Masters of War (6 page)

And Danny. He stood twenty metres from the chopper, his pack on his back, his personal weapon slung low, his Kevlar helmet in his hands. The US military personnel all but ignored him as they swarmed round the Sea Knight, readying it for take-off, even though they were doing so for the benefit of Danny and his mates. The wind blew his blond hair all over the place and salty spray stung his skin. On the southern horizon he could see lights twinkling. Tripoli, he figured from his mental map. Amazing how some of the world’s worst shitholes could look all Thomas Cook from a distance. Something nudged him in the back. He turned round to see Boyd, their patrol leader. Like Danny, he was dressed in Crye multicam, belt kit fitted and M4 slung low and attached to his body with a short halyard. Unlike Danny, he already had his helmet on, complete with NV goggles – disengaged for now – and a small torch attachment. The helmet itself was cut away around the ears to make space for his earpiece, and a thin boom mike hung just below his lower lip.

‘Hey, Snapper!’ he shouted over the noise of the deck in his thick Northern Irish accent. Danny didn’t mind the nickname. Snapper was Irish slang for a kid, and at twenty-three Danny was the youngest in the patrol. Boydie was well known for stamping his authority on an op, and anyway, a bit of ribbing came with the territory.

‘Aye?’

‘What d’youse call a Libyan militant with no arms and no legs?’

‘A good start?’

Double thumbs up from Boydie and a grin that revealed the worst set of teeth in the Regiment. ‘We’re loading in five,’ he yelled back. ‘Ready to rumble?’

‘Roger that.’ Danny fitted his helmet and NV as Boydie went off to round up the others. The patrol leader always cracked the same joke before an op. Taliban commander with no arms and no legs? Ba’athist scumbag with no arms and no legs? Always a good start, in Boydie’s take on the world. Nobody in the Regiment would ever disagree with him, and certainly not tonight. The militants that Danny and his mates were heading
in country to locate deserved everything they were about to
get.

Three days previously, a group of four UN peacekeepers – all British – had been kidnapped in Benghazi. For twenty-four ominous hours there had been no news, until a tape had arrived at the offices of Al-Jazeera TV in the time-honoured fashion. The grainy footage showed the peacekeepers first bound and beaten, then hooded and dead, hanging by the neck from a wooden ceiling beam. A balaclava’d figure, speaking in Sulaimitian Arabic, claimed responsibility for the atrocity on behalf of a rebel group still loyal to the memory of the ousted Gaddafi regime. To add insult to injury, he was wearing one of the peacekeepers’ camouflage jackets, complete with the bright blue armbands of the UN. It had taken about twenty minutes for the footage to go viral – which meant the families of the deceased got the good news via YouTube rather than the traditional knock on the door – and thirty minutes for two of the bodies to show up in a street two blocks from the British Embassy in Tripoli, not only dead but horrifically mutilated, a pro-Gaddafi slogan carved on the torsos with a razor or the point of a knife.

Intelligence operations on the ground in Libya had gone into overdrive. Who were these militants? More to the point,
where
were they? There was no doubt in Danny’s mind that a fair few Libyan nationals had had their arms twisted – literally – to reveal what they knew, or suspected, about the location of the militants. The limb-twisting had come up trumps. Word had reached British intelligence officers of a tiny Ruwallah Bedouin village in the Libyan desert 150 klicks due south of Benghazi. Two independent sources had verified that the inhabitants had been evicted from their encampment there by a group of pro-Gaddafi militia. Evidence that these militia were the same individuals who had captured and killed the four UN personnel was sketchier, but, so far as Danny could tell, the powers didn’t give a shit about that. And he was right behind them: the only good militant was a dead one, and his patrol had direct orders to help the bastards on their way.

Their objective was straightforward. Insert under cover of night into a wadi five klicks to the south-west of the target area. Tab along the wadi and set up an OP at a pre-determined location with a visual on the Bedouin village. Conduct surveillance on the village to confirm the absence of Bedouin and the presence of militia. Then laser-mark the location so that an RAF Tornado could bomb the living shit out of the place and send a message loud and clear that anyone who harmed British nationals could expect a swift and brutal reprisal. Job done.

