Michael Asher (11 page)

what Mohammed had to say, but were evidently familiar with the story � another reason to believe it, I thought. Remembering that Ryan had men-tioned a possible building not far from the berm where the SAS had spent 25 January, I wondered if he might have mistaken the farms of these Bedouin for an enemy position. They told me, though, that the farms � actually it was a sin�gle farm with several buildings � had been built since 1991, and that there had been nothing on the same site previously. I turned my attention back to Mohammed and asked what he had done with Vince's body. 'I put it in the back of the pick-up as I said,' he told me. 'I had to open the tailgate and bend him over to get him in. I took him to the police HQ at Rumadi, but they said they had no vehicles and asked me to take the body to Habbaniya where there was a proper morgue with a refrigeration plant. I took him there after I had handed the cards and the other things over to the Rumadi police. I was tempted to keep the money, but I looked again at the photo of his wife and children and I felt guilty and didn't. I kept the binoculars, though, because after all they were no good to him any more and I knew they would be useful in the desert. I still have them, but they're broken � my children played with them, you know.' `Could I see them?' I asked. `Yes, certainly, but they are at my house. I'll have to bring them later.' Turning my mind to objects, I suddenly realized that there was something I had missed � or rather, several things. Mohammed had never mentioned the pistol Vince had been carrying, nor any ammunition. Neither had he mentioned twenty gold sovereigns, or Vince's dog-tags. When I asked him about the pistol and ammunition, he began to cough nervously. 'I never found any weapon or bullets,' he snapped. `Come on,' I said. 'This man was a soldier. He must have had a weapon and ammunition.' `I said there weren't any.' His manner had changed so abruptly that I knew he was hedging. The more I pressed him, the more aggressive he became, and he began look-ing around for a way of escape. I sensed that he knew about the pistol; in fact I guessed he had kept it and did�n't want to tell me. I decided that it would do no good to press him further about it and turned instead to the dog-tags and the gold. He heaved an audible sigh of relief. He hadn't found any gold on Vince, he, told me, neither had he found any dog-tags. His voice had regained conviction and I was inclined to believe him this time. After all, he had admitted keeping Vince's binos, because they were no good to him any more, but had returned his money out of guilt. In any case, he hadn't stripped Vince's body and since the sovereigns were concealed around his waist, it was perfectly possible he hadn't found them. The dog-tags would have been around his neck, though, and easy to find. They would have had no value to Mohammed, and therefore there would have been no motive for his denying that he'd found them. Yet he insisted Vince had not been wearing dog-tags. The dog-tags remained a mystery, but the pistol did not. That evening, Abbas took me aside and told me, `Mohammed has the pistol. I know he has because I have seen it. He took the pistol and the ammunition, but he didn't want to admit it.' `Why?' I asked. 'He admitted taking the binoculars.' `Yes, but that was different. He doesn't want to admit in front of government people that he took a firearm, which would be illegal.' It made sense, but though I subsequently tried to per�suade Mohammed to show me the pistol privately, he declined. By the time I had finished questioning Mohammed, there were at least eight or nine Bedouin around us, which made my next proposal rather awkward. I was sat�isfied now that I really had found the spot where Vince had died, and I wanted to carry out my undertaking to the Phillips family to build some kind of memorial here. The obvious thing was a cairn � a fairly common feature in most deserts � but I wondered how these locals would react to the idea of building a memorial in their back gar�den to an enemy soldier who had also been a Christian. When I explained what I wanted to do, there was silence for a moment. `Why not?' Abbas said. 'He deserves it.' `Yes,' one of the Bedouin agreed. 'He was a very brave man to come here far from his own country.' `They were all brave,' another said. 