Bravo two zero (21 page)

    As I got to the edge of the wadi, I crawled over the lip to have a look inside. Mark was behind me. I started to move down, and as I did so, the horizon on the opposite side of the wadi was a lot easier to see.

    The first thing I saw on the skyline was the silhouette of a sentry.

    He was walking up and down, stamping his feet and blowing into his cupped hands to keep warm. I looked around him, and I couldn't believe what I saw. It was a vast location-tents, buildings, vehicles, radio antennas. As my eyes focused, I started to notice people coming out of the tents. I heard bits of talking.

    They had their backs to the moon, looking in our direction. I didn't move.

    It was fifteen minutes before I could make my way back to Mark. I knew he would have seen the same as I had because he hadn't come to join me.

    He, too, was lying as still as a stone. This was scary stuff. We were terribly exposed.

    I got back level with Mark. "Have you seen it?"

    "Yes, this is outrageous," he said. "We need to get back and sort our shit out."

    "No drama."

    We'd crawl back to the others to regroup. From there we'd make our way back to the hedgerow, sort ourselves out, and find another route round.

    We had gone 100 feet to get out of the immediate area when we got up to a semi crouch position in the ditch.

    Jittery shouting and firing happened at the same time. All hell was let loose. Mark was down with the Minimi and stitched all along the hedgerows, wherever he saw muzzle flashes. The location on the other side of the wadi opened up. I was severely unimpressed because they were on higher ground.

    I used the last of my 203 bombs; then it was time to run away gracefully. I wanted to get back to the riverbank because it would give us cover. There was shouting and firing all over the place as we legged it. The rest of the patrol was having contacts. There was major chaos going on all around the hedgerow. I assumed that Bob and the others were in a group of three. The Iraqis on the other side of the wadi were firing in all directions. I heard 203 bombs, which had to be Legs because Dinger and Bob both had Minimis. It was very noisy. Everybody was involved in his own little world. I realized with a sinking heart that there was no chance of us getting together again. We were split now into another two groups, with only miles to go. What a pisser. I really thought we'd cracked it.

    Mark and I were on the bank of the Euphrates, trying to make sense of what was happening. The waterline was 30-50 feet below the line of the ploughed land that we'd just come over, and in between lay a system of small plateaus. We were on the first one, in amongst the bushes.

    We could hear the follow-ups from the opposite bank, working towards us with torches and shouting to one another. There was intermittent, nervous enemy fire from our side of the wadi, then contacts to our left and half left involving 203s and Minimis. Tracer was going horizontal and then vertical as it hit rocks and buildings.

    We stuck our heads up like a couple of ferrets and looked around. It was hard to know what to do and where to go-whether to cross the river or go through the positions and risk getting killed or captured.

    "No way the river," I whispered into Mark's ear.

    I wasn't brave enough for that, so we decided to go through the positions. But when? There was so much confusion, it was difficult to say what was a good opportunity and what wasn't.

    "Fuck it," Mark whispered, "we're in the shit, so what does it matter?"

    If we got out, all well and good, but if we didn't, so what-I just hoped that it would be nice and quick. I was feeling quite dispassionate about the whole business.

    We checked our stocks of ammunition. I had about one and a half mags;

    Mark had a hundred link for the Minimi. It was such a ridiculous situation we were in, with contacts and shouting and tracer all over the place, and there's us sitting in a bush trying to organize ourselves and look over the other side of the bank at the same time. My hands were freezing cold. The grass and leaves were brittle with frost. The river was shrouded with mist.

    I looked at Mark and nearly laughed. He was wearing a long woolen scarf known as a cap comforter that can be folded into itself to make what looks like a Second World War commando hat. Mark had failed to tuck the top of his hat in, and he looked like Noddy. He was peering through the bushes with a serious expression on his face and he looked so comical.

    "If we don't go now, mate, we never will," he said.

    I nodded.

    Still looking out as he spoke, he dug in his pocket for a boiled sweet and popped it into his mouth.

    "It's my last one. I might as well have it now: it might be my last one ever."

    All of mine had gone. I looked at him longingly.

    "You ain't got none left, have you?" he smirked.

    "No, fuck all left."

    I looked at him like a puppy dog.

    He took the sweet out of his mouth, bit it, and gave me half.

    We lay there savoring the moment and psyching ourselves up to go.

    In the end the decision was made for us. Four Iraqis came along the bank, and they appeared to be well trained and switched on. There was no shouting, and they were well spread out. They looked nervous though, as you do when you know there are people about who might fire weapons at you. If we moved they would see us. I signaled to Mark: if they don't see us, let them go on; if they do, they get it. But they got so close there was no way they were going to avoid us,so we dropped them.

    Now we had to go, whether it was the right time or not. We legged it up the ploughed field, parallel to the river. Further up to the right we started to come over a gentle rise where the ground went down to the water. There was movement, and we went straight down.

    The furrows were running north-south so we were in the dips. We started to belly crawl and worked our way the whole length up to the hedgerow.

    Orders were being barked, and squads were running around confused.

    They were no more than 80 feet away. We crawled for twenty minutes. The ground was icy cold, and it hurt to put your hands on the mud and pull yourself along. My clothing was drenched. Tiny puddles of water had frozen, and as we moved the ice cracked. The sound was magnified a thousand times in my head. Even the noise of my breathing sounded frighteningly loud. I just wanted to get through this shit and get to the treeline, and then it would be a totally different, brave new world.

    There was still firing, shouting" and all sorts of confusion going on.

