Tim went on to impress on me that the mission he was giving us was absolutely critical to the timing of major plans then underway to save Dhofar for the Sultanate if the anticipated big PFLOAG attack on Salalah could somehow be delayed. The only way to do this was to defer the PFLOAG elimination of the dissenters within their eastern ranks. Sahayl, in Tim’s opinion, offered him the first chance of putting a meaningful spanner in the adoo works.
We must go at once, guided by Sahayl, to his village some fourteen miles into adoo territory and south-east of the PFLOAG base at Qum.
The mountains between O’bet and our target were a maze of crooked ravines, but Sahayl knew them by day or by night like the back of his hand. There were scattered villages and adoo camps, but he would avoid them.
We were to set out at once and reach the village by dawn, when two key PFLOAG commissars were due to arrive there with important orders from PFLOAG in Hauf. Until his defection, Sahayl had been a trusted member of the local militia, and he was confident that Commissar Salim Amr and his local liaison officer would arrive there ‘bukra qabl dhuhr’ (tomorrow by noon). We were to take both men alive, Tim stressed, and with whatever documents they carried intact. If we were compromised we should call for air support to cover our escape back to the safety of the open nej’d north of O’bet.
Salim Khaleefa spoke no English, but he understood the movement of Tim’s finger on the map as he pointed out the route from O’bet to the target. In a low voice he asked me how we could trust this Mahra. It could easily be a deadly trap.
I knew, as did Salim, of past occasions when SAF patrols had walked into carefully prepared ambushes and suffered many dead, even though their guide, out front, had survived unscathed. This was why SAF policy had recently been to accept new volunteer jebali guides only after a probation period under the surveillance of other, more trusted, guides, like fat Said bin Ghia and Sultan bin Nashran.
When I put this to Tim, he gave me a hard stare. ‘I trust Sahayl,’ he said quietly, ‘and you should too. I recognize hatred when I see it, and Sahayl hates Commissar Salim Amr. This is a huge opportunity.’
‘Why Recce?’ I pressed Tim.
He laughed. ‘You should be pleased, Ran. It shows what I think of your team’s record on and off the jebel. Also, due to your clever new “Ali trail” and ramp, the adoo will never suspect any army action coming from the nej’d. They know where all the other companies are from hour to hour. I must have these two men, Ran, and whatever the commissar’s documents contain, and we must strike while the iron is hot. So good luck and good hunting.’ He then had to fly back to Salalah.
I briefed all the men, and some showed considerable alarm. Salim quietened them down, but they glared at Sahayl with open mistrust. None of us spoke jebali, as Nashran had gone on leave to Salalah, so we had to communicate with Sahayl using hand signals. Only he knew the exact location of our target and the best route to get there through adoo-infested country and, vitally, by dawn the next day. Any movement in such an area would invite the speedy presence of adoo cut-off groups and, with no possible help from the three beleaguered companies, we would not last long once the single active SAF fighter from Salalah had gone to refuel.
As soon as our five Land Rovers were ready, the ammunition doled out and water bags filled, we drove south-east from Thumrait through an area of nej’d where the only vehicle tracks were those we had ourselves made a year before in the rocky canyons and gravel hills between the wide watersheds of the Rubkhut and Jazal valleys. We then headed south beside the cliffs of the Wadi Waghala, where I had once shamed myself by suffering from some mild form of heat-induced dizziness in mid-patrol through not wearing my shemagh. Mubarreq reminded me of this with obvious relish.
Murad hid the vehicles three miles north of the little-known spring of O’bet at the very head of a tributary to the Wadi Jazal. This was closer than we would normally drive to the mountains, but a strong wind blew from the south and the wadi walls would also deaden the noise of our vehicles.
Just as we were leaving, Murad approached me, shook my hand and muttered, ‘Go well, Bakheit. Be safe. Insha’Allah.’ This he had never done before and I found it both touching and slightly ominous.
The platoon was as silent as Sahayl, despite their unusually heavy loads. I had left our Browning heavy machine gun and the 2-inch mortar behind, but had taken all our light machine guns and 200 rifle rounds for each man, which was more than normal.
