27

But there was a new drama elsewhere. An urgent report crackled over the PRR.

'Ops Room, Back Sangar. We've got a rocket down here. It's fucking facing right at us.'

A clutch of enemy used the latest mortar barrage to break cover and run out into the river road 50 metres east of Back Sangar. There, they dumped a homemade firing frame loaded with a 107mm Chinese rocket – a projectile big enough to do away entirely with Back Sangar and the five men in it. It was all set and ready to launch on a ticking timer. It would go off in seconds; no longer.

Captain Curry didn't waste any time.

'Back Gate Warrior, Ops Room. Get out there quick and give it some pedal.'

The moment the OC's order was given, the Warrior's engine revved up and its clumsy tracks began to grind over the driveway's paving stones. Two sentries ran to the back gate to pull it open.

As soon as the 30-tonne beast's gunner had a direct line of sight through the opening gap, he stamped on the foot pedal and opened up the chain gun with an enormous thirty-second burst. The hailstorm of pinpoint accurate rounds demolished the threat completely; the frame first in a shower of sparks, then the rocket eventually went up where it had fallen on the road with a boom and a large puff of grey smoke. Just as quickly as it opened, the back gate slammed shut again.

Then a yell from Smudge inside Rooftop.

'Shit! Target on the civilian gate!'

He'd been duelling with enemy snipers on the rooftops above RPG alley, when movement caught his eye below. A gunman had sneaked across the road and behind the compound wall in the blind spot between the two gate sangars while the rocket drama had been going on. He was followed by a second. The first man climbed up on top of the iron gate used as an entrance to Cimic by civilians.

Sixty metres from Back Sangar and just five feet tall, it's the weakest point in the compound's perimeter because it has no sniper screen. The man had already got one leg over the gate when Smudge spotted him. Jumping up on the sandbag wall to get a better aim, Smudge raised his Minimi to his shoulder and began blasting away with well-aimed three-second-long bursts until he ran out of ammo. He killed the first man, and hit the second trying the same thing in the arm.

It gave the soldiers on the ground enough time to turn their fire on the threat. Five seconds later, half a dozen Minimis and SA80s plus a Gimpy were hurling everything they had at the gate, riddling it from top to bottom. More troops sprinted round to it and engaged the enemy from over its top, driving that attack back.

Unfortunately the rocket and the civilian gate had been just a sideshow.

'Enemy to the west at 100.'

Des's urgent shout refocused all our attentions in a second.

'They're moving up and down like jack rabbits.'

One hundred metres away was too close by half. The wasteland after the dam and its dozens of piles of earth presented the perfect ground to approach on. The enemy were using it like seasoned infantrymen. At least fifty SA80s, Minimis and Gimpys were hosing down anything that moved on it now with furious vigour. But they were too quick for us to nail any more than a handful.

Fuck, could we do with a dirty great F16 right now. Screw Danger Close, just slap a 1,000 pounder right on them.

I grabbed at the 51 again.

'Corky, give us some more HE.'

'We've done the whole tin already, Dan.'

'Well, crack open another, then. Quick.'

I raised the 51's barrel still higher towards me, and slid a round down the tube. The things would be practically going straight up and down now. If I wasn't careful I'd mortar us.

After we threw a few out, Fitz in Top Sangar in front of me spotted an opportunity. A long, deep pile of jagged shale stretching 30 to 40 metres sat right in front of the advancing fighters' path.

'Danny, if you can get a few rounds in the shale, it'll give you a million secondary projectiles.'

'Roger that, Fitz. Where is it?'

'Starts about 20 metres short and 30 metres to the right of your last.'

'Got it.'

Boom.

'Still 10 metres too long, Dan.'

Boom.

'That's 20 too short now.'

Bugger it.

Boom.

'Good length now. But 15 metres too far left now.'

Fucking bloody thing. I was ready to hurl it off the roof if the next one didn't work.

Boom.

Fitz didn't need to say a thing. Red hot shrapnel and shards of shale tore through the enemy's ranks like meat through a grinder. Because of their proximity, I could hear each and every one of their screams.

Good. Now you wankers know what it feels like to get mortared up the arse. Des started to cackle in his maniacal high-pitched laughter. Another very positive sign.

'Keep 'em coming, Corky.'

I held the mortar tube in precisely the same position. Another full tin on exactly that trajectory should do the trick. The next load of shells sent the Mehdi Army fighters running around the wasteland like headless chickens. As they were forced to expose themselves, the boys cut them down.

One bloke clutching a badly bleeding right arm made it 75 metres to a waiting car on Tigris Street. Sadly for him, the back door he tried to pull open was still locked from the inside, so to buy time he gave us another burst with the AK still in his right hand. Silly. He was riddled with a dozen rounds on the spot. As the driver got out to help, he popped away at us with a little pistol. So the boys killed him too.

The rate of small arms incoming we were receiving began to drop considerably. Means nothing though. Dale knew that instantly too.

'Keep sharp, lads,' he boomed out from Rooftop. 'They'll just be flanking away from the dam to have a go at us on the gates. You four Recce boys, get over to the south wall.'

Crump. Crump. Crump.

