There’s no need to look for any more clues. The reference to a warning is confirmation enough of the message. The question now is how to interpret it and, if necessary, respond. It’s strange news to get and I’m annoyed with myself for being hungover and slow. I regret my mind isn’t feeling sharper and that the whole significance of the message isn’t coming to me more quickly. The only thing I know for sure about the message is that it’s been sent by someone who knows enough of my background to be confident that I’ll figure out how to decipher it, and then how to interpret it. Whoever sent it also knows how to find me.
There’s a another sudden knock at the door, which has an effect similar to a powerful electric shock. I yank open the door with a scowl. There’s a different man standing on the doorstep, this time wearing a fake Barbour, jeans and trainers.
‘I’ve told your friend I’m a Muslim,’ I say gruffly.
The man’s eyebrows go up and down and he let outs a gravelly chuckle.
‘Well, in that case,
As-salaamu aleikum
.’ His voice is low, even and has a rasping quality as if something rough is being continually ground down in his throat. I frown at him. I’ve never met an Arabic-speaking Jehovah’s Witness and wonder if they’ve sent for a specialist to check my theology. He’s going to get a run for his money.
‘
Wa aleikum as-salaam.
’ I return the greeting out of reflex and look at him more closely. His frame is lighter than the other man’s, and the lines on his cheeks suggest leanness. He has short sandy-coloured hair, a neat moustache like an ex-soldier’s and looks a youthful fifty. His eyes have a watchful and mischievious sparkle. But he has no documents or bag. Before I can think of anything else to say, he speaks again.
‘Ana rafiq min landan.’
I am a friend from London. He speaks Ministry of Defence Arabic. ‘I parked down the road,’ he adds, gesturing with a thumb over his shoulder. Then it sinks in.
It’s Seethrough’s man from the Regiment. The SAS has arrived.
‘Oh, Christ. Sorry. Come in.’
He smiles and his eyes dart watchfully over the hallway as he steps inside. ‘It’s H—— by the way. Friends call me H.’ The handshake is firm. ‘Late night?’ he asks with a knowing look.
‘Something like that.’
‘We’d better have some coffee.’
‘I’ve just made some.’
‘Good man.’
He sniffs the air as we go into the kitchen, puts his coat neatly over the back of a chair and sits at the table. The room’s a mess. I’m embarrassed and surreptitiously cover the ashtray in the sink with a plate as I rinse a pair of cups. I ask where he’s driven from this morning.
‘Hereford.’ That figures. Hereford is home to the Regimental HQ of 22 SAS.
I’m about to ask whether he lives there, but he answers first.
‘Settled down after I left the Regiment ten years ago, give or take.’
‘Marry a local girl?’
‘The whole nine yards. Wife, kids, cats, dogs.’
‘What have you been doing since?’
‘The security and protection circuit – rigs and pipelines, mostly. Some BGing once in a while. Sorry – bodyguarding. And the occasional special request.’
‘Isn’t it all a bit dull after the SAS?’
‘Better than sitting around in a damp hole all day.’
This is modest, coming from a member of the most elite special forces regiment in the world.
‘There’s a company that helps the blokes who want to stay active – the ones who don’t become postmen, mostly.’
‘Remind me not to tangle with the postman.’ I sit down opposite him and pour the coffee. His eyes fall on the dark red and blue bands of my watchstrap.
‘Regimental flash?’
‘Scots Guards.’
‘Alright for some.’ He grins. ‘When did you pack it in?
‘After the Gulf. Granby, wasn’t it? Stupid name for a war,’ I say. I know that military code names are chosen by computer and run alphabetically, but still.
‘Stupid war, if you think about it.’ He blows thoughtfully on his coffee. I like his irreverence.
‘Regiment did well out of it,’ I say.
‘The usual balls-up,’ he says, dismissing this. ‘Typical Regiment story. A lot of guys spread out all over the world in different theatres, and then up comes a deployment like the Gulf.’ His fingers trace a phantom squadron gathering across the tabletop. ‘All of a sudden every one of them wants a piece of the action, and a lot of jostling goes on. You get guys who’ve been training for something else doing the wrong job, and the right guys getting bumped down the line.’
