by Shaun Clarke
‘Keep going!’ Ellsworth bawled. ‘Don’t stop! Head for the slope!’
More enemy bullets whipped and hissed about them as, up at the front, Les lurched forward as fast as his injured leg permitted, gritting his teeth against the pains that were stabbing up it with each step. Bringing up the rear, and firing his SLR on the move, Ken was suffering similar agony.
‘Stop firing and move faster!’ Dead-eye bawled.
‘I can’t!’ Les protested.
In fact, he paused and turned to see if the others were still with him. As he did so, a machine-gun roared into action, adding its noise to the one giving cover from the smaller sangar, and green tracer arced out of the guerrilla positions, zipped between the running men, then moved left to cut across Captain Ellsworth, who shuddered violently, as if being electrocuted. Punched sideways, he was then spun around and hurled violently to the ground, hitting a small rock with a sickening thud and flopping onto his spine.
‘Shit!’ Dead-eye turned back while waving the other two onward, but they ignored him and stood their ground, giving him covering fire, as he ran up to Ellsworth and knelt beside him to examine him. He was badly mangled and clearly dead.
After stripping Ellsworth of his weapon and ammunition, Dead-eye ran back to the others at the crouch. Even as they were making their escape over the rim of the northern hill, the enemy machine-gunner and others using small arms were concentrating on Ellsworth. The combined force of their bullets jerked his body sideways across the slope until it was stopped by a rock. There it quivered constantly under the impact of more bullets and gradually turned into what looked like a tattered pile of rags.
That, at least, is all Dead-eye and the others saw the guerrillas picking up and carrying triumphantly off as their comrades spread out and advanced on the two sangars.
Deeply shocked by the loss of Captain Ellsworth, the other three men slipped over the rim of the southern hill, some 15 yards from the sangars, then lay belly down on the ground to give covering fire to Jimbo and his men.
Dead-eye groaned softly. ‘Those guerrillas are practically on top of the sangar. Jimbo and the others haven’t got a chance. They’ll never get out of there.’
At that moment a deep thunder swelled up from far behind him and lightning illuminated the distant horizon. Within seconds the first shells from the 25-pounders in Thumier were ploughing into the southern hill, erupting in a series of fearsome explosions that tore up the soil, sand, gravel and rocks around and between the screaming guerrillas. Many Arabs were picked up and smashed back down in this lethal maelstrom.
Les whooped with joy. Ken just grinned at him. Even the inscrutable Dead-eye gave a slight grin; he had forgotten the promised barrage and was relieved to see it.
While the barrage was devastating the hill running down to the hamlet, turning it into a gigantic convulsion of swirling soil and gravel, and mushrooming smoke that obscured the screaming, spinning Arabs, the four survivors from the sangar – the original covering party of Jimbo, Larry, Ben and Taff – burst out into the night and headed rapidly down the north hill to join Dead-eye, Ken and Les.
In the event, they did not need covering fire as the guerrillas were so devastated by the barrage from the distant 25-pounders that they failed to notice the departure of the men from the smaller sangar.
‘Where’s the Bren?’ Dead-eye asked.
‘Shot to pieces,’ Jimbo replied tersely. ‘Not worth bringing out.’
Approaching that sangar in the darkness, out of the hell of explosions erupting further down the hill, the guerrillas opened fire with everything they had. When their bullets struck showers of silver sparks from the sangar walls, the guerrillas mistook them for the return fire of the SAS and decided to charge the position from both directions.
As the SAS men hurried away at the crouch, disappearing into the darkness, the guerrillas broke into two groups, encircled the smaller sangar, and fired on it from both directions. With neither group knowing which way the other had gone, each mistook the other’s fire for the return fire of the SAS. They were mowing each other down in a bloody fire-fight.
‘Beautiful!’ Dead-eye murmured with satisfaction.
Using a pair of binoculars and his PNGs, he observed the activity of the Arabs. The artillery barrage on the lower slope had temporarily stopped when the guerrillas entered the smaller sangar and emerged empty-handed, barking angrily at one another. They then went into the larger sangar and emerged with Terry’s lacerated body. As a couple of them carried him clumsily down the hill, another couple picked up the dead Captain Ellsworth and then followed them.
