'Put it this way, Danny, threatening the Imam Ali mosque is like waving a giant blood-red flag with bells on it in front of a seriously histrionic bull with a persecution complex. It's Moqtada's nuclear button, and he's fucking well pressed it.'
'I see.' Clearly it wasn't going to be much of a birthday.
From the peace and quiet of just two days ago, reports were now flooding into the Ops Room of serious trouble all over the country. Coalition forces had come under heavy attack again in the poor Shia suburbs of Baghdad and across all the major southern cities: Nasiriyah, Kut, Kufa and Diwaniya. Basra too was once more in flames. The Mehdi Army there had tried to take control of strategic buildings and were fighting open gun battles with British troops in the streets.
Now it would be nice to say that the people of Al Amarah rose above all the tosh being spoken by Moqtada, and got on quietly with their everyday lives. But if they'd done that, they wouldn't have been the people of Al Amarah. The city was as bad as anywhere. From what it looked like in Abu Naji, possibly worse.
Within hours of the Moqtada pronouncement, the city's mosques began broadcasting a furious call to arms. Thousands were out on the streets in angry protests, and the OMS were in the middle of it all, frantically rabble rousing and sinisterly mobilizing at equal pace. The shooting started almost immediately.
Redders also told me about the head casualty that had come in from Cimic. It wasn't a sniper. It was Ray, the cheeky but lovable private from Mortar Platoon. Ray the Mortar Magnet. He was dead.
'Ray? Jesus, poor guy. How the fuck did that happen?'
'It's unbelievable, Danny. As soon as the trouble started, the Iraqi Army who were manning the front gate fucked straight off. We had to put Ray and a couple of other lads on it instead. It was kicking off pretty badly in town. The OC's rover group in a couple of Snatches came screaming back in and Ray raised the metal barrier on the chicanes to let them in.
'You know the metal chain you use to pull the bloody thing up and down with? The cheese cutter pole on top of one of the Snatches caught it as it went past. That yanked the barrier straight back down right on Ray's head. It must have pretty much killed him on the spot. Don't think he knew anything about it. Which is something, I suppose.'
What a pathetic waste. After all we'd been through, Ray was killed in a stupid little accident like that. It wasn't anybody's fault, but it was the first fatality the battle group had suffered and it was a bitter blow.
Soldiers understand losses in combat, because that's what happens in war. We're all big boys and we know the risks. To lose someone so needlessly like that though was gutting. Ray especially, who'd shaken off everything the OMS had thrown at him. He was their casualty all right, albeit in a more oblique way. Of that we were all sure.
'There's more, Dan,' Redders continued. 'The OMS even managed to cut short a little memorial service organized for Ray yesterday. Just as the padre was saying his bit, the first round of a mortar barrage landed on the cookhouse roof. Everyone had to scarper for cover.'
'Fucking wankers.'
'That's another thing – the mortaring is back something special as well. It's up there with what we were getting at the start of May. Didn't take them long to find all the tubes they're supposed to have got rid of, did it?'
From that moment onwards, I bust a gut to get myself back to Cimic. A new movement ban on Snatches was coming into effect at dusk that evening. After that, fuck knows when the next Warrior column would move.
The situation was deteriorating by the hour. The CO's desperate negotiations with city leaders to try to halt the violence had failed. Instead, the Mehdi Army stormed all of Al Amarah's police stations and assumed full control over the town council. In effect, the town was theirs again.
Cimic was the uprising's next target, and it was taking a pounding. As the most obvious as well as accessible symbol of the coalition's presence in Maysan, the compound swiftly became the focus of the entire province's resistance. For the same reason, it was imperative the battle group as the lawful Iraqi government's agent defended it.
Just as the sun began to dip below the horizon, the two Snatches I had persuaded Featherstone to send down finally turned up at the front gate. I had the passenger door open before the lead vehicle even stopped moving.
'Don't even stop the engine, Sam, fucking go now.'
