Ryan, Chris - Zero 22

‘ Roger that. Wait out. Over. ’

Two minutes passed. Then: ‘ Zero 22, this is Alpha. We’ve lost contact with the Kurds. Looks like a comms outage. Over. ’

Danny swore. Losing radio contact was an occupational hazard. But why was there no safe-approach signal?

‘ Zero 22, are you in a position to make an approach and recce the target? ’

Danny narrowed his eyes. He didn’t like it. But the only option was a full retreat, and he didn’t like that either. ‘Roger that,’ he said. ‘Wait out.’

He switched frequency to speak to the rest of the troop. ‘The Kurds have lost contact with base. They want us to make a recce. Advance with care.’

Danny and Dougie stayed on the ground, keeping eyes on the target while the convoy approached. Once the three Jackals and the Bushmaster had caught them up, Danny and Dougie rejoined them. ‘Place looks deserted,’ Dougie said. ‘Maybe the Kurds got cold feet and fucked off.’

Yeah , Danny thought. Maybe .

‘This is the plan,’ he said. ‘Jackal One, make an approach. Jackals Two and Three remain static to provide covering fire. The Bushmaster will hold back in a protective position. I’ll take the top gun in Jackal Two.

Danny took his position at one of the Gimpys on Jackal Two. As Jackal One advanced towards the target, Jackals Two and Three positioned themselves on either side of the road that led towards the prison, which was four hundred metres distant. The Bushmaster was thirty metres behind them. To Danny’s right was another drainage ditch leading at right angles from the road. Danny and the other three Gimpy operators rotated their weapons towards the prison compound, ready to give covering fire if necessary. Jackal One trundled towards the prison at a slow, steady rate. In his peripheral vision, Danny was aware of Chinese Mike aiming the Bushmaster’s grenade launcher towards one of the security towers. Danny raised his night sight again, looking for the three regular flashes of the torch. They didn’t come.

He switched his radio frequency to speak to the ops base. ‘Alpha, this is Zero 22. We have one vehicle approaching the target now. Over.’

A pause and a hiss. ‘ Roger that. Over. ’

Jackal One was ten metres from the entrance. It stopped. Through his sight, Danny saw the top-gunners making a precautionary sweep of the compound. A voice in his earpiece said, ‘ Clear .’ Jackal One sustained its slow advance towards the guard house. Danny continued to watch through his sight.

It happened suddenly. One moment the Jackal was advancing. The next, there was an explosion so fierce that, even from a distance, it sent a shock wave through Danny’s body. There was a brief flash, bright enough to dazzle him. When his sight returned, he saw smoke belching from the position the Jackal had held, it was so thick that it completely obscured the vehicle.

Danny screamed into his radio. ‘Land mine! Contact! Contact! One vehicle down! Three guys!’

But it was already going noisy. Tracer fire shot through the air from positions inside the prison. It lit up the night, burning through and over the perimeter fence, at first landing only in the vicinity of the convoy vehicles and spitting up vicious explosions of desert dust. It took only seconds for the shooters to fine-tune their aim. Before any of the team could return fire, the tracer rounds – .40 and .50 cal, Danny estimated – slammed into the two remaining Jackals and the Bushmaster. Each time a tracer round hit, there was a sickening metallic crunch and a multicoloured burst of ricochet, like fireworks.

After a few seconds’ delay, the air exploded with the thunder of the SAS team returning fire. The night split with the cacophony of the four Gimpys on Jackals Two and Three pumping ordnance back towards the prison. Danny fired bursts of three to five rounds – the most effective and accurate way to operate a Gimpy. The empty rounds spat out of the weapon and the 7.62s flew through the thick plume of smoke billowing from the wrecked Jackal One. Grenades smashed through the perimeter fence and exploded in the vicinity of the prison. But sustained and relentless and brutal though the SAS’s counterattack was, it seemed to have no effect. If anything, the incoming fire increased in intensity. More lines of tracer fire sliced towards them, slamming into the Jackals and the Bushmaster, which were rocking and smouldering with the impact. Two RPGs starburst in the air, showering the area with shrapnel. Two more exploded on the ground fifteen metres behind the Bushmaster. The incoming grew heavier and heavier, high-calibre rounds drilling into the armoured panels of the vehicles.

‘Bullethead!’ Danny screamed through comms at the driver of the Bushmaster. ‘Advance, advance! We need more covering fire!’ He could feel the heat coming off the barrel of his Gimpy.

As the Bushmaster moved forwards, Danny switched frequency. Immediately he heard a stressed voice at the other end of the radio. ‘ Zero 22, what is your sitrep? ’

‘We’re under heavy fire! We need air support! Now!’

Even as he spoke, things got worse.

Through his night vision he saw a flare from inside the prison. In the two seconds that followed, he became aware of an anti-tank missile hurtling through the air directly at Jackal Three. The vehicle was to his three o’clock, no more than twenty metres away. Against a weapon like that, it didn’t stand a chance. The missile slammed hard into the Jackal. The extremity of the explosion punched all the air from Danny’s lungs. Jackal Three was thrown on to its side like a toy. Flames engulfed it. Within the space of ninety seconds, whoever was lying in wait at the prison had demolished two Jackals and six men, and things were only going to get worse. Danny fired more bursts from the Gimpy. The barrel was glowing faintly, and smoking. He was going to burn it out if he kept this rate of fire, but there was no chance of changing out the barrel. ‘Fast air!’ Danny shouted into comms. ‘FAST AIR!’

He didn’t hear the response, because right then the Bushmaster hit an IED in the road that the rest of the convoy had miraculously missed. The gutting crack of the explosion cut through the noise of tracer rounds and Gimpy fire. The front end of the Bushmaster crumpled horrifically and the whole vehicle tipped over on to its side with an ominous creak.

And then its problems really started.

Three anti-tank missiles slammed into the Bushmaster’s undercarriage. The noise and devastation were immense. Metal ripped. Smoke belched. Fuel ignited. It was obvious at a glance that everyone inside the vehicle was fucked. Danny quickly switched his radio to personal comms. He wished he hadn’t. All he could hear was inhuman screams from inside the Bushmaster. Macalister? Bullethead? He couldn’t tell. Danny tried to concentrate on keeping the rounds from his Gimpy raining down on the prison, but now he was aware of someone moving away from the Bushmaster. It had to be Chinese Mike, thrown from the remote weapon station. He was staggering towards Jackal Two, then he stumbled and fell perhaps fifteen metres away, Danny could hear him screaming.

Danny’s reaction was instinctive. He threw himself from the Jackal, hitting the ground with a heavy, deadened thump. Chinese Mike was in trouble. He needed help. Danny struggled to his feet, the air around him a riot of tracer fire and shrapnel. He sprinted towards Chinese Mike, who had managed to get to his knees.

He was only five metres away when the rounds hit. If the effect of the tracer rounds on the armoured shells of the convoy vehicles was brutal, their effect on a human body was obscene. They cut through Chinese Mike’s neck, abdomen and groin like he was made of warm butter. Blood and the hot mush of decimated internal organs and fragments of bone showered everywhere. Danny hit the ground, pressing himself hard on to the desert floor to avoid meeting the same grisly fate as his mate. He looked back towards Jackal Two. It was ten metres from where he was lying and only had one Gimpy operational since Danny had gone to Mike’s rescue.