Michael Asher

by The Real Bravo Two Zero

  CHAPTER seven AFTER ABBAS HAD RETURNED his bulldozer into the barn, I asked him to explain what had happened on 24 January 1991 after he had spotted the British patrol. In reply, he led me back down towards the site of the LUP, with Hayil and Adil following on. As we walked across the slightly undulating landscape, Abbas hobbling on his crippled ankle, I began to glimpse the desert as they saw it. The area Bravo Two Zero had chosen to lie up in was this family's backyard. Given Bedouin powers of observa�tion and the very proximity of the place, there had really been no more chance of the SAS escaping unseen than if a band of Iraqis had landed on a British council estate. Was McNab right, then, to blame the Head Shed for the compromise because they were dropped in inhabited country, in the middle of more than 3,500 Iraqi troops?. According to McNab's own text, the patrol alone picked the place on the MSR where they would insert their LUP. They also decided to be flown in by Chinook rather than driving or going on foot, and selected the dropping-off place themselves. To choose a point twenty kilometres from the site of the LUP when you are carrying 95 kilos of gear looks like unsound strategy, but McNab explains this by saying that he didn't want the heli to be compromised by locals. At the same time, he says that the house `shouldn't have been there', and that they had been dropped in an area as crowded as Piccadilly Circus: it is difficult to see how he could have been afraid of being compromised by locals he didn't know were there, especially when he adds that the object was to reach the LUP as quickly as possible." According to the blurb of McNab's book, supported by his sketch-map, the patrol lugged their equipment � Bergens, belt-kit, jerrycans of water and two full sandbags apiece �twenty kilometres, in the dark over unknown, hostile country, in only nine hours. Anyone who has tried to carry 95, or even 80 kilos any distance, even in daylight, will recognize this as no mean feat of endurance. To make things doubly difficult, half of the team had to be protecting the others as they moved, so every few hun�dred metres they had to dump what they had shifted and go back for more � which would presumably have taken twice the time. If it is true that the SAS men patrolled twenty kilometres across flat desert to reach their objec�tive carrying such burdens, as the blurb, of Bravo Two Zero states, then it is rightly celebrated. The question is, did it really happen in the first place? I asked Abbas how he thought the enemy patrol had arrived in the area. 'They came by helicopter,' he told me confidently. 'In fact, we heard it come in, at about eight o'clock on 22 January. I remember the time because I sent someone to the nearest military base to report it. I knew it was a twin-engined helicopter by the sound, but of course at the time I wasn't sure whether it was one of theirs or one of ours. It landed not more than two kilo�metres from the house � I know that for certain because we found the tracks later. It was very muddy then and the tracks were clear � big wheels, you couldn't mistake it. In fact the tracks stayed there for weeks until the rain washed them away, and everybody here saw them.' I asked what the military had done when his messenger had reported the aircraft. `They didn't investigate it,' he said, `because they thought it was one of ours. It was only later we connected it with the foreign commandos and realized it must have brought them in.' He showed me a flat-bottomed wadi where he had found the Chinook's tracks, and I later measured it with the Magellan as about two kilometres south of the LUP. If Abbas was telling the truth, it meant the feat made so much of in the blurb of McNab's book was incorrect. Moreover, if the patrol had really reached their objective at 0445 hours on 23 January, as McNab said, it had taken them just under nine hours to ferry their kit two kilometres � a feat of a far more mundane, but also more reasonable order. I tried carrying four twenty-litre jerrycans � a total weight of 80 kilos � a distance of one kilometre, and with pauses for rest it took an agonizing hour. Of course, the SAS patrol were much younger and fitter than me, but even if they managed to do it in half the time, it would still have taken ten hours to cover twenty kilometres, assuming each man was carrying his own kit. But we know this was not so, because McNab points out that they used a shuttle system, and in fact only half the patrol was carrying at any one time � bringing the time to twenty hours: more than double what McNab says. Two kilometres, though, would be a comfortable distance to carry such weights in nine hours, silently and tactically, with appropriate rests and time to scout the country ahead as well. The fact that Abbas said the heli came in only two kilometres away is doubly interesting, because it not only coincides with what Ryan wrote, but would also explain why McNab had seen a settlement with a water-tower at both the helicopter drop-off point and the LUP � Abbas's house could be seen from both. Incidentally, the fact that the helicopter was heard is inadvertently revealed in McNab's book when one of his interrogators tells him so, and as for his assertion that according to the intelligence officer's briefing, the house 'should not have been there', Ryan clearly states that the satellite images they had been shown revealed crops and habitation. We halted on the flat ground opposite the overhanging rock shelf of the LUP and Abbas pointed down into the cul-de-sac. 'It was from here that I saw them for the sec�ond time,' he said. But that time I was armed. When I got back to the house with the bulldozer I went straight in and got my AK47. While I was loading it, my father, Fadhil � who is dead now, may God have mercy upon him � asked me what I was doing. "I've seen some strangers in the wadi," I told him. "I don't know who they are � whether they are Iraqi army or foreigners or bandits � but I'm going to find out what they're doing." I wasn't really concerned with the war at that stage � it didn't enter my mind. .I was only worried because there were these armed strangers near my home, where there were women and children. I was afraid some harm would come to my family. My father was over seventy then, but he insisted on coming with me. He got out his old rifle. It was a Brno five-shot, one of the old type with the bolt action that you have to cock shot by shot. It was almost as old as he was. Then, as he was getting his rifle out, my brother Hayil arrived and asked what was up. We told him and he said, "I'm coming too," and got out his AK47. So we were three � me, my brother and my father.' Abbas pointed again to the watershed, about five metres below us. 'When we got to this point, I saw eight men down there. I suspected they were foreigners, but I still couldn't tell for certain. They saw me, but I was holding my AK47 down by my side so they couldn't see it.' (In fact, Ryan notes that he saw the Arabs holding their rifles by their sides.) `Why didn't you attack them then and there?' I asked. `They would have been- sitting ducks.' `There were two reasons. First we only had rifles, and there were rocks to hide behind in that wadi. They could have got behind the rocks and we would never have been able to kill them. There 'were eight of them and only three of us � my father was an old man, and I have a crippled ankle and can't run, so we wanted to be sure of our ground before we did anything. The second thing was we still did- n't know who they were, and if we'd shot them and they turned out to be Iraqis we could have got into big trouble. Remember, they'd seen us but hadn't done anything, and it's very hard to just shoot someone down in cold blood, whoever they are. So for now we just watched. `Soon � it was late afternoon, about five-thirty or so �they started moving south down the wadi in single file. They were carrying packs that looked very heavy, and were spaced about ten metres apart. We didn't do any-thing, but just walked parallel with them along the wadi to see where they would go.' He led me along the edge of the wadi on the same route, where the hooves of thousands of sheep and goats had cut grooves in the surface over generations. As we went, I tried to imagine how it must have felt for both par�ties � British and Arab � one above, one below, both knowing the other was there, but not yet certain they were hostile. For the SAS, I guessed, the strain must have been almost unbearable. Although some of the men in Bravo Two Zero, like Vince Phillips, were veterans, this was their first operation in a 'real war'. Several of the team � perhaps most � had been involved in operations in Northern Ireland, but those were security operations rather than genuine combat. This was the Big One they had all been waiting for. They
