Heat

by Ranulph Fiennes

  The fallout did not take long. Both the bedu asked for discharge from the army, and I was pleased to see them go. Two Baluchis and three Omanis applied for transfer to the companies, all of which I encouraged.

  Murad drove Abdullah and me to the other company bases spread about northern Oman, but we were careful to arrive in each case when the British major was away on leave or in hospital.

  By the end of the week two dozen volunteers joined us in the Bidbid barracks, all hardened men with previous Dhofar experience. The Baluchi–Omani mix was even, with a smattering of Zanzibaris. One of the new men was a medical orderly, one a signaller with reasonable English, and two were Land Rover mechanics, which greatly pleased Murad.

  I divided the thirty men into five sections of six, allotting to each a Land Rover driver and section leader. The Baluchis were evenly spread through the sections.

  ‘Nichna alhein al Akhl Recce, willa Baluchi, Ingleezi, Omani willa Zingibari,’ Abdullah told the assembled unit. ‘We are now Recce Family whether we are Baluchi, British, Omani or Zanzibari.’

  I appointed as section leaders, Abdullah, Mohammed of the Beard, the moolah, Ali Nasser, and Salim Khaleefa, a popular corporal and a recent acquisition. This Khaleefa knew a great number of key clerks and storemen, mostly Pakistanis, in all four companies, to whom he introduced me. As a result Recce managed to ‘borrow’ a magnificent supply of military stores while the company officers were still absent. Abdullah surprised me one day by his comment, in perfect English, that ‘when the pussee-cat’s away is the time for play.’

  Within ten days Murad and his four driver-mechanics had all five Land Rovers running with an impressive back-up of spare parts, including a dozen half-shafts. The floorings of each vehicle were carefully covered with full sandbags against blast from land mines.

  Each section commander carried a walkie-talkie with a two-mile range, and we never spoke, only whispered, when using them. Three sections carried BCC30 backpack radios with a Morse code range of some 200 miles.

  We trained by day and by night, although I stressed that in Dhofar’s war zone we would move only by night.

  In the blazing oven of the Omani summer, at 10,000 feet above sea level and in the foliage of the Jebel Akhdar we trained for ten hours a day, often creeping in single file through thorn bush scrub along the floors of sheer-sided ravines wherein no breath of wind disturbed the blistering heat.

  For once the moans of the Baluchis were at one with those of the Omanis, and a noticeable measure of inter-ethnic harmony crept in, for the common denominator was now shared discomfort.

  We trained with live ammunition and with no stultifying safety regulations. Abdullah and the five drivers acted as adoo, setting up trip flares as ambushes. Movement orders were always by hand signal from man to man in bush country, and only when each man knew by heart over a dozen such signals by day did we start to move by night.

  The difficult art of moving in silence in the dark requires great patience, especially when carrying weapons, supplies and heavy zamzamia chaguls (water bags) for a six-day operation in the world’s hottest climate. And, heavily outnumbered by the adoo in the Dhofar Mountains, silence would be vital to avoid detection and destruction.

  Clattering pebbles, loud whispering, a stifled cough or the chink of a weapon against a rock – just one such sound could lead to disaster.

  Each section boss carried on his belt a couple of phosphorous grenades to fling in the direction of a sudden ambush in order to provide instant cover for withdrawal. An added advantage of phosphorous over explosive hand grenades was that an adoo hiding behind a rock might escape shrapnel, but could not escape from phosphorous which, settling in a scorching shower, caused an agonizing burn to any exposed skin which would then continue to eat deep into flesh.

  Constant sweat soon rotted our clothes, and sharp rocks and camel thorns punctured footwear and clothing. However, by the end of November 1968 we were as ready for combat as we would ever be, and our five vehicles left the gates of Bidbid with thirty-six of us waving rifles at the sentries and each man singing his favourite song.

  Sergeant Abdullah left the army to work in his family’s orchards, or so he said. I felt there were other reasons but I was unable to change his mind. We parted the best of friends a week before the platoon headed south and Corporal Salim Khaleefa took over as temporary sergeant.

  CHAPTER 6

  Midway

  ‘This cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate climate can match.’

