Zero Six Bravo (34 page)
Grey lugged the jerry back to Scruff’s Pinkie, upended it, and sloshed the diesel into the wagon’s tank. To their rear he could see scores of headlights probing through the gloom as the Fedayeen fanned out across the desert. Maybe they, too, were running short of ammo and were holding their fire until they were close enough to see the whites of the eyes of their prey and be certain of their targets.
He cursed as he tried to get the can to empty faster. As he finished draining the last of the diesel he noticed that his hands were shaking. Whether it was from the exhaustion, the adrenaline rush, or the fear, he didn’t know. And in a sense he was past caring.
He raced back to his wagon and set to working out a bearing to take them to the extraction grid. The wagons moved out. But after some nine hours of navigating through the darkness he was tortured with exhaustion, his eyes red-raw from staring at his map and into the hungry maw of the night. He was desperate for a break.
They got Scruff’s wagon to take the lead. It made double sense, for their vehicle was arguably the most vulnerable now. It was better to have it up ahead where a problem could be instantly spotted. It hadn’t escaped any of them that a round might have gone through the Pinkie’s fuel lines, in which case it would piss out any diesel into the desert sands.
Fifteen minutes’ hard driving later they reached the grid for the helo pickup, with Scruff’s wagon still going strong. The men disembarked and went into all-round defense. They were flat out on their belt buckles, but it was clear right away that this was a totally shit patch of terrain from which to mount a battle. Headquarters had chosen a featureless stretch of open desert: it was perfect ground for a
pair of Chinooks to put down on but useless for repelling an attack by scores of Fedayeen wielding 12.7mm Dushkas, let alone a marauding Iraqi T-72.
They’d need a minimum of two Chinooks to lift them and their wagons out of theater, but there was precious little cover the men could give the helos if they landed here. That would be the ultimate nightmare: seeing a couple of those giant twin-rotor helicopters blasted out of the sky. It would be a disaster for the RAF aircrew, who’d likely die—or get captured—if by some freak of chance they survived. And it would be a disaster for the twenty-six men waiting on the grid, for no one was kidding themselves that the British military would get a replacement pair of helos up and running in the few short hours before sunrise.
Ed radioed Headquarters that the patrol was in position and gave a warning about the lack of available cover, plus that enemy forces were all around them.
He was told to stand by.
They’d been on the ground for ten horribly tense minutes when Ed got the word. The Chinooks were en route to their grid, but they were being diverted. Reggie, the Squadron OC, had just come up on the air with his own extraction coordinates.
It made every sense to pull out the HQ Troop and all the extra men with them, especially if they had seriously wounded. But it was still massively frustrating to have this happen right now, inasmuch as it was their unit that had been drawing the bulk of the enemy fire.
Their force was to remain static on the present grid for as long as they could possibly manage. Headquarters would try to get the helos in to pick them up once they’d lifted out the HQ Troop. If the patrol needed to bug out, they’d set another RV point further west and try to marry up the helos and the patrol that way.
They held firm for a further five minutes, but time was dragging painfully slowly. Each second felt like a bloody lifetime as the thought of the hunter force that would be drawing ever closer gnawed into each of the operators’ minds. Eyes stared out anxiously into the dark night, keeping watch on the scores of headlights tracking back and forth across the desert.
The Fedayeen were out there not that far away, driving what looked like a series of search grids. It stood to reason that sooner or later they’d stumble upon the force that was static at the
hot-extraction grid. Grey knew it was suicide to stick around for much longer. If they did, they were going to be caught in the open with their pants down.
He had this ghostly, creepy feeling, like ice running down his spine: it was his sixth sense screaming
Danger!
From long years of elite soldiering, he knew when his instinct was telling him that the enemy was close, and it was doing so right now. He’d learned to trust that instinct, for it had saved his life on more than one occasion.
He caught the snarl of a revving motor to the east, and a Toyota SUV crawled out of a deep river gully not three hundred yards away. Grey knew that steep-sided ravine well, for it was one Moth had had real problems getting their heavy wagon out of as he headed for the extraction grid. The powerful, lightly loaded Toyota suffered no such difficulties as it hauled itself onto level ground.
