Andy McNab - Bravo Two Zero

As the boy shouted, Mark gave him the good news. His body disintegrated in front of my eyes. Mark gave it a severe stitching all the way along-from where we were, all the way along west. I scrambled out of the hedge line and carried on the fire while Mark came through. We moved east, stopped, put down a quick burst, ran, gave it another quick burst, and then just ran and ran.

There was high ground to our front. Below it were buildings with lights on and movement. We didn’t want to cross the open ground, so we had no option but to use the obvious cover of a ditch. I had no idea what we’d got ahead of us.

The fence line was above us. Because the fields were irrigated, the roads and buildings were on built-up land to keep them above the waterline. We got into a little dip below the fence and moved south.

We started to slow down now that we seemed to be out of immediate trouble. We took the 6-foot chain link fence to be the perimeter of a military installation. We got halfway along and stopped. We’d seen a road to our front, running east-west. Vehicles were driving up and down, fully lit. Other vehicles drove with their lights off.

There had to be a definite junction to the east of us. We could see vehicle lights heading up there and changing direction. There was a mass of activity. Every man and his dog seemed to be on alert. They must have thought the Israelis had turned up or the Syrians were invading. All I hoped was that in all this confusion a little gang of two and a little gang of three could work their way through.

We found ourselves opposite a large mosque on the other side of the fence. We stopped and observed the road. Closer now, we could see vehicles parked up along the side of the road as headlights swept past. Trucks, Land Cruisers, APCs. Where there are vehicles there are people. We could hear talking and the mush of radios. I couldn’t tell how far the column extended, east or west. From the initial contact on the edge of the wadi to here had taken three hours. With only two and a half hours of darkness left I was flapping. We’d have to take a chance. There was no time left for boxing around.

We were lying in the dip, wet and freezing, trying to work out where we were going to go through the fence. Both of us were sweating and shivering. We were almost out of ammunition. We waited for lights to pass so we could get an idea of where all the vehicles were sited. We would cross in the biggest gap.

Two of the trucks were about 50 feet apart. If we could get through unchallenged, the border beckoned. We’d just have to brass it out. We started across the field, taking our time. Each time a vehicle passed we hit the ground. It was important to get as near to the parked convoy as we could before we made our dash. All we planned to do was run through them. Neither of us had a clue what was on the other side, but we didn’t care-we’d sort that out when we came to it.

The vehicles were 3 feet above us on the raised road. At the top of the bank, we discovered, was a three strand barbed wire fence, 3 feet high. We’d have to get over it before we could even start to dodge between the vehicles.

The gap was between two canvas-topped trucks. In one of them a radio hissed loudly. We were going to have to climb the mound, and would be committed from the moment we started moving.

I clambered over the fence and got down to give Mark cover. He cleared the fence, but the wire twanged as he removed his weight. A jundie started jabbering and stuck his head out of a truck window. He got it from me straightaway. I ran to the back. The tailboard was up, but there were two slots at floor level which would have served as footholds when it was down. I put my muzzle through and gave it a good burst. Mark went straight across the road and was down on the other side of the mound, firing along what to him was the right-hand side of the convoy. I didn’t know if the other vehicle had characters aboard, so I threw in a grenade and legged it over the road to Mark. We fired until we ran out of ammunition, which was all of five seconds. We dropped our weapons and legged it. They were no use now. The Iraqis used 7.62 short, and we needed 5.56. Now the only weapon we had left was darkness.

We must have put down enough rounds to get them flapping because they didn’t follow immediately. We ran for 900 feet. The sounds of screaming filled the night.

We stopped near a water tower. It wasn’t that long now before first light. Looking straight ahead, we could see the road that we’d just crossed to our right hand side, the mast on the Iraqi side, and another road that we’d have to cross to go west.

We looked at one another and I said, “Right, let’s do it.”

We scuttled on across the fields and stopped short of what we could see was a large depression. On the other side was a built-up area, unlit. The right-hand corner, the end of it, was more or less at a road junction.

The depression must have been used as a rubbish dump. Small fires smoldered in the darkness. We went down into the dip and stumbled over old tins and tires. The stench of rotting garbage was overpowering. We started to come back up the other side. About halfway up the rise we were opened up on by two AKs, from really close range. We hit the ground and I went right.

I ran for what I thought was enough distance to get me level with the junction, then turned left. I wanted to get over the road and carry on running. I ran around the side of a mound and thought I could get up the other side, but what I’d come into was a large water storage area. There were two big pools, oily and greasy. I was flapping, running around like the cornered rat that I was, trying to find a way out. The sides were sheer. I couldn’t get up. I had to retrace my steps. I wasn’t even looking now, I was just running. If they were behind me, knowing about it wasn’t going to change anything.

I got out of the immediate area and stopped at the road. My chest heaved as I fought for breath. Fuck it, I thought, just go for it.

I got past the buildings. I was elated. I felt I’d cracked it. Just the border now. I didn’t worry about Mark. I’d seen him go down. I didn’t hear anything after that, and he didn’t come with me. He was dead. At least it had been quick.

I felt it was all behind me. All I had in front of me was a quick tab to the border. The mud built up around my boots. It was heavy going. My legs were burning. Physically I was wrecked. I stopped to get some scoff down my neck. It felt good. I drank some water and forced myself to calm down and take stock. Navigation was easy enough. The mast was right ahead of me. As I walked I tried to work out what had happened during the contacts. But there had been total confusion, and I couldn’t make sense of it. There was still firing behind me.

It was the early hours of the 27 th, and I had about 2-3 miles to go. In normal circumstances I could run that in less than twenty minutes with my equipment on. But there was no point just running blindly towards Syria with only an hour of darkness left. I didn’t know what the border crossing was like physically-if it was a fence or a high berm, if it was heavily defended or not defended at all. And even if I did get into Syria during daylight hours, what sort of reception could I expect?

I was about a half mile south of the Euphrates and a half mile north of a town. The area was irrigated by diesel pumps at intervals along the river. The field crops were about eighteen inches high. I had kept off the tracks and moved through the center of the fields, putting my feet down on the root mounds of the plants. Even so, I knew I couldn’t avoid leaving sign. My hope was that no one would be out in the fields the next day, tending what, apart from the frost, seemed to be a healthy young crop.