He paused and added, 'You're going in on ATVs, I think?'
'That's right.'
'They'll be fine. Roll over the sand no problem.'
That reassured me. At least this info was coming straight from a guy who knew what he was talking about, rather than through a range of filters and competing intelligence agencies hundreds of miles apart.
Gus moved on to show us more detail of the terrain on our run-in. The large wadi was almost two miles wide. 'In winter that can be some river,' he told us. 'But right now it's dry, and likely to remain so. Could be the odd pool still lying in the bed, but my bet is you'll cross, dry-shod.'
He then gave us a ran-down of temperatures at first and last light. Here again I was on my guard, because in Iraq we'd been totally misinformed. Nobody had warned us that on the plateau in winter we would encounter snow, ice and vicious winds, with daytime temperatures barely above freezing, and night-times well below. The result was that we went in with nothing like enough clothes, and two of our guys died from hypotherrnia. Now in Libya we were promised a night-time minimum of eighteen Celsius and a daytime maximum of thirty-six. From the magic laptop came three-day weather charts giving temperatures, humidity, moon state, and first and last light. When I challenged the temperatures, mentioning our Iraq experience, the answer was, 'Yeah — but that was winter, and on the plateau you were a thousand feet above sea level. This time it's early summer, and even on those goddamn dunes you'll be at sea-level or maybe even below it.'
Again I relaxed.
Gus continued with an analysis of vehicle movements up and down the approach road to the camp, but these were of less interest to us. I couldn't see us getting up round that side of the establishment at all.
We'd come in from the south or south-east, find a lying-up point a kilometre or so short of the fence, and build an OP on one of the dunes. Mine's a steak, as Whinger would say: piece of cake.
Having made sketches and taken some notes, I felt reasonably confident. But one point that still worried me was the sheer number ofjundis likely to be on site.
Gus reckoned that there might be two or three hundred troops on the camp at night. If the alarm went up and that lot got deployed into the desert, they could form a hell of a cordon, through which we'd just have to blast our way.
All the more reason for us to operate discreetly: we'd need to be. in and out before anyone became aware of our presence.
Back in Hereford, the knowledge we'd gained focused our training effort. Now we knew that we needed practice at building OPs in a sandy environment, so we loaded the quads into another four-tonner and made away to the dunes near Borth on the Welsh coast. There we had a couple of good days riding the bikes on the loose, steep slopes and making OPs by digging into banks, building walls with bags of sand, and roofing over the hollows we'd made with extending aluminium rods covered with scrim netting and marram grass. The second day turned out fine and warm, so when we'd finished work two of the guys stripped off and rushed into the sea; but the water was so cold that they were out again in short order, cursing wildly and covered in purple-red patches.
After a few hours riding the quads I'd thought of a couple of modifications that might prove useful. One was a bracket mounted above the handlebar panel to hold a Magellan GPS kit, so that we could keep an eye on our little displays while driving with both hands on; the other was a speedometer (as delivered, the bikes had nothing to tell you how fast they were going). So I got the MT Section to give us all Magellan-holders, and to cobble up two of the quads with speedos.
Weapons and weapon-training were another major preoccupation. From the SAW's own closed-offsection of the armoury we drew brand-new AK-47s, silenced Browning 9ram pistols, and one Soviet-made Dragunov 7.62 sniper rifle — a semi-automatic, bolt- action weapon fitted with a telescopic sight. The AK- 47s were Chinese-made Type 5611s, with skeleton stocks that folded under for easier transportation, and Chinese characters stamped into the metal. It was obvious they'd never been fired because the working parts were still coated in their original grease; they could well have been part of the shipment seized off the Irish coast which Gilbert had mentioned.
After stripping the rifles and giving them a good clean-up, we took them out to an isolated range and began getting to know them. The AK-47 is a primitive beast, coarsely made and finished, but it's a robust enough weapon, and at normal distances reasonably accurate. The safety-catch, on the right-hand side above the pistol-grip, is dead simple — one click down for fully automatic, two down for semi-automatic — and pro vided rounds don't jam in the magazine you're laughing.
To free up the working parts we loaded magazines fully with thirty rounds apiece, and fired a few initial bursts, four or five rounds at a time. Three of the mags proved sticky, if not downright defective, so we binned them on the spot. Then we got down to zero the rifles, and found that at a hundred yards we could achieve three-inch groups, firing at plain white aiming marks on a buff background. At two hundred the rounds were falling four or five inches, but an adjustment of the battle-sight, half-way up the barrel, soon put the point of impact back in the bull. Nevertheless we decided that our best policy would be to keep the sight in its normal position and, if necessary, aim a bit high.
I never saw the AK-47 as our assassination weapon.
It would be our main armament if we got involved in a contact, but it was too crude and cumbersome for the close-quarter job which I envisaged. Our aim was to take Khadduri out with maximum precision and minimum disturbance: a surgical strike at pointblank range, for which a silenced pistol would be ideal. I therefore paid close attention to my 9 mm Browning.
Like the rifles, the Browning is a basic weapon, but this customised version had a thick cylinder of sound- baffle wrapped round the barrel. Another silencing device is the button Which locks the top slide of the pistol forward after a shot, keeping most of the noise inside — the penalty being that you have to knock the lever off to re-cock the mechanism. After a few warmup shots I fired at a Hun's-head target from close range — between ten and twenty feet. Although the pistol was accurate enough I didn't like the trigger-pull, which was too heavy, and I wasn't happy with the sluggish action. So in the afternoon I took the weapon back to the armourer and got him to polish up all its working surfaces, and next time out on the range I found a big improvement. At twelve feet I could put every round not just into the Hun's head but into a two-inch circle in the middle of the forehead.
I knew that, if I could get close enough to the target, I would nail him.
Our joker weapon was the sniper rifle, which proved deadly accurate. We set the telescopic sight at 300 yards, and worked out how much to aim up or down at other ranges without altering the zero. Already a plan of campaign was forming in my mind: when the assault party of two or three went in to penetrate the building and engage the target, the rest of the guys would be on the perimeter fence, ready to put down rounds if anyone came after us. In this last role the Dragunov could prove a big asset; if it dropped a sentry, for example, three or four hundred yards from the real scene of activity, it would create a useful diversion.
As for the secondary target — that would have to take its chance.
Explosives I left mainly to Fred Parry. After some discussion we decided to bin the idea of taking bar mines, Chinese or otherwise, as they weighed about forty pounds each and we already had too much kit to carry. Instead we indented for a supply of Semtex, with which we could blow the fence, a door or a window, or make diversionary booby-traps that would delay any attempt at follow-up. We could also use it to destroy a quad, if one was disabled, or — in extremis — to vaporise, a body. A further joker in our pack was a clutch of Claymore anti-personnel mines, which are easy to transport. These curious-looking things — like little green bars in the shape of crescents, only an inch and a half thick, with a leg at each end — pack a nasty punch in the form of ball bearings, which fly out like grape shot when the mine is detonated. American-made Claymores have TOWARDS ENEMY stamped on the business side. Ours, which were Soviet-made, bore no such legend; but as we were all familiar with the weapon, we knew well enough that the outside of the crescent was the face to show the Libyans.