'They were real men, those soldiers, to have endured the conditions here in winter. Heroes every one.' The rest of the Bedouin mumbled in agreement and I felt humbled. McNab had called them ragheads, but I knew this was as fine a tribute to the SAS as I was ever likely to hear. There were no stones in the place I wanted to build the cairn, but the Bedouin knew where to get them. We jumped into Mohammed's pick-up and drove about a kilometre to the outcrop of limestone I had seen from some distance away. The Bedouin helped me pile the stones into the back of the truck and soon we were roar ing back to the site of Vince's death. Before building the cairn itself, I had one more task to perform. I took out a small can of Guinness I had brought from Britain �Vince's favourite tipple � and while the Bedouin watched in surprise, I buried it in the earth, where the cairn was going to be. Then the men helped me pile the rocks and boulders over it and stood back. For a moment no one spoke. The sun was going down: a vast globe of lemon light balanced on the world's edge. A slight breeze flut�tered the Bedouins' dishdashas, but the desert was utterly silent. This place has already become a sacred site, I thought, and thanks to all the Bedouin who had gathered here, the story of Vince Phillips would blend into local tradition, becoming part of the landscape, a legend that would be handed down among the desert people for gen�erations. Just as the spirits of their ancestors still lived here among them, so Vince's voice would be here for ever, in the wind that drifted across the plateau. Building this cairn had been a simple act, but a satisfying one. I had proved to my own satisfaction that Vince had not compromised the Bravo Two Zero patrol. He had done his job, and no one could ask for more. I hoped this cairn would itself become part of the landscape and remain here for ever in memory of a brave British soldier who had given his life for his country � Sergeant- Vincent David Phillips, of A Squadron, 22 SAS.

CHAPTER twenty FINDING THE SITE OF VINCE'S death was a tremen-dous advantage to me because, like the first LUP, the spot was a fixed anchor point from which I could work both backwards and forwards. This was important, for while I had found the place, and probably the cause, of Vince's death, I had not yet ascertained the circumstances. That night we were invited to the Bedouin farm for dinner, and our hosts, who belonged to the Duleim tribe, slaughtered sheep for us. Once again a vast number of guests popped up out of the desert, and after we had gorged ourselves and were sat drinking tea, there was a lot of banter. Abbas was ribbed ceaselessly as 'the one who caused the prob�lem in the first place', and at one point a row broke out between the Bedouin and Abu Omar, the sour-faced mili�tary minder, who declared that the SAS patrol had been `cowards who ran away from two boys and an old man'. It did my heart good to see the Duleim tribesmen throw�ing down their headcloths and declaring angrily that the government representative didn't know what he was talk�ing about. These people had to dice with the conditions Bravo Two Zero had encountered here their entire lives and understood instinctively that the true heroism the patrol had showed was not in gunning down countless men, but in surviving the appalling enemy of this desert in winter. At one point during the evening there was a touching ceremony when Mohammed handed over to me Vince Phillips's binoculars. I looked at them carefully � they were badly broken, and although they were olive-green in colour, they were certainly not identifiable as British army issue. I remembered, though, that Ryan had made a reference in his book to members of the patrol buying pairs of little binoculars in Abu Dhabi before the opera�tion, which he described as a distinct asset. Surely, I thought, this tended to support Mohammed's claim that the binos had belonged to the dead Vince. Afterwards, I asked him if he knew of any tank berms in the area, hoping to find Ryan's LUP of 25 January. He looked puzzled and began to ask the others, 'What does he mean?' Nobody seemed to know, so I explained that I was looking for a sort of hole in the ground where the British soldiers might have hidden. Mohammed's face suddenly cleared. 'I know the place,' he said. 'The place I found tracks the day after I took Flips to the morgue � but it wasn't anything to do with tanks. It was a water catch-basin the Bedouin dug with a bulldozer.' `You- mean you returned to the area after you'd taken Phillips's body away?' `Yes, because I thought there might be more of these men about. I saw tracks by Flips's body the day before and I knew he hadn't been alone. I returned with five other people � my relatives, mostly.' Ever since arriving on the plateau I had wondered why tanks would be in place up here when they were needed at the front in Kuwait, and the idea that the 'tank berm' was a catch-basin for the Bedouin seemed to make more sense. The next morning, soon after first light, we headed out to see the 'berm' in Mohammed's pick-up. As we drove, I asked Mohammed if there were many such basins around here. 'No,' he said. 'This is the only one I know of. We haven't dug any in recent years because of the drought. Actually, there isn't much of it left now because it has been filled in by rain and snow over the years, but at the time I found Flips � ten years ago it was quite deep.' He stopped the car surprisingly soon after starting off and showed me an oval-shaped hollow, no more than a foot deep, but partly surrounded by what had obviously once been high banks, of spoil. It wasn't much to look at, but it was clearly the remains of some sort of earthwork, and I for one hadn't come across anything else like it in the area. Surely, I thought, this had to be it. `So you came here the day after you found Phillips?' I asked Mohammed. `Yes,' he said. 