The One That Got Away - Junior edition

CHAPTER 9 Boxing Clever

In the days and nights that followed, there were several moments when my morale plunged to rock-bottom. This was one of them. A wave of loneliness swept over me as I realized that I was utterly alone. I was hungry, wet, tired, cut off from all communication with friends, and still far inside a hostile country. I thought it couldn’t get any worse.

‘If things get on top of you,’ my mum always used to say, ‘have a good cry.’ So I lay there in the rocks and tried to cry — but I couldn’t. Instead my face crumpled up and I started laughing. Somehow it did the trick. It got rid of the tension and sorted me out. I daydreamed about the glorious puddings my mum used to make — particularly her rice pudding, with its thick, sweet, creamy inside and its crust baked to a crisp golden brown. I could have done with a helping of that, there and then. But from that point on I wasn’t bothered about being alone. All I had to do was get on with heading for the border.

It was the morning of Sunday 27 January, and I’d been on the run for three nights. I would have liked to let my feet breathe, but that would have involved too great a risk. I had to be ready to leg it at any minute: so it was one boot off, one sock off, check that foot, and get sock and boot back on. Then the other foot. The blisters looked bad. They had burst, and the skin below was raw and bleeding. My toenails had started lifting, and there were blisters under my toes. I had no way of treating them, and could only hope that my feet would hold out until I reached the border.

With my boots back on, I spent an hour cleaning my weapon again. I took care, as before, not to make any noise that would carry. Once I had everything squared away, I lay back with my belt undone but my webbing still in place, straps over my shoulders, so that I could make a quick getaway if need be.

Even down there, almost on the level of the Euphrates, the air was still icy cold, and I was shivering. I lay on one side, with my hands between my legs, tucked in under one big rock. Smaller rocks pulled into position shielded my head and feet, and there was bare rock beneath me.

From time to time I dozed off, but always I woke with a start a few minutes later, shaking all over. It was my body’s defence to bring me round like that: if I hadn’t kept waking, I would have drifted off and been gone for ever. Aching from contact with the rock, I would shift about, trying to find a more comfortable position. There was always a pebble or bump of rock digging into some part of me, and the pressure points on the outsides of my knees, hips and spine had already begun to rub sore.

The water had made me feel better in one way; but it had given me the shivers, and all I wanted to do was press on again, so that I could warm up. The hardest thing was to keep still in daylight. The urge to start walking, to make progress towards the border, was almost overwhelming.

Below me, the wadi dropped towards the river in a V-shape, snaking left and right. There was nothing alive to keep me interested: no bird or animal, nothing moving. Boredom soon became another powerful enemy. It took all my willpower to resist the urge to move on, or even just to have a look around.

The day was quiet: I never heard voices or traffic movement. Now and then the wind would stir among the rocks and I would come fully alert, looking round, wondering if a person or an animal had shifted. From where I lay I could see what looked like the remains of an ancient viaduct, jutting out from the bank of the river into the water. I wondered how old it was, and whether it could date back as far as the Romans. Round the base of the arches the water was obviously deep, because through my binoculars I could see the current swirling fast. The river was brown with silt, a strong contrast with the salty-looking land on the far bank.

What kept my spirits up was the thought that I must be close to the Syrian border — no more than thirty or forty kilometres away. Looking at the map again and again, I worked out that I was much farther west than I had thought I was. I reckoned I was within one night’s march, possibly two, of safety.

Until then, the longest I’d ever gone without food was four days, on combat survival training in Wales. Even then, an agent had brought me one slice of bread or a little piece of cheese every twenty-four hours — but I remembered feeling pretty weak at the end. The furthest I’d ever walked in one march was sixty-five kilometres — the final march on Selection. Now, I reckoned, I’d covered about 150 kilometres in three nights, and already it was five days since I’d had a proper meal — the big blow-out at Al Jouf. With my biscuits finished, I began to worry about how long my strength would hold out. How long could I go on walking? Would I slow right down, or even be unable to keep going at all?

