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  Grey turned to Moth. ‘How you doing, mate?’

  Moth fixed him with a stare from eyes rimmed with painful red. ‘Boss, I’m wiped. I need several hours’ solid kip or I’ll be useless for tonight.’

  ‘Get your head down, mate,’ Grey told him. ‘We’ll worry about vehicle checks and the rest later. Grab some kip before it’s too hot to do so.’

  For those like Grey’s team who had been first into theatre, they were starting their seventh day in Iraq. It was one hell of a length of time to have spent behind enemy lines without being hit.

  During the long night’s drive Grey had kept thinking about the B2Z patrol. The fate that had befallen that SAS mission had cast a long shadow over Special Forces soldiering – and especially for a band of warriors pursing a mission like the present one. All bar one of the B2Z team had been captured or killed, and they had been an eight-man patrol moving on foot. By anyone’s reckoning, M Squadron was far more visible and potentially just as vulnerable.

  Grey checked his map. He figured they were 120 kilometres short of the Iraqi 5th Corps’s position – wherever they might be exactly. They’d covered some six hundred kilometres of the infil, the first 250 having been made via C130 and Chinook, and the last 350 overland. He checked the Pinkie’s milometer: those 350 kilometres amounted to some 600 kilometres of driving.

  It was some achievement to have made it thus far and not to have seen a single enemy or been in a single contact. Maybe they were going to make their rendezvous with the Iraqi 5th Corps after all. But even if they did, it was anyone’s guess as to how they were going to be received once they got there.

  *

  As the Squadron prepared for another day’s rest and standing sentry, not a man amongst them had the faintest clue as to what had been happening in the wider scheme of the war. They knew that the air war would be under way by now, for that was gearing up by the time they flew into Iraq on the C130 Hercules. But they were several hundred kilometres north of where any air strikes might be going in, and they’d neither seen nor heard any sign of warplanes above them. If they hadn’t known differently, the men of the Squadron could have been forgiven for forgetting there was a war on at all.

  Yet hundreds of kilometres to the south of their present position the air war had actually begun in earnest. As M Squadron’s vehicles had been creeping through the Ninawa Desert, US warplanes had launched a series of air assaults into southern Iraq, the most recent of which had reached as far north as the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.

  The first air missions were flown by a top-secret US unit called Task Force Tiger (or TF20 for short). It was made up of state-of-the-art F15E Strike Eagle fighter jets, and each aviator was hand-picked – for TF20 was specially formulated to support those first into Iraq on Special Forces operations. In early March 2003, at the same time as M Squadron was heading for Iraq, TF Tiger had deployed to an air base in Qatar. Their first major combat missions were flown over the Western Desert of Iraq, providing air cover to US Special Forces as they took airfields and other strategically important targets.

  TF Tiger’s next mission had been far more challenging and high-profile. The elite aviators were tasked to hit a fleet of Iraqi warships in the Tigris and Euphrates river delta, to the far south of Iraq. The chief targets were two missile corvettes with a flotilla of smaller boats providing a defensive shield.

  The F15Es headed in on a bearing that took them right up against the Iranian border, while avoiding the SAM (surface-to-air missile) batteries at Basra. The warplanes dived down and dropped 500-pound bombs with delayed-action fuses. They hit the lead missile cruiser, the bombs penetrating the deck and blasting the sides of the warship asunder, after which it capsized and sank. The other vessel took four hits before it finally went down, leaving both warships half submerged in the shallow waters at the northern end of the Gulf.

  The results of those air missions were highly visible to the Iraqis, especially as Iraqi TV was pumping out such images to ramp up their propaganda campaign. The Iraqi people were being urged to make the ultimate sacrifice, so as to defend ‘the mother country and to protect the father of the nation’, the great leader Saddam Hussein. Saddam was urging his armed forces and the wider Iraqi public to drive the ‘infidel invaders’ out of Iraq, and assuring them that victory would be theirs.

