Zero Six Bravo (27 page)

In truth, this was a total game changer.

None of the wagons was able to fight effectively anymore. They could barely move across the terrain, or at any pace much above a slow crawl; and right now they were cut off from the rest of the Squadron, including the OC. In short, they couldn’t hope to do much more than find somewhere to hide and, with a bit of luck, get airlifted out of there.

Every man present knew the gravity of their predicament, and nothing much needed to be said about any of this right now. The inconceivable had happened—something that they’d never rehearsed for, trained for, or game-planned, let alone imagined. But no one was about to drag it over the coals. They’d speak if they had
something to say. Otherwise, they’d shut the fuck up and try to keep a constant watch for the enemy.

As the unwieldy convoy nosed eastward, Raggy kept trying to shift around so as to give Moth a better line of sight out front.

“Can you see all right, mate?” he asked.

“Yeah, just about,” Moth replied.

Raggy shifted again. “Is it better if I lie this way? Can you see better like that?”

“Stop fucking wriggling or you’ll roll off,” Grey told him. “Just keep fucking still.”

If the situation hadn’t been so utterly desperate, they’d all have seen the funny side of things right now. But as it was, no one was so much as cracking a smile as Raggy squirmed around on the Pinkie’s hood.

Bang on cue there was a huge blast from their rear, a blinding white flash lighting up the entire length of the lake bed. It made the distinctive sharp crack of a steel-on-steel explosion—the shrapnel of the charge tearing into the wagon’s chassis. If it had been a tank shell landing in the wadi, it would have made the duller thump of shrapnel exploding in amongst soft sand and mud.

An instant later the night sky dissolved into a raging sea of fire as a series of further explosions punched a huge fist of smoke and flame high into the air. The blasts were followed by a massive fireworks display that seemed to light up the entire night sky while the ammo on the vehicles started to kick off a fiery orange.

As the first of the bogged-in Pinkies went up, the three wagons on the move were no more than a hundred yards away. A crazed barrage of rounds went tearing past overhead as boxes of .50-cal and 7.62mm ammo fired off in the blistering heat. Instinctively the men on the wagons ducked their heads, and the angry buzz of bullets cut through the air all around them.

Grey jerked a thumb in the direction of the blown-up vehicles. “That’s it,” he yelled at Moth, Raggy, and the Dude. “They sure as hell fucking know where we are now.”

For several long seconds the exploding ammo cooked off a blinding firestorm. With the enemy moving in from the west, east
was the only way to run now. If they headed in any other direction, their wagons would be silhouetted by the conflagration in the lake bed and be clearly visible. It was a stroke of luck that that fiery hellhole lay between them and the advancing threat.

It struck Grey that, by blowing the wagons, they might also have brought themselves a little time. With all the ammo cooking off, it would look as if a massive firefight had erupted in the wadi. The enemy had to be wondering what the hell the force they were hunting was up to now. They’d be drawn to that violent conflagration, but presumably they’d approach it with some degree of caution, especially as further wagons proceeded to explode.

Grey forced his mind and his senses back to the terrain to their front and the route they needed to take. Automatically, he went to grip his GPMG and swing it onto his line of vision. It was second nature to be on his weapon and scanning his arcs of fire whenever the wagons were on the move. But, overloaded as they were, the Gimpy was unusable. He felt as if he’d had both his hands cut off at the elbows, he was that useless right now.

But if he could spot the enemy early, at least he could get Moth to try to steer a path to evade them. Ahead was an open and gently undulating expanse of terrain. It was shitty ground on which to try to lose an enemy force, but at least there was one blessing: the night sky above them remained sullen, overcast, and dark. There was little if any ambient light, and if the enemy were equipped with night-vision goggles, they’d have precious little chance of using them.

He was acutely aware that they were balanced on a knife-edge now. If they lost one more vehicle, there simply wasn’t room to load any more on board. If another went down, at least some of the soldiers would be forced to go on the run on foot. At which point, what would the others do? After all, they were hardly likely to abandon their fellow operators.