  — T.E. LAWRENCE

  Our convoy headed south from Izki. Our destination, a deserted army camp known as Thumrait or Midway, once a temporary base for oil prospectors, was 500 miles to the south.

  We passed the turn-off to the Wadi Tayyin, the valley of the aggressive Zayanis, then zigzagged through the southern limits of the Hajar Mountains and on through the wilderness of the Ja’alan and the Sharqiyah to the coastal town of Sur. Once famous for its boat-builders and slave trade, Sur was now a dilapidated place of low, treeless mud flats which John Cooper said we should call at by way of showing the Sultan’s presence.

  Murad regaled us with a fable as we passed by some very fine buildings along the beach which seemed entirely deserted and, in places, badly vandalized.

  ‘They were too proud,’ he said, shaking his finger at the mansions, ‘so Allah told the waves to punish the rich merchants who lived here.’ He then described an infamous storm which his Baluchi grandfather had witnessed at the neighbouring town of Qalhat.

  The monsoon wind had, as it did every year, blown the entire Omani trading fleet back north from Zanzibar. The ships were fully laden and close by their home port of Sur when the great storm struck. The captains tried to anchor offshore, but the cables snapped and every ship was lost with all hands, including the best and most experienced captains and crews of Oman. The business community of Sur never recovered. Over a hundred of their ships, the entire merchant fleet of Sur, was destroyed that day, as were their jobs.

  Where once famous shipwrights had built 400-ton cargo boats, there were now a handful of small fishing dhows being patched up. Abandoned wrecks like scarecrows of the sea pocked the shoreline.

  I later told John Cooper that we had indeed shown the flag, but I hadn’t seen a soul who was interested. Truly a place of past glories.

  Ten years later when working for a magazine, I came back to Sur to record a little-known battle which had caused great dismay in the Bombay headquarters of the East India Company, and even back in Whitehall, for it involved the defeat of a British force by Bedouins.

  In 1820, two years before the Sultan abolished the slave trade in Muscat, it was reported to the British and the Sultan that the rebellious Albu Ali tribe, who lived a little inland of Sur, were pirates. The Sultan asked Captain Thompson, the British officer in charge of anti-piracy in the Gulf, to help. Thompson sent his official messenger to the troublesome tribe’s Sheikh to complain, but the messenger was murdered (quite possibly by bandits).

  Thompson, known by the East India Company and by the navy as a zealous anti-piracy and anti-slavery man and a friend of the famous abolitionist William Wilberforce, decided, despite no hard evidence at all of any piratical acts by any Albu Ali, to mount a punitive expedition against them after landing at Sur which was a few hours’ march from their village.

  The Sultan himself, with two thousand Muscat levies, led the attack which was supported by Thompson with 350 East India Company troops. According to the battlefield guide, himself a wizened Albu Ali who later gave me a tour of the village where it all happened, the result was spectacular.

  Armed with long swords and shields, the entire tribe attacked the Sultan’s force in the date groves with such speed and aggression that they achieved a resounding victory. They wielded their razor-sharp swords with both hands, lopping off heads and limbs and allowing the soldiers no time to reload their single-shot rifles. The British commander was killed along with seven officers and 240 soldiers.

 
; The Sultan was himself badly wounded while trying to save the life of a British soldier. Carrying hundreds of wounded men on litters with them overland, they reached Muscat five days later.

  Thompson, whose impulsive attack had clearly exceeded his orders from Bombay, was hauled back there under arrest for ‘disgraceful conduct’ and was sentenced to receive a public reprimand.

  Nonetheless, in January the following year a retaliatory force of some three thousand troops from Bombay with artillery attacked the Albu Ali’s fortress and, after fierce fighting outside and inside the fortress, a white flag was eventually raised on the battlements. Five hundred tribesmen and two hundred soldiers lay dead, the Sheikh and one hundred and fifty prisoners were taken to Jelali prison and the village was destroyed.

  My Albu Ali guide greatly enjoyed recounting this moment of history, and I certainly came away duly impressed by the bravery of his clan. Back in London I checked out the historical records, which tallied precisely with the old man’s account.

  From Sur we drove through the dune country at the northern end of the Wahiba Sands, passing by, to our east, the one-time pirate villages of the Joasmi, Junuba and the tribes of the Wahiba. Oryx and gazelle frequented these dunes.