‘What did London tell you?’ I ask.
‘I only get a phone call from the liaison officer with the where and when. Sounds like they’re going to leave the details to us. We’ve got a month. Should be plenty of time.’
This is a very low-key approach, and unlike anything I’ve encountered in the military. I also find it hard to reconcile the softly spoken almost boyish manner of the man in front of me with the more sensational tales told popularly about the Regiment.
‘I don’t suppose you were on the balcony at Prince’s Gate, were you?’ I’m joking, but every soldier knows how many thousands of men have claimed they were part of the spectacular hostage rescue at the Iranian embassy in London twenty years earlier.
‘No, not on the balcony,’ he says in a thoughtful tone. ‘Anyway, the blokes on the balcony were only there for the TV cameras.’
Good answer. I ask how long he’s been in the Regiment.
‘I’m a twenty-fourer.’ He chuckles. ‘Boy soldier.’ He’s served in every major theatre where the SAS has deployed. Aden, Borneo, Oman, Northern Ireland, the Falklands, Iraq, Bosnia and, between training some other military units in far-off places and what he calls ‘extra-curricular stuff’, a dozen other countries.
‘I’m surprised you haven’t thought of a literary career,’ I say. ‘Wasn’t it your CO who started the trend?’
He shrugs cynically. ‘DLB was a good soldier. Anyway, it’s his memoirs they’ll be reading in ten years, not the other bloke’s.’
He’s loyal too, I’m thinking to myself, to his former Regimental commanding officer, Peter de la Billiere. By the sound of it he doesn’t care much for the celebrity authors the Regiment has also produced over the past few years. Then I remember what Seethrough told me the day before.
‘What’s a Mirbat vet?’ I ask.
‘I am, for starters,’ he says.
‘Then what’s a Mirbat?’
‘Mirbat? That’s the name of the town. On the Omani coast. Operation Storm.’ His eyes light up. ‘The Regiment’s golden hour. Have you got an atlas?’
A vet, it now dawns on me, is obviously a veteran, but I’ve been thinking a Mirbat is some kind of animal, not the site of a battle. Feeling very ignorant, I fetch the atlas from the sitting room, where I’ve left it. We push our cups aside and a few moments later our fingers are trailing southwards across the Arabian peninsula. I’ve forgotten how strategically placed Oman is, with its north-eastern tip pointing into Iran across the narrowest stretch of the Persian Gulf. H’s finger comes to rest on the coastline not far east of the border with Yemen.
‘We were down south, here, in Salalah. And there,’ he says, pointing to a long mountainous shadow running east to west, ‘was where the Adoo were, up on the Jebel.’
‘What were you doing there?’
‘We weren’t. Officially. Too secret at the time. No one back home knew we were out there. But look.’ He points to the map again. ‘Everything coming in and out of the Gulf has to run through the Straits of Hormuz. Imagine if we’d lost it.’ He smiles and then does a comic caricature of an officer. ‘We couldn’t very well let them have our oil, could we?’ Then as if he regrets making light of the subject, adds, ‘That wasn’t the point at the time. We were British. We knew we’d win.’
He flattens out the sheet gently with his hand, and we lean over it to peer at the names. From the coastal plain around Salalah, several dark lines cut into the looming escarpment that H calls the Jebel, which means mountain in Arabic. The lines split and waver like veins as they travel north. They’re the giant wadis that lead into the hinterland of the enemy, he explains, verdant in the monsoon season and blisteringly barren in the summer.
‘That’s Wadi Arzat,’ he says. He smiles. ‘God, I remember hiking all the way up there with a jimpy.’ Jimpy is army slang for GPMG, the unpleasantly heavy general purpose machine gun. He takes a key ring from his pocket and uses the tip of a key to follow the coastline to the east, until it comes to rest on a town at the foot of the great Jebel.
‘There,’ he says, ‘that’s Mirbat. That’s where I got my first souvenir.’
