The One That Got Away - Junior edition

by Chris Ryan

  All the time I was turning to look behind, to see if any more lights were coming up – but nothing showed. At last I thought it was safe to stop, sit down and sort out my equipment.

  After a contact like that, it takes time to recover. Gradually I chilled out and got myself together. One minor improvement was that I had less to carry: once I’d fired the 66 I threw away the tube, which was useless to the Iraqis.

  Walking again, I kept on for a couple of hours towards the north. All the time I was wondering what had happened to Stan, and hoping he hadn’t come back in one of the vehicles. Or had he sent them up to me? No, I decided: he couldn’t have. It must have been the goatherd who brought the Iraqis back to the wadi; no one else could have directed them onto my position with such accuracy. My intuition about him had been right. I should never have let Stan go off with him.

  The question was, what had happened back on the site of the contact while I had been heading north? If anyone had got away from one of the vehicles I’d hit, or if someone else had found the wrecks, word might have gone out that another enemy soldier was on the run. People would surely guess that I was heading for the Euphrates. From the firepower I’d put down, they might even have thought that there were several of us.

  I tabbed on and on through the moonlight. Now the desert was rolling in gentle undulations, and I believed that the river was going to appear over every rise. Then, to my right, I heard dogs barking, kids shouting, grown-ups calling. As I went down on one knee to listen, I saw the red tracer of anti-aircraft fire going up in the distance. Obviously there were habitations somewhere close to me, and the people I could hear were watching that nice firework display on the horizon. Then I heard the far-off roar of jets. They must have been miles off, attacking some target, and the red tracer was curving silently up towards the stars.

  Half an hour later I spotted a glimmer of light ahead. The night-sight picked out three stationary vehicles, with light coming out of the side. I went down and watched for signs of people on foot, in case a mobile patrol was being deployed to cut me off. Men on foot could be strung out in an extended line, sweeping the desert ahead of them. But I saw nothing more, so I avoided the vehicles and carried on.

  Again, as I came to the top of a rise, I was convinced that I must find the Euphrates in front of me – but no. The next thing I saw was a set of pylons. I’d been expecting them for some time, because they were marked on my map. Beyond them was a main supply route, and some fifteen kilometres beyond that, the river. When I sat down under the power lines and scanned ahead, I found I could see the road, and a wide-open flat area beyond it – but no water.

  I knew that in Biblical times the Euphrates had been a mighty waterway, and I assumed that it must still be pretty big. But after I crossed the main supply route, all I hit was a huge system of dry wadis, with steep walls up to twenty metres high. Obviously they’d once been a river bed. Maybe in wet weather flash floods would turn the channels into a rushing river again. I was gagging for want of water, and getting so confused in my mind that suddenly I thought, I hope this isn’t the Euphrates. Surely it can’t have dried out since the Bible? If it has, I’m finished.

  Panic was making me walk faster and scrabble down through the tumbled, loose rock. I kept thinking, There’s got to be water at the bottom of this. At its lowest point the river bed seemed to open out, and as I looked down through the night-sight, I made out a line of palm trees running across my front from left to right. Also, away to my right, I could see the houses of a village. I still couldn’t see any water, but I thought, This has got to be the river – the Euphrates, at last. I started walking down towards the trees, which I presumed were growing on the bank.

  The closer I came, the warmer the air seemed to be – or at least, the atmosphere seemed stiller and calmer. I kept about 300 metres from the edge of the village, but dogs came out and started barking. As there was no wind, they could hardly have smelled me. They’d probably picked up the noise of my feet. The houses were dark. They may have been blacked out on purpose, but more likely the people in them were asleep.

  Moving along to the boundary wall of the village, I made my way carefully down to the river through oblong fields. No crops were sprouting as yet, but the ground had been well tilled, and the fields were divided up by irrigation ditches, with grass growing here and there. I tried to keep out of the fields, in case I left footprints in the soft soil. Instead, I kept to the ditches, which as yet had no water in them.

  At last, between the trunks of the palm trees, I saw water. Irrigation pumps were working all along the bank: the night was full of their quick, steady beat – boop, boop, boop, boop. I could hear many different pumps working up and down the valley. For several minutes I kept still, watching for any movement. The cultivation seemed to end about ten metres from the edge of the water, and my night-sight revealed piles of cut bushes, each about two metres square, sticking out from the bank into the stream, one about every fifty metres. At first I couldn’t make out what they were for, then it occurred to me that they were probably makeshift jetties, for men to fish off or to bring boats alongside. Using one for cover, I crept right down to the water’s edge.

  Crouching next to the pile, I got out my water bottles, but found that at the bank the water was only a few millimetres deep – a thin skin over mud. I tried to wade out, but I hadn’t taken three steps before my feet plunged deep into silt. In a second I was up to my knees, then up to my waist. I was sinking. I threw my rifle back onto the pile of bushes and dragged myself out, soaked up to the waist and coated in slimy, silty mud.

  For my next attempt, I crawled out over one of the platforms of bushes. As my weight came onto it, the whole structure sank into the stream. I could feel water coming through my clothes at the front, but I filled both bottles, crawled back out, and drank one down.