No sooner had they disappeared into the darkness of the southern slope than more shells from the big guns fell on the hill, but this time higher up, blowing the sangars to smithereens and gradually rearranging the topography of the hill with awesome efficiency.
When the barrage had ceased and the smoke had cleared away, no trace of the sangars was left and the top of the hill was pock-marked with enormous shell holes and covered with huge mounds of upturned, smouldering sand and soil.
‘The bastards got the bodies of Captain Ellsworth and Terry,’ Dead-eye said, lowering his binoculars and removing the PNGs to look steadily and unemotionally at the others. Then, before they could give in to shock, he said: ‘Come on, let’s get moving.’
Turning away from that still smoking scene of terrible devastation, they hurried all the way down the north hill, then out across the dried-up Wadi Rabwa, heading back towards the Dhala Road and Thumier. But they still had a long way to go.
14
Deeply shocked by their losses – the more so because the bodies had been carried off by the enemy – and suffering from psychological and physical fatigue, the men marched through what seemed like a nightmarish lunar landscape in a gloom that could not be relieved by humour. Dead-eye and Jimbo led the way, with Larry right behind them, still carrying his medical box on his shoulder. Taff and Ben followed Larry, while Ken and Les hobbled along painfully in the rear.
Ben’s tunic had been slashed open by the bullet that had scorched across his back, and a bloody bandage showed through the tattered, flapping cloth. Les was limping very badly on his wounded leg, though losing no blood and clearly determined to make it back. But Ken was suffering much more, gradually slowing down, and stopping frequently to adjust the bandage around his thigh, from which blood was still seeping at a dangerous rate.
They were marching along the crest of the hill, heading south-west, parallel to the wadi far below, whose darkness was broken by striations of silver moonlight. Even at night it was warm, with a clammy breeze, and all of them were soon pouring sweat and feeling parched.
After Ken had stopped for the third or fourth time to adjust his bandage, Larry glanced back, saw the seeping blood and hurried to him.
‘Jesus,’ Larry said, ‘why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I didn’t want to hold us up.’
‘You’ll hold us up more if I don’t treat that. Take a seat, soldier.’
With one hand, Larry indicated to Dead-eye and Jimbo that they had to stop for a while; with the other he gently pushed the wincing corporal down onto the stony earth. Kneeling beside him, he removed the original, blood-soaked bandage, cleaned the two bullet holes with antiseptic and applied fresh dressings.
‘I wish I could take those bullets out,’ he said, ‘but I can’t risk it here. I’ve already lost one man; I don’t want to lose you.’
‘You didn’t lose Terry,’ Ken told him. ‘He was shot to pieces.’
‘Which he might not have been had I treated him and kept him off that stretcher. I should have done more for him.’
‘You’re a medic, not a doctor, for Christ’s sake. You did all you could for him.’
‘I still feel bad.’
‘We all do – for him and for Ellsworth.’
‘Yes, a good officer.’
‘One of the best.’
Completing the dressing of the wound, Larry patted Ke
n on the shoulder, then moved across to Les, who was gingerly examining the bloody bandage around his own wounded leg. The bandages were soaked in caked blood to which dust and sand had stuck.
‘At least the bleeding’s stopped,’ Larry said as he cut away the four old dressings that Les had applied himself and which were now flapping loose.
‘Yeah,’ Les replied with a tight grin. ‘That’s a blessing, I suppose.’
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Only when I put my foot on the ground.’
‘Which you’ll have to do a lot,’ Larry said.
‘Don’t remind me, Sawbones.’
Smiling reassuringly, Larry removed the last of the old bandages, cleaned and checked the wound – it was not too bad, though not helpful for marching – then applied antiseptic and redressed it. He then went over to have a look at Ben, who was at that very moment wincing and arching his wounded back.
‘Does it hurt?’ Larry asked, kneeling beside Ben, close to Taff.
