John Nichol - Tornado Down

Nothing stirred. Finally we decided we would have to move, and began leopard-crawling across the ground on our stomachs. Every so often there would be a two-foot rise in the sand. Wriggling over these was a nightmare. It felt like everyone in Iraq must be watching, as we rolled down the reverse slopes. I looked back at JP: his leg was worse, it was stiffening, he was obviously in pain. His left eye was coming up nicely.

Then something really did move, to the south. We lay still. Definitely people, coming this way. We took out our pistols. I checked that we both had a round up the spout. A vehicle moving closer, it sounded like an armoured personnel carrier. Then the real horror: a group of figures shimmered on the horizon, advancing towards us.

We lay perfectly still. There didn’t seem much option. I was still hoping against hope, thinking: ‘Maybe they won’t see us.’ As they moved steadily towards us, our only protection was a minuscule twig.

Then we saw a vehicle, a red pickup truck. It drove past our position a couple of times, less than half a mile away. Surely they must have spotted us by now? A volley of shots rang out. ‘Bloody hell, what are they firing at? Us?’

Gradually, tantalisingly, the figure-mirage resolved itself: a skirmish line, strung out, advancing purposefully, searching methodically – for us. More shots cracked out, some of them whirring close: they were trying to scare us out of hiding, to flush us out like gamebirds. I remained perfectly still, my heart hammering. I prayed the line would turn, would move away from us.

A loud yell rang out. They had spotted us.

I had never been shot at before at close range. There is nothing more frightening. I wanted to shit, my guts churning, demanding evacuation. They had automatic rifles, AK-47s, the guerilla’s friend. Being torn open by one of those is not the way to go.

The noise was unbelievable, endless whipcracks, deafening: crack! crack! crack! crack! The twig we were lying behind was eighteen inches high, tops, but bullets were buzzing through it, swarming angrily over our heads, kicking jets of sand up around our position. In my fear, I found that I was digging a shallow grave in the earth with my elbows, knees, groin, face, everything, driving my whole body down into the sand, the grains in my mouth and nose. Anything, anything to get down below the bullets, to avoid that shattering impact.

The image of the three of us, Helen, myself and John, came back to me, in flashback, that evening before the war, in the living room at Laarbruch, when we had joked about capture, about suicide. I remembered the things we had read that the Ba’ath Party did to prisoners. But did we really want to kill ourselves? Wouldn’t that, too, amount to failure, but of a different kind?

I looked at John. Now it came right down to it, I didn’t much fancy killing him, in any case. It seemed absurd; we had known each other for a long time. I was much less than sure I could do it. There was another option though.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘They are going to come and get us anyway. Shall we go out with a bang?’ I was suggesting that we start shooting back at them, make a fight of it at least. It looked like they were going to kill us anyway.

Dazedly, he looked at the gun I was aiming at the skirmish line. ‘No, there’s always hope,’ he said, with a warmth in his voice I was surprised to hear. I looked over to him, and he smiled, wryly. All of a sudden, I knew he was right. The odds were way too heavily stacked against us. There were at least twelve of them, and they had automatic rifles; there were two of us with pistols, one of us injured. All we could have done is stand up with our little popguns, and fire off a couple of rounds. In return, they would have split our bellies open with the AKs.

We looked at one another. Without a word, we stood up slowly, very slowly, arms raised high into the air.

Never have two people hit the ground again as fast as we did. The whole world was exploding round our ears. We were completely submerged in gunfire, we were drowning in it. The Iraqis were a mass of beige, black and red – a welter of uniforms, wild black hair and beards, gaping mouths. They were charging towards us, screaming, shooting wildly, less than a hundred yards away. Hearts thumping, ears pounding, we tensed ourselves for the kill. This was it.

But the firing stopped. The Iraqis stopped. It was hard to believe, but they had stopped. Very, very slowly, we started getting up again – and again they let loose. It was stupid, but they were scared of us: in the pandemonium, they thought we were shooting at them. At the end of the line, an officer fired his pistol into the air repeatedly, shouting, in English, ‘No, no, no, no, stop, give yourself in!’ The firing tailed off again. Then, ‘It’s OK… up, up, up!’ JP was still clutching his gun, but I had concealed mine, some grand notion of derring-do in my head. We stood up for the third time – extremely slowly! We still expected the worst. I was rock-taut waiting for the bullets to hit. We were both of us trembling visibly.

They came up to us, immediately grabbing JP’s gun, and my radio, which was still sticking out of my pocket. There were three Bedouin trackers and a boy of about twelve; the rest, uniformed, were clearly airmen from the base we had just attacked. Great. One of the Bedouins was dressed in traditional robes. His face suffused with rage, he came right up to me, shouting his head off, and started punching me in the face.

We were very lucky the officer was there. Without him, it was as clear as day they would have killed us on the spot. He was shouting at them continuously in Arabic, at the top of his voice, still very worried they might kill us, especially the Bedouins.

He wasn’t as worried as we were.

A lieutenant, he strode up to me. ‘Where’s your gun?’ I pointed to my flying-suit. He reached in and pulled it out. So much for the heroics. He gave it to one of the trackers, who raised it and pulled the trigger. One shot rang out, whirring skywards; the second time he fired, the Walther jammed. Good job I hadn’t tried anything.

We were quite simply looted: they took all our possessions. As they found things, they just threw them down onto the sand. The Bedouins got very excited by our ballpoint pens and felt markers. Then the one who had punched me in the face found my money, £1,000 in gold sovereigns. He looked at it. The gold glittered back at him. The look on his face… It was more than he could reasonably have hoped to earn in five, maybe ten years. He grinned at me, squirrelling it away among his folds. The lieutenant removed my flying watch. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I’ll give this back to you later.’ This was a bit like King Herod saying ‘Leave the baby, he’ll be fine with me.’

‘Which one is Peters?’ the officer demanded. They had found our flying helmets, with our names on them.

‘This,’ I thought, ‘is definitely not going well.’ It felt as though we had wandered onto the set of a very bad movie.

Once they had taken everything, they tied our hands behind us, and prodded us into the back of the pickup with their Kalashnikovs. The little Bedouin boy was beside himself with excitement, bouncing around and waving his hands in the air. The lieutenant said, ‘He is very excited: you came from the skies.’ The kid had never seen a military aircraft before, let alone anybody who flew one; he was torn between desperately wanting to talk to us and hating us.

The airmen had given our personal locator beacons to the Bedouins, as well as most of the rest of our kit. This was amazing luck, because the Iraqi Army could easily have used them to lure CSAR into a trap. One of the tribesmen turned mine on. A series of beeps came out of it as the locator began working. Whatever anybody said now, the words would go winging back to the Search and Rescue teams. He muttered suspiciously at it. His mate found the other one, and they started speaking to one another, on the back of this truck, the conversation going out all over the airwaves, Arabic voices on our survival beacons. I was suddenly very happy. It meant that someone must know where we were. But could they do anything about it now?