Sniper one

  The rest of the compound was no better. Cimic resembled a disaster scene.

  Barely a single square foot of surface inside it, vertical or horizontal, wasn't now pockmarked with bullet holes or shrapnel gashes. The house was so badly scarred it looked like something out of West Beirut in the 1980s.

  All bar none of the Portakabins and prefab accommodation blocks were blown up, and every single room pepperpotted from floor to ceiling. In the washroom blocks, half the sinks had been shattered and the rest were hanging off the walls.

  The OC's was the last to go, not that Charlie Curry ever moved into it. Since Major Featherstone found the blind in the floorboards, it had miraculously escaped any other attention from the OMS mortars. Then, around halfway through the all-out assault, it took a direct hit right through the middle of the roof.

  Not just one but two kitchens had now been blown to pieces: the aluminium trailer from June and then the field kitchen under the green tent.

  At least half of the perimeter fencing was either blown on the floor or simply not there any more. Ugly lumps of mortar shrapnel lined the paths and driveway. Every one of the garden's palm trees oozed sap from where they'd been slashed by flying metal.

  I surveyed the damage from the roof with Dale at sunset.

  'D'ya think the new governor will want his house back now, then?'

  'No chance, Danny boy. It's just a scrapheap now, innit.'

  I couldn't disagree.

  'At least it's still our scrapheap I suppose,' he pondered. 'Anyway, ours not to reason why and all that. Give us a hand with doing the stock list will you, Dan? I'm not looking forward to this.'

  Establishing what supplies we had left was grim work indeed. We weren't doing great on food. Most of the ration boxes had been broken open and plundered for all the best bits, with little more than pâté tins and stewed plums in custard left. There were many hundreds of those though, so we'd be shitting five times a day but at least we weren't going to starve for a bit.

  Water was a different picture. We were very low. Dale and I calculated there were just four two-litre bottles left per man. In that heat we could probably get by on two bottles a day each, as an absolute minimum. We might still be thirsty, but we probably wouldn't dehydrate. We rationed them all out.

  Most seriously of all, we were very low on ammo. The ceiling-tall wall Dale had built up inside the secure room was now almost entirely gone. It its place now were just a couple of tins and a red fire extinguisher.

  'Jeez, is that all we got left?'

  'Yeah. Still lots of stuff lying around in the sangars, but we ain't got nothing in reserve any more. All faarkin' gone.'

  We worked out we had enough bullets to last around sixty hours at the siege's normal pace of fighting. A lot less, if the enemy mounted another all-out assault. We gave Captain Curry the bad news.

  'Well that's it then,' he pronounced. 'The battle group is just going to have to come and get us. Neither we nor they have a choice in that any longer, do we?'

  'No, sir. We don't.'

  There was absolutely no doubt about it. Any convoy that tried to get through to Cimic was going to get the mother of all smackings. But there was simply no other option this time.

  The message went back to Abu Naji. They'd been guessing as much, after having to sit through the all-out assault with nothing else to do but listen to events play out on the radio. During it, Captain Curry was told an emergency convoy would be dispatched the moment he genuinely thought we were going to be overrun. It had got close, but not close enough. Cool as ever, Curry kept his nerve.

  The Ops Room gave Slipper City the news. Abu Naji had new orders for us within the hour. The resupply was set for around twenty-four hours' time, at some stage during the next night. They needed that long to pull together everything they had in mind for it. It was going to be close.

  'There's something else,' Curry said, when he told us the news at a midnight O Group. 'We're being relieved. It was an order, I wasn't given a choice.'

  The CO had decided that we'd more than done our bit, and it was time to pull us out. Exposing us to extreme combat with us in the state we were now in was simply not something he was prepared to take responsibility for any longer.

  Crucially, it was a relief-in-place, not a withdrawal. The company of Royal Welch Fusiliers was going to take over our position. They'd come in with the resupply column, and we'd go out with it.

