Zero Six Bravo (18 page)
Grey smiled to himself. He recognized most of the voices bitching on the radio, but he didn’t rise to the bait. In a way it was good to see that the rest of the men in the Squadron were still sparking in spite of the crushing burden of fatigue.
The temperature dropped rapidly, and soon it was hovering around five degrees. With the wind-chill factor on the open vehicles,
Grey figured it had to be well below freezing. They’d been kipping at night wrapped in sleeping bags and Gore-Tex bivvy bags for the extra warmth. But while on the move they needed their bodies free—to drive, to keep watch, to navigate, and potentially to fight. Moth’s hands gripped the steering wheel encased in leather gloves for the added warmth. But those manning the machine guns like Grey and Dude could wear only the thin air-crewmen’s gloves, for they needed the added dexterity.
Between one and five degrees was the temperature bracket in which snow would fall, and it struck Grey that if it rained right now over northern Iraq, it would fall here in the Ninawa Desert as snow. It was bizarre. A few hours ago he’d felt as if his head was being boiled in a cauldron. Now it was as if he was suffering from severe brain freeze.
Grey reached forward and flicked on the wagon’s heater. He had the fan set to zero, so it made almost no noise, but still the hot air should waft into the footwell and seep up around him and Moth. As for the Dude, heaven only knew how the poor bastard wasn’t freezing to death, perched up there on the .50-cal turret.
Grey couldn’t afford for his mind to seize up. He had a thousand and one things to think about, leading the Squadron on a night drive such as this. As well as all the obvious navigational issues, he had to try to map out in his head a series of escape routes, should they get hit from out of the darkness by the enemy. He checked his map again and issued a fresh set of navigational instructions. A dry ravine had pushed the convoy too far eastward, and he needed Moth to compensate. He told him to steer a route due north whenever he could, using the North Star as his celestial fix.
After two hours of leading the Squadron Grey was feeling totally messed up. As for Moth, he was hanging out of his hoop. They stopped to do a map change, Grey using the tiny penlight on his flashlight to scrutinize the maps in his folder, and to select the right sheet for the terrain they were moving into.
A wagon pulled up beside them. “How’re you blokes doing?” a voice whispered. It was Scruff. “We’re frozen solid.”
“Still alive,” Grey whispered back. “Mate, we’ve had the heater on full blast the whole time.”
“Shit. Didn’t think of that one.” Scruff leaned forward and flicked the switch to activate his wagon’s heater. “We’re freezing our bloody nuts off.”
They pushed onward, Grey tensing himself for the attack he felt certain was coming. If the Fedayeen had slipped past them when the previous night’s sentry had nodded off, they could have set an ambush anywhere up ahead. The jumbled, chaotic terrain certainly offered them the perfect opportunity to do so. The Squadron was making around five kilometers per hour, and at such a slow crawl it would make the perfect target to any watching gunmen.
It’s standard operating procedure if hit in an ambush to keep driving. If you attempt to turn round or to stop, you only make yourself a sitting target. It’s far better to keep moving and fight your way through. If that Fedayeen force did hit them, Grey would have to rely on speed and the cover of darkness, plus the firepower of the Squadron, to smash their way past.
But being at the head of the snake, Grey’s wagon would be the first facing the enemy guns.
Several hours into that night drive, Moth reduced their speed to a dead slow crawl. If the lead Pinkie actually stopped, the rest would come to a halt behind it, and it generally took an age to get the convoy moving again. It was better to keep moving than to stop completely, which was why Moth had them inching ahead at no more than walking pace.
Regardless of breaking light discipline, Grey needed to use the GPS to get an exact fix on where they were, so as to take them through a series of ravines that slashed like knife cuts across their intended path. Right now the danger of going over one of those and rolling the wagon far outweighed the risk of the light thrown off by the GPS compromising them.
Even if they survived going over the edge of an unseen wadi, most were six feet or more in height and more or less vertical-sided, so getting out would present a real problem. If there was no natural exit point, the only way would be to dig a slope by hand and drive the wagon out, and that could take all night. With the men dismounted and the wagons trapped, it would present an ideal moment for the Fedayeen force to hit them.
