Zero Six Bravo

by Damien Lewis

  The second he did so, a shell aimed with pinpoint accuracy slammed into the patch of desert that they’d just vacated. Blasted rock and sand hammered into the rear of their Pinkie, the shock-wave rocking it savagely from side to side. They were under fire from what had to be those enemy tanks, the T-72 Lions of Babylon unleashing their massive, fearsome 125mm shells.

  This time, Grey didn’t need to tell Gunner to pull his throttle to the max. Ahead of him the quad shot ahead like a bullet out of a gun, and – bugger the blokes hanging onto their vehicle – Moth floored the Pinkie’s accelerator. All three wagons started to buck and kangaroo their way across the terrain, the extra blokes hanging on for dear life.

  None of the Pinkies could return fire, for their extra passengers were blocking their arcs of fire. Even if they could have done, there was jack shit they could do against those T-72s. Their only hope was to try to outrun them and disappear into the dark desert, and to evade and escape from the enemy that way.

  Those in the back of Grey’s wagon were on their feet now, using their knees to cushion the blows as the vehicle cannoned into dips and off ridges, their hands gripped tight to whatever they could find close by. Yet no matter how hard Moth pushed the Pinkie, the hunter force kept coming.

  Grey could sense the 12.7mm Dushka rounds tearing past overhead now, as blast waves from further salvos of 125mm tank shells pounded them from either side. He figured the T-72s had opened up from no more than a kilometre away. Most likely, the enemy armour had sneaked closer while they were doing their head count, hoping to tear them apart from point-blank range.

  As the wagons had got on the move again, the tank commander must have decided to hammer in the rounds anyway. The only thing that was preventing the wagons from getting hit was the way Gunner was weaving the convoy through any patches of cover he could find, plus the thick blanket of darkness.

  But they were at the total mercy of the elements right now. If the cloud cover cleared and the moon came out, they’d be finished. They had an enemy force closing on them, and they were ploughing ahead as fast as their vehicles could go. If the clouds blew over and the sky brightened they’d be silhouetted in the moonlight, and they’d be toast.

  As they careered across the terrain Grey’s wagon went flying over a ridge with a sharp drop on the far side. For a good few seconds the Pinkie was airborne, and then the wheels hit the deck with a tortured groan as the weight of the human and other cargo slammed down. There was a horrible crack as the springs bottomed out. Moth fought to control the speeding vehicle, as the heavier rear end tried to slide forwards and overtake the front, sending them into a wild spin.

  Moth won the battle and wrestled the Pinkie under control again. Grey was tempted to tell him to slow it a little. A couple more incidents like that, and the wagon was surely going to shake itself apart. But to their rear the Iraqi tanks were coming on fast, and the only option they had was to run and run. There was only so much battle damage a Land Rover could take, and he feared theirs was fast approaching the limits of its endurance.

  Another worrying thought struck Grey: Where the hell were the Fedayeen? They had armour to their rear hammering in the 125mm shells, but the militia were nowhere to be seen. Their Toyotas were way faster than the Pinkies, and they were very likely familiar with the terrain here. Grey couldn’t help but think they were going to run into those bastard Fedayeen sometime soon.

  A voice came up over the radios, from the rearmost of the vehicles. ‘What you guys got to the front? We’ve got fucking armour to the back of us. And on the right there – can you see those vehicles? They’re moving to head us off. We’ve got to split up!’

  ‘Fucking bullshit,’ Grey snapped. ‘Keep the force together.’

  He glanced to their right, and sure enough a line of headlamps low to the ground had appeared from behind the cover of a slight rise. They were speeding along, and seemed to be making good use of the tracks that criss-crossed the sands, while the British vehicles were churning across the rough of the open desert. It had to be the Fedayeen.

  More alarming still, they looked as if they were making towards the south of the British patrol’s line of march, to cut off their escape. This had become a desperate race to get far enough south to lose the enemy armour and before the Fedayeen could intercept the British force and trap them. Grey had few doubts as to who was going to win this particular struggle.

