Zero Six Bravo (9 page)
With the team going in on quads, a lone Chinook was able to ferry them all in. It dropped them in the open desert just over
the Iraq side of the border, and under a night sky that was blissfully overcast and dark. Once the Chinook had disappeared in the direction from which it had come, the team bugged out from the dust-enshrouded drop zone. They searched for and found an LUP (lying-up point), and by first light they were safely hidden from prying eyes, their quads shielded by the rocky walls of a ravine and covered in camo netting.
Back at their tented camp, the bulk of the Squadron were just finishing their breakfast. As he exited the cookhouse tent, Grey ran into the Squadron OC.
Reggie put out a hand to stop him. “Okay, boy? All good?”
“Yeah, boss, it’s all good.”
“I heard your concerns, buddy, and similar from the other OAB.” “OAB” was slang for “the old and the bold.” “The Al Sahara mission should answer some of ’em. It tests the waters. Probes the Iraqi defenses. We’ll see if there’s any will to fight. Plus it shaves a good three hundred clicks off our infil, and should firm up the intel all round.”
“Nice one, boss,” Grey replied. “They’re a good team of blokes you’ve sent in. If anyone can do it, they can.”
All that day the four-man quad team remained in hiding, observing the desert terrain. Nothing seemed to be moving out there in the empty, barren landscape. By last light they were ready to move the two dozen kilometers to the outskirts of the airfield. The journey across the night-dark desert went without a hitch. They found the airfield easily—a clutter of decrepit buildings standing out like a dog’s bollocks on the flat, featureless horizon. It looked to be long abandoned. Even so, the four men probed the outskirts of the air base first on foot for maximum stealth.
Finding no sign of any hostile force, they mounted up their quad bikes to do a three-sixty-degree recce. They moved in to the airfield and were just about to turn across the airstrip itself when all hell let loose. A hidden force of Iraqis had spotted the small British force. Worse still, they were equipped with heavy machine guns plus vehicles.
The Squadron’s Honda quad bikes could really shift, and one of the team had his machine airborne for several seconds as they powered out of there. But the Iraqis were no slouches. They chased the British vehicles with fierce tracer fire, hosing down the escape routes with long blasts from their heavy weapons. Others mounted up their vehicles and prepared to follow. They were using Toyota-type four-wheel drives—powerful, fast, and highly maneuverable—and each was equipped with a mounted machine gun.
As fast as the quad bikes were, right now they had a hunter force coming after them that was only marginally slower and by which they were heavily outgunned. The four M Squadron operators were armed only with their personal weapons—Colt 7.62mm assault rifles, plus their pistols. They had no firepower to engage the Iraqis, let alone the range.
Timms led his team toward the open desert, where he planned to call in a Chinook to lift them out, but the Iraqis seemed well aware of the British soldier’s intentions.
Each of M Squadron’s Land Rovers was equipped with a fixed radio antenna, one that resembled a horizontal crucifix and via which it was possible to call in a rescue force while on the move. But not the quads. The quad-borne force carried a satcom—an encrypted radio satellite communications system, one that the enemy would be hard-pressed to intercept. But the satcom worked on a “spider antenna,” a Christmas-tree-like latticework that took time to erect and yet more time to find enough satellites to be serviceable. And each time the four-man force stopped to set it up and make a satcom call, the enemy were quickly onto them.
No sooner had they gone static and called through a set of coordinates for a hot extraction—a helo pickup under threat of enemy attack—than the first bursts of enemy fire would come slamming into their position. Repeatedly, the four men were forced to mount up their quads and bug out to try to get some distance between themselves and their pursuers before repeating the process all over again.
They did this several times as they were hunted across the desert, and each time the hot-extraction point had to be abandoned. By the
approach of first light the men were running low on fuel and ammo, not to mention options. By now they were pretty much surrounded by the Iraqi hunter force and about to lose the cover of darkness. There was one upside. In the last few minutes they’d managed to get an American F-15E warplane—call sign
Irish
—flying top cover for them.
The F-15 hailed from a top secret U.S. unit called Task Force Tiger (or TF 20 for short). It was made up of state-of-the-art F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets, and each aviator was handpicked, for TF 20 was specially formulated to support those first into Iraq on Special Forces operations. In early March 2003—as M Squadron was heading for Iraq—Task Force Tiger had deployed to an air base in Qatar. Their first major combat missions were flown over the western desert of Iraq, providing air cover to British and U.S. Special Forces as they took strategically important targets.