'I returned with five other men and we followed the tracks back from the place I found the body. It was very muddy then, and the tracks were clear. I could tell they weren't the tracks of locals. Anyway, when we arrived we found a lot of scuff marks around the water-basin � signs that people had been here, not just passing by, but had spent some time here. There were quite deep ruts leading up to the pit and there were a lot of marks around them too. The tracks led � off north directly towards the place where I had found the body.' I looked around and noticed that the Duleim houses where we had had dinner were in clear sight, not much more than a kilometre away to the east. I wondered again if they or their predecessors could have been mistaken by Ryan for a military post. This was crucial, I realized, because it was the apparent proximity of the military post (or vehicle) which had prevented the SAS men from cud�dling up, getting on a hot brew or moving around, any or all of which actions might have saved Vince's life. Ryan even emphasizes in his book how Vince asked him if they could cuddle up together, to which Ryan replied that it was 'too dangerous to move'. Mohammed confirmed that there had been no houses in that spot in 1991, and as for a military post, there never had been one here, he said. The nearest military instal�lation was the now ruined one I had seen while following in the footsteps of McNab, more than fifteen kilometres away. That couldn't even be seen from the berm. What about a military vehicle? `There was no military vehicle here then,' Mohammed said emphatically. 'I was here at the time, and I would either have seen it or seen its tracks. Nothing can pass through here without the Bedouin knowing. There was no military post and no vehicle, and no house that could have been mistaken for one.' What surprised me about the berm was that it was so close to the road � no more than ten kilometres away. This was astonishing, because Ryan says that they left the road at about 0030 hours on 25 January and did not arrive here until 0500 hours � four and a half hours' march to cover ten kilometres. When I looked closely at Ryan's map, the LUP of 25 January appeared to be only about ten kilometres north of the road, suggesting strongly that this could be the spot. And if it was, I could make a good assessment of the distance Ryan actually covered on the night of 24/25 January. Disregarding his own map, he writes that they had covered sixteen kilo�metres southwards from the LUP, then ten kilometres west, then another ten to fifteen kilometres north back to the road. At the most generous estimate, then, his group had covered only forty kilometres by midnight on 24 January from the original lying-up place, in roughly eight hours, rather than the sixty de la Billiere reports in his account. This would, incidentally, mean that they were walking not at the nine kilometres per hour Ryan says, but at five kilometres per hour � the standard SAS pace for an unladen patrol in good conditions. If the lying-up place of 25 January was only ten kilo-metres north of the road, then even giving Ryan's recorded figures the benefit of the doubt, his group cov�ered only fifty kilometres that night, rather than the seventy he says. Judging by his map, though, the distance may have been even less � perhaps no more than forty. Anyone who has tried to march forty kilometres at night over rough and unknown country carrying thirty kilos will recognize that this was no mean feat. To have cov�ered seventy, or indeed, the 'two marathons' as McNab says they did, beggars belief. Incidentally, if Ryan did cover fifty kilometres that night in eleven and a half hours, then the average pace was 4.3 kilometres per hour � one which most SAS men would recognize as pretty good, given the execrable conditions. My next task was to measure the distance between the berm and the place where Mohammed had found Vince's body. I asked Mohammed to take me back to where we had built the cairn, walking in a straight line. Although I couldn't see the little pile of stones from the berm itself, it very quickly came into focus in the flat desert. There was no mistaking the reading on my GPS. The place Vince had died was exactly three kilometres from the berm. I checked it over and over again, but � there could be no possible doubt. It was three kilometres from where Ryan and the others had lain up to the place they had lost Vince. At the pace they had been going on the previous night, that would have made it under an hour's journey, but taking into account that they were suffering profoundly from hypothermia, it might have been an hour and a half. Yet Ryan states baldly in his book that they covered forty kilometres that night and lost Vince after twenty. I had already noticed that, since the Krabilah road lay only sixteen kilometres north of the berm, it would put Vince's disappearance north of that road, when Ryan states it was to the south of it. But more than this, Ryan clearly gives the idea in his book that Vince's decline was a gradual process that continued over hours as they tried in vain to encourage him onwards, with ever-diminishing