‘What the fuck do you think?’ Ben replied in his pugnacious manner.
‘It’s only a scratch,’ Taff said with a sly grin. ‘Anyone’d think he’d been hurt really badly!’
‘Fuck you, Taff,’ Ben shot back. ‘That bullet gouged out a length of skin and bloody near killed me to boot. I don’t see you being so brave about it.’
Taff pointed to Ken and Les. ‘Those two have real wounds,’ he said, trying to keep his spirits up by taking a rise out of Ben. ‘Not a poxy little scratch across the back.’ He turned to Larry. ‘His wound doesn’t hurt,’ he explained. ‘It just stings a bit.’
‘Go fuck yourself,’ Ben said.
When Larry parted the torn tunic, he saw that there was indeed a combination of gouged skin and a burn mark running in a diagonal line across Ben’s back. After getting the trooper to remove the tunic, he examined the wound more thoroughly and saw that the gouge was deep, almost cutting through to the bone, and that the burning effects of the hot bullet had actually congealed the blood, thus doing some good.
Ben, he realized, was not exaggerating when he said that the bullet had nearly killed him. In fact, if he had moved just a fraction backwards, the bullet would have entered through his waist and shot up through his chest at the same angle, shredding everything in its path, before possibly emerging from just under his armpit and then ploughing through his shoulder, which it would have smashed to pieces on its way out. In the event, it had merely left a deep, burnt furrow in the skin, running obliquely across Ben’s back from the left side of his spine to the right shoulder. Almost certainly it did more than merely sting; it probably hurt like hell.
‘Very nice,’ Larry said. ‘Really quite artistic. I’m going to apply some cream which will hurt at first, but then gradually act as an anaesthetic. The wound won’t sting after the cream takes effect.’
‘It’s more than a sting!’ Ben insisted.
‘Ha, ha,’ Taff cackled.
Ben winced as Larry applied the cream. But he relaxed completely when the wound was covered in cream and already starting to hurt less. Larry then wrapped a lengthy bandage repeatedly around Ben’s torso, until most of his back had been covered. When he had finished tying the knot, he stood up and told Ben to put his tunic back on.
‘You can close that long tear with safety pins,’ he advised him. ‘That’ll keep the breeze off it.’
‘The breeze is warm,’ Ben said.
‘It’ll blow sand over the dressing and some of it could work its way under it and into the wound. Close up that tear, Trooper.’
‘Yes, Sawbones,’ Ben said, removing some small safety pins from his escape and survival belt and proceeding to pin up the tear in his tunic.
‘Feeling better, then?’ Taff asked innocently.
‘Yeah,’ Ben said, speaking with the safety pins in his mouth and clipping one over the tear in his tunic.
‘You just needed a little attention,’ Taff said. ‘All mummy’s boys do.’
‘Up yours,’ Ben grunted.
Returning to the front of the file, Larry was approached by Dead-eye and Jimbo.
‘How are they?’ the latter asked.
‘Trooper Riley’s all right – his wound’s only superficial. Lance-Corporal Moody’s gonna have a painful march, but I think he can make it.’
‘And Corporal Brooke?’ Dead-eye asked.
‘His leg wound’s pretty bad. I can’t stop the bleeding. He needs a proper surgical operation and I can’t give him that. The more he marches, the more he’s going to bleed. I don’t know how long he can go like that, but the sooner we get back the better.’
‘But he can march?’ Jimbo asked anxiously.
‘He’ll be slow, but he can march.’
‘OK,’ Dead-eye said, ‘let’s march.’ He raised his right hand, then let it drop, indicating ‘Forward march’.
The men climbed laboriously to their feet and began their long trek south-west, struggling up and down the steep, irregular walls of parched water channels that had once fed the wadi below. The network of gullies criss-crossing the rocky slope did not make the going any easier – and in fact made it hell for the two men with leg wounds – while the walls, even steeper than the hill, were encrusted with sharp stones.
