Soldier A: Behind Iraqi Lines Read online

  SOLDIER A: SAS

  BEHIND

  IRAQI LINES

  Shaun Clarke

  Contents

  Prelude

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Discover other books in the SAS Series

  PRELUDE

  Just after two in the morning the Kuwaiti Customs and Immigration officials playing cards at a table in the concrete administration office of the Al-Abdaly checkpoint were distracted by a rumbling sound approaching from the border of Iraq. Lowering their cards and removing their cigarettes from their lips, they glanced quizzically at one another as other officials, who had been dozing at their desks, were awakened by the increasing noise.

  The floor began shaking beneath the men’s feet. At first bewildered, then slowly realizing that the unthinkable might be happening, the senior official, an overfed, jowly man in a dusty, tattered uniform, dropped his cards onto the table, stood up and walked to the door. By the time he opened it, the whole building was shaking and the distant rumbling was rapidly drawing nearer.

  The Customs official looked out of the doorway as the first of a convoy of 350 Iraqi tanks smashed through the wooden barriers of the checkpoint. Shocked almost witless, he dropped his cigarette and stared in disbelief as one tank after another rumbled past, noisily smashing the rest of the barrier and sending pieces of wood flying everywhere.

  Fear welled up in the official when he saw shadowy figures in the billowing clouds of dust created by the tanks. Realizing that they were armed troops advancing between the tanks, he slammed the door shut, bawled a warning to his colleagues, then raced back to his desk to make a hurried telephone call to Kuwait City, informing his superiors of what was happening.

  He was still talking when the rapid fire of a Kalashnikov AK47 assault rifle blew the lock off the door, allowing it to be violently kicked open. Iraqi troops rushed in to rake the room with their weapons, massacring all those inside and – more important from their point of view – blowing the telephones to pieces.

  As the spearhead of Saddam Hussein’s military machine rumbled along the 50-mile, six-lane highway leading to Kuwait City, troops were dropped off at every intersection to capture Kuwaitis entering or leaving. Other troops disengaged from the main convoy to drag stunned Kuwaiti truck drivers from their vehicles and either shoot them on the spot or, if they were lucky, keep them prisoner at gunpoint.

  Simultaneously, Iraqi special forces, airlifted in by helicopter gunships, were parachuting from the early-morning sky to secure road junctions, government buildings, military establishments and other key positions in the sleeping capital.

  Moving in on the city, still out of earshot of most of those sleeping, were a million Iraqi troops, equipped with hundreds of artillery pieces, multiple-rocket launchers, and a wide variety of small arms. Stretched out along a 200-mile front, obscured by clouds of dust created by Saddam Hussein’s five and a half thousand battle tanks, they endured because they were motivated by months of starvation and their growing envy of Kuwaiti wealth.

  In air-conditioned hotels, marble-walled boudoirs and lushly carpeted official residences, the citizens of Kuwait were awakened by the sound of aircraft and gunfire from the outskirts of the city. Wondering what was happening, they tuned in to Kuwait Radio and heard emergency broadcasts from the Ministry of Defence, imploring the Iraqi aggressors to cease their irresponsible attack or face the consequences. Those who heard the broadcasts, Kuwaitis and foreigners alike, went to their windows and looked out in disbelief as parachutists glided down against a backdrop of distant, silvery explosions and beautiful webbed lines of crimson tracers. It all seemed like a dream.

  Thirty minutes later, as the early dawn broke with the light of a blood-red sun, the grounds of the Dasman Palace were being pounded by the rocket fire of the Iraqis’ Russian-built MiG fighters. Even as the Emir of Kuwait was being lifted off by a helicopter bound for Saudia Arabia, his Royal Guard, pitifully outnumbered, were being cut down by Iraqi tanks and stormtroopers. In addition, the Emir’s half-brother, Sheikh Fahd, who had nobly refused to leave, had been fatally wounded on the steps of the palace.

