Zero Six Bravo (13 page)
A Special Forces request for air cover should be given top priority, but there were never any guarantees. Air power was where small elite units normally had the upper hand, when on the ground in hostile territory. Tasked to penetrate several hundred kilometers behind enemy lines, it would have been nice to have something big, punchy and lethal orbiting over M Squadron, but that clearly wasn’t happening on this mission.
Apart from air power, one of the few other advantages M Squadron had over the enemy was the secret comms system that each wagon also carried—a military-issue satellite phone system was used when speaking to air cover, and it also formed their lost-comms fallback option. If a troop or a team was compromised and on the run, the satcom allowed secure encrypted voice communications with headquarters. With a satcom antenna built into each wagon, it could even be used while on the move.
As their team’s JTAC, Moth would speak to the warplanes using the satcom, but with a “donkey dick” aerial attached to it. In that
configuration it became a line-of-sight comms system via which he could talk directly to the aircrew and guide them onto target.
The second night’s airborne infil went pretty much like clockwork, and by now a third Chinook had joined the airlift. At the end of the flights in, there were some forty men and their machines gathered on the ground. The part-formed Squadron moved off from the LZ, and Grey led it to an LUP a good distance from the one of the night before. It was a golden rule of such ops never to return to an LUP if you could possibly avoid it. No matter how careful you might be, it stood to reason that the more you used one, the more telltale signs of your presence you’d leave.
By the approach of first light Grey’s team were preparing to get a good hot meal down them—the first they’d had for several days. They’d been living off British Army ration packs and mostly on “hard routine,” which meant no brewing tea or hot food was allowed. But with the firepower now gathered around them, those who were first onto the ground could afford to treat themselves to a little luxury.
Grey fished out a foldable hexamine stove—one that utilized small solid-fuel blocks a lot like household fire lighters—and began to cook up for his entire team. He asked the men what they fancied from the menu: corned beef hash, chicken casserole, beef stew, Lancashire hotpot, or the pasta.
“I’ll have anything bar the corned beef hash,” Dude volunteered. He was taking the first sentry duty, and he’d eat his meal perched atop the .50-cal heavy machine gun. “Dunno what it is about that corned beef, but it blocks me up real bad, if you’ll forgive me talking about my bowel movements.”
Grey glanced up at him. The young American was always so polite, and there were times when he wondered if he was secretly taking the piss. But invariably he wasn’t—it was just the good, clean-living American inside him shining through.
“Dude, we’ll be spending weeks shitting in cling film, wrapping it in plastic bags, and carrying it on the wagons,” Grey remarked. “I’ll know all there is to know about your bowel movements by the
time we’re done.” He fished out one of the boil-in-the-bag meals. “You good with Lancashire hotpot?”
Dude smiled. “Kind of a Brit version of Dunkin’ Donuts? Yeah, that’ll do me just fine.”
Anything more unlike Dunkin’ Donuts Grey couldn’t quite imagine. As far as he was concerned, the Lancashire hotpot was the foulest thing the British Army catering department had ever managed to concoct. It was an eye-of-newt, claw-of-bat, foul-as-fuck brew, one cooked up by a coven of witches cackling over a cauldron. But if the Dude was partial to it, who was he to argue?
He handed the lumpy, steaming bag across to the Dude. “Here you go, mate. All yours. Tuck in.”
“Thank you very much,” said Dude, with a one-hundred-per-cent genuine smile of gratitude.
“You finish that lot, I’ll bung you a couple of my private supply of Hobnob biscuits. How’s that for a deal?”
Hobnobs are a brand of British biscuits made from oatmeal and honey, and Grey never deployed on ops without his precious supply of them stuffed in his backpack.
“Fantastic, boss,” Dude remarked through a mouthful of dumpling like congealed glue.
Grey settled down to a steaming bag of chicken pasta, his favorite.
He glanced across at the HQ Troop, positioned at the center of the LUP and surrounded by a protective screen of vehicles. He almost choked at what he saw. There, perched in the rear of the OC’s wagon, was Sebastian. He had a floppy-type jungle hat perched atop his head, presumably to keep off the burning sun, and he had a pair of nail clippers in the one hand with which he appeared to be doing his toenails.
