Heat Read online

  The bedu looked sullen, but the moolah grinned. Abdullah, who had remained quiet throughout, made out a duty list, and we slept.

  On the fourth day the valley breeze ceased to blow and I woke with a sweaty body, the humidity uncomfortable even at dawn. Flies came to join the mosquitoes eagerly whining about my net. I felt dirty and lethargic. By midday my ankles, neck and arms were dotted with red spots from the sharp bites of small flies.

  Masra Ain was marked on my map as a village, but turned out to be a mere clump of withered palms beside a filthy pool. The toothless hag who squatted by a bush with her skeletal husband waved a cup at us and croaked, ‘Tafuddel (Welcome), you are our guests. Eat what we have.’

  At each village where we stopped I followed Abdullah into the trees, and the Omanis followed after. The Baluchis were content to guard the vehicles, for the local people eyed them with open dislike.

  My tally of village property, a sort of Domesday Book, grew to many pages as we progressed, for the village Head Men were proud of their communal wealth.

  But then we came to Zayan, the first village owing allegiance to the hostile Sheikh Mohammed of the Sharqiyah. The Zayanis had heard of our approach up the Tayyin and were waiting for us.

  Two or three hundred men with weapons, ranging from flintlocks to Boer War-vintage Martini-Henry rifles and a few Mark 4 Lee Enfields like our own.

  I noticed also the menacing groups of camel-borne, rifle-carrying Zayanis silhouetted on the low cliff tops on both sides of the valley.

  We halted some fifty yards short of this silent reception committee.

  Sergeant Abdullah advanced with me towards the most likely-looking leader and raised his hand in friendly salutation. He shouted a greeting, but there was no reply. We glanced at each other. ‘What do you like us to do now?’ he asked me.

  ‘Whatever you normally do,’ I suggested. He looked nonplussed, so I went on, ‘Tell them we are friends and just want to ask their leader some questions on behalf of the Sultan.’

  Abdullah did this and added that we were merely the advance group of an entire Sultanate regiment. The Zayanis responded with a furious waving of their rifles and a cacophony of unintelligible invective.

  Not wishing a confrontation, I bade Abdullah return with me to our Land Rover and, once there, we agreed that we must turn around rather than risk provoking an armed conflict by trying to continue up the wadi. But first, we agreed, we would show the Zayanis our considerable fire power.

  I had managed to ‘obtain’ from various stores at Bidbid a total of three Bren guns, in addition to the 2-inch mortar.

  Retreating half a mile back down the wadi from the Zayanis, I gave the entire Recce Platoon, all fifteen men, orders to conduct a ‘field firing exercise’ in full view of the Zayanis. The men were delighted at the prospect. A cliff-bound area was quickly cleared of goats and chickens and two empty 10-gallon fuel drums were placed on rocks a hundred yards or so ahead of our vehicles.

  Abdullah positioned the men in a long line and ordered the riflemen, including the drivers and signaller, to loose off three rounds each at the drums. Two bullets out of three dozen punctured the drums. Not good.

  I could hear raucous laughter from the Zayanis. But there were still the three Brens and these could not fail to damage the drums.

  A wild burst of fire issued from the bedus’ Bren and rock dust rose from the cliff wall some twenty feet above the drums. The bedu were ecstatic, especially when they noticed that the two other Brens had jammed.

  A desperate Abdullah ordered the mortar crew to fire smoke bombs. After much fiddling with fuse settings on the bombs, two were fired in quick succession, but the elevation settings were wildly wrong and both bombs whistled high over the cliffs and out of sight.

  God help us down in Dhofar, I thought.

  Back at the friendly Tayyin village of Hindarut, the Wali said, ‘Zayanis bad people. You did well to turn back. The sons of Al Harthi are murderous and you are few.’

  Many villagers bade us share food. It was rude to refuse, but I disliked the main delicacy of sheep’s eyes, which I learnt to swallow whole while smiling. The plates of sticky dates always crawled with flies and evil-looking dibbee, date wasps whose needles flickered in and out of their long abdomens as they moved. Flies rose in swarms from the faeces about the compounds and settled on the plates.

