the Coalition forces.
Talking it over at Al Jouf, we reckoned that we could jog and run to the border in two nights. But we’d forgotten about water: you can’t jog carrying full jerry cans, and there was no other source around. Nor had we bargained for the cold.
Five minutes out from Bravo Three Zero’s location, the loadie gave a thumbs-up signal. I smelled rather than heard the Land Rover engines start up. The back of the Chinook filled with choking diesel fumes.
Then two fingers from the loadie indicated ‘Two minutes to landing’.
Then one minute.
With a bump, we were on the ground. The tailgate went down, the vehicles rolled, and the guys hurried out into the night. That was a tense moment, because it was perfectly possible that enemy were waiting to receive us. The rest of us were at the ready: we had our webbing on and weapons in hand. If the chopper had come under fire, we’d have burst out and gone to ground. But nothing happened. The tailgate came up. With some of the weight gone, the heli made a normal take-off, and we were away again.
Twenty minutes later it was our turn.
We grabbed our own kit and dragged it to the edge of the tailgate. Soon the loadie gave us five fingers, then two. We pulled on goggles to keep flying sand and grit out of our eyes. As the chopper hit the deck, the tailgate went down. Cold air and dust came screaming in, but thanks to the goggles I could still see.
We tumbled out, dragging our kit.
Above us was a horrendous sight. Two enormous blue lights seemed to be blazing above the aircraft. For a moment I couldn’t think what was happening. Had we been caught by an Iraqi searchlight? Then I realized that the downdraught from the rotors was raising a storm of grit, and as the grains hit the whirling blades they lit up with a bright blue glow.
While the noise of the Chinook’s engines still covered us, the guys with machine guns snapped their belted magazines into place. Then in a few more seconds the heli lifted away into the night and was gone.
For the last couple of hours we’d been in deafening noise. Now suddenly we were thrown into silence. The air was still, the night clear. We lay facing outwards in a circle on the desert floor. Dogs barked not far off to the east. They’d heard us, even if nobody else had.
With our goggles off, we had a good view of our surroundings. We’d landed in the middle of a dry wadi maybe 200 metres wide. Scattered clouds were sailing across the moon, and in the clear intervals its light was very bright. Too bright. As our eyes adjusted, we could see that the wadi had walls five or ten metres high, apparently with a level plain above them on either side.
The main supply route was somewhere up ahead of us, to the north, running roughly east to west. The ground beneath us was dead flat, and consisted of hard-baked clay, but we found we were lying right between a set of tracks made by a vehicle whose tyres had sunk into the dry mud. I realized that the mud was only a few centimetres deep, and that under it lay solid rock. There was no loose material with which to fill our sandbags.
I reckoned that if any Iraqis had seen the chopper, they’d already be running or driving across the flats towards the lip of the wadi. I had visions of people coming from all directions and suddenly appearing on the rim, against the stars.
‘Let’s get some guns onto the high ground,’ I whispered to Andy. So we sent out two lads, one on either side, to go up the wadi walls and keep a lookout.
Gradually the barking of dogs died away and left us in total silence. Our most urgent need was to get our kit out of sight. We began dragging it into the shadow of the moonlight cast by the right-hand or eastern wall. From the middle of the wadi that shadow looked solid and deep — a good place in which to hide. But when we reached it, we found it was an illusion. There was no cover of any kind, and in the daylight the whole river bed would be dangerously open.
In heaving and dragging our kit, we were leaving marks in the baked mud of the wadi floor. But we had a much bigger problem than that. There was hardly a grain of sand in the whole area. We were on bedrock. Training in the dunes of the Gulf, we had built beautiful OPs with the greatest of ease, digging into the sand and filling as many bags as we needed. Here, without sand, our bags were useless.
We needed to find out exactly where we were. So Mark got out a GPS unit and plotted our position to within a few metres. Then we pulled in our two flanking guys, who reported that the desert on either side of the wadi ran away level in flat plains, without a stitch of cover.
Andy went forward with Mark to recce the ground ahead. As the rest of us lay waiting for them to return, we began to realize how cold it was. The wind bit through our DPMs and smocks, which were far too light for the job, in both weight and colour. They gave very little protection against the cold, and were such a pale sandy colour that they shone like beacons in the moonlight — my builder had been right! Way down at Victor, several hundred miles further south, the nights had been warm and the days hot enough to make us sweat. Nobody had thought to warn us that things would be different up here.
The dogs started barking again. It was hard to tell what had set them off this time. Could they hear us, or was our scent carrying on the wind? We reckoned they were no more than 400 or 500 metres away. That figured, because the satellite photos had shown irrigated fields and habitations within about that distance of our drop-off point. We just hoped they didn’t come across to suss out what was disturbing them.
In twenty minutes Andy and Mark were back. ‘Right,’ Andy whispered. ‘We’ll head up here. Get forward up the wadi.’
Four of the guys struggled into their bergens and walked forward about 300 metres, then went to ground. As soon as they were settled, the rest of us moved up to join them. Then the first four went back and picked up the rest of their kit, including the jerry cans, which were tied together in pairs with tape. Once they’d joined us, we went back, and so it continued for most of the night: shuttling forward, back, forward, back. It was tiring work.
By 0500 we had moved about two kilometres to the north, and were in the area selected for the OP. The sky in the east was already beginning to lighten. We were still in the wadi, but we couldn’t stay where we were, because the ground was far too open, and the walls were bare rock, so there was no chance of digging. Then Andy went on round a corner with Stan and found that the wadi came to a dead end in a cul-de-sac no bigger than a good-sized room. The walls were fairly steep, but on the left-hand side, as we faced north, one massive slab of rock had fallen off the side of the ravine. The detached lump was about two metres high, and lay a metre or so clear of the wall, with a second, smaller rock near its foot. It made some natural shelter. A little further to the south there was an overhang going back under the wall. The floor was of hard-baked clay, with loose rocks and some stunted thorn bushes scattered about.
It wasn’t a great hiding place, but it was the best we could find.
CHAPTER 4
Contact!
We went into our hiding place and packed away all the kit for the OP, because it was no use to us in this rock desert. We put the jerry cans at the bottom, with the thermal sheets, cam nets and empty sandbags on top, to deaden any noise. Some of us sat on the cans, a couple of us tucked in underneath the overhang, and the rest settled around the rocks at various places. If we wanted to shift about, we went at a crouch or on hands and knees, but all movement was kept to a minimum.
The end of the wadi covered us from the north — the direction of the main supply route — and we were quite well protected by the sides. But to our rear we were dangerously exposed. If anyone came up the river bed, following our tracks, they’d be bound to walk or drive right on top of us.
‘This is no good,’ somebody muttered. ‘If it looks bad in the daylight, we’ll have to consider getting on the phone so we can be relocated.’
Before dawn, we put out two claymore mines, about fifty metres down the wadi with wires running back to our position, so that we could blow up anybody who approached along the foot of the eastern wall.
At first light Andy and I crept carefully up a small channel and lay at the top of the bank for a look around. Daybreak revealed that flat, grey-brown plains stretched away into the distance to the east and west. But there,