success. If Vince had gone within an hour or so of setting off, it immediately threw the whole affair into a very different light. It even meant that the date given on Vince's head�stone in St Martin's churchyard in Hereford � 26 January 1991 � was probably wrong. Ryan says they left the berm at about 1830 hours, so if my information was correct, the time of Vince's collapse � or at least his disappearance � cannot have been after about 2000 hours on 25 January. If what Mohammed had told me was true, then Ryan must have been extremely confused about the events of that night, because even the facts he reported to the Regiment were wrong. This is borne out by the Commanding Officer's official letter to Mrs Phillips informing her of Vince's death, stating that he had wandered off in the 'course of the night, and had died on the night of 25/26 January. This information, which can only have come from Ryan, .suggests that the disappearance of Vince Phillips had occurred well into the night's march, rather than a mere three kilometres � 1.8 miles � from the starting point. Ryan did apparently tell the Phillips family that Vince had died on the night of 25 January � why, then, does the headstone bear the date 26 January? The only other versions of what happened that night come from McNab and de la Billiere. Both probably orig�inate from Ryan or Stan, and are therefore interesting for the extra details they put in or leave out. McNab, for instance, says that at one point when they stopped Vince had become incoherent, and Stan and Ryan tried to hud�dle around him to give him body heat, but without much success. He implies that they were walking together until they started to ascend a gradient, when Stan stopped to wait for Vince, but Vince didn't appear, whereupon both of them went back to look for him. De la Billiere's account differs only in one significant detail: he reports that Ryan left Stan and went back to look for Vince alone. Both accounts are wrong in at least one aspect � Ryan and Stan could not have been climbing a gradient when Vince disappeared, since in the area where Mohammed found Vince's body there are no gradients: the desert here is completely and utterly flat. McNab himself repeats the intelligence brief the patrol were given before the mis�sion, stating that within seventeen kilometres of the original MSR, the land dropped no more than fifty metres. If Stan and Ryan abandoned Vince to die alone and cold as Stan has now admitted, then, of course, they had had no choice. Militarily, they had done the right thing. The great weakness of all Special Forces operations has always been the problem of casualties. The official doc�trine is simply to leave them, but there is also an unwritten code of comradeship in the army obliging men to save their comrades if there is the slightest chance. There could be no moral condemnation of Ryan and Stan. Had they not abandoned him, they would all have died. It struck me suddenly that Ryan had felt intensely guilty about Vince's death. Even after he returned to Britain he admitted that thoughts about Vince plagued him, and he continually went over the things he might have done to save him Ryan must have known when writing his book that his condemnation of Vince was a breach of Regimental tra-dition, yet he adamantly followed it through. The other members of the patrol were obviously furious at his por-trayal of Vince, because, following the TV version of The One That Got Away, the Phillips family received letters from Coburn, Dinger and McNab, all criticizing Ryan in no uncertain terms. 'At no time throughout the patrol did Vince display the actions portrayed . . .' Coburn wrote. `On the contrary, the very fact that he was in the patrol disputes Ryan's version of events, otherwise he would never have been allowed to deploy across the border .. . although I did not know Vince well, I found him of immense help to me personally on the build-up to the operation. His strength of character and Regimental expe-rience was a constant source of confidence. His actions on the ground can only be described as professional and you . . . have every right to be justly proud of him.' u Stan later told the Daily Mirror, 'What gives me the greatest pain is how Vince's death was written about by Chris Ryan. Any one of us could have dropped first. It just happened to be Vince. But to say, as Ryan did, that he wasn't up to it was despicable � utterly despicable � and the whole Regiment thought it and still thinks that.' Dinger characterized his reaction to the portrayal of Vince by Ryan as 'shock, anguish, loathing' and called it a pack of lies. 'If you can draw any comfort from this let�ter,' he told Veronica and her husband, 'it is that I tell you the truth. Vince was a good mate and a key member of the patrol in a difficult situation. Vince DID NOT corn- 217 promise the patrol or behave in the manner portrayed. It was an honour to have known Vince and served with him on operations.' 29 In a letter to Vince's father, McNab confirmed that Vince had done his job proficiently and attacked Ryan bitterly for denigrating 'comrades who would have sacri�ficed their lives for his had the situation demanded it'. 30 Despite these reassurances from other patrol members, there was still the classified SAS report about Vince which had been leaked to the Mail on Sunday that appeared to have given official sanction to Ryan's story. A close scrutiny of the report, though, leaves little doubt as to its source. Since McNab does not say that Vince alerted the herdsboy by moving, and Dinger expressly denied it, surely this allegation can only have come from Ryan himself. Similarly, the allegation that Vince fell asleep on stag is only mentioned by Ryan, and the asser�tion that his 'heart
