The Devil's Handshake (3 page)

“
Well at least I don’t have
to listen to the fucking RSM talking about tablecloths!” Taff
offered in the way of humor.

Split into two teams of four and as had been
pre-agreed in their pre-mission briefing if they couldn’t EXFIL.
One team led by Taff Jones set off for Saudi Arabia, whilst the
other led by Thomas headed for the Syrian border and their
secondary pick up point that was about twenty-five miles away from
the border, a distance that was at least hundred and twenty miles
away from where they were now.

As freezing wind and driving sleet hit their
faces, Thomas and his team watched Taff and rest of boys disappear
into the night. He had no idea that it would be the last time he
ever saw them again.

Forty miles into the trek, as they took a
break in the first of the four LUP they had planned to take on
water, Thomas and the men had their first contact since they
destroyed the missile.

The hand signal of Mickey Ward, a thin and
willowy Trooper from Essex, about eight hundred yards in front on
point alerted them to the danger.

In the open and with limited cover all knew
their options were few. Thomas focused in eyes in front of him. It
was an Armored Personnel Carrier and an infantry truck that had
spotted them.

He didn’t hesitate and neither did the rest
of the three-man team, despite the Standard Operation Procedure
(SOP) calling for a soldier to run away from Armor as fast as
possible.

Mickey Ward fired the first shot, taking out
the man on the top of the Armored Personnel Carrier with the 7.62mm
machine gun.

Following the Trooper’s lead, Thomas let off
a volley of anti-armor grenades, advancing quickly towards the
enemy and Mickey’s position while Stevie provided cover fire with
his FN Mimi 5.62mm machine gun in the direction of the truck.

The sounds of screaming Iraqis being hit by
the rounds of ammunition rippled across the ground towards them as
he closed the gap.

On reaching a position just to the left of
Mickey in a matter of seconds, Thomas stopped and knelt on one knee
continuing to let off more rounds towards the direction of the
troops exiting from the armored personnel carrier. More screams
erupted from the Iraqis.

As Thomas began to focus his gaze towards the
threat of the truck, his peripheral vision took in the sight of
Mickey being hit.

Traveling at speeds exceeding 3,200 feet per
second and despite a soldier’s training, he may or may not see a
bullet coming. In the end that is pretty much irrelevant, as you’re
certainly not going to have time to respond to it.

That was why Ward didn’t duck, yell, or
indicate to Thomas he had been hit.

Instead, Thomas relied on the blood spatter
with Mickey’s hair, skin, and muscle hitting his face, followed by
the acrid smell of powder burning flesh assailing his nostrils to
tell him that the Trooper had been hit.

The Iraqi who released the round into Mickey
also didn’t have time to respond. The 5.62mm rounds of his and
Stevie Wiltshire’s machine guns tore him to pieces.

Seconds after that, Thomas gave the order to
cease-fire with a hand pump signal from Thomas.

The early morning wind brought the sound of
whimpering soldiers to be added to the smell of burning flesh that
filled the air around him.

“
Take his tag,” he ordered
Stevie without emotion, referring to the bracelet with his name,
rank, and serial number on it. The time for mourning would be at
the Trooper’s memorial service at Hereford if they made it. Without
saying a word, the Trooper did just that.

Stevie and the other remaining Trooper, who
also doubled as the team’s Medic, Tony Patterson, calmly made sure
there were no survivors in the burning truck and Armored Personnel
Carrier. Taking out his binoculars, Thomas focused his gaze on the
horizon, ignoring the screams in Arabic of the wounded Iraqis as he
did so.

He knew what his men were doing was a war
crime. Article 12 of the Geneva Convention states “Wounded and sick
soldiers who are out of the battle should be humanely treated, and
in particular should not be killed, injured, tortured, or subjected
to biological experimentation.” Thomas didn’t care. Those Iraqis
made their choice, and in any case they couldn’t very well take
prisoners with them.

