Killer Elite

20

The khareef flies, as small as European midges or Canadian “no see-ums” but more aggressive, crawled over his forearms and sucked blood from his neck. His shirt was soaked with the monsoon drizzle and his spectacles were misted up. On June 1, 1972, Mike Kealy, SAS troop officer at the jebel outpost of Tawi Ateer, the Well of the Birds, was squatting in the orange mud in a glade above the camp. His SLR (self-loading rifle) lay within easy reach but his concentration was focused entirely on the iridescent plumage of the hummingbird that hovered less than two paces from his knees. Wingtip to wingtip, Mike estimated the body size as two and a half inches-a tiny masterpiece of nature-and he sorely regretted that for once he had failed to bring his camera.

Khaki rivulets veined the clay soil around islets of fern and bidah gladioli. From the overhanging cliffs above to the edge of the clearing lianas fell in dank profusion. Tamarind trees and wild citrus shed their burdens of rain in a nonstop and rhythmic tattoo while all manner of crawling, hopping insects animated the undergrowth.

Mike’s lifelong fascination with nature ensured that he was never bored during the long, gray days of the 1972 monsoon. At home on the Sussex Downs, around his home at Ditchling, Mike’s father had lovingly taught him all he knew about the then abundant fauna of the area. Mike’s only sister had died young, and the Kealys’ world revolved around their son. After Eastbourne College he had passed into Sandhurst, keen for a career in his father’s old regiment, the Queen’s Surreys.

In 1965 he was commissioned and, after six years as an infantry officer, joined that small but elite group selected, from the many who try, to be SAS officers. With four months of intense specialist training under his belt, he was sent to B Squadron, then commanded by the jovial little dynamo Major Richard Pirie.

Mike did well but he found life far more tense and competitive than during his years of infantry soldiering. Then, he had commanded mostly amenable teenagers on humdrum exercises. With the SAS he found himself appointed to 8 (Mobility) Troop, generally considered the regiment’s best. A dozen or more veterans of several wars and secret operations around the world constituted the twenty-seven-year-old officer’s new charges. These were men who accepted nothing at face value, who questioned orders with a cool appraisal based almost always on experience, whereas Mike’s thinking was often the result of classroom military dogma.

His first few months with the troop were a far tougher test than even the SAS selection course. He was on sufferance from day to day and he knew it. Not a few aspiring young officers, elated by success at selection and proudly sporting their newly awarded winged-dagger badge, have found themselves unacceptable to their designated troopers. In such cases the officers always moved on, not the troopers.

Unlike in infantry regiments, where each officer has a personal batman-orderly to attend to his needs, the SAS officer will often find himself cooking for his radio operator while the latter is busy with codes and ciphers on arrival at a “basha” (improvised tent) site for the night. One way of speeding the process of acceptance into a troop is, of course, for the officer to prove himself in battle. This was Mike’s first four-month tour in Oman, and so far the adoo had opened fire on his men only once.

On June 8, 8 Troop were helicoptered down from the jebel to the coastal town of Mirbat. This village of fishermen’s shacks huddled in isolation on a stormy promontory under the shadow of a three-thousand-foot escarpment. Two small mud fortresses protected the jebel side of Mirbat, and the broiling monsoon breakers prevented any attack from the south. A tangle of barbed wire ringed the forts and the town from west to east, starting and ending in the sea.

Mike and his eight men took over a lone mud hut known as the Bat-house between and slightly to the south of the two forts. The village itself squatted in poverty and squalor between the Bat-house and the sea.

The sultan’s wali, or village headman, lived in the fort to the northwest of the Bat-house with a garrison of thirty ancient askars (militia). The second fort, seven hundred yards to the northeast of the Bat-house and mere yards from the perimeter wire, housed two dozen Dhofar Gendarmerie troops. These fifty-five men, armed with outdated bolt-action rifles, formed the wali ’s entire defense force. The small SAS presence was intended to provide only civil aid and military training. Their own defense consisted of two roof-mounted machine guns and a mortar pit close by the Bat-house.