wasn't in it and he lacked the will to survive' is similar in form and content to Ryan's book. As he was officially second-in-command of Vince's half-patrol, Ryan would have been the proper source for such a report. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that Ryan's last conversation with Vince, lying in the ruts by the berm, slowly freezing to death, might provide a key. Here Ryan says that Vince confessed to the fact that he had spotted the herdsboy, and that the herdsboy had therefore seen him, confirming Ryan's view that the ser�geant had jeopardized the entire mission. One of the reasons that Vince was suffering so badly from hypother- mia was because � on his own admission � Ryan had refused to allow them to break hard routine, as McNab had done, and risk compromise by the enemy position 600 metres away. Yet by making hot brews and risking compromise, McNab had put the lives of his men higher than tactical considerations. And my eyewitness said there was no enemy position nearby, so Ryan's refusal to relax is questionable, considering Vince's condition. Could it be, I wondered, that Ryan felt so deeply guilty for his refusal to abandon hard routine, even though according to my witness there had been no enemy nearby, that when it came to writing his book he was compelled to try to persuade his readers � and perhaps even himself � that he was not really responsible for what happened to Vince? CHAPTER twenty-one THE KRABILAH ROAD WAS ONLY sixteen kilometres north of. Vince's cairn and as I came off the roof of the plateau and began to descend into the more broken coun�try beyond, I saw the line of pylons that Ryan mentions running parallel with the asphalt road. This confirmed my belief that Vince's disappearance could not have occurred twenty kilometres north of the berm as Ryan says, because he also recalls that as he and Stan descended from the 'cruel, high plateau' he hoped to God that Vince was doing the same. I followed their-progress under the pylons and across the road towards the two-metre chain-link fence sealing off the railway line. The fence looked impenetrable from a distance, though Ryan wrote that if they had not been in such a weakened condition they would have scaled it in a minute. As it was, they had to cut their way through with a Leatherman. I had one with me and would have like to have done the same, but my minders were waiting on the other side and I thought it inadvisable to start cut�ting up government property. It was only when I got right up close that I saw it would not be necessary � the fence was only nominal, riddled with gaps and holes, and I passed through without even breaking step. I was fairly sure that I was on Ryan's and Stan's line of march on the night of 25/26 January. Ahead of me, beyond the railway line, was a round-topped hill, perhaps the very same one on which Ryan had seen anti-aircraft gun-emplacements. A few kilometres further on the land broke up into a moonscape of serried ridges, bronze-green in colour and penetrated by the deeper green veins of wadis filled with low scrub. It was in one of these wadis that the two of them had holed up at about 0530 hours on the morning of 26 January, wrapping their arms round each other for warmth. WHEN AT MID-MORNING THE SUN broke out of the clouds, Ryan realized that it was going to be a fine day and said a silent prayer of thanks The sunshine saved their lives. One more day in the kind of conditions they had endured in the berm would certainly have seen them off, he thought. The relative warmth of the day revived them and, to restore morale, they began cleaning their weapons and laying their kit out to dry At about noon, they heard goats approaching and saw to their dis�may that the animals were accompanied by a young shepherd, who sat down to watch his flock. Ryan was all for 'doing' the Arab if he came in their direction, but Stan demurred � he thought the shepherd might be able *to help them get a vehicle and food. The argument was cut short when the man approached them abruptly and, according to Ryan, Stan jumped up and grabbed him. He seemed innocuous enough � Ryan suspected that he was of low intelligence � but Stan began drawing pictures in the air and repeating 'house' and 'car', to which the man nodded and jabbered in Arabic. Impulsively Stan decided to go off with the man in the hope of getting hold of a vehicle. Ryan thought the proposal ridiculous, even stupid, but Stan was set on the idea, and was even prepared to leave his weapon behind to cut a less