  The Fedayeen vehicles thundered ahead with their lights on full beam, making no attempt to conceal themselves. When you were a force as fast and as potent as they were, Grey figured, you didn’t really have to hide. The nearest of their Toyotas were closing fast, and shortly they were barely three hundred yards away. As they drew level with the British vehicles, Gunner slowed the convoy to a crawl.

  Moments later, he pulled to a halt, and the wagons behind him did likewise. Every bloke held his breath as the enemy force approached. The lead Toyotas tore past going at breakneck speed, and no more than 150 yards away. The blokes on the Pinkies kept as quiet and as still as they could. They barely dared to breathe, as one after another the Toyotas powered onwards.

  At this range, they could make out the enemy force in detail. The open rear of each of the vehicles was crammed full of fighters, clustered around a tripod-mounted Dushka. Each was dressed from head to toe in white – a long robe topped off by a shemagh wrapped around the head that left just the eyes showing. Their vehicles looked brand spanking new, and the fighters riding in them were armed with smart-looking AK47 assault rifles.

  There were some half-dozen in the rear of each wagon, so eight or more per vehicle. With a good dozen Fedayeen wagons out there, that made a force of pushing one hundred fighters. They looked hardcore, well disciplined and up for the fight, plus they packed some serious firepower. They had the air of fanaticism about them that the briefings back at the forward mounting base had suggested.

  These, then, were Saddam’s diehard militia.

  They had one disadvantage right now, compared to the tiny British force. With their headlights on full beam those behind were lighting up the vehicles in front, and they would have acquired little if any natural night vision. In effect they would be blinded by their own lights, which meant that the desert outside the cone of illumination thrown off by their convoy would be an impenetrable wall of darkness. By contrast, the British wagons were totally unlit. More than likely, the Fedayeen would spot the hidden force only if one of their Toyotas got lucky and swung its headlamps across a Pinkie’s flank.

  Sure enough, the convoy of enemy vehicles swung eastwards, and as their headlamps swept round it looked for a moment as if they were going to spotlight the lead Pinkie in their glare. Blokes were poised to dive off the rear of the British wagons so that the heavy machine-gun operators could use their weapons to defend the small force. Even so, the Fedayeen seemed set on getting the drop on them.

  Yet as luck would have it none of the Toyotas seemed so much as to slow, and within seconds the last of the hunter force had surged onwards into the night. The Fedayeen had failed to spot the British vehicles, and were racing on ahead to block the route south.

  For now the threat was past. Grey breathed out a long sigh of relief, and glanced at the open map in his lap. His heart was hammering against his rib cage, and he fought to get his pulse rate under control again. That had been bloody close. He was trying to read the map without using any light at all. If the barest pinprick was visible, it would draw all the demons from hell onto their position.

  From the map their situation looked pretty close to hopeless. To their north they had the Iraqi armour. To the south were now the Fedayeen. Going east would only take them further into Iraq, and they’d quickly be into built-up areas and major roads, which would be perfect terrain for the Iraqi forces to run them to ground.

  He figured there was only one option left open to them. If they swung west, it might enable them to sneak between the Fedayeen force to their south and the armour to their north. But somewhere out there
was likely to be the Iraqi infantry in their trucks, and heading west risked running onto their guns. In short, Grey didn’t have much of a clue where next to steer the patrol.

  As he scrutinized his map, desperately trying to find a safe route through, he was tempted to hit the Mayday button on his Blue Force Tracker system. If he did, an emergency burst of data would be emitted, which would be picked up first in the American military’s operations room – for theirs was the central coordinating point for all BFT traffic. From there it would go to British SFHQ, alerting them that more M Squadron wagons were in serious trouble.

  He glanced across to the BFT unit. Hidden deep in the dash the tiny light diode was flickering away, indicating it was switched on and operational. There were only three buttons on the unit: ‘on’, ‘off’ and ‘Mayday.’ For a second, his finger hovered over the third. Then he told himself not to be so fucking defeatist: I’m not going to bloody do it. Whatever it takes, we’ll get ourselves out of this shit.

