rock a metre or so high which was casting a black shadow in the moonlight. I curled up beside it, with my map case beneath my legs, one shamag round them and the other round my head. I lay there feeling fairly safe in that patch of deep darkness.
Before settling down, I gave myself the only treat at my disposal: I got out my flask, and took a nip of whisky. The spirit burned as it went down into my empty stomach, but it gave me a momentary lift.
I was so exhausted that in spite of the cold I kept falling asleep, only to come round with a start a few minutes later, racked by shudders. It was a real pain to be wet again; having spent hours with Stan getting dry, I was now soaked all up the front, with my sodden clothes clinging to me, and the damp making the cold even worse.
When first light came, with dawn breaking early under clear skies, I realized that I wasn’t really in any sort of cover. At night the shadow of the rock had looked comforting; if someone had walked past in the dark, he wouldn’t have seen me. Now I found I was lying out in the open.
Looking up onto the north bank of the wadi, I saw a hollow among some loose rocks. I walked up to it, lay inside, and piled up a few more rocks at either side to break up the outline of my body. That was the best place I could find in which to spend the day.
And it was only then that it really hit me how much I was on my own.
CHAPTER 9
Boxing Clever
In the days and nights that followed, there were several moments when my morale plunged to rock-bottom. This was one of them. A wave of loneliness swept over me as I realized that I was utterly alone. I was hungry, wet, tired, cut off from all communication with friends, and still far inside a hostile country. I thought it couldn’t get any worse.
‘If things get on top of you,’ my mum always used to say, ‘have a good cry.’ So I lay there in the rocks and tried to cry — but I couldn’t. Instead my face crumpled up and I started laughing. Somehow it did the trick. It got rid of the tension and sorted me out. I daydreamed about the glorious puddings my mum used to make — particularly her rice pudding, with its thick, sweet, creamy inside and its crust baked to a crisp golden brown. I could have done with a helping of that, there and then. But from that point on I wasn’t bothered about being alone. All I had to do was get on with heading for the border.
It was the morning of Sunday 27 January, and I’d been on the run for three nights. I would have liked to let my feet breathe, but that would have involved too great a risk. I had to be ready to leg it at any minute: so it was one boot off, one sock off, check that foot, and get sock and boot back on. Then the other foot. The blisters looked bad. They had burst, and the skin below was raw and bleeding. My toenails had started lifting, and there were blisters under my toes. I had no way of treating them, and could only hope that my feet would hold out until I reached the border.
With my boots back on, I spent an hour cleaning my weapon again. I took care, as before, not to make any noise that would carry. Once I had everything squared away, I lay back with my belt undone but my webbing still in place, straps over my shoulders, so that I could make a quick getaway if need be.
Even down there, almost on the level of the Euphrates, the air was still icy cold, and I was shivering. I lay on one side, with my hands between my legs, tucked in under one big rock. Smaller rocks pulled into position shielded my head and feet, and there was bare rock beneath me.
From time to time I dozed off, but always I woke with a start a few minutes later, shaking all over. It was my body’s defence to bring me round like that: if I hadn’t kept waking, I would have drifted off and been gone for ever. Aching from contact with the rock, I would shift about, trying to find a more comfortable position. There was always a pebble or bump of rock digging into some part of me, and the pressure points on the outsides of my knees, hips and spine had already begun to rub sore.
The water had made me feel better in one way; but it had given me the shivers, and all I wanted to do was press on again, so that I could warm up. The hardest thing was to keep still in daylight. The urge to start walking, to make progress towards the border, was almost overwhelming.
Below me, the wadi dropped towards the river in a V-shape, snaking left and right. There was nothing alive to keep me interested: no bird or animal, nothing moving. Boredom soon became another powerful enemy. It took all my willpower to resist the urge to move on, or even just to have a look around.
The day was quiet: I never heard voices or traffic movement. Now and then the wind would stir among the rocks and I would come fully alert, looking round, wondering if a person or an animal had shifted. From where I lay I could see what looked like the remains of an ancient viaduct, jutting out from the bank of the river into the water. I wondered how old it was, and whether it could date back as far as the Romans. Round the base of the arches the water was obviously deep, because through my binoculars I could see the current swirling fast. The river was brown with silt, a strong contrast with the salty-looking land on the far bank.
What kept my spirits up was the thought that I must be close to the Syrian border — no more than thirty or forty kilometres away. Looking at the map again and again, I worked out that I was much farther west than I had thought I was. I reckoned I was within one night’s march, possibly two, of safety.
Until then, the longest I’d ever gone without food was four days, on combat survival training in Wales. Even then, an agent had brought me one slice of bread or a little piece of cheese every twenty-four hours — but I remembered feeling pretty weak at the end. The furthest I’d ever walked in one march was sixty-five kilometres — the final march on Selection. Now, I reckoned, I’d covered about 150 kilometres in three nights, and already it was five days since I’d had a proper meal — the big blow-out at Al Jouf. With my biscuits finished, I began to worry about how long my strength would hold out. How long could I go on walking? Would I slow right down, or even be unable to keep going at all?
I knew from weight-training, and books about the subject, that when the body is under stress it starts to burn its own muscle, trying to preserve fat for emergencies. I was carrying very little fat anyway, so I knew my muscles would waste away quite quickly, especially as I was burning yet more energy by shivering all the time. In lectures on combat survival, we’d been told that a man lost in the desert can only survive for a day without water — but this wasn’t a typical desert, because the temperature was so low.
I kept wondering about the rest of the patrol. I greatly feared that Vince was dead, and in a way I felt responsible. Lying all day by the tank berm had definitely contributed to his collapse, and it was me who had said we should follow SOPs and stay there. Then, in the night, I should have tied him to me. As a qualified mountain guide, I could have handled the situation better. But at the time I’d been going down with exposure myself, and not thinking as clearly as I might have.
What about Stan? It seemed certain that he’d been captured, and I could only hope he wasn’t having too bad a time. As for the other five… I reckoned that a chopper must have come back and lifted them out. I felt sure that the aircraft must have been inbound towards our original position, following the normal Lost Comms procedure, and that it would have flown around until the guys made contact with the pilot. In fact, as I found out later, the other guys in the patrol had been captured that day close to the river at a point about a hundred kilometres nearer to the Syrian border. As a result of contacts with them, 1,600 Iraqi troops had been deployed to look for other Coalition soldiers on the run, and the civilian population along the river had been alerted.
I came out of my hiding place not long after dark, and began heading north-west, keeping as close as I could to the edge of the cultivated land, where the going was easiest.
I was walking more carefully now, because I was in a populated area. I was probably down to three or four kilometres an hour. Occasionally, for a change, I rested the 203 over my shoulder, but for most of the time I held it in both hands, with the weight taken by the sling of paracord round my neck. That way, the weapon was less tiring on my arms, but it was also at the ready: I could have aimed and fired a shot within a second.
Soon I found that there were amazing numbers of Arabs out and about. Every half hour or so I’d come across
