by Damien Lewis
From off to one side a voice rang out through the dark. ‘Steve Grayling! Grey! You there?’
The voice sounded familiar, and Grey figured it had to be one of his mates from his days spent working with the Regiment.
‘Yeah! Over here, mate! Over here!’
Two points of eerie light emerged from the gloom. They turned out to be cyalumes – chemical light sticks – one held in either hand of the SAS guy who was here to receive them. He waved Grey’s wagon forward, and at walking pace they followed him across the dirt strip. They made towards the ghostly form of a waiting Chinook, which loomed out of the murk like a darker patch of shadow amongst the dust swirling all around.
Grey indicated the helo’s open rear. ‘Take mega fucking care when you go up the ramp.’ He jerked his thumb in the direction of their tailgate. ‘Especially with the camo-netting.’
‘Got it, boss,’ Moth confirmed.
There were only a bare couple of inches to spare on either side when driving a Pinkie into a Chinook, plus the arse-end of their wagon had a rolled up camo-net strapped across it. If that caught on anything it could rip the innards out of the helo, or damage the hydraulic system that opened and closed the tail ramp.
With all the dust in the air, the blokes had pulled shemaghs over the exposed skin of their faces, and sand goggles over their eyes. It was the only way to safeguard their vision, but it made it impossible to wear NVG, for both sets of kit wouldn’t strap over the eyes at the same time. It was only the dim light thrown off by the cyalumes, plus the way the SAS bloke guided the wagons forward, that got them safely into the dark hold.
There were two Chinooks waiting to ferry the Squadron onwards, but each could only take one Pinkie and a couple of quads. Part of the aircraft’s hold was occupied by a bulging fuel bladder, which took up precious space but added extra range. They had before them a sixty-kilometre flight, after which they’d be dropped in the open desert to the north of the Euphrates, to form up M Squadron’s vanguard.
Once they’d been delivered to their open-desert LZ, the men were to establish the Squadron’s forwards mounting base for the mission. This was by far the most dangerous stage of the operation so far. A small lightly armed force was flying into the unknown, tasked with holding a patch of flat, featureless terrain for three days and nights, so the rest of the Squadron could be ferried in.
As Grey waited for the helo’s rotors to spool up to speed, his mind drifted to thoughts of his wife and kids back home. He couldn’t help but wonder if this was the mission that was going to get him. It was rare for him to feel as anxious as he did now: in fact, he couldn’t think of another moment in a lifetime of elite soldiering that had unnerved him so much. It was ominous and unsettling.
He glanced at Mucker squatting by his quad, but the tough northerner seemed to be showing no special signs of nerves or of tension. He too had a wife and young children back in the UK, so by rights he should have been equally worried. As for the Dude and Moth, Grey figured they were the lucky ones right now. Sure, they lacked operational experience, but at least the young guns didn’t have the added burden of a wife and kids on their shoulders.
The turbines screamed deafeningly above them, and the Chinook clawed into the air for the next leg of the insertion. As the pilot banked the big helo round and set a course heading north, Grey could see his men checking and rechecking their weapons. Two of his team were untried and untested in combat, and he hoped and prayed that they weren’t about to fly into a patch of desert packed with a hidden enemy, one that their scrutiny of the sat-photos had somehow failed to detect.
The Chinooks were operating on black light and the aircrew were flying fast, at tree-top level. They were throwing the massive, cumbersome machine around like a sports car, and the effect in the rear was electrifying. They were going in blind to a potentially hot LZ, they had no one on the ground to guide them in, and they were unsighted and defenceless – apart from the door gunners hunched over their miniguns.
Following the experience of Afghan ops in 2001–2, the Chinooks had been upgraded with a fantastic NEP (night enhancement package), which enabled the pilots to fly nap-of-the-earth missions even in extremely low light. The NEP included specialist night-vision technology that showed the terrain over which they were flying in glowing near-daylight, on laptop-like computer screens mounted in the cockpit. It also included a moving mapping package that displayed a 3D contour map of the ground they were crossing.
