Heat

by Ranulph Fiennes

  Said warned me to avoid sleeping in caves if there was a reasonable alternative. The main danger was from the tics which could bite into your skin without you feeling anything and then, in sucking your blood, they infect you. Some cause raging irritation and fever, others deep ulcers and lesions. They are hosted by the foxes, goats and leopards that frequent the caves. Other denizens include hyenas, civet-cats and lynxes. Wolves, Said told me, usually keep to the more open places but are the worst predators of cattle.

  Blood-sucking flies, an unfortunate by-product of the Qara monsoon, forced the adoo down to the foothills where our patrols became correspondingly more dangerous. Tim Landon once sent us to the western edge of the plain to ambush the spring of Mugshayl close to the sea. The date was 20 July 1969, and on the surface of the moon that night at the Sea of Tranquillity, Neil Armstrong planted a flag in the lunar dust.

  Monsoon waves crashed against the cliffs below me as, unaware of this historic event, I watched the moon’s reflection dancing on the waves. In that part of the Indian Ocean dorsal-finned Indian rorqual whales, over a hundred feet long and the largest of all living creatures, cry into the night like humans. Great mammoths, and even vicious hammer-headed sharks, provide food for fifteen-foot-long sawfish with six-foot saws. These lesser monsters attack with speed and rip their giant victims’ bellies out. Then they feed at leisure on the entrails of the threshing leviathans.

  One day our platoon was ordered to the Salalah Palace, where the Sultan greeted me in front of all the men lined up by our vehicles.

  ‘These are your men?’ he asked. His English was without an accent. He shook my hand, his turban at the level of my shoulders. His face was gentle like his voice. He was little in stature and, in his billowing pantaloons, a touch dumpy – an Arab version of Queen Victoria. Above his fine white beard there twinkled the warm, brown eyes of Father Christmas. Since my job was to fight and possibly die for him, I was pleased that I found myself instinctively liking him.

  ‘Yes, Your Highness.’ I bowed as I would to the Queen. ‘The Reconnaissance Unit.’ After an English education in India, he had ruled Oman wisely for thirty-five years in the days of no oil revenue. Now the money was beginning to pour in, but cautious by nature, he had no desire to rush into crash programmes of modernization with undue speed. I felt respect and loyalty for him, knowing that I would continue to fight his enemies and, if necessary, die in his service despite disliking his shortcomings. I had often blackened his name when we were refused extra food to give to half-starved jebalis and when issued only aspirins for the sick and dying.

  His son Qaboos was somewhere in the palace kept well away from any potential plotters. But, unknown to the Sultan, his own chief intelligence officer, Tim Landon, whom he permitted to visit Qaboos weekly for tea as they had been friends back at Sandhurst, was the chief co-ordinator of secret British plans to replace the Sultan with his son as soon as was humanly possible.

  Back in the 1950s the Middle East section of the Foreign Office had contrived the successful removal of Sheikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi when his lack of reform and progress had helped the arguments of UAE revolutionaries, and Whitehall had engineered a coup to replace him with his more progressive younger brother. So they had form!

  Now that the British handover of Aden to a leftist Yemeni regime had enabled Russia and China to reach the point of imminent takeover in Dhofar, Whitehall had woken up rather late in the day to the Soviet-inspired threat to the Omani side of the oil-vital Straits of Hormuz. So a repeat of the Zayed coup was put in place, involving Tim Landon, senior representatives of PDO (Shell) in Muscat, Qaboos himself, the Wali (Mayor) of Salalah, and senior British officers in the Sultan’s Armed Forces.

  The coup was planned for the summer of 1970 and, once completed, massive military support would be sought to defeat the adoo. This would include the SAS, a helicopter squadron, jets from the Jordanian Air Force, and thousands of crack ground troops from the Shah of Persia (Iran).

  The problem was that, for various reasons, none of this could be put in place until after the monsoon season. Yet the Marxist forces were all but ready for their superior ground forces in Dhofar to crush the Sultan’s Army before the New Year dawned.

  Whitehall’s main action man on the ground in Dhofar was Tim Landon, and he had the ability to thwart the subjugation by PFLOAG of the jebali tribes in Eastern Dhofar, including the Eastern Mahra and the Bait Howairat to the east of the Midway Road.