  We were always going to leave Cimic at one stage or another, but when the notification of it actually came it was still funny to hear it. If given the choice at the time, to a man we would all have stayed on. The OMS weren't beaten yet, and the fear of life in Slipper City and the RSM's petty bollockings haunted us all.

  The CO was probably right though. With the physical activity, the heat, the sleep deprivation and the dwindling supplies, we had become a force of skeletal zombies relying on little more than an intravenous drip of adrenalin to get us through.

  Every man in the company had lost at least a stone during the siege, some double that. I was surrounded by odd creatures covered in grime, dried sweat and flecks of blood from head to toe, with two huge black circles around their eyes. Most worrying of all was the slightly crazed look we'd all begun to adopt – like we were all on the first rung on the ladder to insanity. No. It couldn't last.

  Most importantly, a relief was something our pride could deal with. It meant the British Army in Al Amarah weren't losing an ounce of face.

  The lads were resigned to their fate when I broke the news to them. There was a stunned silence for some time.

  Pikey broke it, with the perfect comment.

  'Oh, fuck it. All good things come to an end.'

  Secretly, everyone also craved some decent nosh and a good night's kip. Almost as much as they craved killing OMS men.

  At midnight, the mortaring began to pick up again. It kept up throughout the night and into the next day.

  The mood was tense. Several false alarms had the whole company repeatedly standing-to. Yet by 2 p.m. that afternoon, a repeat of the previous day's all-out assault hadn't materialized. Instead, there was just regular sniper fire from the usual locations – old town rooftops and the north bank. Curry ordered every soldier to conserve his ammo as much as possible.

  All we needed was for the OMS to lick their wounds for another twelve hours longer, and they could come at Cimic as hard as they liked. Then, the battle group would be fully ready for them again.

  So Abu Naji knew what to bring in, Dale had the unfortunate task of delivering to the battalion Quartermaster a battle damage assessment on all the military equipment in the camp. It was just one long list of misery.

  I sat on the house's front doorstep beside Dale as he set up the portable satellite phone and dialled the Quartermaster's number.

  Like most in his trade, our QM would never give anyone an easy run for what he saw as his own money if there was anything he could do about it. That day was no different. He insisted on Dale giving him a description of every single thing that had been signed off to Y Company. It was going to be a painful conversation.

  It started with the Portakabins. Each one separately.

  'Blown up, sir,' was Dale's response.

  'OK. Portakabin number two?'

  'Blown up too, sir.'

  'Really? Portakabin number three . . .'

  And so it went on. The QM decided to change tack.

  'OK, well what about the vehicles then? Better news there I'd hope, or have they been mistreated too?'

  'We've only got one out of the ten Snatches serviceable now, sir.'

  'WHAT? What happened to the rest of them?'

  'Blown up.'

  'Every one of them?'

  'Yes.'

  'Are you sure? Even the civilian Land Rover Discovery that we paid to have air conditioning in?'

  'Even that one, sir, yes.'

  The more damage the QM heard about, the more irate he got. He could see money going down the pan left, right a
nd centre. There goes his fucking OBE.

  Dale then went on to tell him about the swimming pool, the chef's galleys, the TV trailer, the satellite and Internet dishes, the outdoor gym and weightlifting equipment, two giant JCB generators, all the compound's fencing and, the QM's most beloved articles of all, the two Mark 5 speed boats.

  'No, Sarn't Major, not your brand new boats too?'

  'Yes, sir, the boats too.'

  'But we only bought them in June. And at some considerable cost, as you well know.'

  'Yes, I do know that, sir.'

  'Are you sure they are totally unusable?'

  'You could put it like that. They're at the bottom of the Tigris.'

  'Well, this is all very bad news, Sarn't Major. This is an appalling waste of perfectly good military equipment. Taxpayers' money all of it. It doesn't grow on trees, you know.'

  The QM's rattiness had started to rub Dale up the wrong way. The bloke just couldn't have been living on the same planet as us. He clearly hadn't been reading any of our sit reps, and must have thought we'd only taken a couple of pot shots.

  Finally, twenty-five minutes later, Dale got to the end of the list.