The pair of helicopters tore ahead at near-maximum speed – approaching 250 kph – the terrain flashing past barely a few dozen feet below the porthole-like windows. There was a glint of moonlight on water below them, which had to be the Euphrates, as the pilot dropped the Chinook down to hug the surface of the river. They powered across that mighty waterway, putting the barrier it represented well behind the advance force of M Squadron.
For a moment Grey was reminded of the MV Nisha assault. He’d sat by the Chinook’s open ramp in the howling, icy draft thrown up by the wind-whipped sea. Just as now, that Chinook pilot had brought them in at ultra-low level, the wave tops seemingly tearing at their undercarriage. The assault had been carried out in the midst of a raging gale, but still the pilot had held the Chinook rock-steady as it hovered over the deck and the men went down the ropes.
Grey had every confidence in the highly-trained Special Forces aircrew doing a similarly sterling job on their insertion into Iraq. As they thundered across the desert leaving the expanse of the river behind them, and with little sense of what they were flying into, the one comfort Grey felt was in the calibre of the men flying the helicopters: the MV Nisha assault had more than proved them the best in the business.
The noise in the Chinook’s cavernous hold was deafening – the throbbing of the rotor blades plus the roaring of the wind from the open ramp – and it made it impossible to talk. Grey got his men to don their night-vision kit, which rendered the dark interior of the helo a ghostly fluorescent green. He gave each of his team a thumbs-up, and got a silent nod and a forced smile in return.
As they neared the LZ the nerves were really starting to show. This was the kind of mission that he had trained and coached his men for relentlessly, and he hoped they were ready. He only wished they’d had more time in Kenya to prepare for what was coming – surviving and very likely fighting from their vehicles over weeks spent behind enemy lines.
But it was too late to worry about that now: they were well past the point of no return.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Chinook’s loadmaster – the crewman responsible for getting men and materiel on and off the helicopter – flashed the five fingers of one hand in front of the men’s faces. It was the signal that they were five minutes out from the LZ; it was time to mount up the Pinkie and the quad, for the helo would be touching down only long enough for the vehicles to roar down its open ramp and be gone. Those few precious seconds on the ground were all the aircrew could afford.
Grey, Moth, Dude and Mucker flipped up their NVG, pulled down their sand goggles and wrapped their shemaghs ever more tightly around them. Their faces were smeared in a thick layer of camouflage cream, and their combats were covered in a layer of dust that already seemed to be making its way into everything. They were starting to assume the colour and hue of the Iraqi desert in which they would be operating.
Here and there the vehicles were plastered in dun-coloured camouflage tape, to dull down any vaguely reflective surfaces. Special attention had been paid to the light units, which were completely taped over. They’d be operating on black light, so the fuses had been removed, and the switches for turning them on and off had been taped over to ensure no headlamp or brake light could be operated accidentally. This was vital tradecraft when operating in an open, sun-blasted desert environment, and something that their US Special Forces and SAS mentors had banged into them during training back in Kenya. One flash of sunlight on a patch of metal could prove fatal this far inside Iraq.
Likewise, if a
s seemed likely the enemy were out there scanning the desert for British Special Forces, they’d do so at night with their headlights sweeping the open terrain. So all windscreen glass had been removed from the Pinkies, and there was nothing about the wagons – or indeed the men driving them – that would reflect any hostile light.
In short, the men of M Squadron had made themselves as invisible as it was possible to be. They were a ghost force, and to that end they’d also removed all identifying marks or documents. They carried no wallets, photos of family, or ID papers of any sort, and their combats were bereft of any sign of rank or unit. If captured, there was nothing about them that would identify what nation or force they hailed from, or who they were.
Sure, the Iraqis would have ways to break a man and force him to talk. But sanitized as they were, a captured individual might at least buy his fellow warriors a good few hours or even days of precious time, before he cracked. If anyone was taken alive then the mission would still have to be considered blown, but at least the OC would have a few hours in which to try to ensure his remaining force’s survival.
