Secret War in Arabia. Shaun Clarke

allocating the other members of B Squadron to their respective Bedfords. ‘The unloading must be nearly completed,’ Lampton said, dropping his cigarette butt to the tarmac and grinding it out with his heel. ‘OK, Ricketts, collect the other probationers together and follow me to that truck.’

      Ricketts did as he had been told, calling in his small group and then following Lampton across to one of the Bedfords parked on the edge of the airstrip. When they were in the rear, cramped together on the hard benches, already covered in a film of dust and being tormented by mosquitoes and fat flies, Lampton joined them, telling another soldier to drive his Land Rover back to base. The Bedford coughed into life, lurched forward, then headed away from the airstrip to a wired-off area containing a single-storey building guarded by local soldiers wearing red berets. The Bedford stopped there.

      ‘SOAF HQ,’ Lampton explained, meaning the Sultan of Oman’s Air Force. Removing a fistful of documents from the belt of his shorts, he climbed down from the Bedford and went inside.

      Forced to wait in the open rear of the crowded Bedford, Ricketts passed the time by examining the area beyond the SOAF HQ. He saw a lot of Strikemaster jet fighters and Skyvan cargo planes in dispersal bays made from empty oil drums. The Strikemasters, he knew from his reading, were armed with Sura rockets, 500lb bombs and machine-guns. The Skyvan cargo planes would be used to resupply, or resup, the SAF and SAS forces when they were up on the plateau, which Ricketts could see in all its forbidding majesty, rising high above the plain of Salalah, spreading out from the camp’s barbed-wire perimeter. The flat, sandy plain was constantly covered in gently drifting clouds of wind-blown dust.

      Returning five minutes later with clearance to leave the air base, Lampton climbed back into the Bedford and told the driver to take off. After passing through gates guarded by RAF policemen armed with sub-machine-guns, the truck turned into the road, crossed and bounced off it, then headed along the adjoining rough terrain.

      ‘What the matter with this clown of a driver?’ Jock McGregor asked. ‘The blind bastard’s right off the road.’

      ‘It’s deliberate,’ Lampton explained. ‘Most of the roads in Dhofar have been mined by the adoo, so this is the safest way to drive, preferably following previous tyre tracks in case mines have been planted off the road as well. Of course, even that’s no guarantee of safety. Knowing we do this, the adoo often disguise a mine by rolling an old tyre over it to make it look like the tracks of a previous truck. Smart cookies, the adoo.’

      All eyes turned automatically towards the road, where the Bedford’s wheels were churning up clouds of dust and leaving clear tracks.

      ‘Great,’ Gumboot said. ‘You take one step outside your tent and get your fucking legs blown off.’

      ‘As long as it leaves your balls,’ Andrew said, ‘you shouldn’t complain, man.’

      ‘Leave my balls out of this,’ Gumboot said. ‘You’ll just put a curse on them.’

      ‘Any other advice for us?’ Ricketts asked.

      ‘Yes,’ Lampton replied. ‘Never forget for a minute that the adoo are crack shots. They’re also adept at keeping out of sight. The fact that you can’t see them doesn’t mean they’re not there, and you won’t find better snipers anywhere. You look across a flat piece of desert and think it’s completely empty, then – pop! – suddenly a shot will ring out, compliments of an adoo sniper who’s blended in with the scenery. They can make themselves invisible in this terrain – and they’re bold as brass when it comes to infiltrating us. So never think you’re safe because you’re in your own territory. The truth is that you’re never safe here. You’ve got to assume that adoo snipers are in the vicinity and keep your eyes peeled all the time.’

      Again, they glanced automatically at the land they were passing through, seeing only the clouds of dust billowing up behind them, obscuring the sun-scorched flat plain and the immense, soaring sides of the Jebel Dhofar. The sky was a white sheet.

      ‘Welcome to Oman,’ Tom said sardonically. ‘Land of sunshine and happy, smiling people. Paradise on earth.’

      After turning off the road to Salalah, the truck bounced and rattled along the ground beside a dirt track skirting the airfield. About three miles farther on, it came to a large camp surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, with watch-towers placed at regular intervals around its perimeter. Each tower held a couple of armed SAF soldiers, a machine-gun and a searchlight. There were stone-built protective walls, or sangars, manned by RAF guards, on both sides of the main gate.

      ‘This is Um al Gwarif, the HQ of the SAF,’ Sergeant Lampton explained as the truck halted at the main gate. A local soldier wearing a green shemagh and armed with a 7.62mm FN rifle checked the driver’s papers and then waved the Bedford through. The truck passed another watch-tower as it entered the camp. ‘Home, sweet home, lads.’

      Had it not been for the exotic old whitewashed fort, complete with ramparts and slitted windows, located near the centre of the enclosure and flying the triangular red-and-green Omani flag from its highest turret, the place might have been a concentration camp.

      ‘That’s the Wali’s fort,’ Lampton explained like a tour guide. ‘That’s W-A-L-I. Not wally as you know it. Here, a Wali isn’t an idiot. He’s the Governor of the province. So that’s the Governor’s fort, the camp’s command post. And that,’ he continued, pointing to an old pump house and well just inside the main gate, beyond one of the sangars, ‘is where our running water comes from. Don’t drink it unless you’ve taken your Paludrine. There, behind the well, to the right of those palm trees, is the officers’ mess and accommodations.’ He pointed to the lines of prefabricated huts located near the Wali’s fort. ‘Those are the barracks for the SAF forces. However, you lads, being of greater substance, are relegated to tents.’

      He grinned broadly when the men let out loud moans.

      As the Bedford headed for the eastern corner of the camp, Ricketts saw that many of the SAF men were gathering outside their barracks, most wearing the same uniform, but with a mixture of red, green, sand and grey berets.

      ‘The SAF consists of four regiments,’ Lampton explained. ‘The Muscat Regiment, the Northern Frontier Regiment, the Desert Regiment and the Jebel Regiment. That, incidentally, is their order of superiority. While in the barracks, they can be distinguished from each other by their regimental beret. However, in the field they all wear a green, black and maroon patterned head-dress, known as a shemagh. As it’s made of loose cloth and wraps around the face to protect the nose and mouth from dust, you’ll all be given one to wear when you tackle the plateau.’

      ‘We’ll look like bloody Arabs,’ Bill complained.

      ‘No bad thing,’ Lampton said. ‘Incidentally, though there are a few Arab SAF officers, most of them are British – either seconded officers on loan from the British Army or contract officers.’

      ‘You mean mercenaries,’ Andrew objected.

      ‘They prefer the term “contract officers” and don’t you forget it.’

      The Bedford came to a halt in a dusty clearing the size of a football pitch, containing two buildings: an armoury and a radio operations room. Everything else was in tents, shaded by palm trees and separated by defensive slit trenches. One of them was a large British Army marquee, used as the SAS basha, and off to the side were a number of bivouac tents.

      The rest of the Bedfords had already arrived and were being unloaded as Ricketts and the others climbed out into fierce heat, drifting dust and buzzing clouds of flies and mosquitoes. Once the all-important radio equipment had been stored in the radio ops room, they picked up their bergens and kit belts and selected one of the large bivouac tents, which contained, as they saw when they entered, only rows of camp-beds covered in mosquito netting and resting on the hard desert floor. After picking a spot, each man unrolled his sleeping bag, using his kit belt as a makeshift pillow. Already bitten repeatedly by mosquitoes, all the men were now also covered in what seemed to be a permanent film of dust.

      Even