As the march continued and the moon rose higher, spilling more light on the wadi and the desert plain beyond it, Les limped gamely on, muttering curses each time his leg hurt. Ken, however, was suffering even more, for both his wounds were being opened by the constant strain of the climbs and bleeding even worse than before. Forced to stop twice to let Larry attend to him, he was noticeably white and strained-looking, breathing heavily and undoubtedly weakening. Nevertheless, when his wounds had been attended to, the march had to go on.
‘We should have made a stretcher for Corporal Brooke,’ Jimbo whispered to Dead-eye when both of them were marching up at the front, on point. ‘We need one right now.’
‘There was only enough wood for one stretcher,’ Dead-eye informed him, ‘and the one we got out of it was shot to hell.’
Jimbo glanced left and right at the barren, moonlit hill and the flat desert plain beyond it. ‘Nothing here, I suppose.’
‘No, Jimbo, nothing. No wood. No poncho sheets.’
Jimbo glanced back over his shoulder at the limping Les and then at Ken, desperately struggling along. ‘He’s not going to make it,’ he said quietly.
‘He’s got to. Those guerrillas will be on our tail, so we have to keep moving.’
They marched for another hour – until clouds passed over the moon and blocked out most of the light. Then the march became even more difficult because they had to climb in and out of the pitch-black gullies without the benefit of light. At the same time an insidious combination of shock and exhaustion was attacking their nervous systems and making them tense, irritable and – even more dangerous – highly imaginative. They heard the enemy in every unfamiliar sound, and saw him in the shifting of the sands, the rustling of clumps of aloe and euphorbia, the shivering of jujube trees.
They marched over high sand dunes, back down into dark gullies, across stretches of dangerously smooth volcanic rock, staying parallel to the wadi, which would lead them eventually to the Dhala Road. At one point the moon passed between two banks of clouds, briefly shedding its light across the level strip ahead, before plunging it back into near total darkness.
In that brief illumination Jimbo thought he saw a group of Arab tents. He and Dead-eye dropped immediately to the ground, with the men behind them following suit. By the time they were belly down in the sand, the clouds had covered the moon again and the remaining light was of little use. When Jimbo’s eyes got used to the darkness, he saw the tents again.
‘Arab tents,’ he whispered to Dead-eye.
‘You think so?’
‘For sure.’
‘They’re certainly shaped like tents,’ Dead-eye said, ‘but they’re very still.’
‘Naturally,’ Jimbo said. ‘Most of the bastards are asleep. The camp
will be guarded, though. What should we do? Fight it out, sneak around them, or what?’
Dead-eye tried using his binoculars and PNGs, but even in the green glow of the night vision goggles the tents were relatively indistinct and could not be seen clearly. He did, however, see to the left of the tents what could either have been shivering trees or restless camels. Though doubting his own senses, not sure that what he was looking at was actually an Arab camp, he said: ‘With Brooke and Moody in the shape they’re in, we can’t take any chances. So let’s climb higher, circle above them, and maybe we’ll see more clearly as we pass over them.’
‘Right,’ Jimbo said.
Giving the ‘Follow me’ hand signal, Dead-eye and Jimbo led the others further up the hill in a circular direction that gradually brought them directly above the problem. Looking down, they realized that the tents had been pitched directly above the main wadi and the track they had been looking for themselves.
Cursing under his breath, Dead-eye indicated that the others should lie belly down behind him. He did the same, then studied the tents through his binoculars and his PNGs.
‘Rocks,’ he said, passing the binoculars and PNGs to Jimbo. ‘Rocks and shivering doum palms.’ When the latter had also studied the ‘tents’, he handed back the binoculars and PNGs with a rueful grin. ‘You win,’ he said.
‘Still,’ Dead-eye replied, ‘we found the track we’ve been looking for, so let’s get ourselves down there.’
To descend they had to march farther around the hill, almost completing their broad arc, until they came to a goat track that wound down in the right direction. It was very steep, and sliding gravel and sand made it difficult for most of the men to keep their balance. If it was hard for them, it was close to hell for the wounded Ken and Les, both of whom were visibly twitching from the pains shooting through their legs and lagging behind with increasing frequency.