might have fought terrorists, but none of the team � not even McNab � had been involved in a real firefight against superior numbers of troops, and they were asking them�selves, perhaps, how they and their comrades would react. `This was what we were there for,' Peter Ratcliffe wrote, 'what all the years of training were about. However useful we had proved ourselves in dealing with terrorists, only in a war could we ever put our training to full use and only in a war would we get the chance to prove conclusively that we were worth our pay.' 14 They were selected SAS soldiers � the finest Special Forces men in the world � but as Ratcliffe has pointed out, 'Selection doesn't tell you everything you need to know about a man. Only what he does in battle will ever show you what he's really like.15 They were a tiny unit inn hostile environment, without transport and without communica�tions. The infiltration with so much equipment must have been incredibly tense, and on top of the revelation that the ground was too hard to dig an OP had come the real�ization that the radio wouldn't work, and finally, that there were anti-aircraft guns almost on top of the LUP. As they moved out that afternoon, watching the Arabs for the first move in a drama that must inevitably come, the tension among the patrol members must have been like a taut bowstring waiting for release. I saw that the wadi was flattening out into a basin five or six hundred metres wide, rimmed by stony shale out�crops on both sides. The basin was grassy, with a few stunted thorn bushes, and to the west the desert stretched away in galleries of serrated humpbacks as far as the eye could see. Abbas led me over to the eastern side of the basin, nearest to his house, which was still in full view. The place where he claimed to have found the Chinook tracks lay less than a kilometre to the south. 'This is where we were when they came out of the wadi,' he said. `We waited for them to come one by one. There were eight of them and I remember the last but one � the sev�enth � actually waved at us.' I was intensely interested in this point because I remembered that Ryan wrote that he had waved at the Arabs, though he also said that he had been first in the file, not seventh. Hayil, Abbas's brother, confirmed that it was the seventh man who had waved, but neither could remember if the man had used his left or right hand. This was significant also, because Ryan said that by waving with his left hand he inadvertently revealed to the watch-ing Arabs that the patrol were Christians. An Arab, he writes, will never wave with his left hand, which is con-sidered unclean. While it is true that Bedouin use their left hands to clean themselves after defecating, a left-hand wave has no particular significance, and evidently it meant nothing to Abbas and Hayil. Nevertheless, the detail was important, for if these Bedouin had somehow been got at and briefed by the Iraqi government, why would they be so insistent that it was the seventh man who waved, when Ryan is adamant in his book that he was in the lead? Since no spin could be put in the waver's position, wouldn't they have left this insig�nificant detail intact in order to convince me of their veracity? The question was, who was right: these Bedouin or Ryan? Turning to McNab's book, I thought I might have the solution. McNab writes clearly that Ryan was placed in the lead only after the patrol had been ambushed, when he changed the order of march. This suggests that wher�ever Ryan might have been in the line-up as they moved out of the LUP, he was not the first man, as he says. `They were moving fast,' Abbas said, 'and we knew we had to do something before they got away, but we still didn't know who they were. We decided to fire two warn- ing shots over their heads to find out who they were.' At first I wondered what he meant. Then I remembered that, in the past, when Bedouin tribes used to raid each other for camels, they were often faced with the same problem of identifying friends or enemies before it was too late. When a party of unknown camel-riders approached a camp, the men there would fire a few shots over their heads. If the strangers were friends they would wave their headcloths and shout "Afya! Afya!" (It's all right) in reply, or sometimes throw handfuls of sand in the air. 'I fired two quick shots over the strangers' heads with my AK47' Abbas said, 'and immediately they went down. By God, they were fast. They started shooting back straight away, so of course we knew they were enemies. We were lying flat out on the ground about three hundred metres from them, and had taken off our red shamaghs so as not to present good targets. It must have been quite diffi�� cult for them to see exactly where we were. Hayil and I were putting down fire on automatic and my father was strug�gling with his old rifle. Suddenly they fired rockets in our direction � two rounds, which just exploded harmlessly in the desert. At the time I thought they were mortar shells, but later we found the used rocket-launchers.' `What happened then?' `A smoke grenade went up, or maybe more than one, and under the cover of the smoke they pulled out: From what we could see they seemed to do it in a very disci�plined way, working in pairs with one firing and the other retreating. We were still firing, but couldn't see them prop-erly until they went over the rim of that ridge, heading south-west. Actually, we only saw five of them going over the hill, and we thought maybe we'd hit the other three.' I listened to Abbas's tale with growing incredulity, wait�ing in vain for the point when the hordes of Iraqi troops and vehicles mentioned by McNab and Ryan would turn up. In McNab's book, the patrol is attacked by two armoured personnel carriers with 7.62mm machine-guns, and at least three lorry-loads of Iraqi troops and two Land-Cruisers. Coming under fire from the APCs and hordes of infantry, and amidst a great deal of screaming, `Let's do it!', McNab's patrol fires off its 66mm rocket-launchers, dumps its heavy Bergens and charges the APCs, putting them out of. action and killing or wound�ing dozens of Iraqis with their Minimi machine-guns and M203 grenade-launchers. McNab describes how the ground was littered with writhing bodies, and how Iraqi casualties were spread over a wide area � 'fifteen dead and many more wounded', he recounts. A burned-out APC smoulders and a truck blazes, with a black and peeling Iraqi lolling in the passenger seat. Someone lobs an L2 grenade through the unbattened door of one of the APCs, killing dozens more. 'The troops that withdrew were sort of reorganizing themselves,' he explained later to one newspaper. 'It was very much like a scenario in a school playground where you would get two gangs � they would have a fight, one gang would run away and then sort of poke their fingers out, "We're going to get you." And then they'd sort themselves out and come forward again. Now, we didn't want to get involved in that, so we ran . . According to the book, having reduced the Iraqi ambush to bloody ribbons, McNab's patrol withdraws, picks up its Bergens and makes off over the brow of the hill, where it comes under concentrated fire from the S60 anti-aircraft battery on the ridge nearby and is forced to drop its Bergens once again. As more enemy vehicles roll up, the patrol disappears into the growing dark If there was no trace of McNab's pitched battle against massively superior forces in Abbas's and Hayil's accounts, what about Ryan, I wondered? Initially, in fact, his description bears some resemblance to what they told me. He writes that he saw two (not three) Arabs pacing them down the wadi, but hoped that they would go away. When he waved, though, the Arabs opened fire, and shortly afterwards, a tipper-truck arrived with eight or ten soldiers in it. In Ryan there is no long build-up with tracked vehicles approaching ominously, heard but not seen, nor is there a salvo of rockets as the patrol takes them on. Ryan does declare that Stan had seen an APC, but that somehow he'd failed to notice it, as it was 'prob-ably behind a mound'. In his account there are no writhing bodies, and while McNab states 'fifteen dead and many more wounded', Ryan puts the total number of Iraqis after them as 'about a dozen', three of whom he accounts for himself. Significantly, in Ryan's book, the patrol does not charge, but simply drops its Bergens and makes off over the ridge, where it comes under anti-aircraft fire. A bullet narrowly misses Ryan's arm and knocks his Bergen flat (McNab says it was an anti-aircraft shell), but, undeterred, he goes back for a hip-flask of whisky his wife had given him as a Christmas present � an exploit also repeated by McNab. Again and again I pressed Abbas and Hayil on the sub�ject of armoured personnel carriers, vehicles and Iraqi troops, desperate to find some reference to them, no matter how