  I swallowed and gasped and choked, trying to stifle the noise. The relief of getting water down my neck was incredible. I shone my torch beam down the neck of the full bottle, and saw that the water was black and foul-looking, but it tasted quite good. I crawled out to fill the empty bottle again.

  At that point the river was a couple of hundred metres wide, and I could see no buildings or cultivations on the far bank. In the moonlight the land beyond glowed white, as if it were covered in salt. I thought about swimming across, because it would be safer on the far side. But although I’m a strong swimmer, I realized that to go in with my weapon and webbing would be asking for trouble. The water was icy cold, and although the surface was smooth, I could see that a strong current was flowing out in the middle of the stream. If I’d got into difficulties halfway across, that would have been it.

  By then it was nearly five o’clock in the morning. I needed somewhere to lie up for the day.

  I moved cautiously out between scattered houses, up to a dirt road. Again a dog started barking, so I waited a couple of minutes before going on up into the dry wadi systems. Once into the rocks I turned on my TACBE and tried speaking into it. There was no response, so I left the beacon on for a while. As I climbed, the rocky channels grew steeper and steeper. A couple of hundred metres above the road, they came to a dead end. There I found a rock a metre or so high which was casting a black shadow in the moonlight. I curled up beside it, with my map case beneath my legs, one shamag round them and the other round my head. I lay there feeling fairly safe in that patch of deep darkness.

  Before settling down, I gave myself the only treat at my disposal: I got out my flask, and took a nip of whisky. The spirit burned as it went down into my empty stomach, but it gave me a momentary lift.

  I was so exhausted that in spite of the cold I kept falling asleep, only to come round with a start a few minutes later, racked by shudders. It was a real pain to be wet again; having spent hours with Stan getting dry, I was now soaked all up the front, with my sodden clothes clinging to me, and the damp making the cold even worse.

  When first light came, with dawn breaking early under clear skies, I
realized that I wasn’t really in any sort of cover. At night the shadow of the rock had looked comforting; if someone had walked past in the dark, he wouldn’t have seen me. Now I found I was lying out in the open.

  Looking up onto the north bank of the wadi, I saw a hollow among some loose rocks. I walked up to it, lay inside, and piled up a few more rocks at either side to break up the outline of my body. That was the best place I could find in which to spend the day.

  And it was only then that it really hit me how much I was on my own.

  Sunday 27 January: Escape – Day Four

  In the days and nights that followed, there were several moments when my morale plunged to rock-bottom. This was one of them. A wave of loneliness swept over me as I realized that I was utterly alone. I was hungry, wet, tired, cut off from all communication with friends, and still far inside a hostile country. I thought it couldn’t get any worse.

  ‘If things get on top of you,’ my mum always used to say, ‘have a good cry.’ So I lay there in the rocks and tried to cry – but I couldn’t. Instead my face crumpled up and I started laughing. Somehow it did the trick. It got rid of the tension and sorted me out. I daydreamed about the glorious puddings my mum used to make – particularly her rice pudding, with its thick, sweet, creamy inside and its crust baked to a crisp golden brown. I could have done with a helping of that, there and then. But from that point on I wasn’t bothered about being alone. All I had to do was get on with heading for the border.

  It was the morning of Sunday 27 January, and I’d been on the run for three nights. I would have liked to let my feet breathe, but that would have involved too great a risk. I had to be ready to leg it at any minute: so it was one boot off, one sock off, check that foot, and get sock and boot back on. Then the other foot. The blisters looked bad. They had burst, and the skin below was raw and bleeding. My toenails had started lifting, and there were blisters under my toes. I had no way of treating them, and could only hope that my feet would hold out until I reached the border.

  With my boots back on, I spent an hour cleaning my weapon again. I took care, as before, not to make any noise that would carry. Once I had everything squared away, I lay back with my belt undone but my webbing still in place, straps over my shoulders, so that I could make a quick getaway if need be.

  Even down there, almost on the level of the Euphrates, the air was still icy cold, and I was shivering. I lay on one side, with my hands between my legs, tucked in under one big rock. Smaller rocks pulled into position shielded my head and feet, and there was bare rock beneath me.

  From time to time I dozed off, but always I woke with a start a few minutes later, shaking all over. It was my body’s defence to bring me round like that: if I hadn’t kept waking, I would have drifted off and been gone for ever. Aching from contact with the rock, I would shift about, trying to find a more comfortable position. There was always a pebble or bump of rock digging into some part of me, and the pressure points on the outsides of my knees, hips and spine had already begun to rub sore.

  The water had made me feel better in one way; but it had given me the shivers, and all I wanted to do was press on again, so that I could warm up. The hardest thing was to keep still in daylight. The urge to start walking, to make progress towards the border, was almost overwhelming.

  Below me, the wadi dropped towards the river in a V-shape, snaking left and right. There was nothing alive to keep me interested: no bird or animal, nothing moving. Boredom soon became another powerful enemy. It took all my willpower to resist the urge to move on, or even just to have a look around.

