Chris Ryan (6 page)

Down To Two 71 due west and did ten kilometres in that direction, hoping that the Iraqis were wasting their time and resources by throwing out a cordon ahead of where they'd last seen us. The pace was very, very fast � speed marching, with every�one in line-ahead, going as fast as they could without running, probably at nine kilometres or six miles an hour. Now and then we crossed a dry wadi like the one in which we'd lain up, but for most of the way the desert was com�pletely open, without landmarks, and we kept going on a bearing. Whenever we heard the sound of jet engines over�head, we'd switch on our TACBEs and shout into them �but answer came there none. By the end of the ten kilometres westwards, the strain was starting to tell. We'd been moving at high speed, with fifty-pound belt-kits and our weapons, and we were sweating quite a bit in spite of the cold. That meant we were all thirsty, and soon we'd drunk nearly all our water. Whenever we stopped, we made sure to get more liquid down Stan's neck. He had kept going by sheer will-power; admittedly he had been relieved of the burden of his weapon, but even so, after such a collapse it was a major feat to maintain the pace we were setting. As soon as we'd fully lost sight of the vehicle behind us, we made our second right turn and headed north, stopping frequently to check our position with the Magellan. This went on until we thought we were back within about seven kilometres of the MSR. Then, as we went to ground for yet another map-check, I said to Andy, 'Right: from now on, we're coming to the most dangerous bit. What I'll do is push as hard as I can until we've crossed the MSR. There could be people looking for us along it. If we get caught on those tracks, out in the open, we're going to be knackered. If there are any enemy on the ridge beyond the road, we want to be up on the high ground as soon as we can.' `Yeah,' Andy agreed, 'push it out.' And he told everyone else, 'We're going to walk real fast until we cross the MSR. OK?' So we started again, travelling at an even faster pace. By 72 The One That Got Away then I was using the kite-sight most of the time, with my weapon tucked under my left arm. It was awkward and tiring to walk in that attitude. After a while my eyes started to hurt as well, because looking through the sight continuously was like staring at a light. But there was no alternative. Soon I could make out the ridge on which the AA guns were mounted, and I kept scanning for lights or artificial shapes, focusing my attention on what lay ahead. Disaster hit us without warning. We'd been walking for an hour since I last spoke to Andy, when at last we came to the MSR and started to cross the tracks. It turned out that there were about a dozen of them, running side by side, marked in hard mud, and they seemed to be spread over 200 or 300 metres. Out on that open expanse, obviously well used, I felt horribly exposed, so I turned up the pace even faster. Then, just short of the high ground, I looked through the night-sight yet again and saw what I thought was a build�ing or vehicle. I couldn't be sure what it was, but the object certainly looked artificial, so at the foot of the slope I stopped to confer with Andy. Looking round, I saw Stan behind me, with his head hanging down, then Vince . . . but no one else. `Where the fuck's the rest of the patrol?' I demanded. Vince just said, 'I don't know. We've lost them.' `What d'you mean, lost them?' `They split off somewhere.' Vince didn't seem too concerned. But I thought, 'Oh my God!' I was on the verge of panic, but all I said was, 'Right �let's get up on the high ground, fast.' I took one more look at the black object, decided it was a rock, and hustled forward as fast as I could. Just short of the top of the ridge I stopped again. Stan lay down like he was dead. Vince was completely zonked as well � he just sat there and couldn't speak. By my calculation, it was at least an hour since the patrol had split. Looking back across the open gravel plains with the kite-sight, I had a clear view for miles. It seemed im-possible that the others could have gone far enough to vanish. I kept scanning and thinking that at any second I Down To Two 73 would see five black figures trudging in single file � yet I couldn't get any movement anywhere. Men walking in that bare landscape would have showed up large as life � but somehow the desert had swallowed them. For a few moments I was dumbfounded. Then I thought: `My TACBE and Andy's are compatible; if both are switched on at the same time, we should be able to talk to each other.' The SOP for this situation was that anyone in difficulties would listen out on every hour and half-hour; so I waited five minutes till midnight, pressed the button and called: 'Andy! Andy!' No answer. I kept on for five minutes, fully expecting him to shout back, but no call came. Things were going from bad to worse. We were down to