Sahayl kept trying to chatter to me as we slowly scrambled up the rough cliff path, but I hissed ‘Uskoot’ (‘Shut up’) at him. All he needed to do was to lead us to the right place by the best route and get us there in darkness. Tim had estimated some eight hours from O’bet at ‘imshee jebali’ (the pace of a jebali).
Once up the cliff, sweating profusely, I checked all the men, then beckoned Sahayl to lead on. He seemed always to go too fast or reacted childishly when asked to slow down, and then went too slowly. If only I could follow a compass bearing or Nashran as usual, and not this mercurial Mahra.
After nearly an hour Ali Nasser ran up to me and pointed back the way we had come. In a moment and, it seemed, far out over the nej’d, a green illuminating flare shot up. Then another, and then a third.
‘That is the second time,’ Ali whispered. ‘Murad must be in trouble.’ We had agreed on total radio silence. I cursed, for I had only one option. I told Salim Khaleefa to listen out on his radio but to stay where he was. Lightly laden with only my section, I would return to Murad’s hide to see what was wrong. Then I would double back. We should still have time.
Going down the cliff was far quicker and Murad was, in fact, fine. He had neither seen nor heard the flares, but from his position within the high-cliffed wadi that was not surprising. So we trudged back south again and arrived with Salim none the wiser as to the reason for the flares and having wasted three precious hours. The men were clearly on edge. None gave me their normal patrol grins. The flares had made them even more apprehensive. We were surely walking into an adoo trap. Thirty of us in enemy heartland and easily cut off from the comparative safety of the nej’d.
My signaller, normally a smiling and imperturbable man, even under heavy fire, whispered in my ear at a brief halt, ‘We are going to our death, Sahib’ (not ‘Bakheit’, I noted). ‘This evil Mahra is well fed – proof that he is of the adoo. We must go back now or it will be too late.’
‘Abadan. Kull shay ba stawee zehn,’ (‘All will be well’) I told him. But time was flying and I felt that the whole affair was going dangerously wrong.
Sahayl persevered. He knew every minor fork in each new ravine where goats had made countless narrow foraging trails through the thick scrub. I was glad in these sweaty labyrinths of camel thorn that I did not suffer from claustrophobia. The mosquitoes attacked in humming clouds and a sticky heat emanated from the dark foliage.
There were, I knew, many small villages dotted about this Bait Fiah land and there were herdsmen who spent nights alone near their flocks. Yet Sahayl kept us unerringly clear of any human – at least as far as I could tell. And his overall pace settled down. We made good ground and the men were tiring with their unaccustomed loads. With three hours to dawn we pressed on. Salim Khaleefa came to warn me that the men wished to rest.
‘Too bad,’ I told him. ‘We’re all tired but if we’re not in position by dawn, we’ll be dead. Tell the men that.’
Sahayl followed high grassy shoulders above the ravines, but kept low enough to avoid being unnecessarily skylined. Towards three o’clock we moved through high open grassland and smelt the acrid tang of burning dung, which was a sure sign of a village or at least of goat herders keeping mosquitoes away.
To the south-east a patch of spreading grey sky heralded dawn. Sahayl, coming to a lone and withered fig tree, gave me a gaptoothed grin of delight. He pointed immediately ahead. Peering through the semi-gloom, I made out the bowl of a rounded valley below us with the dark silhouettes of Mahra huts dotted about.
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sp; As I turned to signal with both hands on my head for the section leaders to be briefed, a pinpoint of light pulsed from some high ground close by, but only for a couple of seconds. I might have imagined it, for I was on edge.
Merely to position our four sections around the grassy rim of the bowl, on the floor of which lay the village, would be stupid, for we would be in danger from any adoo on the still higher ground on all sides. We must hide ourselves in that higher ground from where we could still cover all approaches to the village.
One section climbed up a hill to an outcrop of boulders, from where they could cover the west side of the village with back-up from Mohammed the Beard’s section.
Ali Nasser’s section settled in a clump of thorn and scattered rocks along the shoulder of our approach route, while Salim Khaleefa’s men followed mine up to high ground to the east with good cover for his machine guns. Spotting even higher ground, I moved wearily as dawn broke to a thicket on the hilltop and just by a well-used village approach path which I only noticed too late to be able to move anywhere further away.
