by Damien Lewis
Waiting to get torn to pieces like this was the worst of all feelings. For a second, Grey considered how he would go about finishing off the Squadron, were he that force of Iraqis. They’d know by now that smashing in the 12.7mm rounds from two thousand yards hadn’t quite done the job. They were also sure to know that the Squadron was equipped with nothing that could kill heavy armour.
Grey had to assume that the Iraqi military had been briefed on NATO weaponry, just as the Squadron had been briefed on available Iraqi firepower. By now they must have worked out that the Squadron had no Milan or equivalent weaponry, and that they weren’t about to bring in any air power.
In the Iraqis’ place, Grey would opt to sneak up on the British force. He’d get the three wagons on the rocky knoll pinned in his gun sights, and mallet them from a couple of hundred yards away. He’d opt to blow them apart and tear the wagons to pieces, using either the tank’s Dushka or its main cannon. At that kind of range, Grey and his fellows wouldn’t even see the bullets coming. The only positive for the beleaguered operators was that they’d be dead before they knew it.
A voice came up on the radios: ‘All call-signs, confirm with me when ready to blow charges.’
With every passing second, Grey was growing more and more anxious and edgy. He could sense the deadly threat out there in the dark, and that it was hunting for them remorselessly. He leaned across to Moth, and gestured at his GPMG.
‘I’m going to check on the others – your weapon, mate.’
He slipped from the wagon and jogged down the incline leading into the lake bed. A well-worn track snaked into the depression, so at some time of the year it had to be passable. It was sod’s law that the Squadron had chosen to use it just when it happened to be a treacherous swamp. He reached the bed of the wadi, and the first thing he saw was the arse-end of the rearmost wagon, with blokes clustered around it.
Ahead of it lay a column of vehicles similarly up to their doors in the mud. He kept flipping his NVG up and down, so he could check on the men’s whereabouts, while maintaining his natural night vision. He counted eight wagons in all, stretching across the lake bed.
At the far end he figured he could see a lone Pinkie perched on the wadi’s rim, with a couple of quads near by. It wasn’t a command vehicle, so presumably one wagon from Four or Five Troop had made it through the swamp. By his reckoning that was all of their Land Rovers accounted for. They’d lost eight bogged in; three were on the lip of the wadi behind him; two from HQ Troop had gone east; and one had got out of the northern exit point with a few quads for company.
Moving south across the wadi towards him were the first of the figures on foot – those that were abandoning their vehicles, in preparation to blow them. Grey counted a dozen figures heading his way. In the eerie light of the NVG it was a ghostly scene, as the blokes struggled their way through. In spite of the urgency of the situation, they seemed to be moving in painfully slow motion, laden down with gear as they were and wading through the thick and cloying mud.
Grey raised an arm and yelled at them to make for the wagons above, then turned and ran up the incline. As he powered up the steep slope his mind was racing. The Squadron had lost almost two-thirds of their wagons and their firepower, and maybe a similar number of quads. The situation was pretty close to terminal. In fact, he couldn’t really see how it could get a great deal worse.
‘We’ve got eight wagons bogged in, and blokes coming our way on foot!’ he yelled, once he was back with the vehicles. ‘Make room for a shedload of passengers.’
The eight wagons bogged in would equate to twenty-four men, and with all the will in the world there was no way they could load that many onto the waiting Pinkies. Hopefully, some would have gone north to join the small force of vehicles gathered there.
In spite of the blokes’ apparent calm, what was unfolding here was their worst ever nightmare. They’d got the entire Squadron minus a handful of wagons and quads mired in an Iraqi swamp, and about to be blown to smithereens. And that meant they’d got sixty elite operators about to go on the run deep behind enemy lines, without the vehicles to carry them. They could easily lose half the Squadron or more here – injured, dead or captured.
Grey heard a yell over the radios: ‘Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!’
It was time for the last blokes to get the hell off the vehicles, for they were about to blow. To trigger the fuses you had to unwrap the gaffer tape protecting them, push the plunger, then make a run for it. The plunger worked on a ninety-second fuse which set off a length of detonation cord, and that in turn would punch into the charge with enough force to trigger it.