'Mortars incoming from Zinc! Three possible base plates!'

Everyone dashed for the sangars again and curled up into foetal positions.

Silence. There were no explosions. Eh?

'Where the fuck did them things land then, Des?'

'Two on the dam, one on Tigris Street. They were smoke rounds. I can't see a damn thing behind them now, just white smoke all over the shop.'

What the hell was the smoke for? It made no sense. If we couldn't see them to shoot at, they certainly couldn't see us. The small arms incoming suddenly stopped too.

Dale was the first to realize what was going on.

'Cease firing!'

'Why, sir, what if we see targets through the smoke?'

'You won't, lad. They're withdrawing. The smoke's to cover their retreat.'

Nobody could really believe it. All of us stayed stood-to in our battle positions until long after the last smoke cleared. The only enemy fighters to be seen were the dead and dying, scattered around the wasteland, the end of the pontoon bridge and Tigris Street. The only sound was the odd pathetic groan.

It was over. The enemy had had a damn good crack at us; they'd given everything they had, they'd got as far as our walls, and they weren't far from success. Yet just as they'd reached their closest point to overrunning us, they ran out of men. Dozens of their number were killed, many more again wounded.

I looked at my watch. 4 p.m. The battle had lasted four hours. It felt like twenty minutes. Just after five, more than an hour after the last round was fired, came the tired message over the PRR.

'Charlie Charlie One. Stand down.'

To a man, the whole company was exhausted. After such a long hit of adrenalin, we were all now totally drained of it; way too tired even to celebrate. Anyway, nobody said it was all over yet. If they had surprised us so badly by mustering that many fighters for an assault, who's to say they couldn't do the very same thing again with more? We'd beaten them, but for how long?

The roof was littered with debris. A carpet of empty brass casings, water bottles, sand and stone shards lay under our feet. The remnants of the Light Infantry's original half-sangar wooden frame had been blown totally upside down, and every sandbag in our sangars had rips and tears in them. It had been too dangerous to clear any of it up, or do anything but fight up there for days.

The rest of the compound was no better. Cimic resembled a disaster scene.

Barely a single square foot of surface inside it, vertical or horizontal, wasn't now pockmarked with bullet holes or shrapnel gashes. The house was so badly scarred it looked like something out of West Beirut in the 1980s.

All bar none of the Portakabins and prefab accommodation blocks were blown up, and every single room pepperpotted from floor to ceiling. In the washroom blocks, half the sinks had been shattered and the rest were hanging off the walls.

The OC's was the last to go, not that Charlie Curry ever moved into it. Since Major Featherstone found the blind in the floorboards, it had miraculously escaped any other attention from the OMS mortars. Then, around halfway through the all-out assault, it took a direct hit right through the middle of the roof.

Not just one but two kitchens had now been blown to pieces: the aluminium trailer from June and then the field kitchen under the green tent.

At least half of the perimeter fencing was either blown on the floor or simply not there any more. Ugly lumps of mortar shrapnel lined the paths and driveway. Every one of the garden's palm trees oozed sap from where they'd been slashed by flying metal.

I surveyed the damage from the roof with Dale at sunset.

'D'ya think the new governor will want his house back now, then?'

'No chance, Danny boy. It's just a scrapheap now, innit.'

I couldn't disagree.

'At least it's still our scrapheap I suppose,' he pondered. 'Anyway, ours not to reason why and all that. Give us a hand with doing the stock list will you, Dan? I'm not looking forward to this.'

Establishing what supplies we had left was grim work indeed. We weren't doing great on food. Most of the ration boxes had been broken open and plundered for all the best bits, with little more than pâté tins and stewed plums in custard left. There were many hundreds of those though, so we'd be shitting five times a day but at least we weren't going to starve for a bit.

Water was a different picture. We were very low. Dale and I calculated there were just four two-litre bottles left per man. In that heat we could probably get by on two bottles a day each, as an absolute minimum. We might still be thirsty, but we probably wouldn't dehydrate. We rationed them all out.

Most seriously of all, we were very low on ammo. The ceiling-tall wall Dale had built up inside the secure room was now almost entirely gone. It its place now were just a couple of tins and a red fire extinguisher.

'Jeez, is that all we got left?'

'Yeah. Still lots of stuff lying around in the sangars, but we ain't got nothing in reserve any more. All faarkin' gone.'

We worked out we had enough bullets to last around sixty hours at the siege's normal pace of fighting. A lot less, if the enemy mounted another all-out assault. We gave Captain Curry the bad news.

'Well that's it then,' he pronounced. 'The battle group is just going to have to come and get us. Neither we nor they have a choice in that any longer, do we?'

'No, sir. We don't.'

There was absolutely no doubt about it. Any convoy that tried to get through to Cimic was going to get the mother of all smackings. But there was simply no other option this time.

The message went back to Abu Naji. They'd been guessing as much, after having to sit through the all-out assault with nothing else to do but listen to events play out on the radio. During it, Captain Curry was told an emergency convoy would be dispatched the moment he genuinely thought we were going to be overrun. It had got close, but not close enough. Cool as ever, Curry kept his nerve.

