Sniper one (19 page)

We put in a request for Spectre air support. It was just the excuse we had craved.

I passed the coordinates back to the Ops Room in Cimic. Five minutes later, the drone of propellers moved towards us until they were somewhere above our heads.

The VHF beside me crackled into life.

'Alpha One Zero, this is Zero. Be advised Steel Rain is above you.'

Spectre pilots have call signs only the Yanks can get away with. Brit pilots would never be sad enough to call themselves Steel Rain. We loved it anyway.

There was more from the Ops Room.

'Alpha One Zero, Steel Rain has identified a group of armed men on rooftops around Blue 11. Send loc stats.'

Holy moly. The Spectre crews now had us on their little CCTV screens. To avoid a rather painful blue on blue, I didn't hang about telling them exactly where we were. Again via the Ops Room, I guided the Spectre crews on to the flatbed trucks. Then the mortar crews launched another volley, which only sealed their own fate.

Three minutes later, the Ops Room came on again.

'Alpha One Zero, Steel Rain has identified the target. Will use the 105s to neutralize. Steel Rain wants you to be advised that you are within "No Fire" range.'

'Acknowledged Zero. We're cool about that.'

If friendly troops are within blast or ricochet radius of the Spectre's armaments, its crew has to warn you before they fire. Shrapnel could go anywhere with a dirty great cannon firing at an angle out of the sky in the middle of a city at night. Each weapon has its own 'No Fire' range, and for the Spectre's 105mm howitzers it was 700 metres. If you're within 200 metres of its target, it's called Danger Close. It would take the CO himself to sign that off. The threat to us though was slim. We were 500 metres away, at height, and in good cover.

So the OMS mortar crews were going to get the good news from the 105s, were they? Fucking excellent. I passed the news around the platoon over the PRR.

'So keep your swedes down lads,' I was careful to add.

The Spectres didn't disappoint. It was like the gods joining the offensive on our side.

With a deafening boom and echo right above our heads, great balls of pink suddenly streaked down through the night sky towards the first flatbed truck and exploded on it in a rage of yellow flames. Sparks shot up hundreds of
feet into the night sky, and bits of metal and wood flew off in every direction. The truck took six shells in a row, and it was like the thing was being hit with a giant hammer – bang bang bang bang bang bang. It pummelled it to pieces.

For Chris, it was all too much. The American blood inside him rushed to his head and he jumped to his feet and punched the air.

'Yeah, brother! Woo woo woo! Give them fucking hell from us!'

The fact that he was supposed to be an undercover sniper clean slipped his mind. But nobody was going to hear him over the sound of the howitzer.

'Shut up, Chris, you silly septic, we're supposed to be covert!'

'Sorry, Danny. Just couldn't resist it.'

Then the aircraft methodically moved on to the next flatbed, and gave it exactly the same treatment. All five of them got five or six shells each, around thirty in total. It was an awesome spectacle, easily the most impressive demonstration of firepower I'd ever seen. It was also a terrific feeling for us up there alone to know we'd got friends like that on our side. If only Spectre was around every time we got mortared.

The whole show lasted ten minutes before the aircraft's drone moved south again. Since each truck had a petrol tank, fires raged on the spot where the trucks once stood for the rest of the night, sending dust clouds high above the area. The smell of gunpowder, burnt wood and singed flesh was overpowering.

A few minutes later, we saw the gunship join its sister craft pounding down shells again around Red 11.

After three hours of furious combat, the OMS's attacks began to dry up. In their stupidity, they had badly worn their ranks down.

At dawn, the CO gave the order we'd all been waiting to hear. It was relayed across all the battle groups' PRRs.

'Advance and storm the OMS headquarters. Let's go and knock on their door.'

This time, all the snipers let off a huge cheer from our rooftops.

With the Challengers leading again, the column advanced over the bridge and on to Tigris Street at Yellow 3. It was met by a barrage of fire from the OMS building's defending force. Fighters were spread out across its garden walls and the park opposite by the river, the place we had codenamed Zinc. Spectre smacked into them too, silencing them in a few minutes.

With no more resistance visible, the OMS building was surrounded. Someone brought out a loudhailer to instruct everyone inside to come out with their hands up. But its occupants had long since fled, leaving their foot soldiers as lambs to the slaughter.

