Michael Asher (7 page)

threat `alayya at-talaq' � 'I will divorce my wife', which obliges him to do so if his hospitality is further refused. I was stopped three times that morning and each time followed the same pattern. I would shake hands with my hosts and be ushered into the main part of the tent, where a fire of woody roots would be coaxed to life in the cen�tre of the floor. While the kettle or coffee-pan went on the fire, more Bedouin would arrive as if by magic, and I would rise to greet each of them. When they had sat down and the tea was being passed around, they would ask for what they called 'the news'. Bedouin are immensely curious about anything that goes on around them, and so avid for 'the news' that in the past they would ride hundreds of miles by camel to get it. The most important news is not politics or war, but the state of grazing and water, which is crucial to their survival. The news' also includes everything they have experienced over the past few days, and many nomads, being illiterate, have photographic memories and can describe what they have seen in incredible detail. Often in my journeys in the desert I have arrived at Bedouin camps to find that the people there know all about me already � the Bedouin grapevine, coupled with powers of observation honed sharp by years of experience in a landscape where noth�ing is hidden, is extraordinarily efficient. The tribesmen would have been happy to sit jawing over the news all day, but I had a walk to do and I was often obliged to refuse offers of vast meals and slaughtered sheep to escape. As I made my way south, though, the tents grew fewer. Often I came upon squares of stones around neat black rectangles of earth where tents had stood recently and I reflected once again that while this place seemed a wilderness to me, every square metre of it had been a home to the Bedouin at some time. By sunset that evening I had reached the place marked on McNab's map as the helicopter drop-off point, exactly twenty kilo�metres due south of the LUP. The plain here was almost chillingly flat, and I could understand why the patrol had been moving so fast that night. To be caught out here in the open at first light could have been a sentence of death. This was the place in which � according to McNab �the team had originally been dropped on 22 January and had lain down in all-round defence, acclimatizing to the night, as the noise of the chopper's motors drifted slowly away. McNab says that he heard dogs barking and spot�ted a plantation within 1500 metres to the east, complete with water-tower, outbuildings and a house � uncannily like Abbas's place, which lay exactly twenty kilometres due north. I stood on the spot indicated by my Magellan and looked east. There was nothing there � no farm build�ings, no water-tower, no plantation. This was remote, uninhabited country, far from roads. There never had been a house here, Abbas said, but I decided to check anyway, and a sweep to the east revealed nothing but the same rocky, flat, stubble-covered desert � no ruins, no debris, nothing. If there ever had been a building here as McNab writes, it had vanished without trace. McNab says that they passed this point by about five kilometres on the night of the 24th, retreating from the firefight, though why he didn't wait for the heli due in at 0400 the next morning he doesn't make clear. Though he and Ryan differ on the actual distances they covered that night, both agree that they headed roughly south then west then north in a loop back to the road. At this point it became obvious that although none of the patrol had been hit in the ambush, there were two casualties � 'Stan' � who was suffering from extreme dehydration, and was in a state of near collapse, and Vince Phillips, who, according to McNab, had suffered some kind of leg injury while skirmishing out of the firefight. McNab notes that it was so completely out of character for Phillips to complain that his swollen leg must have been agony, while Ryan makes no mention of the injury at all. Realizing that they had to move at the speed of the slowest, McNab changed the order of march, posting Ryan as lead scout with Stan after him, then Phillips, then McNab himself, and the other four behind. If this is true, it is curious because Ryan maintains that he had insisted on being lead scout from the moment they had left the LUP, and that immediately after the firelight Vince Phillips was behind him as Number Two. Lead scout is the most risky position in a patrol formation, because at any point he is the most likely to get bumped in a contact. If such a contact happens, numbers two and three in the line go to ground and cover the scout, who moves back tactically while the others go to ground. Ryan, however, says that Phillips kept falling back 'as if he didn't want to be near me' � clearly suggesting that the sergeant was afraid of getting hit in a contact. He also maintains that Phillips kept stopping and insisting that if they got bumped they should put up their hands and surrender rather than shooting back, or they would all be massa�cred. This is an unashamed accusation of cowardice against Phillips on Ryan's part, yet its veracity depends purely on the assertion that Phillips was Number Two in the line of march � otherwise it does not make sense. If McNab is right, though, and Ryan was not put in the lead until after the party had turned north many