Michael Asher by The Real Bravo Two Zero Read Free Book Online

Scuds. In Ryan's account the task is essentially passive. He maintains that the patrol would remain hidden, manning the OP for ten days, after which it would be relocated by air. He mentions nothing about `destroying Scuds', or patrolling 250 kilometres along the MSR, but does state that a subsidiary task was to blow up any fibre-optic cables the patrol might happen to find while going about their principal task. Though McNab's version is the more dashing and romantic, the road-watch OP is classic SAS procedure, with a history going back to the Long Range Desert Group. In 1942 LRDG patrols set up OPs along the Via Balbia � the main German supply route along the coast of North Africa � to watch and report enemy movements in order to verify the decrypts British Intelligence had obtained through crack�ing the Enigma code. They had succeeded brilliantly, hiding their vehicles behind dunes or in wadis, rotating two men out each night to man the OP, which was often little more than a rock or a clump of grass. Later, throughout the Cold War, it was the main task of 21 and 23 SAS, the territorial units, to dig and operate similar OPs in Europe � a fact that Ryan knew well, having orig�inally served in 23 SAS. Of the three road-watch patrols sent out from B Squadron, two elected to go on foot. Why send foot patrols to knock out highly mobile and heavily protected Scud launchers, I wondered? A mobile patrol could do the job far more efficiently with its Milan missiles, and as Schwarzkopf had rightly said, a Stealth fighter could do it even better. Even the A and D Squadron patrols that had gone out on 20 January had been directed to locate rather than destroy Scuds, trans-mitting their locations to the Air Arm so that they could be taken out with ease. Expecting a foot patrol to destroy Scud erector launchers with the whole of the desert to hide in seemed to defy military logic, while going in on foot if you intended to lie hidden in one place for ten days and be relocated by aircraft at least made some kind of sense. Ryan states clearly that if the patrol sighted a Scud convoy on the road, their task was not to attack it, but to relay the information back to base by both satcom and patrol radio, upon receipt of which an aircraft would be vectored in to take the missile out.6 That the patrol planned to put in a hide is also indicated by the tremen�dous weights they were hefting, which Ryan puts even heavier than McNab, at 120 kilos per man. Although McNab emphasizes the large amount of ordnance they had with them � plastic explosive, Claymore and Elsie anti-personnel mines, timers, detonators, primers and det�onating cord � the patrol was also carrying hundreds of fibre sandbags, camouflage nets and full-sized shovels, the function of which can only have been to put in an OP. Though Ryan states that they intended to dig into the bank of a wadi, McNab maintains that the shovels were for digging up fibre-optic cables. The road climbed a low escarpment, passed buildings and plantations and descended through a series of bends into a valley, with a fifteen-foot ridge of crumbling basalt to our right and, to our left, the bronze-green folds, fur�rows and ripples of the desert. I stopped the car and looked around. According to my best assessment from the map and the Magellan, we were now within a few hundred metres of Bravo Two Zero's LUP. I jumped out and looked around. To the south, the rocky table-land fell away suddenly about 250 metres from the road into a sys�tem of deep-sided wadis, and as I climbed down to investigate the various re-entrants I wondered if the LUP would be recognizable: both Ryan and McNab had described a sort of cave or overhang, divided in the mid�dle by a detached, wedge-shaped rock. One re-entrant I followed ended in a narrow cleft wide enough only to hold a single man; this could not be the place in which eight SAS men had holed up. A second branch-wadi terminated in a bowl-shaped