A few mortars and rockets were occasionally fired at Mirbat by night, but by the time 8 Troop were due to hand over to a new SAS team, Mike had still undergone no baptism of fire. A roster of guard duties was rigidly followed but the months of inactivity tended to reduce a man’s alertness.

The Eagle’s Nest, the summit of Jebel Samhan, towered 6,000 feet above Mirbat. At dusk on July 18, seventy men picked their precarious way down its mist-swathed face, all heavily laden with weapons and ammunition.

Ali, second son of Sheikh Amr bin Issa, led the sixth and last subunit of the Wahidaat a Wasata wa Sharqeeya. The previous week his men had completed the nerve-racking task of locating and removing the many PMN plastic antipersonnel mines the PFLO had previously sown on the vertiginous trails.

Every man was proud to be a part of this historic attack. Omani and Ingleezi blood was to gush and the shock troops of the PFLO would be heroes for years to come.

Ali was himself from Arzat country to the west and knew little of this arid region north of Mirbat. For three days he and his men had worked out of the cavernous hollows of the upper Samhan. The jebel here is limestone on a bed of chalky dolomite. Erosion had worn away the softer strata into innumerable crags and winding tunnels.

Ali’s heart was proud as he led his men down the precipitous and slippery route. In places there were fixed ropes, further evidence of the intricate preparations involved with the operation.

The previous morning Ali had heard the news on Radio Aden of a major reverse. The perfidious President Sadat had ordered the Soviet supporters of Islam out of Egyptian territory. So be it: tomorrow the PFLO would show the world what Arabs could do without a single Soviet adviser.

Ali did not stop to consider the arsenal that his men and other converging PFLO units were carrying that night. The grenade and rocket launchers, the heavy mortars, the motley array of machine guns of various calibers, the recoilless antitank weapons and their personal AKM and AK47 rifles-all were of Soviet origin.

The PFLO leaders had laid their plans with care. The attack coincided with maximum mist cover from the khareef, making it all but impossible for government airplanes to support the Mirbat garrison.

A diversion the previous day had drawn out the Mirbat firqat, the fifty or so ex-PFLO turncoats normally based in the village. These men were now several hours’ march away to the north, an important factor since, unlike the askars and Dhofar Gendarmes in the two Mirbat forts, they were all armed with fully automatic rifles.

The “Ingleezi” element would be a pushover since they were less numerous than the fingers of a single man.

Long before midnight Ali’s men crossed the ravine of the wadi Ghazira. Ali remembered a visit to this wadi when he was a child. His foster father had brought him and his brother Tama’an down from Qum to see the great flood. They had quivered with fear, long before they reached the wadi, at the distant reverberating roar of the storm water descending from the escarpment. He would never forget that noise, the very sound of God. No man alive who had heard and seen those floods could ever swallow the Marxist claptrap about Allah being merely an invention of British imperialists. They had clung to their father’s waist, their mouths agape at the boiling maelstrom that filled the forty-foot-high gorge, changing its shape forever, destroying everything in its path and driving its plunder of dark detritus far out into the Indian Ocean. Looking back at the mountainside, they had gasped at the glistening sheets of falling water, Niagaras spumed by the wind and plunging down from the jebel to the drainage wadis as though it was once again the beginning of time.

Ali was called back. One of his men, crossing the wadi, had been bitten by a snake, a large cobra. He bade the man, a black freed slave from Darbat, to remain still. They would return for him after the attack was over. Meanwhile he apportioned the man’s spare ammunition among the others. Each man carried well over a hundred pounds of lethal hardware. Ali trod with extra care now. In these days of mines, one was inclined to forget the snakes. Yet a venomous cocktail of vipers infested the scrub of these coastal wadis, including the rare Thomasi, with its sharply etched black rings, the Boulenger or Spotted Rhodorhachis, which climbs near-vertical rock as fast as a windblown leaf, the minute, almost invisible, thread snake, and sixty or so other equally unfriendly species.

