Zero Six Bravo (5 page)
Their unit-specific call sign for Iraq was
Zero Six Bravo
, which Moth would use when calling in the warplanes. Grey couldn’t help noticing how much their call sign echoed that of
Bravo Two Zero.
And although he wasn’t the superstitious kind, he couldn’t shake off the feeling that all hell awaited them in the deserts of Iraq.
The vehicle mobility training was as rigorous as they could make it—but getting slick at such ops was still going to be a massive challenge in the time available. A few years back Grey had spent six weeks traversing the Omani desert with the SAS, living and breathing the reality of a simulated patrol deep behind enemy lines, and before that he’d spent months learning the standard operating procedures of desert mobility work.
Here in Kenya, all of that had to be telescoped into a fraction of the time. The Squadron would spend fourteen days learning the basics of vehicle-borne mobility work, after which they’d run a makeshift “test week.” The eight soldiers from the SAS and Delta Force would act as informal “examiners” as they put the men through an extended desert exercise. The training program was designed to squeeze as much rigor into the time available and to extract as much as possible from the expertise on hand.
Moving as a squadron meant orchestrating close to thirty Pinkies plus quad bikes on the move. It meant operating in a strict formation within which each vehicle commander understood his place in relation to the others while keeping a good distance between Pinkies so as to avoid making an easy target. It meant doing so in conditions akin to a massive sandstorm and while keeping complete
radio silence so that the Squadron’s movements couldn’t be traced by an enemy using electronic tracking.
It meant learning to do so under the permanent threat of attack, and always being ready to use vehicle fire-and-maneuver drills to extract from an enemy ambush. It meant learning what amount of fuel the wagons burned over what type of ground, how much water a man needed in what conditions, and what type of driving techniques various terrains required. But most challenging of all was learning how to do all of this at night, when driving with no lights—on “black light”—and using night-vision aids to render the desert into a fluorescent green video-game daylight.
Delta Jim and his fellow American operators had been given a Pinkie and a quad between them, so they could fit in with the rest during Squadron’s training. The American operators had deployed to Kenya complete with loads of top-notch equipment, including state-of-the-art weaponry, body armor, and GPS. They were used to driving hulking great Humvees, which like everything else American were built extra-large. Now they had to squeeze themselves, plus all of their gleaming gear, into the cramped confines of a jeep that was completely open to the elements.
For an ex-Para like Delta Jim, being in a Land Rover again was like coming home. But the rest of Jim’s team were seriously nonplussed. They were used to their Humvees, which provide substantial protection for the vehicles’ occupants from enemy fire or mine strikes. By comparison, M Squadron’s Pinkies were open to sun, rain, and bullets alike—like throwbacks to the Second World War.
Yet, over the days in Kenya, Delta Jim’s team warmed to the Pinkies. There was a real sense of freedom when working from an open-topped vehicle, one that imbued the operators with something of a Lawrence of Arabia devil-may-care attitude. And on a practical level the Land Rovers were far more frugal with the diesel.
There was one other serious advantage to operating from an open vehicle: it made for easier navigation. On top of everything else, the lads of M Squadron had to learn how to find their way
across hundreds of miles of trackless bush, more often than not at night. Under such conditions the stars provided an invaluable “map” from which to keep track of progress, and a wagon open to the elements offered all-round vision of the moon and stars.
The final week of mobility training was a blur of desert-driving exercises, ones that were scrutinized by Delta Jim and his team, some of the best at vehicle-borne mobility operations that the Americans have, plus the SAS team. By now the men of M Squadron had acclimatized well, growing seriously unshaven and sporting a thick film of dust and dirt over any exposed skin. As their bodies adjusted to the searing heat, they were sweating and drinking less than they had been during the first few days.
This last week wasn’t so much about being tested as about getting the men to work as a team in such conditions. The Squadron headed out one evening at last light. The men were tasked with spending the entire night pushing through the dry bush and scrub. They had a distant objective to reach by first light, and they had to navigate their way using the stars and compass alone. Grey’s wagon took the lead, for he was a shrewd and skillful navigator when moving during the hours of darkness.