  While Hussein’s tanks surrounded the British and American embassies, his jets were rocket-bombing the city’s airport, illuminating the starlit sky with jagged flashes of silver fire, which soon turned into billowing black smoke. Two guards died as Iraqi troops burst into Kuwait’s Central Bank to begin what would become an orgy of looting.

  By dawn the Iraqis were in control of key military installations and government buildings in the capital, Kuwait’s pocket army was fighting a losing battle to protect the invaluable Rumaila oilfields and thousands of wealthy Kuwaitis and expatriate Britons, Americans, Europeans and Russians, trying to flee to Saudi Arabia, were being turned back by the Iraqi tanks and troops encircling the city.

  Having returned to their homes, the expatriates heard their embassies advise them on the radio to stock up with food and stay indoors. Those brave enough to venture out to replenish their food stocks saw Iraqi generals riding around in confiscated Mercedes while their troops, long envious of Kuwaiti prosperity, machine-gunned the windows of the stores in Fahd Salem Street, joining the growing numbers of looters. Soon reports of rape were spreading throughout the city.

  Before sunset, the invaders had dissolved Kuwait’s National Assembly, shut ports and airports, imposed an indefinite curfew and denounced the absent Emir and his followers as traitorous agents of the Jews and unspecified foreign powers.

  No mention was made of the Iraqi tanks burning in the grounds of the fiercely defended Dasman Palace, the sporadic gunfire still heard throughout the city as loyal Kuwaitis sniped at the invaders or the many dead littering the streets.

  Even as the sun was sinking, torture chambers were being set up all over the city and summary executions, by shotgun or hanging, were becoming commonplace.

  By midnight, Kuwait as the world knew it had ceased to exist; the armoured brigades of the Middle East’s most feared tyrant stood at the doors of Saudi Arabia; and thousands of foreigners, including Britons, were locked in hotels or in their homes, cowering under relentless shellfire or hiding in basements, attics, cupboards and water tanks as Iraqi troops, deliberately deprived of too much for too long, embarked on an orgy of looting, torture, rape, murder and mindless destruction.

  Chapter 1

  On 1 January 1991, almost four months to the day after Saddam Hussein’s bloody take-over of Kuwait City, an RAF C-130 Hercules transport plane secretly took off from RAF Brize Norton, Oxfordshire. It was transporting members of the SAS (Special Air Service) and the SBS (Special Boat Squadron) to a holding area in Riyadh – the joint capital, with Jeddah, of Saudi Arabia – located in the middle of the country and surrounded by desert.

  Though the SAS men were pleased to be back in business, the fact that they had been called back to their Hereford base on Boxing Day, when most of them were at home celebrating with family or friends, had caused some of them to voice a few complaints. Now, as they sat in cramped conditions, packed in like sardines with their weapons, bergens, or backpacks, and other equipment in the gloomy, noisy hold of the Hercules, some of them were passing the time by airing the same gripes.

  ‘My missus was fucking mad,’ Corporal Roy ‘Geordie’ Butler told his friends, in a manner
that implied he agreed with her. ‘No question about it. Her whole family was there, all wearing their best clothes, and she was just putting the roast in the oven when the telephone rang. When I told her I’d been called back to Hereford and had to leave right away, she came out with a mouthful of abuse that made her family turn white. They’re all Christian, her side.’

  ‘Don’t sound so hard done by, Geordie,’ said Corporal ‘Taff’ Burgess. ‘We can do without that bullshit. We all know your heart was broken a few years back when your missus, after leaving you for a month, returned home to make your life misery. You were having a great time without her in the pubs in Newcastle.’

  That got a laugh from the others. ‘Hear, hear!’ added Jock McGregor. ‘Geordie probably arranged the phone calls to get away from his missus and her family. Come on, Geordie, admit it.’

  ‘Go screw yourself, Sarge’. She’s not bad, my missus. Just because she made a mistake in the past, doesn’t mean she’s no good. Forgive and forget, I say. I just think they could have picked another day. Boxing Day, for Christ’s sake!’

