Sniper one (14 page)

'Say that again, Wedlock.'

Luckily, Major Featherstone walked out of Cimic just at that moment. With reluctance, the two giants parted looking daggers at each other.

The only racism I ever heard in the battalion was between those two. And they were both black. How they were going
to peacefully coexist within the same 100 square metres for the next six and a half months we had no idea. It was Clash of the Titans, and secretly, everyone longed for the next instalment.

That evening's O Group finally brought news about Daz. It had been twelve days since we had last seen him or known anything about him. Once a bloke disappears out of the battalion's area of responsibility, it's very hard to keep track of him. But the news was good. Having lost a lot of blood he had been in a critical condition when he arrived at the Basra field hospital on a Chinook. But the surgeons had done a great job of putting him back together, and he was expected to make a full recovery.

He was now in Selly Oak hospital in Birmingham, where all military battle casualties go. He'd also heard what we'd been going through since he left. He was furious he was missing all the fun. Apparently, he had already pissed the doctors and nurses off considerably by continually demanding to know the date when they would release him so he could get back out. A proper soldier.

Inside the platoon, the only teething problem we were having was Gilly. He was another new arrival for the tour and was a lazy bastard. Like Louey, Gilly had been attached to us as a driver. But if we'd won the lottery with Louey, with Gilly we'd lost the ticket. He was a 27-year-old recruit to the British Army from the Caribbean. He had made a mistake in joining the infantry, and he knew it. Sitting in trenches wet and tired all day long wasn't his bag at all. But the real problem for me was that he couldn't hack Iraq. Its extraordinary pace exposed him as the crap soldier he was. He could hide that easily enough in Tidworth. He was a quiet character who was just happy doing as little as possible for his money. But in Iraq there was nowhere to hide. If
you didn't give your all while everyone around you was, they'd notice pretty quickly. It meant you would become an extra burden, and we didn't need that. Gilly would do everything he could to avoid going out on patrol, and he absolutely hated leaving camp. The thought of it terrified him. And he hadn't even been shot at yet.

He couldn't drive either. I learnt that the very first time he drove me around Al Amarah. He had no confidence behind the wheel of a Snatch. He kept tailgating cars in front, which is dangerous because it means you won't be able to manoeuvre around them if something happens. Then, as we approached the police station we'd planned to visit, I told him to hang a left into its driveway. Gilly turned right instead, straight into a garage. He was as nervous as a virgin on prom night. He'd got himself in such a state he was no longer listening to me.

'Gilly! What the hell are you doing? I said turn left, not right.'

'Sorry boss.'

I'd seen enough. 'Right. Stop there. Gilly, get out and get in the back. Sam, get out the back and get behind the wheel. Now, Sam, take us into the police station please.'

Gilly didn't drive for anyone again.

A few days later, he asked me for a transfer. Someone had obviously told him you got an easy life in the Royal Logistics Corps. It was bollocks, because loggies get shot at as much as the rest of us. But none of that stopped Gilly from going on and on at me about wanting to join 'the RLCs'.

'Gilly, do you even know what RLC stands for?'

'Er, well, er . . .'

'You haven't a fucking clue, have you? When you know a bit about the new unit you want to join, come back and see me, you silly sod.'

We were in a combat zone now. The company needed all the blokes it could get, even if they were as useless as Gilly. If he couldn't do anything else, he could hump water or ammo about the place. There was certainly no shortage of shitty jobs to do in Cimic. Passing him on to the RLC would also just be passing on the problem to some other poor sergeant in a loggies regiment. Perhaps Gilly just needed some more time to adjust. It was a brand new experience for all of us after all.

Gilly aside, in just a short time the battle group had made considerable progress in learning how to defend itself against the OMS and their tactics. In fact, we were getting pretty good at it. But there was also no ignoring that instead of it abating, the level of OMS-orchestrated violence against us was only increasing. Rapidly. The frequency of their attacks on patrols was going up day by day. At night, more and more mortars would thump in. The more we hurt each other, the greater the animosity on both sides. Notwithstanding events in Najaf, our own little war in Al Amarah began to develop a healthy life of its own. Every time the OMS escalated it, the battle group was forced to react.

