Zero Six Bravo (4 page)

One of those “old and bold” was Steve Greyling. Many in the Squadron viewed Greyling as a cantankerous and cynical old bastard. He was tall and lean but with a rock-hard muscular physique, one honed by years of training for ship and oil rig assaults—which required clambering out of the freezing sea in full scuba gear and laden with weaponry, to scale the decks high above and launch an attack. In his early forties, Greyling was too old to worry about promotion, and he had zero interest in rising above the rank of sergeant. Unsurprisingly, he took no shit from anyone, regardless of rank. Renowned for speaking his mind, he wasn’t a particular favorite with the SBS’s top management. At one point in the past they’d shunted him sideways into the SAS, which had got him well out of the way for a couple of years.

But now that the Squadron was preparing for war in Iraq, having Greyling in their number had an unexpected upside: he was one of the most experienced at vehicle-borne ops, and so could take the less experienced under his wing. While he was renowned for not suffering fools gladly, he was also known as a safe pair of hands to handle the younger men, which was something of a relief if you were placed on his team.

Greyling was known to all simply as “Grey,” a nickname that suited his no-shit kind of persona. A while back he’d suffered a bad accident while on an SBS deep-water mission, and he was still using
painkillers to deal with the long-term effects of the injuries. Many argued that that accounted for his up-front, devil-may-care attitude.

M Squadron deployed to Kenya as three Troops—Four, Five, and Six—and Greyling was a vehicle commander in Six Troop. Each troop consisted of teams driving specially adapted, open-topped Land Rovers, a British-made four-wheel-drive jeeps designed for penetration missions deep behind enemy lines. In addition to those, each troop had a similar number of powerful quad bikes, ones that acted as an outrider force to scout for the enemy.

The Land Rovers were nicknamed “Pinkies,” for they were painted the same light shade of desert pink that had proved such an effective camouflage for David Stirling’s Special Forces during the North African campaign of the Second World War. In fact, the Pinkies were pretty much the same kind of vehicle that Stirling’s SAS had used to attack German and Italian forces some sixty years before.

Penetrating hundreds of miles into the empty wastes of the Sahara Desert, Stirling’s SAS had used light jeeps to mount lightning raids on enemy targets, hitting especially hard at their airfields. Many argued that Stirling’s SAS—plus its sister force, the Long Range Desert Group—managed to destroy more enemy aircraft in North Africa than Britain’s entire Royal Air Force. The commander of the German Afrika Korps, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, admitted that Stirling’s SAS had caused him “more damage than any other British unit of equal strength,” and the Pinkies had certainly proved their worth.

The driver on Grey’s Pinkie was Dave Saddler, otherwise known as “Moth.” Moth had pale skin through which you could see the blue of his veins, and there was an air of silent mystery about him. With his near-albino features and his watery-eyed, unblinking stare, he had a distinctly alien look. Moth was in his early twenties and he’d not long been with M Squadron. He’d transferred across from the SBS’s swimmer delivery vehicle (SDV) unit, and he was a specialist at underwater missions.

The swimmer delivery vehicle is a top secret midget submersible designed to transport combat divers over long distances to target.
Needless to say, such underwater missions were a far cry from desert mobility ops, and Moth had the appearance of one who would be far more at home underwater than under a burning Iraqi sun.

In terms of land-based combat ops, Moth was a complete virgin, and Grey worried how he’d handle the forthcoming deployment to war. Greyling was a far more experienced vehicle operator, and he knew that he was going to have to force himself to hold back in Iraq if Moth was going to find his way as the driver on his team. Grey sat in the vehicle commander’s seat —the passenger seat—behind a general-purpose machine gun (GPMG) mounted on a pivot on the hood. In sharp contrast to himself and Moth—the former grim-faced, the latter decidedly spooky—the gunner positioned behind them in the wagon’s open rear was a cheerful breath of fresh air.

Chris McGreavy was an open-faced young American who’d somehow found his way into British Special Forces. He was one of the newest guys in the Squadron, and one of the tallest to boot. At six-foot-four he towered over most of them. He’d earned the nickname “Dude” for the simple reason that he was seriously laid-back, and he peppered his every sentence with that word. McGreavy never seemed to tire of nattering on, and it was all “Dude” this and “Dude” that.

