While we waited for Bert to come back, blokes wandered off to fill their flasks or make use of the remfs’ plumbing facilities.

“I’ve got the mapping for you,” Bert said as he came through the door a quarter of an hour later. “And I’ve got the information on the ground-but not a lot of it. I’ll try to get more. There are some better escape maps coming through. I’ll get you those before you leave.”

We had already pocketed the others as souvenirs in any event.

We’d now had time to think things through a bit more, and Bert was bombarded with requests for information on enemy positions; areas of local population; the nature of the border with Syria because we were immediately thinking of an E amp;E plan and that frontier was the closest; what type of troops were near our area and in what concentrations, because if there were massive concentrations of troops, there was going to be a lot of movement up and down the MSR, which would make the task harder; what type of traffic moved up and down the MSR and in what volume; plus everything he could find out about how landlines worked, what they looked like, how easy they were to detect, and whether, having been found, they could be destroyed with ten pounds of plastic explosive or just a bang with a hammer.

Bert left with our new shopping list.

Looking at the map on the wall, I saw an underground oil pipe that had been abandoned. “I wonder if it’s laid parallel to the MSR,” I said, “and if the cable runs through it?”

“There’s a boy in the squadron who used to lay landlines for Mercury,” Stan said. “I’ll see if he knows the score.”

Bert came back with piles of maps. While some of us taped the separate sheets together to make one big section, two lads went out and nicked chairs.

The atmosphere was rather more serious now. We mulled things over in general for another half an hour before we launched into planning proper. Chris studied the maps and made pertinent comments. Legs scribbled memos to himself about radio equipment. Dinger opened another packet of Benson amp; Hedges.

The first point we had to consider was the location we were going to. We needed to know about the ground, and areas of civilian and military population. The information available was very sketchy.

“The actual MSR isn’t a meta led road but a system of tracks amalgamated together,” Bert said. “At its widest point it’s about one and a half miles across, at its narrowest about two thousand feet. Over 10 miles either side of the MSR there’s only a 150 foot drop in the ground. It’s very flat and undulating, rocky, no sand. As you start moving north towards the Euphrates, the ground obviously starts to get lower. Going south, it’s flat area most of the way down to Saudi, but then you start coming into major wadi-type features, which are good for navigation and good for cover, and then it flattens out again.”

The tactical air maps didn’t have contours but elevation tints, rather like a school atlas. Ominously, the whole area of the MSR was one color.

“This country’s fucking shit,” Vince said.

We laughed, but a bit uneasily. We could see it was not going to be easy terrain to hide in.

In remote regions, everything tends to be near a road or a river. The MSR went through built-up areas of population, three or four airfields, and several pumping stations for water, which we could take for granted would be defended by troops. It was also a fair assumption that there would be pockets of local population all along the MSR, either in fixed abodes or as bedu on the move, and plantations scattered all along the area to take advantage of the availability of transportation and water.

The MSR hit the Euphrates in the northwest at the major town of Banidahir; then it ran southwest all the i way to Jordan. Traffic would be in the form of transports to and from Jordan, military transport going to airfields, and local militia in the built-up areas. They weren’t likely to be on the alert, because they would not be expecting Allied troops in such a remote spot.

As far as they would be concerned, there was nothing of great strategic importance up there.

So, where along the MSR should we operate? Not at its widest point, that was for sure, because if we had to call up an air strike we wanted to keep the potential target area tight. What we really needed was a point where the MSR was at its narrowest, and common sense dictated that this would be at a sharp bend: no matter where you are in the world, drivers always try to cut a corner. We looked for a choke point that was as far away from habitation and military installations as possible. This was hard to do because an air chart only shows towns and major features. However, Legs pinpointed a suitable bend at a position midway between an airfield and the town of Banidahir, and about 18 miles from both. As a bonus, the underground pipeline crossed at the same point, which might provide a useful navigation marker.

The weather, Bert informed us, would be a bit nippy but not uncomfortably cold. Like a spring day in the UK, we could expect it to be chilly at night and early morning, warming up in the afternoons. Rainfall was very rare. This was good news, because there’s nothing worse than being wet and cold, particularly if you are hungry as well. Keep those three things under control and life becomes very easy indeed.

We knew where we were going to go. Next, we had to decide how we were going to get there.

“The options are to patrol in on foot, take vehicles, or have a heli drop-off,” Vince said.

“Tabbing in is a nonstarter,” Chris said. “We wouldn’t be able to carry sufficient kit such a distance-and we’d have to be resupplied after a while by a heli that might just as well have dropped us off there in the first place.”

We agreed that vehicles could get us away from trouble quickly and let us relocate on the MSR or get to another area altogether for re tasking Pinkies or one-tens (long-wheelbase Land-Rovers) would also give us the increased firepower of vehicle-mounted GPMGs (general purpose machine guns) and M19 40mm grenade launchers, or anything else we wanted. We could take more ammunition and explosives and equipment as well, and generally make ourselves more self-sufficient for a longer period. But vehicles had two major disadvantages.

“We would be limited as to the amount of fuel we could take with us,” Dinger said, puffing on his cigarette, “and besides, the possibilities for concealment in the area around the MSR look bugger all.”

Since our mission required us to stay in the same area for a long time, our best form of defense was going to be concealment, and vehicles wouldn’t help us with that at all. In this territory they’d stick out like a dog’s bollocks. Every time we went on patrol we’d have to leave people with the wagons to keep them secure. Otherwise we wouldn’t know if they’d been booby-trapped or we were walking into an ambush, or if they had been discovered by the local population and knowledge of their existence passed on. What was more, for eight men we would need two vehicles, and two vehicles equaled two chances of compromise. With one patrol on foot, there was only one chance of getting discovered. On the other hand, it might just be that two weeks’ supply of ordnance and other equipment would be too much for us to carry, and despite their shortcomings we would have to go in vehicles -after all. We’d have to work out the equipment requirements first and take it from there.

We worked out that we would need explosives and” ammunition, two weeks’ worth of food and water per man, NBC clothing, and, only if there was room, personal kit. Vince did the calculations and reckoned that we could just about lug the lot ourselves.

“So we’re going to patrol on foot,” he said. “But do we get people to take us in vehicles, or are we going to get a heli and patrol in?”