As we sped out of Abu Naji's front gate, there was a series of mechanical clicks and clunks as everyone in the vehicle made their weapons ready.
We took a back route in up the city's eastern flank as the Red route would be a certain death trap. As we cut into the old town, there were OMS gunmen milling around on pretty much every corner.
'Just put your foot right down, Sammy. Don't stop for anything, got it?'
'Got it, Danny.' He didn't.
I depressed the button on my chest rig to speak into my PRR. 'Everyone else, keep your eyes peeled. With a bit of luck we'll get through without a fight. The first person you see raise their weapon at us though, give 'em blue fucking murder.'
The two Land Rovers' V8 engines roared as we shot past most of the groups of hoods before they even got a chance to see what we were.
Only one problem. It was obvious where we were going. One of the OMS had radioed ahead. We were tearing up Tigris Street only 500 metres away from Cimic when they sprang the ambush. If you can call it that. Slaughter is a better word.
It was the most suicidal thing I have ever seen. Less than 100 metres in front of us, three youngish looking lads in black ran right out into the middle of the road. With their AKs at their waists Rambo style, they opened up on us.
'Top cover!' I screamed up at Louey and Des, as I opened the passenger door and jammed my SA80 down the crack between the door and the window.
That's when I heard the shouts of the men in black. Over and over, 'Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar!'
Louey and Des were already on to them. Fucking good blokes. A second later both their Minimis were chattering with fury. Metal on metal, as dozens of 5.56mm shell casings rained down on the roof above my head. With my left foot jamming the door open, I flicked my SA80 onto automatic and sprayed a full mag at them too.
'Hold on,' hollered Sam.
The Snatch's tyres screeched as he swerved it from one side of the road to the other to make us a harder target. Fantastic skills, Sam.
A couple of rounds piled into the Snatch's engine block, sparks flying as they smacked through the bonnet's metal. Another tore through the glass, just missing Sam's head.
The nutters weren't going to beat the Minimis though. By the time we'd reached their position, two had been blasted to the left side of the road. The third fell into a kneel, clutching his badly bleeding gut. Sam swerved to miss him, but the second wagon had no chance. Both its offside wheels went straight over the fighter, finishing him off for sure.
Sam craned round for a second to stare at the carnage.
'Fucking lunatics! What were they on?'
It was madness. If our bullets hadn't cut the men up, we would have knocked them down like bowling pins with four tonnes of Snatch. They'd known that before they even went into the road.
The contact was hard proof that this fight really was going to be different.
It wasn't just about the OMS's ego any more. This time, there was real religious belief behind what these fighters were doing. Their fanaticism took away any fear of death. Death was good, if Allah wished it. Everything was Allah's call to them; it was all out of their own control. Fighting people who don't care about dying is harder because they don't do what you expect them to do. Or what you'd do. Like keeping your fucking head down if two Minimis are going to blow it off.
Luckily, the road kill behind us were only new recruits. Nobody had bothered to teach them how to aim.
21
Cimic was no longer the holiday camp that I'd left. Instead, it was a hive of activity with blokes running left, right and centre getting ready for another long night. The place was on a major war footing.
&nbs
p; The sangars were double-manned, with many of the sentries' eyeballs already red with tiredness. On the righthand side of the driveway as we drove up was a freshly bombed-out Snatch, peppered from top to bottom with holes. A mortar had landed a few feet away, totalling it where it stood. A young lad from Recce was darting about all over the paving stones furiously trying to sweep up dozens of shards of shrapnel into an untidy pile to stop vehicle punctures. The boys had obviously had a busy time of it.
As I jogged into the house, a constant stream of instructions crackled out over the PRR from the Ops Room to various sections of the defensive cordon. On the main stairway, I was almost knocked over by a pair of blokes carrying a fucking great chest of 7.62 link for a Gimpy somewhere.
Behind them was Dale.
'Ah, Danny boy!' He gave my hand an even harder bone crunch than usual.
'Thank fuck you and your boys are back. Thought you might have decided to sit this one out.'