Grey had seen such charges in action. Designed to take out a main battle tank, they had the power to visibly lift a T-72 off the deck when detonated beneath it. They’d totally shred the soft-skinned Pinkies, thus denying the enemy the vehicles as well as any sensitive equipment that might remain on them.
Grey gave the word to Moth to move the wagon a good few feet off the rocky knoll. Up there, they’d be exposed to any blast thrown off by the charges, plus the ammo carried by the wagons would cook off in the heat of the explosions. They dropped the three Land Rovers down to where the high ground shielded them from the coming explosions but where the blokes bugging out should still find them.
The first ghostly figure appeared, stumbling up the incline. The apparition was made all the more eerie because he was caked from head to toe in the black, gooey shit. Laden down with weapons and sensitive gear from his wagon, he was moving horribly slowly. Others emerged, strung out in a ragged line behind him.
‘I wish they’d get a fucking move on,’ Grey remarked to Moth, as he scanned the darkness with his weapon.
He couldn’t believe the enemy hadn’t hit them yet, and at any second he was expecting a 125mm tank shell to come howling down his throat.
The lead figure flung himself onto the rear of Grey’s vehicle. Others clambered aboard wherever they could, clinging on to the .50-cal and surrounding the Dude in his gun turret. They were exhausted from having to fight their way through the swamp, and they’d come out carrying only their personal weapons and whatever sensitive kit they could manage.
Scruff’s and Ed’s wagons each got loaded up with a similar number of men, who perched on the wagons’ sides and clung to the heavy weapons for support. Gunner got the commander of Four Troop perched on the rack of his quad, which was designed as a one-rider vehicle. At that stage they were about as overloaded as it was possible to get.
One of the last blokes to clamber aboard a vehicle was Angus, the Scottish guy who was new into the Squadron. A short while before, back in the LUP, he’d been moaning on about how he’d hoped to be ‘flat-packing ragheads’. Two hours later he’d been forced to abandon his bogged-in wagon and beg a lift on someone else’s vehicle, and all so they could go on the run from the hunter force that was right on their tail.
It struck Grey as the ultimate irony: Beware of what you wish for indeed.
Just as the four vehicles were about to pull out, a lone individual came stumbling up the incline. It was Raggy.
‘FUCKING MOVE IT!’ Grey yelled.
It seemed to take for ever for the last man to make it to the wagons. He glanced around for a second, before throwing himself across Grey’s bonnet, which was about the only space left available. As was typical of Raggy, he was the last to reach them, yet he seemed totally unflustered. As he wrapped his arms around the M72 LAW (light anti-tank weapon) strapped to the wagon’s bonnet, to hold on, he let out this wild laugh.
‘Better late than never, mate,’ Grey grunted.
‘Fucking hell, mate, this is shit! Ninety-second fuses on the wagons.’
‘Best we get the fuck out of here. But fucked if I can use the Gimpy with you there.’
Grey didn’t know for sure how many blokes were packed onto each of the Pinkies. But one thing was certain: with the number they had clinging to their vehicle, it had rendered the machine-guns totally unusable. G
rey’s arc of fire was blocked by Raggy, and the Dude’s .50-cal was packed around with blokes on all sides.
Those who’d joined Grey’s wagon were passengers in more ways than one. Grey was his vehicle’s commander, and Moth and Dude were his driver and gunner. That was the basic operational unit, and they ran their own wagon. Those who’d clambered aboard were going where Grey and his team went, and they’d have little say in the matter. It would have been the same had Grey and his lot clambered aboard their wagon.
Grey heard a series of sharp cracks from below, as the .22 rounds went off – part of the charges’ final trigger system.
There were only seconds now, and those eight wagons down in the wadi were set to blow sky high.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Grey pointed due east. ‘Only one way to go,’ he remarked to Moth, ‘– away from the enemy’s line of march.’
