Andrew nodded and beamed.
‘A solid or liquid substance which, under the influence of a certain stimulus, such as an exploding detonator, is rapidly converted into another substance with accompanying high pressure, leading to the outburst of violence and noise known as an explosion. What say you, Sergeant?’
‘Is that fucking Swahili?’
‘I’m from Barbados,’ Andrew replied, ‘where they only speak English.’
‘You could have fooled me,’ Alfie said, shaking his head. ‘I thought I spoke English!’
‘They only think they speak English in Barbados,’ Paddy Clarke said. ‘All that molasses and rum goes to their heads and makes them think they’re white men. We should hand Andrew over to a missionary for a little correction.’
‘The Paddy from Liverpool has spoken,’ Andrew intoned. ‘Let us bow down and throw up.’
‘Can it, the lot of you,’ the RAF Loadmaster barked at them as he materialized from the gloom. He glanced through one of the portholes in the passenger hold and announced: ‘We’re coming in, if we’re lucky, to the LZ, so prepare to offload.’
‘Yes, mother!’ Taff chimed in a high, schoolboy’s voice, though he quickly made a great show of checking his gear when the Loadmaster gave him a baleful stare.
‘Hey, Moorcock’ Paddy said, turning to the new man beside him, eager for a little sport. ‘Where did you say you were located before you were badged?’
‘The Welsh Guards,’ Moorcock answered, giving his kit a great deal of attention.
‘See any action?’ Paddy asked him.
‘A brief tour of Northern Ireland,’ Moorcock said, sliding his arms awkwardly through the webbing of his bergen. ‘Though I didn’t see much there.’
‘Know much about the Iraqis?’
‘No.’
‘They’re fuckin’ murderous bastards. Don’t on any account let yourself be caught. There’s things worse than death, kid.’
‘What’s that, Corporal?’ Trooper Stone asked with a grin, being less impressionable than his friend. Although he, like Moorcock and Gillett, had only recently been badged and was serving his probationary period, he wasn’t about to take any bullshit from the older hands. ‘What’s worse than death, then?’
‘They’ll pull your nails out,’ Paddy said.
‘They’ll gang-bang you,’ Jock added.
‘They’ll chop your cock off and make you eat it with couscous,’ Geordie put in. ‘Then they’ll cut your eyeballs out and make you suck them until you go gaga.’
‘Go fuck yourselves,’ Trooper Stone said.
‘Leave these poor probationers alone,’ threatened Andrew, ‘or I’ll personally chop your cocks off and shove them, all shrivelled, up your arses, which will then need some wiping.’
‘Thanks, Sergeant,’ Trooper Moorcock said, tightening the straps on his bergen and looking serious while his two friends, Stone and Gillett, grinned at each other.
‘We’re touching down,’ the Loadmaster said. ‘Hold on to your balls, lads…Three, two, one, zero…Touchdown!’
The transport landed with a lot of bouncing, roaring and metallic shrieking, but otherwise no problems, on an LZ located about half a mile from the main road that ran one way to Basra, 40 miles the other way to Baghdad.
The men disembarked even before the two Chinooks’ engines had gone into neutral, spilling out of the side into dense clouds of sand whipped up by the twin-bladed rotors. When the billowing sand had subsided, the first thing they saw was a fantastic display of fireworks illuminating the distant horizon: immense webs of red and purple anti-aircraft fire, silvery-white explosions, showers of crimson sparks and streams of phosphorus fireflies.
‘Baghdad,’ Hailsham explained to those nearest to him. ‘The Allies are bombing the hell out of it. Rather them than us.’
As their eyes adjusted to moonlit darkness, they saw the nearest two microwave links, soaring high above the flat plain, about a quarter mile apart, but less than twenty yards from the road. Spreading out and keeping their weapons at the ready, the men hiked across the dusty, wind-blown plain until they reached a point equidistant between the two towers. From here, the road was dangerously close – a mere twenty-odd yards.
‘It’s pretty dark,’ Ricketts said, glancing in every direction, ‘so if anyone comes along the road, we should be OK if we stay low. We need sentries on point in both directions, with the men not being used for digging keeping guard in LUPs.’
‘Right,’ Hailsham said.
Ricketts gave his instructions by means of hand signals. With the Chinooks waiting on the ground a quarter of a mile away, their rotors turning quietly in neutral, the bulk of the men broke into four-man teams, then fanned out to form a circle of LUPs, or lying-up positions, from where they could keep their eyes on the road and defend the diggers and demolition team if anyone came along.
Meanwhile Hailsham and Ricketts accompanied Sergeant Lloyd as he checked the alignment between the two communications towers and gauged where the fibre-optic cable was running between them, hidden under the ground.
‘This is it,’ he said, waving his hand from left to right to indicate an invisible line between the two towers. He turned to the dozen troopers selected to dig. ‘I want a series of four holes about twelve foot apart, each six foot long and as deep as you need to go to expose the cable. That should be about four feet. If you see any transport coming along that road, or if we call a warning to you, drop down into the hole you’re digging and don’t make a move until given clearance. OK, get going.’
The men laid down their weapons, removed spades and shovels from their bergens, and proceeded to dig the holes as required. As they did so, they and the others – now stretched belly-down in LUPs on the dark ground, their weapons at the ready and covering the road in both directions – were able to watch the fantastic pyrotechnics of crimson anti-aircraft tracer fire and silvery bomb bursts over distant Baghdad, which was being bombed by wave after wave of British, American and Saudi jets, as well as Tomahawk Cruise missiles fired from ships in the Gulf, flying in at just under the speed of sound at heights of 50–250 feet, to cause more devastation and death.
‘Wow!’ Andrew whispered, looking at the lights over the distant city. ‘That’s just beautiful, man!’
‘Beautiful from here,’ Hailsham replied. ‘Hell on earth if you’re there.’
‘You men,’ Sergeant Lloyd said to two of his eight sappers, both of whom had various explosives, charges and timers dangling from their webbing. ‘I want you to take out those towers, one to each man. Fix enough explosives to the base to make sure the whole caboodle topples over. Use electronic timers that can be fired from here by remote control. Don’t make any mistakes. When this lot goes up, those towers have to go up at the same time. Understood?’
‘Yes, boss,’ the men nodded.
Then they headed off in opposite directions, towards the tower each had selected, the explosives on their webbing bouncing up and down as they ran.
‘You see that?’ Geordie whispered to Trooper Gillett, having decided to pass the time by winding him up. ‘Those explosives are liable to go off any second, taking us out with him.’
‘Aw, come off it, Geordie!’
‘No, kid, it’s true! I’d be pissing in my pants if I was you. He’ll blow up any minute now.’
‘That’s bullshit, Geordie,’ Trooper Stone retorted. ‘We all heard what Sergeant Lloyd said in the plane – explosives don’t blow up easily.’
‘Besides,’