three men; one of them was out of the game, and the other didn't want to be in it. We had only two main weapons: I had my 203, and Vince a 203 and a pistol. Stan had nothing but a bayonet. I felt a kind ofjealousy and resentment start to burn inside me. The other group was larger, a stronger fighting force, most of them armed with Minimis. If anybody was going to get out, they were. I felt I'd much rather have been in their party than in ours. Already thirst was a problem. We'd done a fearsome tab, and Stan had drunk all my water. We had also lost the Magellan, which was with Mark. From now on we'd have to navigate by map, compass and dead reckoning � and this depended on knowing how fast we were covering the ground. Experience told me that the error was likely to grow ever-larger as we became more tired and tended increas�ingly to over-estimate the distance we'd gone. I regretted never having done a course in astral navigation: I could recognise the Plough, Orion's Belt and a few other con�stellations, but that was all. I looked round. Stan was asleep on the ground beside me, but Vince had moved off about fifteen metres and was squatting 'down. I thought he was having a shit, and that if he was, I'd better go across to make sure he buried it. But when I walked towards him, I found that what he was doing was burying his ammunition � a box of 200 rounds and a sleeve of 203 grenades. 74 The One That Got Away `What the hell are you doing?' I hissed. `I'm not carrying that stuff,' he said. 'It's too heavy. If we get into a big contact, we'll all be wasted anyway.' `You've got to fucking carry it,' I told him. `I can't.' `Give us those rounds here, then.' I was fuming. We only had the two weapons, and might really need the ammunition. But I couldn't turn round and order Vince to carry it. So I slung the 203 bandolier over my shoulder and let him bury the box. But I knew that from that moment I couldn't rely on him. I went back, sat down, and waited until 0030. Then on the half-hour I tried the TACBE again � but still the night yielded no reply. I felt angry as well as scared. I simply couldn't make out how the patrol had split. But whatever had happened behind us, I could see no future in sitting where we were; we had to get away from the MS R and put more distance behind us, in case the Iraqis tried to follow up. So we cracked on, walking again, with Stan on my shoulder and Vince behind him. For the next four and a half hours, we slogged on and on. By then, on the high plateau, the ground was flat as a billiard table, but it was covered with loose rocks the size of your fist. These made the going rough, and I could feel I was starting to get blisters along the sides of my feet. Every time I stopped to check our position, I'd say, 'Stan�just lie down,' and he'd lie down and go straight to sleep. If I tried to get Vince to help me plot where we were, he showed no interest in the map, because he was knackered, mentally as well as physically. I had a small torch attached to my com�pass, and I'd covered the lens with black masking tape, with just a pinhole in it, so that a very fine beam of light shone on the map. Whenever I tried to work out where we were, Vince would agree with anything I suggested. I would have pre�ferred him to argue. I kept wanting him to say, 'No, look: I think we're there,' because it would have made me think harder � but he'd gone completely inert. Anyway, we kept going until 0500, by which time we were Down To Two 75 all at the end of our tether. That was hardly surprising, as we'd covered the best part of seventy kilometres during the night. I was thinking, 'Dawn can't be far off. We'd better find somewhere to hole up for the day,' when we came across an old tank berm. This took the form of a bank of soil about six feet high, built in the shape of a big U or horseshoe with one end open, so that a tank could drive into it and be hidden from the other three sides. Just short of it, and lead�ing into it, were two tracks about twenty-four inches wide and fifteen deep, where a tank had sunk into the ground on its way in or out. There was no future in lying up inside the berm itself; the wind was blowing straight into its wide, open end, so that its walls gave no shelter, and anyone passing could look in. Equally, we couldn't lie outside the walls in the lee of the wind, because we'd have been in full view from the other direction. The only shelter from the wind, and at the same time cover from view, was in the tank-ruts outside. `We're going to have to stay here,' I said, and we lay down in the deepest part of one of the tracks, head to toe, Vince at one end, me in the middle and Stan beyond me. Down flat, we were more or less hidden, but I only had to raise my head an inch or two to see out. It was a precarious refuge to say the least � and if anyone came to visit the berm for any reason, we would obviously be compromised. While we'd been on the move, the wind hadn't seemed