As the convoy crept ahead, Scruff’s vehicle pulled up alongside them to provide some extra cover. Grey was punching the buttons on his GPS, and he could hear Scruff cursing under his breath.
“Still freezing our bloody nuts off,” he hissed. “Bloody heater isn’t working. The last thing we thought of bloody checking before deploying.”
Grey smiled grimly to himself. While his feet and legs were reasonably toasty, his face felt frozen to the touch, his lips cracked and sore. But at least having the heater working meant he wasn’t in danger of getting his nuts frozen off.
By the approach of first light the men in the lead vehicle had horribly red and bloodshot eyes—the result of staring into the artificially boosted luminosity of night vision for hours on end. Trying to find a way through an increasingly pockmarked and ravine-strewn terrain would be nightmarish in broad daylight, yet they’d been doing just that with only the fluorescent green glow of NVG to guide them.
Grey figured the patrol had made sixty kilometers max. By now they were entering the badlands of the far north of the desert, where the plateau broke up into a confusion of all but impassable terrain. It made for horrendous going, and for long stretches Moth had been managing little more than ten kilometers per hour. As the coming dawn lit the horizon to the east of them, Moth led the Squadron into a narrow ravine. It was one of the few patches of cover he could maneuver the wagons into. With the vehicles snaking out along the dry riverbed, they could just about keep the whole Squadron hidden from view. They pulled up in their concealed position and cut the engines.
Grey turned to Moth. “How you doing, mate?”
Moth fixed him with a stare from eyes rimmed with painful red. “Boss, I’m wiped. I need several hours’ solid kip or I’ll be useless for tonight.”
“Get your head down, mate,” Grey told him. “We’ll worry about vehicle checks and the rest later. Grab some kip before it’s too hot to do so.”
For those like Grey’s team who had been first into theater, they were starting their seventh day in Iraq. It was one hell of a length of time to have spent behind enemy lines without being hit.
During the long night’s drive Grey had kept thinking about the B2Z patrol. The fate that had befallen that SAS mission had cast a long shadow over Special Forces soldiering—and especially for a band of warriors pursing a mission like the present one. All bar one of the B2Z team had been captured or killed, and they had been an eight-man patrol moving on foot. By anyone’s reckoning, M Squadron was far more visible and potentially just as vulnerable.
Grey checked his map. He figured they were 120 kilometers short of the Iraqi 5th Corps’s position—wherever they might be exactly. They’d covered some six hundred kilometers of the infil, the first 250 having been made via C-130 and Chinook, and the last 350 overland. He checked the Pinkie’s milometer: those 350 kilometers amounted to some 600 kilometers of driving.
It was some achievement to have made it thus far and not to have seen a single enemy or been in a single contact. Maybe they were going to make their rendezvous with the Iraqi 5th Corps after all. But even if they did, it was anyone’s guess as to how they were going to be received once they got there.
As the Squadron prepared for another day’s rest and standing sentry, not a man amongst them had the faintest clue as to what had been happening in the wider scheme of the war. They knew that the air war would be under way by now, for that was gearing up by the time they flew into Iraq on the C-130 Hercules. But they were several hundred kilometers north of where any air strikes might be going in, and they’d neither seen nor heard any sign of warplanes above them. If they hadn’t known differently, the men of the Squadron could have been forgiven for forgetting there was a war on at all.
Yet hundreds of kilometers to the south of their present position the air war had actually begun in earnest. As M Squadron’s vehicles had been creeping through the Ninawa Desert, U.S. warplanes had launched a series of air assaults into southern Iraq, the most recent of which had reached as far north as the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.
The first air missions were flown by the elite U.S. unit Task Force Tiger (TF 20 for short), with their F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets.
After flying various missions in support of U.S. and British Special Forces, Task Force Tiger’s next mission had been much more high-profile. The elite aviators were tasked to hit a fleet of Iraqi warships where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers empty into the Persian Gulf, to the far south of Iraq. The chief targets were two missile warships with a flotilla of smaller boats providing a defensive shield.
