PROLOGUE

GAINING HEIGHT AND circling out above the vast expanse of the harbour, the seven aircraft go into a holding pattern. It feels like an age to the men of D Squadron – poised and ready for action inside the choppers – although it can only last for little more than ten minutes. They all know the reason for the delay: they have been listening in on the radio net to the short exchange of words between the Chinook pilot and Lassie on the ground at the rebel base. It’s still too dark to hit the target. If only the sunrise would get a move on, they’re thinking. If only the river mist would clear.

Despite the noise of the aircraft’s turbines, it is eerily quiet and tense as everyone waits for the mission proper to begin. These men know that when they pile off this chopper, all normal rules and values in life will have disappeared. There will be no one behind them from Safety checking that they’re sticking to the regulations, and they will do whatever is required to get the job done. Whatever it takes. From the moment they hit that target, they will be thinking about nothing else but the mission.

Each man will then exist in a totally new space, where if he does not do his job he knows that he will end up dead. This is a unique moment in each of their lives. Each man has a single, absolute focus now, an all-consuming purpose. Nothing can get in their way. Nothing can stop them. These men are no longer just a unit of British soldiers, a group of individuals, a band of brothers even. They have become as one now, a single fighting machine – a living, breathing, deadly animal of war.

They feel the Chinooks turning, slipping, dipping down now, losing altitude and gaining speed as they do so, and immediately the men are back in the reality of the moment, with their hearts leaping. It is 6.15 a.m. and the mission is on again – and they are just ten minutes to target.

‘THIS IS IT,’ the loady yells back down the long body of the twin-bladed helicopter. Most of the men cannot hear what he is saying above all the noise, but they know anyway. The expression on his face says it all. ‘THIS IS IT. We’re going in for REAL this time.’

No sooner has the loady finished speaking than the men on board the Chinook start going crazy, pounding their weapons into the floor, beating on the sides of the chopper with their fists, smashing their helmeted heads into the guy’s in front of them, and yelling and screaming – all in an effort to relieve the tension and get the adrenalin really pumping for the assault.

‘YEAH! YEAH! YEAH! YEAH! YAAAAAH! WE’RE GOIN’ IN!’

‘FUCKIN’ A!’

‘LET’S GET IT ON!’

‘GO, D SQUADRON, GO!’

The air armada levels out over the river waters – three giant Chinooks in line abreast roaring down the Rokel Creek at 160 mph, with the four attack helicopters sticking close behind them. The helo’s wheels are all but skimming the water’s surface, scattering the river mists as they pass. There is the wild rush of wind through the open ramp in the hold of the lead chopper, with a blur of water, sky and trees flashing past all around. The men are being thrown from side to side as each speeding machine follows the contours of the river bed, hugging its twisting, labyrinthine course through the trees.

The lead chopper lowers its rear ramp fully now, and the men standing in the pounding backdraught of the slipstream can see river waters and reed beds flashing past directly below them. They catch sight of crocodiles, a flash of their white underbellies, scrambling off sandbanks into the swamp at the river’s edge, startled by the deafening roar of the airborne beasts above them.

It is like a sign for the coming mission, the watching soldiers are thinking. We are jumping into a crocodile-infested swamp. And woe betide any of the bastards who don’t get out of our way.

The loady is counting down the time to target now, hand-signalling each passing minute to the men behind him. As they reach the three-minutes-to-target mark, the uproar in the lead chopper dies down, to be replaced by a silent, icy calm. Each man is preparing himself for the task before him, running through the assault plan one last time; his unit’s overall objective, his fire team’s specific targets and limit of exploitation (LOE), and his own personal role. This is it. No turning back now. We’re going in.

They hit the two-minutes-to-target mark, and suddenly, the first Chinook, Sierra One, swerves hard left towards the northern end of Gberi Bana, the men in the hold being thrown against the side of the chopper as it does so. The second, Sierra Two, comes roaring in directly after it, veering towards the southern end of the village. The third Chinook, packed with men from the Parachute Regiment, swings hard right across the water towards the opposite river bank, where the Paras will be going into action against the rebels at Magbeni.