When doing such a night drive, the Squadron moved in such a fashion that vehicles had to basically play follow-my-leader. It was the best way to ensure they didn’t lose each other in the dark. Grey was using night-vision goggles on twin leather cups that flipped down over the eyes. They looked like a small pair of binoculars, weighed about the same, and worked by amplifying the ambient light given off by the moon and stars.
There was little cloud cover and the wide expanse of the African sky was star-bright. The NVG functioned exceptionally well under such conditions. Every way Grey looked, the desert was illuminated in a weird, foggy-green glow, which was almost as good as driving in daylight. In an effort not to lose his natural night vision, he kept flicking the NVG up and down as their wagon pushed ahead. Every now and then he’d catch the twin glow of a big cat’s eyes staring out from the darkened bush.
They had been making good progress when, almost without warning, the sandstorm hit. They heard it before they saw it, a strange hollow roaring sound whipping through the night. As the storm bore down upon them, Grey flipped up his NVG and pulled on his sand goggles—plastic eyewear a bit like a welder’s glasses—to keep the cloud of driving grit out of his eyes. Above the deafening snarl of the storm he yelled for Moth and Dude to do likewise.
The sandstorm was a monster, piling up like a thundercloud on the horizon and dumping half the desert on their heads. The standard operating procedure was to go firm when hit by such a storm. You’d wrap a
shemagh
—an Arab headscarf—tightly around your face to shield it from the stinging sand, and wait for it to pass. But tonight’s mission was a time-specific tasking, and if they held still for too long they’d fail to reach their objective.
The thick, howling storm blanked everything out, cutting off the Pinkies from the heavens—which meant that Grey couldn’t use the stars to navigate anymore. But there was one upside. The storm having reduced visibility to a matter of tens of meters, no watching “enemy” would be able to see them, and that in turn meant that Grey could risk using a GPS. The faint glow thrown off by the gizmo’s screen was invisible in such conditions.
Earlier that day Grey had studied the maps closely and inputted a waymarked route into his military-issue GPS, one that would lead them to their objective. He punched in the relevant instructions and the GPS spun up to speed, mapping out the route ahead. Using that, and keeping a close watch on his compass as a backstop, he was able to press onward. But the wagons following behind had to bunch up much closer together to maintain visual contact.
One of the golden rules of mobility driving is that you should never enter a patch of difficult terrain or try to move across an obstacle before the vehicle in front has cleared it. Otherwise, several wagons could get trapped at the point of greatest difficulty.
Grey navigated the Squadron into a steep-sided wadi, and Moth found himself trying to exit via a near-vertical track that led out of the far side. With all the food, water, fuel, and ammo aboard, even
in four-wheel drive the wagon got only two-thirds of the way out before it slipped and skidded its way back down, its engine howling like a thing possessed and its wheels spinning horribly. Within seconds the dry riverbed was filled with the acrid smell of burning rubber, and then the second and the third wagon came rumbling in behind them. It was only by chance that a major pileup was avoided.
Moth only managed to find a way out of the wadi when he stumbled across an easier exit point, and at least by then the worst of the sandstorm had blown over. They pushed onward and Grey navigated the Squadron right to its very objective. They had made it through the heart of the raging storm, and there was a massive sense of achievement to have done so.
The men ended that exercise with a “Chinese parliament”—a Squadron-wide heads-up to which all could contribute ideas and suggestions. They’d toyed with the idea of driving in two-wheel drive when in Iraq, because it reduced fuel consumption and increased range. On firm, flat terrain two-wheel drive was all that was needed. But the experience of that night’s exercise had proved that you never knew when you might hit trouble, and keeping the wagons in four-wheel drive was vital.
But that in turn meant that the weight the Pinkies were carrying had to be cut, so as to be able to carry more fuel—and about the only thing they could possibly consider losing was ammo. Yet, less ammo meant less firepower, which increased the risk of getting caught and smashed by the enemy. This was the eternal conundrum of vehicle mobility operations: how to maximize range, mobility, and firepower on a small four-wheel-drive vehicle.
