A voice came up over the radios from the rearmost of the vehicles. “What you guys got to the front? We’ve got fucking armor to the back of us. And on the right there—can you see those vehicles? They’re moving to head us off. We’ve got to split up!”
“Fucking bullshit,” Grey snapped. “Keep the force together.”
He glanced to their right, and sure enough a line of headlamps low to the ground had appeared from behind the cover of a slight rise. They were speeding along and seemed to be making good use of the tracks that crisscrossed the sands, while the British vehicles were churning across the rough of the open desert. It had to be the Fedayeen.
More alarming still, they looked as if they were making toward the south of the British patrol’s line of march, to cut off their escape. This had become a desperate race to get far enough south to lose the enemy armor and before the Fedayeen could intercept the British force and trap them. Grey had few doubts as to who was going to win this particular struggle.
The Fedayeen vehicles thundered ahead with their lights on full beam, making no attempt to conceal themselves. When you were a force as fast and as potent as they were, Grey figured, you didn’t really have to hide. The nearest of their Toyotas were closing fast, and shortly they were barely three hundred yards away. As they drew level with the British vehicles, Gunner slowed the convoy to a crawl.
Moments later he pulled to a halt, and the wagons behind him did likewise. Every man held his breath as the enemy force approached. The lead Toyotas tore past at breakneck speed, and no more than 150 yards away. The men on the Pinkies kept as quiet and as still as they could. They barely dared to breathe as one after another the Toyotas powered onward.
At this range they could make out the enemy force in detail. The open rear of each of the vehicles was crammed full of fighters clustered around a tripod-mounted Dushka. Each was dressed from head to toe in white—a long robe topped off by a
shemagh
wrapped around the head that left just the eyes showing. Their vehicles
looked brand-spanking-new, and the fighters riding in them were armed with smart-looking AK-47 assault rifles.
There were some half dozen in the rear of each wagon, so eight or more per vehicle. With a good dozen Fedayeen wagons out there, that made a force of almost one hundred fighters. They looked hard-core, well disciplined, and up for the fight, plus they packed some serious firepower. They had the air of fanaticism about them that the briefings back at the forward mounting base had suggested.
These, then, were Saddam’s die-hard militia.
They had one disadvantage right now, compared to the tiny British force. With their headlights on full beam, those behind were lighting up the vehicles in front, and they would have acquired little if any natural night vision. In effect they would be blinded by their own lights, which meant that the desert outside the cone of illumination thrown off by their convoy would be an impenetrable wall of darkness. By contrast, the British wagons were totally unlit. More than likely, the Fedayeen would spot the hidden force only if one of their Toyotas got lucky and swung its headlamps across a Pinkie’s flank.
Sure enough, the convoy of enemy vehicles turned eastward, and as their headlamps swept round it looked for a moment as if they were going to spotlight the lead Pinkie in their glare. Men were poised to dive off the rear of the British wagons so that the heavy machine-gun operators could use their weapons to defend the small force. Even so, the Fedayeen seemed set on getting the drop on them.
Yet, as luck, would have it none of the Toyotas seemed so much as to slow, and within seconds the last of the hunter force had surged onward into the night. The Fedayeen had failed to spot the British vehicles and were racing on ahead to block the route south.
For now the threat was past. Grey breathed out a long sigh of relief and glanced at the open map in his lap. His heart was hammering against his rib cage, and he fought to get his pulse rate under control again. That had been bloody close. He was trying to read the map without using any light at all. If the barest pinprick was visible, it would draw all the demons from hell onto their position.
From the map their situation looked pretty close to hopeless. To their north they had the Iraqi armor. To the south were now the Fedayeen. Going east would only take them further into Iraq, and they’d quickly be into built-up areas and major roads, which would be perfect terrain for the Iraqi forces to run them to ground.
He figured there was only one option left open to them. If they veered west, it might enable them to sneak between the Fedayeen force to their south and the armor to their north. But somewhere out there was likely to be the Iraqi infantry in their trucks, and heading west risked running onto their guns. In short, Grey didn’t have much of a clue where next to steer the patrol.