M Squadron’s quad bike force had the best of the best now screaming through the skies above them.
But the battle space below was so confusing, with vehicles charging about in all directions, that the F-15E aircrew were unable to carry out any air strikes for fear of hitting the quad bike team. The one thing they could do in all safety was to get a laser onto the British force so that the rescue Chinook could lock onto the hot point of the laser beam—the spot where it bounced back from the ground—and home in on that for the pickup.
As the Chinook headed in with its tail ramp already lowered, it was audible from many miles out, and the dust thrown up by its flight left a telltale trail. It powered across the desert toward the quad team’s position, but so, too, did the Iraqi hunter force. They were drawn in by the Chinook’s flight path, and were closing fast. Just as the giant, twin-rotor helo put down the enemy guns opened up, the Iraqis firing from their Toyotas as they wove at breakneck speed through the desert sands.
For a bare few seconds the Chinook held rock-steady while the quads tore up its ramp, and then it was airborne again and heading for cover. As it sped across the desert low and fast, the Iraqis
unleashed hell, heavy bursts of fire chasing the helo through the night skies. But with friendly forces now plucked from the desert, the F-15 aircrew had an accurate fix on the Iraqi positions, and were free to mount air strikes without fear of a friendly-fire incident.
The arrow-like form of the jet tore in, the aircrew homing in on the Iraqis’ muzzle flashes. The F-15E unloaded with its nose-mounted M61 six-barrel cannon, a storm of 20mm rounds raking the Iraqi positions. Under cover of that murderous storm of fire the Chinook made it out of there, and M Squadron’s lead element was able to return to their base, decidedly shaken but alive.
“So what’s the ground like?” Grey asked the Al Sahara airfield men, once they’d finished their mission debrief. “What’s it like to drive over?”
“Easy enough,” one replied. “Hard compact gravel and grit, not soft sand dunes.”
“But it’s bloody cold at night, especially when tearing about on a quad,” said another. “Take your bloody thermals, your duvet jacket, and everything in between.”
As they’d reported in on the outcome of their thirty-six-hour mission, the old and the bold within the Squadron had had a distinctly ominous feeling. If Sean Timms had got his tiny force compromised and badly shot up just as soon as they’d crossed the border, what hope was there of getting an entire Special Forces inserted covertly hundreds of miles into Iraq?
They’d just put in one small, low-profile and highly cellular team, only to get it seriously brassed up. If it wasn’t for the smart footwork by the U.S. warplane, not to mention the RAF Chinook crew, the four-man team might well have never have made it out of there. The only advantage M Squadron would have was a greater degree of firepower, but it would be massively more visible to any watching Iraqi forces.
There was also little reason anymore to assume that the 5th Corps was desperate to surrender, especially when the force stationed at Al Sahara airfield had proved so ready to fight. There were 100,000 5th Corps soldiers, complete with light and heavy armor,
and they might be just as aggressive and capable as the Al Sahara airfield defenders. If so, the sixty men of M Squadron were going to be toast.
As had been the case with the Bravo Two Zero mission, it looked as if M Squadron was being sent into Iraq on zero usable intel. The only area they had tested for themselves was Al Sahara, and Al Sahara had proven far from “relatively benign.” But in a sense, Special Forces soldiering was always like this. They were being sent in to prove the ground truth on what amounted to an offensive recce—and this way you risked a few good men, not an entire army.
Special Forces units only ever tended to trust the intel absolutely when it was delivered by one of their own—ideally a couple of their own guys in a hide with eyes on the mission objective. And on this occasion the only possible way to get eyes on the Iraqi 5th Corps was to send the Squadron some seven hundred kilometers into Iraq to find them.
The Al Sahara debrief over, Scruff turned to Grey: “Mate, I’ve just thought of the operation code name: Mission Impossible Iraq.”
Grey shook his head. “Nah, mate.” He gave a wry smile. “More like Operation No Return.”