too cold; but now that we'd stopped putting out energy, it cut through our thin clothes viciously. That was bad enough, but when daybreak came I looked out, and the first thing I saw was heavy clouds piling in from the west, black as the ace of spades. I said, 'Oh, Jesus, fellers. The sky's really dark over there. It's going to piss down with rain.' Then I looked in the other direction and saw something square, about 600 metres off. It was either a little building or a box-bodied vehicle, with antennas poking up out of it, and at least two men round it. This showed how right we'd been to remain alert during the night: here was some small military outpost, miles from anywhere � exactly the sort of place we might have walked on to. 76 The One That Got Away Back at Victor we'd shared some jokes about how shy Arabs are about shitting. The SSM had told me that an Arab will walk miles rather than shit in front of his pal, and this berm seemed just the place one might choose. I couldn't see any old turds lying about, it was true, but the bank was just the right distance from the outpost. So I said to the guys, `There's an enemy position across there. We're going to have to be careful in case one of the fellers there comes across for a crap. We'll have to take turns to stay awake. Vince, you do the first couple of hours' stag.' Not that I'd worked out what we'd do if anybody did approach; we'd either have to leg it across the open ground or take the person out � and neither seemed a good option. There was no other cover for miles around, and if we killed anybody it would inevitably reveal our approximate position and throw away the advantage we'd gained from putting in the dog-leg. Nor did it seem likely that any of us would get our heads down, it was so bloody cold. The wind came knif�ing through my DPMs and smock, so I opened my canvas map case and laid it over my legs. Also I wrapped one sha�mag round my head, and pulled the other round my shoulders. Even then I was still freezing. But somehow I must have dozed off, because I woke up shaking violently, with what felt like pins and needles in my face. When I opened my eyes, I couldn't believe it: it was snowing, and we were covered in white. Big flakes were teeming down, coating us with slush as we lay there. I thought, 'Oh, for fuck's sake!' `Look at this!' I exclaimed bitterly. 'You'd think we were at the fucking North Pole.' Nobody answered, so I said, `Vince, are you all right?' He grunted something back. `Stan, how are you feeling?' `Oh, a lot better.' That lifted me � just to hear him sounding more like him�self. He seemed a hundred per cent livelier than he had been. `Thank Christ,' I said. 'Well � get something to eat.' All I Down To Two 77 had was my biscuits, so I ate two of them, chewing slowly to produce saliva and work them down. Stan and Vince both ate something too. `What was wrong in the night, Stan?' `I had my thermal underwear on, Chris. Sweated myself dry. I didn't have time to take it off when the contact started.' `You lucky bastard!' I said. Now, I mean.' `I'm still fucking freezing, though.' `So am I.' The worst result of the night � though I didn't realise it immediately � was that I'd badly burnt my feet. At first I couldn't understand what had happened; my boots were well run-in and completely comfortable, and had never given me the slightest trouble. Later I realised that the prob�lem was my socks. They were German Army issue, made of rough grey-brown wool, and because our build-up had been done in such a rush, I'd worn them for four or five days on end before the deployment. By the time we started walking, they were already stiff with sand, dust and sweat and now, as a result, they'd chewed the sides of my feet into large blis ters. The normal treatment � which we'd used on selection courses � would have been to push a needle into each blis�ter, extract the fluid, and inject tinc benzine, or Friar's Balsam. The process hurt like hell � it felt as if a red-hot poker had been laid against your foot � but it toughened the underlying skin enough for you to be able to walk on it. Even washing my feet and putting on plasters would have helped. But there, trapped in the tank-track, I couldn't even take my boots off to inspect the damage, let alone do anything to re�pair it. From time to time we talked in whispers. At one point Vince said, 'I knew we'd been compromised in the wadi.' `How?' `That fucking goatherd � I saw him.' `He must have seen you, then.' `Must have.' I cursed silently to myself. If Vince had admitted that at 78 The One That Got Away the time, we'd have got out of the wadi a lot quicker before the bulldozer appeared, and before the two guys appeared above us. We might even have made a clean break back to the drop-off area. Now and then during the day we saw military-looking ve�hicles driving in the distance. I lay in the tank-track thinking, 'This is shite!' The snow turned to rain, then back to snow. Our ditch
