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  ZERO SIX BRAVO

  ZERO SIX BRAVO

  60 Special Forces. 100,000 Enemy.

  The Explosive True Story.

  DAMIEN LEWIS

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

  Quercus

  55 Baker Street

  7th Floor, South Block

  W1U 8EW

  Copyright © 2013 Damien Lewis

  The moral right of Damien Lewis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders of material reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make restitution at the earliest opportunity.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  HB ISBN 978 1 78206 080 2

  TPB ISBN 978 1 78206 081 9

  Ebook ISBN 978 1 78206 082 6

  Maps © 2013 William Donohoe

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  Also by Damien Lewis:

  Operation Certain Death

  Bloody Heroes

  Apache Dawn

  Cobra 405

  Fire Strike 7/9 (with Paul Bommer Grahame)

  Sergeant Rex (With Mike Dowling)

  It’s All About Treo (with Dave Heyhoe)

  For

  Roger Hammond

  Semper fidelis

  A brother and a true friend

  Gone but not forgotten

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  For reasons of operational security I have changed the names of the men who appear in this book, and for similar reasons I have, where necessary, appropriately disguised certain operational details and elements.

  Rarely are two soldiers’ recollections of a mission such as the one related in these pages the same, and individual written records compiled after the event also tend to differ. I have spoken to many different sources from all ranks, and I have done my best to paint a true picture of what took place during the mission. British publishers practice a voluntary code of conduct with relation to books about British military operations. Under this, such books are submitted to the MOD for checking on Operational Security (OPSEC) and Personal Security (PERSEC) grounds. Changes required by the MOD on OPSEC and PERSEC grounds, and agreed as justified under such grounds by the author and publisher, were made to this book. At no stage did the author seek the MOD’s official approval for this book, nor did author or publishers desire or request such, and author and publisher sought no verification from MOD of the factual accuracy or otherwise of events portrayed herein.

  This book is an impartial, independent and unbiased rendering of the events as they took place in Iraq in 2003. Factual accuracy of the events portrayed remains the responsibility of the author solely, and the author takes full responsibility for any errors that may inadvertently have been made. Any such mistakes are entirely of the author’s own making and he will be happy to correct them in future editions.

  Over the past decade I have written several books about contemporary British and allied Special Forces missions, featuring operations by the SAS and the SBS. The manuscripts for those books were submitted to the Ministry of Defence before publication, for clearance for OPSEC and PERSEC reasons. Those books have been well received by key individuals within the military, and they portrayed British forces operating in a professional and dedicated manner.

  The servicemen portrayed here displayed the ultimate professionalism and can-do attitude of our elite military and Special Forces operators, putting their own personal danger second to the success of the mission they had been tasked to undertake. At the time the mission portrayed in these pages took place, those who participated in it were largely denigrated in the world’s media – a condemnation fuelled in part by the capture of some of the Squadron’s vehicles, which the Iraqi regime paraded before the world’s press. These men deserve a far better, more balanced portrayal of what took place, and my purpose in writing this book is largely to set the record straight.

  The operation was extremely high-risk. Rather than being the failure that was portrayed at the time, this elite unit performed to the maximum of its ability and training, both on the ground and in supporting roles. Operating far behind enemy lines against a force by which they were vastly outnumbered and outgunned, they brought every man out alive. This book, written with the benefit of hindsight, should go some way towards setting the record straight – to the benefit of all those involved. The SBS motto is ‘By Strength and by Guile’; that of the SAS, ‘Who Dares Wins’. This mission demonstrated how, in seemingly impossible and unwinnable situations, these mottoes were put into effect.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to the following: my literary agent Annabel Merullo and her assistant Laura Williams; my film agent Luke Speed, and associates; all those individuals who helped with the research and writing of this story; photographer Andy Chittock, for some of the fantastic images; Philip Campion, for casting an appraising eye over the drafts. Special thanks to Richard Milner, David North, Josh Ireland, Patrick Carpenter, Caroline Proud, Dave Murphy, Ron Beard and all at my publisher, Quercus, for recognizing from the get-go what an extraordinary story this is, and why it had to be told. Special thanks also to my very good friend Mike Mawhinney for all the help, and to Lt Col Crispin Lockhart, of the MOD, for his efforts to clear this book for publication.

  Out of the night that covers me,

  Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

  I thank whatever gods may be

  For my unconquerable soul.

  In the fell clutch of circumstance

  I have not winced nor cried aloud.

  Under the bludgeonings of chance

  My head is bloody, but unbowed.

  Beyond this place of wrath and tears

  Looms but the Horror of the shade,

  And yet the menace of the years

  Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

  It matters not how strait the gate,

  How charged with punishments the scroll,

  I am the master of my fate:

  I am the captain of my soul.

  ‘Invictus’ William Ernest Henley

  CHAPTER ONE

  Steve Grayling was crouched in a hidden position, the ink-black desert night deathly quiet all around him. Or at least it had been until the last few minutes of his sentry duty, which was scheduled to last from 0400 hours until first light. But then the first of the animals had appeared.

