Zero Six Bravo (15 page)

For two hours the Squadron wove its way through such terrain. The wagons were making little more than thirty kilometers per hour, which was about the maximum they could manage across such ground, heavily laden as they were.

As far as Grey could tell from his position near the apex of Six Troop’s arrowhead, there were no vehicles tailing them or watching from afar. Maybe they had succeeded in moving out without any alarm being raised. On the one hand it was a wonderful feeling to have got away and be on the move, and with no visible force after them. But still Grey felt a dark sense of foreboding lying over him like a heavy cloud.

Traveling by daylight in a V-shaped formation lent the Squadron more speed. Moving at night with dozens of vehicles strung out in linear fashion made for very slow going. Yet, with each set of tires throwing up its own dust cloud, every man was forced to wrap up in
shemagh
and dust goggles. Even so, the fine sand would still get into everything and play havoc with their equipment. Moving at night might be slow and cold, but at least the moisture in the air would keep the dust down.

Every few kilometers the entire formation had to halt for a navigation check. They were moving in radio silence, and commands could only be passed verbally around the vehicles. Pretty quickly it became clear that this system was unworkable. The CSM (company sergeant major) had to keep driving up to the wagon leading the spearhead so as to pass across another set of verbal instructions. It was all very well trying to keep below the Iraqis’ radar, but it was slowing things down intolerably.

It was around mid-morning when the OC made the call that radio silence would be abandoned. The driving priority was to head north as fast as practically possible to find the Iraqi 5th Corps. The Squadron was under serious time pressure to do so. The opening thrust by Coalition ground forces into southern Iraq was scheduled to start within five days. Ideally, M Squadron would be opening negotiations for the 5th Corps surrender as the Coalition offensive began. Otherwise, the men of the 5th Corps would doubtless see reports of their fellow soldiers getting smashed by British and American forces, and their resistance to any form of surrender would likely harden.

Every effort had to be made to get to speak to the 5th Corps generals as quickly as possible, yet the Squadron could drive itself only so hard. It was the burning heat of midday by the time they had found the first usable TLZ. They’d pushed some twenty kilometers north of the Chinooks’ landing zone, although they’d driven almost twice that distance to navigate a way through the rugged terrain.

Once they’d radioed through a visual description and coordinates of the TLZ, they got under way once more, with Grey’s wagon
in the lead. It was Grey’s role to keep a check on maps and navigation, and Moth’s to pick the path ahead. Both men were acutely aware that one wrong move could spell disaster for them and the wagons following their lead.

With the sun almost directly overhead they faced the most difficult of driving conditions. At any other time of day any dip or rise in the terrain would cast a shadow, which would help alert them to the dangers ahead. But the harsh light of midday rendered the landscape a flat and burning whiteness.

It was hard to spot smaller undulations when scanning ahead for the bigger drops, and a few seconds’ lapse of concentration meant that even a wadi might be missed. If Moth drove over the edge of one of those, he could bring the rest of the Squadron in on top of him, as all vehicles were following his lead. They were driving tactically, so they were keeping a good hundred meters apart, but even so the danger was very real. Loaded down with ammo and the vehicle-mounted machine guns, the wagons were top-heavy. If they blundered over the edge of a wadi, any number of the Pinkies might roll, with devastating consequences for those riding in them.

They were twenty minutes out from the TLZ that they’d marked, when
wham!
—Moth drove over a patch of rock and hit the drop on the far side. It was only a couple of feet to the hard-packed gravel below, and in the flat light the drop-off had been all but invisible. As the front wheels left the rock, the wagon’s nose slammed down and its underside caught on the jagged surface. The Pinkie had been doing only twenty kilometers per hour, but still the noise was deafening. From the harsh tearing of steel on rock, it sounded as if the wagon’s guts had been ripped out.

For an instant the vehicle stuck fast as both sets of wheels spun and the engine whined and howled. With the acrid smell of burning rubber filling their nostrils, Moth eased off the power and slipped the gearbox smoothly into low ratio.

In high ratio, the Pinkie would drive at the standard speed of a Land Rover in four-wheel drive. Low ratio doubled the gearing, so halving the speed of the wagon but boosting the torque and power
that was transferred to the four wheels. And in low ratio Moth found he was finally able to haul the wagon off the rocky snag and onto the flat gravel on the far side.