Within seconds, Sierra One and Sierra Two are across the scrub at the edge of the village and ‘flaring out’ over the buildings, the pilots searching below them for their specific landing zones (LZs) and rope-down points. In the rear of the choppers, the men are at the open windows now, guns at the ready, eyes combing the ground below for rebel targets, as the first into action prepare to jump.

The giant choppers flare to hover, letting off spectacular clouds of chaff – a mixture of hundreds of individual flares and aluminium strips, fired out in a dense, dazzling cloud. Normally used to confuse an enemy heat-seeking missile, in this case the pilots rain down the chaff on the rebel village, to add to all the panic and confusion below.

Suddenly, there is the fearsome, deafening howl of the belt-fed chain-guns roaring into life, as the two Chinooks begin raking the village with machine-gun fire. The loadies are doubling as door gunners, and they start pounding the rebels’ heavy gun emplacements set on the corners of buildings, taking them out before they can fire back in anger at the choppers.

As the two Chinooks come in low over the rooftops, from their positions hidden in the trees, Lassie, Mat and the other men of the SAS observation team have the hostage house covered. They watch it like hawks. At any sign of movement from the rebels, at even a sniff of trouble, they will open up on them from the jungle shadows.

At 6.25 a.m. exactly, the first men go down the fast ropes from the southern chopper, Sierra One, and still the SAS obs team have detected no rebel movement. The six-man hostage-rescue team hits the ground running and race for the hostage house, yelling and kicking in the front door as they do so. In seconds, they’re in. There are a series of flashes and loud explosions from inside the building, smoke billowing from the open doorway, followed by the controlled crack-crack-crack of gunfire.

The SAS obs team spot the first rebel soldiers stumbling forth from a building now – wearing nothing but their underpants. Others follow in a similar state of undress, and equally ill-prepared to repulse the assault. One or two start firing wildly at the Chinooks with their AK47s – emptying whole magazines skywards, with little attempt to aim.

But most just gaze dumbly at the two massive helicopters suspended in the sky above them, twinblades spinning in a blur and driving a whirlwind of dust and debris upon their heads.

The SAS obs team have found their targets now, and they open up on the rebels from the cover of the jungle, putting down a blistering barrage of fire from their light machine guns.

It is a race against time now – to take down the rebels before they get to the British hostages, and kill them.

1

CAPTURE

Nothing is easy in war. Mistakes are always paid for in casualties and troops are quick to sense any blunder made by their commanders.

– Dwight D. Eisenhower, General of the US Army

IT WAS 25 AUGUST 2000. A two-hundred-strong contingent of the 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment, had been in the tiny West African country of Sierra Leone for four weeks. Stationed within the Sierra Leone Army’s Benguema Camp, the British soldiers were split into two units: a larger training force and a smaller defence force. They’d been sent to Sierra Leone as part of a British-led effort to train the Sierra Leone Army to wage war on that country’s notorious rebels and bring peace to the country. The Royal Irish Rangers Training Force had the daunting task of drilling some basic military discipline into the shambolic Sierra Leone Army (SLA), teaching them the basics of British Army combat tactics. By contrast, the Ranger’s Defence Force faced what should have been the far easier task of maintaining security in and around their Benguema Camp.

The headquarters of the Royal Irish in Sierra Leone was based in a crumbling diamond smugglers’ house in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital city. But the bulk of the troops were based out at Benguema Camp, some ten miles to the south-east of Freetown, at an old colonial plantation recently transformed into a military base. Surrounded by ramshackle bamboo fences and rolls of barbed wire, the Royal Irish soldiers were billeted in a tented area at the rear of the Camp, which itself perches on the shores of the West African ocean. Inland towards the east lay the swamps, jungles and heavily forested hills of the nation’s interior.

Seaward lay the Atlantic shoreline, a series of picture-postcard white sandy beaches fringed with palm trees, from where the crystal blue waters rolled on uninterrupted towards South America. It could almost have been a paradise posting for the British soldiers, were it not for several factors all but unique to Sierra Leone: fabulously rich diamond fields, a bloody civil war, battle-hardened rebel guerrilla forces, rampant corruption, regular armed mutinies and widespread rape, looting, mutilations and murder – and all of it fuelled by a surfeit of modern weaponry.

