Shaun Clarke - Behind Iraqi Lines

‘Wow!’ Andrew whispered, looking at the lights over the distant city. ‘That’s just beautiful, man!’

‘Beautiful from here,’ Hailsham replied. ‘Hell on earth if you’re there.’

‘You men,’ Sergeant Lloyd said to two of his eight sappers, both of whom had various explosives, charges and timers dangling from their webbing. ‘I want you to take out those towers, one to each man. Fix enough explosives to the base to make sure the whole caboodle topples over. Use electronic timers that can be fired from here by remote control. Don’t make any mistakes. When this lot goes up, those towers have to go up at the same time. Understood?’

‘Yes, boss,’ the men nodded.

Then they headed off in opposite directions, towards the tower each had selected, the explosives on their webbing bouncing up and down as they ran.

‘You see that?’ Geordie whispered to Trooper Gillett, having decided to pass the time by winding him up. ‘Those explosives are liable to go off any second, taking us out with him.’

‘Aw, come off it, Geordie!’

‘No, kid, it’s true! I’d be pissing in my pants if I was you. He’ll blow up any minute now.’

‘That’s bullshit, Geordie,’ Trooper Stone retorted. ‘We all heard what Sergeant Lloyd said in the plane – explosives don’t blow up easily.’

‘Besides,’ Trooper Gillett added, ‘that sapper’s practically out of sight already. If the stupid bastard blows himself up, we’re well out of range. Pull the other one, Geordie.’

‘Shut up, you men,’ Sergeant Lloyd said, glancing down at the men digging the holes, ‘these men have to concentrate. If you’ve got nothing better to do, I can always hand you a shovel.’

‘No, thanks,’ Geordie said, edging away. ‘I have to go and stand out on point. Have a nice day!’

‘Fucking nerd,’ Sergeant Lloyd said.

The digging alone took forty-five minutes. During that time two vehicles, about half an hour apart, came along the road, heading away from Baghdad, their headlights cutting a swathe through the darkness but not picking out the men who were concealed in LUPs, guns at the ready, only twenty yards or so away. The first vehicle was a Mercedes saloon filled with white-robed Arabs; the second was a soft-topped army truck packed with Iraqi soldiers. Both passed by and disappeared into the night, their drivers and passengers, probably fleeing from the air attacks on Baghdad, not knowing how close to death they had come in what they thought was an empty, safe area.

About twenty minutes after the army truck had passed by, one of the men uncovered a fibre-optic cable.

‘That’s it,’ Sergeant Lloyd said, glancing down into the hole as the trooper who had reached the first cable wiped sweat from his brow. ‘I want that whole stretch of cable cleared, Trooper, so get back to your digging.’

‘Right, Sarge,’ the trooper said. He continued his digging. When the length of cable running across the bottom of the hole was completely exposed, he jumped out to let Lloyd jump in. Ricketts glanced left and right, checking the road in both directions, but there was no sign of any more movement. Satisfied, he knelt beside the hole in which Lloyd, unpacking his boxes, was already at work.

‘Cable!’ a trooper called from the next hole.

‘Me, too!’ someone else called, to be followed by a third, then a fourth.

‘Tell them to clear the whole length of cable,’ Lloyd told Ricketts, ‘then get out of the holes. My men will do the rest.’

‘Right,’ Ricketts said, then stood and went from hole to hole, passing on Lloyd’s orders.

‘I’ve reached mine,’ a man in the fifth hole told him. ‘There it is,’ said a man in the sixth hole, looking down and pointing.

By the time Ricketts had passed on Lloyd’s instructions, the first men had completely uncovered their cables and were clambering gratefully out of the holes to wipe the mud off their hands and have a drink of hot tea from a vacuum flask. As they did so, Lloyd’s assistants, all former sappers, jumped down into the holes to fix explosive charges to the cables.

Major Hailsham was kneeling on the rim of Lloyd’s hole, looking down as Lloyd worked, so Ricketts, just as interested, knelt beside him.

Even as Iraqi MiGs and Mirage F-1s flew overhead, heading away from the battered airfields of a spectacularly illuminated Baghdad, Sergeant Lloyd and his men coolly continued what they were doing. With Hailsham and Ricketts looking on, Lloyd sliced through a cable and slipped a piece into his bergen, to be shipped back to England for examination. He then packed C3/C4 plastic explosive around and between the exposed cables, fixed it in place, and attached a non-electrical firing system with a time fuse connected to a blasting cap in a thin aluminium tube, which he embedded carefully in the explosive charge. To the blasting cap he attached a detonating cord of reinforced prima-cord – a small, high-explosive core protected by half a dozen layers of material – which in turn was taped together with two primers and a detonator fixed to a timing device. He glanced up at Hailsham.

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