hours later, Ryan's accusation must be specious. The idea that Ryan was not lead scout from the beginning is suggested by Abbas's evidence that it was the seventh man, not the first, who waved. Somewhere in the dark wasteland south of the road, McNab heard jets approaching from the north and halted to contact them on his TACBE. According to his account, he put his hand on Phillips's shoulder and told him the patrol was going to stop. Phillips acknowledged this, and assuming he would pass the message on, McNab halted and pulled the pin on the beacon just as the last two jets were going over. As McNab gave out his call sign and prepared to give a fix from the Magellan, he heard an American-accented voice drifting back across the airwaves reiterating the call sign and asking him to repeat the message. However, by the time he had done so the jets were out of range. To his dismay, McNab then realized that the three men in front were no longer with him. He concluded that Phillips � in his 'numbed' cond�ition � had not passed the message along the line. Now he had lost three men. To be fair to McNab, he admits that though it was Phillips's responsibility to pass the message down to Stan and Ryan, as patrol commander he was 'a complete knobber' not to have checked. Ryan, who said later that he had never heard the jets, was stalking on fast ahead, did not realize the patrol had split until he reached the road, and was about to climb the ridge on the far side. Turning to confer with the patrol commander, he sud�denly discovered that McNab was no longer with them. It was not long after midnight, and at least an hour since Ryan had last seen him � in that time the patrol had cov�ered a lot of ground. When Ryan asked Phillips where the others were, he replied that he didn't know, and that they had 'just split off somewhere'. According to McNab, though, Stan later said that both he and Ryan had heard the jets and that Phillips had. 'babbled' about 'aircraft and TACBEs' � suggesting that he had understood McNab's message that the patrol was going to stop. Ryan, however, does not blame Phillips for the split, admitting that he was on the verge of panic himself More than anything, he was angry that he had got 'stuck' with the two 'casu-alties', one of whom (Stan) was 'out of the game' and the other (Phillips) 'didn't want to be in it'. The main fire�power of the team was with McNab's group � since Stan had handed over his Minimi to McNab, the three of them now had between them only two M1 6s and a pistol. The Magellan had also gone with Mark. After sweeping the area with the kite-sight and seeing nothing, Ryan attempted to call McNab on his TACBE with no result. Then, assuming command of his small squad � although Phillips outranked him � he decided that they ought to press on across the high plateau north of the road. Was Phillips really to blame for the split as McNab obliquely suggests? Of course, it was a very dark night, with a freezing wind that forced the men to keep their heads down, low cloud cover, and poor visibility. The patrol had covered a long distance very fast and were exhausted and under extreme tension. In such circum-stances, added to the fact that Phillips was in agony from his swollen leg, it would not be surprising if mistakes had been made. But it is notable that Ryan himself does not quote Phillips as saying McNab had halted to use the TACBE. It could, of course, be that McNab's message had not penetrated Phillips's 'numbed brain' as McNab says, but Phillips is dead and cannot speak for himself. Air force jets move pretty swiftly and the patrol was pre�sumably well spaced out. Perhaps McNab was so anxious to contact the jets on hearing them that he failed to tell Phillips? According to Ryan's story, he had told McNab a full seven kilometres south of the road that he intended to `push as hard as he could' until they had crossed it, despite the fact that he knew Stan and Phillips were dis�abled. Of course, even if he had not heard the shout, Phillips should have checked that McNab was behind him, but even if McNab's description is correct, the split need not have been a disaster had the patrol followed SAS standing procedure. As an SAS patrol moves, the patrol leader should con�stantly be designating emergency rendezvous (ERVs) to which the patrol would return in the event of a problem � particularly a contact. This process is a basic SOP which every SAS recruit learns during selection, and McNab even outlines the system in his book. Theoretically, when Ryan realized that the patrol had split, he should have led his section of it back to the near�est ERV and waited for the others to come in. Ryan says that while moving on from the TACBE contact, McNab's patrol spotted three men walking across their front, but assumed it was an Iraqi patrol and did not challenge them. Even if the SAS were being pursued by 'Iraqi patrols', which Abbas and his brother both denied, it seems highly unlikely that they would have been out on foot in threes. If they were not hallucinations, these three men were almost certainly the missing patrol members, but why, in that case, they should have been moving across the line of march must remain a puzzle. In any case, although the situation obviously demanded it, it is clear that McNab had not given out any emergency RV to the patrol. Whether Phillips did or did not pass the mes-sage along, therefore, is largely immaterial.

