The Network - Jason Elliot [36]
A coup, discreetly assisted by the British, brought the sultan’s son Qabus to power. But in the meantime the communist-trained rebels, the Adoo, had seized the strategic heights of the Jebel, and the new sultan’s army was losing the war for control. Well trained and supplied by their communist sponsors, the Adoo were brave and tenacious.
Enter the SAS. Unofficially, under the quiet euphemism of British Army Training Teams – BATTs. And operationally, with the threefold task of wooing the local population away from the communist-trained guerrillas and persuading them of the benefits of joining the government’s side, raising local irregular units called firqats to fight the Adoo, and taking the war ever deeper into the Jebel.
Within a couple of years a series of daring raids had pushed the Adoo from much of the Jebel, where the SAS built up lines of control and permanent bases. But the Adoo were planning a decisive comeback, and had decided on an all-out assault supported by mortars and artillery on the small coastal town of Mirbat. Their plan was to capture the stone fort and its local defenders, kill the mayor of the town and score a huge propaganda victory for the rebel cause.
They came on 12 July 1972, at dawn.
At least 250 Adoo fighters walked down unopposed from the Jebel, infiltrating the outskirts of the town and fanning out in the gullies and beyond the perimeter wire protecting the fort. The odds in their favour could not have been much better. In the fort were only a dozen local tribesmen armed with bolt-action rifles. Several hundred yards away, in the local BATT house, were a handful of SAS men looking forward to their return to Hereford at the end of their tour in a few days’ time.
When the first Adoo mortars began to fall, showering the sleeping soldiers with dust from the mud walls of their HQ, no one even thought to radio the support base at Salalah. But as the volume of fire increased, it became obvious that the Adoo had launched a major assault. For a few moments the SAS men stared in disbelief from the parapet of the BATT house at the hundreds of advancing men, then opened up with their own mortar and heavy machine gun. The mist was soon sizzling on their gun barrels, and the incoming fire growing with every minute.
One of the SAS troopers, a Fijian called Labalaba, ran to the gun pit at the base of the fort and began firing a 25-pounder into the Adoo lines as their shells exploded around his position. But things were quickly getting worse. The Adoo were soon too close for the maximum elevation of the SAS mortar in the BATT house, so a desperate pair of troopers lifted it from its mounting, and while one man held it to his chest, the other fed the ammunition into the tube. Then came news over the radio that Labalaba had been wounded. Twenty-three-year-old troop commander Mike Kealey, still wearing his flip-flops, radioed for a helicopter to evacuate him while another Fijian, called Tak by his friends, ran to his countryman’s aid through clouds of dust thrown up by exploding mortar shells and automatic weapons. The helicopter attempted to land nearby, but was forced to withdraw.
For an hour the Adoo poured fire into the fort, by now wreathed in smoke and dust and impossible even to see from the BATT house except when lit up momentarily by the bursts of exploding shells. But the rate of fire of the heavy gun manned by Labalaba was faltering and, unable to reach the gun pit on the radio, Kealey decided to run for it with his medical orderly, Tobin.
They sprinted in bursts, firing in turn and hearing the deadly whisper of enemy bullets all around them. Throwing themselves into the gun pit a few minutes later, they scrambled across piles of shell casings to find Tak propped up in a pool of blood, wounded in the back and head but still firing his weapon. Labalaba, with a field dressing tied around his chin, was struggling to load shells into the 25-pounder. A badly wounded Omani gunner