Bravo two zero (10 page)

    The M16 has a quiet safety catch-another plus if you're patrolling-and there are no parts to go rusty. If rifles were cars, instead of going for a Ford Sierra 4x4 -good, reliable, tested, and enjoyed by the people who drive them-in the SA80 the Army went for a Rolls-Royce. But at the stage when it was first brought into service, it was still a prototype Rolls-Royce, and there were plenty of teething problems. In my opinion the one and only drawback with a 203 is that you can't put a bayonet on because of the grenade launcher underneath.

    We didn't have slings on the M16s. A sling means a rifle is going over your shoulder: on operations, why would you want to have a weapon over the shoulder rather than in your hands and ready to fire? When you patrol with a weapon you always move with both hands on it and the butt in your shoulder. What's the point of having it if you can't bring it to bear quickly?

    I'm not interested in how or where a weapon is made, as long as it does the job it needs to do and I know how to use it. As long as it fires ammunition and you've got lots of it, that's all you should be concerned about.

    Weapons are only as good as their handlers, of course. There's a lot of inbred rivalry between the blokes when it comes to live firing drills.

    All our weapon training is live firing, and it has to be that way because only then do you get a sense of realism and perspective. In a firefight, the awesome noise will impair your ability to act if you're not well and truly used to it. An Armalite sounds surprisingly tinny when it fires, and there's not much kick. You tend to hear other people's weapons rather than your own. When the 40mm bomb fires, you just hear a pop; there's no explosion or recoil.

    We had four Minimis, which are 5.56 light-support machine guns They can take belted ammunition in disintegrating link in boxes of 200, or ordinary magazines. The weapon is so light that it can be used in the attack like a rifle as well as giving support fire, and it has a fearsome rate of fire. It has a bipod to guarantee good, accurate automatic fire if needed. The plastic prepacked boxes of ammo for the weapon are not its best design feature. As you're patrolling, the box is across your body; it can bang against you and fall off, but you just have to guard against it. Another problem can be that the rounds are not completely packed in the boxes and you get a rhythmic, banging noise, which is bad news at night as noise travels more easily. Each man in the patrol also carried a disposable 66mm rocket. American-made, the 66 is designed for infantry antitank use. It's just over two foot long and consists of two tubes inside each other. You pull the two apart and the inner tube contains the rocket, all ready to go. As you pull it apart, the sights pop up.

    You just fire the weapon and throw it away. It's good because it's simple. The simpler something is, the more chance there is that it'll work. The round has a shaped charge on the end, which is designed to punch through armor. The fuse arms itself after about 30 feet; even if you just graze the target, it blows up. The 66 doesn't explode in a big ball of fire as in the movies. HE never does that unless there is a secondary explosion.

    We carried white phos grenades as well as the ordinary L2 explosive grenade. Phosphorus burns fiercely and lays down a rather good smokescreen if you need time to get away.

    Grenades no longer have the old pineapple shape that people tend to think of. White phos is cylindrical, with the letters WP written across it. The L2 is more egg shaped and consists of tightly wound wire around an explosive charge. We splay the pins even more than they already are so that it takes more pressure to extract them. We also put masking tape around the grenade to hold the handle down as an extra precaution in case there's a drama with the pin. White phos is not much used in training because it's so dangerous. If you get it on you, you have to pour water very slowly from your water bottle to stop it getting oxygen, then pick it off. If you're not successful, it's not a nice way to die.

    We had at least 10 magazines each, 12 40mm bombs, L2 and phos grenades, and a 66. The four Minimi gunners had more than 600 rounds each, plus 6 loaded mags. For an 8-man patrol it was a fearsome amount of firepower.

    Those of us with 203s checked there was a bomb loaded. Bob was checking that the belts of ammunition for his Minimi weren't kinked-the secret of belt-fed ammunition is that it goes into the weapon smoothly. If it's twisted, you'll get a stoppage. I saw Vince checking the box of ammunition that clips on to the side of the weapon to make sure it was not going to fall off. His gang were going to provide all-round cover by moving straight out to points just beyond the wash of the aircraft.

    As they were running out, the rest of us would be throwing the kit off the tailgate as fast as we could.

    Stan checked his white phos to make sure it was easy to get at.

    Everybody was mentally adjusting himself ready to go. Blokes jumped up and down to check that everything was comfy. You do simple things like undo your trousers, pull them up, ruck everything in, redo them, tighten your belt, make sure your belt kit is comfortable, make sure your pouches and buttons are done up. Then you check and recheck that you've got everything and haven't left anything on the floor.

    I could tell by the grind of the blades that the heli was maneuvering close to the ground. The tailgate started to lower. I peered out.

    You're incredibly vulnerable during the landing. The enemy could be firing at the aircraft, but because of the engine noise you wouldn't know until you were on the ground. The ramp came down more. The landscape was a black-and-white negative under the quarter moon. We were in a small wadi with a 13-foot rise either side. Clouds of dust flew up, and Vince and his gang moved onto the tailgate, weapons at the ready. There was a strong smell of fuel. The noise was deafening.

    The aircraft was still a few feet off the ground when they jumped. If there was a contact, we wouldn't know about it until we saw them jumping straight back on.

    The pilot collapsed the Chinook the last couple of feet onto the ground.

    We hurled the kit, and Stan, Dinger, and Mark jumped after it. I stayed on board while the lo adie went across the floor with a cyalume stick in his hand in a last-minute sweep. The noise of the rotors increased, and I felt the heli lift its weight off the undercarriage. I waited. It's always worth the extra ten seconds it takes to make sure, rather than discover when the heli has gone that you've only picked up half the equipment. The balance, as ever, is between speed and doing the job correctly.