oblique. 'There were no personnel carriers,' they repeated, 'and no troops. There were only the three of us, no one else at all.' Abbas stated over and over that there had been no pitched battle, and that the action had all been over in five minutes or so. 'I fired four magazines,' he told me. `About one hundred and twenty rounds.' `I fired about eighty,' Hayil added. 'I don't know how many my father fired, but not many because his rifle was old.' If these Bedouin were telling the truth, then McNab's `colossal amount of fire' consisted of a total of about two hundred rounds. Abbas beckoned me towards the humpbacked ridge on the brow of which he had last seen five members of the SAS patrol. 'They ran off south-west,' he said. 'And believe me, they were really moving fast.' The Bedouin showed me where they had found the Bergens dumped by the SAS, in two groups. 'There were eight packs,' Abbas said. 'Really big things, they were. But we didn't open them as I thought they might be booby-trapped. We decided not to try to follow them because it was getting dark, and anyhow, I can't walk far with my bad leg. If we had wanted to, some of our people could have tracked them easily enough, as the ground was quite greasy, but we were defending our home, and the main thing was that they'd gone. When the Iraqi army came later, they did open the packs and they found all sorts of stuff � a radio, medical equipment, food, a flag and a map � every�thing you can think of. But at the time all we found here apart from the packs was a clip of tracer rounds, spent rocket-launcher cases, and a pool of blood.' I pricked my ears up at this. There was no indication in either McNab's or Ryan's accounts that any of the patrol had been injured during the attack. Are you sure it was blood?' I asked. Both Hayil and Abbas assured me that it was, and I put this down as another mystery. Obviously the Bedouin were quite anxious to establish the fact that they had hit someone, and they were a little crestfallen when I said that as far as I knew, none of the patrol had been hurt. They had engaged Bravo Two Zero at 300 metres � the extreme effective range of the AK47, which is anyway a notoriously difficult weapon to fire lying down because the magazine is too long. Had the brothers simply invented the blood to reinforce their reputation as marksmen, I won�dered, or had one of the patrol actually been injured running away and had somehow kept it quiet? As we climbed to the top of the ridge over which the -SAS had fled, I quizzed them about the anti-aircraft guns both Ryan and McNab said had opened up on them as they cleared it. The two Arabs shook their heads emphat-ically. 'The anti-aircraft guns never opened fire,' Abbas said, nodding towards the ridge on which the battery had stood, now about a kilometre away. 'The soldiers up there wouldn't have known what was happening � even we didn't realize these were enemy troops until we fired the warning shots. How would we have contacted the bat- tery? We had no radio. The anti-aircraft guns were there to protect the base across the plateau from enemy aircraft, not for fighting on the ground. Anyway, it all happened so quickly � there just wouldn't have been time for the gunners to realize what was happening and open fire_' When I explained that McNab said an AA round had passed through Ryan's Bergen, Abbas chortled. 'Are you joking?' he asked. 'You must know that an S60 shell is a huge thing � fifty-seven millimetres � as big around as a Coca-Cola can. It's designed for destroying aeroplanes. If one of them hit your pack, there wouldn't be much of it left.' `What about the Iraqi army?' I asked. 'When did they turn up?' `We didn't send anyone to tell them until after the for-eigners had got away,' Abbas said. 'And the boy I sent had to go on foot, because there was petrol rationing then and we had none for our vehicles. The base was fifteen kilo-metres away, like I said, so it took him a long time to get there, and by the time the army got themselves sorted out and got here it was one o'clock in the morning (25 January) and the commandos had been gone for hours. There were heavy air attacks all over Iraq that day, and the army were worried that the commandos would call down air strikes if they pursued them, so they left them alone. In fact, we did hear some enemy jets going over between midnight and one in the morning.' This was a point, I noted, that was confirmed by McNab, who was a few kilo�metres south-west of Abbas's house at around that time, and who tried to contact the Coalition jets on his TACBE. I thought about it carefully. 'I don't understand,' I said. `I mean, the AA post was only a kilometre away. Even if the soldiers there didn't open fire with their S60s, surely they would have come to help you, or radioed for more troops.' `They couldn't leave their post,' Abbas said. 'What if an enemy aircraft came in on a -bombing run? I don't think they had any radio either, but even if they did report it back, it still took the army hours to get here. Like I said, it was all over within a few minutes � the soldiers would�n't have had time to work out what was going on.' In a roasting wind I scoured the battlefield carefully for remnants of the firelight described in McNab's book. I had been travelling in the Middle East long enough to know that if vehicles are knocked out in the desert, no one will bother to clear them up. Sinai, for instance, is still littered with the hulks of scores of armoured vehicles dating from the 1967 war. If Bravo Two Zero had really put two armoured personnel carriers and several trucks out of action, there would almost certainly be debris, and yet there was nothing at all � not a fragment of twisted metal, not a link of track, not a sliver of tyre rubber, not even a screw. Moreover, the basin was uniformly flat, without a groove, a mound or a fold. If APCs had been there, it would have been impossible not to have seen them, I realized. Later, back at Abbas's house, I brooded over the mys-tery. McNab writes with such authority in his book, that it was difficult not to be convinced. Yet my own training in the SAS had taught me that it would be folly for a foot patrol to charge a brace of armoured vehicles. SAS philosophy has always been that nine times out of ten discretion is the better part of valour. The SOP (standard operational procedure) on coming into contact with armour is simply to run away as fast as possible � much as Ryan describes. McNab admitted this himself later in a newspaper interview: 'The last thing you want to do is to start getting involved in any contact of any type. Number one, that's not our task; we're not there to start fighting people. We're not a big force. We're not armed enough for that, that wasn't our job.' Yet the same man who admitted later to an interviewer, 'The object is not to fight the enemy, it's to get away from them,' says in his book that he led a suicidal charge against enemy armour in defiance not only of SAS principles, but of every rule in the military book. McNab writes that scores of Iraqis were killed or injured in the contact, and even Ryan sug�gests obliquely to have shot three men. The brothers assured me repeatedly that not one of them was hit. 'Not even a scratch,' as Abbas said. In the evening they took me back over to the barn, where they showed me some of the artefacts they had retrieved from Bravo Two Zero's cache in the wadi. `There was a huge amount of equipment there,' Abbas said. 'Clothing, sandbags, shovels, food, jerrycans � even explosives, which the Iraqi army destroyed.' He showed me a shovel and a jerrycan marked with the British MOD arrow that were obviously in use by his family and, later, a clip of 5 56mm orange and green tracer rounds, not used by the Iraqi army, a camouflage net, a gas-mask, and pieces of a Claymore anti-personnel mine that matched the one shown in McNab's book. 'They dug this up in the wadi,' Abbas said. 'And smashed it.' This confirmed McNab's statement that they had deployed two Claymores and buried them in the wadi bed when they pulled out. It was exciting to think that I was holding a historical artefact � the remains of one of the Claymores actually used by Bravo Two Zero and mentioned in McNab's book. I was delighted when Abbas told me I could keep them. I also asked what had happened to the eight Bergens they had found, and the brothers said they had been taken by the army and were probably in Baghdad. After sunset, the Bedouin slaughtered two sheep in our honour, inviting in all the family and neighbours. A vast oilskin sheet was rolled out in the guest hall and the food brought in, great brass trays piled with hunks of mutton � on buttered rice. We ate the food in Arab fashion, with our right hands, crouching around the trays, and I felt at home once again, basking in the hospitality of these simple peo�ple. Afterwards, as we sat replete, sipping tea, A