The Fedayeen must have used the gully to push northwest, the terrain masking their engine noise until the very last moment. There was no way that the fighters riding in it could fail to spot the British vehicles. Grey saw the lead Dushka gunner swing his weapon round, scanning his arcs. It was simply a question of who got the drop on the others first and opened fire.
Grey swiveled the GPMG round, found his target, pulled the trigger and let rip. At the same instant the heavy .50-cal snarled and roared from behind him as Dude spotted the threat and opened fire. Big, chunky rounds went pumping over Grey’s head and slamming into the enemy vehicle.
Bursts of fire punched a neat line of holes through the windshield of the Toyota and tore through the bodywork, chunks of metal spinning off in all directions. Within seconds the vehicle exploded as heavy rounds sliced through the fuel tank, igniting the diesel in a ball of boiling flame. Figures stumbled from the burning wagon, the clothes of one of them a sheet of raging fire.
The surviving Fedayeen piled off the vehicle’s rear and dived for cover. AK-47s were raised and muzzles sparked as they started unleashing on automatic. To his right Grey saw Moth raise his Colt-mounted M203 grenade launcher and open up, pumping 40mm
grenades into the enemy position. Within seconds, they’d blanketed the surviving Fedayeen in murderous fire.
Moth had proved himself ten times over as a driver and had more than shown his mettle on the M203. He might have been the wild card on their team, but with Moth, Grey reckoned he had hit solid gold, and likewise with the Dude as his rear gunner, a solid-as-a-rock kind of an operator.
As the Toyota popped and burned, Grey detected the grunts of powerful engines from further down the wadi. More Fedayeen were moving through. Where there had been one enemy vehicle there were soon going to be a whole lot more, for it sounded as if the first Toyota must have been leading a sizable convoy.
That first vehicle continued to burn fiercely, throwing off clouds of thick black smoke. The extraction grid had been compromised big-time, the firefight ensuring that it was visible for miles around. It was like a magnet now, drawing in the bad guys. No way were they about to bring any Chinooks in here.
Voices broke out over the radios. “Fucking mount up and move out!”
“Move it! Move it!”
“We’re out of here!”
Figures sprinted across the terrain and hurled themselves into the rear of the Pinkies. Moth slipped his weapon back into its holster and fired up the wagon’s engine as Raggy dived onto his place on the hood, wrapping his arms around their M72 LAW in an effort to hold on.
“Head west!” Grey yelled. “Let’s fucking move it! And, Dude, keep your eyes peeled for the bad guys!”
Within seconds Moth had their Pinkie thumping its way across the rough ground as he accelerated away from their extraction point. But they’d made no more than five hundred yards when the first savage burst of 12.7mm fire tore out of the darkness, hammering overhead.
More SUVs were powering up from the riverbed, and they were onto the British vehicles almost instantly. Less than eight hundred
yards separated the two forces as the Fedayeen gave chase, their convoy charging across the desert terrain. Short bursts of probing Dushka fire sparked over the men’s heads as the enemy gunners tried to gauge the range and fire accurately from their fast-moving Toyotas.
Those hanging off the rearmost Pinkie began trying to return fire with their assault rifles and grenade launchers while others held them fast in an effort to keep them aboard. But it was all but impossible to put down accurate fire from a speeding wagon weaving through horrendous terrain. The only way to do so would have been by means of the tripod-mounted heavy weapons, and they were unusable with so many men clustered around them.
Yet, for some reason the Fedayeen seemed to be hanging back instead of closing for the kill.
As their wagon fought its way across the uneven ground, Grey desperately tried to check his maps. He figured the Syrian border had to be no more than eight kilometers away. It seemed impossible that they’d make it—but hell, they had at least to try.
He glanced at Moth. “We got to make that break for Syria—like, now! Keep going due west as fast as you can go, mate.”
Moth floored the accelerator and the wagon ripped ahead, practically going airborne as it smashed through a patch of broken ground. Grey flicked his eyes down to their fuel gauge. Their reserve tank was half gone: they should have enough diesel to make it across the border—that was if they could head straight through. Too much of a runaround, and in no time they’d be sipping on fumes.
