by Chris Ryan
'Go fight ahead — so long as you don't write down names, or anything that would identify the place to outsiders. OK?'
'Sure.'
'So far as we can see, the fence isn't alarmed. No electric current in it, either — no sensors. Now, I'll just quickly show you the main areas of the camp. These are the accommodation blocks. Cookhouse, here. Mosque here — very important. Parade ground. Headquarter building, with a communications tower above it.
Transport compound — you can see all the trucks lined up — and a few armoured vehicles here. Gasoline tanks in circular bunds. Gas filling point here. Two fifty-yard ranges; the main ranges are out in the training areas to the east. Ammunition bunkers way out on their own. here. Armoury here. That's one thing about the Arabs: they can't stand having weapons around the camp. Everything has to be locked away — that is, except for the guns carried by the guards. This is the recreational area: football fields, volleyball court. OK?'
'What are all those round things?' Pat asked.
'These?' Gus pointed to two or three small dark blobs. 'Palm trees. Remember, you're looking at them from right overhead. Now, the building you're interested in is this one. Bottom left-hand corner, as God and our satellites see it. On your left if you approach out of the desert from the south.'
The tip of the pencil-shadow trembled slightly as it hovered over an L-shaped structure set a little inside the angle of the perimeter fence. 'This seems to be a combination of office and residential accommodation.
OK? It's on two floors, ground and upper, possibly also a basement. Concrete block construction, painted some light colour, buffor cream. Flat roof, double skinned to give some insulation from the sun. Metal window frames. This is where the target lives during his working week.'
'How wide's that gap between the building and the fence?' I asked.
'Maybe a hundred yards, maybe a little more. I'll take you in closer for more detail.'
In the next image the building occupied most of the picture. Two vehicles were parked in front of it, and part of a swimming pool was visible on the left-hand side. 'OK. The main entrance is here, 6n the southern side. There's another door on the right-hand end, here, — and a rear door at the left, here. See this curving row of trees? It looks as though there's some sort of garden been planted in back. The private accommodation is here, around the west end. The room in which the target works nights is this one, on the corner of the upper floor. Two windows, one facing south, one west.
Look at this.'
The speaker put up a night-time shot, taken from an oblique angle. Everything was dim and hazy, and needed explanation. 'You're still looking down, but from a little way out front — a slightly different orbit.
These are the lights on the perimeter fence… and this is the south face of the accommodation building. The main doorway I mentioned is about there.' He pointed at the middle of the south front. 'Now. See the bright spot in this top corner? That's been there on several satellite passes made between one and two a.m. Rest of the building dark, this window lit, OK? That's where we think he'll be.'
'But how do we know it's him?' I asked.
Gus hesitated and turned towards Gilbert, as if uncertain who should answer the question.
'Inside information,' Gilbert quickly explained. 'We have a sleeper who works in the building — a computer maintenance technician. The guy files us reports on a regular basis. The only thing is, he has one hell of a time because the power supply keeps going down. There are *back-up generators, but they don't work too well either.'
I was rather impressed. I hadn't realised that the Firm had such a far-flung web of contacts. 'How late does the target stay there?' I asked.
'Typically until two or three in the morning,' Gus replied.
'And where does he sleep?'
'In back of the building, on that same floor.'
'What about guards?'
'Two or three sleep on the premises. There are normally two on duty nights, but that doesn't mean they're going to be awake. You know what Arabs are like.'
Gus paused, thinking. Then he added, 'If you're going in close, one thing in your favour will be the primitive air conditioning. There's no central system.
Each room has its own unit set into an outside wall, and the fans are pretty noisy. Whenever the AC's on, there'll be a solid background roar. That'll help mask any sound you make.'
'How far away is the nearest building?'
The CIA man switched to another photo, halfway between the first and second in scale, and measured the space from the house to a neighbouring structure, offto the north. 'Also about a hundred yards, we think. This other thing's some kind of a store, probably uninhabited at night. I don't think it'll worry you.'