Dale had his helmet on and he wore his body armour over a T-shirt. He had at least two days' stubble growth, as had many of the blokes in Cimic. The house had also swiftly returned to the Black Hole of Calcutta with everyone having to live back under hard cover again. A couple more of the single-storey Portakabins had bought it from the return of the mortar barrages.
'Me? Fuck off mate. Not for all the tea in China.'
'Good. 'Cos I've had to kick everyone out of the faarkin' pool and send them to work again, haven't I. We need you on the roof big style, mate. Grab some water and I'll give you the low down.'
Dale didn't have much good news. It wasn't just the reason for it that made the fight different this time. It was the numbers too.
'The main problem is that every single fucker out there is uniting against us now. It's all about Najaf, isn't it. It's sent them potty. The OMS is a given, we knew they'd be in a bate. But now it looks like we've got the tribal bosses and estate militias lining up alongside them as well.'
'Shit.'
'Yeah, it is shit. They're not even scrapping with each other any more. They're all fucking Sadrists now. And they want us out of Maysan altogether. The Int boys are getting more reports than they can even process at the moment. People are coming in from all over the province to have a go apparently. There's even a few hundred of those fuck-heads from Majar al Kabir who done the Red Caps last year on their way up as well.'
Majar al Kabir. The land of the savages. We hadn't even gone near them on our tour, but that clearly didn't mean they were going to miss a chance at slotting some more Brits if they could.
But Dale had more.
'And if all of that ain't bad enough, al-Sadr has put a price tag on our heads, hasn't he. It's being put about that anyone who kills a coalition soldier gets 200 US dollars in cash from the local OMS. Cheeky sod – I reckon I'm worth at least a grand.'
It was a good incentive. The average labourer got little more than $100 a month. So the greedy now had a reason to line up alongside the believers too. The Maysanis sensed blood, and everyone wanted a bit of it.
Dale scarpered back to the Ops Room while I thought about what he'd told me. Yes, there was no getting away from it, it was a fucking mess. And we weren't holding the same amount of chips that we had during the spring uprising.
We couldn't just do another Operation Waterloo and clear all the bastards out with our firepower. For one thing, we no longer had the air assets guaranteed. With much of Iraq in flames, the American Spectre gunships were busy elsewhere protecting their own troops.
There was also the dangerously high level of feeling among the average Al Amarahan to take into account. To a man they were all Shia, and therefore far more sympathetic to al-Sadr's cause this time. Would another full-scale armoured incursion into their city set every single male inhabitant against us? It was certainly possible. There must be about 100,000 of them – we'd be outnumbered 100–1.
Of course, privately I was quite excited to be in the thick of the action again. I'd missed it badly, we all had. To feel the adrenalin rush of danger again was a liberation because being mortared, grenaded and shot at turned us all on.
Yet this time the stakes were a whole load higher. It was clear from very early on that this was going to be considerably worse than anything we'd ever seen before. Most importantly of all, we had had people killed now too, and that changed the tone of everything.
The situation boiled down to one simple question. Were we really going to be able to handle the immense scale of the onslaught that was now coming our way? For the first time, I had to admit it. I didn't know.
Without even dumping my stuff, I went straight to the roof to catch up with the boys. I could already hear them returning the odd round to some sporadic incoming fire. As always, the boys were my priority. Until I knew their state the bigger picture could wait.
'Some peacekeeping tour, eh, Dan?' said Smudge with a big grin across his mug.
Excellent. The saying was our catchphrase for the tour. After a few months of redundancy, it had become very relevant again. It also told me immediately that the boys' spirits were as high as they'd ever been. That cheered me up considerably.
'Indeed it is, Smudger. I put in a word with the OMS because I knew you were getting a bit bored.'
'Good on you, Dan, thanks for that.'
'Anyone got any kills in yet?'
They had, as well as amassing a few tales of heroics too. Again, Ads had the best one. He'd charged a building full of gunmen with just a sniper rifle in his hands and only forty rounds of green spot ammunition.
