘Al-hamdu Lillah – praise be to God,’ Ahmed replied, leaning on Ali for some support. ‘This brother fights like the fierce lion, like a true mujahid. From now on I am going to call you “Ali the Lion Cub”. And if Allah the All Merciful One so wills it, my brother Lion Cub here shall be one of the chosen ones and he will be first to be shaheed – to be a martyr.’

  After the fight, word went through the training camp like wildfire. Ali al-Britani – Ali the Briton – had beaten Ahmed! Soon, a large crowd of the brothers gathered around him. There was a frenetic religious fervour within Ali’s unit, which was a melting pot of different nationalities. The Taliban’s war in Afghanistan had becom
e a rallying cry, and Muslims from all over the globe were converging to fight the jihad. The brothers trained together, prayed together and would fight and die together. It was a type of brotherhood that Ali had never experienced before. For the first time in his life he had found a family, a new home, where he felt he absolutely belonged.

  Just as the brothers were congratulating Ali on his fighting prowess, Omer, the commander of their unit, came tearing out of a nearby communications bunker, his arms flailing wildly and his eyes bursting out of his sockets with excitement.

  ‘ALLAHU AKHBAR! ALLAHU AKHBAR! ALLAHU AKHBAR!’ he roared, punching the air with both his arms as he did so. ‘By the grace of Allah, brothers! VICTORY! Victory to the NINETEEN LIONS! Come, brothers. Come,’ Omer announced, waving around a sheet of paper and hardly able to contain his excitement. ‘Come hear about our glorious victory over the kafir – the infidels.’

  The brothers gathered around as Omer began to read from the paper.

  ‘This is a communiqué from our brothers,’ he began. ‘It reads: “By The One who allows the seas to scream, the waves to crash, the winds to howl: we will never rest while our homes are flooded by the blood of our slaughtered children. On a historic sunny 11 September morning, 2001, a few men, armed with little more than their faith have brought the greatest modern military might to its knees. Today, nineteen of the most heroic brothers have struck a mighty blow against our enemies. Today, the Nineteen Lions have crashed four passenger airliners, two of them into the mightiest symbols of America – the World Trade Center Twin Towers.”’

  ‘ALLAHU AKHBAR!’ A huge roar went up from the brothers, as they crowded around to hear their commander speak. Over the previous few days they had heard rumours of a coming victory, but none of them had even dreamed that it could be anything as spectacular as this.

  ‘There is more, brothers,’ Omer announced, holding his hands up to silence them. ‘“So, imagine the scene. ‘Fasten your seat belts,’ the sign flashes. The plane is ushered on to the runway, the sound of the engine rises to a crescendo in tandem with the adrenalin surging through your blood. Your pulse is racing, you feel your heart thudding against your chest; you admonish yourself to increase your remembrance of Allah. You pick up an in-flight magazine, act as if you are flicking through it, while once more you go over the details of the operation: soon, there will be no room for error. The minutes move too slowly and you are eager for Paradise. Finally the time arrives. Without a glance you rise from your seat and dart to the cockpit. Securing control of the plane you set your sights on your target. As the building approaches, you look about you at your brothers and all you see is the blazing light shining from their faces. Attempting to conceal your delight you direct the plane towards the north tower. With a prayer you shout, ‘Allahu Akhbar! Allahu Akhbar!’ as you graciously glide into the tower, obliterating an Idol of the Modern Age.”’