For over a decade, a civil war had been raging in Sierra Leone – a war unrivalled in all of Africa in terms of its senseless horror and brutality. Repeatedly, the country had been ravaged by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), a group of terrorist bandits and rebel murderers. Bereft of political aims or objectives and with little popular support, the RUF were driven by the lust for power and control over the country’s diamond mines. They joyed in meaningless savagery and horror – giving their units names like the Burn House Squad or the Cut Hands Commando. The Kill Man No Blood Unit’s speciality was beating people to death without a drop of blood being spilt.

The RUF was no tinpot outfit. They had serious money with which to buy serious weaponry, earning some $100 million a year from the illicit trade in diamonds. And for years, they had preyed on the people of Sierra Leone like an evil plague, turning their unspeakable practices into so-called ‘games’. The rebels’ version of Russian roulette was designed to extract maximum ‘entertainment’ from terrorising groups of captured villagers. They’d scribble grotesque ‘punishments’ on scraps of paper – ‘cut off hands’, ‘cut off genitals’, ‘slice off lips’ and the like – which were then screwed up and thrown into a heap on the ground. Each of the captured villagers was forced to choose one of the pieces of paper, so choosing whatever horrific mutilation the rebels would inflict upon them.

The ‘sex the child’ game was, if possible, even worse. Captured women would be gang-raped. Presuming they survived that ordeal, the rebels would gather around any of the women who were heavily pregnant. A ringmaster would take bets from his fellow rebels on the sex of the child the woman was carrying. Once all the wagers were in, whoever had bet the highest price got to slice open the belly of the women with a machete and haul out the child, revealing its sex.

The RUF had committed mass rapes and sexual mutilations designed to destroy the very essence of their victim’s humanity. Fathers were forced to watch their own daughters being gang-raped. Boys of just eight or nine years old were forced to kill their own parents, and then join the so-called rebels. But the RUF had achieved real infamy by launching an indiscriminate campaign to hack off the limbs of men, women, children and even babies; mindless mutilations, designed to spread terror. These, then, were the rebel forces that the Royal Irish Rangers were up against; this, then, the insanity of evil that they had come to Sierra Leone to help put an end to, once and for all.

It was the RUF’s campaign to turn Sierra Leone into a nation of amputees that had brought their activities to the attention of the wider world: TV and newspaper pictures of four-month-old babies with both arms amputated at the elbows could not be ignored. While most British, European and US citizens knew little about this country or its war, they knew that depraved rebels were perpetrating acts of terrible brutality such as chopping off babies’ limbs. Something had to be done.

A massive UN peacekeeping force was deployed to the country, but by April 2000 it was in total disarray. The UN and the Sierra Leone Army were in retreat, and the RUF were poised to capture the nation’s capital city. The last time that had happened, some five thousand people were tortured and murdered. With the RUF poised to carry out a repeat performance, a force of British troops, spearheaded by the Parachute Regiment, were drafted into Freetown, under a mission codenamed Operation Palliser. In theory, the Paras were there to carry out an entitled persons (EP) evacuation – to airlift all British and allied nationals to safety. But within days the Paras had moved up-country and engaged the RUF rebels, killing several and stopping their advance in its tracks.

As the immediate rebel threat receded, the British commanders turned their attentions to the bigger picture.

An International Military Advisory and Training Team (IMATT) was put together, under which the Sierra Leone Army was to be given basic combat training by Her Majesty’s Armed Forces (assisted by a small number of their American and Canadian allies). The British made no bones about the ultimate goal of this training: it was to enable the SLA to crush the RUF and allied rebel groups, and to restore order to the devastated country. Fast-track three months hence, and the Royal Irish Regiment had arrived in Sierra Leone to take over the lead role. The Royal Irish Regiment had been formed from a recent amalgamation of the Royal Irish Rangers and the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), its combined troops being known simply as the ‘Rangers’. The new regiment brought with it a long tradition of highly trained and aggressive airmobile soldiering. In a sense, the Rangers were Northern Ireland’s answer to the Paras, although less highly jump-trained and more accustomed to heli-borne assaults. Of particular relevance to the IMATT mission was the Rangers’ experience fighting the terrorist war in Northern Ireland. Within their ranks there were decades of combat experience gained in one of the harshest theatres of urban and anti-terrorist warfare. The Rangers should be more than a match for Sierra Leone’s rebels.

