Michael Asher (4 page)

should be capable of floating like a butterfly and stinging like a swarm of killer bees. The guys in "McNab's" patrol were carrying far too much equipment and far too much weight to be able to operate effectively.'" I awoke in the night to find myself being attacked, not by a swarm of killer bees but of midges, and moved my sleeping-bag up to the channel above the wadi. For a while I lay awake, thinking over what I had read in McNab's and Ryan's books about their first day in this LUP, and it seemed to me that things had gone downhill fast from the start. On arriving here not long before first light on 23 January, the patrol had immediately gone to ground, leaving two men on stag, changing every two hours. The weather was much colder than the spring day in England they had anticipated, and by now they must have realized that lying hidden for hours on OP in these temperatures was going to be no joke. Second, and more serious from the point of view of their task, they now knew it would be impossible to put in their observation post because the ground was rock-hard rather than sandy. They had practised digging the OP in the Empty Quarter of southern Arabia � the world's largest sand desert � and had mistakenly expected the texture of the desert to be, similar here. This meant that they had expended energy and resources in lugging along material for building the OP which had turned out to be totally wasted. When first light came, they checked down the wadi to make sure they had left no tracks, and set up two Claymore anti-personnel mines at fifty metres � basically, shaped charges of PE with ball-bearings embedded in them. The mines were operated by clackers on the end of wires and could be used to spray a path or route if any�one tried to approach them. McNab did a recce, saw the house nearby and, realizing they were too close to habi- tation for comfort, wrote a sitrep (situation report) which Legs, the 'Sealey', or signaller, encrypted and typed into the 319, then sent off. There was no acknowledgement. Again and again they tried, changing the shape and length of the antenna and recalibrating frequencies, but with no result. By the end of the day, the patrol accepted that they had lost comms. This was the most perilous blow they had received so far, because without radio con�tact they were cut off from their base 320 kilometres (200 miles) away. McNab remained cool, however, because they had a prearranged lost comms procedure, by which, if nothing was heard from them, the helicopter would return to the original drop-off point in exactly forty-eight hours. There was worse news to come that night, however, when McNab discovered a nest of two S60 anti-aircraft guns on the ridge north of the road, which he says were attended by Iraqi troops in platoon strength. The follow�ing day, he says, he spotted yet another pair of S60s, only three hundred metres from the LUP, and for the first time he started to feel jittery. There was still no go on the 319, so the patrol prepared themselves to move back to the heli rendezvous that night. Meanwhile, though, Ryan says, McNab made plans to attack the AA position (he does not make clear which one), intending to slam it with everything they had, then make a run for it back to the helicopter RV. Ryan was incensed, pointing out that whatever installation the AA guns were guarding, it had to be protected by large num�bers of troops, and anyway, to knock out AA guns was not part of their remit: 'Our operation's here in the OP,' Ryan told him. 'If we can't stay here we'd better go back.12 By 1400 hours McNab had dropped the idea of attacking the guns and decided they would simply move back to the RV and wait for the hell to come in. It was as they were preparing to move out, both claim, that the patrol was compromised. Although McNab and Ryan describe the compromise differently, both agree that it was a shepherd-boy who spotted them. McNab writes that at about 1600 hours the patrol heard goat-bells approaching the LUP from the west � the direction of the house. Shortly afterwards, a small boy appeared at the lip of the wadi and saw them sitting there. Astonished, McNab implies he immediately made off towards the AA emplacement the patrol had clocked earlier. McNab notes that both Vince and Mark attempted to run after the boy, but had given up the idea for fear of being noticed by the AA gunners. Accepting that Bravo Two Zero had been compromised, McNab then gave the order to pull out. According to Ryan, the shepherd-boy would not have noticed them except for the fact that, overcome with the temptation to see what was happening, Vince Phillips moved, craning his head to see if he could spot him. At the time, though, Ryan says, no one was sure if the boy had really seen them at all � it was only later that Vince came clean about it. In Ryan's version, there is no mad rush towards the AA guns, and no desperate attempt by Vince and Mark to intercept the youth. Ryan says that there was no cry of alarm and that it was pretty obvious that the boy had run off (italics mine), which is merely an assumption, not an observed fact, while McNab recounts that he actually made eye contact with the boy and saw the astonishment in his eyes, and that the youth