Worryingly, the exact location of the Iraqi 5th Corps still hadn’t been identified. It must have taken days, if not weeks, to move up to 100,000 men and arms at night into a place of hiding. But, amazingly, that was exactly what the 5th Corps seemed to have done. They had managed to move an entire corps off the face of the earth, and M Squadron seemed to have no option but to go in and root them out.
There was no explicit Plan B if the Squadron reached the 5th Corps’s position only to find that the Iraqis were less than keen to surrender. If that was the case, every man knew he’d have to go on the run and fight his way out of there, however improbable that might seem.
In truth, most Special Forces operations were defined by such extreme risk and uncertainty. The kinds of men who made up a force like M Squadron knew the hard realities of such missions. They’d rise to whatever challenges were placed before them, no matter what the risks. That was the kind of mind-set the Squadron fostered, and that was why such soldiers had joined Special Forces: to be part of a unit from which small groups of men went out to achieve the seemingly impossible.
Even so, from all that they had heard, the OAB of M Squadron figured there was a very different way of construing the Iraqi 5th
Corps’s makeup and intentions. Northern Iraq was Saddam’s homeland. In Bayji and Tikrit—the cities just to the east of M Squadron’s intended line of march—you had Saddam’s tribal stronghold and his birthplace. If—when—Baghdad fell, Saddam would very likely retreat to this area to make his last stand. That being the case, the 5th Corps—which made up as much as a third of Iraq’s standing army—could well be Saddam’s choice of men-at-arms for his last-ditch battle. Far from being ill disciplined, ill motivated, underfed, and underpaid, these could be the boys that Saddam was relying on to fight to the last man.
There were two other significant forces in the area. First was the Iraqi Security Organization (ISO), Saddam’s feared secret police. The ISO were fiercely loyal to the Great Leader, but they weren’t considered a major combat unit. The second force—the Iraqi Fedayeen—were an entirely different matter. The Fedayeen were a combat militia that worked directly to Saddam’s orders. They were recruited very young and made to idolize Saddam and to show blind loyalty. The Fedayeen were equipped with fast, Toyota-type four-wheel-drive vehicles fitted with heavy machine guns. They were constituted as a highly cellular, fluid, guerrilla-type army, and were probably the most feared of all fighters in the country.
The Iraqi Republican Guard—the nearest Saddam had to elite forces—would be better trained, but they weren’t manic, die-hard lunatics like the Fedayeen.
M Squadron was shown a Fedayeen recruitment video. It pictured these very young men and boys running around in robes and red-and-white checked headscarves, doing combat drills and yelling oaths of allegiance to Saddam and to the mother country. The highlight of the video was those young trainees slaughtering a goat with a knife, then drinking its blood and eating its flesh raw. It all looked very fanatical, hard-core, and messed-up.
There were also some particularly gruesome stories of what the Fedayeen did to their own people if they ever suspected them of harboring any resistance to Saddam’s rule. Clearly, if M Squadron ran into any Fedayeen, there was no way they would be taking their
surrender. If they did come up against those brainwashed fanatics it would be a brutal fight to the death—on both sides.
As the Squadron began to load up the C-130s for their onward deployment, Grey ran into Sebastian en route to the armory. More or less everyone had been avoiding the Squadron’s newest member, but not Grey. Grey had more than warmed to the guy. He found him hilarious and oddly fascinating.
“How’s it going then, mate?” he asked.
“Guess what?” Sebastian replied excitedly. “I’m going to be getting a gun! And guess what else? I’m going to be getting just a spot of training. From that chap you introduced me to—what’s his name? Gunner. Yah, from him.”
Grey couldn’t help but crack up laughing. Sebastian sounded like he was about to go on a pheasant shoot on his country estate. It was priceless. For an instant he wondered if Seb was actually bullshitting. But he clearly wasn’t. He was just a genuine, nice guy who didn’t try to hide who he was or his lack of experience or his fallibilities.
Grey smiled. “Well done, mate. I’m glad you’re getting a gun. The Iraqis will be quaking in their boots.”
“Waz-oh! I say, d’you think I’ll have to shoot anyone?”
Gunner was renowned for being a hard and merciless weapons instructor. He and Sebastian were the proverbial chalk and cheese. What Grey wouldn’t give to sit in on that weapons-training session—but unfortunately there was a mission to prepare for.