‘Good length now. But 15 metres too far left now.’
Fucking bloody thing. I was ready to hurl it off the roof if the next one didn’t work.
Fitz didn’t need to say a thing. Red hot shrapnel and shards of shale tore through the enemy’s ranks like meat through a grinder. Because of their proximity, I could hear each and every one of their screams.
‘Keep ’em coming, Corky.’
I held the mortar tube in precisely the same position. Another full tin on exactly that trajectory should do the trick. The next load of shells sent the Mehdi Army fighters running around the wasteland like headless chickens. As they were forced to expose themselves, the boys cut them down.
One bloke clutching a badly bleeding right arm made it 75 metres to a waiting car on Tigris Street. Sadly for him, the back door he tried to pull open was still locked from the inside, so to buy time he gave us another burst with the AK still in his right hand. Silly. He was riddled with a dozen rounds on the spot. As the driver got out to help, he popped away at us with a little pistol. So the boys killed him too.
The rate of small arms incoming we were receiving began to drop considerably. Means nothing though. Dale knew that instantly too.
‘Keep sharp, lads,’ he boomed out from Rooftop. ‘They’ll just be flanking away from the dam to have a go at us on the gates. You four Recce boys, get over to the south wall.’
‘Mortars incoming from Zinc! Three possible base plates!’
Everyone dashed for the sangars again and curled up into foetal positions.
Silence. There were no explosions.
‘Where the fuck did them things land then, Des?’
‘Two on the dam, one on Tigris Street. They were smoke rounds. I can’t see a damn thing behind them now, just white smoke all over the shop.’
What the hell was the smoke for? It made no sense. If we couldn’t see them to shoot at, they certainly couldn’t see us. The small arms incoming suddenly stopped too.
Dale was the first to realize what was going on.
‘Cease firing!’
‘Why, sir, what if we see targets through the smoke?’
‘You won’t, lad. They’re withdrawing. The smoke’s to cover their retreat.’
Nobody could really believe it. All of us stayed stood-to in our battle positions until long after the last smoke cleared. The only enemy fighters to be seen were the dead and dying, scattered around the wasteland, the end of the pontoon bridge and Tigris Street. The only sound was the odd pathetic groan.
It was over. The enemy had had a damn good crack at us; they’d given everything they had, they’d got as far as our walls, and they weren’t far from success. Yet just as they’d reached their closest point to overrunning us, they ran out of men. Dozens of their number were killed, many more again wounded.
I looked at my watch. 4 p.m. The battle had lasted four hours. It felt like twenty minutes. Just after five, more than an hour after the last round was fired, came the tired message over the PRR.
‘Charlie Charlie One. Stand down.’
To a man, the whole company was exhausted. After such a long hit of adrenalin, we were all now totally drained of it; way too tired even to celebrate. Anyway, nobody said it was all over yet. If they had surprised us so badly by mustering that many fighters for an assault, who’s to say they couldn’t do the very same thing again with more? We’d beaten them, but for how long?
The roof was littered with debris. A carpet of empty brass casings, water bottles, sand and stone shards lay under our feet. The remnants of the Light Infantry’s original half-sangar wooden frame had been blown totally upside down, and every sandbag in our sangars had rips and tears in them. It had been too dangerous to clear any of it up, or do
The rest of the compound was no better. Cimic resembled a disaster scene.
Barely a single square foot of surface inside it, vertical or horizontal, wasn’t now pockmarked with bullet holes or shrapnel gashes. The house was so badly scarred it looked like something out of West Beirut in the 1980s.
All bar none of the Portakabins and prefab accommodation blocks were blown up, and every single room pepperpotted from floor to ceiling. In the washroom blocks, half the sinks had been shattered and the rest were hanging off the walls.
The OC’s was the last to go, not that Charlie Curry ever moved into it. Since Major Featherstone found the blind in the floorboards, it had miraculously escaped any other attention from the OMS mortars. Then, around halfway through the all-out assault, it took a direct hit right through the middle of the roof.
Not just one but two kitchens had now been blown to pieces: the aluminium trailer from June and then the field kitchen under the green tent.
At least half of the perimeter fencing was either blown on the floor or simply not there any more. Ugly lumps of mortar shrapnel lined the paths and driveway. Every one of the garden’s palm trees oozed sap from where they’d been slashed by flying metal.
I surveyed the damage from the roof with Dale at sunset.
‘D’ya think the new governor will want his house back now, then?’
‘No chance, Danny boy. It’s just a scrapheap now, innit.’
I couldn’t disagree.
‘At least it’s still our scrapheap I suppose,’ he pondered. ‘Anyway, ours not to reason why and all that. Give us a hand with doing the stock list will you, Dan? I’m not looking forward to this.’
Establishing what supplies we had left was grim work indeed. We weren’t doing great on food. Most of the ration boxes had been broken open and plundered for all the best bits, with little more than pate tins and stewed plums in custard left. There were many hundreds of those though, so we’d be shitting five times a day but at least we weren’t going to starve for a bit.
Water was a different picture. We were very low. Dale and I calculated there were just four two-litre bottles left per man. In that heat we could probably get by on two bottles a day each, as an absolute minimum. We might still be thirsty, but we probably wouldn’t dehydrate. We rationed them all out.
Most seriously of all, we were very low on ammo. The ceiling-tall wall Dale had built up inside the secure room was now almost entirely gone. It its place now were just a couple of tins and a red fire extinguisher.
‘Jeez, is that all we got left?’
‘Yeah. Still lots of stuff lying around in the sangars, but we ain’t got nothing in reserve any more. All faarkin’ gone.’
We worked out we had enough bullets to last around sixty hours at the siege’s normal pace of fighting. A lot less, if the enemy mounted another all-out assault. We gave Captain Curry the bad news.
‘Well that’s it then,’ he pronounced. ‘The battle group is just going to have to come and get us. Neither we nor they have a choice in that any longer, do we?’
‘No, sir. We don’t.’
There was absolutely no doubt about it. Any convoy that tried to get through to Cimic was going to get the mother of all smackings. But there was simply no other option this time.
The message went back to Abu Naji. They’d been guessing as much, after having to sit through the all-out assault with nothing else to do but listen to events play out on the radio. During it, Captain Curry was told an emergency convoy would be dispatched the moment he genuinely thought we were going to be overrun. It had got close, but not close enough. Cool as ever, Curry kept his nerve.
The Ops Room gave Slipper City the news. Abu Naji had new orders for us within the hour. The resupply was set for around twenty-four hours’ time, at some stage during the next night. They needed that long to pull together everything they had in mind for it. It was going to be close.
‘There’s something else,’ Curry said, when he told us the news at a midnight O Group. ‘We’re being relieved. It was an order, I wasn’t given a choice.’