  After all, what would it achieve? Headquarters had already received several Mayday calls, but all it had served to do was add to the confusion. Without having a fully coordinated sitrep from the Squadron as a whole, there was no way of knowing the fate of all sixty men. Right now, each scattered unit knew only its own, very confused circumstances, and another Mayday call was hardly going to help.

  What they needed was to re-form the Squadron and get this shit sorted.

  They still had options, Grey told himself. Sure, they could do sod all against an Iraqi main battle tank. But they still had a LAW 66mm anti-armour weapon strapped across the bonnet of each of the Pinkies. The LAW was the NATO version of the RPG. It was a bit dated, with a remarkably crude sight, but it was actually very effective. The LAW was more than good enough for taking out one of those Kraz 225 infantry trucks, or you could smash it into the ground next to a group of infantry and cause some real carnage.

  Plus they still had Six Troop’s one SLAR – the shoulder-launched multipurpose assault weapon – the state-of-the-art 85mm rocket launcher. The SLAR was still in the experimental stages of development, so who knew the limits of its thermobaric warhead? It came complete with six thermobaric rockets, and right now that represented the patrol’s greatest firepower. If they could just get into a decent position from which to fight, they could still do some serious damage.

  Grey glanced up from the map. ‘Take a right turn onto a south-westerly bearing,’ he told Moth. ‘Keep on that bearing until—’

  ‘Hold on a minute, are you sure you’re on the right map sheet?’ the rupert sitting next to Grey cut in. Grey had pretty much forgotten about the bloke up until now. ‘I think you’ve made a mistake—’

  Grey fixed him with a look like murder. ‘You want to take over? Be my fucking guest, mate.’

  That killed the issue. Moth eased the wagon into motion, swung right and got them onto a southwesterly bearing. To his rear the rest of the wagons came after them, while Gunner accelerated the quad until it was scouting the terrain to their front.

  ‘We’re heading southwest for reasons that should be obvious,’ Grey announced on the radios. ‘Keep your eyes peeled for those fucking Iraqi infantry trucks.’

  Gunner responded to Grey’s warning by speeding ahead still further, so he could probe the territory they were moving into. He crested a shallow rise. No sooner had he done so than he pulled the quad to a sudden halt. A line of powerful headlights had emerged from the gloom. They lay a good two kilometres west of the British force, and it was obvious at once that this had to be the fleet of Iraqi infantry trucks. They blocked any escape route west.

  He did a quick about-turn and raced back towards the wagons. As he did so, he radioed through a hurried warning, and in response a chorus of voices came up on the radios:

  ‘That’s it – we’ve got fucking enemy infantry to the west’ … ‘Plus Fedayeen to the south, as a blocking force’ … ‘Plus we’ve got armour to the rear’ … ‘And east it’s fucking bedlam’ … ‘We’ve got to fucking split up’ … ‘Yeah, we’ve got to split up’ …

  ‘No way! That’s fucking bullshit!’ Grey countered. ‘Keep the wagons together.’

  ‘Keep the unit together,’ Ed’s voice cut in. ‘Keep the unit together. I repeat, we keep the unit together.’

  But others kept crashing in on the radio net.

  ‘We’ve got to split up.’

  ‘We’ve got to split up.’

  It was then that Gunner’s voice came up on the air. He was screaming to make himself heard above the revving of his quad bike’s engine and the roar of the speeding vehicle’s slipstream. It made comms with him extremely difficult, which added to the confusion.

  ‘If we’re splitting up, I’m off to Syria! See you blokes in Syria!’

  ‘KEEP THE UNIT TOGETHER!’ Ed roared, but his command was drowned out by the chaos on the net, as voices shouted and yelled across each other.

  ‘We’re splitting up!’

  ‘Let’s head for Syria!’

  ‘Split up and head for the border!’

  The Six Troop signaller came up on the net, desperately trying to cut through the radio traffic. ‘Negative! Negative! Stick with the unit! Stick with the unit! All call-signs, stick with the unit!’

