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seemed oddly attached to their vehicles. They argued the Pinkies had better all-round vision than a Humvee, and vastly superior arcs of fire. They weren’t low, claustrophobic, and cramped, which was how the interior of a Humvee often felt, plus the Pinkies were easy on the gas, which meant they had a far greater range.
    At first the Pinkies seemed to suffer an alarming design fault. When out doing the Squadron’s first driving exercises in the bush, the driveshafts broke on two of the Pinkies, including Grey’s wagon. Fortunately, their Land Rover had been crawling dead slow over a dry, boulder-strewn riverbed. Even so, the noise the driveshaft made as it sheared in two and smacked into the rocks below sounded pretty close to terminal.
    As he was the wagon’s driver, vehicle maintenance was Moth’s baby. It had taken him just a few moments to slip out of his seat and slide under the Pinkie to diagnose the problem. Mucker roared up on his Honda quad bike to check what was wrong, and upon Moth’s announcing that the driveshaft had sheared he was quick to give vent to his feelings.
    “Fucking wagons are a fucking pile of shit,” Mucker grunted.
    “Not normally, mate, they’re not,” Grey remarked. “The Pinkie’s about as good as it gets for desert ops.”
    “Well, what kind of an idiot thinks we can take them to Iraq?” Mucker continued. “Two days in and we’re two cranks down. They’re shit.”
    “Like I said, normally they’re not,” Grey replied, with infinite patience. “I did six weeks in the Omani desert and never had a problem. Normally, they’re pretty much bulletproof. I reckon we got a Friday afternoon batch with this lot.”
    “Should have been driving a Hummer, dude,” McGreavy remarked in his signature Texan drawl. “Man, those things are freakin’ unstoppable.”
    He got a barrage of abuse in return from the British operators. The problem with the Pinkies only worsened. The crankshafts onsix of the vehicles went down in as many days. It was hugely worrying. No way could the Squadron afford to carry spare driveshafts with them in Iraq, let alone risk the time required to replace a broken one when moving covertly behind enemy lines.
    Finally, the Squadron’s mechanics diagnosed the root cause of the problem: the Land Rovers had been fitted with a dodgy set of driveshafts. The driveshafts were replaced, and that seemed to solve the issue—which meant that the Squadron could get back to readying itself to drive and fight at war.
    Jim Smith, one of the Delta Force operators tasked with their training, was a Brit. He was ex–Parachute Regiment, the British equivalent of the U.S. Rangers. A few years back he’d married an American girl and joined the U.S. military, progressing by stages into the ranks of the very elite. Predictably, the men of the Squadron had nicknamed him Delta Jim. It was fascinating to hear him brief them on U.S. Special Forces procedures for vehicle operations behind enemy lines.
    Delta Jim talked about what it was like to deploy and to fight when facing a far superior enemy force that was hell-bent on hunting you down. He described the means via which vehicle-mounted SF troops could evade enemy tracking and tracing techniques, and the kind of escape options that were available. The golden rule of such operations was always to try to avoid a fight against a far larger enemy force, but if you had to stand and fight, then to do so at a time and place of your choosing.
    Delta Jim’s brief covered the A-to-Z of vehicle mobility ops: how to live from a wagon over extended periods; how to manage all the food, water, fuel, ammo, weaponry, and personal equipment, and to maximize ease of access in a cramped, open-topped vehicle; how to refuel from jerricans in a burning-hot and dust-ridden environment; how to free a vehicle bogged to its axles in sand using shovels, sand ladders, and winches; how to keep the vehicle-mounted weapons clean during endless days spent driving