Dan Mills - Sniper One

‘Fucking awesome,’ replied Smudge in wonder.

‘Charlie Charlie One. Target acquired.’

‘Hah! Did you hear that Smudge? Target acquired!’

‘Oh, come on, please do it. Pleeeease.’

Every new burst of information sent the two of them into an ever more frenzied ecstasy. We still couldn’t hear any sound of the jets at all though.

Crump . Barrage number three from Zinc had started. It was a good one too. Rounds started to come in quite tightly around the house. We didn’t give a fuck. We’d all have taken a direct hit on our sangar as long as we were allowed to live long enough to see the bomb drop.

‘Danny, Ops Room. Are there any vehicles near the target?’

I had a look through the Beast’s sight. Tigris Street was totally empty. So was Yellow 3, as well as the bridge that led from it over to Red 11. Before the CO in Abu Naji could give specific clearance for an F16 to engage, he had to be as sure as he could that they weren’t going to fry any civilians.

‘Ops Room, Danny. That is a negative. No traffic in the area at all…’

Crump.

‘… also tell Abu Napa the target is still very much live. Tell them they are clear to engage right now.’

Abu Naji didn’t need to ask twice. They’d learnt by then that our word from the roof was as good as gospel. We’d earned that reputation the hard way over a long hot summer. The CO didn’t make us wait very long. The next message from Redders came just ten seconds later.

‘Charlie Charlie One. Weapons cleared for release.’

The CO had given the green light. The F16 pilot went to work.

‘Charlie Charlie One. He has eyes on the target. Commencing bombing run now.’

Buzz leaned out of the sangar to speak to Rob and Smudge.

‘Eh, boys, watch this. You’re gonna like this, I promise you.’

To my right, Chris couldn’t hold his excitement in any longer.

‘Yes! Drop it baby, drop it!’

Jesus. Even Chris had started gibbering like an idiot. It was impossible not to. As the supposed mature commander I was trying as hard as I could to keep a straight face. In fact, every sinew in my body was urging that bomb to fall right on top of those sweaty bastards.

Then, what we’d all been waiting to hear.

‘Charlie Charlie One. Weapons released. Time to impact, figures Three Zero. This is it lads.’

The bomb was in the air and there were thirty seconds to impact. Gleaming.

Very soon after that, we began to hear the jet. A quiet rumble at first, then the noise grew rapidly. After releasing the 500lb device, the pilot had locked the F16 into a steep dive after it. He was guiding the bomb down on to its target from the laser in his nose cone.

‘Here it comes,’ I shouted. Bollocks to maturity.

The closer the F16 came to earth, the louder the jet engines screeched. We craned our necks out of the sangar frantically to catch a glimpse of it, but it was impossible to make anything out in the black of the night sky.

Soon, it sounded like it was coming straight for us. Surely it couldn’t get any lower? Just as the furious scream passed right by, a huge white flash engulfed the whole of the horizon for an instant, followed by a giant ball of flame at Zinc that licked up 50 metres. A fraction of a second later, BOOM!

Cimic erupted. Cheers and maniacal laughter burst out from all over the compound.

‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ shouted Smudge, jumping up and down on the spot.

‘Fucking ’ave it,’ jeered Rob.

It was a great feeling. For countless days on end, the OMS mortar teams had been blowing us to pieces. They’d badly wounded our cook, they’d nearly killed Oost and me in the sangar, as well as at least a dozen other blokes, and they’d smashed our home to bits. Now they knew what it felt like to get pasted.

The blast must have taken out a few power lines too, because all the lights went out over three square blocks of houses around Zinc. That included the OMS building. Good. Now those fuckers couldn’t boil a kettle either.

A few minutes later, the Nimrod, still circling somewhere above us, passed the battle damage assessment down to Buzz. The 500lb bomb had been landed exactly nine metres west of the mortar base plate to limit any damage to the flats to the east. All six members of the mortar crew were vaporized instantly.

A dirty great crater now sat in the park, and the air controller said around forty people were in it pawing over what was left.

‘That OK for you, Buzz?’

‘Spot on, my man. Pints on me next time I see you, Jimbo.’

‘Glad to oblige. Guess what, the F16s wanted to come by and put another one down there on the forty mourners. I had to tell them we couldn’t ID them all as hostiles.’

‘Don’t you just love the Yanks. Shame they didn’t.’

‘Yes it is. That’s us going off task now, Buzz. Cheerio.’

‘See you around, old mucker. Out.’

The air strike wasn’t going to change a great deal. We all knew the OMS would have another mortar crew in the park by tomorrow night. Even if it was just for a few hours though, we were just a little bit safer. It also meant we could draw up a new column for the Ops Room stats board. It read: ‘Air Strike = 1’.

Most importantly, the OMS now had six of their best fertilizing the roses. Fantastic compost.

For the rest of the night, the mortar teams left us alone. The whole town had heard the air strike and knew we had jets up there now. None of them wanted to be the F16s’ next prey. But by mid-morning the crews were back to business as usual.

Unfortunately, that morning we also had to say goodbye to Buzz and John. Their time with us had come to an end. Buzz said he was sad to go, and this time we genuinely believed him.

‘Baghdad want to know when I’m coming back. They want me up there as soon as possible because of the workload. I’ve already delayed it twenty-four hours. I asked for another twenty-four, but they’ll get proper shitty with me if I don’t leave today.’

They were running low on .5 inch ammunition anyway. All the ball and flash tipped rounds had been used up, leaving just the armour-piercing rounds left. You should see the mess that made of people.

They shipped out of Cimic before dawn the next morning, just as discreetly as they had come.

No more Buzz meant no more Beast and no more air strikes. We were on our own again.

That was a shame, because we could have done with Buzz and his entire bag of tricks with the news we got the next morning.

The Intelligence Cell at Abu Naji had passed on an alarming new warning. Working next door to the battle group Ops Room, the Int Cell collated all the snippets of information and gossip they could pick up about the enemy’s movements. It was all graded in terms of its reliability; some things were very accurate, other stuff total fantasy. The new warning had the highest reliability grading possible. It came from a tip-off from a senior insurgency source.

Abu Hatim, the brother of the disgraced ex-governor and the self-styled Lord of the Marshes, was back in town. Over the years, he had built up a sizeable and well-armed following at the head of the terrorist resistance against Saddam in Maysan. Amid the chaos of the uprising, he had sensed this was his chance for power. Abu Hatim had struck an alliance with the OMS to join forces and drive us out of Maysan for good. Under the deal, the Lord of the Marshes would then rule it as an extremist Islamic province under Moqtada al-Sadr’s supreme authority.

The tip-off also had it that Abu Hatim and the OMS were to launch a major new offensive against us that afternoon. For the first time, all the armed militias in the province would be fighting under a single coordinated military leadership. That spelt big trouble.