Parked alongside their wagon was that of the Squadron’s SAS 2iC (second in command). Neither command vehicle carried any top guns, for they were weighed down with specialist communications equipment and long-range aerials. They were relying on the rest of the Squadron to provide a ring of steel around them as they coordinated ops on the ground and liaised with UKSF Headquarters.
Grey shoveled in the pasta, his eyes glued to Sebastian’s nail-clipping performance. No doubt about it: as entertainment went, this was as good as it got. Sebastian glanced up from what he was doing and caught Grey’s eye. His face broke into a smile, and he reached behind him and pulled something out of the wagon. It was a pair of civvy-type hiking boots.
“I’ve got them—my boots,” Sebastian mouthed at him.
Grey gave him a thumbs-up in return. For the laughs he offered alone it was worth having Sebastian along, not to mention the practical need to have someone able to speak to a bunch of Iraqi generals. Grey watched as Sebastian finished his clipping, slipped his socks and boots, on and wandered over.
“So what d’you think?” he whispered, pointing proudly at his footwear. “I might go to ask the CSM if he minds—check I won’t get into any trouble!”
“I reckon you’ll be okay,” Grey reassured him. With the Squadron infil only two-thirds done, Gav Tinker was sure to have more on his mind than Sebastian’s choice of footwear.
“Jolly good show, though, going to take the surrender of the Iraqi 5th Corps.”
Grey stared at him for a long second, thinking:
You have absolutely no idea what that means, do you?
But he kept his thoughts to himself. Instead, he gave a nod toward Sebastian’s boots. “Good you got them sorted. Crucial that, if you’ll be speaking to a few Iraqi generals.”
Sebastian positively glowed.
“Best you get a warm feed down you,” Grey added as he dug deep to scrape out the last bits of pasta. “Might not get many more chances from now on in.”
“Jolly good idea.”
“How was the weapons training with Gunner?” Grey asked.
“A bit like the time I used my shotgun back in my London apartment,” Sebastian answered. “Only rather more noisy, rigorous, and exciting.”
“What were you shooting at in your
London apartment
?” Grey asked incredulously.
“There was a rat running around in the cellar. In my apartment, in Pimlico. So I shot it with my shotgun. Someone must have called the police. The police couldn’t work out who it was had shot what with what, though. What a wheeze.”
“What d’you mean—
you shot a rat with a shotgun in your Pimlico apartment
?”
Sebastian put his hands up in front of his face and wiggled his fingers about, whisker-like. “You know, a rat. A rat. A ratty-rat. I shot a rat.”
Grey noticed the Squadron OC move off from his vehicle. In one hand he was clutching the unmistakable shape of a roll of bog paper.
“Don’t look now, but the OC’s going for a dump,” he remarked. Anything, to get Sebastian off his bizarre rat-killing story.
As the OC strolled toward them Grey raised his spoon in greeting. Reggie gave a nod in return. “Lancashire hotpot? Hmmmm . . . lovely.”
“Not me, boss. That’s the Dude’s favorite. I’m on the pasta.”
Reggie paused beside them. “How’s it been, being first in, and all that?”
“No dramas,” Grey replied. “It’d be nice to get on the move and away from the LZ, though. Been leaving a lot of tracks in the sand around here.”
Reggie shrugged. “We’re going as fast as we can, boy.”
A secondary tasking had just been radioed through to the Squadron, the OC explained. Once the force got under way they were to check out any locations en route where it might be possible to establish a TLZ (tactical landing zone)—a stretch of flat, usable terrain where a C-130 Hercules could land.
The Squadron was to mark any potential TLZs on their GPS systems and radio back such coordinates to Headquarters, which would help establish some degree of ground truth as they went. Any one of those TLZs could then be used to airlift in an airmobile force, like the men of the Parachute Regiment, so as to accelerate the occupation of northern Iraq.
If the 5th Corps’ surrender could be successfully taken, plus a series of TLZs secured as springboards for getting reinforcements flown in,
the inability to launch a northern front via Turkey would become less of a problem. M Squadron would have spearheaded the takedown of much of northern Iraq, in a mission of truly epic proportions.
Reggie raised the toilet paper roll and waved it in the direction of a gully that ran off to one side of the wadi. “Just going for a spot of the obvious up there.”
“Don’t worry, boss,” Grey smiled, “I’ll warn the lads not to shoot you in the ass.”