The rotors of the Sea Knight increased in speed. Boydie reappeared on deck with Tommo and Five Bellies, the other two members of their four-man patrol. Tommo was posher than tea at the Ritz, but his healthy disdain for the Ruperts meant the lads in the Regiment accepted him as one of their own. Five Bellies’ nickname had nothing to do with his girth – on the contrary, he was one of the fittest men Danny had ever met – but commemorated one particularly blood-soaked afternoon in Lashkar Gah when a group of heavily armed Taliban had cropped up out of nowhere and the advance to contact was faster than anyone wanted. He’d taken a shot with a .50-cal machine gun, and through sheer good luck it had ripped straight through five of them. A nickname, and a little piece of Regimental history, had been born. This evening, though, the guys looked almost identical, in their multicam and helmets with NV goggles perched on top. The five-klick tab was long enough that they didn’t want to be wearing plate hangers, though their CamelBaks full of fresh water were essential.

The loadmaster appeared at the tailgate of the Sea Knight, bulky headphones covering his ears and a mike at his mouth. With a wide sweep of his arms he indicated that Danny’s patrol should embark.

‘Let’s go, fellas,’ Boydie yelled over the noise. The four men jogged up the tailgate as the marshals cleared the deck ready for take-off. Danny nodded a greeting as he passed the rear-gunner on his way into the belly of the Sea Knight. Each member of the patrol removed his bergen and stowed it at his feet. Danny took a seat with his back to the side wall – Tommo to his left, the door-gunner to his right – and lightly clutched the webbing behind him while connecting his radio to the aircraft comms system. Five Bellies and Boydie, sitting directly opposite on the other side of the black cylindrical long-range fuel tank – it looked like nothing so much as a massive rubber sausage – did the same. The loadie’s voice came over Danny’s earpiece, a gravelly Midwestern drawl. ‘We have thirty seconds till take-off . . . three-zero seconds till take-off.’

The tailgate remained open. The rear-gunner was hunkered over his Minigun looking like he was about to lay down fire on the aircraft carrier itself. Through the opening, Danny could just make out a marshal in a yellow jacket receding from the LZ. The pitch of the Sea Knight’s engines rose, and with a low judder the chopper lifted slowly up from the carrier. It made a forty-five-degree turn so that it was heading towards land, and then gained speed.

With each member of the patrol hooked into the comms system, ordinary conversation was out of the question. The flight would be conducted largely in silence as each man prepared himself mentally for the op. Danny had other preparations to make too. He bent down and removed a small GPS unit from the top of his pack, along with a roll of gaffer tape. Boydie had designated him lead scout. They’d already entered into the GPS units the coordinates of their expected LUP and OP as waypoints, as well as two emergency RV locations in case they were bumped. If the guys got into a contact and scattered, each man would know where to head: make your way to the first RV, wait out for an hour and, if no one arrives, head for the second RV and wait out for another hour, before walking back on a bearing for the original drop point.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

Now Danny took the opportunity to tape the GPS unit securely to the body of his M4 – easy to locate without having to fumble for it in the darkness, and easy to read even while holding your weapon. He double-checked the rest of his gear. His Sig 9mm was clipped across his chest and his belt kit contained extra ammunition – he’d elected to stock up on this at the expense of full rations as they didn’t intend to be on the ground for more than twenty-four hours. Two flashbangs, two frags. A black-handled utility knife. Also a couple of personal items: a dented, burnished Zippo lighter with the letters ‘SB’ engraved in fussy copperplate. And a second knife, its five-inch blade narrower than that of the utility knife but just as sharp, its handle fashioned from ivory. There weren’t many kids who’d receive a gift like that on their thirteenth birthday, but there weren’t many kids who had Taff Davies as a godfather. ‘A man always has need of a good knife, kiddo,’ he’d said. Danny remembered it like it was yesterday.

He looked through a small window just to his right. It was almost fully dark now, but the reflection of the moon on the water, combined with the lights from the Sea Knight itself, showed how close to sea level they were flying. There couldn’t be more than ten feet between the chopper and the water. The Med remained undisturbed despite the proximity of the skimming aircraft, but it was a reminder of how bright the moon was that he could make out a faint shadow of the Sea Knight on the flat surface.