Instead, the young Captain chose to focus his
mind on the billowing black smoke being emitted from the destroyed
equipment. He knew the “contact” (the term used to describe a
military engagement) would be most likely seen for miles. The
direct consequence therefore would be most likely more troops on
top of them within a matter of minutes rather than hours. This
meant they would have to move out quickly to at least have half a
chance of escaping, something they couldn’t do with 200-pound
Bergen rucksacks they were carrying on their backs. This meant
Thomas and the lads would have to ditch their warm weather
clothing, food, and heavy weapons and just keep the water and
ammunition for their remaining weapons. In his case, the M72 and an
AK-47, a Russian weapon, but one Thomas had chosen as his own
personal weapon of choice because it was the weapon most used by
the Iraqi army as it didn’t require a lot of tender loving care and
rarely jammed. In addition, since he had spent most his time since
August pretending to be a tribesman since the invasion and as there
were hundred million AK-47s worldwide, he reasoned that if he was
ever in a contact he should be able to use ammunition of the dead
or buy some from any Bedouin as needed.

At the time, the boys of the regiment had
made jokes at his expense nicknaming him “Lawrence.” He doubted
they would be now if they were here.

Knowing that they couldn’t engage with
another bout of armored weaponry, Thomas took the decision to ditch
his M72 anti-tank weapon. Weight was king in a fight for
survival.

The wall of sand rolling in from the
direction of Saudi Arabian border in the south brought him a sense
of relief.

“
What’s the plan?” asked
Stevie handing him a collection of magazines full of ammo so as to
save Thomas the time of picking the bodies of the dead Iraqis for
resupplies.

Thomas nodded towards the wall of sand. “That
might just be our friend, lads,” he said.

Stevie and Tony looked at each other and then
nodded at the suggestion, fully understanding what Thomas
meant.

“
We will need to ditch our
kits though,” offered Thomas. With temperatures of minus ten
degrees Centigrade at night, it was, although nobody mentioned it,
a prospect that terrified them more than another contact with the
Iraqis.

“
And we will need to make
another fifty miles over the next twenty-four hours, lads, in order
to make the back-up drop in,” he added, driving his knife home even
more.

“
But it’s your choice,”
stated Thomas, referring to the one rule of the SAS being that, in
the field, all Troopers were entitled to have their say regardless
of rank.

Both men looked at the body of Mickey.
Neither said anything for a moment.

“
Drop the kit,” was Tony’s
response.

“
I thought fucking selection
was hard,” answered Stevie before walking off in the direction of
Mickey to say a silent pray for his fallen comrade and say his
goodbyes. Thirty minutes later, the sand arrived and engulfed them.
The three remaining members of Charlie One Zero set off in the
direction of Syria.

During the next day, using the storm
initially as a cover, they completed the fifty-mile target they had
set for themselves, due partly to the steady pace set by Stevie and
because they only took two stops for water. Yet it didn’t take a
genius for the three men to realize that with only a couple of
bottles of water on each of them, they were burning too much body
fat in the cold by maintaining this pace.

Their training told them that losing five
percent of body fat in a short amount of time and not replacing it
causes the body to seize up as a consequence; the three of them
knew the next five hours would be crucial.

As it was Thomas’s turn to set the pace he
took the lead. Half way to the second LUP, he stopped and turned,
only to find nobody was with him. That in it’s self wasn’t unusual;
groups on a romp often separated.

Despite knowing he was exhausted, he focused
on his training. Again following the SOP of the Regiment, Thomas
pulled out his personal tactical beacon (or TACBE) as the device is
known) so he could alert any planes or helicopters that might be
overhead or nearby to his position. Designed primarily as a
distress signal, it could also be used as a short-range
communications device to nearby aircraft by indicating that someone
is in danger and needs help. Five minutes later, having not
received any response, he turned off the beacon and waited for his
team to turn up. Half an hour later, he was fighting off the urge
to sleep, knowing if he did he would most likely die from
hypothermia, when they still hadn’t turned up after an hour it
started to dawn on Thomas that he was on his own. A Trooper’s
training tells to focus on the goal. Use your willpower to drive
you on. That, unfortunately, though doesn’t stop you from second
guessing yourself.