As he scrutinized his map, desperately trying to find a safe route through, he was tempted to hit the Mayday button on his Blue Force Tracking system. If he did, an emergency burst of data would be emitted, which would be picked up first in the American military’s main operations room—for theirs was the central coordinating point for all BFT traffic. From there it would be sent on to British SFHQ, alerting them that more M Squadron wagons were in serious trouble.
He glanced across to the BFT unit. Hidden deep in the dash the tiny light diode was flickering away, indicating it was switched on and operational. There were only three buttons on the unit: “ON,” “OFF,” and “MAYDAY.” For a second, his finger hovered over the third. Then he told himself not to be so fucking defeatist:
I’m not going to bloody do it. Whatever it takes, we’ll get ourselves out of this shit.
After all, what would it achieve? Headquarters had already received several Mayday calls, but all it had served to do was add to the confusion. Without having a fully coordinated sitrep from the Squadron as a whole, there was no way of knowing the fate of all sixty men. Right now, each scattered unit knew only its own very confused circumstances, and another Mayday call was hardly going to help.
What they needed was to re-form the Squadron and get this shit sorted.
They still had options, Grey told himself. Sure, they could do sod all against an Iraqi main battle tank. But they still had a LAW 66mm antiarmor weapon strapped across the hood of each of the Pinkies. The LAW was the NATO version of the RPG. It was a bit dated, with a remarkably crude sight, but it was actually very effective. The LAW was more than good enough for taking out one of those KrAZ-225 infantry trucks, or you could smash it into the ground next to a group of infantry and cause some real carnage.
Plus they still had Six Troop’s one
SLAR
, the shoulder-launched multipurpose assault weapon—the state-of-the-art 85mm rocket launcher. The
SLAR
was still in the experimental stages of development, so who knew the limits of its thermobaric warhead? It came complete with six thermobaric rockets, and right now that represented the patrol’s greatest firepower. If they could just get into a decent position from which to fight, they could still do some serious damage.
Grey glanced up from the map. “Take a right turn onto a southwesterly bearing,” he told Moth. “Keep on that bearing until—”
“Hold on a minute, are you sure you’re on the right map sheet?” the Rupert sitting next to Grey cut in. Grey had pretty much forgotten about the man up until now. “I think you’ve made a mistake—”
Grey fixed him with a look like murder. “You want to take over? Be my fucking guest, mate.”
That killed the issue. Moth eased the wagon into motion, swung right, and got them onto a southwesterly bearing. To his rear the rest of the wagons came after them, while Gunner accelerated the quad until it was scouting the terrain to their front.
“We’re heading southwest for reasons that should be obvious,” Grey announced on the radios. “Keep your eyes peeled for those fucking Iraqi infantry trucks.”
Gunner responded to Grey’s warning by speeding ahead still further so he could probe the territory they were moving into. He crested a low rise. No sooner had he done so than he pulled the quad to a sudden halt. A line of powerful headlights had emerged from the gloom. They lay a good two kilometers west of the British
force, and it was obvious at once that this had to be the fleet of Iraqi infantry trucks. They blocked any escape route west.
He did a quick about-face and raced back toward the wagons. As he did so, he radioed through a hurried warning, and in response a chorus of voices came up on the radios:
“That’s it—we’ve got fucking enemy infantry to the west . . .” “Plus Fedayeen to the south, as a blocking force . . .” “Plus we’ve got armor to the rear . . .” “And east it’s fucking bedlam . . .” “We’ve got to fucking split up . . .” “Yeah, we’ve got to split up . . .”
“No way! That’s fucking bullshit!” Grey countered. “Keep the wagons together.”
“Keep the unit together,” Ed’s voice cut in. “Keep the unit together. I repeat, we keep the unit together.”
But others kept crashing in on the radio net.
“We’ve got to split up.”
“We’ve got to split up.”
It was then that Gunner’s voice came up on the air. He was screaming to make himself heard above the revving of his quad bike’s engine and the roar of the speeding vehicle’s slipstream. It made comms with him extremely difficult, which added to the confusion.
“If we’re splitting up, I’m off to Syria! See you blokes in Syria!”