bbas told the Bravo Two Zero story once more in front of everyone, while the other Bedouin nodded as if they had heard it many times before. If this was a set-up, I thought, then either everybody here was in on it, or Abbas and Hayil didn't care that they were known as liars to the world at large. Bearing in mind that lying was taboo in Bedouin society, this seemed highly unlikely. Indeed, Abbas and Hayil's courage in taking on eight men armed with machine-guns and rocket-launchers was totally in keeping with the Bedouin ideal. `Didn't it bother you that they were more than you and better armed?' I asked. Abbas shrugged and showed me his crippled ankle, pointing out three or four scars that were obviously bullet entry wounds. 'That was a machine-gun,' he told me. 'In the Iran�Iraq war I was in the Iraqi Special Forces for twelve years, eight years in the war. I saw hundreds of com�rades killed, and was wounded six times. I still have two bullets lodged in my body. They used to use us as snatch-squads, going into the Iranian trenches to bring back Iranians who could be interrogated to give information. We sometimes had to fight with bayonets and � God have mercy on me � I once killed a man with a rock because I had no bullets left. I was promoted to sergeant major, received four citations for bravery, and was once court-martialled because a general ordered my squad to retreat and I refused and called him a donkey and a coward. I got off with it, though. Hayil, my brother, also served in the Special Forces and also received citations for bravery. I got invalided out of the army because of my ankle and could�n't serve in the war of 1991, but anyhow, we are Bedouin and have been handling firearms all our lives. I shot my first wolf when I was twelve. We are used to protecting our flocks and our families, so taking on eight men wasn't such a big deal to my father, my brother and me.' Here, I thought, was another incredible layer to the story. If what Abbas told me was correct, then Bravo Two Zero had certainly picked the wrong neighbourhood for their OP. Not only had they been put to flight by an old man, a cripple and his younger brother, but two of those three men had more combat experience between them than the entire strength of the SAS patrol combined. CHAPTER eight AS THE SUN SET ON 24 JANUARY, Bravo Two Zero melted into the desert, knowing that they were now hunted men. According to both McNab and Ryan, there were vehicle headlights flashing frantically in their wake and they heard occasional bursts of shooting. Quite unaware that there were two extremely cool and seasoned veterans of the Iraqi Special Forces behind them, McNab assumed that the Iraqis were totally confused and shoot�ing haphazardly at rocks and their own shadows. He confessed himself 'chuffed no end'. The team had ditched their Bergens and now had to rely on the escape-belts to which SAS culture attaches great importance. Normally these belts should contain ammunition, a foldable Hexamine cooker about the size of a Walkman, some kind of shelter � a poncho, bivvy�bag or space-blanket � mugs, mess tins, water-bottles, an individualized escape kit containing useful items such as waterproofed matches, and dry rations for twenty-four hours. The radio had been dumped, and when McNab asked Legs about it, the patrol signaller replied that it was in his Bergen, which had 'probably been shot to fuck by now anyway'. McNab thought the loss of the radio no problem at all, because they had their four TACBE radio beacons and could get a fifteen-second response from patrolling AWACS, although both he and Ryan had pulled the tabs on their beacons during the contact and no response had yet come. McNab wasn't worried about navigation either, because Coburn (`Mark') had a Magellan GPS unit. What they did not have, though, was what they needed most: motor vehicles. The Saudi border, beyond which lay their forward oper-ating base (FOB), was about three hundred kilometres to the south, while the Syrian border lay only 178 kilometres to the west. Jordan was nearer than either, but the SAS had been warned not to head there as the Jordanians sup�ported Iraq and had recently handed over a downed American airman to the Iraqis. As the patrol rallied after the attack, McNab says, he decided that their best option was to tab (march) west to Syria, though first they would put in a dog's leg feint to give their pursuers the impres�sion they were going south. Even disregarding Abbas's and Hayil's testimony that there were no pursuers, and that no Iraqi vehicles turned up until about seven hours after the firelight, McNab's account is problematical. According to his own story, the Chinook was due to fly in at 0400 hours the following morning to the drop-off point, which according to his sketch-map lay twenty kilometres due south. If this was correct, the SAS had at least nine hours to make the heli-copter rendezvous � a breeze for an unladen patrol. Why did McNab decide suddenly to head for Syria if, as far as he knew, the helicopter would be coming in to rendez�vous due south of them in nine hours' time? The answer may lie in Ryan's account. If, as Ryan and the Bedouin all testified, the helicopter RV actually lay only a kilometre from the site of the ambush, and if, as Ryan says, it was timed at midnight, then it had now certainly been com�promised by the enemy. Had they been able to make the RV unscathed, Ryan thought, they could have held off the enemy till nightfall, but if the Chinook came in now, it would be spotted by the Iraqis and perhaps shot down. As it turned out � perhaps fortunately for the RAF � the Chinook did not arrive that night, but without radio con�tact, McNab could not possibly have known this at the time. The decision to make for Syria is also questionable for two other reasons. First, although Ryan said that they had no written escape and evasion plan, Peter Ratcliffe, the Regimental Sergeant Major at the time, has stated for the record that there was such a written plan, and that it was filed with the Operations Officer at the FOB, al-Jauf. The plan, devised by McNab himself, was that, on com�promise, Bravo Two Zero would head south for Saudi Arabia. Though Ryan admits that to head back to Saudi was the Regiment's official policy, he suggests, as does McNab, that the patrol had decided to make for Syria before they even left base. Moreover, their attitude to the escape and evasion plan, like the question of sleeping-bags, demonstrates a sad underestimation of the problems of the desert. Ryan says that he had considered packing a pair of shorts, because, talking the matter over at the FOB, they had decided that, walking and jogging, they could make the Syrian border in two nights. Such a plan made no provision whatsoever for the inevitable water-loss that such exertion would bring. A man walk�ing in the desert will require at least five litres of water a day in the cold season to maintain homeostasis. Running, he would obviously require much more � perhaps ten litres. For two days, each man would need twenty litres, weighing twenty kilos, plus his weapon, ammunition and other necessities, adding up to a minimum of a further twenty kilos. Running with forty kilos would require even more water, because of the extra exertion, and so the weight would keep spiralling upwards, and the speed of march down. It is this equation which makes travelling long distances on foot in the desert such a hazard. If the patrol had decided to change the E and E plan at al-Jauf, why didn't they tell someone? Ryan and McNab indicate that they did mention it to one of the intelligence staff, but there was no guarantee that the man would even be present when they had to instigate it. In normal cir�cumstances, it would have been perfectly acceptable to adjust the written plan, even on the ground, but this was a highly dubious strategy for a patrol that was out of con-tact with its base and had no means of informing it of the change. Though Coburn has accused the SAS command of betraying the patrol by failing to send in a rescue mis-sion, in fact two helicopters � one British and one American � did fly in and search the area on the night of 26 January. By that time, of course, the patrol was on its way to Syria and out of the area specified on its own writ- ten escape and evasion plan: there was no way the heli pilots could have known that the plan had been changed. In heading for Syria instead of Saudi Arabia, as Ratcliffe has commented, 'McNab disobeyed his own orders.' The second dubious aspect of the plan to go for Syria lay in its practicability. The route the patrol eventually chose � north towards the Euphrates Valley, then due west towards the Syrian border � was certain to take them into highly populated regions. In the Middle East, river valleys are always densely inhabited, and likely to be the sites of industry, military defences and h
