Andy McNab - Bravo Two Zero

I waved away the cloud of Iraqi cigarette smoke.

“I hate it when you do that,” I said. “Do you know, for every nine cigarettes you smoke, I’m smoking three of them?”

“You shouldn’t honk,” he said. “It’s cheap. You’re not paying, I am.”

The road signs were in English as well as Arabic, and the blokes in the back had a map spread out on their laps, trying to work out where we were. Nothing actually registered. The built-up area stretched all along the Euphrates, and there were no place-names.

All things considered, we were doing rather well. The mood was quietly confident but apprehensive. They must have found the people at the hijack site by now and would be on the lookout for the yellow cab. Compared with what we’d been through in the last few days, it was quite a funny time, and at least it was warm. The car fugged up, and our clothes started to dry.

There were more convoys, consisting of about twenty vehicles at a time. We tagged on behind. There were civilian cars everywhere. There was no street lighting, which was rather good. We tried our best to hide our weapons, but there had to be a compromise between concealment and being able to get the weapons up to bear in the event of a drama.

We rounded a corner on the open road and got into another slowly moving jam. Vehicles had come up behind us, and we were stuck. This time Legs couldn’t get out or he’d be seen by the people behind. We’d just have to bluff it out.

A soldier with his weapon slung over his shoulder was coming down the queue on the driver’s side, the left-hand side as we were looking. People were talking to him from their cars and trucks. There were two more squad dies on the right-hand side. They were mooching along more slowly than their mate, weapons over their shoulders, smoking and chatting.

We knew we were going to get compromised. The moment the jundie stuck his head inside and had a look at us, he’d see we were white eyes. There was no more than a 1 percent chance of us getting away with it.

Big decision: What did we do now? Did we get out straightaway and go for it, or did we wait?

“Wait,” I said. “You never know.”

Very slowly we tried to get our weapons up to bear. If we had a drama, we would have to get out of the car. Every handle had a hand on it, ready for the off.

Mark quietly said, “See you in Syria.”

We’d try to keep together as much as possible, but there was a strong chance we’d get split. It would be every man for himself.

We waited and waited, watching these people slowly working their way down the line. They didn’t look particularly switched on: they were just killing time. Mark tried to get a fix on the Magellan to find out how far we were from the border, but he ran out of time.

“Let’s just go south, and then west,” I said.

That meant jumping out on the left-hand side of the road, firing off some rounds to get their heads down, and running like mad. As far as I was concerned, this was our most dangerous moment since leaving Saudi.

The blokes at the back had got their weapons up. Legs had his 203 across him with the barrel resting on my lap.

“If he comes up and puts his head through, as soon as he ID’s us, I’ll slot him,” he said.

All I needed to do was keep my head out of the way. Legs would just bring the barrel up and do the business. – “We’ll take the other two,” Bob said.

I leaned forward to hide Legs’s weapon.

The jundie got to the vehicle in front of us. He leaned down to speak to the driver, laughing and gob bing off, not a care in the world. He waved his hands as he spoke, probably moaning about the weather. With our Arabic we wouldn’t have much to talk about when he got to our car. I could ask him the way to the market, but that was about it.

He said his goodbyes to the vehicle in front and sauntered towards our cab. I leant forward and fiddled with the dashboard controls.

He did one tap on the window. I put my head right back and in the same motion pushed my legs out and pressed my body against the seat. The squaddy’s face was pressed expectantly against the window. Legs lifted the barrel of the 203. One round was all it took. There was an explosion of shattered glass, and the car doors flew open. We were out and running before the body had even hit the ground.

The two other squad dies started running for cover, but the Minimis took them down before they’d taken half a dozen paces. The civvies were straight down into the foot wells of their vehicles and quite rightly so.

We ran at right angles to the column of cars until we came into line of sight of the VCP and were illuminated by the spill from headlights. They opened up, and we returned a massive amount of rounds. They must have been wondering what the hell was going on. All they would have heard was one round, then a couple of short bursts, followed by the sight of five dickheads in shamags legging it into the desert.

The first people over the road put covering fire down on the VCP until the others got across. Once there, we all moved. The whole contact lasted no more than thirty seconds.

We ran south for several more minutes. I stopped and shouted, “On me!

On me! On me!”

Heads dashed past me, and I put my hand on them and counted one, two, three, four.

“Everybody’s here. Okay, let’s go!”

We ran and ran, making the best of the confusion we’d created behind us. To my right, I heard the sound of Dinger laughing as he ran, and before long we’d all joined in. It was sheer bloody relief. None of us could believe we’d got out of it.

We headed west. From Mark’s last fix on the Magel lan we estimated we had maybe 8 miles to the border. Eight miles in over nine hours of darkness-a piece of cake. All we had to do was take our time and make sure we got there tonight. There was no way a group this big could lie up the next day.

We came to an inhabited area. There were pylons, old cars, rubbish tips, dogs howling, the lights of a house. Sometimes we had to get over fences. There were vehicle headlights on roads. Behind us in the area of the VCP there was still an incredible amount of noise. People were still hollering, and there were sporadic bursts of small-arms fire. Tracked vehicles screamed up and down the road. It was just a race now, a matter of the hares keeping in front of the hounds.

The moon started to come out. A full moon, in the west. It couldn’t have been worse. The only good thing was that we, too, could see more and move faster.

We landed up paralleling another road. We couldn’t avoid it. We had a built-up area to our left and the road to our right. We didn’t have time to fart-arse around. We were going for it big style. We had to hit the border before their initial confusion died down and reinforcements arrived.

Every time a car came from either direction we had to take cover. We were climbing fences, avoiding dogs, avoiding buildings. There were houses everywhere now, lights on, generators going. We picked our way through without incident.

Vehicles started to move along the road without their lights, presumably hoping to catch us out. There was still shooting way off in the distance. In our desert camouflage, against an almost European background of plantations and lush arable land, we glowed like ghosts in the moonlight.

We were spotted from the road. Three or four vehicles came screaming along, and blokes jumped out firing. We were down to a few mags each by now, and there was bound to be lots more drama before the night was over. All we could do was run. There was no cover. They kept on firing and we kept on running, the rounds zinging past us and into the built-up area.

We sprinted for 1,200 feet. We passed through little clusters of houses, expecting at any moment to be slotted by people coming out, but the local population kept themselves to themselves, bless their cotton socks. I was sweating buckets, panting for breath. Adrenaline gets hold of you and you clock Olympic times, but you can’t sustain it. Then the firing sparks up again and you find a bit more.