Behind Iraqi Lines. Shaun Clarke

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.