  With Iraqi military personnel starting to take hits from Coalition air strikes, Saddam’s message would be hitting home. Doubtless, such images and propaganda were finding their way to the Iraqi 5th Corps via their radio sets and TV screens, wherever they might be positioned. In recent days the propaganda war had reached fever pitch, as warplanes from TF Tiger had flown their first missions against Baghdad itself. Those missions were taking place well beyond M Squadron’s visual range. This far north the damage they were wreaking on the Iraqi military remained unseen. The Ninawa Ddesert was an oasis of empty silence, and an eerie kind of peace reigned.

  But to the Iraqi people and military alike, such sorties were highly visible, and it was plain to see how their forces were getting smashed from the air. Doubtless, those images would act as both a powerful warning and a provocation to the force charged with defending the north of the country – the Iraqi Army’s 5th Corps.

  *

  The sun was peeping over the edge of the sharp ravine in which they’d made their LUP by the time Grey’s team had managed to get their heads down. They fell into an exhausted sleep, oblivious to the bloody combat being waged to the south of the country by fearsome warplanes like the F15 Strike Eagles, and to the impact such air strikes might have on their own mission.

  At 1300 Grey was woken to take his stand on sentry. He made his way to the top of the ravine, where he found Scruff, whose watch he was relieving. Grey settled next to him, belly down on the hard rim of the ravine.

  ‘What’s the score?’

  Scruff lowered his binoculars and handed them to Grey. ‘Now and then there’s a vehicle way to the east of us. Take a butchers. Probably moving through the desert towards the 252.’

  The 252 was a B-road that ran from the fringes of the Ninawa desert northeast towards Salah. The Squadron was approaching more populated territory, and it could well be civvie traffic making for that road. But even so this was the first human presence bar the lone goat-herder they’d seen in a week spent crossing Iraq.

  Grey focused the binos. ‘Anything suspicious?’

  ‘Nope. White civvie-looking wagons. No weapons visible. They don’t seem to be stopping, either.’

  ‘Probably traffic heading for the 252.’

  ‘Probably. But they’re sticking to the very limit of our visual range. Could be dickers, mate, so keep a good eye.’

  ‘Dickers’ was a phrase first used by British soldiers in Northern Ireland. It referred to gunmen masquerading as civvies and driving civilian-looking vehicles in an effort to sneak up on a British patrol or position. The dickers would recce the potential target and help call in an attack force, while all the while hiding behind a supposed civilian identity.

  Those like Grey who’d operated in Northern Ireland had learned to treat every civilian as a potential enemy. Even if they were out on the piss in Belfast, it was still an operational theatre, and one of the toughest and most challenging in the world. You could never afford to let your guard down, and you never knew for sure when and in what form the enemy might hit you. And instinctively, Grey sensed there was something very similar about operating here in Iraq.

  ‘Any sense they’re connected to that Fedayeen force?’ Grey asked.

  Scruff shrugged. ‘Could be, mate. They could be Fedayeen scouts, searching for us. But right now there’s just no way of knowing.’

  Scruff wriggled backwards from his position, but as he went to leave he paused. ‘You still got that feeling?’ he asked Grey.

  ‘Like we’re being hunted? I have. Worse than ever, mate.’

  ‘That makes the two of us.’

  Scruff turned and disappeared down the side of the wadi, urging Gre
y to keep a very close eye on those mystery vehicles.

  The sentry point atop the ravine had a fine view, providing an arc of fire from the north round to the southeast. It struck Grey as an ideal vantage point from which to unleash a Milan anti-armour missile on any hostile vehicle that might put in an appearance – that was, if they had brought any Milans with them.

  It was a big bone of contention that their Milans had been left behind, for that was the one weapon with which they would have stood a decent chance of taking out an Iraqi main battle tank. A decision had been made well above Grey’s pay grade that no Milans were needed on this mission, and they had been left behind largely to save on weight.

  Normally, you’d carry one Milan per Troop, so one for each sentry position. A SACLOS (semi-automatic command to line-of-sight) missile, packing a 7.1 kg wire-guided warhead that can defeat most armour, the Milan is the most powerful and accurate piece of kit that can be operated by a light vehicle or foot patrol. But the Squadron hadn’t got any, so if Grey spotted a Lion of Babylon tanks chugging over the horizon they’d have no choice but to high-tail it out of there.

