Zero Six Bravo (19 page)
Scruff wriggled backward from his position, but as he went to leave he paused. “You still got that feeling?” he asked Grey.
“Like we’re being hunted? I have. Worse than ever, mate.”
“That makes the two of us.”
Scruff turned and disappeared down the side of the wadi, urging Grey to keep a very close eye on those mystery vehicles.
The sentry point atop the ravine had a fine view, providing an arc of fire from the north round to the southeast. It struck Grey as an ideal vantage point from which to unleash a MILAN antiarmor missile on any hostile vehicle that might put in an appearance—that was, if they had brought any MILANs with them.
It was a big bone of contention that their MILANs had been left behind, for the MILAN was the one weapon with which they would have stood a decent chance of taking out an Iraqi main battle tank. A decision had been made well above Grey’s pay grade that no MILANs were needed on this mission, and they had been left behind largely to save on weight.
Normally, you’d carry one MILAN per troop, so one for each sentry position. A SACLOS (semiautomatic command to line-of-sight)
missile packing a 7.1-kilogram wire-guided warhead that can defeat most armor, the MILAN is the most powerful and accurate piece of equipment that can be operated by a light vehicle or foot patrol. But the Squadron hadn’t got any, so if Grey spotted a Lion of Babylon tank chugging over the horizon they’d have no choice but to high-tail it out of there.
After spending a couple of hours scanning the terrain to the east, Grey, like Scruff, had seen only a handful of white SUV-type wagons buzzing back and forth in the far distance. He didn’t know what to make of them. They probably
were
just some civvy traffic moving east toward the 252 en route to Salah. But then again they might not be.
His sentry duty done, Grey returned to his wagon. It was mid-morning, and the heat lay across the wadi like a thick and suffocating blanket. Moth and Dude had found it impossible to sleep and were doing some maintenance on the vehicle-mounted weapons. Grey briefed them on what he’d seen. The guys grabbed some binoculars so they could take a look themselves.
“So what d’you reckon?” Grey asked Moth after he’d been staring into the distance for several seconds.
“I dunno, boss. They’re Toyota Land Cruiser–type vehicles, and they’re a long way from us. None seem to be coming any closer, either.”
“I can’t see any with any weapons,” Dude remarked from his elevated position. “Could just be local Iraqi farmers’ vehicles, y’know.”
“Could be,” Grey confirmed. “But it could just as easily be scouts from that Fedayeen force. Think about it. They’re keeping their distance and not showing any weapons, so we can’t engage them. That way they can keep watch and get a good sense of our strength before they hit us. They hold off, watch, and wait until they’ve gathered a strong enough force, and then they really whack us.” Grey paused and eyed the others. “Trouble is, without more and better intel there’s no way of knowing.”
He left them to keep watch and went to grab a jerrican of diesel from the rear. As he upended it and drained the remaining contents into the wagon’s tank, he did a mental check on their diesel supplies.
As with the other wagons, they’d set out with four jerricans of diesel, each with a five-gallon capacity. He figured they’d been averaging no more than twenty miles per gallon over such appalling terrain. With the fuel in the vehicle’s main and reserve tanks, they’d maybe got eight hundred miles’ range, no more. They were also carrying one jerrican of gas for the quad, and Grey had no idea exactly how much fuel that would need. Depending on the terrain, the quads could end up doing many more miles as they buzzed about, scouting for the enemy.
Either way, by the time they reached the 5th Corps’s positions, they’d be at—or maybe beyond—the very edge of their range. It was never wise to push the wagons to the limit of their fuel supplies, just in case the Squadron did get hit. If they had to go on the run and evade and escape from the enemy, they’d need the fuel with which to do so.
In short, they’d need a resupply sometime very soon. Most likely, they’d get one via airdrop from a C-130 Hercules. If the Squadron could identify and secure an LZ, the Herc could roll out a couple of palettes, one packed with jerricans of fuel and the other with water. Dropped under massive parachutes, it should be a simple enough task to get the palettes to hit the LZ if the wind and the release point were calculated correctly.