  Our route followed the south-eastern limits of the Rubh al Khali (the Empty Quarter sometimes known as the Great Sand Sea) which continues virtually waterless for 1,200 miles into Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates up north.

  For many hours the scenery consisted entirely of gravel and sand with low rock outcrops and, here and there, a scattering of acacia brush and dwarf palms.

  Again, on the instructions of John Cooper, we took a further diversion from the main southerly track to Dhofar, this time heading west through Wahiba country towards the area inhabited by the notoriously hostile Duru, in between which and in the low dunes south of Nizwa, lay Fahud where Omani oil had been found in a rich seam. Fahud’s oil was to save the Sultanate by providing wealth and progress in the nick of time. A decade earlier, when the British-owned oil company first began to establish their infrastructure at Fahud, the Duru threatened trouble, so the oilmen helped the Sultan to finance a private army, then called the Muscat and Oman Field Force, to protect them. This unit grew into the Sultan’s Armed Forces.

  Only a decade before our visit to Fahud, the very question as to who owned the Fahud oil was yet to be settled, for the Imam in Nizwa, backed by Saudi and American oil, made a powerful and traditional claim to the entire interior of Oman. In 1955 the Sultan, backed by the British, successfully led his army from Fahud against the Imamate forces and claimed the Fahud oil.

  Fahud’s oil camps were still flourishing when I flew there in 2015 to lecture to their staff. But I remember a horribly hot day during our 1968 visit when we broke down somewhere east of Jebel Fahud after our visit to the oilmen.

  ‘Not a good place to stop,’ Murad murmured from under the bonnet of our Land Rover as I held out spanners like a surgeon’s assistant. He pointed at the twenty-foot-high wall of the wadi, where a shattered date palm trunk was horizontally lodged between two rock shelves and at least twelve feet above the wadi floor.

  ‘Sail [flash flood],’ Murad explained.

  After our vehicle was back in good health and the men had said their evening prayers, Murad told me of a wadi near Rostaq where many had drowned over the years.

  ‘All is well.’ Murad’s facial glances and his gestures always ensured listeners’ rapt attention. ‘All is dry. The sun is out. The wadi is full of goats happy grazing. A family you know from children passes by with greetings. Then – ’ Murad stiffens in mock alarm – ‘you hear up in the high mountains where the eagles fly the fearful rumble of thunder, wave after wave of invisible sound. Not good. Not at all good. Allah is angry. But for a while all seems calm. Then the noise is there again, but this time it is right behind you, the shaking roar of moving rock which speeds without mercy down upon you in a great brown wave in which already are the bodies of camels, men and children.’

  Every evening at prayer time I tried to find shade to write in my diary, as was my habit on expeditions. I cannot regurgitate with certainty the exact turns of phrase that Murad used, in Arabic in his case, but they are as close an interpretation as possible.

  Had we travelled on to the west of Fahud, we would have found our way into the heart of the greatest of all Arabian deserts, the Rubh al Khali or Empty Quarter, known to the bedu as the Sands. But along its eastern approach there lies the 100-mile drainage sink of floods from the Hajar Mountains. On evaporating over centuries of great heat, layers of salty crust have covered stinking black mud several feet deep, a quagmire which has drowned many a camel, bedu and wild animal and over which no sensible driver would take a vehicle. This is the notorious Umm as Samim (the Mother of Poison).

  The drive south of the Wahiba sands was notable for its lack of scenery or landmarks of any sort. Often the soldiers dozed off on their precarious perches on bed bundles, machine guns and kitbags. These gravel deserts, known as the Jiddat al Harasis, stretch between the coast to the east and the Empty Quarter to the west, and we drove at whatever speed the widely varying surface allowed.

  Travelling through this all but waterless wasteland in 1931, the diplomat and explorer Bertram Thomas revealed to the outside world the existence of a ragged tribe of nomads, the Harasis, with their own language and Stone Age survival methods. Their origins were non-Arab and more akin to the Yemeni origins of the Qara jebali tribes.