  In the open, empty quiet of the Iraqi desert his senses had been heightened, his hearing tuned in to the utter absence of life. The slightest noise would signify movement, which meant something living was out there, which in turn might signal danger. But the bone-dry rock and sand had offered little to remind him that he was still on earth and not on some barren, lifeless moonscape.

  That was how it had been for the first ninety minutes of his watch – until, from out of nowhere, the herd of goats had appeared. The hollow tinkling of the animal’s bell sounded alien and alarming as it beat out an eerie rhythm across the bare stillness. It seemed impossible that any four-legged creature could survive in a place so empty of water and vegetation – yet here the goats were. And with the scraggly creatures had come the inevitable two-legged escort.

  Everything about the desert night was black. The moon was hanging low on the horizon, and above it the stars formed a skein
of brightness that stretched across the heavens, but still the light intensity at ground level had to be no more than 10 millilux. Under such illumination the terrain all around him was so devoid of features as to form a flat, uniform void.

  It was only the goats that stood out, their erect forms casting long, leggy moon-shadows. The white splotches on their coats glowed silvery bright, like patches of polished chain mail set into a suit of dark armour. As for the goat-herder, he appeared giantlike, casting mighty distorted shadows as he walked, using a long stick to steer the herd to wherever it was he was heading.

  Steve Grayling hunched over the hulking great form of a .50-calibre heavy machine-gun, its barrel tracing the herd’s every move. He’d long lost the feeling in his hands. Come nightfall, the temperature plummeted in the desert, and he was stiff from the cold. Ice had seeped into his every joint and limb, yet still his frozen fingers gripped resolutely the twin handles of his weapon. He was minutely adjusting his aim, and poised to unleash a barrage of rounds onto the target – that’s if the goat-herder made the fatal mistake of stumbling onto their position.

  He hoped to hell that moment never came, for then he’d have to decide whether or not to open fire. Steve faced a horrible dilemma; if he were to open fire it would be against all the rules of engagement and he might well face the full force of law for doing so – for the goat-herder was no more than an adolescent kid.

  Killing kids: that wasn’t what he had imagined doing when he’d gone for selection into Special Forces. Back then he’d fancied joining the elite, the few who dare, so he could take the fight to the bad guys, Britain’s foremost terrorist enemies. Steve was one of the veterans of the Squadron, one of the ‘old and the bold’. Back when he’d joined, Britain’s chief enemy had been the IRA, and he’d never for one moment imagined himself preparing to unleash a barrage of armour-piercing rounds against a kid.

  But if that goat-herder did blunder into their position and Steve didn’t open fire, then he had few doubts about the consequences. They’d have to consider their mission well and truly blown, and to expect the enemy to come after them relentlessly and in massive and deadly strength. After all, one of their units had already got shot up and hunted by Iraqi forces across miles of trackless desert – prompting a series of battles from which its men had been very lucky to escape with their lives.

  The Squadron was a good 150 kilometres into Iraq by now. Although their route northwards lay through the empty wastes of the Ninawa Desert, due east lay the heavily populated area of Bayji, one of Saddam Hussein’s key strongholds. During the pre-mission briefings they’d been warned that the population of Bayji – both the military based there and the militias – were fanatically loyal to the ‘Great Leader’ Saddam. No doubt about it – if Goat Boy saw them and raised the alarm, the Squadron was going to be in a whole world of trouble.

  The nearest animals had to be a good hundred yards away, but with every second they seemed to be drawing closer. With Grayling’s open-topped vehicle shrouded in camouflage netting, and his face caked in several days’ worth of camouflage cream mixed with dried sweat and dirt, he figured the goat-herder would have to be right on top of their position before he noticed anything. He’d likely have to peer long and hard into the bed of the wadi before the indistinct blobs might resolve themselves into the recognizable shapes of more than twenty four-wheel-drive vehicles and quad bikes. By that time Goat Boy would be just yards away from the gaping muzzle of Steve’s weapon. He’d be opening fire at point-blank range.

  A round unleashed from the .50-cal would leave the muzzle at a velocity of 2,910 feet per second. It would rip a cigar-sized hole where it hit, but exit leaving a gaping wound the size of a giant frying-pan. It was bad enough thinking of it doing that to a fully grown man, let alone to the body of an Iraqi kid, and Steve wanted nothing more than for those goats to piss right off out of there.

  Momentarily, he flicked his eyes away from the approaching threat, to do a visual check on their position. As the sentry for Six Troop of M Squadron, he had the northwestern segment of their position to keep watch over. His arc of responsibility ran from 12 o’clock around to 4 o’clock, 12 o’clock being due north.

  To either side and humped along the jagged rim of the wadi he could just make out the silhouettes of two of the other sentries, the blokes from Four and Five Troop. Like him, they were hunched motionless over their vehicle-mounted weapons, the body of each of their wagons hidden in the cover of the dry riverbed.