igh concentra�tions of troops. The chances of an eight-man patrol slipping intact through those areas were not good. Saudi Arabia was further, but the way there was all sparsely inhabited desert, and the very fact that the Chinook on which they had infiltrated had made it in unscathed sug�gested that the area to the south was clear. Why, again, the decision to go for Syria, when all the odds appeared stacked against them in that direction? ACCORDING TO THE DRAWN-TO-SCALE sketch- map in McNab's book, the first leg of the escape and evasion route took the patrol twenty kilometres due south, though in the text, McNab says it was twenty-five kilometres. Abbas and Hayil had told me that the team had run off to the south-west, and Ryan's map shows a squiggle going first a few kilometres south-east, then south-west, then due west, and finally north. What both Ryan and McNab do agree on is that their objective was to circle back to the road on which Abbas's house was sit- uated and then head north into the desert beyond in an attempt to put their pursuers off their trail. With such conflicting accounts to contend with, I knew I could not hope to find the exact route the patrol had followed, but I could certainly get an idea of the country by walking due south. My first day's walk almost turned into a disaster. From Ryan's and McNab's accounts, I had got the impression that the landscape south of the road was uniformly flat; it was, in fact, extremely rugged, with rocky spurs and whaleback ridges cutting across it from west and east. This was the same area McNab said they had crossed going north on the night of 22/23 January, carrying 95 kilos per man, and which the blurb of his book describes as 'flat desert'. The going underfoot was difficult, the sur�face a rubble of polished limestone pebble-dash with beds of bristling desert grasses and occasional soft beds of pillow-sand thick with tamarisk and brilliant scarlet desert roses. After several kilometres the land dipped into a wide, sandy gulch: the dried bed of the great Wadi Hawran, whose banks were lined with strips of wheat Abbas's family had planted. I understood now why Abbas needed his bulldozers. It was immensely hot, with a baking wind blowing in my face � conditions very different from the ones Bravo Two Zero had endured. I was dressed in a . military-style shamagh, an SAS smock of 1942 vintage �a genuine antique with Bakelite buttons � tracksuit bot�toms and desert boots. I was also wearing an escape-belt of the type the patrol would have carried, with water- bottles, dry rations, a bivvy-bag, map, compass and GPS, and a walkie-talkie to keep in touch with the vehicles car�rying the crew and the Iraqi minders, who were supposed to remain within a kilometre of me. I crossed the wadi and struggled up into the hilly coun�try beyond and had already covered about twelve kilometres from the LUP when things started to go wrong. Squatting by a red-hot cairn of stones for a drink and a piece of pre-cooked flapjack, I received a message from my associate, Nigel Morris, who was with the con�voy, saying that the GMC vehicles were unable to cross the wadi and, in fact, had got stuck in the sand. Nigel told me that only the lighter pick-up belonging to the military escort could get across, and suggested sending it to fetch me. I cursed the GMCs, which I had never trusted as real rough-country vehicles, and told him not to bother. I was just about to add that I would make for his position when the walkie-talkie went dead. Suddenly, without warning, I was experiencing precisely the same problem that Bravo Two Zero had experienced: I was totally cut off from my support in the desert. I had told Nigel not to send the military escort vehicle, but had not been able to say that I was heading back to the convoy. Now I was stuck. If the vehicle did not come as I'd instructed, I would be sepa�rated from the convoy. If I returned, I had no assurance that they would still be there. I decided to go back, and by the time I had trudged the three kilometres up hill and down dale in the dehydrating wind, my water was down to a few mouthfuls. When I arrived back at the place where I had last seen the vehi- cles, there was nobody there. This was a blow My water would soon be finished and I knew that in temperatures like these � mid-forties Celsius � a human being without water would be fried to a crisp in twenty-four hours. I was in no immediate danger because I could have walked the nine kilometres back to Abbas's farm, but I was certain the vehicles had gone on south-west, probably looking for an easier way across the wadi. After a few moments' rest I decided to return to the cairn from which I had made my last transmission. The blast furnace wind was in my face again, and I knew I had to conserve what little water I had. As I stumbled wearily up and down the ridges, it suddenly occurred to me that water must have played a vital role in the patrol's escape and evasion plan. Indeed, Ryan admits that their original plan of making a dash for Syria directly in run-ning shorts had to be modified to one taking them north to the Euphrates and then west along the river because they had dumped their jerrycans with their Bergens and now had only a few litres of water each. Though it was bitterly cold then, the patrol was moving very fast on foot and losing large quantities of moisture which had to be replaced. As McNab himself points out, once a body has lost five per cent of its weight through dehydration, it begins to seize up, and if the deficit is not made up at this point, death will quickly follow. I did not find the vehicles, but I did see a shadow on the desert surface some kilometres away which looked like some kind of habitation. As the minutes ticked by and I moved closer, I realized that it was a nest of Bedouin tents, with a three-ton truck parked outside. By now my mouth was parched dry and full of mucus and I felt exhausted from moisture-loss; my feet were staggering and stumbling over the stones. The wind felt like a heavy overcoat on my back, a weight pressing down on me, and my breath was evaporating like a vapour. I could almost feel the moisture being sucked from my pores. The tents were perhaps a kilometre away, but that felt like infinity in this stifling wind. I must have been about five hundred metres from the tents when a spectral white figure appeared. He held something shiny in his hand, and for a moment I feared it was a pistol. The Bedouin are hos�pitable people, but after what had happened near here ten years previously, you couldn't blame them for being on their guard. Even from that distance it must have been obvious that I was a stranger, dressed in quasi-military gear, and after all, this was still a country at war. I con�tinued warily, and it was only as I got close that I realized the figure was a Bedouin boy and that what he was car�rying was an aluminium bowl of water. With the hawk eyes of the Bedouin he must, have perceived from more than a kilometre away that I was suffering from thirst, and he had ventured out into the heat to meet me with this offering. The water was cool and clear � and was probably the best water I have tasted in my life. After I had drunk, the boy led me to a tent where I was received graciously by an oldish man in a dishdasha and headcloth. Luckily, he had been at the feast at Abbas's place the previous night and recognized me. Within min�utes he was offering me tea and coffee, and shortly after brought me a tray laden with goat's milk cheese, butter, ghee and flaps of unleavened bread. As I ate, I reflected on how welcoming the Bedouin were � probably the most welcoming people on earth. One of the problems the SAS had in the desert was that they regarded it as a hostile environment. Even Peter Ratcliffe admitted that 'none of us felt completely at ease in the desert, for all our training, and for some of us years of experience.' This unease was exacerbated by the fact that there were now few Arabic speakers in the Regiment, though back in Dhofar in the 1970s, there had been many who spoke the language fluently. Bravo Two Zero included not a single Arabic speaker, though even a lim�ited knowledge of the language might have enabled them all to escape and might even have saved their lives. True, McNab's patrol had been compromised by Bedouin, but Abbas insisted that they had attacked the interlopers solely because they felt their home was under threat. The SAS had discussed the problem of what to do about the Bedouin before being deployed in the desert, and some individuals had. been in favour of killing or abducting any tribesman who saw them. In the event, this never happened, because there were enough moderate souls in the Regiment to realize that the tribesmen didn't have much interest in politics or war or who was fighting whom, as long as they were left alone. A Bedouin's loy�alty is always to his tribe, an