On one level, Grey’s confidence in the Squadron had been boosted massively by the past few days’ operations. Compared to how they’d performed during training in Kenya, the Squadron was starting to work as one well-oiled machine. Incredibly, they’d pushed this far north without getting a single vehicle seriously bogged in or having any serious accidents. It was pretty impressive for a unit with zero vehicle mobility experience on operations.
The Squadron was becoming slick at day and night drives, getting into their hidden LUPs unseen, establishing arcs of fire, and setting sentries. Seven days on the ground, and not a man had been wounded or hurt or a vehicle lost, and not a shot exchanged with the enemy: it was one hell of an achievement, by any soldier’s reckoning.
But now there were those mystery vehicles to factor into the equation. Grey just didn’t know what to make of them. He was more or less certain he’d seen the same wagon tracking back and forth at the limit of their visual range. What kind of Iraqi farmer drove back and forth across the open, scorching desert for hours on end?
It was just possible that he was searching for a lost animal or something. But to Grey’s mind it was far more likely that he was getting eyes on the Squadron. If those vehicles were carrying enemy scouts, then it meant the Squadron’s long night drive had failed to shake off any pursuers or watchers. If they were dickers, then the enemy had to know M Squadron’s present location.
And they would be feeding back information to the main force as it prepared to hit the Squadron like a whirlwind.
By the time they set out on their second night drive of Operation No Return, the issue of those distant vehicles had still not been resolved. But with darkness cloaking the silent terrain, there was no sign of any headlights in pursuit, or even the sound of any vehicles.
The Squadron pushed ever northward. A few hours’ drive would take them into the farmland south of an Iraqi town called Sirwal, at which point they’d find a patch of cover to lie up for the remaining night hours. The Squadron was about to switch to day moves again, and for crucial reasons.
Once they left the Ninawa Desert behind them they were well out of the area of the Sunni Triangle—die-hard enemy territory. By contrast, the area of northern Iraq from around the city of Salah stretching east to the border with Iran was largely the domain of the Kurds. The Kurds were the natural-born enemies of Saddam Hussein, and that should make them friends to the Coalition forces.
Over the years of his despotic rule Saddam had launched repeated offensives to wipe out the Kurdish people and other rebellious ethnic groups. In one of the most murderous, the Iraqi 5th Corps had been tasked with the “Anfal Campaign”—
anfal
being a word from the Koran that translates as “the spoils of war.” In that campaign, the 5th Corps’s objective was to shell and burn Kurdish villages in an effort to purge the Kurdish population from Iraq.
Some 50,000 to 100,000 Kurds were killed. Eventually a 5th Corps general, along with dozens of the Corps’s top officers, was executed by Saddam for refusing to bomb villages and further prosecute genocide. Following that, a group of major generals and a further batch of officers were executed after they were accused of trying to overthrow his regime. So while the 5th Corps had a record of being a tool of brutal oppression of the Kurds, they’d also been a focus of resistance against Saddam’s autocratic rule.
The biggest challenge facing M Squadron now was locating the 5th Corps’s whereabouts. With no further intel having been provided, there was only one possible means of doing so, and that was to drive up to some local villagers and ask them where the Corps was positioned. And that meant pushing ahead in broad daylight so that the Squadron OC, plus Sebastian the terp, could try to extract that vital information.
That night the weather changed dramatically. The open skies became overcast, a thick band of cloud scooting across the heavens and blocking out stars and moon. It acted as a welcome insulating blanket, keeping some of the daytime heat in. As they pushed ahead in the inky darkness, Grey spotted the odd flash in the far distance to the southeast.
At first it looked as if it might be the flares from 2,000-pounder bombs exploding somewhere over Bayji or Tikrit, but there was no accompanying roar of distant explosions. Instead, the flashes played out in an eerie blue-white silence across the horizon. The Squadron was hundreds of kilometers north of any Coalition ground forces, not to mention the coming thrust of the military action, so air strikes this far north seemed unlikely. Finally, Grey concluded it had to be an electrical storm, especially as it had the appearance of constant lightning.
But the intense darkness to their front seemed impenetrable, and it made for horrendous driving conditions. The NVG worked by boosting ambient light—that of the moon and the stars—but with the sky overcast and angry they were barely able to function. Moth kept the wagon moving at a dead crawl, but he was only just able to make headway.