He glanced up and into the far distance, scanning the route that would take them to the border. As he did so, he almost had a heart attack on the spot. Due west of their position he’d spotted lights in a long, linear formation—ones that had just become visible on the near horizon. Up ahead they had a convoy of vehicles spread out at regular intervals on what had to be a road.
It was at the limit of his sight, so maybe three kilometers away. But via his natural night vision he figured he could just make out army trucks and the squat forms of armor. It had to be an Iraqi military convoy on the N253. It was static, and this was where Grey figured the commander
of the entire Iraqi battle effort had to be positioned. Doubtless, it was from here that he’d been overseeing the hunt for M Squadron.
It struck Grey that they were being herded into the final trap. This had to be what the Fedayeen were trying to drive them into—this solid front of Iraqi armor and guns. He felt the wagon slow as Moth woke up to the new threat. It was clear as day that there was no way through to the Syrian border anymore. Even that doubtful promise of sanctuary was now suddenly closed to them.
Grey flicked his eyes down at his map. “The border kinks east, and the 255 with it!” he yelled at Moth. He grabbed the handset of their comms device: “They’re trying to herd us onto the 255. Steer north-northeast to take us away from the fuckers!”
With the Fedayeen on their heels it was the only route left open to them—though somewhere to their north lurked the hunter force of Iraqi battle tanks. Moth spun the steering wheel through his hands, and the nose of the wagon swung ninety degrees northeast.
As they came around to the new bearing, Grey could just make out the faintest trace of a fine duck-egg blue painting the horizon due east—the first hints of the coming dawn. They’d just run out of escape options, and they were fast running out of time.
They had an Iraqi military convoy bang west of them; Fedayeen to the south and east; T-72 tanks to the north; plus a shedload of Iraqi infantry somewhere in the middle. They were totally boxed in, and they’d been left with nowhere to run or to hide. They needed some air cover—like, now—or they were totally fucked.
“Where the fuck’s that Specter gunship?” Grey yelled.
Moth pointed to the comms handset bolted to the Pinkie’s dash. “Fire that up and dial up the air. How many satellites is it showing?”
“Two.”
“Not enough. Needs three.”
The wagon careered ahead at breakneck speed, with the odd burst of tracer fire tearing through the night. There was an audible bleep as a third satellite icon flashed up on the screen.
“Three!” Grey yelled. He grabbed the satcom’s receiver. “Zero Six Bravo, calling Ghost One Six, d’you copy?”
A beat. Then: “Zero Six Bravo, this is Ghost One Six,” the American Specter gunship pilot’s voice came up on the air. “I got you good and clear. How you doing down there?”
“Not fucking great! We’re three jeeps with a shedload of Iraqi SUVs on our tail. We need you to smash them. Our grid is 98463782, and we’ve heading northeast at roughly thirty kph. The enemy is five hundred meters to the south of us and closing.”
“No can do, Zero Six Bravo. We’re a good thirty minutes out from your location. It’s that kind of time before we’ll be within range and we can light those fuckers up for ya.”
“Stand by.” Grey cut the line. He let out a string of curses. The adrenaline was pumping in bucket loads, and despite the icy cold of the desert night his combats were soaked in sweat. “They’re thirty minutes out. There’s no air cover. What the fuck?”
Moth shrugged. “We need an extraction grid, like, yesterday.”
As if to reinforce what he was saying, from just beneath where Raggy was lying across the hood the Pinkie began to emit a tortured whine. The engine sounded as if it was about to shake itself to pieces. It was hardly surprising: there were more bullet and shrapnel holes than bodywork on their wagon, and the damage to the internal components had to be terminal. The fact that it was still moving at all was little short of a miracle.
Ed’s voice came up on the radios, thick with tension and urgency. “We’ve got a new extraction grid! 14657389. Repeat: 14657389.”
Grey plotted it. “It’s just to the north of here,” he yelled into the radio, “and well away from the 255. It’s doable. But make sure the fuckers get the Chinooks in this time, ’cause we ain’t going to get another chance.”
“It’s a one-ship,” came Ed’s reply. “They’ve split the Chinooks so the other can lift out the OC. It’ll be standing room only, and we’re gonna have to blow the vehicles.”