  The day was quiet: I never heard voices or traffic movement. Now and then the wind would stir among the rocks and I would come fully alert, looking round, wondering if a person or an animal had shifted. From where I lay I could see what looked like the remains of an ancient viaduct, jutting out from the bank of the river into the water. I wondered how old it was, and whether it could date back as far as the Romans. Round the base of the arches the water was obviously deep, because through my binoculars I could see the current swirling fast. The river was brown with silt, a strong contrast with the salty-looking land on the far bank.

  What kept my spirits up was the thought that I must be close to the Syrian border – no more than thirty or forty kilometres away. Looking at the map again and again, I worked out that I was much farther west than I had thought I was. I reckoned I was within one night’s march, possibly two, of safety.

  Until then, the longest I’d ever gone without food was four days, on combat survival training in Wales. Even then, an agent had brought me one slice of bread or a little piece of cheese every twenty-four hours – but I remembered feeling pretty weak at the end. The furthest I’d ever walked in one march was sixty-five kilometres – the final march on Selection. Now, I reckoned, I’d covered about 150 kilometres in three nights, and already it was five days since I’d had a proper meal – the big blow-out at Al Jouf. With my biscuits finished, I began to worry about how long my strength would hold out. How long could I go on walking? Would I slow right down, or even be unable to keep going at all?

  I knew from weight-training, and books about the subject, that when the body is under stress it starts to burn its own muscle, trying to preserve fat for emergencies. I was carrying very little fat anyway, so I knew my muscles would waste away quite quickly, especially as I was burning yet more energy by shivering all the time. In lectures on combat survival, we’d been told that a man lost in the desert can only survive for a day without water – but this wasn’t a typical desert, because the temperature was so low.

  I kept wondering about the rest of the patrol. I greatly feared that Vince was dead, and in a way I felt responsible. Lying all day by the tank berm had definitely contributed to his collapse, and it was me who had said we should follow SOPs and stay there. Then, in the night, I should have tied him to me. As a qualified mountain guide, I could have handled the situation better. But at the time I’d been going down with exposure myself, and not thinking as clearly as I might have.

  What about Stan? It seemed certain that he’d been captured, and I could only hope he wasn’t having too bad a time. As for the other five . . . I reckoned that a chopper must have come back and lifted them out. I felt sure that the aircraft must have been inbound towards our original position, following the normal Lost Comms procedure, and that it would have flown around until the guys made contact with the pilot. In fact, as I found out later, the other guys in the patrol had been captured that day close to the river at a point about a hundred kilometres nearer to the Syrian border. As a result of contacts with them, 1,600 Iraqi troops had been deployed to look for other Coalition soldiers on the run, and the civilian population along the river had been alerted.

  Sunday 27 January: Escape – Night Four

  I came out of my hiding place not long after dark, and began heading north-west, keeping as close as I could to the edge of the cultivated land, where the going was easiest.

  I was walking more carefully now, because I was in a populated area. I was probably down to three or four kilometres an hour. Occasionally, for a change, I rested the 203 over my shoulder, but for most of the time I held it in both hands, with the weight taken by the sling of paracord round my neck. That way, the weapon was less tiring on my arms, but it was also at the ready: I could have aimed and fired a shot within a second.

  Soon I found that there were amazing numbers of Arabs out and about. Every half hour or so I’d come across a group standing or sitting around, chatting in quiet voices. Several times I picked up the glow of a cigarette and had to box round it. (Boxing is when you walk in a box shape round an obstacle, counting your paces and turning right-angles so you end up walking in the same direction as before.) Often I just smelled smoke, either from cigarettes or from a fire or stove, and pulled off without seeing anything. It seemed odd that so many citizens should be out of doors on a freezing winter night.

  Again and again I saw or sensed people ahead of
me, brought up the night-sight for a better look, and had to make a detour. In the end my lack of progress became quite frustrating, and I started to think that if things were going to be like this all the way to the border, I would never get out. I would become too weak from lack of food, and would end up getting captured.

  During that night I was on the move for eight hours, and must have covered thirty or forty kilometres, but I made only about ten kilometres towards the frontier. I would walk gently forward for a while, see someone, back off and box them. Immediately I’d come on someone else, box them, and carry on. It was zigzag, zigzag, all the time, five or ten steps sideways for every one forward.

  I found it incredibly difficult to maintain concentration for any length of time. Wild animals like antelopes and deer, which are preyed on by carnivores, have the ability to remain on the alert for hours on end. Their lives depend on it. But humans have lost the knack, and it takes conscious effort to stay watchful.

  Often I found I was having silent conversations with myself.

  I’ll walk as far as the top of that hill, I’d say. Then I can have a rest.

  Soon I’d ask, How did you get yourself into this mess? And where have the others got to now? Casting ahead in my mind, I wondered what the border with Syria would look like, and how I’d cross it. People and personalities from my past kept drifting into my head: my mum and dad, my brothers, my school teachers. I’d wonder what they’d be doing at that moment – and I longed to tell them where I was. I imagined how surprised they’d be if they knew what I was doing. Often I heard their voices, and these became so real that I’d forget about my own security and pay no attention to my surroundings. Suddenly I’d come to and realize that I’d covered a kilometre or more in a dream.