    The lo adie gave the thumbs up and said something into his headset. The aircraft started to lift and I jumped. I hit the ground and looked up.

    The heli was climbing fast with the ramp still closing. Within seconds it was gone. It was 2100 and we were on our own.

    We were on a dried-up riverbed. To the east was flatness and dark. To the west, the same.

    The night sky was crystal clear, and all the stars were out. It was absolutely beautiful. I could see my breath. It was colder than we had been used to. There was a definite chill in the air. Sweat ran down the side of my face, and I started to shiver.

    Eyes take a long time to adjust in darkness. The cones in your eyes enable you to see in the daytime, giving color and perception. But they're no good at night. What takes over then are the rods on the edge of your irises. They are angled at 45 degrees because of the convex shape of the eye, so if you look straight at something at night you don't really see it: it's a haze. You have to look above it or around it so you can line up these rods, which then will give you a picture. It takes forty minutes or so for them to become fully effective, but you start to see better after five. And what you see when you land and what you see those five minutes later are two very different things.

    Vince with his hoods was still out giving cover. They had gone out about 30 meters to the edge of the rise of the wadi and were looking over. We moved off to the side to make a more secure area. It took each of us two trips to ferry the berg ens jerricans, and sandbags.

    Mark got out Magellan and took a fix. He squinted at it with one eye.

    Even small amounts of light can wreck your night vision, and the process must start all over again. If you have to look at something, you close the eye that you aim with, the "master eye," and look with the other.

    Therefore you can still have 50 percent night vision, and it's in the eye that does the business.

    We lay in all-round defense, covering the whole 360degree arc. We did nothing, absolutely nothing, for the next ten minutes. You've come off a noisy, smelly aircraft, and there's been a frenzy of activity. You have to give your body a chance to tune in to your new environment. You have to adjust to the sounds and smells and sights, and changes in climate and terrain. When you're tracking people in the jungle you do the same: you stop every so often and look and listen. It happens in ordinary life, too. You feel more at ease in a strange house after you've been in it a little while. People indigenous to an area can sense instinctively if the mood is ugly and there's going to be trouble; a tourist will bumble straight into it.

    We needed to confirm our position because there's often a difference between where you want to be and where the R.A.F put you. Once you know where you are, you make sure that everybody else in the patrol knows.

    Passage of information is vital; it's no good just the leader having it.

    We were in fact where we wanted to be, which was a shame, because now we couldn't slag the R.A.F when we got back.

    The ground was featureless. It was hard bedrock with about two inches of rubbly shale over the top. It looked alien and desolate, like the set of Dr. Who. We could have been on the moon. I'd been in the Middle East many times on different tasks, and I thought I was familiar with the ground, but this was new to me. My ears strained as a dog barked in the distance.

    We were very isolated, but we were a big gang, we had more weapons and ammunition than you could shake a stick at, and we were doing what we were paid to do.

    Bombing raids were going on about 10-20 miles to our east and our northeast. I saw tracer going up and flashes on the horizon, and seconds later I heard the muffled sound of explosions.

    Silhouetted in one of the flashes I saw a plantation about a mile to our east. It shouldn't have been there, but it was-trees, a water tower, a building. Now I knew where the barking had come from. More dogs sparked up. They would have heard the Chinook, but as far as any population were concerned a helicopter's a helicopter. Problems would only come if there were troops stationed there.

    I worried about how good the rest of our information was. But at the end of the day we were there now: there wasn't a lot we could do about it. We lay waiting for signs of cars starting up but nothing happened.

    I looked beyond the plantation. I seemed to be staring into infinity.

    I watched the tracer going up. I couldn't see any aircraft, but it was a wonderful, comforting feeling all the same. I had the feeling they were doing it just for us.

    "Fuck it, let's get on with it," Mark said quietly.

    I got to my feet, and suddenly, to the west, the earth erupted with noise and there was a blinding light in the sky.

    "Fucking hell, what's that?" Mark whispered.

    "Helicopter!"

    Where it had sprung from I didn't have a clue. All I knew was that we'd just been on the ground ten minutes and were about to have a major drama. There was no way the heli could be one of ours. For a start, it wouldn't have had its searchlight on like that. Whoever it belonged to, it looked as if it was coming straight towards us.

    Jesus, how could the Iraqis be on to us so quickly?

    Could they have been tracking the Chinook ever since we entered their airspace?

    The light seemed to keep coming and coming. Then I realized it wasn't coming towards us but going upwards. The bright light wasn't a searchlight; it was a fireball.

    "Scud!" I whispered.

    I could hear the sighs of relief.

    It was the first one any of us had seen being launched, and now that we knew what it was, it looked just like an Apollo moon shot, a big ball of exhaust flames about 6 miles away, burning straight up into the air until it finally disappeared into the darkness.

    "Scud alley," "Scud triangle," both these terms had been used by the media, and now here we were, right in the middle of it.

    Once everything had settled down, I went up and whispered in Vince's ear for him to call the rest of the guns in. There was no running or rushing. Shape, shine, shadow, silhouette, movement, and noise are some of the things that will always give you away. Slow movement doesn't generate noise or catch the eye so easily, which is why we patrol so slowly. Plus, if you run and fall over and injure yourself, you'll screw everybody up.

    I told them exactly where we were, and confirmed which way we would be going, and confirmed the RV that was forward of us. So if there was any major drama between where we were now and our proposed cache area and we got split up, everybody knew that for the next twenty-four hours there was a meeting place already set up. They would go north, eventually hit a half buried petroleum pipeline and follow that till they hit a major ridgeline, and we'd meet there. It had to be that vague because anything more precise would mean nothing to a bloke in the middle of the desert with just a map and compass: all the map shows is rock. After that, and for the next twenty-four hours, the next RV would be back at the point of the landing site.