SAS Bravo Three Zero: The Explosive Untold Story by Damien Lewis & Des Powell

Author:Damien Lewis & Des Powell [Lewis, Damien]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2021-10-27T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Road Watch

Come dusk we broke camp, starting the entire LUP process in reverse: glugging down a cold meal, stowing away sleeping kit in our Bergens, and breaking out our night-vision optics. I got together with Jim to discuss the route we planned to take and our aims when we got there. Our objective was one of the main east–west MSRs, running from central Iraq to the Jordanian border. It was from there that Saddam was lobbing his missiles into Israel; this terrain had earned the nickname ‘Scud Alley’.

Scud Alley stretched for several thousand square miles from Baghdad west and south to the Jordanian and Saudi borders. Right now, we were about to head northeast, every turn of the Land Rovers’ wheels taking us one step closer to the Iraqi capital, less than 100 km away. In short, we were right in the heart of Saddam’s backyard and cruising deeper into Scud Alley. It was some proposition.

Thirty minutes before nightfall we rolled back the cam nets and stowed them, loading them and our Bergens onto the wagons, as Chewie made one last attempt to raise some kind of response from headquarters via the radio. Needless to say, all he got was an echoing void of silence. So, with none of us any the wiser we clambered aboard the Pinkie and the Dinky and prepared for the off.

Deprived of any link to higher command, we felt horribly isolated. It was as if we had been cut loose and left to fend for ourselves. But that is what SAS Selection and training is there for. It is designed to prepare you to face the very worst kind of scenarios and to keep going; to execute the mission objective, no matter what. As Jim had rightly pointed out, we still had our task to achieve: we still had to find some Scuds and to kill them. In the absence of any orders from on high to the contrary, we were game on.

We set forth, slipping into our night configuration – Pinkie leading, Dinky taking up the rear. Although we couldn’t know it, this very night Saddam would rain down eight more Scuds on Tel Aviv. All eight would be taken out by Patriot missile batteries, but even so, the debris would cascade down, killing and injuring Israeli civilians, and who knew what else might be drifting to earth, along with those blasted fragments of missile.

Sarin? Chlorine? Mustard gas? Or worse?

Saddam actually had two models of Scud in use – the Al-Hussein, with a range of some 650 km, and the Al-Abbas, with a range of around 900 km. Both were Iraqi-engineered modifications on the Soviet R-17 Elbrus ballistic missile, known as a ‘Scud B’ in NATO parlance. The R-17 is named after Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in Russia and all of Europe, and it was a mainstay of Soviet forces. To give an indication of how ingenious were the Iraqi modifications, the R-17 had a range of around 300 km. In order

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.