Thomas’s tired and troubled mind tried to
focus. He checked his water can. His lips were cracked and sore. He
could feel all the joints in his body and fingers becoming numb.
That was a bad sign.

“
Half a can,” he muttered as
he fought the urge to sip it all, and questioned whether he should
try to find his missing colleagues.

Suddenly the face of his dead mother appeared
in front of him. He knew his mind was beginning to play tricks. He
shook his head in an attempt to break free. He felt his muscles
began to cramp up. He knew what that meant. His body was shutting
down to reabsorb fluid from his blood and his other body tissues.
He was about to go into shock. That meant he had to rehydrate. Yet
before he could, the delirium arrived.

“
Move darling,” she
said.

“
I need to wait Mummy,” he
said to her out loud as though he was eight and heading off to
boarding school.

Then the face of his hated father appeared in
front of him.

“
Fuck off!” he said as the
wind continued to whistle around him. He shook his head to break
free. He tried to focus on the waterproof map that he had pulled
from the inside of his combat jacket, forgetting in the process
about the urgent need to take on more water to stop the delirium
playing havoc with his mind.

Then it was the turn of the mythical face of
the legend Homer that he had used in his Thesis at Oxford to appear
before him.

“
Thomas, you must live,” the
Greek ordered.

“
Do not shrink from it. Have
inner strength. Your Kelos will be won later through your great
deeds,” the voice whistled, referring to the Greek word meaning
“What others hear about you” through accomplishing great deeds,
often through death.

“
It is not Hades’ time to
welcome you yet!” the voice instructed, referring to the Greek god
of the underworld. “For the Gods have other plans for you. Your
Odyssey is only beginning,”

Thomas’s entire world went black.

The word “Bedouin” is derived from a plural
form of the Arabic word Badawi, and literally translates as “nomad”
or “wanderer.”

Amongst the Bedouin, there are as many as one
hundred and fifty tribes in Iraq. One such Clan is The Dulaym.
Today many prominent Iraqis carry the last name “Dulaym,” because
it signaled to the other Clans of the country and the area that
they belong to the tribal confederation. Since 1968, the Clan had
been allied with Saddam Hussein. They supported him throughout his
war with Iran with manpower and ruthlessly opposed anyone that had
tried to dispose of him. As a consequence, members of their clan
held important positions within government, mostly in and around
the western province of al-Anbar. Yet that link was severed forever
when Saddam, by way of the arrest and removal of individuals that
held close ties to Saudi Arabia via family connections, chose to
break that bond.

One such man was Hassan Karim Dulaym, a
senior chieftain in Albuminr. Charismatic and popular, the former
Special Forces commander who had made his reputation during 1984
when he had led a helicopter assault on Iranian troops that were
atop a mountain in Kurdistan.

It was because of this popularity Saddam,
fearing him to be a rival for the Presidency had tried to have him
arrested as soon as Iraq invaded Kuwait. In response, Hassan along
with his sons somewhat foolhardily, instead of escaping and leading
an opposition, had tried to orchestrate a failed coup attempt
against Saddam utilizing former members of his unit that the
dictator had disbanded.

“
Drink! My dear,” came the
voice filtering through the blackness.

Immediately Thomas’s mind switched back on.
His eyes tried to open.

The first thing that struck Thomas was his
body was covered in wet clothes. He knew instantly this meant he
had been captured and the captors were now talking to him as they
tried to return moisture back to his body.

“
Drink!” came the voice
again.

This time Thomas opened his eyes as the firm
hand lifted his head and forced the liquid onto his dried lips. His
eyes focused. The face of a man of about sixty with a salt and
pepper beard with dark eyes and Bedouin smock was staring back at
him. Thomas’s eyes moved to left and right quickly. He tried to
move his body but because he was still weak, he couldn’t. A searing
headache attacked his brain. Then as he swallowed the water, he
felt the urge to vomit.