For a minute or two we all sat staring, memorising details, and I made a few notes in my book. Then Whinger forgot himself and declared, 'All we need do is take a couple of Uzis with us and accidentally scatter them about the place..That'd put the finger on fucking Israel, all right.'
I saw Gilbert looking rather pained, so I said, 'Not on, mate. We need to keep ourselves clean.'
'Was that a joke?' asked Gus. 'I hope so. Oh, I nearly forgot. I don't want to overburden you guys, but there's a secondary target that would merit your attention.'
He projected yet another image from his laptop and showed us a picture of a satellite receiving station — a thirty-foot steerable dish aerial with a couple of ancillary buildings — in a small compound of its own. 'This is one of the nerve centres of their military communications network,' he said. 'Knock that out and you'd do everyone a good turn. It was built by the Soviets, and with things being as they are now it might not be too easy to replace.'
'Where is it in relation to the accommodation block?' I asked.
'On the other side of camp. The east side. I think you'd see it OK from the perimeter wire.'
'And how far from that gate you showed us?'
'Maybe three hundred yards.'
'P-PG,' said Whinger judiciously. 'Slip a rocket up it as we're moving off. No problem.'
'Like I said,' Gus emphasised, 'it's very much a secondary target. Only to be engaged if you've hit Number One. And certainly I wouldn't want you to prejudice the main operation.'
'Got that,' I said. 'Can you fill us in on the surrounding terrain?'
'Sure.'
A wide-angle shot (or maybe one taken from a higher orbit) showed an expanse of desert south of the camp. To our untrained eyes the picture didn't mean, much. Apart from a single dirt road coming out from the fence to the south-east and ending at a range, there were a few wadis and stream-beds winding about, but we couldn't identify anything else specific. Yet Gus, armed with notes, gave a useful general description.
During the chopper flight in we would overfly one MS1L (main supply route), a metalled road running north-east to south-west, he told us. Once on the ground we'd have to cross another road, a smaller one, and a single large wadi. Down to the south the desert was flat, but as we approached the area of the camp we would come into a belt of dunes a couple of miles across from south to north, the range as a whole lying east and west, the northern edge of which was less than a quarter of a mile from the camp fence. Gus reckoned the dunes were 150 feet high, and should give us an excellent site for an observation post. The elevation was ideal: we'd be looking down slightly. Another picture, taken soon after sunrise, proved his point: strong light coming low from the east caught on the sweeping, curved rims of the dunes, casting pools of shadow hundreds or maybe thousands of yards long.
As I stared at the picture my mind flew back to the Gulf, and the crappy gen we'd been fed in the run-up to the war. For months we had trained in the sand of the United Arab Emirates, firmly believing that the desert plateau in the west oflraq — where our patrols would be inserted — also consisted of sand. The basis of our belief was US satellite imagery, from which our own int boys had deduced that Iraq was covered with sand from top to bottom. Then, when our patrols had gone in, what di
d we find? The entire environment was rock and shale, with not a grain of sand in sight. All the kit we'd brought for building OPs was useless, and we were caught with our pants down: you can't build anything out of solid rock.
Were we being given another load of crap now? I didn't want to seem aggressive, but I had to ask — so I put the point as politely as possible. 'Excuse me,' I said, 'but in Iraq we got stuffed because everyone misread the terrain.'
'I know, I know!' Gus grinned in a friendly enough fashion. 'That was real tough. But the fault didn't lie in the imagery. The trouble was, your intelligence guys didn't know how to interpret the data they were getting. Nobody had time to brief them properly and pass information on down the line.'
'So you're confident this environment is sand?' I gestured at the screen.
'One hundred per cent. Look at the'soft curves on these dunes. They couldn't be made of rock. Apart from anything else, they change shape with the seasons as the winds shift their surface. There's another thing, too: it's the loose texture of the ground that stops the Libyans using this sector for manoeuvres. As I said, they've got enormous infantry training areas, but those are all further north where the desert's harder and more stable.'
He paused and added, 'You're going in on ATVs, I think?'