Instead, the Warrior dismounts that stormed it found a giant hoard of weapons of every shape and size. There were enough AKs to equip a battalion, along with mortar tubes, mortar rounds, heavy machine guns, rockets, blast bombs, missiles and mines. Even a Soviet-made AGS 17 automatic grenade launcher. It took three of our great big eight-tonne trucks to take all the stuff away.

A foot patrol sent into Zinc found Spectre's calling card all over the park: dismembered bodies with their rifles and RPGs still beside them.

By 10 a.m., the battle was over. Everyone was jubilant.
Not only had we won a sweet victory overwhelmingly, but it had been a tremendous feeling to have been part of an armoured battle group at war. We were just proud to have been there.

We had to keep up our watch over Aj Dayya for the rest of the day, in case of a counterattack from the estate. Unexpectedly, the five of us on my roof ended up celebrating our success with some very rich homemade Arabic coffee.

Just after the OMS building was stormed, a set of keys went into the padlock on the other side of the sheet metal door that led down into the house whose roof we were on. We all spun round just in time to point our longs at the door. It opened slowly, to reveal a chubby bloke in his forties with a bushy Saddam Hussein moustache. He had a grin on his face from ear to ear, and clasped his hands together as he addressed us in fluent English.

'Not to be afraid. You are most honoured guests in my humble home. We heard you shouting in middle of night after airplane strike. Now we must make you feel welcome. You like Arabic coffee?'

'Err, well . . .'

'I am number one fan of British Army. Mehdi Army are scum. My father in England in 1950s. He was pilot in the Royal Air Force.'

With that, he puffed out his chest in pride. Extraordinary. We had managed to pick the house to sit on that belonged to the one person in Al Amarah who loved our country as much as any of us did. His name was Abdul, and his old man really had been in the RAF. After he invited a few of us down for coffee that was so thick you could stand a spoon up in it, we had to inspect all his father's old squadron photos. He had flown Canberra bombers out of RAF Cottesmore in Rutland. All of a sudden, his two best friends appeared. They too were
huge British patriots, and shook our hands incessantly.

After half an hour of glad handing, I got sudden inspiration for a brilliant tactical move.

'Ads, I've got an idea. Come with me. Excuse us for a minute, Abdul, but where's your toilet?'

We found it on the bottom floor of the house.

'Right, Ads. What I'm about to do in there is top secret. It's vital you stand here and cover for me. Understood?'

'Sure, Danny.' He wore a frown of utter concentration. 'I'll follow you anywhere, mate.'

Not in here you won't.

I went inside the toilet and closed the door. Presented with a nice clean porcelain toilet cistern and wooden seat, I pulled down my trousers and pants and sat down in some considerable comfort. It was a tactical bowel move. Having been up on the roof all night, I hadn't been able to manage the morning constitutional. It was a shame to let such a good opportunity go to waste, and who knew when I might get it again? I needed Ads there just in case some mean-spirited OMS man ran in off the street and slotted me on the shitter.

'You sneaky bastard,' he said, shaking his head as I emerged. So I stood guard while he dropped the kids off at the pool too.

The great counterattack from Aj Dayya never came, so we took it in turns for one pair to do a stint on the roof while the other four spent the rest of the day watching TV with Abdul in his nice air-conditioned sitting room.

We were called back to Cimic at sunset. That evening, Operation Waterloo's second phase began. The two armoured Warrior companies and the attached company of Royal Welch Fusiliers had moved into the town's main police stations. At a synchronized time, all four companies
in the city pushed out patrols to re-establish law and order on the streets.

The OMS scored an early success with an attack on Sgt Adam Llewellyn. A ten-year-old boy on a rooftop chucked a petrol bomb into his Warrior turret. The top half of his body was engulfed in flames and by the time they had got him out, there was skin hanging off all over him. His burns were awful, but the fact that it was a ten-year-old that had done him was most shocking.

Apart from that, the patrols met little resistance. The few other individual lunatics who took us on were shot dead on the spot. But there weren't many who tried. The OMS had been given a thorough kicking. Dozens of their men lay dead and they had little ability left to fight.