Danny’s earpiece crackled into life. A member of the flight crew communicating with the SF ops room on the aircraft carrier. ‘Zero, this is Desert Wanderer. Requesting permission to cross from water on to land. Repeat, requesting permission to cross from water on to land.’ They’d already had a briefing with the pilot so he could explain their flight plan. Danny pictured their location on the mapping, near the southernmost point of the Gulf of Sirte, fifty klicks west of Brega.

A five-second pause. And then, as clearly as if he were on the Sea Knight with them, he heard the familiar voice of the ops officer – a broad-shouldered American major who was also liaising with the ops room back at Hereford. ‘
Desert Wanderer, that’s an affirmative. The op is still a go.
’

Ten seconds later they made land. A deserted beach where the flight crew extinguished the chopper’s lights and started flying blind. Through the window, the ground beneath them resembled a fast-moving photographic negative. ‘Welcome to the dark continent, gentlemen,’ the pilot’s voice came over the comms. ‘That’s twenty minutes till target.’

Danny turned his eyes back to the inside of the chopper. Boydie, Tommo and Five Bellies were still sitting in silence, their faces calm as they mentally prepared themselves for their insertion. Danny was doing the same, reminding himself in simple terms of their objective: insert by helicopter, tab to a predetermined location in view of the deserted encampment where the militants were thought to be, set up an OP about a kilometre from the encampment and try to get a visual on the militants themselves. If they did, they were to laser-mark so fast air could come in and bomb the place to hell.

Theirs was a non-offensive role. The real violence would be done by the bombs of the RAF Tornado squadron once the patrol had marked the target and given the go-ahead. That didn’t mean it was safe. You could stare at a patch of satellite mapping till you were cross-eyed, but it wouldn’t tell you half of what you needed to know about the terrain of an insertion zone. You’d be an idiot to think any time spent on the ground in a country like Libya wasn’t a risk. Eighteen months earlier an SAS patrol had been compromised by a group of farmers. It had sounded comical to everyone back home, and the papers had enjoyed a good laugh at the Regiment’s expense. To Danny it had simply highlighted one thing: on unfamiliar ground you had to expect the unexpected. Sometimes a stray farmer could fuck your mission just as surely as a landmine. And although Gaddafi might have assumed a horizontal position while the rebels who ousted him were scrabbling around to form a government, the situation on the ground was still extremely volatile – not to mention the international news crews crawling round the place, sniffing for stories.

The pilot’s voice again. ‘Patrol commander, we’ve flown over the main highway. One vehicle, heading east.’

‘Roger that,’ Boydie replied in a flat voice, his face betraying no emotion.

The loadie was holding up the fingers of one hand. ‘Five minutes till target.’ Danny checked his watch. 23.08 hrs. On schedule. Each member of the patrol disconnected his radio from the Sea Knight’s comms system, before picking up their packs and settling them on their shoulders. Through the open tailgate, Danny could just make out the dark shadow of the desert floor zooming past ten feet below.

The loadie had moved to the tailgate end of the fuselage, where he was holding up three fingers. Three minutes till target.

Two minutes.

One.

Danny engaged his NV. The world changed. The four apertures of his fifth-generation goggles – two for each eye – afforded him a wide field of view and excellent peripheral vision. He had a full panorama of the chopper’s interior, both the tailgate and the sides of the fuselage to left and right cast clearly in green and black. There had been a time when wearing NV meant you could only see what was directly in front of you, like looking through a Smarties tube. Not any more.

A sudden change in the pitch of the Sea Knight’s engines. A lurch as it lost speed quickly. A shudder as it made land. The loadie’s voice, urgent, shouting over the engine noise. ‘
You’re on the ground! Go!
’

The flight crew wanted to be airborne and out of Libyan airspace as soon as possible, and the patrol wanted the same. The longer the Sea Knight was on the ground, the higher their risk of being compromised. Boydie led them down the tailgate, and Danny felt the crunch of hard-baked earth under his feet. They were surrounded by a brown-out of dust. Above him there was a neon glow where the particles of sand sparked against the spinning rotors, causing a double halo over the chopper. Even though Danny was expecting it, he had to control a moment of anxiety. Those halos were always brighter than you expected them to be. If everything had gone according to plan, they’d set down in a deep wadi. But the desert was dark and flat, and glows such as this could be seen from several kilometres away.