  After spending a couple of hours scanning the terrain to the east, Grey, like Scruff, had seen only a handful of white SUV-type wagons buzzing back and forth in the far distance. He didn’t know what to make of them. They probably were just some civvie traffic moving east towards the 252, en route to Salah. But then again, they might not be.

  His sentry done, Grey returned to his wagon. It was mid-morning, and the heat lay across the wadi like a thick and suffocating blanket. Moth and Dude had found it impossible to sleep and were doing some maintenance on the vehicle-mounted weapons. Grey briefed them on what he’d seen. The guys grabbed some binoculars so they could take a look themselves.

  ‘So what d’you reckon?’ Grey asked Moth, after he’d been staring into the distance for several seconds.

  ‘I dunno, boss. They’re Toyota Land Cruiser type vehicles, and they’re a long way from us. None seem to be coming any closer, either.’

  ‘I can’t see any with any weapons,’ Dude remarked, from his elevated position. ‘Could just be local Iraqi farmers’ vehicles, y’know.’

  ‘Could be,’ Grey confirmed. ‘But it could just as easily be scouts from that Fedayeen force. Think about it. They’re keeping their distance and not showing any weapons, so we can’t engage them. That way, they can keep watch and get a good sense of our strength before they hit us. They hold off, watch and wait until they’ve gathered a strong enough force, and then they really whack us.’ Grey paused, and eyed the others. ‘Trouble is, without more and better intel there’s no way of knowing.’

  He left them to keep watch, and went to grab a jerry-can of diesel from the rear. As he up-ended it and drained the remaining contents into the wagon’s tank, he did a mental check on their diesel supplies.

  As with the other wagons, they’d set out with four jerry-cans of diesel, each with a five-gallon capacity. He figured they’d been averaging no more than 20 mpg over such appalling terrain. With the fuel in the vehicle’s main and reserve tanks, they’d maybe got eight hundred miles’ range, no more. They were also carrying one jerry of petrol for the quad, and Grey had no idea exactly how much fuel that would need. Depending on the terrain, the quads could end up doing many more miles as they buzzed about scouting for the enemy.

  Either way, by the time they reached the 5th Corps’s positions they’d be at – or maybe beyond – the very edge of their range. It was never wise to push the wagons to the limit of their fuel supplies, just in case the Squadron did get hit. If they had to go on the run and evade and escape from the enemy, they’d need the fuel with which to do so.

  In short, they’d need a resupply sometime very soon. Most likely, they’d get one via air-drop from a C130 Hercules. If the Squadron could identify and secure an LZ, the Herc could roll out a couple of palettes, one packed with jerry-cans of fuel and the other with water. Dropped under massive parachutes, it should be a simple enough task to get the palettes to hit the LZ, if the wind and the release point were calculated correctly.

  On one level, Grey’s confidence in the Squadron had been boosted massively by the past few days’ operations. Compared to how they’d performed during training in Kenya, the Squadron was starting to work as one well-oiled machine. Incredibly, they’d pushed this far north without getting a single vehicle seriously bogged in, or having any serious accidents. It was pretty impressive for a unit with zero vehicle mobility experience on operations.

  The Squadron was becoming slick at day and night drives, getting into their hidden LUPs unseen, establishing arcs of fire and setting sentries. Seven days on the ground, and not a man had been wounded or hurt or a vehicle lost, and not a shot exchanged with the enemy: it was one hell of an achievement, by any soldier’s reckoning.

  But now there were those mystery vehicles to factor into the equation. Grey just didn’t know what to make of them. He was more or less certain he’d seen the same wagon tracking back and forth at the limit of their visual range. What kind of Iraqi farmer drove back and forth across the open, scorching desert for hours on end?

  It was just possible that he was searching for a lost animal, or something. But to Grey’s mind it was far more likely that he was getting eyes on the Squadron. If those vehicles were carrying enemy scouts, then it meant the Squadron’s long night drive had failed to shake off any pursuers or watchers. If they were dickers, then the enemy had to know M Squadron’s present location.