On a vehicle patrol around the OMS stronghold suburb of Aj Dayya, a blast bomb was thrown at my Snatch. A long burst of machine-gun fire also rattled just over the heads of the two top cover. The bomb exploded a fraction early, a second before we would have driven into its full blast. But it still scorched and fragged the Land Rover's right side and windscreen. It was a close call. But it also proved to be the death knell for Snatches.

After the carnage that resulted from our first vehicle patrol along with the ever-increasing roadside bomb threat, it was decided that troops inside Snatches were too vulnerable. All Snatch Land Rovers were banned from leaving Cimic. Our
patrols were to be on foot from now on. That way we would have more visibility around us and we could get into cover quicker. Warriors would be dispatched to extract us in an emergency, if we couldn't fight our way out.

For that purpose, two Warriors turned up at Cimic on permanent attachment. The forty-minute trundle from Abu Naji was too long for patrols in the shit to wait. They also provided the base with another excellent layer of protection. One was stationed just inside the front gate, and one ditto for the back.

Warriors are built to carry ten men: the driver, gunner, and commander and seven dismounts in the back. They were seriously ageing by then, but they still provided some handy firepower. The chain machine gun was gravity fed, loading long belts of 7.62 into itself upside down. It's fired by the gunner stamping on a pedal under his foot.

Hence the popular phrase among us in a contact, 'Give 'em some fucking pedal.' In the turret next to the chain gun was the Warrior's main armament, a 30mm Rarden cannon. With a range of 1,500 metres, its high explosive rounds would silence most enemy positions that fancied engaging us. But it was never easy to fire something as powerful as that in the middle of a built-up city. We didn't want to kill everyone.

Of course, the CPA bods made more irritated noises about us putting a couple of tanks on their lawn. But they didn't complain with any real conviction any more. With the fighting on the increase, even they were secretly quite pleased to see them there now.

At the very end of April, our official mission in Al Amarah was hit by another serious setback. For the last two days in a row, some of the civilian NGOs' 4×4 Land Cruisers had got badly shot up. On both occasions, gunmen lay in wait
for them at Red 11. It was a major road junction on Route 6 just over the river from the OMS's HQ building. It was inconceivable that anyone else but the OMS could have been responsible.

The two organizations they had got were the American Heart Foundation and the Mines Awareness Teams. Both had been totally unarmed. One of their workers was shot in the leg. He lived, but it made the NGOs finally decide they couldn't stay any longer amid the town's rapidly deteriorating security. It was simply too dangerous for them to do any meaningful work. As a group – and with little regret – they packed up and left. This was bad news for us because it meant the only people left to rebuild Al Amarah now was us. Because of the fighting, most of our reconstruction effort had ground to a halt too. And that was really the only reason we were there in the first place.

That night, Cimic took its heaviest pounding yet from the OMS mortars. They opened up from three different positions just before midnight. They also used an 82mm tube on us for the first time. Previously, they had only chucked 60mm rounds. But an 82mm is getting on for the same sort of calibre shells used by light artillery guns. It was set up among the slums of the north bank and made a hell of a racket too. One of its giant shells scored a near direct hit on a Snatch in the vehicle park. It tore the arse out of the thing.

While we hunkered down under hard cover during the ferocious mortar strike, the operations officers at Abu Naji were already hard at work. For the CO, the NGOs' disappearance was the last straw. We had let the OMS take the initiative this far. But enough was enough. It was time for the battle group to attack.

Operation Pimlico was planned to begin at 2 a.m. the next
morning, May Day. It turned out to be a very bad joke. But the Abu Naji planners could never have foreseen what was to happen that day. None of us did.

On paper, the plan was a good one. We represented law and order, and the OMS were the criminals. So that's how it was decided to treat them.

