Tak steadied himself, the rasp in his throat slowly subsiding. Through a mist of perspiration, he surveyed the chaos in the gun pit. Laba was firing the gun on his own. He had looked around briefly, nodded an acknowledgement, pointed to the unopened ammunition boxes and turned back to the gun. Tak squinted through the smoke and dust at the broken ramparts of the fort. If there was any firepower left in the fort, if he could organize and motivate the DG to help out in the gun pit it could make all the difference.
Tak carefully eased himself over the sandbagged wall of the sangar and, crouching to the lowest profile possible, sprinted across the short distance to the great doors of the fort. Grasping the large metal handle in his left hand, SLR at the ready in his right, he twisted the locking mechanism and pushed. Nothing. He swore in Fijian, and shouted at the DG. Surely they would recognize his voice – he was always up there drinking tea with them. Impatiently he cranked the mechanism again before putting the full weight of his muscular shoulders behind the next push. Still nothing. The door was solid. He cranked the mechanism a third time. Every moment he remained in this exposed position he was in mortal danger. Suddenly, he heard the heavy metallic sound of a bolt being withdrawn. The door creaked open and there, to his relief, in the small opening he recognized the dark features of the Omani gunner. Tak motioned him over.
Just then a burst of HMG fire hammered into the fort wall above Tak’s head, sending small stone splinters whining viciously past his ear. He sprinted back to the cover of the gun pit. As he jumped over the side of the sangar wall, he glanced around to see the Omani, who had started to follow him, spinning around and around, pirouetting like a ballet dancer with an insane grimace on his face, then falling to the ground clutching his stomach.
The big gun continued to belch flame. It looked brave and defiant, spitting death at close range. It wasn’t called the artillery machine gun for nothing – and in the hands of Laba and Tak, the Adoo must have thought it was belt-fed! They were now working as if possessed, shovelling the shells into the breech like madmen. Open breech, slam a shell in, ram it with baton, fire. Open breech, eject hot spent cartridgecase, kick it away. The same mechanical sequence repeated time after time after time. Laba, covered in sweat, the front of his clothes blackened with cordite, had no time to think. He just kept laying the sight – bubble up, line, bubble up, line. On. Fire! And still the Adoo kept coming. As one group reached the wire and was gunned down, another replaced it almost instantaneously. Wave after wave surged up behind their fallen comrades, willingly following the same fate, a relentless waterfall of human beings plunging over the precipice of life.
The heat from the red-hot breech made sweat run down Tak’s face in dirty rivulets. Open breech, slam one in, ram it, close breech. Fire! A small group close to the wire disappeared in a rain of shrapnel, smoke and dust. Open breech, slam one in, ram it, close breech. Fire! Tak was soon surrounded by piles of empty ammunition boxes and spent cartridge-cases. He searched frantically for another shell. His hand closed around a dull brass case – and in that instant he tumbled backwards and sideways. The pain in his shoulder exploded into his brain as he slumped against the sangar wall. He looked towards Laba without uttering a sound. Then another round parted his thick black hair and ploughed a bloody furrow through the skin on top of his skull. ‘Laba, I’m hit!’ he shouted violently in Fijian, the whole of his upper body suffused with the pain of the 7.62mm round lodged somewhere in his back, perilously close to his spinal column. Another millimetre, and his spine would have been snapped in two.
The mighty twenty-five-pounder now stood silent. Without Tak to feed the beast, the situation was desperate. The gun pit was in real danger of being overrun. Laba looked around in despair. Tak was propped against the sangar wall, his shirt soaked in blood, somehow, with a supreme effort, summoning up the strength to take well-aimed shots with his SLR at the figures near the wire. We’ve got to have more firepower, thought Laba. His eyes darted anxiously from left to right. He knew what he was looking for.
There it is, there’s the firepower we need, he thought triumphantly. He began to crawl through the piles of spent shell-cases towards a 60mm mortar leaning upright against the sandbagged wall of the gun pit. The sweat ran down his face, stinging the wound on his chin. The noise of Tak’s SLR made him flinch momentarily and then he was moving again, oblivious to the hot brass cases burning his hands and lower arms. A Titan figure, seemingly immortal, he was now dangerously beyond the cover of the twenty-five-pounder’s bullet-riddled armour shield. He stood up and reached out for the mortar. Bullets whistled all around him. He seemed driven by a superhuman energy, possessed by a singleminded duty to fight his fight, to stand by his comrades. Above the din of the battle he could just make out Tak’s voice shouting in Fijian, ‘Get your head down, get your head down!’
Laba didn’t hear the bullet that killed him. His only sensation must have been an intense burning pain on his neck, as though someone had stabbed a red-hot needle through his jugular. And then he was falling through darkness, lost forever. The mighty Fijian warrior had breathed his last. Tak was on his own.
‘I don’t like it. It’s gone too quiet. Something’s happened over at the fort. If the gun position goes we’ve got big problems. I need a volunteer, someone to watch my back. I must find out what the situation is over there.’ Mike Kealy’s terse request cut through the tense atmosphere in the radio room. Gone were the boyish features of the young, inexperienced troop officer. His face now had a grim, grey-edged, hard-bitten look about it that none of us had seen before. We were standing before him in a half-circle, Bob in the centre, me to the right, and Tommy, his stocky frame resting casually on the SLR propped up by his side, to the left. I had just finished keying out the 316 radio to Um al Gwarif requesting an airstrike and a casevac chopper, and I now joined the other two in agreeing that we should all share the risk. This was the ultimate Chinese parliament. We argued our case vehemently, but Mike’s mind was made up. He would only take one man, the Batt House medic, Tommy, who could give medical assistance to any casualties we had taken at the gun pit. Mike reasoned that Bob would be required to take over command of the Batt House and control the air strike, and I was needed to give covering fire on the .50-calibre and also to man the radio set.
Disappointment and feelings of guilt swept over me as I removed my belt kit. Why had I not been chosen to go with Mike? Was I not good enough, not experienced enough? I desperately wanted to get over to Laba and Tak. In a short space of time I had grown to like the two Fijians enormously. I felt a bond with them as if they were my own brothers. I admired their great courage, their fortitude and stamina, their laconic understatement in the face of real danger.
I swept aside the negative thoughts worming through my brain and considered the worsening situation. I looked down at the luminous face of my watch: it was just 0700 hours. A short time ago we had heard high-velocity gunfire passing over our heads from the south of Mirbat town. That could mean only one thing – a co-ordinated attack from the north and the south. We were surrounded. It was shit or bust now. Once more, I sat down at the radio table and repeated the request for Startrek on the 316. The jets were really going to be at a premium now, if only the wretched monsoon mists and low cloud would lift.