aggres�sive figure. Eventually Ryan let him go, on the understanding that he would wait here in the wadi until last light � about 1830 hours � and if Stan failed to return, he would press on alone. Stan had already started off with the Arab when Ryan called him back and insisted that he took his weapon. Once again he tried to persuade his comrade to shoot the Iraqi, but Stan replied that he trusted him. Taking his M16 but leaving his web�bing, he set off east with his new companion. Ryan watched the two of them until they disappeared, swal�lowed up by the landscape. He was not to see Stan again until after the war. RYAN AND MCNAB'S BOOKS BOTH contain short descriptions of Stan's last few hours of freedom gleaned from personal contact and the official debrief after the war. Stan's own account was included in a television documentary first transmitted in February 2002. Ryan wrote that Stan had walked for about four hours with the goatherd until, in the distance, they had seen a group of buildings with vehicles parked outside. The man had pointed to them and turned away, leaving Stan to approach them alone. As he had neared the houses, an Arab in a white dishdasha had emerged and Stan had tried to engage him in conversation. The man had made a dive for the vehicle � a Toyota Land-Cruiser � and, thinking he was going for a weapon, Stan shot him down. The sound of the gunshot brought about eight militia-men armed with AK47s charging out of the building, and Stan blasted away at them, taking out two, until his ammunition ran out. He made an attempt to get into the Land-Cruiser, but while he was fumbling for the key, the windscreen was smashed in and he found him�self staring up the barrel of a Kalashnikov. Firing wildly into the air, the Iraqis bundled him into another car and drove him to the nearest town, where he was questioned by officers and given tea. Later, though, he was starved, blindfolded, and beaten so badly he sustained a hairline fracture of the skull. Eventually he was reunited with McNab and Dinger in a holding centre in Baghdad. Stan's account of his capture by the Iraqis, as portrayed in the television reconstruction, was broadly similar. However, the version of events that McNab says Stan told him when they met is basically the same, but differs in some details. McNab reports, for example, that it was the shepherd � an old man, in this version � who volun�teered to take them to a house and a vehicle, drawing pictures in the sand. While in McNab's account it is clear that Stan intended to hijack a vehicle, return with it and make a dash for the Syrian border that night, Ryan's account is far more ambiguous. Although Stan- does talk about getting a tractor, Ryan repeats that he is convinced the Iraqis wouldn't help. He likened their situation to two German paratroopers dropped in the UK during World War II � any British civilian offering assistance would only be doing so as a ruse, `to put us in the nick', as Ryan wrote. At one stage Ryan apparently tells his mate, `It'll mean us splitting up,' � an almost subliminal indication that he knew his friend would not return. In McNab's text it is a but rather than a group of buildings that the shepherd guides Stan to, and a soldier rather than a civil-ian in a white dishdasha whom the SAS man drops. A group of six or seven more soldiers then runs out, and Stan gets off three shots, hits two of the squaddies, gets a stoppage and runs to the car, where he is brought up sharply by a rifle in the ribs. I HAD ASKED ABBAS IF HE KNEW of any isolated cottage, but or group of buildings in the desert nearby, and once again he came up trumps. As I camped that night on the side of a broad wadi, he turned up and told me that there was only one such house that he knew of �about ten kilometres from here and twelve from the main road leading to Ani, the nearest small town. The house was uninhabited now, but was owned by a man from his own tribe called al-Haj Abdallah, an educated person who lived in Ani, but who owned a large flock of sheep. Abdallah, he told me, knew about the capture of a British commando here in 1991. Not only was this Abdallah a distant relation of Abbas's, but he had also encountered him in Baghdad, when he had been presented to Saddam Hussein with himself, his father, and Adnan Badawi as another citizen who had helped foil the commando patrol which had been dropped on Iraqi soil. That night Abbas and I talked for several hours by the fire. He told me of his years in the Special Forces during the Iran�Iraq war � how he had been terrified of dying until he had dreamed of his grandfather, who had told him not to be afraid. He described the incidents in which he had been wounded, horrific accounts of hand-to-hand fighting, and told me how he had come face to face with an Iranian in no man's land. 'He was a big fellow,' he said. 