The Squadron rounded off their time in Kenya with a week’s high-altitude training, just in case they did end up heading into the more mountainous parts of Iraq. While no one doubted they were going to war—President Bush had already approved the deployment of 200,000 American troops to the Gulf—they didn’t have the faintest idea what their mission might be or over what kind of terrain they’d be operating. It made sense to prepare for every
eventuality, especially when the Squadron had such limited experience of overland operations.
There was only one place to do mountain training in Kenya, and that was Mount Kenya itself—a 17,000-foot peak high enough to be permanently snowcapped even though it lies bang on the equator. The men drew specialist mountaineering equipment from the stores, including ropes, cold-weather gear, and rigid-soled rock-climbing boots. The ascent was done in four stages under crushing loads, each stage taking them to a higher altitude, then dropping lower overnight. This was in line with the concept of “climb-high, sleep-low,” designed to help the body adjust to altitude. The lower slopes were clad in a dense tropical jungle, but the higher reaches were fields of bare rock and massive boulders, interspersed with ice fields.
The first three days of the climb were rain-lashed and sodden, and after the blistering heat of the savanna it was truly miserable. The final ascent was done overnight so as to reach the high point at sunrise. But en route the wind blew up and flurries of snow began to whirl around their frozen ears. By the time Grey, Moth, Dude, and Mucker reached the summit they were chilled to the core and gasping for breath due to the lack of oxygen.
As they crouched in the howling gale the weather miraculously cleared, and a view opened before them that took their breath away. They were sitting on the roof of the world, while two thousand feet below them a carpet of fluffy white clouds stretched into the distance. And at the very limit of the horizon the cloud cover burned off over the golden-brown expanse of the African plains.
During the last stages of the summit climb Grey had been leading his team, and he’d kept calling to the youngsters: “Moth! Dude! Come on! I got something to show you!” They’d only managed to catch up with him when the summit itself was reached, and Dude for one was curious as to what Grey had been going on about.
“Say, boss, so what you got to show us?” he gasped, fighting to breathe in the thin, oxygen-deprived atmosphere. In British Special Forces everyone gets called by first name, or “boss” if a more senior
rank is being addressed. Merit is valued above rank, and those who lead have to earn the respect of those who will follow.
“You what?” Grey replied, feigning ignorance.
“During the last few minutes of the climb,” Dude explained. “Something you wanted to show us?”
“So there is, mate.” Grey stretched his arm out into the far distance. “See where I’m pointing?”
“Kind of. Yeah.”
“Well, I can see your house from here.” Grey swung his arm around a bit and repositioned it. “And you know what, Moth? I can see yours ’n’ all. Fucking marvelous, eh?”
Moth eyed him silently for a few moments, as if it just didn’t compute. As for the young American, it took a few seconds for the penny to drop: the lack of oxygen was seriously fogging his brain. Then the Dude cracked up laughing, although at such high altitude it petered out into a strangled gasp and a wheeze.
“Don’t worry about Grey,” a figure remarked from behind them. “Full of more shit than a Christmas goose.”
“Christmas goose?” Moth queried.
“Christmas goose,” the figure confirmed. “Got to be full of shit. When was the last time you ate goose for Christmas?”
It was Andy “Scruff” McGruff making the comment, a fellow veteran of Six Troop. As his name suggested, Scruff was hardly the most organized or smartest-looking of soldiers, but he was a first-class Special Forces operator. A few months back he and Grey had fought side by side in the epic siege of Qala-i-Jangi, the battle to secure an ancient mud-walled fortress in northern Afghanistan. Eight SBS and SEAL operators had put down a savage uprising by six hundred Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters.
Grey and Scruff had bonded during that die-hard encounter, and if Grey had a confidant in M Squadron, Scruff was it. The two of them gazed out over the dramatic scenery for a good few moments before the chilling cold and the lack of oxygen finally got the better of them.
“Seen enough to last a lifetime,” Grey announced. “Anyone care to join me going down?”