Eye of the Storm (47 page)

All of a sudden we were going in at the sharp end. Just from the sparse information I had been given in that first order I knew we were being sent into action.

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 The RAF squadrons operating Special Forces flights are Nos 7 and 47, the former operating Chinooks, the latter C-130s.

Chapter Twenty

I
HAD
a gut feeling from the very outset that we would be walking into a heavily defended location, from which perhaps not all of us could expect to walk away.

It was almost certain that we were being sent into a situation that must result in a firefight. Even from the few details I had received so far, it was plain to me that Intelligence was only guessing at the enemy’s strength. Indeed, I was also very dubious about their estimate of the number of enemy troops we were likely to encounter. Right from the start I realized that the figure thirty, which so conveniently matched our own strength, somehow failed to emit that much desired – and hoped for – ring of truth.

For obvious reasons we would try to make this a covert operation, which meant we’d be going in at night, but if the target was defended by the enemy in any great numbers, then the chances were that the mission would ‘go noisy’ on us – our euphemism for all hell breaking loose – before we could even get the explosive charges into position. Furthermore, no matter how difficult sneaking in might prove, getting out again promised to be even more of a nightmare.

I already had a number of burning questions buzzing around in my head, all of which needed answering before I could plan the mission with any accuracy. It was certain, too, that there were a few more I hadn’t even thought of yet. I therefore decided that this was one of those rare occasions when several minds were better than one. I called Mugger over and told him to seek out Major Peter, Pat and Des and have them rendezvous at my wagon in ten minutes.

Meanwhile I brewed myself a strong mug of tea, carefully rolled a cigarette and sat in the sunshine with my back against one of the Land Rover’s rear wheels. After a few minutes the others drifted over and I suggested they sit down facing me. When they were all settled I took a long swallow of my tea, looked at each of them in turn and announced, ‘We’ve had a signal giving us a target – known as Victor Two – which HQ want taken out. According to them it’s a microwave station which is only lightly defended. There’s a civilian parking lot near by but no major enemy presence.

‘I’ve signalled Al Jouf that I want a direct satcom voice link with the ops officer in half an hour so I can get some more info. I’ve already come up with a bunch of questions myself, but if you three can think of any others then let’s hear from you. The more we know, the better prepared we can be.

‘Which, of course, doesn’t mean a dicky bird if they don’t actually know anything else. In fact, let’s face it – they could come back with a “don’t-know” response to all our questions, leaving us with just the info we can pick up ourselves.

‘But there is a deadline on this one. They want us to complete the mission by zero six hundred hours on Friday.’

That grabbed their attention and gave them something to chew on, and for the next twenty minutes or so we sat by my vehicle weighing up the pros and cons. By the time the satcom link was established and Harry had called me over, the four of us had come up with a dozen very relevant questions. I was told by the ops officer, however, that most of our queries – particularly those concerning the enemy’s strength and their deployment, for which we were most eager to get replies – could not be answered until the following day.

What Intel could tell us was that the main target – a bunker about forty metres square – was completely surrounded by an eight-foot-high wall of prefabricated concrete slabs slotted into concrete posts. Between this wall and the target bunker was a six-foot-high intermediate chain-link fence. Having reached the main building we would find steps leading down to three underground rooms, one of which contained the vital switching gear. Just behind the bunker was the secondary target, a 250-foot-high mast. About a quarter-kilometre south-east of the military installation was a lorry park, which was used by civilian drivers as a night stop.

And that, apparently, just about covered all the information the ops officer back in Al Jouf could give us. Having made an arrangement to speak with him again at the same time the following day, I replaced the radio handset. Then I turned to face the other three and repeated all the details given in the ops officer’s briefing. They were silent for a moment; then Pat said, ‘If the stuff we’ve got to destroy is in one of three rooms, how the hell will we know which one? Does anyone know what communications switching gear looks like?’

The others looked as blank as I did. Time to take a hand, I decided.

‘OK, let’s not worry ourselves about that,’ I told them, far more cheerfully than I was actually feeling. ‘We’ll blow up all three rooms to make quite sure we’ve got the right one. The tricky bit is going to be the getting in and the getting out. Compared with that, the demolition side of it is a complete doddle.’ I paused to let this sink in, then went on, ‘I want a bit of time to myself to work out a plan, but let’s meet back here in one hour. Meanwhile,’ I added, ‘let’s try to build ourselves a model of the target.’

As they dispersed back to their vehicles I wandered off about twenty yards from the Land Rover until I found a rock to lean against. Sitting down, I rolled myself another cigarette and turned my mind to the coming operation.

From the location HQ had given me, Victor Two was situated about ten kilometres north of the new motorway being constructed to the south of the main supply route from Jordan, and which we had stumbled across on our way back from the airstrip recce the night before. This put the target about thirty-five kilometres from our LUP.

Our first problem was how to cross the motorway. It was most probably of British design and construction and, just like the motorways at home, consisted of three lanes each way with crash barriers lining both sides of a central reservation. According to Intelligence, the road needed only the finishing touches before its official opening.

Once over the motorway our next major hurdle, other than approaching the target without being spotted and challenged, would be making our way through the wall and fence protecting the main bunker. I worked out that the only way the demolition team could successfully breach the target was by blowing a way through both obstacles with instantaneous shaped charges, then rushing through the gaps and heading straight down the steps. Once below ground we could use similar charges to remove the doors, if any, to the three rooms, and place charges with two-minute fuses in each of them. The team would then make a dash back to the main group, which would be laying down supporting fire and otherwise responding to any enemy threat that might arise.