The F-15Es headed in on a bearing that took them right up against the Iranian border while avoiding the SAM (surface-to-air missile) batteries at Basra. The warplanes dived down and dropped five-hundred-pound bombs with delayed-action fuses. They hit the lead warship, the bombs penetrating the deck and blasting the sides of the vessel asunder, after which it capsized and sank. The other vessel four hits before it finally went down, leaving both half submerged in the shallow waters at the northern end of the Gulf.
The results of those air missions were highly visible to the Iraqis, especially as Iraqi TV was pumping out such images to ramp up their propaganda campaign. The Iraqi people were being urged to make the ultimate sacrifice so as to defend “the mother country” and to protect “the father of the nation,” the great leader Saddam Hussein. Saddam was urging his armed forces and the wider Iraqi public to drive the “infidel invaders” out of Iraq, and assuring them that victory would be theirs.
With Iraqi military personnel starting to take hits from Coalition air strikes, Saddam’s message would be hitting home. Doubtless, such images and propaganda were finding their way to the Iraqi 5th Corps via their radio sets and TV screens, wherever they might be positioned.
In recent days the propaganda war had reached fever pitch, as warplanes from Task Force Tiger had flown their first missions against Baghdad itself. The F-15E aircrews were tasked to take out any rocket or artillery positions that could be used against Coalition ground troops. They had to recon the route ground forces would take as they advanced on the Iraqi capital, seeking out Iraqi tanks, armored personnel carriers, antiaircraft guns, and missile batteries, and hitting them with their smart bombs and cannon fire.
Those air missions were taking place well beyond M Squadron’s visual range. This far north of Baghdad the damage they were wreaking on the Iraqi military remained unseen. The Ninawa Desert was an oasis of empty silence, and an eerie kind of peace reigned.
But to the Iraqi people and military alike, such sorties were highly visible, and it was plain to see how their forces were getting smashed from the air. Surely those images would act as both a powerful warning and a provocation to the force charged with defending the north of the country: the Iraqi Army’s 5th Corps.
The sun was peeping over the edge of the sharp ravine in which they’d made their LUP by the time Grey’s team had managed to get their heads down. They fell into an exhausted sleep, oblivious to the bloody combat being waged to the south of the country by fearsome warplanes like the F-15 Strike Eagles, and to the impact such air strikes might have on their own mission.
At 1300 Grey was woken to take his stand on sentry. He made his way to the top of the ravine, where he found Scruff, whose watch he was relieving. Grey settled next to him, belly down on the hard rim of the ravine.
“What’s the score?”
Scruff lowered his binoculars and handed them to Grey. “Now and then there’s a vehicle way to the east of us. Take a look. Probably moving through the desert toward the 252.”
The 252 was a minor road that ran from the fringes of the Ninawa Desert northeast toward Salah. The Squadron was approaching more populated territory, and it could well be civvy traffic making for that road. But even so this was the first human presence bar the lone goat herder they’d seen in a week spent crossing Iraq.
Grey focused the binoculars. “Anything suspicious?”
“Nope. White civvy-looking wagons. No weapons visible. They don’t seem to be stopping, either.”
“Probably traffic heading for the 252.”
“Probably. But they’re sticking to the very limit of our visual range. Could be dickers, mate, so keep a good eye.”
“Dickers” was a phrase first used by British soldiers in Northern Ireland. It referred to gunmen masquerading as civvies and driving civilian-looking vehicles in an effort to sneak up on a British patrol or position. The dickers would recce the potential target and help call in an attack force while all the while hiding behind a supposed civilian identity.
Those like Grey who’d operated in Northern Ireland had learned to treat every civilian as a potential enemy. Even if they were out on the piss in Belfast, it was still an operational theater, and one of the toughest and most challenging in the world. You could never afford to let your guard down, and you never knew for sure when and in what form the enemy might hit you. And instinctively Grey sensed there was something very similar about operating here in Iraq.
“Any sense they’re connected to that Fedayeen force?” Grey asked.
Scruff shrugged. “Could be, mate. They could be Fedayeen scouts, searching for us. But right now there’s just no way of knowing.”