'That's right.'
'They'll be fine. Roll over the sand no problem.'
That reassured me. At least this info was coming straight from a guy who knew what he was talking about, rather than through a range of filters and competing intelligence agencies hundreds of miles apart.
Gus moved on to show us more detail of the terrain on our run-in. The large wadi was almost two miles wide. 'In winter that can be some river,' he told us. 'But right now it's dry, and likely to remain so. Could be the odd pool still lying in the bed, but my bet is you'll cross, dry-shod.'
He then gave us a ran-down of temperatures at first and last light. Here again I was on my guard, because in Iraq we'd been totally misinformed. Nobody had warned us that on the plateau in winter we would encounter snow, ice and vicious winds, with daytime temperatures barely above freezing, and night-times well below. The result was that we went in with nothing like enough clothes, and two of our guys died from hypotherrnia. Now in Libya we were promised a night-time minimum of eighteen Celsius and a daytime maximum of thirty-six. From the magic laptop came three-day weather charts giving temperatures, humidity, moon state, and first and last light. When I challenged the temperatures, mentioning our Iraq experience, the answer was, 'Yeah — but that was winter, and on the plateau you were a thousand feet above sea level. This time it's early summer, and even on those goddamn dunes you'll be at sea-level or maybe even below it.'
Again I relaxed.
Gus continued with an analysis of vehicle movements up and down the approach road to the camp, but these were of less interest to us. I couldn't see us getting up round that side of the establishment at all.
We'd come in from the south or south-east, find a lying-up point a kilometre or so short of the fence, and build an OP on one of the dunes. Mine's a steak, as Whinger would say: piece of cake.
Having made sketches and taken some notes, I felt reasonably confident. But one point that still worried me was the sheer number ofjundis likely to be on site.
Gus reckoned that there might be two or three hundred troops on the camp at night. If the alarm went up and that lot got deployed into the desert, they could form a hell of a cordon, through which we'd just have to blast our way.
All the more reason for us to operate discreetly: we'd need to be. in and out before anyone became aware of our presence.
Back in Hereford, the knowledge we'd gained focused our training effort. Now we knew that we needed practice at building OPs in a sandy environment, so we loaded the quads into another four-tonner and made away to the dunes near Borth on the Welsh coast. There we had a couple of good days riding the bikes on the loose, steep slopes and making OPs by digging into banks, building walls with bags of sand, and roofing over the hollows we'd made with extending aluminium rods covered with scrim netting and marram grass. The second day turned out fine and warm, so when we'd finished work two of the guys stripped off and rushed into the sea; but the water was so cold that they were out again in short order, cursing wildly and covered in purple-red patches.
After a few hours riding the quads I'd thought of a couple of modifications that might prove useful. One was a bracket mounted above the handlebar panel to hold a Magellan GPS kit, so that we could keep an eye on our little displays while driving with both hands on; the other was a speedometer (as delivered, the bikes had nothing to tell you how fast they were going). So I got the MT Section to give us all Magellan-holders, and to cobble up two of the quads with speedos.
Weapons and weapon-training were another major preoccupation. From the SAW's own closed-offsection of the armoury we drew brand-new AK-47s, silenced Browning 9ram pistols, and one Soviet-made Dragunov 7.62 sniper rifle — a semi-automatic, bolt- action weapon fitted with a telescopic sight. The AK- 47s were Chinese-made Type 5611s, with skeleton stocks that folded under for easier transportation, and Chinese characters stamped into the metal. It was obvious they'd never been fired because the working parts were still coated in their original grease; they could well have been part of the shipment seized off the Irish coast which Gilbert had mentioned.
After stripping the rifles and giving them a good clean-up, we took them out to an isolated range and began getting to know them. The AK-47 is a primitive beast, coarsely made and finished, but it's a robust enough weapon, and at normal distances reasonably accurate. The safety-catch, on the right-hand side above the pistol-grip, is dead simple — one click down for fully automatic, two down for semi-automatic — and pro vided rounds don't jam in the magazine you're laughing.