I knew from weight-training, and books about the subject, that when the body is under stress it starts to burn its own muscle, trying to preserve fat for emergencies. I was carrying very little fat anyway, so I knew my muscles would waste away quite quickly, especially as I was burning yet more energy by shivering all the time. In lectures on combat survival, we’d been told that a man lost in the desert can only survive for a day without water — but this wasn’t a typical desert, because the temperature was so low.

I kept wondering about the rest of the patrol. I greatly feared that Vince was dead, and in a way I felt responsible. Lying all day by the tank berm had definitely contributed to his collapse, and it was me who had said we should follow SOPs and stay there. Then, in the night, I should have tied him to me. As a qualified mountain guide, I could have handled the situation better. But at the time I’d been going down with exposure myself, and not thinking as clearly as I might have.

What about Stan? It seemed certain that he’d been captured, and I could only hope he wasn’t having too bad a time. As for the other five… I reckoned that a chopper must have come back and lifted them out. I felt sure that the aircraft must have been inbound towards our original position, following the normal Lost Comms procedure, and that it would have flown around until the guys made contact with the pilot. In fact, as I found out later, the other guys in the patrol had been captured that day close to the river at a point about a hundred kilometres nearer to the Syrian border. As a result of contacts with them, 1,600 Iraqi troops had been deployed to look for other Coalition soldiers on the run, and the civilian population along the river had been alerted.

I came out of my hiding place not long after dark, and began heading north-west, keeping as close as I could to the edge of the cultivated land, where the going was easiest.

I was walking more carefully now, because I was in a populated area. I was probably down to three or four kilometres an hour. Occasionally, for a change, I rested the 203 over my shoulder, but for most of the time I held it in both hands, with the weight taken by the sling of paracord round my neck. That way, the weapon was less tiring on my arms, but it was also at the ready: I could have aimed and fired a shot within a second.

Soon I found that there were amazing numbers of Arabs out and about. Every half hour or so I’d come across a group standing or sitting around, chatting in quiet voices. Several times I picked up the glow of a cigarette and had to box round it. (Boxing is when you walk in a box shape round an obstacle, counting your paces and turning right-angles so you end up walking in the same direction as before.) Often I just smelled smoke, either from cigarettes or from a fire or stove, and pulled off without seeing anything. It seemed odd that so many citizens should be out of doors on a freezing winter night.

Again and again I saw or sensed people ahead of me, brought up the night-sight for a better look, and had to make a detour. In the end my lack of progress became quite frustrating, and I started to think that if things were going to be like this all the way to the border, I would never get out. I would become too weak from lack of food, and would end up getting captured.

During that night I was on the move for eight hours, and must have covered thirty or forty kilometres, but I made only about ten kilometres towards the frontier. I would walk gently forward for a while, see someone, back off and box them. Immediately I’d come on someone else, box them, and carry on. It was zigzag, zigzag, all the time, five or ten steps sideways for every one forward.

I found it incredibly difficult to maintain concentration for any length of time. Wild animals like antelopes and deer, which are preyed on by carnivores, have the ability to remain on the alert for hours on end. Their lives depend on it. But humans have lost the knack, and it takes conscious effort to stay watchful.

Often I found I was having silent conversations with myself.

I’ll walk as far as the top of that hill, I’d say. Then I can have a rest.

Soon I’d ask, How did you get yourself into this mess? And where have the others got to now? Casting ahead in my mind, I wondered what the border with Syria would look like, and how I’d cross it. People and personalities from my past kept drifting into my head: my mum and dad, my brothers, my school teachers. I’d wonder what they’d be doing at that moment — and I longed to tell them where I was. I imagined how surprised they’d be if they knew what I was doing. Often I heard their voices, and these became so real that I’d forget about my own security and pay no attention to my surroundings. Suddenly I’d come to and realize that I’d covered a kilometre or more in a dream.

Whenever I passed a house, the dogs would start barking, and the noise would ricochet down the valley. One lot of dogs would alert the next, and they’d start up before I even reached them. Those tell-tale alarm calls progressed along the river ahead of me, and to my ears they sounded as loud as the wail of a siren.

The dogs were a real nuisance. As I was skirting one village, above me on a mound, I looked up at the houses — square, dark silhouettes with flat roofs and no lights showing — and saw a whole pack of them coming down, barking their heads off. Through the night-sight I watched them make straight for me. One ran up to within three metres, with four or five more close behind it. If I stopped, they would stop, and also they’d stop barking. But the moment I threatened them or moved, they’d bark like hell again and creep on some more, stalking me.