Moth nodded, and eased the wagon into forward motion. He edged it further into the line of enemy sight, so he could do a ponderous turn. The Land Rover was painfully overloaded, and the steering felt horribly spongy and unresponsive due to all the extra weight on the back. He got the wheels pointing east and nursed the Pinkie into gear.
But as they were moving off a terrible thought struck Grey. What if they’d left a man behind? They’d just presumed that the rest of the lads from the bogged Pinkies had headed north and linked up with the vehicles there. But what if they were still trying to fight their way out of the quagmire? What if they were coming south, to link up with their wagons?
What if they were about to leave some of their own behind?
He grabbed Moth’s arm. ‘Hold it!’ He eyed Raggy, sprawled across the wagon’s front: ‘Mate, are you the last?’
‘Yeah, I’m the last man,’ Raggy confirmed. ‘Let’s fucking go.’
Grey spoke into his radio, so all could hear. ‘Ed, Raggy says he’s the last man out.’
‘I reckon that’s everyone,’ Ed replied. ‘Grey, you lead off. Let’s fuck off while we still can.’
As far as Grey could tell, they had a mixed bag of blokes from Four, Five and Six Troops on the wagons. They also had one of Four Troop’s commanders perched on the rear of Gunner’s quad, and an officer from Five Troop in the rear of one of the Pinkies. But as the three wagons here were Six Troop vehicles, by rights that made Captain Ed Smith the officer in command of this force.
As they pulled away from the lake bed, Grey breathed the longest sigh of relief ever. It was pure ecstasy to be on the move again and getting away from the wadi of death, not to mention the threat of heavy tank fire. If the Squadron’s tracks didn’t lead the enemy to that lake bed, the coming explosions certainly would. They’d light up the Iraqi desert like Blackpool Illuminations on LSD.
The three wagons swung eastwards and Gunner’s quad moved into the lead, so he could scout the way ahead. As they gathered speed Grey glanced at Moth. He could see the same kind of exhilaration in the young operator’s eyes as he himself was feeling. It was pure madness, really. The fact they were on the move didn’t change their predicament one jot. In reality, it was still the mother of all cluster-fucks.
With Raggy clinging to the bonnet, Moth could barely see to drive, and Grey couldn’t use his weapon. To their rear they had half a dozen unexpected passengers, and the wagon was now overweight by an extra six hundred kilos. The springs were groaning under the load.
In truth, this was a total game-changer.
None of the wagons was able to fight effectively any more; they could barely move across the terrain, or at any pace much above a slow crawl; and right now they were cut off from the rest of the Squadron, including the OC. In short, they couldn’t hope to do much more than find somewhere to hide, and with a bit of luck get airlifted out of there.
Every bloke present knew the gravity of their predicament, and nothing much needed to be said about any of this right now. The inconceivable had happened – something that they’d never rehearsed, trained for, game-planned, let alone imagined. But no one was about to drag it over the coals. They’d speak if they had something to say. Otherwise, they’d shut the fuck up and try to keep a constant watch for the enemy.
As the unwieldy convoy nosed eastwards, Raggy kept trying to shift around so as to give Moth a better line of sight out front.
‘Can you see all right, mate?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, just about,’ Moth replied.
Raggy shifted again. ‘Is it better if I lie this way? Can you see better like that?’
‘Stop fucking wriggling, or you’ll roll off,’ Grey told him. ‘Just keep fucking still.’
If the situation hadn’t been so utterly desperate, they’d all have seen the funny side of things right now. But as it was, no one was so much as cracking a smile as Raggy squirmed around on the Pinkie’s bonnet.
Bang on cue there was a huge blast from their rear, a blinding white flash lighting up the entire length of the lake bed. It made the distinctive sharp crack of a steel-on-steel explosion – the shrapnel of the charge tearing into the wagon’s chassis. If it had been a tank shell landing in the wadi, it would have made the duller thump of shrapnel exploding in amongst soft sand and mud.
An instant later the night sky dissolved into a raging sea of fire, as series of further explosions punched a huge fist of smoke and flame high into the air. The blasts were followed by a massive firework display that seemed to light up the entire night sky, as the ammo on the vehicles started to kick off a fiery orange.
