Zero Six Bravo (26 page)

Grey sensed it was only a matter of moments before they got seriously whacked. He glanced around at their position. They were perched atop a mound of rock that gave them a slight vantage point. It was the only position from which they could be seen from
the lake bed, so that those abandoning their vehicles would know which way to come.

Grey was torn between trying to keep a watch for men emerging from the wadi and scanning the darkness to the west for the enemy. He was also trying to get a glimpse of where the HQ Troop’s wagons might have got to. It was hard to see how things could get any worse, but it sure as hell wouldn’t help if the Squadron got split up and Grey and those with him got cut off from the OC.

One thing was clear: only the wagons on the lip of that lake bed could provide covering fire for those bugging out on foot if and when the enemy came thundering out of the void of the night. Without some kind of force to defend them, those on foot would be mown down like so much summer hay as they staggered out of the quagmire laden down with gear.

Grey swept the darkness with his weapon as he prepared to defend the majority of the Squadron, who were dismounted and bereft of their heavy machine guns. It was clear to all that their position offered absolutely no cover and that they had negligible firepower compared to what was coming. Yet, somehow they had to hold this ground.

“We’re in a totally shit position,” he grunted, “but the lads below are in a shittier one. Prepare to fucking mallet any enemy that get near us.”

In response, he heard a sharp clack-clack as the Dude ratcheted back his weapon’s breech and double-checked that he had a round chambered in the .50-cal. As for Moth, he reached forward, unhooked his assault-rifle-cum-grenade-launcher from its holster, and punched in a 40mm grenade round. Grey figured it was a fair one. Desperate situations called for desperate measures.

A voice drifted across to them from one of the other wagons. “They’ve got onto us every bloody time.” It was Scruff. “Sooner or later they’ll do the same here. They’ll see us through the smoke.”

“Yep,” Grey replied. “I reckon we’ll get opened up on any second now . . .”

“You heard the fucking score on the air power?”

“Nope. Must have missed it in all the carnage.”

“There is none. At least not right now. Fucking what wouldn’t you give for a pair of A-10s?”

“The sky’s the fucking limit, mate.”

The A-10 Warthog is a seasoned American ground-attack aircraft and a superlative tank-busting warplane. Its nose-mounted, seven-barrel Gatling-type cannon would make short work of even an Iraqi Asad Babil, so more the pity there was no air power available.

Waiting to get torn to pieces like this was the worst of all feelings. For a second, Grey considered how he would go about finishing off the Squadron, were he that force of Iraqis. They’d know by now that smashing in the 12.7mm rounds from 2,000 yards hadn’t quite done the job. They were also sure to know that the Squadron was equipped with nothing that could kill heavy armor.

Grey had to assume that the Iraqi military had been briefed on NATO weaponry, just as the Squadron had been briefed on available Iraqi firepower. By now they must have worked out that the Squadron had no MILANs or equivalent weaponry and that they weren’t about to bring in any air power.

In the Iraqis’ place, Grey would opt to sneak up on the British force. He’d get the three wagons on the rocky knoll pinned in his gunsights and hammer them from a couple of hundred yards away. He’d opt to blow them apart and tear the wagons to pieces using either the tank’s Dushka or its main cannon. At that kind of range, Grey and his fellows wouldn’t even see the bullets coming. The only positive for the beleaguered operators was that they’d be dead before they knew it.

A voice came up on the radios: “All call signs, confirm with me when ready to blow charges.”

With every passing second, Grey was growing more and more anxious. He could sense the deadly threat out there in the dark, and that it was hunting for them remorselessly. He leaned across to Moth and gestured at his GPMG.

“I’m going to check on the others—your weapon, mate.”

He slipped from the wagon and jogged down the incline leading into the lake bed. A well-worn track snaked into the depression, so
at some time of the year it had to be passable. It was sod’s law that the Squadron had chosen to use it just when it happened to be a treacherous swamp.

When he reached the bed of the wadi, the first thing he saw was the ass-end of the rearmost wagon, with men clustered around it. Ahead of it lay a column of vehicles similarly up to their doors in the mud. He kept flipping his NVG up and down so he could check on the men’s whereabouts while maintaining his natural night vision. He counted eight wagons in all, stretching across the lake bed.