  Ali Nasser and The Beard handed out recruiting pamphlets to young and old alike as coffee was poured out of long-necked silver jugs and handed to all of us in order of our importance. Being a Nasrani (Christian), I rated lower than the poorest Muslim, except in mainline Sunni villages whose inhabitants were less strict than Ibadis, and there I came higher on the coffee list than even the Wali.

  John Cooper had bade me do my best if asked for medical help. We had no medic, but each vehicle had a first-aid bag.

  One old man with puffy eyelids prodded me and, pressing his thumb against one eyelid, forced white pus to squirt onto his cheek. Villagers gathered around.

  ‘Give him an aspirin,’ Murad suggested.

  I squeezed some Optrex into the loose sacs under his eyes after swabbing away more pus. I guess he was afflicted with trachoma.

  Dirt-bearing flies massed at the backsides of naked babies and crawled about the lips and eyes of children who seldom bothered to brush them off. These same flies fed on the festering sores of the village pi-dogs.

  Abdullah told me that tuberculosis was common, as was chronic anaemia, enlarged spleens and other symptoms of malaria. Leprosy was endemic and lepers were seldom segregated. ‘Eight out of every ten babies born in Oman die before their first birthday,’ I was later told by an American at the Mission Hospital in Muscat.

  We left the Tayyin, gave my Domesday lists to John Cooper, who agreed that we should not have risked a fight at Zayan. Later that year two tribes in the region clashed with one another, killing a hundred or more of their number and even making the foreign news page of The Times.

  Peter Southward-Heyton listened when I voiced my concerns that the Sultan seemed to have done nothing in Omani villages. There were but three hospitals and a dozen schools in all Oman.

  ‘You are right,’ Peter said quietly in one corner of the Mess. ‘He is playing into the hands of the Marxists. Both the Soviets and the Chinese are training hundreds of dissidents from all over the Middle East, and arming them. We can expect big trouble soon. Not just in Dhofar, but here up north as well.’

  The Arab world from Egypt to Jordan, from Yemen to the Sudan was in ferment. Until now Omanis had been geographically isolated from the general unrest by the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and the great deserts to the west, but transistor radios were increasingly available, and transmitters from Cairo and the Voice of Aden beamed sedition east at a thousand megawatts – the seedlings of what, half a century later, would be known as an ‘Arab Spring’.

  I also discussed with Sergeant Abdullah the lack of hospitals, schools and help for the Omani people, but he merely shrugged.

  ‘His Majesty has little money to spend. Anyway, Sahib, this has always been a poor country. Illness comes to those who sin.’

  At that time the Sultan did anticipate great wealth from recent successful oil drillings in the Omani hinterland but, cautious by nature, he was determined to spend money only when he had money, and the promise of imminent funds once huge exploration costs were paid off was still just that, a promise. This conservative thinking would soon prove to be his undoing.

  The great sand seas of the Empty Quarter absorbed the shock waves of Arab militancy and Marxist-supported militancy for many years, but now the Voice of Cairo reached a growing group of potential troublemakers, even in the heart of Muscat.

  ‘Take the oil wealth that is yours,’ the voice on the radio urged. ‘See what we have done in Egypt . . . Our new schools, food centres, roads, hospitals . . . What our allies in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen have likewise created with the help of our Chinese and Russian brothers. The route to success,
Omani friends, is revolt! Tomorrow Said Masoul, leader of the gallant Omani freedom fighters, will speak to you at this time.’

  Mounting oil revenues had reached Oman over the last three years and plans had been announced for a new deep water port, as had details for electricity and water supplies. But nothing concrete was in place, while oil revenues had already begun to alter life for the inhabitants of neighbouring lands such as the Trucial Coast and Kuwait.

  Rumours spread as to a dangerous build-up of enemy forces, well trained and armed in the Soviet Union and in China, congregating at the coastal town of Hauf prior to invasion over the Yemeni-Dhofari border.

  The Muscat Regiment’s commanding officer made it very clear to me that when the regiment moved south to take over war operations, we would be up against a highly professional enemy with numerical and weapon superiority. I must quickly sort out the raggle-taggle Recce Platoon into an efficient fighting force or face potentially lethal consequences in Dhofar.

  After a council of war with Sergeant Abdullah, we began, slowly but surely, to rehabilitate our platoon into a force to be reckoned with.