  'I'm not happy about this at all, Sarn't Major. Not one little bit.'

  'Yeah, well neither were we, sir.'

  There was a silence.

  'Look, can you go through everything again with me just to make sure?'

  That was the final straw for Dale.

  'Look, sir, it's real simple. Everything's fucked, all right? Everything I'm looking at has been fucking blown up. It's all faarkin' fucked, and there's not a bollocks I can do about it. Sorry, sir, I've got to go.'

  He slammed the handset down into its bracket, breaking a small piece of plastic off the phone too.

  28

  Darkness fell with still no sign of another compound assault. The OMS and Abu Hatim clearly needed more than just one day to reorganize after the losses they'd suffered. Perhaps they'd been even bigger than we thought.

  The message came through from Abu Naji that the resupply operation would begin at 9.45 p.m. By nine, we were all packed up and ready to go, and stood-to for the inevitable outbreak of mayhem as soon as the column put in its first appearance.

  What a moment that was to be too.

  The plan was really quite simple. The battle group had worked throughout the previous night to amass the greatest single column of British armour since the invasion of the country a year earlier. They were just going to pound their way through to us in the straightest and shortest line possible, with overwhelming brute force.

  That meant a battalion-size war formation: an extraordinary total of seventy-two Warriors, led by the Queen's Royal Lancers' entire squadron of twelve Challenger II main battle tanks. Every spare armoured vehicle within 300 miles had been rustled up for the job. That meant not just the PWRR's A Company coming up from Basra again, but a full company of the Black Watch in Warriors too. Thickly armoured and tracked CRV recovery vehicles fitted with bulldozers were coming along too. Nothing must be allowed to get in the column's way.

  All this, just to give Cimic House a fresh face and a few bombs, beans and bullets.

  The route was just as simple as the plan. It was A to B. The column was simply going to come straight up the Red Route as fast as possible, and then stop at Yugoslav Bridge. The final leg round to us was always a surefire death trap. The north bank and OMS's stronghold estate Aj Dayya threw up a series of choke points perfect for ambush. So for once, they weren't going to give the bastards the chance to use them.

  Instead, the Royal Welch Fusiliers would dismount, cover the kilometre of rough ground between us on foot, while crossing the Tigris on the dam and carrying in by hand the entirety of the resupply. Then, we'd come out the very same way. It was ballsy, and brilliantly simple.

  The whole thing began with a deep rumble. We heard the 7th Cavalry coming long before we could see them. Almost 100 armed vehicles all moving in unison makes a hell of a noise.

  As usual, the column got contacted on the city outskirts. This time, though, they were stopping for nobody. With bullets and RPGs pinging off their ultra-hard shells, the Challengers smashed through Mehdi Army defences with chain guns and main armaments blasting away, often at the same time. Anything that was deemed remotely hostile got the good news.

  Again, we followed their progress from the roof, thanks to the light show of the white and yellow flashes of explosions, and the red tracer rounds pinging off in every direction from everything metallic – the column's armour, civilian cars and trucks, wrought iron gates and fences.

  Their junction drills were spectacularly slick; two Challengers stopped off on each side and blazed away repeatedly to cover the rest of the column across it. They were making astonishing progress.

  Finally, once the first tanks passed Red 11, they began to come into our view. It was mesmerizing, an awesome display of force that none of us had seen anything like before.

  Gradually, the column's full might became apparent. Deploying a tactical spacing of 25 metres between each vehicle, the whole thing was almost two kilometres long from start to finish.

  'Fuck me,' said Daz. 'It's bigger than Ben Hur.'

  Chris just looked on stunned, his mouth wide open.

  'It's like the wrath of God. Hey, maybe it is God.'

  The closer it got to us, the more we could feel the armour's vibrations under our feet. It was rocking the whole of the city.

  The enemy was in disarray. The column moved so quickly, it gave no time to plan a proper attack. In their determination to finish us at Cimic the day before, the rebel alliance had totally neglected their own town defences. The few fighters that did come were uncoordinated and got pulverized.