At the far end he figured he could see a lone Pinkie perched on the wadi’s rim, with a couple of quads nearby. It wasn’t a command vehicle, so presumably one wagon from Four or Five Troop had made it through the swamp. By his reckoning that was all of their Land Rovers accounted for. They’d lost eight bogged in; three were on the lip of the wadi behind him; two from HQ Troop had gone east; and one had got out of the northern exit point with a few quads for company.

Moving south across the wadi toward him were the first of the figures on foot—those who were abandoning their vehicles in preparation to blow them. Grey counted a dozen men heading his way. In the eerie light of the NVG it was a ghostly scene as the men struggled their way through. In spite of the urgency of the situation, they seemed to be moving in painfully slow motion, laden down with gear as they were and wading through the thick and cloying mud.

Grey raised an arm and yelled at them to make for the wagons above, then turned and ran up the incline. As he powered up the steep slope, his mind was racing. The Squadron had lost almost two-thirds of their wagons and their firepower, and maybe a similar number of quads. The situation was pretty close to terminal. In fact, he couldn’t really see how it could get a great deal worse.

“We’ve got eight wagons bogged in and blokes coming our way on foot!” he yelled, once he was back with the vehicles. “Make room for a shedload of passengers.”

The eight wagons bogged in would equate to twenty-four men, and with all the will in the world there was no way they could load
that many onto the waiting Pinkies. Hopefully, some would have gone north to join the small force of vehicles gathered there.

In spite of the soldiers’ apparent calm, what was unfolding here was their worst-ever nightmare. They’d got the entire Squadron minus a handful of wagons and quads mired in an Iraqi swamp and about to be blown to smithereens. And that meant they’d got sixty elite operators about to go on the run deep behind enemy lines, without the vehicles to carry them. They could easily lose half the Squadron or more here—injured, dead, or captured.

Grey heard a yell over the radios: “Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!”

It was time for the last men to get the hell off the vehicles, for they were about to blow. To trigger the fuse you had to unwrap the gaffer tape protecting it, push the plunger, then make a run for it. The plunger worked on a ninety-second fuse, which set off a length of detonation cord, and that in turn would punch into the charge with enough force to trigger it.

Grey had seen such charges in action. Designed to take out a main battle tank, they had the power to visibly lift a T-72 off the deck when detonated beneath it. They’d totally shred the soft-skinned Pinkies, thus denying the enemy the vehicles as well as any sensitive equipment that might remain on them.

Grey gave the word to Moth to move the wagon a good few feet off the rocky knoll. Up there, they’d be exposed to any blast thrown off by the charges, plus the ammo carried by the wagons would cook off in the heat of the explosions. They dropped the three Land Rovers down to where the high ground shielded them from the coming explosions but where the men bugging out should still find them.

The first ghostly figure appeared, stumbling up the incline. The apparition was made all the more eerie because he was caked from head to toe in the black, gooey shit. Laden down with weapons and sensitive gear from his wagon, he was moving horribly slowly. Others emerged, strung out in a ragged line behind him.

“I wish they’d get a fucking move on,” Grey remarked as he scanned the darkness with his weapon.

He couldn’t believe the enemy hadn’t hit them yet, and at any second he was expecting a 125mm tank shell to come howling down his throat.

The lead figure flung himself onto the rear of Grey’s vehicle. Others clambered aboard wherever they could, clinging on to the .50-cal and surrounding the Dude in his gun turret, rendering the .50-cal pretty much unusable. They were exhausted from having to fight their way through the swamp, and they’d come out carrying only their personal weapons and whatever sensitive equipment they could manage.

Scruff’s and Ed’s wagons each got loaded up with a similar number of men, who perched on the wagons’ sides and clung to the heavy weapons for support. Gunner got the commander of Four Troop perched on the rack of his quad, which was designed as a one-rider vehicle. At that stage they were about as overloaded as it was possible to get.

One of the last men to clamber aboard a vehicle was Angus, the Scottish guy who was new into the Squadron. A short while before, back in the LUP, he’d been moaning on about how he’d hoped to be “flat-packing ragheads.” Two hours later he’d been forced to abandon his bogged-in wagon and beg a lift on someone else’s vehicle so he could go on the run from the hunter force that was right on his tail.