  On his own journey to Dhofar via this route, Patrick Brook, my fellow recruit to SAF, had fallen asleep at night and then fallen out of his doorless Land Rover, unobserved by the equally sleepy driver beside him. By the time his absence was noticed and the alarm raised, poor Patrick had watched the rear lights of the convoy disappear south in clouds of dust.

  Both he and I had been trained in strictly disciplined advances over North German countryside, moving very often in single file, 60-ton tank after 60-ton tank, progressing at a strictly controlled speed. But now every Sultanate vehicle moved at maximum velocity, desperate not to become bogged down in powdery sand. And ideally never moving in some previous track, whether recent or several years old. This meant a wild cavalcade advancing criss-cross without discipline over a frontage up to a mile or so wide for a desert journey by day and night of over 550 miles as the buzzard flies.

  Often enough a vehicle would break through the thin gravel surface crust and crash into low gear, leading to overheating and delay.

  Additionally, so as not to drive in the worst ruts and in order to avoid the choking dust set up by a previous vehicle, each Land Rover or lorry drives to the side of, rather than behind, the others. Thus the task of searching for lost detritus, such as Patrick, in the dark had to be done with care so that he wasn’t missed altogether by the questing headlights of the returning convoy.

  He was, on being picked up, as extremely relieved as he was embarrassed.

  We spent two days and a part of each of two nights crossing the Harasis. John Cooper had allocated to Recce Platoon two extra drivers with their respective vehicles, a camouflage-painted water tanker and a standard Bedford 3-ton lorry carrying a dozen live goats and 10-gallon drums of diesel, lashed down so as not to crush the goats.

  One goat a day had its throat slit before being cooked over an open fire of hatab (brushwood collected from wadi beds that we passed).

  Sometimes an Arab (never a Baluchi) would break out in song in the back of our Land Rover. Murad would always join in. I only diarized the words, or rather my translation of them, from one song which was oft repeated during my years with Recce.

  Heywah the sun is silver

  where the date palms shade the land

  and the women carry water from the wells

  Heywah the men are riding

  on their camels to the war

  and they’ll die or kill with honour, Insha’Allah

  They beat out the rhythm of their songs with their gun butts or their open palms on the hot meta
l sides of the Land Rover.

  One night, in the wilderness of the nej’d, I heard the high pure song of a lark, but by day we saw only hawks and massive vultures, the funeral directors of the desert.

  Somewhere off to the east we passed by Masirah Island and its fast diminishing population of turtles and, much later to the west, the isolated Sultan’s camp of Mugshin on the very edge of the Empty Quarter dune-land. When in the 1950s Wilfred Thesiger reached Mugshin, he recorded, ‘Skeletons of trees, brittle powdery branches fallen and half-buried in the sand and deposits of silt left by ancient floods.’ He noted that no rain had fallen there for twenty-five years, although once a great water course had flowed through the Umm al Hait (the Mother of Life). Here, a few years before, a detachment of home guard askars had been dropped off for a six-month stint at this dead-end spot, ideal for a dedicated Trappist monk in search of a spell of uninterrupted navel contemplation and disgusting-tasting water.

  Somehow, due to record-keeping, army clerks being sacked, or because of sheer incompetence, this unfortunate detachment’s existence at Mugshin was forgotten at Muscat HQ. Their radio set failed to work, they had no vehicles and no bedu visited them. There were a few date palms around the mud fort and local fauna, including lizards and foxes, for sustenance, which was lucky because nine months passed by before some relative of a missing askar started to ask questions, and the forgotten few were retrieved. In Britain this would have been a tabloid front-page scandal and there would have been a government inquiry. In Oman there was only cynicism, shoulder shrugging and much raucous laughter each time the tale was retold.

  The Empty Quarter stretched away north to Saudi Arabia for a thousand miles from our track. In all that desert there was nothing permanent, and the wandering bedu, who dared patrol its wastes, traditionally lived for inter-tribal warfare, feuds, gossip and camels.

  Had oil been discovered here or down south in the mountains of Dhofar, nomadic life would quickly have changed, as it already had for the northern bedu of the Gulf States. But, despite spending $40 million on exploration between 1953 and the mid 1960s, the Iraq Petroleum Company found no economically viable well. Only Fahud, way up north, hit the jackpot.