As the first of the bogged-in Pinkies went up, the three wagons on the move were no more than a hundred yards away. A crazed barrage of rounds went tearing past overhead, as boxes of .50-cal and 7.62mm ammo fired off in the blistering heat. Instinctively the blokes on the wagons ducked their heads, as the angry buzz of bullets cut through the air all around them.
Grey jerked a thumb in the direction of the blown-up vehicles. ‘That’s it,’ he yelled at Moth and Raggy. ‘They sure as hell fucking know where we are now.’
For several long seconds the exploding ammo cooked off a blinding firestorm. With the enemy moving in from the west, east was the only way to run now. If they’d headed in any other direction, their wagons would have been silhouetted by the conflagration in the lake bed and clearly visible. It was a stroke of luck that that fiery hellhole lay between them and the advancing threat.
It struck Grey that by blowing the wagons, they might also have brought themselves a little time. With all the ammo cooking off, it would look as if a massive firefight had erupted in the wadi. The enemy had to be wondering what the hell the force they were hunting was up to now. They’d be drawn to that violent conflagration, but presumably they’d approach it with some degree of caution, especially as further wagons proceeded to explode.
Grey forced his mind and his senses back to the terrain to their front and the route they needed to go. Automatically, he went to grip his GPMG and swing it onto his eye-line. It was second nature to be on his weapon whenever the wagons were on the move, and scanning his arcs. But overloaded as they were, the Gimpy was unusable. He felt as if he’d had both his hands cut off at the elbows, he was that useless right now.
But if he could spot the enemy early, at least he could get Moth to try to steer a path to evade them. Ahead was an open and gently undulating expanse of terrain. It was shitty ground on which to try to lose a highly mobile enemy force, but at least there was one blessing: the night sky above them remained sullen, overcast and dark. There was little if any ambient light, and if the enemy were equipped with night-vision goggles they’d have precious little chance of using them.
He was acutely aware that they were balanced on a knife-edge now. If they lost one more vehicle, there simply wasn’t the room to load any more on board. If another went down, some of the blokes at least would be forced to go on the run on foot. At which point, what would the others do? After all, they were hardly likely to abandon their fellow operators.
If they did go down to two wagons, he guessed they�
�d have no option but to bin every last piece of kit they carried. Ammo, weaponry, food, water and fuel – all would have to be dumped, in an effort to somehow cram the extra blokes aboard. It didn’t bear thinking about. He tried to blank such thoughts from his mind and concentrate on the one overriding priority right now: survival.
They were no more than a couple of hundred yards away from the wadi of death when there was a series of further massive explosions in quick succession, as more of the abandoned Pinkies blew. The entire night sky behind them was transformed into a curtain of raging fire, as the ammo went off and a barrage of rounds hammered high into the heavens.
Grey counted four detonations, which meant that there were two vehicles still to blow. It was a good minute or more after those last explosions when he began to feel seriously worried. All the charges would have been fitted with ninety-second fuses, and he’d started to suspect that one or two of the detonators might be duds. If they were, the charge would fail to blow, and unless the wagon was caught in a neighbouring vehicle’s blast it would be left undamaged.
Grey stole a quick glance behind him. Their vehicle was cresting a small ridge, which provided a vantage point from which he could see along the whole of the wadi. The fierce white light of the explosions had lit up its entire length. It was a raging inferno, with twisted, blown-up hulks burning fiercely.
He searched for anyone they might have inadvertently left behind. He couldn’t see anyone moving down there. He was pretty certain there was no one they’d forgotten, which meant that no one had been caught in the shrapnel as the wagons blew, or worse still, abandoned to the mercy of the enemy. But with the Squadron scattered, he couldn’t know for sure.
Yet the far end of the wadi of death he figured he could just make out the forms of one or two wagons that seemed untouched by the flames. And if that was the case, some hugely sensitive kit might be about to fall into enemy hands, not to mention the Pinkies themselves.