d though he may be forced to work for someone else, or do so for money, his employer will always be regarded as a foreigner, even if it is his own government. 'After a few chance encounters with the Bedou,' one sergeant of A Squadron wrote, 'they realized that the patrols were treating them a lot better than the Iraqis. To my knowledge they never compromised us �we were never followed up by Iraqis after meeting Bedou � they just let life go as it was. They stopped and chatted with us to pass the time of day. We'd give them tea, food and blankets, they'd give us information about where the Iraqis were and then they would leave. In the end, if there were Bedou about we actively let them know we were there rather than trying to hide.' " Hiding like bandits in a wadi only 600 metres from a house, Bravo Two Zero were certain to be seen as a threat, yet even then Abbas and his two companions had given them the benefit of the doubt by firing warning shots, following Bedouin custom. If the patrol had kept its cool and realized that those first two shots had not been aimed at them, or simply waved and made some answer in Arabic, they might have got away, or at least gained the advantage. As it was, their nerves drawn tight from the knowledge that they were alone and cut off in the fearful void of the Syrian Desert, they had over�reacted, and in the end their own fear of the environment had defeated them. After I had eaten and drunk tea, I explained my predicament to the old man and at once he offered to take me back to Abbas's farm in his truck. I accepted, even though I knew I could offer him nothing in return � to have offered money to a true Bedouin would have been a deadly insult. As we bounced and bumped back towards my starting-off point, I decided that this must not happen again. I could find my way across the desert all right, but the vehicles would not be able to follow me without a guide who knew the area like the back of his hand. By the time we had arrived back at Abbas's place I knew I had already met the person I needed: the ideal guide would be Abbas bin Fadhil himself, the 'idiot on the digger' who had turned out to be anything but an idiot, the man who had compromised the Bravo Two Zero patrol. CHAPTER nine AT THE FARM, ABBAS AND HIS brother welcomed me enthusiastically, ushered me into the guest hall and brought tea. They chortled when I told them of the mis-adventure. 'There are very few places where you can cross the Wadi Hawran with a car,' Abbas said. 'And you have to know where they are. Only the Bedouin know. I wanted to tell you that yesterday and to offer to be your rafiq, but you seemed so set on doing things your own way that I didn't say anything.' I nodded, realizing that I had been so determined not to be deflected that I had forgotten the Bedouin tradition of taking a rafiq or companion from the local tribe when crossing their territory. The office of rafiq was almost sacred to the Bedouin. He acted not only as a guide, but also as a sort of ambassador from the local tribe, franking the foreign party across its neighbourhood. Once he had 'eaten bread and salt' with his travelling companions, he would be obliged to defend them to the death, even against his own people, and to steal from them or injure them in any way was considered bowqa or treachery � the worst crime in the book as far as nomads were concerned. If a man couldn't be trusted as a rafiq, he was worthless and would soon find himself being avoided by his rela�tives. In a Bedouin tribe, no one actually had the authority to 'expel' a tribesman, but people would simply stop cooperating with him, which meant that he was on his own. Traditionally, to be 'on your own' in the desert was a death sentence, because it meant that blood ene�mies could bump you off without fear of revenge. I acknowledged my fault and asked Abbas if he would consider acting as guide and rafiq for the convoy in his own vehicle. He accepted enthusiastically. 'I think you should wait here for a couple of hours,' he said. 'If they don't return we'll take my pick-up and go to look for them: There's no chance we'll lose them. I know the country here blindfold � I was brought up here. My brother and I know all the country as far as Damascus in the north, Amman in the west and Kuwait in the south. You get to learn a lot when you travel by camel, and that's what we did when we were boys. We used to smuggle sheep across the borders. In those days, if you were a Bedouin no one asked you what country you belonged to, because the Bedouin had no country. The Anazeh � our tribal confederation � used to move their herds right from Syria down to Saudi Arabia at different times of the year. It's different now, of course.' While we waited, I went over Abbas's account of the Bravo Two Zero story once again with him and Hayil, but the details did not alter. `What's the matter?' Abbas enquired at one stage. `Don't you believe us?' `It's not that,' I said. 'But I have to be sure. Are you cer�tain that there were no Iraqi soldiers involved?' Abbas pointed solemnly at the ceiling. 'As God is my witness,' he said. 'Bedouin do not lie. It is the greatest of all sins. Why, even when I met the President himself I told him the truth.' I was startled. 'What?' I said. 'You mean you met Saddam Hussein?' `Yes,' Abbas said. 'It was while the war was on. He heard about our story � how we had spotted the com�mandos and taken them on alone, and he wanted to hear it from us and to reward us. We met him in Baghdad and he was very polite and friendly. There were two other people there: a man called al-Haj Abdallah from Ani, who belongs to the same tribe as I do, and who was involved in capturing one of the commandos, and another called Adrian Badawi, a Christian from Mosul, who had been hijacked by them.' I gasped. Adnan Badawi was the same man who had told his story of being hijacked by British commandos to an Iraqi newspaper � I had the very article in my bag. This revelation opened up an entirely new can of worms, though. I had left Baghdad thinking no one had ever heard of Bravo Two Zero, and now I was learning that its defeat had been celebrated by Saddam himself. 'What did he give you?' I asked. `He didn't give me anything personally, because he con�sidered my father the head of the family. He gave him a Toyota pick-up � a brand-new one.' `Good grief.' As I thought about it, I realized that Abbas's admission did alter the picture significantly. It meant that he had been celebrated as a hero in his own country, just as McNab and Ryan had in theirs It gave them a motive for exaggerating what they had done. On the other hand, I reasoned, it also tended to confirm their story. Why should Saddam have rewarded them if the major part in the drama had been played by the Iraqi army? `What did you mean,' I asked, 'when you said that you told Saddam the truth?' Abbas shrugged. 'He asked me why I did it, expecting me to say that I did it for the country. I told him that I did it because those men were threatening my home and fam�ily. Like I said, it is wrong to tell a lie.' THE CONVOY TURNED UP LATER that afternoon, and Abu Omar was so furious that I had got separated from the vehicles for several hours that he insisted that we all returned to Baghdad. He was, he said, not happy with the conditions he had to work under anyway � he didn't like the food, couldn't sleep at night, and had not been able to have a shower in the past two days. He hadn't brought with him so much as a blanket or a water-bottle, and I wondered what kind of army officer would venture into the desert so unprepared. After a blazing row in Arabic, during which both of us probably said things we regretted later, the rotund Ali came to my aid and smoothed it over. To my surprise, he told me that he was the senior of the two minders and took priority over Abu Omar, so was perfectly within his rights to overrule him. Abu Omar, he informed me expansively, was only here to make sure we did not film where we were not allowed to. He did tell me that I should not have engaged Abbas as a guide without consulting him first, but in view of the problems of the day he thought it was, generally speak-ing, a good move, and would let it ride. The following morning, with Abbas now leading the convoy in his Toyota pick-up, I set of on foot from the Bedouin tent I had arrived at the previous day. It was still hot, but the wind had dropped and the going evened out into a flat, stony plain, melting at the horizon into a radiant sky. There were the tents of Bedouin families like dark stains on the landscape and, in places, thousands of black dots that were their flocks of sheep. Now the rough country was behind us, the terrain was ideal for four�wheel-drive vehicles, and I wondered again why McNab and his team had elected to go without them on this operation. Ryan points out that B Squadron, being the reserve unit, had no proper desert