The men of the Rangers’ Defence Force were rotated through stag duty (sentry watch) and security patrols, which made their work a little more varied and interesting. Many of the Rangers drafted to Sierra Leone had seen action overseas, most recently in Bosnia and Kosovo, so they were well placed to defend the IMATT mission. But as had been the case with those conflicts, the Rangers found themselves parachuted into the midst of a long-running, brutal civil war, one beset by insecurity.

The hostile forces of the RUF were massed to their north and east, and several other heavily armed rebel groups roamed the surrounding jungles. It was clearly no place for complacency.

Shortly after first light on 25 August 2000, Defence Force headed out on foot patrol to recce the terrain inland of the Royal Irish base. Their route led into the densely forested, rolling hills stretching from their Benguema Camp into the remote jungles of the country’s interior. The patrol followed narrow bush paths that snaked through the jungle, massive tree trunks towering to either side, reaching a hundred feet or more into the canopy above. As the patrol probed deeper into the jungle it was deathly quiet, apart from the tramp of boots on the bare, sandy soil of the forest floor. Dawn mists still clung to the treetops high above. So little light penetrated through the jungle canopy that it took several minutes for the men’s eyes to adjust to the gloom, so they could see to find their footholds properly.

The patrol’s mission was to search for observation points (OPs), from where they could keep an eye on any rebel movements in their area. Ideally, they were looking for a large granite outcrop breaking through the forest canopy, offering a vantage point.

As the African sun rose higher above the forest, the animal and bird life woke with it, the dank air split by the barking of troops of monkeys and the Caw! Caw! of parrots and hornbills. The path climbed over tangled labyrinths of tree roots, dived down slopes into sunlit streams, and skirted around the eerie, man-size mushroom-shaped termite mounds that grew out of the forest floor. But by mid-morning, all the patrol had discovered were several clearings for hashish plantations – a scattering of bright green cannabis plants with spiky leaves, and shacks for drying them. The jungle had proven far too dense to offer the British soldiers any OPs with useful views over the surrounding terrain.

By lunchtime the men were back at Benguema. Word had gone out that the Officer Commanding (OC) at Benguema Camp, Major Alex Martial, was preparing a vehicle reconnaissance patrol into the Occra Hills, which lay some thirty-five miles to the north-east of Benguema, a considerable distance into bandit country. None of the Royal Irish had ventured that far inland. Everyone in Defence Force wanted to be on that patrol, especially as Major Martial would be leading it. In his early thirties, Martial was one of the youngest majors in the British Army. The word among the men was that he was a good guy in a crisis.

In many ways Major Martial was the typical ‘grey man’; the sort of person who would be unnoticed in a crowd. He had few distinguishing features as such, and it would be hard to describe his physical appearance. Being able to keep such a low profile was of crucial value in the ongoing wars against terrorism. So far, most of the men had found the Sierra Leone posting pretty dull – too much time spent guarding the camp on stag in the pouring rain. The offer of a vehicle patrol was a rare chance to get out and about and see some new terrain.

Major Martial chose Captain Ed Flaherty as his second in command (2iC). Flaherty was in his late twenties and a Belfast man. He was around five foot seven, stocky, and wore his blond hair an inch or so longer than most of the junior ranks (an officer’s prerogative). Like the Major, he was seen as being an army career man through and through. As the Regimental Signals Officer (RSO), Flaherty would be in charge of comms on the patrol.

Sergeant Michael ‘Mickey’ Smith, another veteran of Northern Ireland, and another Belfast man, was also chosen to go. Smith was a lanky whippet of a soldier and a typical sergeant – good at keeping things running smoothly; good at discipline. Then there were the three corporals, Alistair ‘Ally’ Mackenzie, Reginald ‘Reggie’ Ryan and Jason ‘Sam’ Sampson.