  The PFLOAG leader entrusted to suppress any rebellion against the adoo in the East was their political commissar, Salim Amr, once a worker in RAF Salalah, who had risen through cunning and cruelty to the notice of PFLOAG recruiters and had been sent to Odessa in the Soviet Union for training. Now he was appointed overall PFLOAG commissar in the Eastern Dhofar region.

  Amr ruled the east through his Idaara execution squads, all trained in the Yemen by the East German HVA in the art of persuasive torture. His local liaison officer was Musallim Ali. I knew these names well because of a subsequent close and lethal encounter with both men.

  Tim Landon decided to trap Salim Amr by a series of ambushes which were set up in caves overlooking a long-standing Fiend Force ambush target in Amr’s tribal region, the spring of Arzat.

  David Bayley, one-time Yemeni War mercenary and current commander of ‘A’ Company, was the first to take a stint in the Arzat cave system. I met him the day after his return to base. His face was a mass of red spots, many bleeding. His arms, ankles and neck were similarly marked and he scratched furiously at the livid blotches as I watched.

  ‘The little bastards eat you alive from dawn to dusk,’ he muttered. ‘The caves are a living hell.’

  And they were. Despite the mosquito nets wrapped around us, the flying ticks were small enough to wriggle through the mesh in their hundreds. At dusk, leaving us all itching in the stifling heat, they disappeared and a whining hum announced the arrival of the cave mosquitoes.

  One night, returning from an Arzat ambush, one of Murad’s drivers overturned his vehicle in an unseen ditch and Hamed Sultan was crushed to death. We all sorely missed him.

  Prodded by Tim Landon, the Sultan finally allowed me a large issue of supplies to give to the half-starved inmates of the foothill villages. Over our shoulders we carried sacks of flour and rice, sugar and tea, milk powder and spices by night from the Land Rovers to village headmen. Tim also gave me cash and some jebalis began, for the first time, to tell me of their anger with the adoo. ‘We do not like them, but what can we do? The government doesn’t help us, until now, nor give us protection. We have so little food, but we must give what we have to the PFLOAG men or they beat us. If we pray, they torture and even kill us. They rape our daughters. They are blasphemers.’

  Radio Aden announced that the ‘freedom fighters’ of Dhofar had located a Sultan’s propaganda group who were trying to bribe the simple folk of the mountains to turn against PFLOAG. These brave freedom fighters would, however, soon eliminate these imperialist lackeys.

  We made the mistake one night of telling a woman in one village that we would bring her starving children and sick husband more food and medicine at the same time the next night.

  The result was a narrow escape from a well-positioned ambush. Only Salim Khaleefa’s acute observation at the very last minute saved us from a wipe-out, but our guide, Said bin Ghia, was shot through the wrist and two of our Baluchi were badly wounded before we escaped from the village. I took over the machine gun while Said Salim carried the portly Said bin Ghia over his shoulder and back to the Land Rovers. Next day I found that a bullet had split apart the butt of my rifle.

  Tim, at a weekly ambush discussion, warned me to be hyper-alert at all times in the light of the adoos’ growing strength. I assured him this was already the case, but to ensure my future avoidance of adoo traps, he recounted two tales about late friends of his.

  The previous year the SAF officer Hamish Emslie had led a Land Rover patrol in the gravel deserts just north of the scrub-zo
ne, an area then considered fairly safe, when an adoo group had fired a 3.5-inch rocket at the lead vehicle, killing all the occupants including Hamish.

  ‘And,’ Tim added, ‘Alan Woodman, down in the forests of the Wadi Naheez on foot patrol was hit by a bullet in his guts. I remember hearing his voice, very faint, on our radio calling for help. But help was, as always, slow in coming and Alan died in great pain . . . So, Ran, I repeat, take no unnecessary risks. Be invisible.’

