The Real Bravo Two Zero (Cassell Military Paperbacks) by Asher Michael

Author:Asher, Michael [Asher, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781780222530
Publisher: Hachette Littlehampton
Published: 2011-11-30T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

eleven

FROM THE POINT WHERE THE patrol had split I had the option of following either McNab’s or Ryan’s route. Though I was still anxious to find out what had happened to Vince Phillips, I decided to go with McNab as far as the place where he and his team were captured or killed, then double back to the point of divergence and follow Ryan, Phillips and Stan.

I crossed the ragged, boulder-strewn country to the south of the road, working towards the granite ridge that marked the table-land where both Ryan’s and McNab’s groups had lain up on 25 January. The MSR itself came as something of a surprise. Both Ryan and McNab repeat the intelligence brief they had received before the operation, declaring that the road was a system of tracks amalgamated together, varying in width from two and a half kilometres to 600 metres. I had followed the MSR as far as Abbas’s place already and had found no sign of this vast rural highway: up to that point, at least, it had been a narrow country road, asphalted in places. There was no sign on the map that it ever got any wider, and though it wasn’t asphalted where I was now crossing, it seemed extremely unlikely that it had ever been more extensive than it was. Bounded on the northern side by the ridge, it could never have expanded far in that direction, and to the south it ran through flat fields of millions of boulders. Unless these boulders had appeared since 1991, it was inconceivable that the road had been wider in that direction either. Perhaps the MSR might be an amalgam of tracks further west, but here it was an ordinary country track, no more than five metres wide. I wondered where the intelligence report about the road had originated, and why McNab and Ryan had repeated it even though they had been on the ground and must have known the reality.

I crossed the MSR and climbed the ridge, finding myself on the stark plateau that lay between here and the second MSR to the north – the road McNab’s party had reached by the evening of 26 January. The two roads did not run parallel, but formed sides of a triangle, meaning that the plateau was wider the further west you went. According to McNab’s intelligence brief, the land did not drop more than fifty metres between here and the next road, and this at least looked accurate. In fact, the area was mind-bogglingly uniform, so stark and clean that it strained the senses. The occasional blemish on the surface looked grotesque and gigantic, drawing the eye towards it automatically, while close up it resolved into nothing more than a pebble or a tin can. Here, the Bedouin tents were fewer, and all day I walked on into a shimmering haze. Often I had the familiar feeling that I was not making progress at all, just marking time on the same spot while the horizon remained equidistant before me, and the sky beat out a percussion of unforgiving heat.

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