But right now the main threat to Grey’s team was what they might be flying into at the fast-approaching LZ. Once the Chinooks had dropped them, he felt confident they could blend into the desert environment and disappear. It was standard operating procedure to evacuate the area of the LZ as quickly as possible – but whereas two Pinkies and two quads might vanish into the rock and sand, a pair of massive, thundering Chinooks was a very different matter.
As the helos tore in and put down they couldn’t help but advertise their very noisy arrival. And the trouble was, Grey and his tiny force had to remain static on the LZ for a good two hours before they could make themselves scarce. The Chinooks were going to drop them at 2400 hours, and at 0200 they were scheduled to fly in again with a further batch of men and machines. In the meantime the tiny advance force had to secure and hold the LZ, or at least give ample warning to the pilots that it had been compromised and to abort.
Grey felt the contents of his stomach lurching into his throat as the massive helo decelerated from speed, while at the same time the pilot lowered its rear end towards the earth. It was ‘flaring out’ so as to touch down with its ramp on the desert sands, its wheels barely making contact, and keeping the rotors turning and burning. It would hang like that for a few seconds, then the wagons would away, and the aircraft would get airborne once more and head fast and low for safety.
As the Chinook lost altitude the first whips of choking dust came whirling through the open rear, the twin rotors blowing up a veritable sandstorm. Grey gave the signal to start the engines, and within seconds the hold was filled with the blue-grey smog of diesel fumes mixed with the dust. To their left and right the Chinook’s door gunners were sweeping the terrain below for hostile threat, but with the rotors kicking up a brownout of swirling sand they could barely see a thing.
A thud reverberated through the airframe as the pilot settled the giant machine arse-end onto the desert. No sooner had he done so than the loadie gave the ‘Go-go-go’ – signalling with his gloved hand for the vehicles to get down the open ramp. Mucker went first, the quad exiting the helo like a bat out of hell. Grey’s wagon followed, with Moth inching it down the ramp and nosing it all but blind into the seething, dust-filled darkness.
As their rear wheels left the ramp and hit the desert with a thump, Grey tried to shout some kind of confirmation that they were gone, but the Chinook was already getting airborne again. The pitch of the rotors whined to a scream, the aircraft rose, dipped its nose and powered away. It roared into a banking turn, the pilot swinging the giant machine onto a southerly bearing, before being was swallowed up by the dark night.
Grey and his men hunched over their weapons, trying to shield themselves from the stinging rotor-driven sand and grit. There was no point in trying to move anywhere. Visibility was at zero and it was impossible to do anything other than ride out the storm blind. They had to sit and wait until the air cleared enough to be able to see and move.
The first thing to become visible was the night sky, the brightest stars piercing the thinning halo of dust like pinpricks of molten gold. As the fine sand settled and pooled all about them, drifting to earth on the desert air, the strong, heady smell of burning aviation fuel faded into the background, as did the characteristic thwoop-thwoop-thwoop of the Chinook’s double rotors.
In its place was a deep and residing stillness such as few of the men had ever experienced, plus the empty, wild, earthy smell of the cold desert night. The terrain all around them was so utterly still and devoid of life that the gentle purr of the Pinkie’s engine sounded deafeningly loud, and as if it might carry for dozens of kilometres to any listening human ear.
Grey and Dude hunched behind their machine-guns, scanning their arcs. The men on the other Pinkie, commanded by Scruff, were doing likewise. Grey felt certain there were alert enemy forces out there somewhere. He could feel it in his bones. Yet his initial rapid scan revealed nothing. They had been dropped in dead-flat and open terrain, the darker shades indicating where patches of sharp black gravel lay between stretches of bare rock and lighter sand.
As soon as the air had cleared enough, Grey signalled Moth to move out. Scruff knew to fall into line behind, as they pushed out to the eastern side of the LZ. Moth nosed the wagon ahead, the ambient light thrown off by the moon and stars being strong enough to pick out a route. It was easy enough driving, the ground under foot being hard-packed, smooth and firm, and devoid of even the slightest trace of track or pathway.