After crossing the wadi they took up positions in an outcrop of boulders and Ali counted over two hundred men pass him by in the semidarkness. Some carried long tubes or other awkward loads, parts of the heavy longrange weapons.

Two hours before dawn the attack lines were ready. Two hundred fifty of the PFLO’s finest fighters, trained in Moscow and Odessa, took up position overlooking the silent village and its puny forts. A killer squad left the main body and silently climbed toward the only government watch-post north of the perimeter wire.

The Dhofar Gendarmes who manned the post were caught by surprise. Four were held fast while their throats were slit but others escaped into the night, and one, before he flung down his rifle the better to flee, loosed off a magazine to warn the wali’s men.

With speed the adoo forces spread out across the whole length of the perimeter wire and eight hundred yards to its north. Ali found himself immediately opposite the Dhofar Gendarmerie fort, the first main target of the attack along with the twenty-five-pound field gun dug into an adjacent sandbagged pit.

Ali checked and exhorted each of his men, then delved into his pack for the Chinese field cap of which he was so proud. He pulled it tightly down to his ears and gently checked

the cocking lever of his AK47.

With a burst of sudden son et lumiere the PFLO heavy mortars began the offensive as the first stirrings of dawn came to Mirbat.

Mike lay half awake, pleasantly aware that life was about to take on a rosy tint. Tomorrow 8 Troop would be relieved. In only a few days he would be home in his beloved Sussex. Idly he ran over the things to be done in preparation for the handover to G Squadron.

He heard the crump of incoming mortar bombs; another symbolic action by the adoo. Nothing serious was expected. There had been no warnings from the “green slime”-SAS argot for Intelligence.

When several heavy mortar rounds landed close by, Mike rose and fumbled in the dark for his spectacles. Donning shorts and rubber flip-flops he grabbed his FN rifle and clambered up a rickety ladder to the Bat-house roof.

The predawn sky crackled with high-velocity bullets. To his immediate front Mike watched a patch of perimeter wire disintegrate in a mortar explosion, while 12.7mm Spaagen rounds dug great chunks of masonry from the Dhofar Gendarmerie fortress and shrapnel screamed over the Bat-house. This was no low-key attack.

Mike was mentally well prepared. He had spent time over the previous month plotting imaginary reactions to hypothetical attacks on Mirbat. He knew exactly what to do and so did the men of 8 Troop. A lot of “muck” was already being flung at the fort, a sure sign that the building was a priority target for the adoo. The poorly armed Dhofar Gendarmes were unlikely to survive a frontal assault without immediate aid. If they fell, the twenty-five-pounder would go too.

Mike knew that his Fijian sergeant, a giant of a man named Labalaba, had already departed into the gloaming to help the single Omani gunner in the pit beside the fort. Laba, as he was known, was a humorous soul, given to boasting that an ancestor of his had once feasted on the missionary John Wesley. He was one of a number of Fijians who had been recruited by the British Army when good jungle soldiers for Borneo service were at a premium.

Mike approached Corporal Bob Bennett, the quiet West Countryman in charge of the Bat-house mortars. Mike had established a close rapport with Bob over the previous three months.

“High explosive and white phosphorus, Bob,” Mike ordered. The WP mortar shells would provide an instant screen of white smoke among the adoo, upsetting their aim and giving Labalaba time to prepare the twenty-five-pounder for action.

“Right, boss,” Bob replied and radioed his mortar-fire directions to Fuzz Pussey, an Oldham man, down in the mortar pit.

Mike could see major trouble was imminent. He turned to the powerfully built trooper lying behind the sights of the. 50 Browning machine gun.

“Pete, see if you can establish comms with HQ.”

Pete Winner was a northerner with a fiery nature. In May 1981 he was to lead the Alpha Assault Group raid on the Iranian Embassy in Kensington, London.