  He had to assume the other sentries had heard, if not seen, the goats from where they were positioned. But it was towards his arc of fire that the foremost animals were heading, wandering across the flat desert and taking the occasional nibble at God only knew what. Over the three days that the Squadron had been pushing through the Iraqi wilderness, Steve had started to think that nothing could grow in this sun-blasted wasteland.

  Clearly, the goats knew otherwise.

  Steve shifted his gaze further east, towards the centre of the sheer-sided wadi. There sat the vehicles of their Headquarters Troop, the distinctive whippy antennae marking out the signals wagon. The HQ Troop was surrounded by the protective firepower of the sixty-odd men of the Squadron – though all apart from the handful on sentry were sleeping the sleep of the dead right now.

  Steve had to assume that Reggie, their Squadron OC, was oblivious to the threat, but there was little point in alerting him to the goat-herder’s presence, for the decision to pull the trigger would be Steve’s and Steve’s alone. If the herd kept its distance, the shepherd would live. If the animals came too close and the goat-herder got wise to M Squadron’s presence, Steve would have to decide in that split second whether to open fire and kill him.

  There was no chance of trying to capture the little blighter. By the time Steve had made it out of the wagon – fighting his way through the camo-netting as he went – and clambered up the steep, rocky side of the wadi, the kid would be long gone.

  Regular soldiers in the British Army tended to be told when to eat, sleep or take a piss. Often, only the senior ranks carried a map, and the riflemen knew little about where they were going or what the bigger picture might be. Special Forces soldiering was a whole different ball game. Operators like Grayling were given the entire sketch of the mission, and they were sent out to find their own way and achieve the objective using their own drive and initiative.

  Decisions were based on intuition and past operational experience, and Steve had plenty of that to draw on. He’d done several missions serving in joint SAS–SBS units, and on many of those they’d been outnumbered and outgunned. Those ops had given men like Grayling a baptism of fire at the hard and brutal end of soldiering.

  But the trouble was, Grayling had no experience to draw on whatsoever when it came to killing kids.

  He had no idea exactly how long he’d spent on stag. He couldn’t risk a glance at his watch. The slightest movement might draw the goat-herder’s eye, plus the faintly luminous dial would shine out like a beacon in the dark. All he knew was that the horizon to the east was brightening slightly, which had to mean that first light – 0600 – couldn’t be that far away.

  Steve noticed a figure moving silently through the shadows of the dry riverbed. It was the Six Troop Sergeant Major. He paused to wake one of Steve’s fellow Six Troop operatives. Dave Saddler was scheduled to take over from him on watch. He was lying comatose on the dirt next to one of the ‘Pinkies’, as they called their open-topped desert-adapted Land Rovers.

  You always woke the next guy a good fifteen minutes early, so he had time to get some food and liquid on board before taking over sentry. He could hardly set his watch to wake himself at the right time – for even the faintest bleep-bleep-bleep or the brrrr of an alarm’s vibrations could travel a great distance on the still desert air. So one bloke had to stay alert and organize the sentry rotation, waking the others at their allotted times.

  With Dave being wakened, Grayling figured it had to be around 0545, which m
eant that he had fifteen minutes in which to make the call. He didn’t want to leave that decision to Dave, one of the youngest and least experienced operators in the Squadron. Steve had got him on his team in part so he could mentor him through the coming mission.

  Killing kids definitely wasn’t the way to get him started.

  Steve flicked his pale ice-blue eyes back to scrutinize the herd. He had a horrible suspicion that their destination was the wadi in which M Squadron had made its lying-up position. Just after last light their vehicles had crawled into this patch of cover, hoping the darkness would shield their hiding-place from any watchful eyes. If any terrain in this vast and empty wilderness was likely to nurture vegetation suitable for hungry goats, then the wadi was it. On the rare occasion that it rained, this dry gully would be transformed into a raging torrent driving all before it, and much of that moisture would soak deep into the riverbed.

  Here and there a stubborn shrub still clung tenaciously to life, roots penetrating deep into the desert sands and leaves sheltering in the shadows of the wadi wall. Steve felt increasingly certain the goat-herder was steering his animals towards the location of such greenery, which meant that sooner or later he was bound to blunder into M Squadron’s place of hiding.

  His hands tightened around the spade-handle-like grips on either side of the .50-cal, his thumbs poised over the V-shaped butterfly trigger and minutely adjusting his aim. As long as he kept still and in cover, Grayling knew that Goat Boy had almost zero chance of seeing him. But no amount of immobility would hide an entire Special Forces squadron.

  Over the past few days the sun had cooked off the cam-cream that had been smeared across Grayling’s features. It felt as if he had an old, dried mud mask plastered across his face. Growing up in London’s East End, he’d loved getting covered in mud as a kid. His family had lived next to the Lea Valley, a great place for messing about in muddy canals. But that was then and this was now – and right now he wished he could scratch the driest, itchiest patches, which were driving him close to insane.