filled with water. The water dissolved the earth into mud, and soon we were wallowing in an icy quag�mire. There was mud all over us, all over our weapons. We were becoming sodden with the filthy stuff. But all we could do was lie there in it, from six o'clock in the morning right through till dusk. I'd often been cold before, but never in my life had I been as cold as that. The cold bit into our very bones. Time slowed to a crawl. Now and then we heard a vehicle drive past, but otherwise there was nothing to occupy our minds. I became so frozen that I didn't even want to move my arm so that I could see my watch, and I asked Stan what the time was. 'Twelve o'clock,' was the answer. Jesus! Was this day ever going to end? Trying to escape from reality, I thought back to other times when I'd been frozen. Once when I was seventeen, on my first escape and evasion exercise with the Territorial SAS, up at Otterburn in the middle of the winter, I was caught by the hunter force of Three Para. They got us, gave us a good kicking, stripped us naked, tied our wrists and anchored us up to the chest in the middle of the river until we were completely numb. Then they took us into an in�sulated airborne shelter, with five gas heaters blazing, where the temperature was about 120 degrees. As our circulation got going again, the pain became excruciating � and it was then, when we were doubled up in agony on the floor, that they started interrogating us about who we were and what we'd been doing. As soon as we were warm and starting to recover, they put us back in the river and so began the whole process again . . . In the tank-ruts, it was impossible to concentrate on any�thing for long, the discomfort was so intense. I tried to think Down To Two 79 of places where I'd been warm, like Africa, but I couldn't stay long in any of them. The one big plus was that Stan seemed to be back in his normal spirits. He'd brought a proper boil-in-the-bag meal in his belt-kit, and once he'd got that down him, he was ready to go. Vince, on the other hand, was feeling the cold worst of any of us. He wasn't whingeing, but he kept saying, 'Chris, I can't feel my fingers. I'm bloody freezing,' and I was saying, 'So am I. But we can't do anything, Vince. We can't move, so we've just got to stick it out.' `Can't we cuddle in together?' Not yet. It's too dangerous to move.' The temptation to get up and go, to start moving again, was colossal: anything would be better than enduring this agony. But one of the regiment's most fundamental SOPs is that during escape and evasion you don't move in daylight, and I decided that we must stick by it. If we were spotted walking, Iraqis would come at us from all sides. Grim as it was, I insisted we stayed where we were. Then, late in the afternoon, Vince put the wind up me by saying, 'Look � I'm going down here.' We had to do something. `What's the time, Stan?' `Four o'clock.' `Let's cuddle in, then.' Vince and I wriggled further down to where Stan lay, and the track was a bit wider. At that point we were all coming out into the open, but we took the risk and lay together, cud�dling in for warmth, with me in the middle and the other two on the outsides. After what seemed an age, I asked again, 'What's the time, Stan?' `Five past four.' `Fucking hell!' This was real torture. It seemed like eternity, lying there caked with freezing mud, with icy water soaking through to our shreddies. Whenever the snow stopped, the wind would get up and bring on the rain, and then the snow would start 80 The One That Got Away again � as if someone was programming the weather to cause maximum discomfort. At last, at about five-thirty, darkness began to fall, and we decided to crawl inside the berm so that we could shift around and get some feeling back into our bodies. But until we tried to move, we didn't realise what a state we were in. Then we found we were truly in the shit. My fingers and toes were numb, but that was to be ex�pected. It was when I went to stand up that I really got it: the pain in my knees and back was outrageous. I felt as if I had acute arthritis in my spine and hips. Suddenly I thought, `Jesus, we really are going down here.' For a moment I was hit by despair. Anyway, we dragged ourselves inside the berm and started trying to run back and forth, to start the energy going and get some heat moving inside our bodies. But my feet were still numb, and clay built up on the soles of my boots so that I could hardly make any progress. Our hands were so dead that we couldn't pick up our weapons but luckily they had slings, and what we did was duck down, put our heads through the slings, and stand up. As Vince did so, he said, 'Chris � I can't carry my weapon. I just can't.' I heard a note of desperation in his voice, so I just said quietly, 'Stan, you take it for him.' So Stan took Vince's 203, leaving him with his pistol. My memories of the next few hours are hazy, because I was being hit by hypothermia. All three of us were. But even though my mind was becoming clouded, I knew we had to keep moving. `Right, fellers,' I said. 