suddenly went running off. McNab also writes that he 'followed the boy with his eyes' as he ran away, yet the LUP is five metres deep and steep-sided, and while you could see someone standing right on the lip, it would be impossible for men lying prone to have seen the boy running off. Not only does McNab's account seem unlikely judging by the ground, but the two accounts are obviously incompatible. I looked forward keenly to returning to the farm the fol�lowing day, hoping that some fresh light would be shed on the matter by the mysterious 'Uncle Abbas'. CHAPTER six ABBAS BIN FADHIL WAS THE head of the extended family living in the settlement on the hill � a family that must have numbered at least thirty men, women and chil-dren. He was a slim, upright man with an open face and a wild beard, who walked with a pronounced limp. His voice was raucous and he tended to shout, as Bedouin will do, but he exuded warmth and hospitality. As I shook hands with him and his relatives and seated myself on a cushion in the vast mudhif or reception room, I won�dered what the day would bring. Abbas ordered tea for everyone, and while it was being served I gazed around me. There were no electric lights in this place, I noted, and neither did there appear to be any running water. The house consisted of little more than this mudhif, carpeted and lined with cushions � obviously no one but guests actually slept there. While we were drinking the tea, Abbas introduced me to two more Bedouin: a tall, spindly-looking man with a Mexican-style moustache, a little younger than Abbas himself, and a handsome youth of about eighteen or twenty The tall man was Abbas's younger brother, Hayil, and the youth their nephew, Adil. As we chatted, Abbas told me that they belonged to a Bedouin tribe called the Buhayat, who had long had a farm in the area. Though he had been brought up in a black tent in the desert and had ridden camels as a boy, his family were now settled here. They raised livestock � mainly sheep � and planted wheat in the wadis after the rains, but had long ago given up their camels in favour of motor vehicles. Abbas said that the mudhif we were sitting in was new, but it stood on the site of a more primitive structure which had been hit by Allied bombers back in 1991. `Thank God no one was killed,' he said. 'But they did hit some Bedouin tents on other raids and killed both people and sheep. Now what was the point of that?' Despite the fact that I was British, he appeared � like the people in Baghdad � to nurse no grievance against me personally. 'I can tell you everything about the foreign soldiers who were here,' he said. 'At the time we thought they were Americans, but if you say they were British, all right. First of all, it wasn't a herdsboy who saw them in the wadi, it was me. I was the one who saw them first.' I squinted at Abbas, wondering whether he might have been mistaken for a boy ten years before. Black-bearded and weathered-looking, I concluded that he was a man who had probably looked forty all his adult life. Excited, I watched him, waiting for more, but he suddenly, urged me up and called me outside. "There's something I must show you,' he said. Behind the house was a square of one-roomed stone cottages, which were evidently the real living quarters of the house, and a large open-sided barn. There were three vehicles in the barn: a battered truck and two yellow bull-dozers. Abbas led me to the larger of the bulldozers. 'I bought this new back in the 1980s,' he said. 'Imported direct from Japan. In 1991 there was a very cold winter. The wind was terrible. This house is on a hill, as you can see, so one day � it was 24 January; I know the date because a lot happened on that day � I decided to park it down in the wadi, out of the wind. I was afraid the fuel would freeze up. I drove it down there � it only takes a few minutes from the house � and right up to the end of the wadi, where there is a sheltered place. When I got there I saw two armed men peering at me over the rocks, not more than ten metres away, one on the side of the wadi in front of me and one below to my left. They were wearing camouflage jackets and shamaghs over their faces, and I had no idea who they were. They could have been Iraqi commandos, or special troops of the Intelligence Service, or enemy fliers who had crashed. They could have been sheep-rustlers. Whoever they were, I decided to pretend I hadn't seen them. I looked at the ground, avoided eye contact, and reversed the bulldozer out of the wadi-end. Then I just turned it round and drove straight back to the house.' I listened to Abbas, fascinated. Both McNab and Ryan had described a man approaching them on a bulldozer, but I hadn't mentioned it eitherto Abbas or to the youth last night. It had come entirely out of the blue. Now it appeared I had not only found the driver they had written about, but the bulldozer too. McNab recalls that the patrol had heard the sound of a tracked vehicle and, assuming it was an armoured per-sonnel carrier alerted by the herdsboy, had cocked their 66mm rocket-launchers, ready to take it out. When it had come into view and McNab saw that it was just 'an idiot pottering about with a digger' he had relaxed, thinking �rightly, according to Abbas � that it was there quite inno�cently. McNab had been wrong, though, in assuming that `the idiot' hadn't seen them in fact, Abbas's quick think�ing in averting his gaze had probably saved his life. Ryan writes that the patrol knew the man had spotted them, concluding that since the wadi was a cul-de-sac he could only have been coming to find out who was there. This in turn suggested that the shepherd-boy had warned him When I asked Abbas about this, he laughed and pointed at Adil, his nephew 'There's your shepherd-boy,' he said. 