  Peter warned me to keep our five Land Rovers away from dust roads if at all possible, for the adoo, the enemy, had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of Mark 7 anti-tank mines left behind in Aden by Harold Wilson’s government.

  Peter told me about Hamish Ainsley, my predecessor as a Land Rover patrol officer in Dhofar.

  ‘He took his Land Rover deep into the scrub of the northern mountains,’ he remembered. ‘He had unfortunately developed a routine and the adoo were waiting with a 3.5-inch rocket launcher. Their first rocket hit the radiator and disabled the vehicle. They closed in to slit the throats of the crew. Hamish was already dead, but his signaller killed the adoo leader. Two of our men escaped.’

  Abdullah and I forced a hard training regime on our little group of near-mutinous men in the furnace heat of that summer, and one result was merely the loss of a third of the soldiers who simply couldn’t take the new reality of hard work.

  The training was suddenly interrupted by a call for me to report to the colonel of the Muscat Regiment, Peter Thwaites, a seconded Guards officer with only one kidney.

  ‘Make yourself comfortable, Ranulph,’ he said, waving at a chair. ‘You are to fly south tomorrow . . . without your men . . . to join the Northern Frontier Regiment for a month. They are short of officers and you could do with the experience before I let you loose with our Recce Platoon. Things are hotting up down there, so be careful.’

  I packed my bags and, after a quick goodbye to Abdullah and the men, caught the flight south over 500 miles of shimmering desert to the unmarked border of Dhofar.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Sewage Ambush

  Twenty-five years after my father was killed fighting fascism, I was on my way to my first action against communists. Far below my porthole on the highly functional little Beaver cargo plane of the Sultan’s air force, the endless deserts unrolled, split here and there with centuries-old, long-dry water courses. Then, sharply delineated, a bank of sunlit cloud covered the land below.

  The tannoy crackled with the Scottish-accented drawl of the pilot. ‘The Dhofar mountains are below you now, gents. If you could see them beneath the monsoon cloud, you’d think we were back home. It’s green as a forest down there, and full of friendly folk who want to kill you.’

  A voice interrupted with landing instructions from Salalah Control. The verdant nature of the Qara, as the mountain feature beneath us was named, is a quirk of nature that runs for some thirty miles along Dhofar’s southern coastline, except where the verdant Plain of Salalah separates the sea from the Qara Mountains. Quite unlike the rest of Arabia, the Qara are covered with high grasslands split by deep forested valleys. Every year between June and September, south-westerly monsoon winds speed over the Indian Ocean from East Africa and are sucked against the Qara in response to the vacuum caused by the scorching heat of the great deserts to the north of them. The Khareef (monsoon) clouds beneath our plane deposit, most years, up to fifteen inches of rain onto the Qara, forming perennial streams and waterfalls that fall in torrents for hundreds of feet over cliffs. Terrain, I reflected, made to measure for guerrilla warfare.

  The Sultans of Oman have, from Muscat 500 miles to the north, nominally ruled Dhofar for over a century. Their authority extends only along the coastline, the Plain of Salalah and, for what it’s worth, the arid nej’d or desert hinterland of the interior, but not onto the Qara heartland where the fierce jebali (mountain) tribes hold sway, forever feuding with one another when no external threat brings them together.

  The western extremity of the fertile zone ends at the border with South Yemen. To the east, overlooking Mirbat, the last coastal village of any size, the jagged heights of Jebel Samhan are seldom blessed by the monsoon and so mark that extremity of rainfall. Where the monsoon clouds end so too does the exotic jungle growth in the valleys and grassy downs on the high plateau which turn quickly to thorn and acacia. Here, too, the many bright birds of the Qara cease to sing and wolves mark their last patrol lines.

  All of Dhofar, including its offshore island of Masirah, is but the size of Wales, and over a hundred years ago at the time when my grandfather was doing his bit to prop up the Empire, the grandfather of my boss, Sultan Said bin Taimur, signed a Treaty of Friendship with the British, and this still exists today. As a result the Omanis receive military aid when needed and, in return, allow the RAF full airport facilities at Salalah and on Masirah Island, where there was also for many years a powerful radio transmitter which provided a key geographical link to the BBC Far East service.

