Michael Asher

by The Real Bravo Two Zero

  CHAPTER ten THAT NIGHT I CAMPED NEAR the crew and the min-ders at McNab's stated drop-off point. The evening was a hot one, the moonlight bright, and after dark the grasses were crawling with scorpions and spiders � more than I had ever seen anywhere at one time. These creatures only emerge from under their stones when the heat there becomes unbearable, and were not a problem for Bravo Two Zero in the freezing desert winter. Most scorpions inject a local toxin which causes a painful swelling, but a few carry a nerve toxin as powerful as a cobra's that can kill a man in four hours. To pass the time, Abbas organ�ized a shooting competition among the military escort, using a plastic bottle at 100 paces. The only one who hit it consistently was Abbas himself. In the morning I marched a brisk ten kilometres across an unrelenting plain, and then turned north once again until my way was barred by a deep descent of hundreds of metres into a rocky valley. Almost certainly, this was where Bravo Two Zero had turned north, the route directed more by the landscape than time and distance. Here in the valley, among more broken country, there were ridges, dips and gullies that would give them more cover should the sunrise overtake them here. There was also no way vehicles could descend the steep cliffs, which would have thrown off any possible pursuers; Abbas had to take our convoy round by a circuitous route. It was even hotter down in the valley, and I struggled across a rubble of boulders and sat down for a snack and a mug of water in a sandy wadi, slowly frying. As I continued north, every hour or so I would see Abbas's pick-up bobbing out of the desert, keeping tabs on my progress. Somewhere between here and the road to the north, Bravo Two. Zero had split on the night of 24 January. Because of the time and distance discrepancies in McNab's and Ryan's accounts, it was impossible to know exactly where, but I was to get a clue from a totally unexpected source. About three kilometres south of the road, Abbas appeared once more and stopped me. He pointed out a mound on the side of a horseshoe-shaped ridge, where there appeared to be a small cairn of stones. Taking his AK47 with him, he led me up to the mound, which formed a kind of flat-bedded platform on the side of the ridge, facing south and at least ten square metres in area. If the wind had been from the north, this place, though high up, would have been fairly well sheltered on three sides. 'A few days after our gun-battle with the commandos,' Abbas said, `the police found a weapon here. I only arrived later and I didn't get a good look at it, but I think it was a machine-gun. It was broken and couldn't be used, and we guessed it had been left here by the same people we had shot at back near the farm.' I scratched my head. 'That's not possible,' I said. 'A British patrol wouldn't abandon its weapons. It would be a disgrace.' Abbas shrugged. 'I'm only telling you what they found,' he said. 'There were also signs that people had stopped here. The stones had been made into a kind of shelter and there were cigarette ends and papers.' This rang a bell, and I searched through my copy of McNab's book, looking for some reference. McNab notes that on the morning of 25 January, his section of the patrol decided to lie up on a lone knoll in an area, of hard sand, on the top of which was a cairn surrounded by a dry-stone wall. I searched for a reference to an abandoned weapon and found none. I knew I had read it somewhere and I scoured Ryan's book too, without success. This was frus�trating and I started to wonder if I had imagined it. Then it suddenly occurred to me that both books ended with ret-rospective accounts from the other members of the patrol, acquired when they were reunited in Britain after the mis�sion. I turned to the back of The One That Got Away and found the page quickly. According to Ryan, McNab had told him that when they had established their LUP for 25 January, they had destroyed the radio's encrypting unit as well as their codebooks. They had also dismantled and scattered the parts of Stan's Minimi, which McNab had been carrying ever since Stan had gone down with heat exhaustion. Suddenly it made sense. McNab had been hefting two weapons, and once Stan had disappeared with the others, there would have been no point in having his Minimi along, as no one but Rambo could fire more than one weapon at once. This was a key geographical clue, too, I realized. Since McNab would certainly not have aban-doned Stan's weapon until after the split � and assuming it was Stan's weapon that had been found here � I knew I had now passed the place where the split had occurred.. The only nagging question was whether this could have been the patrol's LUP when McNab's sketch-map showed it as being at least twenty-five kilometres further on. If they had indeed spent the day of 25 January here, that meant they had covered no more than forty-five kilo-metres the previous night � and that was going by the distances McNab gives in his text, which tally neither with his sketch-map, nor with Ryan's data. According to Ryan, the patrol marched only sixteen kilometres south, compared with McNab's twenty-five, and only ten kilo-metres west, compared with McNab's fifteen. Ryan's map, however, indicates that the distances were even shorter. Allowing about another seven kilometres for the march north, this came to a total of only thirty-four kilo�metres (about twenty-one miles). Moreover, because of the doubt over McNab's story concerning the heli RV, I had been following Ryan's text to this point, and since I had found the place where the weapon had been aban�doned near to my route, this suggested that Ryan's account was the more accurate. The night had been pitch-dark, the conditions terrible, the going underfoot rocky and difficult, and at least as far as this point the patrol had been slowed down by two dis-abled men. They had been carrying weapons and belt-kit containing water, grenades and ammunition, weighing at least thirty kilos per man. They had stopped for some minutes, at first every hour, then every half hour, and had been further slowed down by the fact that the