The Ops Room gave Slipper City the news. Abu Naji had new orders for us within the hour. The resupply was set for around twenty-four hours' time, at some stage during the next night. They needed that long to pull together everything they had in mind for it. It was going to be close.

'There's something else,' Curry said, when he told us the news at a midnight O Group. 'We're being relieved. It was an order, I wasn't given a choice.'

The CO had decided that we'd more than done our bit, and it was time to pull us out. Exposing us to extreme combat with us in the state we were now in was simply not something he was prepared to take responsibility for any longer.

Crucially, it was a relief-in-place, not a withdrawal. The company of Royal Welch Fusiliers was going to take over our position. They'd come in with the resupply column, and we'd go out with it.

We were always going to leave Cimic at one stage or another, but when the notification of it actually came it was still funny to hear it. If given the choice at the time, to a man we would all have stayed on. The OMS weren't beaten yet, and the fear of life in Slipper City and the RSM's petty bollockings haunted us all.

The CO was probably right though. With the physical activity, the heat, the sleep deprivation and the dwindling supplies, we had become a force of skeletal zombies relying on little more than an intravenous drip of adrenalin to get us through.

Every man in the company had lost at least a stone during the siege, some double that. I was surrounded by odd creatures covered in grime, dried sweat and flecks of blood from head to toe, with two huge black circles around their eyes. Most worrying of all was the slightly crazed look we'd all begun to adopt – like we were all on the first rung on the ladder to insanity. No. It couldn't last.

Most importantly, a relief was something our pride could deal with. It meant the British Army in Al Amarah weren't losing an ounce of face.

The lads were resigned to their fate when I broke the news to them. There was a stunned silence for some time.

Pikey broke it, with the perfect comment.

'Oh, fuck it. All good things come to an end.'

Secretly, everyone also craved some decent nosh and a good night's kip. Almost as much as they craved killing OMS men.

At midnight, the mortaring began to pick up again. It kept up throughout the night and into the next day.

The mood was tense. Several false alarms had the whole company repeatedly standing-to. Yet by 2 p.m. that afternoon, a repeat of the previous day's all-out assault hadn't materialized. Instead, there was just regular sniper fire from the usual locations – old town rooftops and the north bank. Curry ordered every soldier to conserve his ammo as much as possible.

All we needed was for the OMS to lick their wounds for another twelve hours longer, and they could come at Cimic as hard as they liked. Then, the battle group would be fully ready for them again.

So Abu Naji knew what to bring in, Dale had the unfortunate task of delivering to the battalion Quartermaster a battle damage assessment on all the military equipment in the camp. It was just one long list of misery.

I sat on the house's front doorstep beside Dale as he set up the portable satellite phone and dialled the Quartermaster's number.

Like most in his trade, our QM would never give anyone an easy run for what he saw as his own money if there was anything he could do about it. That day was no different. He insisted on Dale giving him a description of every single thing that had been signed off to Y Company. It was going to be a painful conversation.

It started with the Portakabins. Each one separately.

'Blown up, sir,' was Dale's response.

'OK. Portakabin number two?'

'Blown up too, sir.'

'Really? Portakabin number three . . .'

And so it went on. The QM decided to change tack.

'OK, well what about the vehicles then? Better news there I'd hope, or have they been mistreated too?'

'We've only got one out of the ten Snatches serviceable now, sir.'

'WHAT? What happened to the rest of them?'

'Blown up.'

'Every one of them?'

'Yes.'

'Are you sure? Even the civilian Land Rover Discovery that we paid to have air conditioning in?'

'Even that one, sir, yes.'

The more damage the QM heard about, the more irate he got. He could see money going down the pan left, right and centre. There goes his fucking OBE.

Dale then went on to tell him about the swimming pool, the chef's galleys, the TV trailer, the satellite and Internet dishes, the outdoor gym and weightlifting equipment, two giant JCB generators, all the compound's fencing and, the QM's most beloved articles of all, the two Mark 5 speed boats.

'No, Sarn't Major, not your brand new boats too?'

'Yes, sir, the boats too.'

'But we only bought them in June. And at some considerable cost, as you well know.'

'Yes, I do know that, sir.'

'Are you sure they are totally unusable?'

'You could put it like that. They're at the bottom of the Tigris.'

'Well, this is all very bad news, Sarn't Major. This is an appalling waste of perfectly good military equipment. Taxpayers' money all of it. It doesn't grow on trees, you know.'

The QM's rattiness had started to rub Dale up the wrong way. The bloke just couldn't have been living on the same planet as us. He clearly hadn't been reading any of our sit reps, and must have thought we'd only taken a couple of pot shots.

Finally, twenty-five minutes later, Dale got to the end of the list.

'I'm not happy about this at all, Sarn't Major. Not one little bit.'

'Yeah, well neither were we, sir.'

There was a silence.

'Look, can you go through everything again with me just to make sure?'

That was the final straw for Dale.

'Look, sir, it's real simple. Everything's fucked, all right? Everything I'm looking at has been fucking blown up. It's all faarkin' fucked, and there's not a bollocks I can do about it. Sorry, sir, I've got to go.'

He slammed the handset down into its bracket, breaking a small piece of plastic off the phone too.