‘Allocation of duties is being drawn up right now and you’ll all be informed within the hour. Any more questions?’
‘No, boss,’ was the general response.
‘OK, men, go and have some chow. Get as much rest as possible. You’ll get your allocations later. Departure time will be the afternoon or early evening. That’s it. Class dismissed.’ As the men turned away, heading for the mess tent, Hailsham indicated that Ricketts should remain. ‘I have a special job for you,’ he said. ‘Pull up a chair, Sergeant-Major.’
Ricketts sat in a wooden chair on the other side of the trestle table Hailsham was using as a desk. The major placed two cups on the table and removed the cap from a vacuum flask. ‘Tea?’ he asked. When Ricketts nodded, he poured two cups of hot, white tea, then pushed one over to Ricketts. ‘Sorry, Sergeant-Major, no sugar.’ He glanced out over the sea of tents, now sinking back into a crimson twilight streaked with great shadows. After sipping some tea, he turned back to Ricketts. ‘Before anyone goes anywhere,’ he said, ‘we have to cut Iraq’s links with the outside world. They’re in the shape of a complex web of communications towers known as microwave links, set up in the desert, dangerously close to main roads and supply routes.’
‘Should be easy to find,’ Ricketts said, trying his hot tea.
‘Not that easy, Sergeant-Major. The towers may be visible, but the fibre-optic cables are buried well below ground. So far, even the US National Security Council’s combined intelligence and scientific know-how hasn’t been able to bug them or tap into them – let alone destroy them.’
Ricketts spread his hands in the air, indicating bewilderment. ‘So how do we knock out Iraq’s whole communications system? It’s too widespread, boss.’
‘We don’t necessarily have to knock the whole system out,’ Hailsham said. ‘According to the green slime, it’s the communications system coming out of Baghdad that controls Saddam’s trigger-finger. Like the rest of the system, that network is a mixture of microwave link towers, in which telecom messages are transmitted short distances by air waves, and by fibre-optic cables buried in the ground and capable of carrying an enormous amount of data. We’ve received enough info from Intelligence to enable us to concentrate on the fibre-optic cables. Those lines carry Baghdad’s orders to the Iraqi troops responsible for Scud operations. They also run Saddam Hussein’s diplomatic traffic to Amman, Geneva, Paris and the UN, thus increasing his political credibility. It’s our job to destroy that credibility as well as the Scuds – and we have to do it immediately.’
‘You mean tonight?’
‘Exactly. I want you to pick 40 of your most reliable men and have them ready to be airlifted before midnight. I’m coming with you. Our LZ is an area approximately sixty kilometres south of Baghdad, near the main road that leads to Basra. According to Intelligence, the highest density of Baghdad’s fibre-optic cables are buried there and the ground is relatively easy to dig. We’re going to dig down, remove a sample of cable for analysis, then blow up the rest – so we need a couple of demolition experts. Any questions, Ricketts?’
‘No questions, boss.’
‘I’m delighted to hear it. Have you finished your tea?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then go to it.’
Ricketts grinned, finished his tea, then stood up and left the tent. Heading back to his own lean-to, he was enthralled by the sight of so many tents on the dark plain, under the desert’s starlit sky, but even more thrilled – indeed almost ecstatic – to be back in business at last.
It was what he and most of his mates lived for.
At approximately midnight, two of the RAF’s CH-47 twin-blade Chinooks lifted Ricketts’s chosen team of 40 men off the airstrip of the FOB and headed through the night sky for the LZ. The men, packed into the gloomy, noisy interior of the helicopter, were wearing the normal beige beret, but without its winged-dagger badge and now camouflaged under a shemagh, or veil, that could also be wrapped around the eyes and mouth to protect them from dust and sand. (The same kind of veil was used to camouflage the standard 7.62mm SLR, or self-loading rifle.) The standard-issue woollen pullover was woven in colours that would blend in with the desert floor and matched the colouring of the high-topped, lace-up desert boots.
‘I feel like an A-rab,’ Geordie said. ‘What do I look like?’
‘Real cute,’ Paddy replied.
‘I always knew you adored me.’
Most of the men were armed either with the ubiquitous semi-automatic SLR or with 30-round, semi- and fully automatic M16s and their many attachments, including bayonets, bipods for accuracy when firing from the prone position, telescopic sights, night-vision aids, and M203 40mm grenade-launchers. Some had Heckler & Koch MP5 30-round sub-machine-guns. A few had belt-fed L7A2 7.62mm general-purpose machine-guns, or GPMGs, capable of firing 800 rounds a minute to a range of up to 1400 metres. All had standard-issue Browning FN 9mm high-power handguns on their hips, capable of firing 13 rounds in a couple of seconds.
These weapons and their bulky ammunition belts, combined with the standard bergens and camouflaging, made the men look awkward and bulky, almost Neanderthal. However, those weapons were only part of their personal equipment, and other, heavier weapons were taking up what little space they had left between them.
In case they were approached by tanks during the operation, the men were also carrying heavy support weapons, including the 94mm light anti-tank weapon, or LAW 80, which fired a high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) rocket and could be used on bunkers as well as armoured vehicles; the portable FIM-92A Stinger anti-aircraft missile system, capable of firing a heat-seeking missile 8000 metres and fitted with a friend or foe identification, or FFI, system; and two different mortars: the 51mm mortar, which, though carried and operated by one man, could launch an HE bomb to a range of 750 metres, and the larger, heavier 81mm mortar, which required three men to carry it, but could fire HE bombs 5660 metres at a rate of eight rounds per minute.
‘Tell me, Alfie,’ Andrew said, bored out of his mind, and deciding to have a bit of sport with Sergeant Alfred Lloyd, who was sitting beside him, ‘how come you’re almost as tall as me, but only half of my weight?’
‘I’m taller than you, fella, by half an inch. I can tell when our eyes meet.’
A dour Leicester man and SAS demolition specialist who had formerly been a Royal Engineer, then an ammunition technician with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, Lloyd had unkempt red hair, a beakish, broken nose, and a lean face veined by booze and scorched by the sun.
‘I’m always willing to give a man the benefit of the doubt,’ Andrew said, ‘so how come, since you’re even taller than me, you only weigh half my size?’
‘I’ve sabotaged ships, aircraft, every type of armoured vehicle, power stations, communications centres, supply depots, railways and roads. It required a lot of climbing and running, which is why I’m still slim.’
Alfie Lloyd was indeed still as thin as a rake, though now heavily burdened like the others and divided from big Andrew by the boxes packed with explosives, charges, detonator caps and the many other tools of his dangerous trade. Andrew stared at them sceptically.
‘Those bloody explosives, man, are they safe?’
‘Sure.’
‘I’ve heard that explosives go off real easy.’
‘Bullshit. Most explosives are safe unless they’re deliberately set off. You can hammer TNT into powdered crystals and it still won’t explode. That’s why it can be delivered by parachute. No problem at all.’
‘Mmmmm,’ Andrew murmured,