Dirty Deeds Done Cheap by Peter Mercer Read Free Book Online

brought to mind that scene in from the movie From Dusk Till Dawn when Quentin Tarantino’s character, Richard Gecko, gets shot through the hand!).
    Our medic wrapped a dressing around his wounded hand and taped it up tight with some electrical tape. We then bundled him into another tanker and we put our foot down to catch up with the rest of the convoy, which hadn’t waited for us – that was our standard operating procedure, up to a point.
    As we came to the outskirts of the town, my adrenalin was pumping and I kept my thumb on my safety catch. We all carried a different selection of weapons for a reason: it was because we were getting into unconventional situations and no one knew what we would need. Having to go up against all kinds of things that could be difficult, most of us carried the standard American M16s but a few of our guys carried the HKG3 (Heckler & Koch G3) because of its heavier calibre (7.62 mm) – it was a lot more effective at stopping vehicles that got too close. A 5.56mm round would bounce off an engine block sometimes but a 7.62mm would penetrate it and stop it dead (hopefully). A few of the veterans, who’d worked in Bosnia and Somalia and had been working as contractors for years, still favoured the AK-47, which I personally think was pretty inaccurate but was deadly effective and had a lot more stopping power. The 5.56mm round was brought into service years and years ago because it was so much lighter than the 7.62mm, and you could carry a lot more ammunition; so, although it was still quite capable of killing people, it couldn’t quite hack taking out engine blocks. For this reason we needed the 7.62mm.
    We came off the main road and started making steady progress through the town. The two vehicles that roamed up and down the convoy sped ahead and set up roadblocks. Nothing stopped us – nothing. We gave clear and precise warnings and had signs written in Arabic on the vehicles warning anyone to stay at least 20 metres away from us. If they came any closer, they’d become a target. If a vehicle came too close a few rounds were fired in front of it. If that didn’t stop it, then we would shoot out the tyres. If it still came onto us, the engine was shot up, then the driver and, most likely, any passengers! We couldn’t afford to mess about taking unnecessary risks in these situations. A lot of the time it was a case of kill or be killed. It was a simple fact that you couldn’t let unfamiliar cars get too close.
    If we did somehow manage to get stuck in traffic – some big traffic jam through a town, for instance – we would all jump out and mingle between the Iraqi traffic. Even most of the insurgents didn’t want to kill their own, so we always took cover in between the Iraqis. However, that said, the things we saw did make us wonder sometimes.
    We were doing quite well so far on this convoy. We’d lost only two of the tankers out of the eighty we were escorting and we’d had only one minor contact and one minor injury. We tanked on through the town with everyone getting out of the way. Because of the way we’d handled previous firefights, with total aggression and a huge amount of returned fire, a lot of the insurgents knew we would unleash hell on them were we to come under attack. American intelligence (probably our CIA mates) had told us that most of the insurgents would rather take on the US military than us. We were now nicknamed ‘the Black Death’ by the insurgents. Apparently, this was down to the colour of the Fijians and Gurkhas’ dark skin. On a typical run we would usually lose about 15 per cent of our tankers, mainly due to breakdowns but often enough due to IEDs and RPGs.
    We had now, at this time, travelled into the thick of it with our convoy, right into the centre of Mosul, and were nearing our final destination: an American airbase on the outskirts of the city. This is where we would drop the tankers off and the Americans would take over. We were on our last