There isn’t much written about Mirbat or Operation Storm, so I’m pleased to be hearing about it from someone who was actually there, and I fill in the gaps later. Mirbat itself was the most dramatic engagement in a six-year-long campaign spanning the final days of British control in the Gulf. In 1970 the British protectorate of Aden had fallen to a Marxist-oriented government. On its eastern border lay Oman, governed by an ageing and autocratic sultan with the help of a small army run by British officers. When intelligence reports began to suggest that communist-trained guerrillas from Yemen, as well as others from revolutionary Iraq, were infiltrating the country, there was a reappraisal of British interests in the region. The prospect of allowing the country to fall into communist hands was unthinkable.
A coup, discreetly assisted by the British, brought the sultan’s son Qabus to power. But in the meantime the communist-trained rebels, the Adoo, had seized the strategic heights of the Jebel, and the new sultan’s army was losing the war for control. Well trained and supplied by their communist sponsors, the Adoo were brave and tenacious.
Enter the SAS. Unofficially, under the quiet euphemism of British Army Training Teams – BATTs. And operationally, with the threefold task of wooing the local population away from the communist-trained guerrillas and persuading them of the benefits of joining the government’s side, raising local irregular units called
firqats
to fight the Adoo, and taking the war ever deeper into the Jebel.
Within a couple of years a series of daring raids had pushed the Adoo from much of the Jebel, where the SAS built up lines of control and permanent bases. But the Adoo were planning a decisive comeback, and had decided on an all-out assault supported by mortars and artillery on the small coastal town of Mirbat. Their plan was to capture the stone fort and its local defenders, kill the mayor of the town and score a huge propaganda victory for the rebel cause.
They came on 12 July 1972, at dawn.
At least 250 Adoo fighters walked down unopposed from the Jebel, infiltrating the outskirts of the town and fanning out in the gullies and beyond the perimeter wire protecting the fort. The odds in their favour could not have been much better. In the fort were only a dozen local tribesmen armed with bolt-action rifles. Several hundred yards away, in the local BATT house, were a handful of SAS men looking forward to their return to Hereford at the end of their tour in a few days’ time.
When the first Adoo mortars began to fall, showering the sleeping soldiers with dust from the mud walls of their HQ, no one even thought to radio the support base at Salalah. But as the volume of fire increased, it became obvious that the Adoo had launched a major assault. For a few moments the SAS men stared in disbelief from the parapet of the BATT house at the hundreds of advancing men, then opened up with their own mortar and heavy machine gun. The mist was soon sizzling on their gun barrels, and the incoming fire growing with every minute.
One of the SAS troopers, a Fijian called Labalaba, ran to the gun pit at the base of the fort and began firing a 25-pounder into the Adoo lines as their shells exploded around his position. But things were quickly getting worse. The Adoo were soon too close for the maximum elevation of the SAS mortar in the BATT house, so a desperate pair of troopers lifted it from its mounting, and while one man held it to his chest, the other fed the ammunition into the tube. Then came news over the radio that Labalaba had been wounded. Twenty-three-year-old troop commander Mike Kealey, still wearing his flip-flops, radioed for a helicopter to evacuate him while another Fijian, called Tak by his friends, ran to his countryman’s aid through clouds of dust thrown up by exploding mortar shells and automatic weapons. The helicopter attempted to land nearby, but was forced to withdraw.
For an hour the Adoo poured fire into the fort, by now wreathed in smoke and dust and impossible even to see from the BATT house except when lit up momentarily by the bursts of exploding shells. But the rate of fire of the heavy gun manned by Labalaba was faltering and, unable to reach the gun pit on the radio, Kealey decided to run for it with his medical orderly, Tobin.
They sprinted in bursts, firing in turn and hearing the deadly whisper of enemy bullets all around them. Throwing themselves into the gun pit a few minutes later, they scrambled across piles of shell casings to find Tak propped up in a pool of blood, wounded in the back and head but still firing his weapon. Labalaba, with a field dressing tied around his chin, was struggling to load shells into the 25-pounder. A badly wounded Omani gunner was sprawled among the ripped sandbags and ammunition boxes. Despite sustained fire from the BATT house, the Adoo then breached the perimeter wire, and were close enough to begin throwing grenades into the gun pit. Labalaba, after slamming a final shell into the breech of the gun, fell to an Adoo bullet. Taking his place, Tobin was shot through the jaw. He died later.