If they did go down to two wagons, he guessed they’d have no option but to throw away every last piece of equipment they carried. Ammo, weaponry, food, water, and fuel—all would have to be dumped, in an effort to somehow cram the extra men aboard. It didn’t
bear thinking about. He tried to blank such thoughts from his mind and concentrate on the one overriding priority right now: survival.

They were no more than a couple of hundred yards away from the wadi of death when there was a series of further massive explosions in quick succession, as more of the abandoned Pinkies blew. The entire night sky behind them was transformed into a curtain of raging fire— the ammo went off and a barrage of rounds hammered high into the heavens.

Grey counted four detonations, which meant that there were two vehicles still to blow. It was a good minute or more after those last explosions when he began to feel seriously worried. All the charges would have been fitted with ninety-second fuses, and he’d started to suspect that one or two of the detonators might be duds. If they were, the charge would fail to blow, and unless the wagon was caught in a neighboring vehicle’s blast, it would be left undamaged.

Grey stole a quick glance behind him. Their vehicle was cresting a small ridge, providing a vantage point from which he could see along the whole of the wadi. The fierce white light of the explosions had lit up its entire length. It was a raging inferno, with twisted, blown-up hulks burning fiercely.

He searched for anyone they might have inadvertently left behind. He couldn’t see anyone moving down there. He was pretty certain there was no one they’d forgotten, which meant that no one had been caught in the shrapnel as the wagons blew or, worse still, been abandoned to the mercy of the enemy. But with the Squadron scattered, he couldn’t know for sure.

Yet, at the far end of the wadi of death he figured he could just make out the forms of one or two wagons that seemed untouched by the flames. And if that was the case, some hugely sensitive equipment—not to mention the Pinkies themselves—might be about to fall into enemy hands.

More worrying still: What had happened to the men who’d been operating those vehicles? Had they failed to trigger the charges because the enemy had somehow overrun them? The nightmare scenario right now was a couple of teams being taken alive.

The Iraqis would torture them to secure intelligence on the nature of the mission and parade them before the world’s media to prove how the Coalition was far from invincible, and by doing so they’d torture the men’s families in turn.

It would be a massive propaganda victory for the enemy, not to mention a disaster for British and allied forces operating here. And all before the ground war proper had really even started.

Unbeknown to the scattered forces of M Squadron, that very night British and American troops would begin their push across the border from Kuwait into southern Iraq. At any moment now the ground offensive would begin, the opening sortie of which would be an airborne assault by British Royal Marines to take the Al Faw peninsula, the southernmost territory of Iraq.

But right now, the course of the wider war was irrelevant to the men of M Squadron. Right now, their every fiber was focused on the desperate struggle to escape from and evade an enemy who were faster, more cellular, better equipped, better armed and far more numerous than the scattered forces of M Squadron.

The three wagons were crawling away from the wadi, making no more than fifteen kilometers an hour, when Grey sensed a pop in the sky high above them. Suddenly, the landscape all around was lit up by a brilliant white light. He glanced skywards, and high above him he could see a blinding globule of fire floating gently to earth like a giant candle flame.

He recognized it instantly as an illume round—a flare suspended beneath a parachute. His first thought was:
Fucking hell, they’re managing to get illume rounds above us while moving through the desert and hunting us down
. His second thought was:
What the hell kind of weapon is managing to put up those illumes?

Judging by the height at which they were bursting and the size of the flares, Grey reckoned that these were monster illume rounds—81mm minimum, perhaps larger. They’d light an area two to three kilometers across, so the wagons would be just within the enemy’s visual range. He had to hope and pray the bastards didn’t spot them.

It couldn’t be the Fedayeen SUVs or the Iraqi Army trucks firing those flare rounds, because neither carried a weapon that could handle that caliber of ordnance. He looked west, and in the intense white light he could see scores of vehicles moving in line abreast, combing the desert terrain.

There were dozens of white Fedayeen SUVs, and in the center of that force were the hulking forms of half a dozen KrAZ-225s. The Iraqi Army was clearly working hand in hand with the Fedayeen, using their light SUVs like a pack of dogs to hunt their prey.