We had proved two important things: we had the bigger stick and we were prepared to use it. It wasn't a trick we could pull every day. The Spectre gunships and A Company's Warriors together were a rare treat that we would be lucky to get again. But the OMS didn't know that, and we weren't going to tell them.

We'd also won the town back for the price of just three serious injuries: Sgt Llewellyn, a corporal shot in the foot, and a private fragged by a grenade hurled from a passing motorbike.

The cherry on the cake for Y Company was found in what was left of a school classroom on the north bank. A muzzle flash had been spotted from a top window in the school during the battle. So a Challenger II put a shell from its main gun straight through it. The body of an OMS sniper was found under the rubble. Next to him was a Draganov sniper rifle. It had been the fucker that shot Baz Bliss.

*

A few days later, it was considered calm enough for the armoured companies to pull out of the police stations and leave it to the local cops to get on with it again. The chief of police was called in by our CO and Molly Phee for a delicate fireside chat.

'Your men have had all the training, we've cleared up the enemy for you, so, with respect sir, is there any reason why they can't start earning their fucking pay now?' the colonel asked him. And for a few days, they even did.

Out on patrols, we learnt what had been happening while we were locked down in Cimic. The OMS had enforced strict Islamic law on Al Amarah's streets. Women who dared to show their ankles underneath their long black veils had been beaten. A man had been shot in the mouth for drinking whisky. Normal people came up to us quite openly to thank us for doing something about it. Many seemed delighted the OMS had been forced to wind their necks in.

It was important to keep up the momentum and build on what we had achieved. Basic security on the streets allowed us to go after a number of smaller targets that we'd wanted to have a crack at for some time. We carried out a series of raids, smashing doors down with a heavy metal thumper. In one house near the OMS building, we found a massive arms stash inside a false wall in the garden. RPGs and boxes of ammo were stacked from the hide's floor to the top of the six-foot wall. The buffoon owner inadvertently put Pikey's well-honed street antennae on to it by standing right in front of it and looking deeply uncomfortable.

Prodding him in the chest with a finger, Pikey demanded: 'Oi jackass, why the fuck is you standing in front of that wall all the time we've been here?'

'What wall mister?'

That sealed it.

The success of Waterloo also saw the mortaring on Cimic drop off a little bit to just a strike every couple of days. The OMS had been badly winded, and it took them a few days to get their breath. They were soon back though. Events elsewhere made that a cert.

There was still no sign of any end to the standoff between Moqtada al-Sadr and the Americans. If anything, it was getting worse. Moderate Shia leaders and tribal chiefs were still trying to negotiate a peace between the two sides. But neither seemed particularly interested. There were only two months to go before the CPA was due to hand power back to the Iraqis, and both al-Sadr and the Yanks were desperate for victory before that. Continual fighting in or around Iraq's two holy cities, Najaf and Kerbala, threatened to spread mayhem across the country.

More than 2,000 US soldiers were now encamped on the edge of Najaf. With the threat of an all-out assault ever present, troops made regular incursions into the city's outskirts. As May went on, US tanks were sent for the first time into Kerbala, where a Polish soldier had been killed in the Mehdi Army uprising. The tanks destroyed an al-Sadr office with heavy machine-gun fire and then took up positions just 500 metres from the gold-domed Imam Hussein shrine, the second holiest Shia site of all. In retaliation, Moqtada called for his followers everywhere to launch a new wave of attacks on coalition troops.

The national picture was leapt on afresh by the OMS,
and they used it to renew their rabble rousing in Al Amarah. They were short of new recruits, after folk had seen what mincemeat the Spectre made of the last lot. Instead, they did a bit of thinking and changed their tactics. They came back out in smaller but more lethal packages.

As the battle group had learnt from Op Pimlico, the OMS learnt valuable lessons from Op Waterloo too. To take us on head to head was futile, and the battle proved to be their last big set piece. Until later, of course. From then onwards it was to be high-intensity guerrilla warfare. That meant fewer open assaults and less of a will to hold fixed patches of ground, but more hidden bombs and far cleverer ambushes. Now they'd only confront us on their terms when they knew they had more firepower than us, or could catch us unaware. It became a regular pattern of combat for the next six weeks.