I kept looking anxiously up at the houses, expecting lights to come on at any second. I felt like the Pied Piper, with all the dogs following me. I stopped, picked up a rock and hurled it. The pack ran away for a few metres, only to close in again. As I cleared the houses, they followed for a couple of hundred metres. They stopped, and stood or sat, watching and barking until I was out of their sight. Then, when my nerves were in tatters, they turned back and trooped home. The one saving grace was that their owners seemed to pay no attention whatsoever. So far as I could see, nobody ever came out of a house to see what the noise was all about.

For a while I stayed as close to the river as I could, partly for navigation, partly so that I could get more water when I needed it. But then, deciding I was too close to the inhabited stretch, I drew away to the south again and returned to the edge of the desert. There I started cross-graining through the wadis, which were running down towards the Euphrates at right-angles to the way I was going. I wanted to try to stay far enough from the river and its habitations, but at the same time out of the wadis, so that I wasn’t forever scrambling up and down.

By five in the morning I was starting to worry about finding somewhere to lie up for the day. At 0530 it was still fully dark, but when I came to the top of a cliff looking out over the river, something made me decide to scramble four or five metres down the face. There I found a ledge, and at the back of it a nice flat area, with a crack going back underneath the cliff. That seemed as good a hiding place as any, and I lay in it until day broke.

Monday 28 January: Escape — Day Five

When the light came up, I found I could look straight down into the river. On the opposite bank there was a small village. The houses were simple, single-storey structures, mostly built of breeze blocks, with flat roofs. They stood in areas of dirt, with no sign of a garden. Soon, as I watched through binoculars, people started to come out and walk up and down, going about their daily tasks. There seemed to be very few men, but plenty of women, all dressed in black robes from head to foot and heavily veiled. Groups of them came down to the water’s edge to fill their buckets. Surprise, surprise, the place was alive with dogs.

I was looking for any strange activity which might suggest that the area was on the alert — military vehicles driving about, or troops on the move, but I saw nothing of note.

Two men spent the whole day fishing, paddling up and down in a boat. On each pass they let themselves drift maybe a hundred metres downstream. The speed at which the boat picked up confirmed that the current was strong, and I felt glad that I hadn’t tried to swim across. In daylight the water looked a dark brown colour, and a good deal of rubbish was floating about inside my bottle; but the sight of the shining fish reassured me. If they could live in the river, I thought, the water couldn’t be too bad.

All that day — Monday 28 January — I lay on the ledge, with my webbing under my head as a pillow. I felt secure, almost peaceful. It was the sort of place, I thought, in which an eagle or a peregrine falcon would nest. There was no movement close to me, and my main enemy was boredom. I spent hours studying my map, trying to work out exactly where I was. Again I managed to convince myself that I was well to the west of my true position, and a great deal nearer the border.

I tried not to think about food, but inevitably, with all that time on my hands, it had become a major preoccupation. Each one of those houses opposite had food in it, even if it was only flour or bread. If it weren’t for the dogs, I could nip into one under cover of darkness and steal a loaf. In my mind I kept seeing the sachets of fruit that I’d left in my bergen. What wouldn’t I give for some pineapple in syrup? When I get out of here, I thought, I’m going to eat a gallon of ice cream.

The day passed. From my perch on the cliff face, I watched the shadows lengthen in the village opposite. Gradually the grey-brown fields beyond the houses faded into the dusk. As evening came on, I wanted to get going again, and had to hold myself in check.

When darkness fell at last, I moved out, climbed to the top of the cliff and started walking. That night, thank goodness, people disappeared into their houses and after dark there was nobody about. But to keep out of the way, I pushed up towards the wadis, between a line of pylons and the main road. Up there, I found myself in steep country. I kept coming to what looked like small quarries, so I’d have to climb down, walk across a flat floor, then scramble up again and along the top. It was really tiring, and my feet were seriously sore.

After studying the map all day, I thought I’d worked out where I was — a big bend in the river with a village on it. This looked only about a day’s walk from the border — a fact which lifted my morale and gave me strength.