The Pinkie pulled to a halt in a cloud of dust. The smell of burned rubber and diesel fumes was thick on the air. For a second Grey and Moth stared at each other. They carried few if any heavy spares. They just didn’t have the capacity to do so.

It was day one of the land move north, and already they had visions of a smashed oil pan pissing into the sand, and having to abandon their vehicle.

CHAPTER TEN

Moth slipped out of the driver’s seat and under the wagon. After a few seconds he emerged with an expression of massive relief on his features. He raised his fine blond eyebrows in amazement. “Seems to be okay. No harm done. Bloody incredible.”

Thankfully, each of the Pinkies had an oil pan guard—a sheet of solid steel that ran beneath the engine—and it was that which had taken the brunt of the impact.

Grey smiled. “Short of rolling the thing, a Pinkie’s pretty much bulletproof.” He glanced at the Dude. “Bet you couldn’t do that in a Hummer, eh?”

The Dude shrugged. “Gee, I dunno—Iraqi rock versus American Humvee. It’d sure be a clash of the Titans. My pop and me were once out in our Hummer . . .”

As the Dude launched into another of his life-on-the-ranch-back-home stories, Moth got the wagon under way.

“Bit of vital tradecraft, lads,” Grey announced once they were pushing ahead at a decent speed. “If you can’t free the wagon in low ratio, what d’you do?”

Moth and Dude shook their heads.

“You unload all the heavy gear, get twelve of your biggest men around her, and you lift her free. Bet you couldn’t do that with a Humvee, either.”

The Dude laughed good-naturedly. “Dude, you’d need a dozen Godzillas to lift a freakin’ Humvee free!”

“And here’s another for you,” Grey continued. He reached forward and pulled aside an old rag, to reveal a travel kettle that he’d bolted into the footwell of the wagon. He plugged the gizmo into the Pinkie’s cigarette lighter and switched it on, and the kettle started to whine and sizzle as it brought the water to the boil. He delved into his bag and pulled out some boil-in-the-bag meals.

“What d’you fancy? I got pasta, beef stew, or the Dude’s favorite: Lancashire hotpot.”

He threw the chosen meals into the kettle, then settled back to let them cook. The best time—sometimes the only time—to eat a hot meal when on a mission deep behind enemy lines was on the move. Any time parked up was best spent cleaning weapons, maintaining the wagon, doing map and navigation checks, standing sentry, or catching some precious moments of sleep.

In such open terrain as this, you didn’t need to be finger-on-the-trigger every second, for you could see far ahead. That left time free to spoon out the hot contents of a boil-in-the-bag meal and get it down you, but only if you had the means to heat it on the go—hence the travel kettle.

“An old trick I learned with the Regiment,” Grey continued as he handed Dude his steaming bag of Lancashire hotpot. For some inexplicable reason the young American operator still seemed partial to the stuff. “Enjoy.”

Grey indicated the kettle, which he’d covered in dull gaffer tape to camouflage its shininess. “A few of the other OABs have got one, but try and keep it quiet. Those that haven’t will be jealous as fuck once they see us lot getting a good hot feed down us while on the move. They’ll have to cook up when they reach the LUP, and more ’n’ likely they won’t have the energy or the time.”

Grey had his bag of hot pasta jammed between his knees so he could feed himself with one hand and keep the other on his weapon. He kept his eyes front to scan the landscape, with the map stuffed to one side of him and folded to show the patch of territory they were
moving through. It showed a series of gentle contours up ahead, which meant they were approaching more undulating terrain.

He pressed the Send switch on his radio and spoke into the mouthpiece taped to his webbing. “Zero, this is
Zero Six Bravo
. Get the quads up front to scout the higher ground to the east of us.”

“Affirm,” came back the OC’s reply. The OC was call sign Zero.

A few seconds later Grey saw the quad force doing what they did best. Gunner shot past in the lead, with the unmistakable figure of Mucker on his shoulder. The quads roared up and over the rocky high ground to their right, leaving Moth clear to take the even ground that bypassed it. If there was trouble up ahead—be it enemy forces or impassable ground—the quad drivers should spot it from their vantage point and help steer the rest of the Squadron past.