'We're going to have to start off again.' So away we went. I was stumbling with my weapon slung over my shoulder and my hands tucked under my arms, trying to get some feeling back into them. I kept think�ing, 'If we have a contact, we're knackered, because we're not going to be able to shoot back.' I couldn't have pulled the trigger or changed magazines to save my life. Stan and I were doing the navigating, but he was getting his compass out more often than I was. Down To Two 81 `Where are we heading?' I'd ask, and he'd say, Due north. We're all right.' Then the clouds thickened up. Another flurry of snow drove into our faces, hurtling in from the north-west, and soon we were tabbing over ground as white as on a Christ�mas card. One advantage of the blizzard was that it hid us; no one was going to see us while so much snow was falling. But equally, we ourselves were blinded, and could easily walk on to an enemy position without spotting it. When the moon came out again, the desert was light as day, and I could read my map without the torch. Vince, who kept lagging behind, called, 'Hey, you're going to have to slow down. I need a rest.' `Vince,' I told him, 'you can't rest. We've got to keep mov�ing, see if we can warm ourselves up.' The worst thing was that we were walking hard but not getting any less cold. Normally, after you've walked for an hour, your circulation's really going, and you're warm all over. But because our clothes were soaked through, and this bitter wind was blowing, the chill-factor was keeping our body temperature right down. Also, there was no fuel left in me to re-stoke the fires: I'd burnt it all up. I thought, 'If it's still like this tomorrow morning, we're all going to be dead.' I knew that in our state, without warm clothes or shelter or food, we couldn't survive such conditions much longer. In fact I thought it was likely we would all die that night. I'd never experienced such pain from cold, such agony in spine and legs. In the course of training I'd had plenty of lectures on hypothermia, and now I recognised some of the symp�toms in myself: disorientation, dizziness, sudden mood swings, outbursts of anger, confusion, drowziness . . . Normally a man in that state would be put into a sleeping bag or a space blanket and brought round � but here there was no respite. So we kept walking � until Vince really started going down. 'Wait for me,' he called. 'You've got to wait.' We waited a few times. But then I decided that shock tac�tics were necessary. I knew that at home he had two young 82 The One That Got Away girls and a little baby, and that he was nuts about his family. So I gripped him by the arm and said, 'Vince, if you don't fucking keep going, you're never going to see your kids. Think about your home. Think how they'll want you back. Now � get your finger out and start moving.' `Listen,' he said, 'I want to go to sleep. I'm too tired. I've got to sit down.' `Vince,' I said, 'we can't sit down. If we stop, we're going to fucking DIE. Get that? If we lie down and sleep, we'll freeze to death, and never know anything about it.' We carried on walking for a bit, and then he shouted at me, 'Chris!' `What?' `My hands have gone black.' I thought, 'Jesus! Frostbite!' My own fingers were still numb, and I wondered what state my hands were in under my gloves. I walked back to Vince and found him staring down at his hands. He was wearing black leather gloves. `My fucking hands have gone black,' he repeated. 'My fucking hands!' I realised his mind was wandering, so I just said, 'OK, Vince, put them in your pockets. Get them warm, and the colour'll come back to them. Come on now: keep up with me and Stan, mate. Keep going.' At that point I can't have been thinking straight. What I should have done was to keep hold of him, or actually tie him to me. But that didn't occur to me, and I just kept walking. Stan and I would tab on for a bit, then wait for Vince to catch up. Then the same again. I tried to alternate, being sharp with him one moment, kind the next. One minute I'd shout, `Get a grip!' trying to spark him into action. Then I'd turn comforting, tap him on the shoulder, and say, 'Come on, Vince, keep walking. Everything'll be all right. We're going to get out.' Vince's own behaviour was swinging wildly. Several times he started yelling out loud � which of course was bad for our nerves, as anybody could have heard him from hundreds of metres off. Stan hissed, 'Vince � be quiet!' and he shut up for a while. Down To Two 83 Because hypothermia was hitting us, our navigation had become erratic. For some time I'd had the feeling that I was drifting away from reality. The map was saying one thing, and what was happening on the ground seemed to be quite different. Somehow we were getting dragged off to the north-east all