  But in truth, he’d been relieved. Geordie was a tough nut and he couldn’t stand being at home. He didn’t mind his wife – who had, after all, only left him for a month to go and moan about him to her mother in Gateshead – but he couldn’t stand domesticity, the daily routine in Newcastle – doing the garden, pottering about the house, watching telly, walking the dog, slipping out for the odd pint – it was so bloody boring. No, he needed to be with the Regiment, even if it meant being stuck in Hereford, doing nothing but endless retraining and field exercises. And now, with some real work to do, he felt a lot happier.

  ‘What about you, Danny?’ Geordie asked Corporal ‘Baby Face’ Porter. ‘What about your missus? How did she take it?’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ Danny answered. He was a man of few words. ‘She understood, I suppose.’

  ‘I’ll bet she did,’ Corporal Paddy Clarke said.

  Sergeant-Major Phil Ricketts smiled, but kept his mouth shut. He knew Danny’s wife, Darlene, and didn’t think much of her. Danny had married her eight years earlier, just after the Falklands war. Having once spent a weekend leave with Danny and his parents in the Midlands, a few weeks before Danny proposed to his Darlene, Ricketts felt that he knew where Danny was coming from. Always intrigued by the contradiction between Danny’s professional killer’s instincts and his naïvety about personal matters, he had not been surprised to find that Darlene’s father was a drunken loudmouth, her mother a tart and Darlene pretty much like her mother.

  Nevertheless, blinded by love, Danny had married Darlene and was now the proud father of two children: a boy and a girl, seven and six respectively. While Danny had never been one for talking much, it was becoming increasingly evident from his unease at the very mention of Darlene’s name that he was troubled by secret doubts which he could not articulate. The marriage, Ricketts suspected, was on the rocks and Danny didn’t want to even think about it.

  No such problem, however, with the big black sergeant, Andrew Winston, formerly of Barbados, who was sitting beside Danny, looking twice his size, and crafting poetry in his notebook, as he usually did to pass the time. In fact, since the Falklands campaign, Andrew had become something of a celebrity within the Regiment, having had his first book of poems published by a small company based in London’s Notting Hill Gate, and even receiving a good review in the highly respected magazine Orbit. When most of the book’s print-run was remaindered, Andrew bought the books himself, and sold them off cheaply, personally signed, either to his friends in the Regiment or, more often, to their wives, who clearly were deeply interested in six-foot, handsome, black poets.

  As the poems were about Andrew’s experiences with the Regiment, he had also sent copies of the book to the Imperial War Museum. When the curator wrote back, thanking him for his contribution and assuring him that the three signed copies would be placed in the museum’s library, Andrew was so thrilled that he rushed straight out and married his latest girlfriend, a beauty from his home town in Barbados. Now he too was a father – in his case, of three girls – and he appeared to have no complaints.

  ‘I used to spend so much time chasing nooky,’ he explained to Ricketts, ‘that I didn’t have any left for my poetry. Now I’ve got it on tap every night and I’m much more creative. Marriage has its good points, Sarge.’

  In the intervening years, Ricketts had been promoted to sergeant-major, Andrew to corporal and then sergeant, while Jock McGregor, Paddy Clarke and the reticent Danny had become corporals. Geordie Butler and Taff Burgess, however, although experienced soldiers, had repeatedly been denied promotion because of their many drunken misdemeanours. Also because, as Ricketts suspected, they simply didn’t want responsibility and preferred being troopers.

  As for Ricketts, now nearing 40, he was increasingly fond of the comforts of home, appreciating his wife Maggie more than ever, and taking a greater interest in his two daughters. It still surprised him that they were now virtually adults: Anna, 19, was working as a hairdresser in Hereford, while Julia, a year younger, was preparing to take her A levels and hoping to go to art school. Though he was proud of them, they made him feel his age.

  Now, thinking about his family, and surrounded by his men in the cramped, clamorous hold of the Hercules, Ricketts was forced to countenance the fact that the battle for Kuwait might be his last active engagement with the Regiment. In future, while still being involved, he was more likely to be in the background, planning and orchestrating ops, rather than taking part in them. For that reason, he was looking forward to this campaign with even more enthusiasm than usual. It marked a specific stage in his life, and a very important one. After this he would settle down.