  And they would be feeding back information to the main force, as it prepared to hit the Squadron like a whirlwind.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  By the time they set out on their second night drive of Operation No Return the issue of those distant vehicles had still not been resolved. But with darkness cloaking the silent terrain there was no sign of any headlights in pursuit, or even the sound of any vehicles.

  The Squadron pushed ever northwards. A few hours’ drive would take them into the farmland south of an Iraqi town called Sirwal, at which point they’d find a patch of cover to lie up for the remaining night hours. The Squadron was about to switch to day moves again, and for crucial reasons.

  Once they left the Ninawa Desert behind them they were well out of the area of the Sunni Triangle – diehard enemy territory. By contrast, the area of northern Iraq from around the city of Salah stretching east to the border with Iran was largely the domain of the Kurds. The Kurds were the natural-born enemies of Saddam Hussein, and that should make them friends to the Coalition forces.

  Over the years of his despotic rule Saddam had launched repeated offensives to wipe out the Kurdish people and other rebellious ethnic groups. In one of the most murderous, the Iraqi 5th Corps had been tasked with the ‘Anfal Campaign’ – anfal being a word from the Koran that translates as ‘the spoils of war’. In that campaign, the 5th Corps’s objective was to shell and burn Kurdish villages in an effort to purge the Kurdish population from Iraq.

  Some fifty to a hundred thousand Kurds were killed. Eventually a 5th Corps general, along with dozens of the Corps’s top officers, was executed by Saddam for refusing to bomb villages and further prosecute genocide. Following that, a group of major-generals and a further batch of officers were executed, after they were accused of trying to overthrow his regime. So while the 5th Corps had a record of being a tool of brutal oppression of the Kurds, they’d also been a focus of resistance against Saddam’s autocratic rule.

  The biggest challenge facing M Squadron now was locating the 5th Corps’s whereabouts. With no further intel having been provided, there was only one possible means of doing so, and that was to drive up to some local villagers and ask them where the Corps was positioned. And that meant pushing ahead in broad daylight, so that the Squadron OC, plus Sebastian the terp, could try to extract that vital information.

  That night the weather changed dramatically. The open skies became overcast, a thick band of cloud scooting across the heavens and blocking ou
t stars and moon. It acted as a welcome insulating blanket, keeping some of the daytime heat in. As they pushed ahead in the inky darkness, Grey spotted the odd flash in the far distance to the southeast.

  At first it looked as if it might be the flares from 2000-pounder bombs exploding somewhere over Bayji or Tikrit, but there was no accompanying roar of distant explosions. Instead, the flashes played out in an eerie blue-white silence across the horizon. The Squadron was hundreds of kilometres north of any Coalition ground forces, not to mention the coming thrust of the military action, so air strikes this far north seemed unlikely. Finally Grey concluded it had to be an electrical storm, especially as it had the appearance of constant lightning.

  But the intense darkness to their front seemed impenetrable, and it made for horrendous driving conditions. The NVG worked by boosting ambient light – that of the moon and the stars – but with the sky overcast and angry they were barely able to function. Moth kept the wagon moving at a dead crawl, but he was only just able to make headway.

  The driving was made all the more challenging by the thick tufts of vegetation that had begun to appear on all sides. Grey could feel the humidity in the air here. After the bare dryness of the desert it felt claustrophobic and suffocating. The undergrowth seemed to be growing thicker with every minute, and he could hear it brushing against the thin alloy skin of their Pinkie, as Moth eased it through the densest of thickets.

  This was ideal ambush territory, and at every turn Grey tensed himself to come face to face with a rank of Fedayeen machine-guns, and to meet fire with fire.

  The darkness made the terrain look flat and uniform. The lack of visibility reminded him of some Arctic training he’d done in Norway. Six Troop had been on a three-day exercise, driving skidoos at night. Grey was leading, and a couple of times he’d stopped his snow-machine just metres away from a crevasse that cut across the snowfield. In the dark everything looked flat and featureless until the very last moment. Finally, the Troop commander had lost patience with Grey’s stop–start progress. ‘Fucking get a move on, mate,’ he’d snapped. ‘We don’t have all bloody night.’