Sam, a tough and uncompromising non-commissioned officer (NCO), was all right once you got to know him, the men would say, but that could take time. The Major asked Corporal Sampson to select four Rangers as security for the patrol from his own Rifle Platoon. Corporal Sampson chose men that he knew well, all with significant combat experience: Rangers Gavin ‘Gav’ Rowell, Jim ‘Sandy’ (on account of his bright blond hair) Gaunt, Kieran ‘Mac’ MacGuire and Marcus ‘Marky’ McVeigh. At twenty-one, Ranger MacGuire was the oldest of the four. A quiet, popular soldier, Mac had mousy brown hair and was of average build. He was the only patrol member who hailed from Southern Ireland, but that wasn’t really an issue; there were lots of Southern Irish in the Rangers and no one felt any animosity towards them.

Rangers Gaunt and Rowell were twenty-year-old neighbours from east Belfast; they’d grown up together on those tough streets and were best mates. Ranger Gaunt was five foot eight and wiry going on thin. With his bleached-blond hair and freckled face, he could still have been mistaken for a schoolkid. In fact, he often was when trying to order a few pints of Guinness in the bars of Belfast. Ranger Gaunt was trusting almost to the level of naivety; trusting of his superior officers, the camaraderie of his mates and in the military in general. When he spoke he did so quietly, almost under his breath, with his sentences peppered with ‘sort of’s and ‘youse know what I mean’s, as if seeking reassurance all the time. He did his best to disguise this lack of confidence with an off-the-wall sense of humour.

By contrast, Ranger Rowell was over six foot, thickset with close-cropped dark hair, and said to look a lot older than his twenty years. A confident individual and a natural soldier, women found the Ranger handsome in that rugged, soldierly way. He had an air about him of being a man who knew he could get the job done, of being devoid of fear and self-doubt. When he spoke, he did so confidently, and with an air of knowing what he wanted to say.

Ranger McVeigh, the youngest at nineteen, was another east-Belfast lad. He’d joined the Rangers at the same time as Ranger Gaunt, so they were the most junior in terms of time served. Even so, Ranger McVeigh was convinced that a career in the British Army was the only life for him. Despite their obvious youth, all four Rangers had combat experience from Northern Ireland and recent tours in the Balkans. Ranger Rowell, the most experienced of the four, had also served for seven months in Macedonia, spending nearly a year on combat duty before being posted to Sierra Leone. For most of these young men, joining the British Army was a welcome ticket out of Belfast, and one of the few ways to escape from the Troubles that had blighted so much of life in Northern Ireland.

Settling down in the shade of a tree to a meal of spam (again), Ranger Gaunt glanced around the base. To his right, there was the coiled razor-wire perimeter, with the dirt track on the far side. To his left, there was a series of khaki tents in which the Rangers slept, with the old colonial-style red-brick plantation house in the background, where the officers were billeted. As he looked around, the Ranger spotted a group of his mates preparing some Sierra Leone Army (SLA) soldiers for ambush training. God, what a shower the SLA looked, slouching about in their ragtag uniforms. At least with Defence Force it felt like they were doing some real soldiering. According to his mates, the SLA recruits were usually half pissed on some locally brewed hooch, which meant it was all but impossible to get them up and out for PT early in the morning. The SLA had a long way to go before they’d be ready to patrol the jungles of Sierra Leone, he thought to himself, never mind the streets of Northern Ireland.

As he began cleaning his SA80 assault rifle in preparation for the patrol, the Ranger thanked his lucky stars that he’d been put on Defence Force. They were getting out and about that afternoon, not overseeing some hopeless SLA training exercise.

It was no wonder the SLA had proven so incapable of defeating the rebels, the Ranger reminded himself, before slamming the breech back into his SA80. He began preparing the rest of his kit for the patrol, checking on his grenades, flak jacket and spare magazines. Now, where was his jungle hat? That’s right, he’d been sitting on it while cleaning his weapon.