  Al Ghassani, the notorious leader of PFLOAG in Hauf, made sure that the fate of all jebalis who failed to obey his new regime was made known throughout Dhofar. Old men had their loins, backs and stomachs held down on beds of hot charcoal, others were thrown over cliffs after being flogged, and still others had their eyes gouged out with hot spoons in front of their families. Fear was an important weapon to help PFLOAG in the difficult struggle against such a deep-rooted faith as Islam.

  Setting up his base in Eastern Dhofar, where no army patrol had ever ventured, at the mountain village of Qum, Salim Amr and his brown-uniformed Idaaraat drew up their lists of known and likely ‘traitors’. When the time was ripe, he had only to point his finger at an individual to condemn him, or her, to death or worse. He had no need to rape a pretty girl who took his fancy, for a word to the head of her family was enough to ensure her favours.

  The one fly in Salim Amr’s ointment was, perversely enough, the local PFLOAG liaison officer Musallim Ali in the eastern sector, an earlier member of the Dhofar Liberation Front nationalists. He was clearly anti-Sultan, but not, to Salim Amr’s mind, sufficiently in tune with PFLOAG’s extreme policies and aims to fight, not only for the freedom of Dhofar, but for a united Marxist community from Aden to Kuwait with full ownership of its own oil rights.

  Musallim Ali’s belief was that they, the jebalis, must indeed get rid of the Sultan and his foreign friends, but without accepting the new burden of Marxist Maoism. Furthermore, Musallim was reported to have said, ‘Marxists say, “What is yours is mine” and take it. But we Dhofaris have always said, “Take all that I have. You are welcome to it.”’

  A powerful group of Eastern Qara fighters under their influential leader, Hafidh bin Abdullah, backed Musallim Ali and suggested at public meetings that they would remain loyal to PFLOAG only for as long as their traditional Islamic beliefs were not attacked, as was clearly happening in the rest of Dhofar.

  Al Ghassani was aware that his assault on Salalah could go ahead only with the full participation of the eastern tribes, and he relied on Commissar Salim Amr to root out quickly all the eastern troublemakers and eliminate all the religious reactionaries. In mid-September the monsoon began to lift, revealing the Qara Mountains in all their post-monsoon glory. Verdant, high rolling downs above steaming jungle and menace in the valleys below.

  Unpleasant things now began to happen for, despite our best attempts at blocking the trails from the west, many heavily laden camel caravans had crossed through the Central Dhofar jebel, along with well-trained armed units and their heavy weapons. Meanwhile on the Sultan’s side, no extra men, weapons or even a helicopter was added to our strength.

  Adoo land mines now peppered the plain to deadly effect, and, for the first time, anti-personnel mines were placed around the garrison camps of the three companies. Little plastic mines no bigger than torches, but sufficient to blow a man’s leg into his stomach, to tear off his scrotum and to blind him. And adoo execution squads came by night to coastal villages with target lists, so that even inside the perimeter wire of Salalah town, many civilians lived in fear.

  In the Salalah suburb of Arzat, one Sultanate guide, Naseeb, was shot at point-blank range by his own brother, an adoo squad leader.

  Spike ‘Muldoon’ Powell, our only Australian officer, decided that, although we in the Sultan’s Army had no anti-personnel mines of our own, he would make some. Using empty beer cans, torch batteries, detonators, electric wire and plastic explosive, he formed a production line in his office.

  I was given fifteen such ‘mines’ to plant a few months later and very nearly trod on one when, just before leaving Dhofar, the time came to remove them.

  I only know of two victims of these ‘Muldoon’ mines. One was an armed adoo and the other a company soldier who went to urinate where he had been warned not to. He was badly hurt and his officer, a friend of mine, Eddie Viturakis, entered the minefield and dragged him clear, luckily avoiding other mines. Soon afterwards Eddie was murdered by one of his own soldiers, a drug addict, who then fled to the adoo.

  Tim Landon told me that, eight weeks before, a group of five hundred uniformed adoo with two hundred camels had crossed into the eastern sector of the jebel with heavy weapons that included Meemtoos, US Army Browning M2 .50 machine guns (originally captured by the Viet Cong), alongside British 81mm mortars.