They pushed ahead observing complete radio silence, just in case the Iraqis were scanning the airwaves for Coalition radio chatter. With a force as small as theirs, it was simple enough to communicate using hand signals. Grey brought Moth to a halt, then with a knife-slice motion across the throat he got him to cut the engine.
Scruff’s wagon pulled in alongside them, its bonnet pointed in the opposite direction to their own. That way, they had a pair of .50-cal heavy machine-guns plus GPMGs covering them in both directions. As the second wagon cut its engine, the tiny force of British soldiers was enveloped in the silence of the night.
Grey strained his ears, and he figured he could just make out the faint beat of the Chinook’s rotor blades fading into the distance. He wondered for how many kilometres that sound might be audible, and who exactly might have heard them. There was an empty ghostliness to this place that unnerved him, and yet was strangely peaceful and calming.
It struck him that being dropped by Chinook in the Iraqi desert was something like walking out of the world’s noisiest rave club in the early hours of a Sunday morning. They’d exchanged the deafening roar of the helo’s turbines and the rush of the slipstream for utter stillness and silence like the grave. He flipped his NVG down and began to do a more detailed scan of the terrain.
‘Mate, best keep your natural night vision,’ he whispered to Moth, ‘just in case we need to move out.’
If both men used their night-vision kit, then were jumped by enemy vehicles using headlights, the NVG would be ‘whited-out’ by the high light levels and they’d be blinded. So one operator would always keep his natural vision, to avoid that happening.
Grey was struck by how deafeningly loud those few words that he had spoken had sounded. There was a weird, wired tension underlying the quiet here. As he scanned the terrain, in each direction that he looked the frog-eyed green fluorescent glow lit up a tunnel of desert. Grey didn’t particularly rate the night-vision kit. Sure, it rendered darkness into near-daylight, but at the same time it distorted everything. It condensed distance, concentrating all into a narrow-view glow that cut out all peripheral vision.
His search revealed nothing that he hadn’t seen with the naked eye: all signs of human life were absent here. He leaned across to Scruff in the wagon beside him. The two men exchanged a few whispered words, their eyes barely moving from their gun sights.
‘Dog’s bollocks?’ Grey muttere
d.
‘The proverbial,’ Scruff whispered back.
Their two wagons and the pair of quads stuck out like a sore thumb, marooned in the sea of empty desert as they were.
‘Anything?’ Grey queried.
‘Nothing, mate. Not a thing. Plus it’s quiet enough to hear a sparrow’s fart.’
They’d driven maybe three hundred metres to the east of the LZ. It was far enough to keep eyes and weapons on it, and at least they weren’t parked up bang where the helos had put them down. Still, this felt all wrong. After the deafening noise of the insertion they should be making haste, putting several kilometres between them and the LZ. But the British military didn’t have the airframes to move an entire Special Forces squadron into Iraq in one go, and so they’d have to stay put and wait.
Had the Yanks been running such an operation, they’d have mounted up a dozen Chinooks and swept in like a scene from Apocalypse Now. But this being a wholly British gig, the plan had been crafted around the available assets, and they were going to have to use waves of aircraft spread over three nights.
The risks of doing so were legion. Not only were the helos audible for several klicks away as they put down on the LZ, but coming in at low level anyone on the flight track would also detect their passing. No one but British or American forces would be using helos deep in the Iraqi desert, so it didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out who it was powering overhead.
‘Hope it’s not going to be Al Sahara all over,’ Scruff whispered, referring to the Squadron’s attempt to seize the airfield not far from their present location.
‘Too right,’ Grey grunted. ‘But we’re asking for it, that’s for certain.’
‘Boss, it goes against all we learned in Kenya,’ came a quiet voice from beside him. It was Moth. ‘Remember Delta Jim’s words: Bug out of your LZ like as soon as possible. Make directly for a hidden LUP.’
‘Yeah.’ Grey shrugged. ‘But orders are orders. Tell you another thing, I’m bloody frozen.’ He flexed his fingers around the GPMG’s icy grip. ‘Forget a bloody brass monkey, it’s cold enough to freeze my own balls off.’