The driving was made all the more challenging by the thick tufts of vegetation that had begun to appear on all sides. Grey could feel the humidity in the air here. After the bare dryness of the desert it felt claustrophobic and suffocating. The undergrowth seemed to be growing thicker with every minute, and he could hear it brushing against the thin alloy skin of their Pinkie as Moth eased it through the densest of thickets.
This was ideal ambush territory, and at every turn Grey tensed himself to come face-to-face with a rank of Fedayeen machine guns, and to meet fire with fire.
The darkness made the terrain look flat and uniform. The lack of visibility reminded him of some Arctic training he’d done in Norway. Six Troop had been on a three-day exercise, driving Ski-Doos at night. Grey was leading, and a couple of times he’d stopped his snow machine just meters away from a crevasse that cut across the snowfield. In the dark, everything looked flat and featureless until the very last moment. Finally, the troop commander had lost patience with Grey’s stop-start progress. “Fucking get a move on, mate,” he’d snapped. “We don’t have all bloody night.”
He’d taken over leading the troop and raced ahead on his Ski-Doo. Barely minutes later he’d gone flying over a ravine. His machine had gone airborne with the trailer behind it, the rider leaving the saddle and landing face first. Grey and the others pulled to a halt at the lip of the ravine. Below them was a cartoon-like scene of a human imprint where the troop commander had disappeared into a thick snowdrift.
No one knew quite what to say. Everyone was trying not to laugh. As they pulled him out of the snow, someone got their camera out to take a souvenir photo. “Anyone takes a fucking photo, I’ll flatten the fucker,” he exploded, spitting out a mouthful of snow as he did so. Luckily, the only damage to the Ski-Doo was a broken throttle—and he’d insisted on continuing with the exercise, using a pair of pliers to operate the throttle cable.
That experience of driving through the Arctic light had taught Grey a crucial lesson: it was dead easy to miss a massive drop in
such conditions, even when it was right in front of your bloody nose. Back then the troop commander had been fortunate enough to land in soft snow. There would be no doing that here in Iraq.
With the darkness deepening, the Squadron pulled to a halt in some thick cover. If they tried to push any further, there was bound to be a serious accident, or worse. It was the early hours of the morning, and this would be their LUP for the remainder of the night. Sentries were posted, while the rest of the men got their heads down for some much-needed sleep.
Grey shook himself awake for stand-to at 0500 hours. He’d got a solid four hours’ sleep in the cool of the night, which was about as good as it got on such operations. He liked to get his men ready a full five minutes prior to stand-to. He glanced around at the other wagons, but no one seemed to be making much of an effort. They were lazing about drinking tea.
Mucker started to complain that no other fuckers were readying themselves, so why couldn’t they grab five minutes’ extra rest? It was well out of character for him to get in a bad mood like this, and it reflected how burned out they all were feeling.
The rest of the Squadron shook off their fatigue and got locked and loaded for stand-to. They were on high alert due to all the signs they’d picked up of a vehicle-borne force shadowing them. But first light revealed nothing untoward. There was no sign of any hostile presence, though the thick palm trees and reed beds cut visibility to a few hundred yards at most. For all they knew, an entire army could be hiding out there.
The Squadron formed up in V-shaped formation for that day’s drive north. Somehow, all the men on Grey’s wagon knew that today was the day: it was make-or-break time for M Squadron. Either the locals would prove friendly and lead them to the 5th Corps’s position, or they’d warn them that the Corps was highly unlikely to welcome the small British force. Either way, they had to know—for without that kind of intel, the Squadron was facing a hopeless situation.
The sun was rising through a narrow break in the cloud cover as the vehicles crawled across the small road that Grey had identified
from his route-mapping. After the days spent traversing a desert devoid of any man-made structures, he felt weirdly exposed and vulnerable as they hit that patch of sunbaked highway. Each wagon used its machine guns to cover those coming after it as they moved in formation over the open expanse of tarmac. On the far side they hit the dirt track that would lead northeast toward Sirwal town, bypassing the marshy lowland area of Duwayliyat Khalaf. They made good time on that track, and by mid-afternoon it had turned into a well-graded gravel road.