CHAPTER ten THAT NIGHT I CAMPED NEAR the crew and the min-ders at McNab's stated drop-off point. The evening was a hot one, the moonlight bright, and after dark the grasses were crawling with scorpions and spiders � more than I had ever seen anywhere at one time. These creatures only emerge from under their stones when the heat there becomes unbearable, and were not a problem for Bravo Two Zero in the freezing desert winter. Most scorpions inject a local toxin which causes a painful swelling, but a few carry a nerve toxin as powerful as a cobra's that can kill a man in four hours. To pass the time, Abbas organ�ized a shooting competition among the military escort, using a plastic bottle at 100 paces. The only one who hit it consistently was Abbas himself. In the morning I marched a brisk ten kilometres across an unrelenting plain, and then turned north once again until my way was barred by a deep descent of hundreds of metres into a rocky valley. Almost certainly, this was where Bravo Two Zero had turned north, the route directed more by the landscape than time and distance. Here in the valley, among more broken country, there were ridges, dips and gullies that would give them more cover should the sunrise overtake them here. There was also no way vehicles could descend the steep cliffs, which would have thrown off any possible pursuers; Abbas had to take our convoy round by a circuitous route. It was even hotter down in the valley, and I struggled across a rubble of boulders and sat down for a snack and a mug of water in a sandy wadi, slowly frying. As I continued north, every hour or so I would see Abbas's pick-up bobbing out of the desert, keeping tabs on my progress. Somewhere between here and the road to the north, Bravo Two. Zero had split on the night of 24 January. Because of the time and distance discrepancies in McNab's and Ryan's accounts, it was impossible to know exactly where, but I was to get a clue from a totally unexpected source. About three kilometres south of the road, Abbas appeared once more and stopped me. He pointed out a mound on the side of a horseshoe-shaped ridge, where there appeared to be a small cairn of stones. Taking his AK47 with him, he led me up to the mound, which formed a kind of flat-bedded platform on the side of the ridge, facing south and at least ten square metres in area. If the wind had been from the north, this place, though high up, would have been fairly well sheltered on three sides. 'A few days after our gun-battle with the commandos,' Abbas said, `the police found a weapon here. I only arrived later and I didn't get a good look at it, but I think it was a machine-gun. It was broken and couldn't be used, and we guessed it had been left here by the same people we had shot at back near the farm.' I scratched my head. 'That's not possible,' I said. 'A British patrol wouldn't abandon its weapons. It would be a disgrace.' Abbas shrugged. 'I'm only telling you what they found,' he said. 'There were also signs that people had stopped here. The stones had been made into a kind of shelter and there were cigarette ends and papers.' This rang a bell, and I searched through my copy of McNab's book, looking for some reference. McNab notes that on the morning of 25 January, his section of the patrol decided to lie up on a lone knoll in an area, of hard sand, on the top of which was a cairn surrounded by a dry-stone wall. I searched for a reference to an abandoned weapon and found none. I knew I had read it somewhere and I scoured Ryan's book too, without success. This was frus�trating and I started to wonder if I had imagined it. Then it suddenly occurred to me that both books ended with ret-rospective accounts from the other members of the patrol, acquired when they were reunited in Britain after the mis�sion. I turned to the back of The One That Got Away and found the page quickly. According to Ryan, McNab had told him that when they had established their LUP for 25 January, they had destroyed the radio's encrypting unit as well as their codebooks. They had also dismantled and scattered the parts of Stan's Minimi, which McNab had been carrying ever since Stan had gone down with heat exhaustion. Suddenly it made sense. McNab had been hefting two weapons, and once Stan had disappeared with the others, there would have been no point in having his Minimi along, as no one but Rambo could fire more than one weapon at once. This was a key geographical clue, too, I realized. Since McNab would certainly not have aban-doned Stan's weapon until after the split � and assuming it was Stan's weapon that had been found here � I knew I had now passed the place where the split had occurred.. The only nagging question was whether this could have been the patrol's LUP when McNab's sketch-map showed it as being at least twenty-five kilometres further on. If they had indeed spent the day of 25 January here, that meant they had covered no more than forty-five kilo-metres the previous night � and that was going by the distances McNab gives in his text, which tally neither with his sketch-map, nor with Ryan's data. According to Ryan, the patrol marched only sixteen kilometres south, compared with McNab's twenty-five, and only ten kilo-metres west, compared with McNab's fifteen. Ryan's map, however, indicates that the distances were even shorter. Allowing about another seven kilometres for the march north, this came to a total of only thirty-four kilo�metres (about twenty-one miles). Moreover, because of the doubt over McNab's story concerning the heli RV, I had been following Ryan's text to this point, and since I had found the place where the weapon had been aban�doned near to my route, this suggested that Ryan's account was the more accurate. The night had been pitch-dark, the conditions terrible, the going underfoot rocky and difficult, and at least as far as this point the patrol had been slowed down by two dis-abled men. They had been carrying weapons and belt-kit containing water, grenades and ammunition, weighing at least thirty kilos per man. They had stopped for some minutes, at first every hour, then every half hour, and had been further slowed down by the fact that the night-vision sight was