The five-thousand-strong Sierra Leone Army might outnumber the rebels some three to one, but they remained a bunch of incompetents, that was for sure. There were only one or two exceptions that Ranger Gaunt had come across. One was the SLA’s Corporal Mousa Bangura, a fine soldier if ever there was one. Formerly a militia member, ‘Corporal Mousa’, as he was known to the British soldiers, had gone on to join the Sierra Leone Army, and had been one of the first to benefit from the British-led IMATT training. In November 1999, he’d been seconded to a platoon-sized unit of British Special Forces, based at a small military camp at Hastings, on the outskirts of Freetown, running recce and combat missions up-country. The forty-odd men were flown in via chopper and dropped onto target, being extracted by similar means once the mission was complete. Though Corporal Mousa was never actually allowed to go on one of these missions, he’d learned an awful lot from the three months he’d spent working with the elite British soldiers.

Ranger Gaunt was relieved to discover that Corporal Mousa would be accompanying them on the coming patrol. He was a tough soldier and smart. He knew how the rebels and the militia tended to think and operate, often from first-hand experience.

While Corporal Mousa had felt very much like a boy who’d suddenly met the real men when liaising with that Special Forces unit, he felt more the Rangers’ equal these days. His role on the patrol would be to act as a guide, translator and adviser to Major Martial.

Captain Flaherty had already approached Corporal Mousa to discuss the intended route of the patrol. The destination was Masiaka, extending the normal range of the Rangers’ territory. To date, patrols had reached only as far as Mabontoso, a village on the outskirts of Freetown. Beyond Mabontoso was bandit country – a large swathe of terrain controlled by a notorious rebel group called the West Side Boys.

Corporal Mousa had already passed along the road to Masiaka with other British Army units, so he wasn’t overly concerned. The rebels were unlikely to cause any trouble as long as the British patrol stuck to the main road passing through their territory.

All in, it was a twelve-man patrol, made up of the eleven British soldiers and the one Sierra Leonean. But with two officers and five NCOs, it was top heavy. The British members were armed with the standard-issue SA80 assault rifle. As usual, Corporal Mousa chose to take with him the far more reliable and larger-calibre AK47 assault rifle.

The patrol would be using three vehicles, all in drab military olive green: a WMIK, an open-backed Land-Rover fitted with a weapons-mount installation kit, boasting a 50-calibre machine gun and a 7.62mm general purpose machine gun (GPMG); a standard Land-Rover; plus a signals Land-Rover bristling with radio antennae. Ranger McVeigh had been chosen for the patrol in part because he was one of the few men who knew how to operate the 50-cal: it was an older design of gun which had to be manually calibrated in order to fire on automatic.

After they’d finished their lunch of spam sandwiches, the Major briefed the mission to the assembled men. ‘OK. Listen up, lads. We’ll be heading up towards the front line, passing through the Occra Hills, to pay a liaison visit to the UN base at JordBat2 – Masiaka. There’s little likelihood of any trouble, but stay alert. If there is a contact, you are to follow standard drill: return fire and drive out of the contact if at all possible. If we cannot get the vehicles out and need to go out on foot, form a base fire line and fire and manoeuvre out of the situation in the normal way. I want to stress that we are to avoid contact if at all possible. That’s all.’

JordBat2 was the UN peacekeeping base at the town of Masiaka, where a Jordanian battalion held nominal control over a swathe of territory. The Jordanians were part of the 13,000-strong United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL), a multinational peacekeeping force that had been made to look hopelessly incompetent by rebel forces in recent months. More than a thousand UN troops had been taken hostage and had their vehicles stolen, as the rebels wrought havoc across the country. Four British UN officers had also been captured, along with the hundreds of UN peacekeepers, but they had managed to make their own getaway.

Rogue elements within the Jordanian UN contingent were suspected of having done a deal with the local rebel group, the West Side Boys – whereby they’d turn a blind eye to the rebels’ road-piracy activities, if the rebels didn’t threaten their men. This went totally against the Jordanians’ UN mandate, one of keeping the peace and ensuring safe passage of people and vehicles along the highway leading to Freetown.

