Chris Ryan - The One That Got Away - Junior edition

Their voices sounded a bit flat, and I could tell they’d been through a lot; they weren’t their normal bouncy selves. But Dinger said, ‘Look — I owe you a pint for making me keep my jacket. I reckon it saved my life.’

‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘But what happened? How did we split?’

‘We heard an aircraft and went to ground. But I can’t say much now. We’ll see you when we get to the UK.’

Obviously he didn’t want to talk on the phone, but I asked, ‘Who else is coming back?’

‘Andy and Mark.’

That was all he said. It meant that, besides Legs — and, almost certainly, Vince — Bob Consiglio had gone.

I felt very sad about Bob, good, tough little guy that he was — and immediately I wanted to know what had happened to him.

I also had a brief word with Stan. ‘Hey,’ I told him. ‘You made the wrong decision back there.’

‘I know,’ he agreed. ‘I owe you a few pints on that. I should have stayed with you. I really should have stayed…’

When we returned to Hereford, the first thing I found was a note in the guardroom telling me to visit the doctor. An appointment was made that very day at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich. I got there at about 5 p.m.

I don’t know what people had been expecting, but they’d scrubbed out an isolation ward just for me. I stuck my head round a pair of double doors, and someone shouted, ‘Get out! Get out!’ as though I was going to contaminate the whole building. When I said I was from Hereford, they told me they’d been expecting someone to turn up in an NBC suit, glowing all over.

The surgeon was fed up that I was so late. But when I explained I’d gone eight days without food, and might have been contaminated in a nuclear refinery, he became a different man, and asked me to report for tests the next day.

The tests lasted all the next morning and into the afternoon. At the end, I went back into the isolation ward, and the doctor came in and said, ‘You’d better take a seat.’ His face was sombre — as if he had really bad news.

‘You’ve got a viral infection,’ he said. ‘It will work its way through your body.’ He also found that I had a blood disorder, and an abnormal amount of enzymes in my liver produced as a reaction to poisoning. On the nuclear front, I was also tested for radioactive poisoning, but there appeared to be no contamination; he did mention leukaemia, but he brushed aside the possibility. That didn’t stop me worrying about it, though…

Back in Hereford, we pieced together what had happened to the rest of the patrol. I’d only been home about three days when Stan phoned and came round to my house. He said the worst thing he’d ever done in his life was to ignore my warnings in the wadi.

He told me that he had walked for about four hours with the goatherd. Towards evening they saw a small group of buildings, with vehicles outside them. Stan approached them on his own. As he arrived, an Arab in a fine-looking white dishdash came out of the building, heading for a Toyota Land Cruiser. Stan tried to engage him in friendly chat, but the man made a dive for the vehicle. Thinking he might have a gun there, Stan fired a single shot through the window and dropped him.

The sound of gunfire brought about eight militiamen, armed with AK-47s, hurtling out of the building, and a firefight broke out. Stan dropped the first, and the second, but then his ammunition ran out, so he leaped into the vehicle. The key was on the floor, under the body of the first Arab. Before he could start the engine the windscreen smashed in on him and a weapon was stuck into his face. Guys dragged him out and were immediately on top of him.

He was captured.

The militiamen bundled him into another car and drove him to the nearest town. At first he was treated well; but later he was kept blindfolded and starved, and was beaten so badly that his skull was fractured. Early in February he had been moved to a base camp near Baghdad; there he was reunited in a cell with Andy and Dinger.

We assumed that after Stan had been captured, the goatherd must have told the militia that there was a second runaway out in the wadi, and directed the party that came in search of me.

Stan and I wondered what would have happened if we’d stayed together, or walked down the railway line. In fact, if there’d been two of us, I think we’d both have been captured. Lonely as it was to be on my own, I was probably better off. There was only one person to hide, one made less noise than two, and there was no chance that the pair of us would talk ourselves into doing something stupid. We probably would have broken into a house in search of food, and that might have led to our capture.

Being alone was what had saved me.

Happily, Stan made a full recovery. He’d had a real battering, but he was able to bounce quickly back to normal.

I also tried to find out what had happened when the patrol split. Andy, who was four back down the column, had heard a jet overhead. He had immediately gone down on one knee in an attempt to contact the pilot on his TACBE, calling out to Vince ahead of him, ‘Go to ground!’ He had been so busy trying to raise the pilot that he hadn’t realized that Vince had never heard his call, and had carried on. We never did work out how we’d become so widely separated, though.

Andy told me that after trying to contact the aircraft, his party saw movement up ahead. They went to ground, and three figures came walking across their front. They assumed this was an Iraqi patrol and let them disappear into the night.

The five picked themselves up and started walking to the north-west, and when dawn came they laid up for the day in the lee of a mound. Because of the snow, rain, wind and bitter cold, Mark started to go down with exposure, so the group decided to risk a daylight move. They made good progress until they reached a main road, where they planned to hijack a vehicle.

Bob leaned on Andy’s shoulder and pretended to be wounded. They flagged down a car which turned out to be a taxi. As it stopped, the other three came up out of cover and surrounded it. Kicking out the driver and two other passengers, they took one man with them, because he looked so scared that they thought he might help. They set off westwards along the highway.

All went well until they reached a vehicle control point. Some way short of it they got out of the car, and arranged with their driver that he would drive through the control and pick them up on the other side. In fact, he shopped them, and they had to escape into the desert.

Moving north towards the Euphrates, they found themselves in an area of habitation. By then they reckoned they were only ten kilometres from the river; but behind them military vehicles began to pull up on the highway. Troops poured out and opened fire. The rounds went well over them, but then three or four anti-aircraft guns opened up as well. On the whole this was helpful, as it made locals think an air raid was in progress and run for cover.

The patrol reached the bank of the Euphrates and took a GPS fix. This confirmed that they were only ten kilometres from the border. By then it was dark. They thought about trying to cross the river, but decided that the risk of going down with exposure was too high. In the end they decided to keep heading west, with the hope of reaching the border that night.

They stumbled upon enemy positions, and got into contacts. Creeping, crawling, working their way forward through ploughed fields and along hedges, they made slow progress. Andy, Mark and Bob had a contact during which Bob got split off and ended up in a contact of his own, and Legs and Dinger also got separated.