  ‘See you blokes in Syria! See you blokes in Syria!’ came back Gunner’s response. It was drowned out by the screaming of the quad’s engine, and it was obvious he wouldn’t be able to hear much of what was being said on the net and probably hadn’t heard the order.

  By now the sound of Gunner’s quad was fading to a ghostly whisper. Even though he was two-up on the machine, it was far more nimble than the Pinkies. He was soon lost in the night, the silhouette of his fast-moving machine being swallowed by the desert horizon, and with the rupert clinging desperately to the rear.

  Grey turned to Moth. ‘What the fuck?’

  Moth shrugged. ‘Sounded like he couldn’t hear us.’

  Grey jerked a thumb towards the rearmost vehicle. ‘Yeah. With those twats crapping on about splitting up, it’s hardly bloody surprising.’

  ‘He sounded pretty pissed off too.’

  Grey smiled grimly. ‘It’s probably sharing his quad with a rupert that’s got him so twitched. That alone is enough to get him pissed off.’

  In spite of their predicament, Moth gave a short bark of a laugh. With the days spent driving through the heat and dust, Gunner’s radio might have packed up completely. Who knows?

  For a few long moments there was chaos on the radio net, as voices ranted on about the need to follow Gunner’s lead and to split up. A far greater number were adamant that the force needed to stick together. Finally, Ed cut it short. They needed to stick to their standard operating procedures, he announced, which meant going through the ERV (emergency rendezvous) procedures.

  Grey couldn’t have agreed more. It was the only logical thing to do right now.

  As the Squadron had pushed northwards through Iraq it had established a series of ERV points. First was the ‘Coastal RV’ – the name being a hangover from M Squadron’s maritime operations that referred to their point of entry into theatre. In this case, the Squadron’s Coastal RV was the original landing zone where the Chinooks had dropped them, north of the Euphrates River. After that, a series of additional ERVs had been established, each fifty kilometres or so further north and distinguished by some special feature – one that would be memorable enough not to have to be marked on the maps.

  A marked-up map was a big no-no for Special Forces operations. If a marked-up map fell into the hands of the enemy, it would give away all the ERVs – hence the need to commit them to memory.

  Whichever RV you made for, when you reached it you’d mark it with a distinctive sign – maybe a cross made of stones – to signal that you’d arrived, before moving off a good distance to find an LUP. That way, there was less risk of compromising the RV point, but others in the Squadron would know that you were there.

  The last-ditch rendezvous was the
‘Combat RV’ – the escape route if all other options failed – which in this case was to make for the Syrian border. Right now, Gunner had thrown steps one to nine out of the window, and was heading direct for the Combat RV. But in a sense it was hardly his fault. With all the calls to split up, he must have thought the entire force was heading for the Combat RV, in which case he’d made a break for Syria along with what he believed was the rest of them.

  Things were getting shittier by the second now. M Squadron was split into at least four separate units. Gunner had been doing a fantastic job of shepherding the three wagons, but now they had well and truly lost him. Their force was deprived of its last quad, which had constituted their only remaining fast-mobility and recce capability.

  They were down to three Pinkies careering across the desert sands, with twenty-six blokes clinging on for their lives.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  If only Grey could navigate the wagons to their last ERV point, there was just a chance that they might find the rest of the Squadron there (minus Gunner and his passenger, of course). If the OC and the third group had followed standard operating procedure, that was where they would have headed – assuming they were able to get on the move at all, what with the numbers of men they’d be carrying and the presence of the enemy.

  If they didn’t find anyone at the ERV, at least they’d know that the rest of the blokes hadn’t been able to make it – which would mean they’d been captured or killed, or that they’d lost their mobility and gone into a hide. Either way, it would give them some concrete, usable intel to go on. Plus the ERV was a known point at which they could try to call in a Chinook, to lift them out of there.

  The Squadron’s last ERV was a four-way junction of dirt tracks, set at the extreme northern end of the Ninawa Desert. It had been chosen because it was visually distinctive and memorable, with the ruin of an ancient stone-walled fortress lying to the north side of the crossroads. It was to there that Grey decided to try to charter a route, using his compass and his mapping.