Masiaka lies on the most important road in the country’s transport system – the main artery heading north into the country’s interior. The patrol’s route lay along this tarmac road, which snaked through the rolling jungle. The drive was expected to take around an hour, and the patrol would have to pass through a series of UN checkpoints, plus two road-blocks manned by the West Side Boys.

This group of rebels called themselves the West Side Boys to signify that they held territory lying to the west of Freetown, as opposed to terrain held by the Sierra Leone government. They’d taken the inspiration for their name from a rap song by the US gangster rapper Tupac Shakur. They were renowned for looting cars and buses and aid vehicles that passed through their territory, which the Jordanian peacekeepers did little to stop. Many Sierra Leoneans suspected the Jordanians of having an even more dubious pact with the West Side Boys. They accused them of buying up the loot that the rebels seized on the highway, and doing deals with the rebels to purchase any diamonds that fell into their hands. Whatever the exact nature of the shady Jordanian–West Side Boys relationship, it would end up costing the Royal Irish Rangers dear.

The thousand-strong West Side Boys – who styled themselves the ‘West Side Niggas’ – espoused no coherent political ideology. They had fought alongside the RUF rebels during previous battles, seizing power and presiding over months of anarchy and murder in the country. Their men and boy soldiers were renowned for dressing up in women’s wigs, and being permanently drunk and high on drugs. Supposedly allied to the Sierra Leonean government at times, the West Side Boys had recently fought a series of battles against the UN and the SLA. The only thing you could be certain about with them was that you could never be certain whose side they were really on. In short, they were famously violent, unpredictable and trigger-happy.

Ten miles north of the Royal Irish base lay the Freetown Amputee Camp, housing several hundred victims of the violence in Sierra Leone. The camp ‘chairman’, Lamin Jarka, was a former bank employee and one of the victims of the West Side Boys.

One afternoon in January 1989, the West Side Boys had come for his daughter Hannah, who was just fourteen. Lamin Jarka had fought them off while she escaped through a back window. When he was finally overpowered, he was ordered to go and stand outside in a line with other captives. At the front of the line stood a teenage rebel with the name ‘Commander Cut Hands’. Cut Hands proceeded to lop off the hands of each man in turn with an axe, using a tree stump as his chopping block. Those who resisted were shot. It was three days before Lamin Jarka received any medical treatment, but at least his daughter had been saved from the rebels.

Sadly, the story was far from unusual. A couple of days after the Rangers’ arrival in Sierra Leone, an escaped West Side Boys prisoner had been brought to their base. Under questioning by the British troops, it turned out that he was an SLA soldier who had been captured at one of the rebel roadblocks. He’d been dragged from his vehicle and taken to a nearby hut, stripped naked and buggered. Just at that moment, another vehicle had appeared on the road, and the West Side Boys had rushed off to loot it. The SLA soldier had grabbed his chance to escape, climbing through the thatched roof of the hut. If he hadn’t done so, he was certain the rebels would have killed him.

Despite such reports, Major Martial’s heavily armed patrol didn’t think they had too much to fear from the West Side Boys. Several times in recent months the British military had shown its teeth against the rebels in Sierra Leone, and each time the rebels had come off badly. Hopefully, word had got around by now that British forces were not to be messed with. In any case, in all of the Royal Irish Rangers’ intelligence briefings, the West Side Boys had been identified as ‘friendlies’. Presumably, the West Side Boys must have somehow allied themselves to the British forces in Sierra Leone. It was a strange alliance, to be sure, but hardly unheard of in the shifting miasma of allegiances in Sierra Leone’s civil war. Major Martial’s patrol would head up for a lunchtime chat with the Jordanians, check that everything was all right, and then return. Simple.

Prior to departure, Major Martial established the order of driving: the standard Land-Rover leading, followed by the WMIK and then the signals vehicle bringing up the rear. In theory, the WMIK would be able to use its heavy machine guns to cover either the vehicle in front or to the rear if they got into trouble.

Major Martial and his driver, along with Rangers Rowell and Gaunt, manned the lead vehicle. The WMIK carried Corporal Sampson and Rangers MacGuire and McVeigh. The signals vehicle to the rear had Captain Flaherty, Sergeant Smith and Corporals Ryan, Mackenzie and Mousa on board. But just as the convoy was about to pull out of Benguema, Defence Force’s Company Sergeant Major (CSM) Head ordered the Major’s driver out of the lead vehicle and jumped in himself.