Said Salim found a passageway into the thicket, which turned out to be hollow inside with an old jebali cowering in one corner and, dotted around, piles of ashes from past dung fires. Said Salim held his knife against the neck of the jebali to prevent him from making a sound.
Mubarreq, who had been carrying our machine gun and 500 rounds on belts all night, looked tired, which was unusual. He showed me a leather pouch with the jebali’s flint and tinder. ‘Still warm,’ he muttered. ‘He made that light signal that we saw. Maybe to signal to the adoo below. Let Said slit his throat now.’
Sahayl entered the thicket last. He clasped the jebali to his chest and they rubbed their cheeks together.
‘They are brothers,’ Said said. ‘Do not trust them, Bakheit.’
Leaving Said on watch, I joined the others for a short sleep as the heat mounted and the mosquitoes bit and filled their stomachs with our blood.
The sun was well up when Said woke me. I shook my head to clear it. The realization of our situation was far from pleasant. Humming birds darted among the white flowers which sprouted on ivy-like creepers in the ceiling of our camel-thorn hide. I noticed that Sahayl’s brother had one pink and glazed eye.
Through a break in the thorns I looked south at the scattered huts below, and beyond them over the rim of the Qara to the Plain of Salalah stretching in a heat haze all the way to the coast of the Indian Ocean.
Men in dark uniforms with slung rifles moved about between the huts below. In two years of ambushes none of us had ever seen such an easy and tempting target. But we all knew the penalty of firing a shot. Our only hope lay in concealment. If and when our target group arrived, we must do our best to remain unobserved and catch them unawares. Truly a tall order but, as Said Salim had often told me, ‘With Allah, all things are possible.’
Women with goats and youths with camels left the village and wandered their grazing animals into the surrounding hills.
Two teenagers with flintlock rifles came along the path which passed within touching distance of our thicket. Mubarreq let them see the black snout of his machine gun as I beckoned them into our hide with a welcoming smile. They looked terrified, but came without a sound. Said had them squat beside Sahayl’s brother, and when they began to natter he shut them up with one hand clasped meaningfully about his knife.
Over the next two hours as the hide grew unbearably hot, seven more passers-by approached our thicket, saw my finger at my lips as well as our weapons pointed at them, and joined our ever more crowded little hell-hole.
Mubarreq scanned the village through binoculars and spotted two smartly uniformed men arrive from the west and enter the biggest, most central hut. And beyond the village, we noted some sixty men busily digging along a salient hill-line to the south presumably in order to prepare an ambush in readiness for an expected army attack from the Plain.
My suspicious mind lingered on the thought that Sahayl might be the key bait in an adoo plot to persuade Tim to send in the army. They would have assumed that, if such a ruse worked, there were no army elements to the north, or indeed anywhere, who were capable of such an attack, except from the Plain of Salalah.
At that point a highly embarrassing personal emergency interfered with my wandering thoughts. Since waking, I had felt sick with the familiar dull pain of lurking diarrhoea in my bowels. Normally I would have relieved myself as quickly as possible, but in such circumstances I had spent the past hours of boiling heat fighting against the mounting need to release a torrent of my stomach contents.
The hide already stank of body sweat and was crowded with jebalis. The last two arrivals were standing stooped as there was no space available to squat. Only Mubarreq was lying prone on his stomach with his machine gun half out of the thicket and covering the path. Said, my signaller, and I sat watching our front.
The pain in my rectum stabbed at me. I groaned despite the need for silence and knew that I could not delay a moment longer.
Scooping some small rocks around my buttocks, I lowered my trousers as my insides gave way in a noisy splatter of foul muck. Flies soon covered the wet rocks. The relief was immense but, as the pain diminished, I felt dizzy and desperate to lie down. There was no paper, so I used stones.
I hoisted my trousers up not a moment too soon, for Said pointed at the path. Two tall men approached moving fast. I released the safety catch on my rifle and slowly swung it round. I knew immediately that these were Tim’s much vaunted targets for the lead man’s cap sported the polished red hexagonal badge of a political commissar. We must take them alive.