  John Cooper told me that the Salalah base had not, in fact, been needed by the RAF since the Second World War and was now considered to be an unnecessary expense to the Westminster paymasters of the overall RAF budget.

  Sultan Said made clear that ongoing usage of Masirah, which the RAF did want, was available to them only for as long as they also retained their basic garrison at Salalah. This assured him that, in the event of an attack on his home, his beachfront palace in Salalah, the British would rush to defend him, if only to ensure the well-being of their garrison, which was happily positioned between his palace and the hostile foothills of the Qara. His own air force at the time consisted of the Beaver I was sitting in and two small Jet Provost single propeller fighters, which were safely based within the fenced perimeters of RAF Salalah. Emerging from beneath the cloud cover, the Beaver flew low over the sea and touched down minutes later on the RAF runway.

  I reached for my dark glasses, for the glare on the tarmac was intense.

  ‘Good luck.’ The Beaver pilot shook my hand and pointed to a camouflaged open Land Rover and two equally camouflaged soldiers inside it. A film of dust covered the vehicle, both men and even their goggles. They wore green Arab shemaghs (headscarves). Their forearms were deeply tanned, but both turned out to be British mercenaries. After cursory greetings they placed my bags on the sandbag-covered rear seat.

  ‘Mines,’ the driver explained. ‘They lay them at night in between the RAF and our camp a couple of miles down the track.’ This also explained why, instead of driving on the track, he drove haphazardly on the bumpy ground on either side of it.

  ‘Sorry about this,’ he shouted, ‘but better than being blown to bits.’

  I nodded urgently in agreement, but found myself spluttering as dust-laden, hell-hot air entered my mouth, nose, eyes and ears. I made a mental note never to drive anywhere in Dhofar without shemagh and goggles.

  The SAF camp, Umm al Ghawarif (Mother of the Mosquitoes), loomed out of our dust cloud. This was the HQ and only permanent army camp in all Dhofar. A high fence topped with coils of barbed wire surrounded groups of low huts and at intervals sentry towers on stilts which boasted rotatable searchlights. This was a luxury absent from the camp back in Bidbid, and I definitely felt comforted.

  Although midday was at least four hours gone, it was breathlessly hot in the camp.
But not as humid as in Bidbid.

  I was introduced to those officers of the Northern Frontier Regiment (NFR) currently on rest-time from their tented operational bases elsewhere in Dhofar. They were, like their counterparts in the Muscat Regiment, a mixed bag of officers on two-year postings from the British Army or they were ex-army men turned civilian and therefore on mercenary contracts. A spattering of Pakistani, Indian and other nationalities added to the easy atmosphere, although an event the previous week had reduced the level of bonhomie in the Mess. A British seconded officer had been cleaning his revolver at a mountain camp when, according to my informant, ‘he somehow banged the gun off by mistake and blew the Mess boy’s head to bits, poor chap.’

  Unlike my own gentle colonel, the NFR commanding officer, Mike Harvey, was a hard nut and an expert at counter-guerrilla warfare. His hobby was karate, and he was known to his officers as Oddjob, though not to his face. He had, during the Korean War, won the Military Cross for leading his company of the Gloucester Regiment out of the Imjin River trap by a frontal assault on the Chinese.

  A Baluchi sergeant issued me with camouflage clothing made in Portugal, three grey blankets and an old, bolt-action Mark Five .303 rifle with two shoulder-slung bandoliers, and a faded green shemagh.

  ‘Now you Lorenz, Sahib.’ He grinned and thrust his hands high.

  ‘Lorenz?’ I was puzzled.

  ‘Heywa! Yez. Lorenz of Arabia.’

  I was shown to a bare room for Visiting Officers. I tried on my new kit in front of the mirror and pretended to look like Peter O’Toole as Lawrence of Arabia.

  I was given a map of the Qara by Bill Prince, the officer in charge of ‘B’ Company to which I would be attached for a month. There were very few place names on this map, and those that there were had, in brackets beside them, ‘Position Approximate’ or merely a question mark. Many names, such as Habdoomer and Gurthnod, reminded me of the Bible or Tolkien.

  Bill put me in charge of a platoon with a Baluchi sergeant named Seramad.