Pete left the Bat-house roof and tapped out a Morse code message to SAS Headquarters near Salalah: “Contact. Under heavy fire. Wait. Out.” Sand and mud showered his face as a brace of 120mm Katyusha rockets exploded nearby.

A dull monsoon dawn had broken over the shore and the village. The SAS men wore shorts, shirts and desert boots. All were bare-headed.

For half an hour the attackers poured bullets, mortars and rockets at the forts and the Bat-house. Bob and Fuzz returned mortar fire as best they could and the others formed a line to haul ammunition boxes up to the roof.

Shortly before 6 a.m. there was a sudden lull in the bedlam and little children appeared on the roofs of the town houses behind the Bat-house. Bob Bennett cupped his hands and shouted, “Go down, go down.”

The two SAS machine guns remained silent, not wishing to give away their position until a ground attack began. At exactly 6 a.m. all hell broke loose.

From shore to shore across the length of the wire the adoo opened up on the Mirbat defenders and, in groups of a dozen, their commandos began the assault. Using the still dim light, the clinging wraiths of mist and the broken ground for cover, they darted forward from rock to rock. They outnumbered the garrison by five to one and their firepower was greatly superior.

On the rooftop Pete Winner waited behind his heavy machine gun. Air-cooled and belt-fed, it could fire up to six hundred rounds a minute.

A few paces away Geoff Taylor, on loan to 8 Troop from G Squadron, adjusted the sights of the smaller 7.62 GPMG (General-Purpose Machine Gun) and prepared the feed belts with help from Roger Coles, a Bristol man built thin as a rake.

Mike felt the tension slacken in his stomach. He cleaned his spectacles with his shirttail and peered into the fog of dust and cordite. He forced down an appalling surge of fear.

Men were advancing on foot toward the perimeter wherever he looked. As they broke into a run, Mike turned and shouted, “Open fire.”

Winner and Taylor were totally efficient with their weapons. The ground to the north of the wire was soon littered with adoo bodies shredded by heavy. 50-caliber and high-velocity GPMG bullets.

The advancing PFLO lines continued, ignoring the screams of their dying. The wire was breached in places, and rocket launchers set up behind rocks. Soon the Dhofar Gendarmerie fort and the nearby gun pit shook to direct hits from Carl Gustav rockets. Gaping holes appeared in the fort and bodies of dead gendarmes slumped over the wall embrasures.

The gun pit was undermanned but Laba worked like a demon to load and fire the Second World War relic over open sights and at point-blank range. His activities attracted a hail of bullets, one of which removed part of his chin.

Back at the Bat-house mortar pit 8 Troop’s second Fijian, another giant, named Sekavesi, lost walkie-talkie contact with his friend and braved seven hundred yards of open ground under heavy fire in a dash from Bat-house to gun pit.

Roger Coles sneaked out of the Bat-house with a Sarbe ground-to-air beacon. He hoped to call a helicopter in from Salalah to evacuate the wounded. Choosing a suitable spot close to the beach, he signaled the machine, which came in low over the sea. Murderous enemy fire precluded any landing and the helicopter veered away into the mist. Coles was lucky to make it back to the Bat-house.

In the gun pit Sekavesi and the wounded Laba were working the twenty-five-pounder. Covered in blood, black cordite and sweat, burned by the empty brass cases, they slammed round after round into the wire to their front. A 7.62 bullet entered Sekavesi’s shoulder and lodged itself close to his spine. A second bullet cut a deep furrow along his skull. Blood cascaded down his face, but realizing the imminent danger of being overrun, he propped himself against a sandbag with his rifle and, wiping blood from his right eye, continued firing at the wire.

Laba limped across to a 60mm mortar tube. A bullet penetrated his neck and the great Fijian fell dead. Beside him in the pit the Omani gunner lay writhing with a bullet in his guts. The big gun, of key importance to the defense of Mirbat, fell silent.

