straight ahead, only a couple of hundred metres away, was the main supply route. It ran right and left across our front on a big embankment like a long ridge. To the left, one harmless-looking civilian truck was parked on the edge of the highway. It had an open back and slatted sides, as if it was used for carrying animals. One or two other lorries rumbled along the road.
On the high ground to our right, another couple of hundred metres away, was something much more sinister: an anti-aircraft position. Through our binoculars we could see the twin barrels of guns, which we identified from our manual as SA60s, poking up above the emplacement. There were at least two Iraqis moving about.
The sight gave us a nasty fright. Those guns could only be there to protect some installation from air attack. It meant we were right on the edge of an enemy position. We would have to be extremely careful.
We came back down and let the rest of the guys know that there were enemy within 400 metres of us. In the shelter of the wadi we heard the occasional vehicle go along the road, but we kept our heads down while we considered what to do. It was too dangerous to spend any length of time where we were. We had to get a message through to base, asking for a relocation or a return.
The trouble was, the 319 radio did not seem to be working. It should have been possible for us to communicate instantly with the base station in Cyprus, and from there messages should have been back in Al Jouf within a couple of minutes. But although Legs patiently tried different frequencies and experimented with various aerial arrays, he got no response. (We discovered much later that we’d been given the wrong frequencies.) For the moment there was no serious worry, because we knew that as a fall-back we had the Lost Comms procedure. This meant that if we had not come on air within forty-eight hours, a helicopter would automatically return, either bringing us a new radio set or armed with a plan to shift us elsewhere.
We took turns to go on lookout duty, or ‘stag’, while the others had a meal or a sleep. We did an hour’s guard-duty each, holding the clackers for detonating the claymores and watching the wadi. The rest of the guys, having had a sleepless night, were glad to get their heads down. It was so cold that several of them struggled into their NBC suits and lay around in them. We were all more or less hidden, and there was a good chance that if we kept still, even a man looking up the wadi from a distance would not have seen us.
Then, late in the afternoon, we heard voices. A boy began calling out, and a man answered him. Peering cautiously over the western rim, we saw them driving a herd of goats. They were walking across the plain, nearly parallel to the wadi, but heading in towards us as they moved northwards, and calling the goats on as they went. The truck with slatted sides was still parked on the far side of the main supply route. It looked as if the goatherds had come out to check their flock, or were about to load the animals up.
Either way, they were too close for comfort. We grabbed our weapons and lay like stones, hardly breathing, each man with a round up the spout.
From the jingling of the goat bells and the voices, we reckoned the flock passed within fifty metres of our hiding place. As the sounds faded into the distance, we kept still, listening. Half an hour later, we crept to the top of the bank again to check what was happening: the truck had disappeared, and there was no sign of the goats. But where they had gone, we couldn’t tell.
This place was bad news. There was so much activity in the area that it could only be a matter of time before we were compromised.
There was still no response on the radio, and we began to grow nervous. We were also getting frozen. I had the best boots of anyone in the patrol, but even I had numb feet. Oddly enough, I didn’t feel hungry, and all I ate during the day was a bar of chocolate and a packet of biscuits.
As soon as it got dark, Andy, Mark, Stan and Dinger decided to take a look around.
‘We’ll leave in this direction,’ Andy briefed the rest of us in whispers, ‘and we’ll come back in the same way. The pass number’s the sum of nine.’
This meant that when they returned, one of us would state a number between one and eight. The correct response would be the number which, added to the original number, made nine. So, if we said ‘three’, they would have to reply ‘six’. In hindsight, this was a bit stupid. If anyone other than the patrol had approached us, it would have been an Iraqi, and just by speaking to them we would be immediately compromised.
‘We shouldn’t be more than three or four hours,’ Andy continued. ‘As we come in, the first man will walk down with his arms extended and his weapon held out sideways in his right hand.’
If the rest of us heard a contact, he went on, we were to stand-to, wait five or six minutes for the recce group to come through our position, and put fire down on anyone following them. If our own four guys didn’t appear, we were to make for the drop-off point, and they would join us there.
They left at 2300 while the rest of us took turns to do an hour’s stag. Not a sound broke the silence; the night was utterly still, but not nearly so light as the one before, because the sky was full of clouds.
The recce party returned safely at 0330. They had found that the main supply route was not a metalled road, but just a series of dirt tracks running parallel through the desert; the tracks spread out across nearly a kilometre. They’d also discovered a single white post standing in the ground, about 300 metres from the lying-up position, but they could not make out what it was marking. Then they’d checked out a little tented encampment beyond the spot on which the truck we’d seen had been parked. It was a second anti-aircraft position, with a few vehicles parked around it.
For what was left of the night they got their heads down, and the rest of us stagged on again. When morning came, we decided it was too dicey to stay. There were too many people about, and we were too close to the site that the anti-aircraft guns were guarding.
For the rest of the second day we tried to get through on the radio, but no luck. We also tried using our Satcom telephone. We didn’t want to speak for long on it, because any call that lasted more than twenty seconds could be picked up by direction-finding apparatus. So we switched the set to listening-wait, hoping to hear a call from base. Then occasionally we would come up on the call-sign with a quick request for a comms check: ‘Hello Zero Alpha, this is Bravo Two Zero, radio check, over.’ But nothing happened.
It looked as though we were going to have to rely on our Lost Comms procedure. That would mean pulling back down the wadi to the drop-off point, and being there when the chopper came in at midnight — forty-eight hours after dropping us off. We hoped that it would take us somewhere better, but more likely it would just bring us a new radio. Either way, after dark the whole patrol was going to move back, humping all our kit. We weren’t looking forward to making the effort.
It was about four o’clock in the afternoon that everything started to go wrong.
Once again we heard the herder boy calling his goats. This time he sounded closer, and coming directly towards us. I’d been talking to Andy and Dinger about the radio, and I was under the overhang when the boy started shouting, from a point directly above my head, but some way out behind me.
The three of us lay still, but when I looked across at Vince, on the other side of the rock, he was craning his head to see if he could spot the boy. Mouthing at him furiously, and giving tiny, frantic movements of our fingers, we tried to make him keep his head down.
If we’d all stayed still, we might have been OK. Nine times out of ten, if hidden people don’t move, they get away with it. What betrays them is shape, shadow, shine and, above all, movement. It’s the same with birds and animals in a wood: as long as they keep still, you don’t see them, but the instant one moves, that’s it.
But Vince moved. Wanting to see what was happening, he eased his head up until the boy could have caught sight of him.
The shouting stopped. There was no cry of alarm, but the sudden silence was ominous. It was pretty obvious that the boy had run off. I crawled round to Vince and hissed, ‘Did he see you?’
‘No, no, no,’ he answered. ‘We’re OK.’
I left it at that, but I didn’t believe him. Things were getting scary: we were about to be rumbled. I felt fear starting up in my stomach. Legs was still at the radio, trying to get through. ‘Have you been on the guard net?’ I asked him.
‘No.’
‘Well, get on it and start tapping Morse.’ The guard net sends out new frequencies, and can only be used in an emergency. This was one.
Legs started working out his Morse code message:
Wild thoughts raced through my mind: an anti-personnel round from a tank could destroy us all.