vehicles like the Land Rover One-Tens or 'Pinkies' which A and D Squadrons had brought with them from Britain. The only vehicles avail�able were what they derisively called Dinkies': short-wheel-base Land Rover 90s without weapon-mountings. They had tried these vehicles out in their training ground in Oman and pronounced them 'crap' � it was impossible to fire a general-purpose machine-gun (GPMG) from them, and since there were no safety-belts, when put into a racing reverse, the passengers would be thrown out. Stan himself had been flung out and narrowly escaped being badly injured on a training run in Oman. Ryan admits that the team were alarmed at the idea of having to use these vehicles behind enemy lines. Of course, they would have been better than nothing. The main problem was striking a balance between escape and compromise. 'The most important reason for taking a Land Rover,' Peter Ratcliffe wrote, 'is that it provides a rapid means of escape from a contact, and the chance to return to the objective at a later date. Retreat-ing on foot with full kit is never fast, or easy. And that means that in a situation where your patrol is threatened, the only way out is to ditch most of the gear and run . . . Even if you managed to get clear, however, there is no way you can ever make another attempt to fulfil the mission . . . ' 18 If Abbas's claim that no Iraqi military pursued the patrol was correct, they could quite easily have reached a vehicle cache on the night of 24 January and beat a retreat to the border. The Iraqi air force was laying low anyway, and they were unlikely to have been hit from the air. Even at thirty kilometres per hour (twenty mph), the patrol could have made Saudi Arabia by vehicle in a day's hard drive. They would also have been able to carry the cold-weather equipment and supplies they needed more than anything in the Arctic temperatures, and enough heavy weaponry � Milan missiles, Browning machine-guns, mortars � to give a good account of themselves if things went noisy. McNab writes that the vehicles would have stuck out like sore thumbs, or 'like balls on a bulldog', as he puts it, yet the country around the MSR was very broken, as I had discovered, full of wadis and re-entrants, and didn't flatten out for at least twelve kilometres to the south. There would have been plenty of places in which to con�ceal Land Rovers in that area. McNab, of course, did not know this before the mission, and had judged the ground from satellite pictures, which showed height but not depressions. 'Once you're on the ground,' Peter Ratcliffe wrote, 'you can usually find depressions to hide the vehi�cle in.' 19 This was certainly the experience of the Long Range Desert Group, which in 1942 had carried out vehicle-supported OPs in North Africa in country as stark and featureless as the Syrian Desert, and had never been compromised. SAS founder David Stirling had realized that foot patrols wouldn't work in the desert the hard way, when, on the Regiment's very first operation, things had gone badly awry and two-thirds of a squadron, dropped in the desert by parachute, had died of thirst. As both Lawrence and Stirling knew, and as I had personally learned years ago, mobility is essential in the desert, where anything that stands still, dies. The distances involved are too vast for human legs alone: in summer or winter, in heat or cold, a man in the desert on foot unsup�ported has virtually no chance. The Commanding Officer of 22 SAS had probably realized this when, on 21 January, the day before the mission, he tried to persuade the patrol to take Land Rovers. Peter Ratcliffe, who encountered the CO that day 'mad as hell' after his abortive discussion with Bravo Two Zero, felt that McNab was playing silly buggers. Asked by his boss to go and knock some sense into him, the RSM suggested strongly that McNab should take the Colonel's advice. 'If it comes to a firefight, (motor vehi�cles) could well save your arse,' he told him. 'So . . . don't be a fool.' Ratcliffe noted that the rest of the patrol, including Ryan, seemed to support the decision. It was a course, the former RSM wrote, which he could not com�prehend, but could do little to change. Although he outranked McNab and could theoretically have ordered him to take the vehicles, in SAS tradition, patrol com�manders make their own decisions as to how they will go about their task, since they have to live with those deci�sions on the ground. `I believed then � and I still do,' Ratcliffe wrote, 'that most, if not all, of Bravo Two Zero's misfortunes resulted from "McNab's" refusal to take advice before he even left base.' He was incensed that McNab made no reference to the advice given to him by the CO and Ratcliffe himself before the mission in his book Bravo Two Zero. `Considering what were, I'm convinced, the results of not following our advice,' Ratcliffe wrote, 'I find it odd that he didn't feel the meetings worth mentioning. After all, the failure of that mission ultimately cost the lives of three men, and led to four others being captured and tor�tured. That's a casualty rate of nearly ninety per cent.'� It might be worth adding that while another B Squadron patrol, Bravo Three Zero, also declined to take a vehicle, the patrol commander aborted the mission immediately on seeing the terrain. The only B Squadron patrol to take a Land Rover, Bravo One Niner, was indeed compromised, but, thanks to its vehicles, man-aged to escape. THE ONLY THING THAT SLOWED my progress was the hospitality of the Bedouin whose camps lay in my path. If I passed within 300 metres of a tent, a dog would bark and soon a dark-swathed figure would appear and insist that I come in to think tea. Traditionally, Bedouin are very prickly about hospitality and to pass a tent with�out stopping is considered an insult. Although it would be unheard of for a Bedouin to offer violence to someone who refuses his entreaties, his last resort would be the threat `alayya at-talaq' � 'I will divorce my wife', which obliges him to do so if his hospitality is further refused. I was stopped three times that morning and each time followed the same pattern. I would shake hands with my hosts and be ushered into the main part of the tent, where a fire of woody roots would be coaxed to life in the cen�tre of the floor. While the kettle or coffee-pan went on the fire, more Bedouin would arrive as if by magic, and I would rise to greet each of them. When they had sat down and the tea was being passed around, they would ask for what they called 'the news'. Bedouin are immensely curious about anything that goes on around them, and so avid for 'the news' that in the past they would ride hundreds of miles by camel to get it. The most important news is not politics or war, but the state of grazing and water, which is crucial to their survival. The news' also includes everything they have experienced over the past few days, and many nomads, being illiterate, have photographic memories and can describe what they have seen in incredible detail. Often in my journeys in the desert I have arrived at Bedouin camps to find that the people there know all about me already � the Bedouin grapevine, coupled with powers of observation honed sharp by years of experience in a landscape where noth�ing is hidden, is extraordinarily efficient. The tribesmen would have been happy to sit jawing over the news all day, but I had a walk to do and I was often obliged to refuse offers of vast meals and slaughtered sheep to escape. As I made my way south, though, the tents grew fewer. Often I came upon squares of stones around neat black rectangles of earth where tents had stood recently and I reflected once again that while this place seemed a wilderness to me, every square metre of it had been a home to the Bedouin at some time. By sunset that evening I had reached the place marked on McNab's map as the helicopter drop-off point, exactly twenty kilo�metres due south of the LUP. The plain here was almost chillingly flat, and I could understand why the patrol had been moving so fast that night. To be caught out here in the open at first light could have been a sentence of death. This was the place in which � according to McNab �the team had originally been dropped on 22 January and had lain down in all-round defence, acclimatizing to the night, as the noise of the chopper's motors drifted slowly away. McNab says that he heard dogs barking and spot�ted a plantation within 1500 metres to the east, complete with water-tower, outbuildings and a house � uncannily like Abbas's place, which lay exactly twenty kilometres due north. I stood on the spot indicated by my Magellan and looked east. There was nothing there � no farm build�ings, no water-tower, no plantation. This was remote, uninhabited country, far from roads. There never had been a house here, Abbas said, but I decided to check anyway, and a sweep to