On the Bat-house roof Mike was deafened by the numbing roar of the battle but he sensed the sudden silence in the gun pit. Receiving no response to repeated calls with his walkie-talkie, he knew he must go to the pit without delay. Bullets were now passing over the Bat-house from the south as well as the north. This could only mean the adoo had outflanked the forts and were already into the village itself. Eight Troop were surrounded. Mike forced this unpleasant turn of events to the back of his mind. Bob, Pete and the others could hold the Bat-house; he must help the Fijians defend the northern perimeter at all costs. The thought of running the gauntlet from Bat-house to gun pit now that the adoo lined the perimeter wire with their full firepower was to stare death in the face. Yet every man on the roof volunteered to go with Mike. He chose Tommy Tobin, the medical orderly. As he was about to set out, Bob reminded him, “You’ll not get far in your flip-flops.”

Mike descended to his bed space and laced up his desert boots. Then the two men, edging around the mortar pit beside the Bat-house, sprinted to a low wadi bed and used its cover to advance a few hundred yards. They were halfway to the gun pit when the adoo spotted them and opened fire. With modern weapons, especially machine guns, and at a range of a hundred yards, it is not at all difficult to hit a man-sized target. Fifty or sixty trained PFLO guerrillas now adjusted their weapon sights and concentrated their fire on Mike and Tommy.

Once clear of the wadi there was not a scrap of cover. Only speed and sheer luck preserved their lives during the four long minutes of their run to the gun pit. Mortar rounds exploded about them, burning tracer sighed above their bent backs and, ever closer, the ground beat of a chasing heavy machine gun pursued their path. From his rooftop Pete Winner spotted the adoo machine-gunner and, adjusting the sights of his Browning, blew the man apart. Mike and Tommy, lungs heaving and eyes blinded by sweat, flung themselves over the gun pit sandbags, Mike landing on the eviscerated stomach of a dead Dhofar Gendarme.

Mike summed up the position. In minutes they would be overrun. Only Sekavesi’s rifle was still active in the pit and many adoo were already through the wire entanglements.

The Dhofar Gendarmerie fort close by was holed and silent. All adoo fire was now directed on the gun pit and its occupants. The gun’s steel shield rattled and clanked as bullets struck its armor, direct hits slicing through and entering the pit behind. Tommy Tobin’s jaw and one cheekbone were shot away from his face. He lay by Laba’s body with blood pumping down his neck.

A group of adoo broke through the wire and rushed to the far wall of the fort. Creeping round to the corner closest to the gun pit, a mere fifteen yards away from Mike and Sekavesi, they unslung and primed their hand grenades, closing in for the kill.

The endless hours of snap-shooting at targets back in Hereford in which both Mike and Sekavesi, like all SAS men, had been thoroughly schooled, now paid off. Ducking and weaving within their pit, Mike subjected everything that moved to the quick double-tap, two-shot sequence that is the hallmark of Hereford training. He killed the first adoo just after he had unpinned a grenade. The man’s own body covered the explosion.

A light machine-gunner targeted the two survivors and for a while movement was impossible within the gun pit. Unable to shoot at the approaching adoo, Mike failed to see a grenade land on the sandbag above his head. The explosion filled the air with sand, steel and a noise that seemed to crack his eardrums. Mike forced himself back up to his knees and then fully upright. Quickly he palmed dirt from his spectacles and, as he replaced them, saw the blurred image of an adoo immediately ahead and beneath the fortress wall. He fired twice and blew the back of the man’s head onto the masonry.

A half dozen grenades arched out toward the gun pit. Most detonated against the outer sandbag wall but one rolled over the top of the sacks and dropped onto the body of the dead gendarme. Mike watched the smoke wisp away from the six-second fuse and braced himself for death.