Intelligence had revealed that six of their main players lived on the same shitty estate, the Kadeem Al Muallimin, in the south-west of the city. So we were going to go in and arrest them. But it was to be done in the dead of night for the maximum element of surprise. The arrest teams – a company of Royal Welch Fusiliers in Saxon armoured cars from Abu Naji who were attached to us for the tour – would be in and out before the city even woke up. If they did, Y Company would hold the fort in Cimic. The operation was named after a London tube station because all of ours on that tour were. No significance, just the easiest names for everyone to remember.

A backlash of some sort was expected. So from the early hours, most of the platoon was up on the roof. The rest of the company either doubled up in the sangars or waited in full battle kit as an emergency QRF.

The plan worked. The OMS men had no idea what was coming and were nabbed in their beds. The teams also picked up a fair stash of arms and explosives. But best of all, they got out with just a few volleys of fire at their rear. At Cimic, it remained quiet too.

We had to wait until sunrise to discover what a hornet's nest we had kicked over.

The OMS were absolutely livid that the battle group had the audacity to kick down the doors of some of their top men's homes. It was the first time we'd gone after them and they were in outraged shock. As far as they were concerned,
it was a declaration of outright war. By the time it got light, they began to mobilize everybody they could, and their fighters started to come out in serious force. The town went crazy. We watched from the roof in amazement as the whole spectacle unfolded.

The city was a wall of noise. Trucks with loudspeakers were driving around and around blasting out angry messages in fast Arabic. The imam of every mosque was up in his minaret on their Tannoy systems. Cars packed full of blokes dressed in black cut about the place at full speed with guns poking out of every window, and car horns were honked incessantly. All over the city, thick plumes of black started to snake up. Many were the result of rubber tyres being set alight. It was an easy way to block a road.

'Jesus Christ, this is going to be interesting,' I said to Chris as we looked out over the mass hysteria. 'Do you think they've just been told they've won the Olympic bid after all?'

Chris thought the whole thing was hilarious. His General Melchett impression was in full swing.

'I don't care if they've just rogered the Duke of York with a prizewinning leek. They've all gone completely fucking kookoo.'

We asked Khalid, one of the Iraqi interpreters who worked for us at Cimic, up on to the roof to translate what all the loudspeakers were saying.

'They say, "Tell everybody to go home and get a gun. Come and fight infidel oppressor." They say this is jihad.'

The OMS were putting it about that our raid was a personal attack on the authority of Moqtada al-Sadr. And in Al Amarah, that was as good as an attack on Allah himself.

Khalid had started to get nervous. He could see his well-paid job coming to a swift end.

'Sergeant Mills, this is very bad. They are going to come in here and kill you.'

Des interjected. With the pride of a seasoned Boer hill scout, he stroked his long's barrel. 'Don't worry, Khalid. They're going to have to get past ten of these little puppies first. I'd just love to see them try.' And he meant it.

Cimic became a frenzy of activity. Everyone was now either standing to, or preparing to. The place was feverish with anticipation. There was another major hurdle we were going to have to overcome that day. We were overdue a big resupply from Abu Naji. We were low on food and ammunition, and it wouldn't wait. A column of Warriors was going to have to come into the city again to do it. The smart arses at Slipper City hadn't thought of that one.

What we didn't know was that there was a little bit of method to all the OMS's madness. By noon, they had mounted their own fortified checkpoints on all the roads leading into Al Amarah, and many of the major road junctions inside it too. The city had been effectively sealed off. With us inside it. And the enemy was ready and waiting to unleash seven shades of shit on anyone who tried enter.

They had also taken a load of senior policemen hostage. We had no dialogue with the OMS. So they broke the news in a phone call to Molly Phee. They would execute all of their hostages unless their prisoners were returned immediately.

I sent some of the boys down to get us a bigger supply of ammunition. If it was going to kick off, we might as well be prepared. They brought a shed load of it back up, and we made a massive central pile in the middle of the roof; boxes of green spot for the longs, belts of 7.62 for the Gimpys, tin after tin of 5.56 for the Minimis and SA80s, and crates of illume rounds for when it got dark. All the weapons we could lay our hands on we brought up and lay next to each of us. I personally had four beside me: a Minimi, GPMG, SA80 and my long.