the time. I don't know why, but something in me kept pulling me that way. I saw what was happening, and began to wonder � quite illogically � if I had a tendency to head north-east because I'd been born in the north-east of England. Basically we were wanting to head north-west, and we kept having to cor�rect ourselves, constantly checking on the compass. Every few minutes Stan would say, 'Eh � we're coming off. We're coming off.' Then the clouds would open, and we'd get a glimpse of the Plough, and we could bring ourselves on course again. Then more snow flurries would come in, the stars would be blotted out, and we'd veer off once more. Because it was so cold, I had one hand in my pocket or underneath my arm. Whenever we stopped, the shivers came on, making it hard to concentrate on the map. Spells of weakness kept sweeping over us, fogging our minds still more. Struggling as we were, we cracked on for a while � but then, as we stopped once again, we realised that Vince was no longer with us. When Stan shouted back for him, there was no answer. 'Chris,' he said, 'we've lost him.' `We can't have,' I answered stupidly. 'He must be just behind us.' We started back on our tracks. Naturally I was worried, but I felt bad-tempered about having to retreat. Where snow was lying, it was easy to follow our footprints; but then there were long stretches of bare rock from which the snow had been blown clear, and whenever we crossed one, we had to cast about on the far side, working forward and back to pick up our trail again. Now we realised how much we'd been veering about as we advanced, zig-zagging all over the place. After twenty minutes there was still no sign of Vince. We called as loud as we dared, and we could see a reasonable 84 The One That Got Away distance � but I suddenly realised that our quest was hope�less. The truth hit me with a jolt: it was half an hour, at least, since we'd seen him, and we had no idea what he'd done. He might have walked off to the right; he might have walked off to the left; he might be walking straight backwards; he might have lain down in a hollow and gone to sleep. This last seemed the most likely; that was all he'd been wanting to do for hours � stop and get his head down. If he had curled up somewhere out of the wind, we could spend all night walk�ing in circles and never find him, probably killing ourselves in the process. `Stan,' I said, 'I'm making a decision. We're going to turn round and leave him.' I could feel my companion's hes�itation, so I added, 'Fuck it � I'll take the responsibility. We've got to leave him, or we'll kill the pair of us.' `OK, then,' said Stan. 'Fair enough.' It was a terrible decision to have to take, but I saw no alternative. I kept thinking of the times I'd been out on the hills in Scotland, and the weather had turned really bad. In the Highlands, there'd always been the comforting thought that we could get into a barn or a bothy, or go to a hotel. The same applied in Norway � we could always take refuge in a hotel or a but if things became impossible. But here there was no such facility: nowhere to go, nowhere to escape from the wind and snow, nowhere to dry our kit and warm up, no-where to find food. I felt all the more certain that if conditions were the same in the morning, Stan and I would die as well. There was no way we would resuscitate our�selves with no shelter and absolutely nothing to light a fire with. So with heavy hearts we turned round and cracked on again, and left Vince on his own. four DOWN TO ONE Our only hope was to get down off the high ground into warmer air, and gradually, as we tabbed on, we did seem to be descending. We never went down any steep gradient, but all the same it felt as if we were losing height. I hoped to God that Vince was doing the same � that he would find his way down off this cruel, high plateau, reach low ground some�where, get his head down in a hollow, and wake up in the morning. Our map showed a line of pylons running across our front, and another line that terminated in the middle of no�where. So we thought that if we hit the first set of masts, and then the second, we'd know exactly where we were. But it didn't turn out like that. We only hit the one line of masts, and couldn't find any more. Later we discovered that the second line didn't exist except on the map. But at least we seemed to be coming down. The snow flurries died out, and the wind became less bitter. Then through the kite-sight I saw a black-looking band running across our front. We sat down to study it, and presently made out that it was another main road. Approaching cau�tiously, we lay in a hollow which turned out to be full of mud: somehow, in the middle of the arid desert, we'd chosen a place like a miniature peat bog. In front of us we saw a chain-link fence running parallel with the road, maybe ten metres on the far side of it, and shining faintly in the moonlight. Beyond the fence some�thing pale was