Chris Ryan - The One That Got Away - Junior edition

If the rest of us heard a contact, he went on, we were to stand-to, wait five or six minutes for the recce group to come through our position, and put fire down on anyone following them. If our own four guys didn’t appear, we were to make for the drop-off point, and they would join us there.

They left at 2300 while the rest of us took turns to do an hour’s stag. Not a sound broke the silence; the night was utterly still, but not nearly so light as the one before, because the sky was full of clouds.

The recce party returned safely at 0330. They had found that the main supply route was not a metalled road, but just a series of dirt tracks running parallel through the desert; the tracks spread out across nearly a kilometre. They’d also discovered a single white post standing in the ground, about 300 metres from the lying-up position, but they could not make out what it was marking. Then they’d checked out a little tented encampment beyond the spot on which the truck we’d seen had been parked. It was a second anti-aircraft position, with a few vehicles parked around it.

For what was left of the night they got their heads down, and the rest of us stagged on again. When morning came, we decided it was too dicey to stay. There were too many people about, and we were too close to the site that the anti-aircraft guns were guarding.

For the rest of the second day we tried to get through on the radio, but no luck. We also tried using our Satcom telephone. We didn’t want to speak for long on it, because any call that lasted more than twenty seconds could be picked up by direction-finding apparatus. So we switched the set to listening-wait, hoping to hear a call from base. Then occasionally we would come up on the call-sign with a quick request for a comms check: ‘Hello Zero Alpha, this is Bravo Two Zero, radio check, over.’ But nothing happened.

It looked as though we were going to have to rely on our Lost Comms procedure. That would mean pulling back down the wadi to the drop-off point, and being there when the chopper came in at midnight — forty-eight hours after dropping us off. We hoped that it would take us somewhere better, but more likely it would just bring us a new radio. Either way, after dark the whole patrol was going to move back, humping all our kit. We weren’t looking forward to making the effort.

It was about four o’clock in the afternoon that everything started to go wrong.

Once again we heard the herder boy calling his goats. This time he sounded closer, and coming directly towards us. I’d been talking to Andy and Dinger about the radio, and I was under the overhang when the boy started shouting, from a point directly above my head, but some way out behind me.

The three of us lay still, but when I looked across at Vince, on the other side of the rock, he was craning his head to see if he could spot the boy. Mouthing at him furiously, and giving tiny, frantic movements of our fingers, we tried to make him keep his head down.

If we’d all stayed still, we might have been OK. Nine times out of ten, if hidden people don’t move, they get away with it. What betrays them is shape, shadow, shine and, above all, movement. It’s the same with birds and animals in a wood: as long as they keep still, you don’t see them, but the instant one moves, that’s it.

But Vince moved. Wanting to see what was happening, he eased his head up until the boy could have caught sight of him.

The shouting stopped. There was no cry of alarm, but the sudden silence was ominous. It was pretty obvious that the boy had run off. I crawled round to Vince and hissed, ‘Did he see you?’

‘No, no, no,’ he answered. ‘We’re OK.’

I left it at that, but I didn’t believe him. Things were getting scary: we were about to be rumbled. I felt fear starting up in my stomach. Legs was still at the radio, trying to get through. ‘Have you been on the guard net?’ I asked him.

‘No.’

‘Well, get on it and start tapping Morse.’ The guard net sends out new frequencies, and can only be used in an emergency. This was one.

Legs started working out his Morse code message: High possibility compromise. Request relocation or expel . But just as he was tapping it in, we heard the roar of a heavy engine and the squealing and grinding of what we thought were tank-tracks, approaching up the wadi.

Wild thoughts raced through my mind: an anti-personnel round from a tank could destroy us all.

‘Get the sixty-sixes open,’ somebody shouted, and we pulled open the tubes and cocked the disposable rocket launchers. The guys had spread out round the end of the wadi, lying behind whatever cover they could find.

Every second the rattling noise of the tracks got louder. We were stuck, pinned like rats in the dead end of the ravine, just waiting for the tank to come round the corner. We couldn’t tell what else might also be coming at us over the flat ground above. The chances were that the Iraqis were deploying behind us too; even at that moment, they were probably advancing on our position. A couple of hand grenades tossed over the edge would make a nice mess of us. Even so, if the tank came into view and levelled its gun on us, we’d have no option but to run up onto the plain and chance it with the anti-aircraft positions on the high ground.

By now it was 1700 hours, but still full daylight. We started drinking, because we knew that if we had to run for it in the desert, we’d need the liquid inside us. Other guys began frantically repacking their kit, pulling off the warm jackets they’d been wearing and stuffing them into their bergens. A couple of the lads struggled out of their NBC suits and stowed them.

I checked my 203 magazines again. Each could hold thirty rounds, but I’d only loaded them with twenty-eight, to leave the springs a bit looser and cut down the chance of a stoppage. The spares were in my left-hand lower pouch.

Then, suddenly, something did come round the corner.

Not a tank… but a yellow bulldozer.

The driver had the blade high up in front of him, obviously using it as a shield. We all kept still, lying or crouching in firing positions, but we knew the man had seen us. He was only 150 metres away when he stopped, stared, and reversed out of sight before trying to turn round. Obviously a local, he must have known that the wadi came to a dead end, and his only purpose in coming up it had been to find out who or what was in there. We held our breath as the screeching and crunching gradually died away.

For a minute or two we felt more relief than anything else. But we felt certain that the local militia must be deploying behind us, and we needed to get out of there. We’d already decided to ditch the surplus kit we couldn’t carry, but we stowed the 66s away, pulled our bergens on and were ready for the off. As we were about to leave, I called, ‘Get your shamags round your heads.’ So we all wrapped our heads in shawls, in case we could bluff our way and pass as Arab soldiers, even for a few minutes.

We started walking southwards, down the wadi, towards our emergency rendezvous point. Finding myself at the front, I led the patrol out, my 203 locked and loaded, ready for action. Andy was in the middle, the normal slot for a patrol commander. Dusk was already coming on, and I was hoping we could reach the drop-off point, less than two kilometres to the south, and put down enough fire to defend ourselves until dark. Then we’d have to wait until the chopper came in.

Moving out, I kept close in to the left-hand wall of the wadi, because that was the steepest, and in the lee of it we were out of sight of the AA guns. When I turned round, I found that the guys had opened up to a tactical spacing of maybe twenty metres between each; but I was thinking, If we have a nonsense here, we want to be tight together . So I yelled back, ‘Close up!’