The trick seemed to be to squat down on one’s haunches by the roadside and look disinterested in everything for hours on end, occasionally holding out one’s hand and muttering something that sounded vague Azeri — Farsi did not cut it around here if you were supposed to be begging — and nobody, absolutely nobody gave a fellow a second look providing you remembered not to look up while there was anybody near enough to see the colour of your eyes. The locals all seemed to have grey or tawny brownish eyes; his blue eyes would have been a dead giveaway that he was anything but local. If he ever got back to base; Stirling Lines in dear old Herefordshire as opposed to the embassy in Tehran which he was reliably informed no longer existed, he was going to have some fine old tales with which to regale Mess.
‘Frank’ Waters was hot, sore, hungry and feeling his age. Although he was only forty-six; the trouble was most of the last twenty-five of those years had been hard years. He had almost bought it twice in the Western Desert, and again in Yugoslavia near the end of the Second War. He still had bomb fragments in his back from that cock up in Oman five years ago, and in the two decades between the excitement of playing hide and seek with the Afrika Korps and this latest little jaunt he had acquired a litany of minor injuries and breakages in training and other escapades. Vexingly, he still had intermittent mild Tinnitus in his left ear off from that time that bloody frog had caught him in flagrante delicto with in his marvellously pneumatic wife in Algiers; in the subsequent undignified melee the gun had gone off a tad too close to his head for comfort…
Anyway, what with one thing and another he was fairly close to half-way towards admitting that he was getting far too old for this sort of lark. Diving back into the fray had been immense fun but he had been around long enough to know when it was time to make oneself scarce.
Now, he had decided, was one of those times.
The Iranians he had been ‘training’ were outraged when he had told them that he and his men were ‘off’. The locals were good sorts, just not very pragmatic. There was nothing wrong with dying for a good cause; but dying simply to make a point or in the name of one’s family honour well, that was just plain stupid. Waters had ordered his boys to saddle up and as they drove south the first line of Napalm strikes had illuminated the night at their backs. Fortunately, the two Land Rovers were five miles south by then.
A couple of his boys had been with him for years; the newer recruits had got squeamish over executing the prisoners. The Rules of War! What did the idiots think was going to happen if the Red Army got its hands on them? As for leaving ‘prisoners’ wandering about the countryside bursting to tell their ‘comrades’ all about British SAS men sneaking about in the night!
Waters slowly stood up.
Life had been so much easier in those long ago days charging about Cyrenaica with the Long-Range Desert Group. That was the ticket, none of this endless walking about in the sun pretending to be a bloody beggar!
Funny old thing, war…
“We’re stringing the aerial now, boss,” he was told as he picked his way into the trees where the Land Rovers were parked half-way between the Mahabad-Urmia Road and the mud brick ruins of what had every appearance of being a very ancient abandoned village.
“Keep up the good work, lads!”
Frank Waters’s tone was relaxed, jovial. Out in the field he was an entirely different man to the ‘barracks officer’ that everybody tried their best to keep out of the way of. Back in the fifties in England and in his postings to the embassies in Bonn, Rome and Buenos Aires he had felt like he was in prison, a tiger caged, distracted now and then by predatory liaisons with other men’s wives, bored beyond measure in his own ill-considered, ill-starred marriage. After the unmitigated ‘fun’ of the war years peacetime soldiering had been, well, a mighty letdown and whenever he was at a loose end it was in his nature to go looking for trouble. The wasted years in foreign embassies, interspersed with stints training men straight off the Selection Course in Hereford and the on the Brecon Beacons had brought out the worst in him. Of course, there was a silver lining to most clouds — as any old soldier will tell you that — and eventually the people back home had got so fed up with him that they had banished him abroad.
His boys had gone in ahead of the invasion force at Suez in 1956; that had been a fiasco but a jolly good bash. He had chased Mau Mau killers through the Kenyan bush, hunted down communist insurgents in Borneo and Islamist fanatics in Oman and Yemen, served two tours on Cyprus where the women were irresistibly dark-eyed, and been on Malta at the time of the October War. The whole Cuban Missiles nonsense had seemed to him, even from a distance of thousands of miles, to be the most monstrous cock up by everybody concerned. On the bright side it had opened up a wealth of opportunities for incorrigible cases like him!
Back in the makeshift ‘camp’ Frank Waters’s mood was almost hearty.
Not even the thought of stale black bread and some kind of half-rancid sausage — all they had left of the food they had purloined clandestinely exploring Urmia after the Red Army had moved in — could dent his good cheer. When it got dark they would move out, try and find a secluded place in the mountains to hide up; somewhere farther south from which they could sortie to snatch prisoners, and properly eyeball the traffic passing into and out of Mahabad. Command would need to know exactly what they were dealing with if this thing was half as bad as it looked.
Whoever was in charge on the Soviet side seemed to know what he was doing. He could not know that the garrison of Urmia had mounted up in anything that had wheels or tracks and ‘run away’ to the north to hide in the hills; so he was doing the sensible thing, sending a column up the road to Urmia to block any hostile force coming south; a few tanks, a couple of anti-tank guns and a company of infantrymen hefting RPG — rocket propelled grenade — launchers and heavy machine guns. And high in the sky there were suddenly the silver arrows of fast jets, circling, patrolling, waiting for business. Not that any of this was ‘rocket science’. One look at a map and any soldier with two brain cells to rub together would know that the road from Qoshachay-Miandoab to Mahabad was the key ‘choke point’ in the advance of the Soviet armour. Anything, absolutely anything which seriously threatened the right flank of that long, exposed road across the high plain into the foothills of the Zagros Mountains was potentially a monumental disaster waiting to happen.
Frank Waters had recommended somebody in Middle East Command got his act together and bombed the road to buggery. Not for the first time in his eventful career his advice had thus far been ignored.
“Have we got through to the boys in Abadan yet?” He inquired, throwing off his hood. He liked to think he looked like a Bedouin; actually he suspected he looked like a dirty peasant and smelled worse.
“Still working on it, boss.”
A man offered Waters a mess tin with what looked like steaming mud in it. He took it gratefully, deliberately not asking what today’s version of ‘tea’ was brewed from. It tasted like it might have been brewed from crushed tree bark and had the subtle bouquet of burned Camel dung. The old soldier hardly noticed, it was warm and wet and had been boiled long enough to kill most of the bugs.
Waiting for the radio link to be established he lowered himself to the ground and looked around the ‘camp’. There were two men out on picket duty, and including him five loitering in the vicinity or sitting on the ground around him and the clumsy, boxy radio transmitter with its improvised whip and long wire aerial. He had lost two good men back in Urmia; his fault. He ought to have pulled out of the town sooner, at least an hour or so before he belatedly concluded the game was no longer worth the candle.