During the Iraqi winter months the sun set early, and as they crawled past the high ground Grey was conscious of the pressing need to find an LUP. To their east they’d left the well and oasis of Bu Jishah well behind them, and to their northeast lay the seasonal lake bed of Muwallah. A good seventy kilometers separated the two points, and between them was a featureless expanse of wilderness. It was marked simply on the map as “Al Jazirah—desert.”

Somewhere within this vast empty quarter Grey had to find a place to hide an entire Special Forces squadron. As he scanned the terrain to either side of him, he felt the sweat from the fierce afternoon sun trickling down his back in rivulets. It was pooling at the base of his spine where his back met the dull plastic of the seat, and spreading out in a soaking-wet patch like he’d pissed himself.

With his skin permanently wet from the sweat, the dust thrown up by the wagons stuck to it, forming a greasy brown slick. He was drinking so heavily that he dreaded to think how much water they were all consuming. He made a mental note to check on their supplies once he’d found an LUP for the night. He had a nasty feeling they’d under-provisioned and would need to get a resupply of water flown in or airdropped to them.

Likewise, he reckoned they might well need more fuel. He figured they’d covered seventy-five kilometers as the crow flies, but
approaching double that distance as they’d sought a path through the rugged terrain. If the conditions continued like this—and there was every reason to suspect they might worsen—it was unlikely they had the fuel to make it.

As he searched all around him for a usable LUP, Grey worried about the massive dust cloud they were throwing up. It rose behind them like a storm front, the finer particles backlit by the sun as it sank toward the horizon. Grey figured it had to be visible from a good seven kilometers away, which made the urgency of finding a usable LUP all the more pressing.

He studied the map spread across his knees. They were using the 1:50,000 scale, which meant he had a folder with thirty individual map sheets in it so as to cover the entire mission. Each sheet lasted for no more than forty-five kilometers, after which he needed to shift to the next. He noticed a feature marked on the map, to the left front of their position. It looked as if it might be a shallow wadi—and was about all there was in terms of cover.

“Moth, head north-northwest,” Grey announced. “After five clicks we should come upon a wadi running southwest to northeast.”

“Boss,” Moth confirmed, spinning the steering wheel counterclockwise to bring them round onto the correct bearing.

Fifteen minutes’ driving took them to the lip of the wadi. Moth edged along it for a good few minutes more before he found what he was looking for. At one point the steep banks of the riverbed dropped away almost to nothing, forming a natural crossing point. Moth drove into the wadi, accompanied by Gunner and Mucker on their quads. The rest of the Squadron halted in the open, waiting for the word on the LUP.

The lone Pinkie and the quads nosed up the wadi floor for a short while before rounding a bend that put the riverbed out of view of anyone using the crossing point. It was as good a place as any to lie up for the night. They did an about-face and headed back to rejoin the Squadron.

“Zero, this is Zero Six Bravo,” Grey spoke into his radio. “LUP is usable. Now making for the stop short.”

“Affirm,” came the OC’s reply.

Their wagon moved off heading east, the rest of the Squadron following. They pulled up some three kilometers distant from the wadi, in open terrain. Last light was all but upon them, and they’d wait here in their “stop short” position until darkness had fallen. Only then would Grey lead the Squadron back into the LUP. That way, if anyone was watching, they wouldn’t see exactly where the Squadron had taken refuge for the night.

It was around 1830 hours when the Pinkies plus the quad force crawled into the wadi and took up their positions. Once all the wagons were well spaced along the riverbed, they cut their engines. For the next fifteen minutes the men did absolutely nothing but sit there and wait, watch, and listen. They scanned their arcs with the heavy weapons, alert to any threat that might be out there in the darkness. If anyone had seen them go into the LUP, it was now that they were most likely to show themselves.

At last there was a squelch of static on the radios and the OC announced: “Stand down.”

The CSM followed on the heels of that radio message, doing a walking inspection of the entire Squadron. His main task was to check on sentry duties and positions. Each troop had set its own watch rotation, so that for the next twelve hours they had eyes scanning the desert 360 degrees all around them. The CSM also asked each troop for fuel and water stats. The only way to get these was to remove the jerricans of diesel and water from the wagons, then check them by feel. Over time, it became second nature to know by the weight of a jerrican how close it was to empty.