Again I walked all night. The occasional car went along the main supply route, which was three or four hundred metres down to my right. Some had headlights on, others were driving blind. At some point late in the night the headlights of a car illuminated a motorway-sized sign. I was too far away to read the names, but I decided to move down to the road and check what it said.

It was then that I saw the only wild animal in the whole of my trek. As I dropped towards the road I looked through the night-sight. There, on top of a mound, stood a big fox, staring down at me. I knew what he was from his sharp-pointed face and sticking-up ears. For a whole minute I watched him, and he never moved; then I went on, and left him in possession of his territory. In that fox I recognized a fellow creature of the night. I bet that, like me, he lay up all day and came out only when darkness fell. He can’t have been as short of food as I was, but I found it hard to imagine what he lived on, because never in all my time on the move or lying up did I see any form of rodent.

Closing on the sign, I peered up at it. It was written in English as well as Arabic:

New Ana was behind me, and I’d known for some time that I was heading for Al Qaim — but fifty kilometres! I had thought I was almost there. That was a massive blow to my morale. Sitting there in despair, I thought, I’m never going to finish this walk. When I got out the map and pinpointed my position, I saw I was still eighty or ninety kilometres from the border — at least two days short of the spot I thought I’d reached.

I couldn’t believe it. I felt as if I’d had a kick between the legs, and sat down on the side of the road, staring at the sign. But the evidence was there, and everything fitted together, as I worked out where I was and where I’d been. The reality was intensely depressing.

There was nothing for it but to keep going.

Weighed down by exhaustion, thirst and fear, I started moving along the line of the main supply route. I was only a hundred metres from it when I heard a drone from somewhere along the road behind me. I went to ground and lay listening. The noise was coming from miles away to the east, but it grew steadily until it seemed to fill the night. A four-ton wagon went past — but still the heavy drone was increasing. I moved down to the edge of the road and hid in some rocks, looking along the highway through the night-sight. For minutes I couldn’t see anything. Still the noise built up.

Then, as I scanned for the twentieth time, I saw a black dot, which grew bigger and bigger until it became a massive vehicle, filling the sight. With a tremendous roar it came level, and suddenly I realized I had a Scud missile going by me! The TEL vehicle was a huge articulated truck, with the missile canopied-up under tarpaulins on its trailer, and a convoy of smaller trucks behind it. They were all heading out towards the Syrian border. In one of them, with an open back, I could see a whole gang of soldiers.

That’s what I’m here for, I thought to myself. To find Scuds! I never imagined I’d get as close to one as this. Should I have opened fire on it? I couldn’t have destroyed the missile, but a grenade from the 203 into the front of the truck might have put the launcher off the road. I would have given away my position, though, and the guys in the convoy would have been on top of me.

If only I could report back what I’d seen: this was exactly the information the Coalition needed. I whipped out my TACBE, switched on and spoke into it, but as before I got no response. The Scud disappeared into the distance

On the move once more, I crossed the main supply route, so that I was between the road and the river, which at that point were maybe fifteen kilometres apart. Now the ground was really flat, and again I started crossing ploughed fields. It was time to look for a lying-up position, but here in the farmland I couldn’t see any rough, broken areas. So I planned to move back across the road and regain the higher ground beyond. Then I came to a culvert — a tunnel underneath the highway about two metres high and three wide. It was obviously built for pedestrians and animals to walk through.

I was feeling so exhausted and let down that I decided to lie up in the tunnel. It was a bad decision, but I can see why I took it. I was thinking, You’re going down. You’re not going to last much longer. Why not take a vehicle and drive to the border? The culvert would make a good base for such a hijack.

I sat there in the tunnel having this discussion with myself. My lazy side was saying, Just do it: grab a vehicle and drive out. The other side was saying, What happens if there’s two people in it? How are you going to make them stop? What if there’s only one man, and he just drives on? Once you’ve been seen and reported, that’s you finished.

I went through the scenario again and again. I imagined myself standing on the road, putting one hand up, levelling my weapon — and the car accelerating past. Then I’d have given my position away and lost all the advantages I’d so painfully built up. If Stan had still been with me, the idea would have been even more tempting — but even if we got a vehicle, the chances were that we’d drive into a control point.