Grey didn’t particularly mind the Dude’s easygoing talkative ways. With Moth and Phil—the fourth member of his team—he’d got a couple of right still-waters-run-deep types, and McGreavy was good for filling in the long silences. In fact, the Dude was the odd one out in a lot of ways. No matter how hard they might try to smarten themselves up, both Moth and Phil were far from easy on the eye, not to mention hopelessly scruffy. And as for Grey, with his hooked and broken nose he was one ugly, scary-looking bastard. By contrast, the Dude sat tall and proud astride his perch on the rear of their wagon, like an advert for Rip Curl.

M Squadron being Special Forces, McGreavy was allowed to wear his beach-blond hair shaggy and long, framing his rugged good looks. But what really set the Dude apart as far as Grey was concerned was his family background. McGreavy was highly
educated and he hailed from a mega-wealthy dynasty based in Houston, Texas, the oil capital of the USA.

None of the others in Grey’s team—himself included—had more than scraped together a few qualifications before leaving school. Grey couldn’t imagine what on earth had brought the Dude into British Special Forces, but he was determined to find out. During the weeks ahead he’d catch a quiet moment with the Dude, fix him with his killer stare, and get the full story out of him . . . that’s if McGreavy survived their coming Iraq missions.

The Dude was the least-practiced operator in the Squadron, having been with the SBS for less than a year. He’d only just finished his probationary period—the months after selection during which a new operator has to learn and assimilate dozens of specialist skills. He was also bloody tall for a rear gunner. The .50-cal operator sat high on the vehicle’s rear, and Grey worried that having McGreavy perched up there was like an invitation to getting his head blown off.

The Dude and Moth had been part of the M Squadron assault force that had hit the MV
Nisha
over those storm-swept December seas, but that was about the entirety of the action they’d seen. It had all been over in a couple of hours max, and it was very much a maritime operation. Once the Squadron deployed to Iraq, Grey felt certain they’d be seeing combat, and he was determined to bring every man on his team out alive.

Phil Birch was the fourth member of Grey’s team. He operated outside the Pinkie on their dedicated quad bike. By contrast with Dude, Birch was definitely not the sharpest tool in the box, or over-easy on the eye. A slow-talking northerner, he always looked like a sack of shit, hence his nickname, “Mucker.”

Mucker’s grumpy persona turned a lot of men off, and that’s why Grey figured he’d got him on his team. But Grey actually valued his presence. He was hard as nails and a superlative soldier, plus he was totally and utterly reliable. No matter what shit went down, Grey knew that Mucker would always be there on his shoulder, his weapon at the ready.

Grey’s team had been bolted together at the start of their Kenya training. Grey was conscious of the lack of battle experience on his vehicle, and especially for the kind of missions they were likely to be tasked with once they were at war. Having Phil on his team helped balance things out a little—with a safe pair of hands only a blast on the quad bike away.

Each team member had skills that he might well be called upon to use if the Squadron landed itself in the shit. Moth doubled as their communications specialist and would be the one to call in any air strikes. He had recently qualified as a joint terminal attack controller (JTAC), which meant he could call in warplanes to drop precision-guided weapons onto targets. Small elite units such as theirs were almost inevitably going to face a larger, better-armed enemy force, and air power was one of the few ways they had in which to even up the odds a little. Grey was the team’s demolitions and sniper specialist, plus its medic.

Dude was the new kid on the block and he hadn’t yet secured any adquals (additional qualifications), but in the .50-cal he controlled one of the heaviest pieces of firepower in their troop, which was more than enough to be going on with.

M Squadron established their training camp in a remote patch of Kenyan bush and set about learning to know and love their Pinkies. Each open-topped Land Rover was fitted with a .50-cal heavy machine gun or a 40mm grenade launcher, plus a 7.62mm GPMG up front. As a result, they packed some fearsome firepower, but when loaded with ammo, water, food, fuel, and associated supplies, they were badly overweight. There was no spare capacity for armor or ballistic matting, which meant that the vehicle’s occupants had zero protection from enemy rounds other than speed, maneuverability, and firepower.