The mission was already exhibiting signs of being difficult, even dangerous, but certainly not impossible. I decided I could do the actual job with just three demolitionists, with two men assigned to each both to help carry the gear and to cover them. That meant just nine men in all for the most dangerous part of the operation. I would be one of them, while the remainder of the half-squadron would act as fire support and provide any additional backup that might become necessary after the primary task had been completed.

Having mentally sketched out the bare plan, I returned to the Land Rover and summoned all the senior NCOs and Major Peter and Captain Timothy. When they had all arrived I outlined the plan to them. ‘The final details depend a lot on the recce I want carried out tonight, and on the one I intend to lead myself just before the actual job,’ I told them. ‘But essentially that’s it.

‘It’s certainly not going to be easy,’ I continued. ‘I expect there to be guards on duty, and other additional troops floating around. In fact, I think we can take that as almost certain. But it’s just as certain that HQ want this little task carried out by zero-six-hundred Friday.’

Although details on the target were still sketchy, the others had managed to put together a model based on the little information we had and on what we could gather of the target area from our own maps. We had no photographs or imagery of any kind – what wouldn’t I have given just then for a portable fax machine – so we had to try to picture the target using the bare description we had been given over the radio, and from that build a very basic model. Between them the guys had come up with a selection of objects – some of the hexamine blocks, the white, one-and-a-half-inch cubes of solid fuel we used in our cooking stoves; small squared-off stones; sweets; cigarette packets; odd scraps of wood; matches; even some buttons – out of which to fashion a model. It may seem strange, but if you give the guys a look at even a crappy model before they attack a target, it boosts their confidence tremendously. They feel they have a far better working knowledge of what they’re getting into, and as a result are much more assured about the tasks that face them.

We knew that the base lay on the north side of an east-west road – MSR 3, soon to be superseded by the new motorway – and that fifty yards east of the main bunker and mast another road led off at right angles to the first, running towards the south. It would be along-side this north-south road that we would be making our approach. Having scraped the outlines and the relative positions of the two roads on a flat, sandy surface the guys had found conveniently near my Land Rover, they had created a square model of a building with a mast just behind it and ringed by both a fence and a wall. Squatting down by the model, I took them through the plan detail by detail.

‘The attacking unit will cross the east-west road directly in front of the target building,’ I told them, pointing the way with a stick. ‘The main fire-support group – at least half our total force – will be positioned south-west of the junction where the north-south road joins the first one. The rest of the men will be given their positions nearer the time – when, I hope, we know a bit more.

‘The reason we should know a bit more is because Pat and Serious here are going out tonight with their section to do a recce of the motorway and locate a decent crossing point.’

‘When do we leave?’ asked Pat.

‘Just before last light. We went that way last night and the going was good. It’s about thirty kilometres maximum to the motorway. Your job is to find us a place to cross, either underneath the roadway through one of the culverts, or across the middle where there’s a break in the crash barriers.’ Both NCOs nodded, and I continued, ‘There was no military presence there last night; in fact, there wasn’t a sign of anyone at all. It was like a ghost motorway. Even so, what I don’t want is you drawing any attention to yourselves or, worse, getting compromised.’

Our briefing ended, and it was a thoughtful group of NCOs who made their separate ways back to their own Land Rovers. Oddly enough, though, I was the one who felt uneasy, and for all the time that Pat’s unit was gone I found myself unable to relax. I was usually good at waiting, but now I had an uncomfortable feeling that the target wasn’t all that it seemed; that there was a lot more to it than I was being given by HQ. Throughout the night my gut feeling, and the knowledge that the main target was on a major junction, told me that we were in for an interesting time, to say the least. There was one thing I was certain about – we were going in come what may. Even so, I was standing on the edge of our LUP, waiting, when Pat and his recce group arrived back. I hadn’t been anxious about their safety because, having been in the area they’d just visited the night before, I knew that there was no Iraqi military presence there. But I wanted to have their intel – indeed, I needed it urgently.

It was about 0630, just on first light, when the vehicles returned. I walked over to Pat’s wagon and immediately asked him, ‘How was it?’

‘There’s no simple way across the motorway,’ he told me.

‘Does that mean we can cross, or that we can’t cross?’ I pressed him.

‘Well,’ he said, looking at me hard, ‘you could probably cross under a culvert, but it would be a tight squeeze. Plus you wouldn’t get the Unimog through, and if you came back the same way you’d have it all to do again.’

‘Did you go into a culvert to check the ground?’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t check,’ he confessed. ‘Time was against us. But further down the road we found a gap in the central crash barriers. There’s a continuous concrete-sided storm drain or open culvert running right along the central reservation between the two carriageways, about three feet wide and four feet deep. If we could get across there, at the gap, then right opposite is a service station, which didn’t appear to be manned. Though it could be used at any time by the Iraqis as a military base,’ he added.

‘Forget about that,’ I told him. ‘Tell me about getting across.’

Pat had obviously given the matter some careful thought. ‘Well, as I said, it won’t be that easy. But if each vehicle carried two sandbags inside the spare tyre on the bonnet, then when we get to the gap in the barriers we could fill in the central culvert with the sandbags, lay a couple of sand channels down on them and drive across.’