The grenade failed to go off. Mike winged a prayer of thanks to God and began to wonder why he was still alive. He felt no fear anymore. If he could survive this far, he was going to make it. A bullet passed through his hair and another fanned his cheek. He clearly saw an adoo aiming at him from beside the remnants of the perimeter fence. He killed the man and saw his Chinese field cap hooked up by the razor barbs of the wire.

Two BAC Strikemaster jets roared by, braving the near-impossible visibility. A curtain of adoo machine-gun fire rose to meet the planes and both were holed. They wheeled over the sea and Mike placed a fluorescent cloth panel on the floor of the pit as a guidance to the pilots.

The Strikemasters did what they could during the brief seconds of mist-free attack. Cannon fire and rockets racked the perimeter wire and gave the defenders of Mirbat a short but welcome respite.

Badly damaged, both jets limped away toward Salalah and the adoo attack resumed. Mike could now hear heavy firing from the seaward side of the gun pit and he called Bob Bennett to bring mortar fire down on the gun pit’s immediate attackers. The SAS mortar man, Fuzz, jacked his tube up to maximum elevation, but Mike was still not happy with the results.

“Get the bloody rounds closer,” he ordered.

“I can’t,” Bob shouted at his walkie-talkie. “They’ll land right on top of you.”

“That’s what I want,” was Mike’s only reply.

Hearing Bob’s relayed orders, Fuzz grinned and, lifting the weapon by its legs, hugged the tube to his chest. Aiming by trial and error, he sent bomb after bomb into the immediate vicinity of the gun pit.

Two more Strikemasters attacked the perimeter and at last the adoo , some five hours after the attack had started, began to retreat into the mist. To the south the sounds of battle mounted over a wide area and Mike was greatly relieved at a radio message announcing the arrival of G Squadron helicopter reinforcements. They had been called off a training exercise and fitted out for battle as quickly as possible. Within an hour the fresh SAS force had driven the remnants of the adoo into retreat.

Mike left Sekavesi in the pit and entered the shattered fort. Major Alistair Morrison of G Squadron found Mike there. In his subsequent report he wrote, “I was speechless when I saw the area of the fort. There were pools of blood from the wounded, mortar holes, many rings from grenades and the twenty-five-pounder itself was badly holed through its shield. The ground was scarred by the many grenades which had exploded. It was obvious that an extremely fierce close-quarter battle had been fought there. Each one of Captain Kealy’s men made a point of telling me that he was the bravest man they had ever seen… I believe his inspired leadership and bravery saved the lives of his men and the town from being captured.”

Amid the carnage and the body bags, Labalaba was identified and taken away by helicopter. Over a hundred of the PFLO attackers had been killed and many of the defenders were dead or dying. Bob and Mike sat together on the Bat-house roof feeling drained yet elated. Tommy Tobin was sent back to England to have his face rebuilt. Mike later visited him in the hospital in Aylesbury. A broken tooth had lodged in Tommy’s chest and he died two months later.

Three days after the Mirbat attack Mike and his men returned to Britain on leave. Mike sat with his parents in their sitting room at Forge House in Ditchling, East Sussex. There had been no news coverage of the Mirbat event in Britain. Over supper and until 1 a.m., Mike unburdened himself to his parents.

“It was exactly like watching a film,” he told them, “except that the dying really died. I thought I would be killed and I worried about people coming here to the house to tell you I was dead… it was very bloody… I felt a great peace when it was over.”

Two years later Mike and Bob Bennett met at the SAS London headquarters and were shown an official painting commemorating the events of Mirbat. Their CO, Colonel Peter de la Billiere, asked for their opinion on the painting’s authenticity. Both men found their eyes pricking with the emotion of their memories.

Not until four years after the battle were details of it finally released to the general public, by which time the forces of the PFLO were on the retreat throughout Dhofar.

Mike Kealy was awarded the Distinguished Service Order by the Queen, a medal second in significance only to the Victoria Cross. He was the youngest Briton to receive the decoration since the Korean War. The only memento that he kept was the Chinese field cap he had retrieved from the perimeter wire before leaving Mirbat.