the east revealed nothing but the same rocky, flat, stubble-covered desert � no ruins, no debris, nothing. If there ever had been a building here as McNab writes, it had vanished without trace. McNab says that they passed this point by about five kilometres on the night of the 24th, retreating from the firefight, though why he didn't wait for the heli due in at 0400 the next morning he doesn't make clear. Though he and Ryan differ on the actual distances they covered that night, both agree that they headed roughly south then west then north in a loop back to the road. At this point it became obvious that although none of the patrol had been hit in the ambush, there were two casualties � 'Stan' � who was suffering from extreme dehydration, and was in a state of near collapse, and Vince Phillips, who, according to McNab, had suffered some kind of leg injury while skirmishing out of the firefight. McNab notes that it was so completely out of character for Phillips to complain that his swollen leg must have been agony, while Ryan makes no mention of the injury at all. Realizing that they had to move at the speed of the slowest, McNab changed the order of march, posting Ryan as lead scout with Stan after him, then Phillips, then McNab himself, and the other four behind. If this is true, it is curious because Ryan maintains that he had insisted on being lead scout from the moment they had left the LUP, and that immediately after the firelight Vince Phillips was behind him as Number Two. Lead scout is the most risky position in a patrol formation, because at any point he is the most likely to get bumped in a contact. If such a contact happens, numbers two and three in the line go to ground and cover the scout, who moves back tactically while the others go to ground. Ryan, however, says that Phillips kept falling back 'as if he didn't want to be near me' � clearly suggesting that the sergeant was afraid of getting hit in a contact. He also maintains that Phillips kept stopping and insisting that if they got bumped they should put up their hands and surrender rather than shooting back, or they would all be massa�cred. This is an unashamed accusation of cowardice against Phillips on Ryan's part, yet its veracity depends purely on the assertion that Phillips was Number Two in the line of march � otherwise it does not make sense. If McNab is right, though, and Ryan was not put in the lead until after the party had turned north many hours later, Ryan's accusation must be specious. The idea that Ryan was not lead scout from the beginning is suggested by Abbas's evidence that it was the seventh man, not the first, who waved. Somewhere in the dark wasteland south of the road, McNab heard jets approaching from the north and halted to contact them on his TACBE. According to his account, he put his hand on Phillips's shoulder and told him the patrol was going to stop. Phillips acknowledged this, and assuming he would pass the message on, McNab halted and pulled the pin on the beacon just as the last two jets were going over. As McNab gave out his call sign and prepared to give a fix from the Magellan, he heard an American-accented voice drifting back across the airwaves reiterating the call sign and asking him to repeat the message. However, by the time he had done so the jets were out of range. To his dismay, McNab then realized that the three men in front were no longer with him. He concluded that Phillips � in his 'numbed' cond�ition � had not passed the message along the line. Now he had lost three men. To be fair to McNab, he admits that though it was Phillips's responsibility to pass the message down to Stan and Ryan, as patrol commander he was 'a complete knobber' not to have checked. Ryan, who said later that he had never heard the jets, was stalking on fast ahead, did not realize the patrol had split until he reached the road, and was about to climb the ridge on the far side. Turning to confer with the patrol commander, he sud�denly discovered that McNab was no longer with them. It was not long after midnight, and at least an hour since Ryan had last seen him � in that time the patrol had cov�ered a lot of ground. When Ryan asked Phillips where the others were, he replied that he didn't know, and that they had 'just split off somewhere'. According to McNab, though, Stan later said that both he and Ryan had heard the jets and that Phillips had. 'babbled' about 'aircraft and TACBEs' � suggesting that he had understood McNab's message that the patrol was going to stop. Ryan, however, does not blame Phillips for the split, admitting that he was on the verge of panic himself More than anything, he was angry that he had got 'stuck' with the two 'casu-alties', one of whom (Stan) was 'out of the game' and the other (Phillips) 'didn't want to be in it'. The main fire�power of the team was with McNab's group � since Stan had handed over his Minimi to McNab, the three of them now had between them only two M1 6s and a pistol. The Magellan had also gone with Mark. After sweeping the area with the kite-sight and seeing nothing, Ryan attempted to call McNab on his TACBE with no result. Then, assuming command of his small squad � although Phillips outranked him � he decided that they ought to press on across the high plateau north of the road. Was Phillips really to blame for the split as McNab obliquely suggests? Of course, it was a very dark night, with a freezing wind that forced the men to keep their heads down, low cloud cover, and poor visibility. The patrol had covered a long distance very fast and were exhausted and under extreme tension. In such circum-stances, added to the fact that Phillips was in agony from his swollen leg, it would not be surprising if mistakes had been made. But it is notable that Ryan himself does not quote Phillips as saying McNab had halted to use the TACBE. It could, of course, be that McNab's message had not penetrated Phillips's 'numbed brain' as McNab says, but Phillips is dead and cannot speak for himself. Air force jets move pretty swiftly and the patrol was pre�sumably well spaced out. Perhaps McNab was so anxious to contact the jets on hearing them that he failed to tell Phillips? According to Ryan's story, he had told McNab a full seven kilometres south of the road that he intended to `push as hard as he could' until they had crossed it, despite the fact that he knew Stan and Phillips were dis�abled. Of course, even if he had not heard the shout, Phillips should have checked that McNab was behind him, but even if McNab's description is correct, the split need not have been a disaster had the patrol followed SAS standing procedure. As an SAS patrol moves, the patrol leader should con�stantly be designating emergency rendezvous (ERVs) to which the patrol would return in the event of a problem � particularly a contact. This process is a basic SOP which every SAS recruit learns during selection, and McNab even outlines the system in his book. Theoretically, when Ryan realized that the patrol had split, he should have led his section of it back to the near�est ERV and waited for the others to come in. Ryan says that while moving on from the TACBE contact, McNab's patrol spotted three men walking across their front, but assumed it was an Iraqi patrol and did not challenge them. Even if the SAS were being pursued by 'Iraqi patrols', which Abbas and his brother both denied, it seems highly unlikely that they would have been out on foot in threes. If they were not hallucinations, these three men were almost certainly the missing patrol members, but why, in that case, they should have been moving across the line of march must remain a puzzle. In any case, although the situation obviously demanded it, it is clear that McNab had not given out any emergency RV to the patrol. Whether Phillips did or did not pass the mes-sage along, therefore, is largely immaterial.