'Ask him.' As I turned to him in surprise, Adil explained that he had been out herding sheep (not goats, as McNab and Ryan said) the same afternoon. 'I was about ten years old then,' he said. 'I took the sheep up to the wadi edge, but I didn't go down into it It is true that I looked down into the wadi, but I certainly didn't see any foreign soldiers there. I know now they were there, of course, but I didn't see them at the time, and didn't know anything about it until my uncle told me later.' I was bowled over by Adil's revelation. Here, against all the odds, was the very boy who would remain frozen for all time in McNab's and Ryan's books as the shepherd who had spotted them and ultimately brought about their downfall. And yet, according to the shepherd-boy's own testimony, he had not seen them at all. Couldn't it have been someone else, I insisted? Surely Adil wasn't the only boy herding sheep that day? `If someone else had seen them, they would have come straight to us,' Abbas said, 'as our house is so near to the wadi. One way or another we would have heard about it, at the time, or since. Everyone who lives in the desert here is related to us � this is the tribal area of the Buhayat. There aren't any strangers around and no one herds sheep here except our family. All I can say is if there was another boy who saw the commandos, then he certainly didn't tell anyone.' It made sense: this was a remote desert region, not a busy city street full of nameless faces. I knew from exper�ience how efficient and precise the Bedouin grapevine could be � if another herdsboy had seen Bravo Two Zero, Abbas and his family would certainly have known. I remembered McNab had written that the boy might have gone running off to tell the anti-aircraft gunners, and I asked Abbas if there had been any S60s in the area at the time. He pointed to the high ridge running along the road about four hundred metres away. 'There was an anti-aircraft post up there,' he said. 'But with only a few soldiers. We had nothing to do with them at all.' The nearest military base was about fifteen kilometres away across the plateau. The soldiers up there had no vehicles � they were dropped off and picked up by vehicles from the base, and they wouldn't have left their post anyway. Why would Adil go to the anti-aircraft guns � even assuming he had seen the commandos in the wadi, which he hadn't � instead of coming to his family? He was only a small boy. It doesn't make sense. I asked Abbas to take me in the bulldozer to reconstruct the short journey of that day ten years ago, and as we trundled up the narrow, steep-sided wadi to the LUP, I experienced a deep thrill. Here I was, seeing not what McNab and Ryan had seen as they peered through the sights of their 66s and Minimi light machine-guns that day, but, incredibly, what the 'idiot in the digger' had seen, sitting on the same bulldozer with the man himself. Both McNab and Ryan had written that the bulldozer had stopped 150 metres from their position, but on the ground I could see this was clearly a mistake, because the LUP was tucked behind a bend in the wadi. Unless the patrol had left their LUP, then they could not have seen the vehicle at such a distance, and indeed, both texts suggest they saw the bulldozer only when it came round a corner. Abbas showed me where he had stopped �almost close enough to the LUP to spit � and pointed out where the two men had been. As we drove back to the house, bumping over the stones, I wondered if Abbas and Adil were telling the truth. I knew that Bedouin do not lie, but under enough pressure from the government, they might have had no choice. Yet no one in the government had known I was coming here to this particular spot, and no one had sug-gested it. If I had followed Ali's advice, we would have ended up somewhere
completely different � even Uday at the Ministry of Information had told me it was highly unlikely I would find eyewitnesses. Any campaign of dis-information would have involved deliberately putting me off-guard with a Machiavellian system of feints and double-bluffs, insisting I would find no witnesses, but with success dependent on the notion that I would find them anyway. And for Abbas, from his Bedouin's point of view, what would be the point of lying? Why, in a culture where the cult of reputation rules supreme, should Abbas deny that his nephew had spotted the patrol if it were the truth, and why should Adil connive in that lie? On the other hand, whether Adil had seen the patrol or not was crucial to my purpose � one I had not even revealed to the Bedouin. If the boy had not spotted anyone, as he claimed, then Vince Phillips could not have compromised the patrol as Ryan and the classified report suggest.