‘No ways are you taking this patrol out and leaving the CSM behind, sir,’ he announced. ‘I hope you don’t mind, sir, but you’re safe now with Sergeant Major Head at the wheel.’

The Major smiled wryly to himself and decided to go with the flow. The CSM was in his mid-thirties, and one of the oldest and most experienced soldiers in the Benguema Camp. He was held in awe by most of the junior ranks and, the Major surmised, would be an asset to have on the patrol.

As the CSM had elbowed Major Martial’s driver out, the two Rangers in the rear of the Land-Rover had looked at each other and groaned. Oh fuck, they were both thinking, why him? The CSM, or ‘Scouser’ as he was known to the junior ranks, was a big man, over six foot, and built like the proverbial brick shithouse. Originally from Liverpool, where the Rangers did a lot of their recruiting, he was a hard man, with a reputation for merciless piss-taking and ‘slabbering’ – tongue-lashing the new recruits. No one would ever have chosen to have Scouser as their CSM, but one way or another he’d be bound to get the job done.

‘Get those bloody gates open,’ the Sergeant Major bellowed, as he gunned the lead vehicle towards the base exit, ‘and let’s get this show on the road.’

‘Here we go then, Gav,’ Ranger Gaunt muttered to his mate, with a grimace, ‘the charge of the flamin’ Light Brigade, if you know what I mean.’

‘Aye, Sandy. The charge of the flamin’ Macho Brigade, more like it,’ Ranger Rowell replied, grinning.

‘Sorry? Did you two frobbers have something to say back there?’ the CSM challenged, shouting to make himself heard above the racket, as the Land-Rover’s tyres hummed on the damp road surface. ‘Speak up then, lads. Share it with the OC and us, why don’t you?’

‘Nothing, sir,’ the two Rangers muttered. ‘Just welcoming youse aboard, like, sir.’

‘Nice to hear it, lads!’ the CSM replied, grinning at them in the driver’s mirror. ‘Nothing like having a couple of keen, fresh-faced Rangers to take out on a nice little jolly like this, is there, sir?’

The Major raised his eyebrows at the CSM in an ‘if you say so, Sergeant’ type of expression, and went back to reading his map.

The patrol pulled out of Benguema at around 11.30 a.m., and half an hour later it was approaching a West Side Boys checkpoint. At first sight, the rebels looked to be about as crazed as their reputation would have them:

young guys sporting pink shades, shower caps and singlets, with strings of machine-gun ammo slung around their torsos. Nearly all of them had bullets on chains hung around their necks, and strange tattoos on their arms and shoulders.

Later, the patrol would learn that the West Side Boys believed these were powerful voodoo charms which made them invulnerable to gunfire and invincible on the battlefield. As the rebels peered into the back of the leading Land-Rover with roving, bloodshot eyes, the air around the checkpoint was thick with the sweet, sickly smell of cannabis smoke.

‘They sure look a sort of fucked-up bunch,’ remarked Ranger Gaunt under his breath, as their vehicle pulled away from the checkpoint.

‘Aye, youse could say that,’ replied Ranger Rowell. ‘Youse smell all that weed they were smokin’? They looked doped to the eyeballs, if youse know what I mean.’

‘No, Gav, I don’t know what youse mean,’ replied a grinning Ranger Gaunt, deliberately raising his voice so the two men in the front could hear him. ‘How do youse know what weed smells like, anyways? Youse partial to the odd puff, now is it?’

‘Sure, I never touch the flamin’ stuff, Sandy,’ retorted Ranger Rowell. ‘Youse was the one I clocked checking out those plants in the jungle this morning. Looked like youse reckoned they were dead on –’

‘Will you two quit bitching in the back like a couple of girls and keep your eyes on the road,’ the CSM barked from the front of the vehicle, interrupting the Rangers’ verbal spat. ‘I don’t much like the look of that bunch of bastards back there. Weed or no weed, I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw them.’