  The lead Challenger reached Yugoslav Bridge and stopped. Behind it, the Red Route was now completely full up with our armour, as far down as the eye could see.

  I was listening in to the battle group net on my VHF. Delta was the tanks' call sign.

  'Cimic, Delta One Zero. We're in situ. Resupply beginning.'

  Stage One was complete. Stage Two was more risky. Every round of ammunition, bottle of water and tin of food had to be carried by hand across a click of rough ground. That meant massive exposure to enemy gunmen and mortars, for some considerable time.

  With eyes the size of oranges and ears the size of naan bread, we were on maximum alert for the first sign of any OMS attack. It still never came.

  One of the first faces into Cimic House was Major Featherstone. He'd come in to command the Royal Welch Fusiliers. It was vital they had an experienced and battle-proven leader who knew Al Amarah inside out. For all his faults, Featherstone was certainly that.

  Reliefs-in-place mean nobody leaves their post until the bloke who's replacing you is in it first. Man by man, Cimic House's defenders were seamlessly swapped. Then I heard a familiar voice on the roof behind me.

  'All right, granddad, you tosser. Some peacekeeping tour, eh?'

  It was Ads. He'd come in on the column with De Villiers and H, the three snipers who'd been away on R&R. That warranted them an awful amount of abuse.

  'Oh, nice of your fucking rear echelons to join us. Good break, then? You've missed all the fun.'

  Ads knew all about that.

  'No shit, Dan. I've been pulling me hair out in Abu Napa for a week. There was no way we could get back in, was there. Proper gutting it was, I can tell you.'

  I knew where I'd rather have been.

  'Anyway, what the fuck have you boys done to this place? Looks like we'll have to give it at least a new coat of paint.'

  I was pleased they were there. It meant Sniper Platoon would still have a representation in Cimic House. But their arrival meant it was time for us to go.

  My platoon was the very last to leave. With Bergens on, we huddled by the front gate awaiting our cue. Yet still there wasn't much sign of the much feared enemy attack. A little harassing fire on the sangars, but nothing on the waste ground and, even more
rarely, no mortars either. It was mighty bizarre, and unnerved me.

  'Right lads, normal drills. As soon as the rounds start coming in, dump everything straight away and then get into a decent covered fire position.'

  Daz led off. Dale was coming out with us; he and I would be the last of Y Company to leave. He grinned at me as the rest of the boys filed by.

  'You're gonna miss this place aren't you, Danny boy?'

  'Yeah, like a hole in the head.'

  Then it was just the two of us.

  'Right, you jammy git, let's get the fuck out of here.'

  Out on the wasteland, we could hear gunfire in the distance where the Challengers were still slapping the odd chancer back at Red 11. As I walked, I couldn't help tensing up to prepare myself for the first incoming mortar. That would be when it would all go horribly wrong, and right at the last bloody minute knowing our luck.

  It never came. Sooner than I thought, we were on top of the brightly lit dam. If only Major Tait had shot out its fucking street lights too. Then we were over it, and on the home stretch.

  Figures in combats and helmets waiting for us on the main road frantically beckoned us to hard-target the last 200 metres, then bundled us into the nearest Warriors with space.

  The automatic door clunked closed. A minute later, the giant column juddered into motion. Every few minutes, our vehicle's chain gun rattled out a few rounds at some target, but there was less than half the opposition on the way out than the convoy had faced on the way in.

  Then the chain gun stopped completely. We were out of the town, and rumbling full speed through the last few kilometres of the dark arid desert before Camp Abu Naji.

  One of the dismounts handed over a set of headphones. The Warrior commander wanted to talk to me. Turned out it was a sergeant who was an old mate of mine.

  'Know why you had to hard-target the last 200 metres, Danny?'

  'No. Why?'

  'Surveillance report came in from the Lynx 2,000 feet above Aj Dayya. They spotted hundreds of enemy on rooftops and street corners. By the looks of it, that's where they were setting up for us. Stupid arseholes never once realized what was going on at Cimic before it was way too late.'