ineffective due to lack of ambient light. If the contact had been at 1800 hours as all the information sug�gests, and they carried on until 0500 hours � the very latest cut-off point before first light � they had been going for a maximum of eleven hours at almost eight kilo�metres an hour. Anything over about six kilometres an hour is a running pace for most human beings, and Ryan says that the patrol were going 'as fast as possible without running'. A good marching pace for an SAS patrol in belt-kit is reckoned to be about five kilometres an hour, but this is in the best conditions, while the conditions Bravo Two Zero experienced that night were almost the worst possible. I scanned the map again. From here to the second MSR was almost exactly fifty kilometres � precisely the dis�tance McNab says they had covered to the metalled road the following night. If this had been the LUP for 25 January, then, the distance would tally ,on the second day, but would mean that what McNab said about covering 85 kilometres � 'the distance of two marathons' � was wrong. Yet desperate men can sometimes achieve incred�ible things, and the patrol certainly had an incentive for moving fast. I had no reason to suspect Abbas of lying �after all, it had been difficult enough for me to find the reference to the abandoned weapon, which was not in the main part of the text. I had to admit, though, that this place bore little resemblance to the description of the 25 January LUP given in the book. There was no reason to suspect McNab was not correct over this. All in all, I thought, I should give McNab the benefit of the doubt �it was perfectly possible that Ryan had got it wrong and that they had broken up Stan's weapon long before they had reached the LUP on 25 January. This might have been a temporary LUP � a place where they had rested for half an hour or so before pressing on. In any case, whether it was 34 or 85 kilometres they covered that night does not detract from the true heroism they displayed: not the superhero ability to march vast distances on foot, but the incredible mental toughness they must have required not to give in to the desert at its most fearful, to keep driving forward right through the jaws of death. In fact, the LUP of 25 January � wherever it was �almost proved the undoing of them. They had found the place by 0500 hours, and by 0700 hours it was raining hard, to be followed in quick succession by sleet and snow. The last thing the SAS had expected was snow in the desert. It piled up over them in a drift as they lay behind the makeshift stone shelter, freezing their camou�flage smocks solid and turning their shamaghs to cardboard. By 1100 hours the patrol was reduced to a shivering, quivering huddle of bodies, desperately trying to share their fading warmth. The human enemy was now forgotten; all thoughts were turned solely to survival. This was a time of great peril for Bravo Two Zero. All their lives hung in the balance, yet they managed to crack stupid jokes and exchange banter to keep their spirits up. It is to McNab's great credit that he realized the danger and decided to throw standard operating procedures to the wind, abandoning hard routine and lighting up a Hexamine stove, brewing up coffee and hot chocolate. Those brews probably saved the patrol's lives. By 1400 hours though, Coburn told McNab he was starting to go down with hypothermia. McNab asked him to hold on as long as he could, but within two hours everyone was slip-ping under, and though it was still daylight, McNab knew he couldn't risk remaining immobile any longer. By last light they would probably be unable to move at all, and by morning they would all be dead. They moved out, shivering, staggering, mumbling to themselves, unable even to hold their weapons properly, trying to move fast enough to get the blood circulating and to generate some body heat. Though they managed to cross the metalled road they had been heading for that night, the trek was a terrible one � the worst conditions the SAS men had ever seen. It was pitch-black and deso-late, with the north wind cutting into them like a blade, so chilling that they gradually started to switch off men�tally and to become disoriented. Their physical condition, McNab concluded, could not have been much worse. Recognizing the danger signals, and knowing the terrible wind-chill was eventually going to kill them any-way, McNab once again abandoned any semblance of tactical movement. He decided to backtrack to a sheltered wadi-bed south of the metalled road, where they huddled around Coburn, the worst affected and, again risking compromise, made brews of hot drinks and dished out food. They were on their feet again within two hours, but instead of marching north, back into the wind, they headed north-west along the wadi-bed, running parallel with the metalled road, which at least afforded a mod�icum of shelter and the possibility of protection from attack. About midnight, Legs Lane � now lead scout � halted suddenly, and the others saw two armed men silhouetted on a hilltop. McNab wondered if they were two of the missing members of the patrol, but rejected the idea � no SAS man would have allowed himself to be skylined like that. Almost instinctively, McNab says, the patrol began to reach for their 'fighting knives', ready to deal with the men. They watched as the men inched up to within twenty metres of them, then suddenly jumped into the wadi and ambled away � 'The two luckiest men in Iraq,' McNab says. McNab makes frequent reference throughout his book to these 'fighting knives' the patrol carried with them, which, he says, 'resembled the famous WWII commando dagger', even suggesting that the SAS men intended to use these daggers to take out the crews of the Scuds they were going to destroy. Although he himself spends half a page explaining how difficult it is to kill someone with a blade, he suggests that the use of such knives was com�monplace in the Regiment. But as everyone who has served in the SAS knows, there is no such thing as a `fighting knife'. In World War II, some commandos and members of the Special Operations Executive � the SOE � were issued with stiletto-like commando knives for