  Rakhyut, the only Sultanate stronghold on the coastline to the west of Salalah to hold out against adoo attacks, now fell to the adoo. Only a few Sultanate askars had defended the fort which was easily overrun and the Muscat Regiment was too overstretched even to attempt to retake the town. Later reports detailed the execution of the garrison including the town governor. This left PFLOAG undisputed masters of two-thirds of Dhofar, with every likelihood of imminent overall victory by way of an all-out attack on Salalah once the eastern sector was secured.

  Our colonel did his best to prepare for the worst, and on 17 September, once the mountains were finally clear of mist, all available army units were mustered at either end of the Midway Road, as that dangerous trail over the mountains was called, the only link between the northern deserts and the Plain of Salalah. There was no other way that the Sultan could receive supplies other than by lorry convoys over this trail, for he had no cargo planes and no navy, other than a single armed dhow.

  The adoo had mined the entire length of this road over the Qara and had laid well-planned ambushes in readiness for the army’s post-monsoon attempts to clear the way for our convoys.

  The colonel’s plan was to send ‘B’ Company, now led by Taweel (the lanky Royal Marine captain recently posted from Britain), to open the road from its northern end, while ‘C’ Company with elements of ‘A’ Company and my Recce Platoon would advance from the Plain and the southern foothills.

  Up north, Taweel was caught with most of his men on open ground some four miles into the mountains at a notorious ravine known as Ambush Corner. He had with him an old 25-pounder cannon (polite name ‘artillery piece’) and, as its three-man crew swung it round to blast off at an adoo machine gun, they were wiped out by another hidden adoo group.

  Caught in crossfire, any position other than lying flat in the grass was suicidal for Taweel, so he was unable to crawl back to his Land Rover radio to call up the Sultan’s two jets for support. He could only lie and watch his men being picked off all about him. He noted that, on striking the ground, some bullets exploded, scattering rock and shrapnel. This was a new addition to the adoo’s arsenal. One such bullet set Taweel’s ammunition lorry on fire, and as the flames roared towards the load of artillery shells, the Baluchi driver bravely tried to douse the inferno. He soon fell with a bullet through his head.

  A junior British officer, just arrived from Muscat, managed to wriggle back to the radio and the jets soon arrived. The adoo melted away from that particular ambush.

  Meanwhile, at the other end of the road some five miles south of Ambush Corner, we reached the last of the foothills before the track began its steep climb up the mountainside. All hell broke loose at that point. I led all the men of Recce in four well-coordinated sections ahead of the company lorries. We found that great boulders had been rolled down to block the track. We managed to shift these with difficulty while under fire. Several firefights later, we reached Ambush Corner, met up with Taweel’s survivors and waved on the convoy. Lorry after lorry rolled past, screaming in low gear down the infamous ravine.

  The convoys would take three days to complete this vital resupply run. Each night, with our long-time guide,
Hamed al Khalas, we moved out from the track to ambush likely adoo ambushers the following day. As we lay motionless not even swatting at flies, the heat was all but unbearable. We longed for dusk.

  At one point Hamed spotted six armed adoo in uniform moving from hut to hut in a village below our hide. I had only to call in artillery fire, but hesitated when I heard the loud laughter of children coming from the huts, and so funked making the call. My men, even Said Salim, were extremely annoyed by my reluctance to engage such a lucky target. Once the adoo unit left the village and moved into the surrounding scree, I did bring artillery fire down on them, but by then it was too late to be accurate.

  Soon after the road clearance, I heard that a minor mutiny had occurred in the ‘B’ Company camp, and the men had refused to serve under Taweel any more. They were sure he had a djinn (spirit), and too many men had been killed since he took over the company. He was forced to leave the camp and his men threatened to shoot him if he returned.

  The colonel flew out to ‘B’ Company to calm things down and to appoint another officer as the new company commander. He also rearranged the companies to form a loose blocking ‘line’ of outposts across the entire jebel from sea to desert at the point where the forested zone was at its narrowest. He called this the Leopard Line.

  As during the previous year, I was given the entire nej’d region of semi-desert, some one hundred miles stretching from the northern cliffs of the Qara to the sand dunes of the Rubh al Khali, to block with my force of six Land Rovers, thirty men including drivers, one 3-ton ammunition and supplies lorry, and a water tank bowser.