night-vision sight was ineffective due to lack of ambient light. If the contact had been at 1800 hours as all the information sug�gests, and they carried on until 0500 hours � the very latest cut-off point before first light � they had been going for a maximum of eleven hours at almost eight kilo�metres an hour. Anything over about six kilometres an hour is a running pace for most human beings, and Ryan says that the patrol were going 'as fast as possible without running'. A good marching pace for an SAS patrol in belt-kit is reckoned to be about five kilometres an hour, but this is in the best conditions, while the conditions Bravo Two Zero experienced that night were almost the worst possible. I scanned the map again. From here to the second MSR was almost exactly fifty kilometres � precisely the dis�tance McNab says they had covered to the metalled road the following night. If this had been the LUP for 25 January, then, the distance would tally ,on the second day, but would mean that what McNab said about covering 85 kilometres � 'the distance of two marathons' � was wrong. Yet desperate men can sometimes achieve incred�ible things, and the patrol certainly had an incentive for moving fast. I had no reason to suspect Abbas of lying �after all, it had been difficult enough for me to find the reference to the abandoned weapon, which was not in the main part of the text. I had to admit, though, that this place bore little resemblance to the description of the 25 January LUP given in the book. There was no reason to suspect McNab was not correct over this. All in all, I thought, I should give McNab the benefit of the doubt �it was perfectly possible that Ryan had got it wrong and that they had broken up Stan's weapon long before they had reached the LUP on 25 January. This might have been a temporary LUP � a place where they had rested for half an hour or so before pressing on. In any case, whether it was 34 or 85 kilometres they covered that night does not detract from the true heroism they displayed: not the superhero ability to march vast distances on foot, but the incredible mental toughness they must have required not to give in to the desert at its most fearful, to keep driving forward right through the jaws of death. In fact, the LUP of 25 January � wherever it was �almost proved the undoing of them. They had found the place by 0500 hours, and by 0700 hours it was raining hard, to be followed in quick succession by sleet and snow. The last thing the SAS had expected was snow in the desert. It piled up over them in a drift as they lay behind the makeshift stone shelter, freezing their camou�flage smocks solid and turning their shamaghs to cardboard. By 1100 hours the
patrol was reduced to a shivering, quivering huddle of bodies, desperately trying to share their fading warmth. The human enemy was now forgotten; all thoughts were turned solely to survival. This was a time of great peril for Bravo Two Zero. All their lives hung in the balance, yet they managed to crack stupid jokes and exchange banter to keep their spirits up. It is to McNab's great credit that he realized the danger and decided to throw standard operating procedures to the wind, abandoning hard routine and lighting up a Hexamine stove, brewing up coffee and hot chocolate. Those brews probably saved the patrol's lives. By 1400 hours though, Coburn told McNab he was starting to go down with hypothermia. McNab asked him to hold on as long as he could, but within two hours everyone was slip-ping under, and though it was still daylight, McNab knew he couldn't risk remaining immobile any longer. By last light they would probably be unable to move at all, and by morning they would all be dead. They moved out, shivering, staggering, mumbling to themselves, unable even to hold their weapons properly, trying to move fast enough to get the blood circulating and to generate some body heat. Though they managed to cross the metalled road they had been heading for that night, the trek was a terrible one � the worst conditions the SAS men had ever seen. It was pitch-black and deso-late, with the north wind cutting into them like a blade, so chilling that they gradually started to switch off men�tally and to become disoriented. Their physical condition, McNab concluded, could not have been much worse. Recognizing the danger signals, and knowing the terrible wind-chill was eventually going to kill them any-way, McNab once again abandoned any semblance of tactical movement. He decided to backtrack to a sheltered wadi-bed south of the metalled road, where they huddled around Coburn, the worst affected and, again risking compromise, made brews of hot drinks and dished out food. They were on their feet again within two hours, but instead of marching north, back into the wind, they headed north-west along the wadi-bed, running parallel with the metalled road, which at least afforded a mod�icum of shelter and the possibility of protection from attack. About midnight, Legs Lane � now lead scout � halted suddenly, and the others saw two armed men silhouetted on a hilltop. McNab wondered if they were two of the missing members of the patrol, but rejected the idea � no SAS man would have allowed himself to be skylined like that. Almost instinctively, McNab says, the patrol began to reach for their 'fighting knives', ready to deal with the men. They watched as the men inched up to within twenty metres of them, then suddenly jumped into the wadi and ambled away � 'The two luckiest men in Iraq,' McNab says. McNab makes frequent reference throughout his book to these 'fighting knives' the patrol carried with them, which, he says, 'resembled the famous WWII commando dagger', even suggesting that the SAS men intended to use these daggers to take out the crews of the Scuds they were going to destroy. Although he himself spends half a page explaining how difficult it is to kill someone with a blade, he suggests that the use of such knives was com�monplace in the Regiment. But as everyone who has served in the SAS knows, there is no such thing as a `fighting knife'. In World War II, some commandos and members of the Special Operations Executive � the SOE � were issued with stiletto-like commando knives for