They stopped and looked all around. I hoped they didn’t have night-viewing aids. If they did, we’d have to go for it good style if they saw us from such a distance. Then I had the mad thought: Chris has got our set of NVG; if we show ourselves, he’ll be able to see us. No, I really wasn’t going to do that. He’d look and just see bodies: he wouldn’t be able to identify us. In reality, the chances of us making a union were going to be quite slim.

They were still too far away for us to ID them. They started moving again, and I watched as they came down from the high ground and walked across in front of us. We got right down, moving very slowly, very deliberately. Even if one of the blokes at the back of the patrol hadn’t seen the two figures on the skyline, he’d have known there was a drama. It would be tactically imprudent to tell him what was happening because that would involve movement and speech.

We were there for what seemed an eternity, just staring at these characters and looking around to see if there was anybody else. They got to our riverbed and started walking along the edge towards us. This was a severe drama. We were going to get compromised by these dickheads. We would have to keep covert as long as possible, but then go overt the moment they saw us. Everybody had made the same appreciation. I saw Legs rest his 203 very gently on the ground and slowly, slowly reach for the fighting knife in its leather sheath. The weapon is housed this way precisely so that it makes no noise when extracted. They were very slow, very deliberate movements. Bob was right up on my shoulder by this stage, and he was very slowly taking the sling of the Minimi off his shoulder. He didn’t have a fighting knife. He had an Ml 6 bayonet, which is stored in a plastic and metal sheath. The bayonet makes a scraping sound as it is pulled out, so Bob just put his hand on the handle and pulled it out a little way. He’d fully extract it at the last minute.

We couldn’t take the risk of them shouting a warning. We’d have to kill them as soon as they came within range. In films, the attacker puts his hand over his target’s mouth and with one smooth motion runs a knife into his heart or along his neck and the boy just drops. Unfortunately it doesn’t work quite like that. The chances of getting one smooth stab into the heart are very remote and not even worth the effort. He might have a greatcoat on, and there could be webbing underneath. You’d do your neat stab, and he’d just turn around and ask you not to. If you’re 5 feet 10” and he’s 6’5” and weighs seventeen stone, you’re going to be in the shit. Even if you cut the boy’s jugular, you’re going to get a minute or so of screaming and shouting out of him. In reality, you have to get hold of his head, hoik it back as you would with a sheep, and just keep on cutting until you’ve gone right through the windpipe and the head has just about come away in your hands. That way he’s not going to breathe any more or have any means of shouting out.

Legs and Bob were ready. The rest of us would be up also to help with the killing by covering their mouths to stop the screaming. They’d have to get out of the riverbed very swiftly and up and on top of them, check they weren’t two of ours, and do the business. The ideal would have been to ID them before they could see us, but it was all going to happen together. If the two characters were ours, there was a chance of them taking us for Iraqis in the sudden attack, and we’d have a nasty “blue on blue.” It happened in the Falklands, when a Regiment patrol got into a contact with a Special Boat Squadron patrol.

They were within 60 feet of us. I crouched against the bank of the riverbed and looked up. Ten or fifteen more paces, I reckoned, and there would be an explosion of movement from in front of and behind me-and then, either a reunion with our lost blokes or two more statistics.

I held my breath. All thoughts of wind chill and exposure were banished now. My mind was concentrated 100 percent on every single little movement that was going on. And these blokes didn’t have a clue they were about to get their throats done.

They stopped.

Had they seen something? They were close enough for me to see that the longs were AKs. They jumped down into the riverbed no more than 20-25 feet in front of us and ambled across to the other side. They scrambled up the other side and walked off towards the plantation, the two luckiest men in Iraq. I almost laughed. I would have enjoyed seeing Bob leap up and do the business, little midget that he was.

We stayed where we were for about a quarter of an hour, tuning in all over again. We were all right, we were in cover, we weren’t making any noise. All we had to do was take our time and make sure we weren’t going to blunder into anything.

We “closed in.” We didn’t know what was on the other side of the high ground that the two Iraqis had come from. They might just have been two blokes who lived at the plantation, or we might be walking into a major drama. Better to stop, take our time, use concealment.

“We’ll head south and box it,” I said into Bob’s ear, and he passed the message down the line.

We patrolled as before with Legs as scout. We had gone about a mile when we came to a mound of high ground to our front. We chose to go through a saddle, and as we moved towards it, Legs stopped. He got on his knees and lay down. We were right out in the open.

I got on my belly beside him, slowly and deliberately. He pointed up. There was a head on the ridge line about 150 feet away. We watched him as he shuffled around, but I couldn’t see any others. I indicated to the patrol by pointing east that we’d have to box around the position. We circumnavigated the high ground for about 1,200 feet and headed west.

We encountered static interior vehicle lights on the other side of the high ground. We had walked into a laager of vehicles parked up for the night. Again we had to back out, head south, then try again heading west. We came across more troops and tents. We turned south again for a half mile, then west again, and at last were in the clear. These encounters had cost us a good two hours, and we didn’t have time to spare.

We pressed on towards Syria along the higher ground. By now we were at an altitude of over 1,000 feet, and it was colder than we could have imagined. The area looked like a NASA photograph of the moon, bleak and white, with random outcrops of higher ground. The hills funneled the wind towards us. We had to lean hard into it as we pushed into the gaps. We came to an area of scorched earth that was broken by craters and tank berms. It could have been an old launch site or the scene of a battle. The craters were full of water, snow, and ice, and reminded me of photographs of the Somme.

We had agreed that if anybody started to suffer from exposure, they were to say so at once and not play the hard man. At anybody’s request we would come down as fast as we could or find some area out of the wind. If we had to stay up there for the following day, we’d die. We were still soaked and frozen. In the early hours, Mark started going down. “We’ve got to get off the high ground because I’m suffering severely here.”

We stopped and I tried to think. It wasn’t easy to concentrate. Icy rain was now driving horizontally into my face. My mind was a blur of wet and cold, and it was hard to shut out the pain for long enough to think. Did we go forward west and try to get over the high ground and hopefully find some cover? Or did we go back to where we knew we would be out of the wind? I decided we must come off the high ground for Mark to have any chance of survival.

The only place we knew for sure was out of the wind was back at the area of the riverbed near the meta led road. We came down more or less parallel with the road but about 600 feet away from any possible headlights. We couldn’t be arsed with navigating: there was not enough time-we needed to get back and recover, and we didn’t want to be out in the open at first light. It was a really bad two hours as we made our way down. We tabbed as fast as we could, and just before first light we found a position, a depression in the ground, a compromise between concealment and keeping out of the elements. We would try again tomorrow.