‘No, it might ricochet and kill him. Can you do the driver’s optics? That’s about the only thing that isn’t metal.’
‘No problem.’
The driver’s viewing optics is a strip of thick glass, three inches high by twelve wide. At a distance of just over 250 metres, it was bread and butter to Fitzy. He put a 7.62 straight into the middle of it. It scared the hell out of the teenager, who jumped off the Warrior and sprinted for his life.
When it started to get dark, we also had to shoot out the Warrior’s headlights because the power in it had been left on in the rush to debug from it. They were facing right into the camp and screwed up the view through our night vision goggles. They were harder shots. Fitzy took both of them out, and then calmly moved on to its indicators and three identification lights. A total of seven targets, all at over 250 metres, each just measuring a couple of square inches. Like the legend he was, he hit all seven first time.
As the sun dropped down over the horizon leaving a crimson-red sky, Chris slumped down against the sandbags in Rooftop Sangar next to me. He’d been down to the Ops Room.
After a full day’s excitement for the OMS, their pot shots on Cimic had started to die down too. But we were still on a sharp lookout for mortar teams. They’d caused us misery all day, and so far they had got away with it. They were a particular concern to us. On the roof all the time, we were the most exposed to their fire.
‘That’s all of our call signs accounted for now, Danny. Everyone’s safe inside here or Abu Naji.’
‘Christ, we got away with that one, didn’t we, mate? May Day. That’ll be right. More like Mayhem if you ask me.’
‘Too right. I tell you what. That Beharry boy deserves a medal for what he just done. Fucking astonishing effort. He’s only twenty-four years old and all.’
‘Yeah. How are the casualties?’
‘Not great. We’ve got a lot of unwell people still, but they’ve all been passed down the medivac chain to Basra. It looks like they’re all going to live.’
Unbelievably nobody had been killed. Again, we had the typical Iraqi undisciplined fire to thank for that. The OMS with their macho promenading were particularly bad at it. If we had been in their place and they had been in ours, we would have massacred dozens of them. Thank God for Rambo films.
As usual, we had spoken too soon.
Thirty minutes later, a series of explosions rang out to our south again. They were followed by a huge weight of AK fire. It was too far away to see much through our sights. Bright yellow flashes intermingled with hundreds of red darts of tracer, and then a lot of smoke. It looked like it was coming from Red 11, the main Route 6 road junction on the other side of the Tigris opposite the OMS building — the OMS’s favourite ambush spot.
‘Whoa, someone’s getting fucking whacked over there. I thought you said all our call signs are back in base, Chris?’
‘They are. At least that’s what the Ops Room told me. I don’t know what the fuck is going on over there.’
Chris radioed it down to the Ops Room. They checked with Abu Naji, and confirmed what they had already told him. The shooting continued for a further ten minutes. Another huge ball of flame shot up over the ambush site.
‘Shit. That looks like an oil tanker going up. Who are those fuckers?’
Chris had been right. The ambush was not on any of the battle group. It was only when a fleet of Warriors reached the scene that anyone managed to work out what on earth had happened.
It was a giant convoy of US Army engineers. Specifically, the 84th Engineer Battalion of the 25th Infantry Division. They were passing through on their way out via Kuwait. It was the end of their year-long tour and they were going home to their base — in Honolulu, Hawaii. You can just imagine how happy they must have been.
At least 60 OMS gunmen were lying in wait in drainage ditches on both sides of the main road to smack anything painted in desert khaki that passed by. They couldn’t give a stuff if it was the Yanks or us. They probably didn’t even realize.
When the rounds started coming in, the American soldiers had bomb burst all over the town in a desperate bid to get away from the gunmen. Two were killed, a 32-year-old staff sergeant from Chicago and a 22-year-old private from California. Eight others were wounded. Most made it to nearby police stations. But two were missing in action.
The battle group launched a massive search operation for them. That meant coming back into Al Amarah yet again and drawing yet more OMS fire. Helicopters were also sent up. But the soldiers had ducked into the southern estates, and it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. They were on the run for hours.
At first the engineers hid, but were soon spotted. In a desperate flight for their lives, crowds chased them through the back streets and shit-filled trenches of the estates. They wanted to lynch them. Eventually, around midnight, they ran out on to a main road and straight in front of a passing Iraqi police patrol car. Normally in Al Amarah that would have meant curtains for them. But they’d got a lucky break. The two coppers inside happened to be some of the very few honest policemen in the city. They ran them down to Abu Naji’s front gate and dropped them off.
Half of the engineer convoy’s thirty-four vehicles had been totally burnt out. They were abandoned where they were hit and left a charred and mangled line of metal almost a kilometre long up the Red route.
We also heard that there were so many OMS gunmen firing on the convoy that the idiots even managed to waste four of each other in their own crossfire. We thought that was exceptional.
The battle group had known absolutely nothing about the convoy. That meant nobody had been given any chance to warn them about what a nest of hatred they were about to stroll into. It was dark when they came over Yugoslav Bridge. So with us busy spotting for mortar teams, we hadn’t seen them either. Nobody should have been operating in Al Amarah without all of us knowing about it. You pass through another unit’s AO, you fucking well tell them. Otherwise, this happens.
But it looked like the engineers weren’t to blame either. Before they had set off from Baghdad, they told the CO in Abu Naji that they had been briefed that there’d been no trouble in Al Amarah for ten days, and no coalition forces were based here. Now two of their men were dead. A lot more had holes in them, and millions of dollars in equipment had gone up in smoke. Somebody in Baghdad had fucked up, big style.
With the Americans’ drama over, most of Cimic’s now burgeoning occupancy crashed out wherever they could. It had been a seriously long day. But it wasn’t finished yet for the snipers.
12
Nightfall only saw the mortaring against us intensify. On top of the nine during the day, we were on the receiving end of eleven more mortar strikes that night too, some of them frighteningly accurate. It had become pretty obvious to us that there was a new team in town. They were good. And they were the ones with the whopping great 82mm mortar tube.
A mortar needs to be fired on a flat hard surface to be sure of any accuracy. To relocate repeatedly and still get the rounds reasonably accurate is not an easy business. We’d always plot the coordinates of their firing position. But by the time we’d done and got all our sights lined up, they’d be off again to another location. The new team also used smoke rounds first to spot whether they were on target or not. When they were, it would be five or six high explosive rounds straight down the tube at us. It was good drills and we were impressed. It also meant they’d had some good military training. A rumour went around that they were Iranian.
After a while, I sent most of the lads to bed. There was little we could do about these fuckers in the darkness and without the ability to send an ambush patrol out. Unless we got very lucky. Three of us stayed up in Rooftop Sangar to mount the usual watch. Fitz and I were on the longs and Des was spotting. Dale had also come up on the roof to keep us company. It had been a busy day. He knew everyone was fucked, so he had volunteered to do the night commander’s shift. He’d even brought us out a brew.
‘Mighty fine of you that is, Dale,’ I said, as I took a long hard slurp of hot sweet tea. ‘Cor, I needed that.’
‘My pleasure, Danny boy. Mind you, it should be you giving me the presents really.’