  ‘How much longer to go?’ Andrew asked no one in particular, suffering from a creative block and just needing someone to talk to.

  ‘About twenty minutes,’ Ricketts replied. ‘We’re already descending.’

  ‘Thank Christ,’ Andrew burst out. ‘I can’t stand these damned flights. You can burn me or freeze me or shoot me, man, but keep me out of these transports. I can’t bear being cooped up.’

  ‘You’re going to be cooped up when we land,’ Paddy gloated. ‘In a fucking OP in the fucking desert – hot by day, cold by night. How’s that grab you, Sergeant?’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Andrew replied. ‘I’m a man who likes his privacy. Just stick me in a hole in the ground and let me live with myself. Since I’m the only man here worth talking to, I’d rather talk to myself.’

  ‘You might find yourself talking to an Iraqi trying to cut your black throat.’

  ‘Lord have mercy, hallelujah, I is ready and waitin’. Ever since that Saddam Hussein pissed on Kuwait City I’s bin dyin’ to come to the rescue. It’s part of my imperialist nature. My noble English blood, brothers!’

  As the customary repartee – bullshit, as they always called it – poured from the other troopers, Ricketts thought of the march of events that had followed Saddam’s invasion. When the news broke, Ricketts had been sceptical about Saddam’s remaining in Kuwait City, assuming it to be a bluff designed to get him his way in other matters. Since then, however, Saddam had stuck to his guns. Because of his intransigence, the UN had imposed economic sanctions and a trade ban on Iraq; President Bush had ‘drawn a line in the sand’ and sent thousands of troops to Saudi Arabia; 12 Arab states, along with Britain and France, had done the same; over 100,000 refugees had crossed into Jordan; Saddam had used British hostages as a ‘human shield’, paraded others on television, and then declared Kuwait Iraq’s nineteenth province and released the hostages as a political gesture; and the UN Security Council had voted for the use of force against Iraq if it did not withdraw from Kuwait by 15 January.

  By 22 December, shortly after the UN General Assembly had condemned Iraq for violating human rights in Kuwait, Saddam had vowed that he would never give up Kuwait and threatened to use atomic and chemical weapons if attacked. As he was still showing no s
igns of relenting, war was almost certainly on the cards.

  ‘’Scuse me for asking, boss,’ Geordie said to Major Hailsham, ‘but is it true we’re not the first to be flown in?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Major Hailsham replied. He had been promoted shortly after his return from the Falklands, when Major Parkinson was transferred to another unit. With his sardonic sense of humour and excellent operational record, he was a popular commanding officer of the squadron.

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘No, Trooper, I don’t. If any other members of the Regiment have been inserted, I wasn’t informed.’ Mike Hailsham was still a handsome schoolboy with a wicked grin. ‘But since I’m only the CO of this benighted squadron, they wouldn’t even think to inform me, would they?’

  ‘I guess that’s right, boss,’ Geordie responded, deadpan. ‘We’ll all have to accept that.’

  In truth they all knew, and were envious of the fact, that other members of the Regiment had been working undercover in Iraq since a few days before the invasion, having flown incognito, in ‘civvies’, on British Airways flight 149 from London to Delhi, with a fuelling stop in Kuwait. Finding themselves in the middle of Saddam’s invasion, which had begun in the middle of that same morning – slightly earlier than anticipated by the ‘green slime’, the Intelligence Corps – the SAS men had melted away, dispersing in two directions, some to send back information from behind Iraqi lines, others to do the same from Kuwait itself, where they would now be hiding in a succession of ‘safe’ houses and operating under the very noses of the Iraqis. Naturally, their presence in Kuwait was unofficial and therefore remained resolutely unacknowledged.

  ‘We’re coming in to land.’ Hailsham observed needlessly as the overloaded Hercules began its shuddering descent. ‘Check your kit and prepare to disembark. I want no delays.’

  ‘Aye, aye, boss,’ Ricketts said, then bawled the same order along the hold of the aircraft.