Some fifteen yards away they stopped, no doubt spotting movement in our thicket. The commissar was tall, his face scarred and his rifle, cradled in his elbow, was a Kalashnikov, a single burst from which would send a rip of hollow-nosed bullets through flesh and bone and guts. A dribble of sweat stung my left eye, but I was certain that the commissar was staring straight at me.
‘Drop your weapons or we will kill you.’ I kept my voice low, and aimed my gun at his stomach.
He moved with snake-speed, bending low as his rifle swung to face me, and I pressed the trigger. As though hit by a sledgehammer, his whole body arched back, his limbs spread puppet-like and he disappeared into the long grass. The other man’s gun was already pointed at me when I fired again, as did Mubarreq and Said Salim.
I saw his face ripped in an instant into a red mask, his nose and eyes smashed back into his brains. Bullets thudded into his body as it settled across a thorn bush on the far side of the path.
Said instantly left our thicket and retrieved from both corpses their weapons, caps and, from the commissar, a leather satchel stuffed with documents. Said pushed them through the thorns to me and took a grenade off his belt to place, with its pin removed, under one of the bodies.
My signaller called Salalah for support, giving them our approximate location. I called the other sections telling them to withdraw at once and, fatigue forgotten, we all broke from our hides to fan out in a long, straggling, undisciplined line in order to flee north. Speed was our only hope to avoid being cut off on the way to the nej’d, and we moved with the wings of fear.
At the next ridge line shots zipped over our heads and, briefly, we all fired back, lightening the load of our ammunition. Sahayl led, as he had before, and our sections soon maintained a tactical distance between us, as in training. Within half an hour the two little SAF fighters buzzed our rear as we fled back to the safety of the nej’d, and the adoo never quite caught up with us.
Back in Thumrait, the men slept like dead men. So did Sahayl and his half-blind brother. Three of the men developed some form of heatstroke, and had to be flown from Thumrait to the Salalah medics.
Tim flew back the next day to collect Sahayl and the captured documents. He regretted that we had failed to bring the commissars back alive, but he was clearly delighted with the papers.
The green flares, he explained, had be
en fired by the Beaver pilot sent out by Patrick Brook and our colonel when he learnt that our patrol was less than thirty men, and not fifty as he had presumed, for I had forgotten to signal Salalah to let them know that I had left a dozen men to guard the Dehedoba trail, and others to protect Murad and his drivers. Quite why the adoo had clearly been expecting us (but from the south) Tim never established, but he assumed that it was due to Sahayl’s escape to Salalah.
Months later both Sahayl and his brother were killed at a waterhole, and their father, a Mahra tribal sheikh, was executed soon after our successful patrol.
But Sahayl’s personal quest of revenge against Salim Amr had far-reaching effects, as Tim had hoped. Other Mahra jebalis in the east followed Sahayl’s example, and Tim soon had a thriving spy service in the midst of the adoo as they attempted to de-Islamize the mountains east of the Midway Road. Tim learnt exact locations of major adoo groups and when PFLOAG VIPs were likely to be there so that our two fighters could target them with bombs and rockets. Other anti-Marxists, even including some trained at PFLOAG camps, came over to the Sultan’s side.
The result was that the adoo were so busy trying to prevent revolt in and defection from their own camps that they were caught on the wrong foot a few months later when the British plan to oust the Sultan and replace him with Qaboos, his half-Dhofari son, was successfully executed.
Tim and various Salalah-based troops entered the palace with minimal challenges from the Palace Guard, and nobody was killed. The Sultan himself was wounded in one foot, but a British officer friend of his held his hand while the wound was dressed, before accompanying the venerable old ruler to a waiting RAF plane, which flew him, his wives and his key staff to England and a private suite at London’s Dorchester Hotel. There he died, after making peace with his successor Qaboos, in October 1972.
On his accession, Qaboos quickly used Oman’s newfound oil wealth to ruin PFLOAG’s propaganda, for he gave all Omanis and Dhofaris exactly what PFLOAG had promised them, but without the threat to their beloved Islamic religion and way of life. He announced an amnesty to all adoo, which triggered a trickle, and soon a flood, of PFLOAG deserters, who then formed a counter-guerrilla force split into regional groups who were retrained by men of the Special Air Service.
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