'And I was out of ammunition and so was he. He pulled a grenade out, so I jumped on him and hit him a great wallop with my rifle-butt. When he went down, I picked up a stone and kept on bashing and bashing him with it till he let out a long "aaaaaaargh". God forgive me, but it was him or me. Another time I was crawling over a ridge with a friend and the Iranians opened up on us with machine-guns. A bullet hit my helmet and knocked me out and my friend carried me back to our lines. He got a citation for that. `God knows, I have been near to death many times and now I don't fear it any more. You only fear death if you are attached to the things of life. I love my children, but I know they have only been lent to me by God for a time and aren't my possessions. The same with money or live-stock � we are only the stewards of our wealth. It doesn't belong to us but to God, and we cannot take it with us when we go. My only problem is my ankle � I can't run or walk far any more. The doctors here have no fear of God. They operated on me in Baghdad and it came out worse. Do you think I could get a better operation in Britain?' Abbas had the qualities which I admired most in the Bedouin: their courage, endurance, hospitality, loyalty and generosity. He was a simple man with an uncom-plicated outlook who had been dragged into a hellish war, had seen the worst that the modern world had to offer, but had never lost his humility. I realized, too, that Abbas was the key to the whole story � not only my own inves�tigation, but the Bravo Two Zero story itself. Fate is a strange mistress, I thought. Andy McNab's patrol had been dropped on the doorstep of a man with twelve years' experience in Special Forces, who had spotted them and organized an attack. Everything that had hap�pened to them had resulted from his alertness. In my story, too, he had been the prime mover: he had intro�duced me to the man who had found Vince, related Adnan's story and showed me the site of the hijack. Abbas might have been 'got at' by the government, I reflected, but when you spend weeks in the desert with someone, their true character comes through, and I would have put Abbas bin Fadhil down as one of the most honest men I had ever met in my life. `It is a sin to lie,' he told me often. 'You might get away with it, but you cannot hide from God. Lying is a terrible disgrace.' THE HOUSE ABBAS HAD TOLD ME about lay where he had said it was, ten kilometres away � it was neither a group of buildings, nor exactly a hut, but a stone-built cottage of about four rooms standing by an ancient well on a wadi side. The roof had fallen in and the rooms were full of rubble. Abbas told me that the well had been dry for many years. I couldn't tell, of course, if there were any other cottages like this one around, but Abbas had told me there weren't, and certainly I had seen no others, nor were they marked on the map. The house was connected with the main asphalt road to Ani by a cart-track, and while I waited there in what little shade there was, Abbas went off to fetch al-Haj Abdallah. I had a long wait. It was afternoon by the time they arrived back Abbas introduced me to a surly, bespeak cled man, who looked anything but a Bedouin. He wore a red shamagh with black cords and a gilt-edged brown cloak. Abdallah had been brought up in Ani, where he was a local party official, but had inherited a large flock of sheep, which he kept out here on the fringes of the desert. The cottage was now derelict, but in the past he had used it to house the shepherd who looked after his flock. Ten years ago, he said, it had been used by a young shepherd whom he described as backward, which imme�diately struck a familiar note. Ryan had described the man whom Stan had gone off with as being of low intel�ligence and the village idiot. I asked avidly after this shepherd, but Abdallah said that he was no longer work�ing for him. We sat down in the shade and I asked Abdallah to tell me what he had seen here back in 1991. 'It was 26 January,' he said, 'and I drove from Ani in my Toyota pick-up to visit my shepherd who was then living in this cottage, to see if he needed any food or drink. When I arrived he wasn't here, but as I looked around I saw a man up in the wadi about two hundred metres away. I drove towards him and I realized he was a foreign soldier. He was carrying a rifle. I drove up and spoke to him � I know a little English � and asked him what he was doing there. I said to him that I would go to Ani and bring back food, and he seemed quite agreeable to this and didn't try to stop me. Of course, I went straight to the police in Ani and told them there was an enemy soldier near my cottage. They collected about fifteen men and set off back in Land-Cruisers. CHAPTER twenty-two RYAN WRITES THAT HE WAITED for Stan in the wadi until about 1830 hours, when he decided that his friend wasn't coming back and set off on the original bearing. He had been marching for only fifteen minutes when he saw headlights approaching the place he had just left. His first thought was that Stan had actually managed to get hold of a vehicle, but when he realized there were two sets of headlights he knew it had to be the enemy, and that Stan had been captured. The two vehicles came charging towards him in the moonlight and, according to Ryan, he found shelter behind a small bush, where he prepared to make his last stand. He didn't know, he says, if they had seen him, but he didn't