McGreavy had served a short time with U.S. forces and he was used to operating in up-armored Humvees, the larger-than-life American four-by-fours encased in armored shells. As far as he was concerned, the Pinkies resembled
Mad Max
dune buggies
with—insanely—the tops left open to the sun and the air, and offering zero protection from fire. But the men of M Squadron seemed oddly attached to their vehicles. They argued the Pinkies had better all-round vision than a Humvee, and vastly superior arcs of fire. They weren’t low, claustrophobic, and cramped, which was how the interior of a Humvee often felt, plus the Pinkies were easy on the gas, which meant they had a far greater range.

At first the Pinkies seemed to suffer an alarming design fault. When out doing the Squadron’s first driving exercises in the bush, the driveshafts broke on two of the Pinkies, including Grey’s wagon. Fortunately, their Land Rover had been crawling dead slow over a dry, boulder-strewn riverbed. Even so, the noise the driveshaft made as it sheared in two and smacked into the rocks below sounded pretty close to terminal.

As he was the wagon’s driver, vehicle maintenance was Moth’s baby. It had taken him just a few moments to slip out of his seat and slide under the Pinkie to diagnose the problem. Mucker roared up on his Honda quad bike to check what was wrong, and upon Moth’s announcing that the driveshaft had sheared he was quick to give vent to his feelings.

“Fucking wagons are a fucking pile of shit,” Mucker grunted.

“Not normally, mate, they’re not,” Grey remarked. “The Pinkie’s about as good as it gets for desert ops.”

“Well, what kind of an idiot thinks we can take them to Iraq?” Mucker continued. “Two days in and we’re two cranks down. They’re shit.”

“Like I said, normally they’re not,” Grey replied, with infinite patience. “I did six weeks in the Omani desert and never had a problem. Normally, they’re pretty much bulletproof. I reckon we got a Friday afternoon batch with this lot.”

“Should have been driving a Hummer, dude,” McGreavy remarked in his signature Texan drawl. “Man, those things are freakin’ unstoppable.”

He got a barrage of abuse in return from the British operators. The problem with the Pinkies only worsened. The crankshafts on
six of the vehicles went down in as many days. It was hugely worrying. No way could the Squadron afford to carry spare driveshafts with them in Iraq, let alone risk the time required to replace a broken one when moving covertly behind enemy lines.

Finally, the Squadron’s mechanics diagnosed the root cause of the problem: the Land Rovers had been fitted with a dodgy set of driveshafts. The driveshafts were replaced, and that seemed to solve the issue—which meant that the Squadron could get back to readying itself to drive and fight at war.

Jim Smith, one of the Delta Force operators tasked with their training, was a Brit. He was ex–Parachute Regiment, the British equivalent of the U.S. Rangers. A few years back he’d married an American girl and joined the U.S. military, progressing by stages into the ranks of the very elite. Predictably, the men of the Squadron had nicknamed him Delta Jim. It was fascinating to hear him brief them on U.S. Special Forces procedures for vehicle operations behind enemy lines.

Delta Jim talked about what it was like to deploy and to fight when facing a far superior enemy force that was hell-bent on hunting you down. He described the means via which vehicle-mounted SF troops could evade enemy tracking and tracing techniques, and the kind of escape options that were available. The golden rule of such operations was always to try to avoid a fight against a far larger enemy force, but if you had to stand and fight, then to do so at a time and place of your choosing.

Delta Jim’s brief covered the A-to-Z of vehicle mobility ops: how to live from a wagon over extended periods; how to manage all the food, water, fuel, ammo, weaponry, and personal equipment, and to maximize ease of access in a cramped, open-topped vehicle; how to refuel from jerricans in a burning-hot and dust-ridden environment; how to free a vehicle bogged to its axles in sand using shovels, sand ladders, and winches; how to keep the vehicle-mounted weapons clean during endless days spent driving through a dust cloud thrown up by the wagon in front.

Another key element of the vehicle mobility craft was being able to pack a wagon so that it could move noiselessly under a
heavy load. Cargo had to be lashed vise-tight to the steel lugs on the wagon’s sides. Any metal objects—jerricans, shovels, steel sand ladders—had to be wrapped in burlap sacking so as to prevent them from clanging against the Pinkies’ alloy panels.

As Grey listened to the briefing and chipped in the odd remark, he figured this would all be very new to Moth, Dude, and the Squadron’s other youngsters. This was the hard reality of what it meant to play hide-and-seek with a far superior enemy force in terrain that more often than not offered little or no cover. This was what they would be heading into in Iraq, and he was keen to see how the new guys on his team would face up to the coming challenge.