Crump. Crump. Crump. Fuzz was now on his feet. ‘I don’t like the sound of this. That was too close for comfort. We’d better go and see what they’re up to.’
The first ranging rounds from the Adoo mortars were already impacting just outside the perimeter wire as I leapt out of bed, pushed past Fuzz, Laba and Tak and scrambled up the half-pyramid of ammunition boxes that served as a ladder up to the roof. When I reached the top I threw myself behind the .50-calibre Browning, my stand-to position in the command-post sangar built on the flat roof of the Batt House. One moment fast asleep, the next under attack, I drew a sharp breath and cursed softly, my left hand closing instinctively on the first incendiary round protruding from the ammunition box. I snapped open the top cover of the .50-calibre and positioned the ammunition belt on the feed tray. The belt held a mixture of incendiary and tracer rounds in a ratio of four to one, the incendiary rounds designed to explode on impact. With the links uppermost I manoeuvred the belt into position with my left hand. With my right hand I closed the hinged cover and cocked the action with a single practised twist of the wrist, feeding an incendiary round into the breech. The cold metal of the trigger felt comforting to the touch as I took up the first pressure, released the safety-catch and stared in disbelief at the scene unfolding before me.
Confident he had everything organized for the relieving squadron, Lofty swung off his bed, slipped into his well-worn shorts and desert boots and creaked open the wooden door. He screwed his face up into a grimace as the cool drizzle of the interminable monsoon washed over his early-morning pallor, making him blink away the last grains of sleep. He ambled past the radio-and-ops room and headed for the armoury. G Squadron transport, two armour-plated Bedfords, stood parked ready on the volleyball court. Several figures clad in OGs were milling around talking in low tones. One character caught Lofty’s eye. Slowly and meticulously he was lacing his boots on the ammunition-store steps. Lofty brushed past him, undid the padlock and pushed open the heavy metal armoury door. He stood still for a moment peering into the store, getting his eyes used to the gloom inside, then set to work issuing the ten GPMGs and 2,000 rounds of ammunition for the day’s zeroing detail on Arzat ranges. Working with quick mechanical precision he didn’t take long. As the last 200-round liner of GPMG link rattled its way onto the back of the Bedford, he began securing the ammunitionstore door. ‘Time for breakfast and a quiet cup of tea,’ he said to himself.
Two thousand metres away, in the dark foothills of the Jebel Massif, I could clearly see the vivid flashes of six mortar tubes leaping into the night, dramatically illuminating their concealed baseplate positions. Nearer, from the Jebel Ali, the muzzle flashes of incoming machinegun and rifle fire sparked white-hot gloom. What the hell’s going on, I thought, where’s the DG night picket? Green tracer from an RPD light machine gun rioted furiously against the walls of the DG fort on the northern edge of the town. A frenzied salvo of mortar bombs suddenly impacted, blowing away part of the perimeter wire. The fire mission crept slowly forward until the last round exploded on the edge of the town, sending pieces of shrapnel each the size of a fist screeching over the Batt House.
Since arriving in Dhofar in 1971, during the months spent skirmishing with the Adoo on Operation Jaguar, I had developed a sort of sixth sense, a feel for contacts with the enemy. I had a bad feeling about this one; it looked like high drama. Over the last three months there had been several stand-off attacks on Mirbat, with the Adoo bugging out after scattering four or five mortar bombs inside the barbed-wire perimeter fence. The Adoo had just been letting us know they were there, trying to prove their virility, maintain their morale. But this time it was different. The intensity of this deployment had all the tell-tale signs of a determined attack.
With my heart beating furiously against my rib-cage, threatening to burst through at any moment, and with a sickening surge of gut fear hardening like cement in my stomach, I squinted through the dark at the defensive layout of the Batt House. It seemed totally inadequate against the firepower of the attacking Adoo, a shanty-town hut against a nuclear bomb. Over to my left, on the north-west corner of the flatroofed building, a GPMG in the sustained-fire role had been mounted in a sandbagged sangar. Behind the gun, awaiting the order to open fire, their eyes aching intensely with concentration, crouched Roger and Geoff. From my sandbagged sangar on the north-east corner of the roof I looked down to a pit ten metres away from the house. I could just make out the wiry figure of Fuzz hunched over the illuminated dial sight of the 81mm BATT mortar. At his elbow knelt Tak, almost invisible in the gloom, cradling a high-explosive mortar bomb in his hands as though it were a rugby ball. To the rear of the mortar position, Tommy worked frantically preparing the mortar bombs for firing, unscrewing the plastic tops of the containers, withdrawing the bombs and checking that the charge cartridges were securely in position, withdrawing the safety-pins, replacing the prepared bombs in their containers – fins protruding from the openings to facilitate easy withdrawal – and stacking the containers in a tier system so there would be as many as four dozen bombs ready to hand at any one time.
I glanced over my shoulder to the far side of the command-post sangar. I looked at Bob, the CPO. Calm, cunning and totally professional, he stood balancing the mortar plotter board on the edge of the sangar wall as if he was about to conduct an orchestra. In his right hand, held close to his ear, was a Tokia walkie-talkie. He was staring intently in the direction of the Adoo mortar line. His sunburnt brow became as furrowed as a seventy-year-old Sherpa’s as his mind wrestled with the problems of estimating bearing and elevation for the BATT mortar site.
That, then, was the sum total of our defences. All in all, with our Second World War twenty-five-pounder, .50-calibre Browning and 81mm mortar, compared to the firepower of the Adoo, it was as if we had brush-handle battering rams against a reinforced steel door. If we had known also that we were outnumbered by nearly thirty to one, we would have already been mentally composing a plea of mitigation for an imminent confrontation with our Creator.
My appraisal of the Batt House defences was suddenly interrupted by a noise on the pyramid of ammunition boxes that led up to the sangar. I looked round to see the grim face of Mike Kealy, the commander of our eight-man civil-aid team, appearing over the sangar wall. His morphine syrettes, watch and ID disc on the para-cord swinging around his neck rattled noisily when the cord became briefly entangled with his SLR as he pulled himself over the sangar wall. On his feet he wore only a pair of flip-flops.
He crouched and moved quickly across the floor of the sangar, carefully avoiding the open ammunition boxes, and took up a position just by my right elbow. His face spoke a thousand words. He was trying to inject some interpretation of the situation into his logical Sandhurst mind. He looked me square in the eyes and, holding my stare, said in a quiet, steady voice, ‘Go down to the radio room and establish communications with Um al Gwarif.’ As I applied the safety-catch to the .50-calibre, I heard the throaty swish of an artillery round. We both ducked as a blinding flash followed by the crump of detonation sent a large plume of smoke spiralling crazily skywards from the centre of the town. Christ, that was no mortar, I thought, with a shiver of trepidation.
I ran down the sangar steps, crossed the small open area leading to the radio room, pushed in through the door and seated myself at the folding six-foot table. On the table, amidst a pile of message pads, codebooks and well-thumbed Penthouse magazines, stood the PRC 316 patrol radio set. The set was already tuned in, so it was just a matter of turning it on, adjusting the fine tuner slightly, then hitting the morse key. With the set switched on, the mush in the earpiece of the headset sounded like hailstones on a skylight. I gripped the morse key between index finger and thumb and tapped out the net call sign: ‘OA. OA. This is 82. Radio check. Over.’