Red 11 was soon reached and secured. A tank sat out on each of its four corners, and the twenty-four Warriors panned into an all-round defence behind them.
‘Red 11 clear. Now come out, come out wherever you are,’ invited the tank commander.
The OMS fell for the trap immediately. Just over 976 tonnes of heavily armed steel in their faces sent them apoplectic, and hundreds of fighters were ordered out to retake the junction. The convoy became a huge magnet, the OMS’s troops helpless iron filings.
Ground and air worked in tandem to beat off attack after attack; literally dozens, and they kept on coming. Of course, they stood no chance. The few RPG men that did get their rounds through on to target found their grenades just bounced off the Challenger’s ultra thick skins like flimsy arrows. An RPG explosion on a Chally’s hull would barely spill its gunner’s coffee inside.
Once word spread that it looked like the Brits were going to hang around, we started to get busy too. Carloads of armed men started to leave Aj Dayya. We put rounds into their tyres to make it a little harder for them. Then came the familiar crump of mortar fire, and from very nearby. There was more than one base plate on the go. The OMS had set up a mortar line on five flatbed trucks just 500 metres away from us and were trying to pound Red 11. We could see the rounds launch, but had no direct sight of the base plates so we couldn’t engage them ourselves.
We put in a request for Spectre air support. It was just the excuse we had craved.
I passed the coordinates back to the Ops Room in Cimic. Five minutes later, the drone of propellers moved towards us until they were somewhere above our heads.
The VHF beside me crackled into life.
‘Alpha One Zero, this is Zero. Be advised Steel Rain is above you.’
Spectre pilots have call signs only the Yanks can get away with. Brit pilots would never be sad enough to call themselves Steel Rain. We loved it anyway.
There was more from the Ops Room.
‘Alpha One Zero, Steel Rain has identified a group of armed men on rooftops around Blue 11. Send loc stats.’
Holy moly. The Spectre crews now had us on their little CCTV screens. To avoid a rather painful blue on blue, I didn’t hang about telling them exactly where we were. Again via the Ops Room, I guided the Spectre crews on to the flatbed trucks. Then the mortar crews launched another volley, which only sealed their own fate.
Three minutes later, the Ops Room came on again.
‘Alpha One Zero, Steel Rain has identified the target. Will use the 105s to neutralize. Steel Rain wants you to be advised that you are within “No Fire” range.’
‘Acknowledged Zero. We’re cool about that.’
If friendly troops are within blast or ricochet radius of the Spectre’s armaments, its crew has to warn you before they fire. Shrapnel could go anywhere with a dirty great cannon firing at an angle out of the sky in the middle of a city at night. Each weapon has its own ‘No Fire’ range, and for the Spectre’s 105mm howitzers it was 700 metres. If you’re within 200 metres of its target, it’s called Danger Close. It would take the CO himself to sign that off. The threat to us though was slim. We were 500 metres away, at height, and in good cover.
So the OMS mortar crews were going to get the good news from the 105s, were they? Fucking excellent. I passed the news around the platoon over the PRR.
‘So keep your swedes down lads,’ I was careful to add.
The Spectres didn’t disappoint. It was like the gods joining the offensive on our side.
With a deafening boom and echo right above our heads, great balls of pink suddenly streaked down through the night sky towards the first flatbed truck and exploded on it in a rage of yellow flames. Sparks shot up hundreds of feet into the night sky, and bits of metal and wood flew off in every direction. The truck took six shells in a row, and it was like the thing was being hit with a giant hammer — bang bang bang bang bang bang. It pummelled it to pieces.
For Chris, it was all too much. The American blood inside him rushed to his head and he jumped to his feet and punched the air.
‘Yeah, brother! Woo woo woo! Give them fucking hell from us!’
The fact that he was supposed to be an undercover sniper clean slipped his mind. But nobody was going to hear him over the sound of the howitzer.
‘Shut up, Chris, you silly septic, we’re supposed to be covert!’
‘Sorry, Danny. Just couldn’t resist it.’
Then the aircraft methodically moved on to the next flatbed, and gave it exactly the same treatment. All five of them got five or six shells each, around thirty in total. It was an awesome spectacle, easily the most impressive demonstration of firepower I’d ever seen. It was also a terrific feeling for us up there alone to know we’d got friends like that on our side. If only Spectre was around every time we got mortared.
The whole show lasted ten minutes before the aircraft’s drone moved south again. Since each truck had a petrol tank, fires raged on the spot where the trucks once stood for the rest of the night, sending dust clouds high above the area. The smell of gunpowder, burnt wood and singed flesh was overpowering.
A few minutes later, we saw the gunship join its sister craft pounding down shells again around Red 11.
After three hours of furious combat, the OMS’s attacks began to dry up. In their stupidity, they had badly worn their ranks down.
At dawn, the CO gave the order we’d all been waiting to hear. It was relayed across all the battle groups’ PRRs.
‘Advance and storm the OMS headquarters. Let’s go and knock on their door.’
This time, all the snipers let off a huge cheer from our rooftops.
With the Challengers leading again, the column advanced over the bridge and on to Tigris Street at Yellow 3. It was met by a barrage of fire from the OMS building’s defending force. Fighters were spread out across its garden walls and the park opposite by the river, the place we had codenamed Zinc. Spectre smacked into them too, silencing them in a few minutes.
With no more resistance visible, the OMS building was surrounded. Someone brought out a loudhailer to instruct everyone inside to come out with their hands up. But its occupants had long since fled, leaving their foot soldiers as lambs to the slaughter.
Instead, the Warrior dismounts that stormed it found a giant hoard of weapons of every shape and size. There were enough AKs to equip a battalion, along with mortar tubes, mortar rounds, heavy machine guns, rockets, blast bombs, missiles and mines. Even a Soviet-made AGS 17 automatic grenade launcher. It took three of our great big eight-tonne trucks to take all the stuff away.
A foot patrol sent into Zinc found Spectre’s calling card all over the park: dismembered bodies with their rifles and RPGs still beside them.
By 10 a.m., the battle was over. Everyone was jubilant. Not only had we won a sweet victory overwhelmingly, but it had been a tremendous feeling to have been part of an armoured battle group at war. We were just proud to have been there.
We had to keep up our watch over Aj Dayya for the rest of the day, in case of a counterattack from the estate. Unexpectedly, the five of us on my roof ended up celebrating our success with some very rich homemade Arabic coffee.
Just after the OMS building was stormed, a set of keys went into the padlock on the other side of the sheet metal door that led down into the house whose roof we were on. We all spun round just in time to point our longs at the door. It opened slowly, to reveal a chubby bloke in his forties with a bushy Saddam Hussein moustache. He had a grin on his face from ear to ear, and clasped his hands together as he addressed us in fluent English.
‘Not to be afraid. You are most honoured guests in my humble home. We heard you shouting in middle of night after airplane strike. Now we must make you feel welcome. You like Arabic coffee?’
‘Err, well…’
‘I am number one fan of British Army. Mehdi Army are scum. My father in England in 1950s. He was pilot in the Royal Air Force.’
With that, he puffed out his chest in pride. Extraordinary. We had managed to pick the house to sit on that belonged to the one person in Al Amarah who loved our country as much as any of us did. His name was Abdul, and his old man really had been in the RAF. After he invited a few of us down for coffee that was so thick you could
