Pirate - Duncan Falconer [109]
There were twenty gliders in total and, as take-off time approached, the men began finalising their kit, putting on cam-cream and testing communications. Several shots came from the back end of the huge deck as a handful of the men tested their weapons out to sea. Dozens of crew members had assembled to help out where they could. Those that weren’t needed stood on the periphery to observe. It was a unique sight, the like of which they might never get again. There was something of a festival atmosphere about the preparation, one tempered by a soberness at the possibility some of the men might not come back.
Downs stepped on deck with four other SBS operatives wearing full camouflage clothing, their faces blackened and carrying substantial backpacks. He had a brief chat with the men before patting one of them on the shoulder. The men walked away down the line of gliders towards the rear end of the flight deck.
‘Good luck, Smudge,’ someone shouted out.
In response, one of the four operatives raised a hand that clutched a loaded Colt assault rifle. They were the pathfinder team, whose job it was to mark the landing strips for the gliders. The operations room back in Poole, using satellite images, had identified several patches of level ground close to the jihadist encampment that would be suitable for the gliders to land on. The robust craft didn’t need much room to land, depending again on the wind. But due to the numbers, they needed enough room to allow the tail-enders to land through the inevitable clutter of those who had already landed, or crashed.
The pathfinders made their way over to the Lynx, which was starting up its high-pitched engines. They would leave well before the gliders so that they had ample time to carry out the task. The plan was to drop them off a mile from the jihadist camp the other side of the range of hills. From there they would yomp to their respective pre-selected sites to prepare the landing markers.
The obvious question was, if pathfinders could get dropped off to yomp on to the target, why couldn’t the other forty men do the same and save the risks involved with flying in? It had a simple enough answer. One small, low-flying super-fast helicopter might not be noticed. And if it was noticed, it wouldn’t be considered a threat. A single Somali military helicopter flying across the plains wouldn’t be unheard of in the area. A squadron of Sea Kings would invoke some concern and a warning message might be called into the jihadists. And two pairs of men could move practically undetected. If by some chance someone saw them, they wouldn’t be considered a major threat to the four hundred or so jihadists. Forty men had a much higher chance of being detected and no matter how good they were at soldiering, they would soon run out of all of the ammunition they could possibly carry if the jihadists came out to meet them for a fight.
The final reason for using the gliders was the need for pinpoint pre-assault bombing. They needed to soften up the camp using air-delivered bombs. They intended to confuse and hopefully scatter the warriors before the ground assault – historically, such bombing operations, particularly in woodland, hadn’t produced a significant number of casualties. A ground force would have had to use mortars. But they wouldn’t have been as accurate as the same bombs delivered by hand from directly above by men who could see what they were