He caught the flare of a muzzle firing further to the west, and a stab of flame belched skywards. In the light of the muzzle flash he thought he’d seen the silhouette of enemy armor. An instant later a second flare round burst high above. In its harsh glare Grey was suddenly very certain: to the rear of the Fedayeen those cursed T-72s were churning forward, and it was the tanks that were putting up the illume rounds.

Pinned under that burning white light, Grey felt horribly exposed. He was also starting to feel punch-drunk. How the hell had the enemy been so quick off the mark?

They’d legged it from their first LUP just in the nick of time, but the Iraqis had scanned the surrounding terrain with their thermal imaging kit and found them. Then the Squadron had broken track by executing a ninety-degree turn, ended up in the wadi of death, and been forced to blow the vehicles.

They’d managed to salvage a handful of wagons and bug out of there, but the enemy had clearly checked out the wadi of death pretty quickly. They’d have unloaded a bunch of their infantry, and just as soon as they’d realized there were a bunch of wagons bogged in and blown, they’d scanned the surroundings with their thermal imaging equipment. By sheer luck, Grey’s and the Squadron’s other vehicles were a good distance beyond the range of such gear, but at that stage the enemy had decided to put up flares, to light up the wider terrain and nail them.

It was now that Gunner started to really earn his pay on the quad. He kept beetling backward and forward, reconning a route that
would hide them from the enemy, then returning to check on the wagons. It was great to have the quad still with them. It was their only remaining means of fast and agile mobility, and it was perfect for checking out the ground ahead and to the flanks for the enemy.

A kilometer further on Gunner pulled his quad to a halt, the rest of the vehicles following suit. They’d taken no incoming fire, so for now at least they had to assume the enemy hadn’t seen them. They’d left behind the cone of light thrown off by the illume rounds and edged into the night’s welcome embrace, which meant they could afford a few seconds to deal with the overriding priority right now—which was doing an accurate head count.

The wagons drew in close so they could speak to each other without dismounting. Normally, doing a head count would be a simple task of asking the troop leaders to check that all their men were present. But right now that didn’t cut it, because the troops had been split left, right and center.

Ed, Scruff, and Grey got the names and call signs of all the men on their vehicles, Ed scribbling a list of them in his notebook. The results confirmed how the Squadron had been scattered. There were a total of twenty-six men with the three Pinkies, plus the two on the quad. With the Squadron numbering some sixty men, that meant there was an equal number out there somewhere unaccounted for.

They’d got most of those from Five Troop and half from Four Troop clinging onto their wagons. They’d lost one of the Six Troop Land Rovers plus every one of their quads. Grey had no idea where the fourth man of his team, Mucker, had got to, or even if his quad had made it out of the wadi. Instead, they had Gunner from Four Troop with them, driving their only quad.

No one had much of an idea where the OC might have got to or even whether his troop was cell. There had been no comms from the HQ Troop, and the OC hadn’t responded to Ed’s repeated radio calls, which had to mean that wherever the HQ Troop might be right now they were out of range of the radios.

But their overriding concerns were for the third group, which had been perched on the northern rim of the wadi. They were pretty
certain the wagons of HQ Troop had made it out of there. Sure, they’d be deprived of the protection of the Squadron’s heavy weapons, but so what? The three wagons right here could hardly use their machine guns, and at least the HQ Troop would be reasonably mobile in their lighter vehicles.

By contrast, the lone Pinkie and the handful of quads on the northern rim of the wadi could be in a seriously shit state. If most of the missing men had headed for their position, they’d be hopelessly overloaded with the extra bodies. But the alternative scenario was even more desperate: if the missing men hadn’t made it to those vehicles, they would be scattered across the Iraqi desert and on the run on foot.

Ed had one of the Six Troop signalers with him in his wagon. He got him to try to raise UK Special Forces Headquarters via the vehicle-mounted satcom. They didn’t have a second to fuck around here, but it was just possible that the other elements of the Squadron had reported in to SFHQ, in which case they could get confirmation that all the men were accounted for. They might even get a workable RV—a rendezvous point where the Squadron could gather together.