“Thanks.” The OC paused. “Not a lot of point keeping on hard routine, is there, buddy? We’ll be sixty blokes and thirty wagons, and we’ll leave a motorway of tracks as we go. A few dried turds are hardly going to be a major giveaway.”
Grey shrugged. “Hadn’t given it much thought. But yeah, boss, now you mention it, it’s a fair point.”
“In any case,” the OC continued, “imagine the wagons after three weeks if we’re carrying all our crap with us.”
“Yeah, not nice,” Grey agreed.
“Three weeks!” Sebastian interjected excitedly. “Are we really likely to be that long?”
Reggie paused. “A good week to do the infil overland and take the Corps’s surrender. Then two weeks to oversee that, as Coalition forces move up from the south of the country. I figure it’s likely to be three weeks at least before we get relieved.”
“Guess we’d best ditch the bags of crap, then,” said Grey. “I hid most of mine in Scruff’s Bergen. But don’t tell him, eh?”
The OC smiled. “Mum’s the word, boy. Mum’s the word.”
By the time Reggie had returned from answering nature’s call, Grey was taking over watch. He mounted his wagon and prepared for 120 minutes of mind-numbing boredom. The trouble with such operations was that one lapse of concentration could well prove fatal. They might have seen nothing for the last forty-eight hours, but that didn’t mean an Iraqi Army patrol wasn’t about to stumble across their hiding place.
Forcing the mind to be totally vigilant when it craved rest only added to the exhaustion. Grey settled into his seat, and as his eyes
wandered across the terrain his mind also wandered. Normally, Special Forces work was never this mind-bendingly monotonous. Invariably, there was something or someone specific to keep a watch on.
He thought back over a Northern Ireland gig that he’d been on several years back—yet another joint operation with the SAS. There had been six men holed up in an OP (observation position). The OP was little more than a large grave-shaped hole scooped in the sodden earth, with the thick heather sliced through and rolled back over the top of them as cover. From there they’d had eyes on a run-down barn, originally built of dark stone and gray slate but which had been repeatedly patched with rusting galvanized iron. Typically for Northern Ireland, the rain had drizzled down from a gray sky that had all but merged into the gray of the earth. It was the kind of weather that never amounted to a downpour, but nor did it ever stop seeping damp into your bones.
The rain was miserable, but all of that had seemed somehow bearable on account of the prize. The barn housed an IRA weapons stash, and one of their more notorious ASUs (active service units) was scheduled to do a pickup, so they could mount another murderous operation. Only, this time Grey and his fellow elite operators intended to meet them with a storm of bullets.
They’d been in the OP for a good forty-eight hours by the time the ASU had shown. They’d left it to the last moment to retrieve the arms—several shotguns and a couple of AK-47 assault rifles—so as to give any watchers the least possible time in which to hit them. The rules of engagement were stacked so far on the bad guys’ side that they could only be engaged if they were holding a weapon and were a “clear and present threat.”
The bad guys had exited the barn and gone to mount up their van, when the trap was sprung. The men in the OP had made the call, and a series of airborne and vehicle-mounted forces had gone in to seal off the entire area. Meanwhile, Grey and his fellow warriors yelled out a challenge for the gunmen to throw down their weapons or face the consequences. They’d tried to hide the guns
under hay bales and the like, but this time they’d been caught red-handed, and they were rolled up without a shot having been fired.
The point about that mission was that in spite of the god-awful weather and the terrain, it had been
interesting
. It had been two days during which anything could have happened, and the comings and goings at the farm had kept the guys on edge. Here in the Iraqi desert there was nothing of the sort.
For now, at least, there was only an empty and burning sun-blasted stillness.
Grey cursed under his breath.
Goat herders. Why was it always bastard goat herders?
For three days and as many nights they’d seen zero sign of life here, and the Squadron was now all but complete. A few more hours and they’d be moving out as one and heading north into the unknown. Or at least that had been the case before the eerie tinkling of the bells and the appearance of the bloody goats.
Grey gripped the weapon closer, his gloved fingers poised to flick off the safety and open fire. He was crouched behind the Dude’s .50-cal, his own GPMG being too low on the vehicle to be of any use in the wadi that made their present LUP. He held his aim rock-steady, his finger laid gently on the trigger. But first he needed to assess the threat, scan for human presence—was there anyone with the herd?—and check whether they had detected the Squadron’s presence. Only then would he unleash hell.