I decided not to risk it. But I’d landed myself in a hell of a place. While I’d been dithering, the sky had begun to lighten, and it was already too late to move on. Safe or not, the place was very uncomfortable. The wind was blowing straight through that culvert like it came from the North Pole. Soon I was absolutely frozen. I tried moving rocks to make a little shelter, but the wind still whistled through the gaps. In the gloom I could see that bushes were growing in the floor of the tunnel, and I thought that maybe I could pile some into a barrier. But when I grabbed one, I got a handful of vicious thorns. There seemed to be no way of improving my shelter, so I simply lay down, determined to stick it out.

Just at full daylight, I heard the sound I wanted least in the world: goat bells. I’d had enough of goats and goatherds already. Looking through the tunnel towards the river, I saw the lead animal come into view, heading confidently into the culvert, obviously on its way through. I just had time to scoot out the other end of the tunnel and up the sloping embankment of the main supply route. As I ran towards the top of it, a car was approaching at speed, so I flung myself into a shallow ditch which led down the bank at an angle from the road-edge.

There I lay on my back, trapped, looking straight down over my boots to the top of the culvert exit. In a few seconds the lead goat emerged below me, not three metres away. More and more goats came into view, pushing and jostling. Their stink rose all round me. Last came the goatherd, an old man wearing a long, woolly coat over several other layers, with a white shamag wrapped round the top of his head. He was leading a donkey, which had a blanket over its back. Five or six dogs jostled at his heels. As he walked out, the top of his head was barely a metre below my boots.

I lay rigid, with the 203 down my front, praying that he would not look back and that the dogs wouldn’t get wind of me. Had they done so, I’d have had to shoot him. I didn’t want to kill an innocent civilian, but I was desperate. If I had shot him, I would have been in a dire position: I’d have had to run off into the wadi system with the pack of dogs after me, and even if I’d made a temporary getaway, the old man’s death would have put down a great big marker. Obviously he came out that way every morning, and people would be expecting him back.

How the dogs failed to smell me, I still cannot imagine — unless my scent was obliterated by the stink of the goats. I held my breath as the party moved slowly away, up into the wadis. The old man never looked back, and the jingle of bells faded among the rocks.

I couldn’t go back into the culvert, because it was clear that at some time during the day the flock and their keeper would return. Equally, I couldn’t move down anywhere below the road, because the farmland was too open, and too full of people at work. Besides, I felt sure that there must be a village, or at least a few houses, not far off.

I lay still and watched the goats until they were out of sight. My mind was racing. There was only one way I could go — up into the wadis. But traffic had started to build up on the motorway; every other minute a vehicle came past, and if I began moving up onto the high ground, a driver might see me. I kept imagining what would happen if somebody spotted me and raised the alert. The hunt would be on, and because it was still just after dawn, the searchers would have all day to catch me.

I decided to take my chance and make a go for it between cars. I rolled over onto my belly, slung the 203 on my shoulder, slithered down the embankment and began crawling up the dry river bed. Every time I heard a car coming, I went to ground, scared stiff that I would be seen. After a hundred metres I scuttled upwards and got round into the beginning of the wadi system, maybe 500 metres from the road. Then I walked on again until I found a hollow in the ground, and lay down in that.

There I was, stuck again for the hours of daylight. It wasn’t a very good hideout. Although I couldn’t see the road, I had a reasonable view downhill maybe 200 metres, but behind me the outlook was blocked by a mound. If anyone had come along, I wouldn’t have seen him until he was on top of me. This kept me fully on edge. Any sound made me whip round, even if it was only the wind passing over the rocks.

I calculated that this was Tuesday January 29, and a map check showed that I was still at least seventy kilometres from the border. Working backwards, I realized that due to hypothermia Stan and I had miscalculated on our last night together, and we’d gone in a much more northerly direction than we’d supposed.

By this stage, even keeping still had become painful. Because of the cold, I had to lie on one side or the other with my knees tucked up to my chest. I’d lost so much weight that my pressure points had become very sore.

I could see that the day was going to be a long one.