It struck Grey as the ultimate irony:
Beware of what you wish for indeed
.

Just as the four vehicles were about to pull out, a lone soldier came stumbling up the incline. It was Raggy.

“FUCKING MOVE IT!” Grey yelled.

It seemed to take forever for the last man to make it to the wagons. He glanced around for a second before throwing himself across Grey’s hood, which was about the only space left available. As was typical of Raggy, he was the last to reach them, yet he seemed totally unflustered. As he wrapped his arms around the M72 LAW strapped to the wagon’s hood, to hold on, he let out this wild laugh.

“Better late than never, mate,” Grey grunted.

“Fucking hell, mate, this is shit! Ninety-second fuses on the wagons.”

“Best we get the fuck out of here. But fucked if I can use the Gimpy with you there.”

Grey didn’t know for sure how many men were packed onto each of the Pinkies. But one thing was certain: with the number they had clinging to their vehicle, the machine guns had been rendered totally unusable. Grey’s arc of fire was blocked by Raggy, and the Dude’s .50-cal was packed around with soldiers on all sides.

Those who’d joined Grey’s wagon were passengers in more ways than one. Grey was his vehicle’s commander, and Moth and Dude were his driver and gunner. That was the basic operational unit, and they ran their own wagon. Those who’d clambered aboard were going where Grey and his team went, and they’d have little say in the matter. It would have been the same had Grey and his lot clambered aboard
their
wagon.

Grey heard a series of sharp cracks from below as the .22 rounds went off—part of the charges’ final trigger system.

There were only seconds now, and those eight wagons down in the wadi were set to blow sky-high.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Grey pointed due east. “Only one way to go,” he remarked to Moth, “away from the enemy’s line of march.”

Moth nodded and eased the wagon forward—further into the line of enemy sight—in order to make a ponderous turn. The Land Rover was painfully overloaded, and the steering felt horribly spongy and unresponsive due to all the extra weight on the back. He got the wheels pointing east and nursed the Pinkie into gear.

But as they were moving off, a terrible thought struck Grey. What if they’d left a man behind? They’d just presumed that the rest of the lads from the bogged Pinkies had headed north and linked up with the vehicles there. But what if they were still trying to fight their way out of the quagmire? What if they were coming south to link up with their wagons?

What if they were about to leave some of their own behind?

He grabbed Moth’s arm. “Hold it!” He eyed Raggy, sprawled across the wagon’s front: “Mate, are you the last?”

“Yeah, I’m the last man,” Raggy confirmed. “Let’s fucking go.”

Grey spoke into his radio so all could hear. “Ed, Raggy says he’s the last man out.”

“I reckon that’s everyone,” Ed replied. “Grey, you lead off. Let’s fuck off while we still can.”

As far as Grey could tell, they had a mixed bag of men from Four, Five, and Six Troops on the wagons. They also had one of Four Troop’s commanders perched on the rear of Gunner’s quad, and an officer from Five Troop in the rear of one of the Pinkies. But as the three wagons here were Six Troop vehicles, by rights that made Captain Ed Smith the officer in command of this force.

As they pulled away from the lake bed, Grey breathed the longest sigh of relief ever. It was pure ecstasy to be on the move again and getting away from the wadi of death, not to mention the threat of heavy tank fire. If the Squadron’s tracks didn’t lead the enemy to that lake bed, the coming explosions certainly would. They’d light up the Iraqi desert like Blackpool Illuminations on LSD.

The three wagons swung eastward and Gunner’s quad moved into the lead so he could scout the way ahead. As they gathered speed Grey glanced at Moth. He could see the same kind of exhilaration in the young operator’s eyes as he himself was feeling. It was pure madness, really. The fact they were on the move didn’t change their predicament one jot. In reality, it was still the mother of all clusterfucks.

With Raggy clinging to the hood, Moth could barely see to drive, and Grey couldn’t use his weapon. To their rear they had half a dozen unexpected passengers, and the wagon was now overweight by an extra six hundred kilos. The springs were groaning under the load.