    How we were ever going to get out of it I had no idea. In situations like this you just have to keep on going and see what happens. It was so tempting just to get up and make a bolt for it.

    The Iraqis were still down at the bottom of the field. Maybe-I hoped-they thought we'd gone further down the riverbed, heading east to get to the other lot. I didn't actually care what they were thinking, as long as they did it a good distance away. The one and only thought I had in my mind was that we needed to get over the border that night.

    We got to the hedgerow. It was a purpose-built field division, small trees and bushes growing out of a two foot mound of earth. Our initial plan was to cross the hedgerow that was running east-west, purely so that we didn't have to cross the south-north one as well. We heard noises to our right. Mark had a look. It was more enemy, behind the hedgerow. And beyond that, further south, there was yelling and shouting and a profusion of lights. Mark signaled me to stay this side of the hedgerow and move left.

    We crawled along the line to get to the hedge that ran north-south. We tried to find a place where we could get through without making any noise. I started pushing through. My head emerged the other side, and I immediately got challenged.

    As the boy shouted, Mark gave him the good news. His body disintegrated in front of my eyes. Mark gave it a severe stitching all the way along-from where we were, all the way along west. I scrambled out of the hedge line and carried on the fire while Mark came through. We moved east, stopped, put down a quick burst, ran, gave it another quick burst, and then just ran and ran.

    There was high ground to our front. Below it were buildings with lights on and movement. We didn't want to cross the open ground, so we had no option but to use the obvious cover of a ditch. I had no idea what we'd got ahead of us.

    The fence line was above us. Because the fields were irrigated, the roads and buildings were on built-up land to keep them above the waterline. We got into a little dip below the fence and moved south.

    We started to slow down now that we seemed to be out of immediate trouble. We took the 6-foot chain link fence to be the perimeter of a military installation. We got halfway along and stopped. We'd seen a road to our front, running east-west. Vehicles were driving up and down, fully lit. Other vehicles drove with their lights off.

    There had to be a definite junction to the east of us. We could see vehicle lights heading up there and changing direction. There was a mass of activity. Every man and his dog seemed to be on alert. They must have thought the Israelis had turned up or the Syrians were invading. All I hoped was that in all this confusion a little gang of two and a little gang of three could work their way through.

    We found ourselves opposite a large mosque on the other side of the fence. We stopped and observed the road. Closer now, we could see vehicles parked up along the side of the road as headlights swept past.

    Trucks, Land Cruisers, APCs. Where there are vehicles there are people.

    We could hear talking and the mush of radios. I couldn't tell how far the column extended, east or west. From the initial contact on the edge of the wadi to here had taken three hours. With only two and a half hours of darkness left I was flapping. We'd have to take a chance.

    There was no time left for boxing around.

    We were lying in the dip, wet and freezing, trying to work out where we were going to go through the fence. Both of us were sweating and shivering. We were almost out of ammunition. We waited for lights to pass so we could get an idea of where all the vehicles were sited. We would cross in the biggest gap.

    Two of the trucks were about 50 feet apart. If we could get through unchallenged, the border beckoned. We'd just have to brass it out. We started across the field, taking our time. Each time a vehicle passed we hit the ground. It was important to get as near to the parked convoy as we could before we made our dash. All we planned to do was run through them. Neither of us had a clue what was on the other side, but we didn't care-we'd sort that out when we came to it.

    The vehicles were 3 feet above us on the raised road. At the top of the bank, we discovered, was a three strand barbed wire fence, 3 feet high.

    We'd have to get over it before we could even start to dodge between the vehicles.

    The gap was between two canvas-topped trucks. In one of them a radio hissed loudly. We were going to have to climb the mound, and would be committed from the moment we started moving.

    I clambered over the fence and got down to give Mark cover. He cleared the fence, but the wire twanged as he removed his weight. A jundie started jabbering and stuck his head out of a truck window. He got it from me straightaway. I ran to the back. The tailboard was up, but there were two slots at floor level which would have served as footholds when it was down. I put my muzzle through and gave it a good burst.

    Mark went straight across the road and was down on the other side of the mound, firing along what to him was the right-hand side of the convoy. I didn't know if the other vehicle had characters aboard, so I threw in a grenade and legged it over the road to Mark. We fired until we ran out of ammunition, which was all of five seconds. We dropped our weapons and legged it. They were no use now. The Iraqis used 7.62 short, and we needed 5.56. Now the only weapon we had left was darkness.

    We must have put down enough rounds to get them flapping because they didn't follow immediately. We ran for 900 feet. The sounds of screaming filled the night.

    We stopped near a water tower. It wasn't that long now before first light. Looking straight ahead, we could see the road that we'd just crossed to our right hand side, the mast on the Iraqi side, and another road that we'd have to cross to go west.

    We looked at one another and I said, "Right, let's do it."

    We scuttled on across the fields and stopped short of what we could see was a large depression. On the other side was a built-up area, unlit.

    The right-hand corner, the end of it, was more or less at a road junction.

    The depression must have been used as a rubbish dump. Small fires smoldered in the darkness. We went down into the dip and stumbled over old tins and tires. The stench of rotting garbage was overpowering. We started to come back up the other side. About halfway up the rise we were opened up on by two AKs, from really close range. We hit the ground and I went right.

    I ran for what I thought was enough distance to get me level with the junction, then turned left. I wanted to get over the road and carry on running. I ran around the side of a mound and thought I could get up the other side, but what I'd come into was a large water storage area.