To free up the working parts we loaded magazines fully with thirty rounds apiece, and fired a few initial bursts, four or five rounds at a time. Three of the mags proved sticky, if not downright defective, so we binned them on the spot. Then we got down to zero the rifles, and found that at a hundred yards we could achieve three-inch groups, firing at plain white aiming marks on a buff background. At two hundred the rounds were falling four or five inches, but an adjustment of the battle-sight, half-way up the barrel, soon put the point of impact back in the bull. Nevertheless we decided that our best policy would be to keep the sight in its normal position and, if necessary, aim a bit high.
I never saw the AK-47 as our assassination weapon.
It would be our main armament if we got involved in a contact, but it was too crude and cumbersome for the close-quarter job which I envisaged. Our aim was to take Khadduri out with maximum precision and minimum disturbance: a surgical strike at pointblank range, for which a silenced pistol would be ideal. I therefore paid close attention to my 9 mm Browning.
Like the rifles, the Browning is a basic weapon, but this customised version had a thick cylinder of sound- baffle wrapped round the barrel. Another silencing device is the button Which locks the top slide of the pistol forward after a shot, keeping most of the noise inside — the penalty being that you have to knock the lever off to re-cock the mechanism. After a few warmup shots I fired at a Hun's-head target from close range — between ten and twenty feet. Although the pistol was accurate enough I didn't like the trigger-pull, which was too heavy, and I wasn't happy with the sluggish action. So in the afternoon I took the weapon back to the armourer and got him to polish up all its working surfaces, and next time out on the range I found a big improvement. At twelve feet I could put every round not just into the Hun's head but into a two-inch circle in the middle of the forehead.
I knew that, if I could get close enough to the target, I would nail him.
Our joker weapon was the sniper rifle, which proved deadly accurate. We set the telescopic sight at 300 yards, and worked out how much to aim up or down at other ranges without altering the zero. Already a plan of campaign was forming in my mind: when the assault party o
f two or three went in to penetrate the building and engage the target, the rest of the guys would be on the perimeter fence, ready to put down rounds if anyone came after us. In this last role the Dragunov could prove a big asset; if it dropped a sentry, for example, three or four hundred yards from the real scene of activity, it would create a useful diversion.
As for the secondary target — that would have to take its chance.
Explosives I left mainly to Fred Parry. After some discussion we decided to bin the idea of taking bar mines, Chinese or otherwise, as they weighed about forty pounds each and we already had too much kit to carry. Instead we indented for a supply of Semtex, with which we could blow the fence, a door or a window, or make diversionary booby-traps that would delay any attempt at follow-up. We could also use it to destroy a quad, if one was disabled, or — in extremis — to vaporise, a body. A further joker in our pack was a clutch of Claymore anti-personnel mines, which are easy to transport. These curious-looking things — like little green bars in the shape of crescents, only an inch and a half thick, with a leg at each end — pack a nasty punch in the form of ball bearings, which fly out like grape shot when the mine is detonated. American-made Claymores have TOWARDS ENEMY stamped on the business side. Ours, which were Soviet-made, bore no such legend; but as we were all familiar with the weapon, we knew well enough that the outside of the crescent was the face to show the Libyans.
A trickier subject was rations. We were going in on hard routine — no cooking, no fires, no heating of brews, even — and this meant that for three days at least all our food would be cold. That didn't worry the guys, especially as we would be in a hot climate; all the same, it was a drag having to transfer every boil-in-a-bag meal from its silver pack, which had writing on it, into an anonymous, clear plastic bag with a zipper-lock fastener. By the time we'd cut offone end of each pack and squeezed sausage and beans or steak and kidney into another container, the meal was even more featureless and gunged-up than before. Yet nobody cared much: on an operation, people accept that they're not at the Ritz; they eat only to shove the necessary amount of calories down their necks, and look forward to proper meals when they get home. Besides, the plastic bags would have a useful secondary role: after we'd eaten their contents we could crap into them.