Ads had been out on a foot patrol with Major Featherstone when they'd been ambushed at a Route 6 roundabout on the north bank dubbed Red 14. It had started with a blast bomb thrown just ten metres in front of Ads, who was the OC's point man and was armed with just his long. As it went off, a load of automatic fire came in on them.
'Gunmen, the two-storey building 150 metres away,' said Ads, spotting them first.
While still out in the open with Featherstone, he knelt down on one knee, dropped a gunman on the roof of the building with the single-shot rifle, and threw a smoke grenade in front of him to obscure the gunmen's view. Both men carried on firing, the OC with an SA80, until the smoke had done its job. Over his PRR, Featherstone then ordered an immediate assault on the building and set off for it at full pelt.
Charging by Ads, he hollered: 'Follow me, Somers.'
Ads took a quick look behind him. The rest of the patrol were now scrambling for cover where they stood. It confirmed his suspicions. Featherstone's PRR wasn't working and nobody had heard the order apart from him. Realizing the OC would be desperately vulnerable alone, he ran after him anyway.
The pair reached cover just beside the enemy held house, and finally had a chance to confer.
'Good work, Ads. Right, everyone follow me . . . hang on, where the fuck's everyone else?'
'I think your PRR's fucked, sir. There's only me. Maybe not such a great idea to storm the house with just the two of us.'
Somewhat shocked, Featherstone agreed wholeheartedly and they pegged it back to the safety of the rest of the patrol. It was typical bloody Ads, and I thought it was hilarious.
'Why did you do an assault with only your bleeding long and forty rounds, you crazy fool?'
Ads just shrugged his shoulders. 'It was all I had on me, Danny.'
Once I'd got the full sit rep, I instituted a few more home improvements. Nobody had any idea how long the new crisis might last, so the CO ordered us to be ready to sit it out for as long as we needed to. If they wanted a siege, fine. We'd make Cimic impregnable.
Darkness had fallen, which gave us a good chance to add a roof to Rooftop Sangar to give it some shelter from flying mortar and RPG shrapnel. On top of the few planks of wood and corrugated iron, we slapped on two layers of sandbags and some camo netting. It wasn't going to withstand a direct hit from an 82mm mortar shell, but it would withstand pretty much anything else.
We also built a smaller sangar on the roof of the
cookhouse, which was situated about 50 metres north of the main house right on the compound's border with the Tigris. From there, you got a better view over the dam on the west and a different angle on to the old town's rooftops to the east. From then onwards, I put a sniping pair in there at all times, giving us three different safe points of fire now from the sangars on Cimic's rooftops.
Then I made sure all the L96s were properly zeroed. Our lives and those of other soldiers would depend on the accuracy of our rifles so I wanted them all spot on. Normally, you go down the range to zero your weapons. We had to improvise.
That meant the corner house, yet again. On the laser ranger, the house measured exactly 100 metres away from the roof; perfect for what we needed. Its inhabitants had already taken more than their fair share of OMS mortar rounds meant for us. Now they were going to get a hefty amount of green spot as well. It was just tough shit. I made a mental note to go round and apologize later.
'OK, lads, the target is that circular electrical box on the outside of the house's main western wall. Can you see it? It's white and the size of a doorbell.'
Under the cover of the next mortar attack, each sniper cracked on.
To zero a sniper rifle, you fire between three and five rounds from the same firing position at the same target, and take the volley's average position as the mean to which your sights are set. If they're off a little, you adjust them accordingly. Then you break the fire position, get up, and get back down into another firing position and let off another volley, repeating the process. To get the sights spot on, it normally takes three or four volleys. The idea is also to test that you are shooting properly from whatever position you need to be in.
It took a good hour. By the end of it, we had put around 400 rounds of 7.62mm into or around the white box. It would have done nothing for the family's electricity supply. Or their nerves.
We were ready just in time.
By the end of my first full day back, the rioting on the streets near Cimic thinned out as the gunfire on the compound began to hot up. Nobody wanted to get hit in the cross-fire.