“KEEP THE UNIT TOGETHER!” Ed roared, but his command was drowned out by the chaos on the net as voices shouted and yelled over each other.
“We’re splitting up!”
“Let’s head for Syria!”
“Split up and head for the border!”
The Six Troop signaler came up on the net, desperately trying to cut through the radio traffic. “Negative! Negative! Stick with the unit! Stick with the unit! All call signs, stick with the unit!”
“See you blokes in Syria! See you blokes in Syria!” came back Gunner’s response. It was drowned out by the screaming of the quad’s engine, and it was obvious he wouldn’t be able to hear much of what was being said on the net and probably hadn’t heard the order.
By now the sound of Gunner’s quad was fading to a ghostly whisper. Even though he had two riders on one quad bike, it was far more nimble than the Pinkies. He was soon lost in the night, the silhouette of his fast-moving machine being swallowed by the desert horizon, and with the Rupert clinging desperately to the rear.
Grey turned to Moth. “What the fuck?”
Moth shrugged. “Sounded like he couldn’t hear us.”
Grey jerked a thumb toward the rearmost vehicle. “Yeah. With those twats crapping on about splitting up, it’s hardly bloody surprising.”
“He sounded pretty pissed off too.”
Grey smiled grimly. “It’s probably sharing his quad with a Rupert that’s got him so twitched. That alone is enough to get him pissed off.”
In spite of their predicament, Moth gave a short bark of a laugh. With the days spent driving through the heat and dust, Gunner’s radio might have packed up completely. Who knew?
For a few long moments there was chaos on the radio net as voices ranted on about the need to follow Gunner’s lead and to split up. A far greater number were adamant that the force needed to stick together. Finally, Ed cut it short. They needed to stick to their standard operating procedures, he announced, which meant going through the ERV (emergency rendezvous) routine.
Grey couldn’t have agreed more. It was the only logical thing to do right now.
As the Squadron had pushed northward through Iraq, it had established a series of ERV points. First was the “coastal RV”—the name being a hangover from M Squadron’s maritime operations that referred to their point of entry into theater. In this case, the Squadron’s coastal RV was the original landing zone where the Chinooks had dropped them, north of the Euphrates River. After that, a series of additional ERVs had been established, each fifty kilometers or so further north and distinguished by some special feature—one that would be memorable enough not to have to be marked on the maps.
A marked-up map was a big no-no for Special Forces operations. If a marked-up map fell into the hands of the enemy, it would give away all the ERVs—hence the need to commit them to memory.
Whichever RV you made for, when you reached it you’d mark it with a distinctive sign—maybe a cross made of stones—to signal that you’d arrived before moving off a good distance to find an LUP. That way there was less risk of compromising the RV point, but others in the Squadron would know that you were there.
The last-ditch rendezvous was the “combat RV”—the escape route if all other options failed—which in this case was to make for the Syrian border. Right now, Gunner had thrown steps one to nine out the window and was heading direct for the combat RV. But in a sense it was hardly his fault. With all the calls to split up, he must have thought the entire force was heading for the combat RV, in which case he’d made a break for Syria along with what he believed was the rest of them.
Things were getting shittier by the second now. M Squadron was split into at least four separate units. Gunner had been doing a fantastic job of shepherding the three wagons, but now they had well and truly lost him. Their force was deprived of its last quad, which had constituted their only remaining fast-mobility and recce capability.
They were down to three Pinkies careering across the desert sands, with twenty-six men clinging on for their lives.
If only Grey could navigate the wagons to their last ERV point, there was just a chance that they would find the rest of the Squadron there (minus Gunner and his passenger, of course). If the OC and the third group had followed standard operating procedure, that was where they would have headed—assuming they were able to get on the move at all, what with the numbers of men they’d be carrying and the presence of the enemy.
If they didn’t find anyone at the ERV, at least they’d know that the rest of the guys hadn’t been able to make it—which would mean they’d been captured or killed, or that they’d lost their mobility and gone into a hide. Either way, it would give them some concrete, usable intel to go on. Plus the ERV was a known point at which they could try to call in a Chinook to lift them out of there.