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through a dust cloud thrown up by the wagon in front.
    Another key element of the vehicle mobility craft was being able to pack a wagon so that it could move noiselessly under aheavy load. Cargo had to be lashed vise-tight to the steel lugs on the wagon’s sides. Any metal objects—jerricans, shovels, steel sand ladders—had to be wrapped in burlap sacking so as to prevent them from clanging against the Pinkies’ alloy panels.
    As Grey listened to the briefing and chipped in the odd remark, he figured this would all be very new to Moth, Dude, and the Squadron’s other youngsters. This was the hard reality of what it meant to play hide-and-seek with a far superior enemy force in terrain that more often than not offered little or no cover. This was what they would be heading into in Iraq, and he was keen to see how the new guys on his team would face up to the coming challenge.
    Their unit-specific call sign for Iraq was Zero Six Bravo , which Moth would use when calling in the warplanes. Grey couldn’t help noticing how much their call sign echoed that of Bravo Two Zero.
    And although he wasn’t the superstitious kind, he couldn’t shake off the feeling that all hell awaited them in the deserts of Iraq.

CHAPTER THREE
    The vehicle mobility training was as rigorous as they could make it—but getting slick at such ops was still going to be a massive challenge in the time available. A few years back Grey had spent six weeks traversing the Omani desert with the SAS, living and breathing the reality of a simulated patrol deep behind enemy lines, and before that he’d spent months learning the standard operating procedures of desert mobility work.
    Here in Kenya, all of that had to be telescoped into a fraction of the time. The Squadron would spend fourteen days learning the basics of vehicle-borne mobility work, after which they’d run a makeshift “test week.” The eight soldiers from the SAS and Delta Force would act as informal “examiners” as they put the men through an extended desert exercise. The training program was designed to squeeze as much rigor into the time available and to extract as much as possible from the expertise on hand.
    Moving as a squadron meant orchestrating close to thirty Pinkies plus quad bikes on the move. It meant operating in a strict formation within which each vehicle commander understood his place in relation to the others while keeping a good distance between Pinkies so as to avoid making an easy target. It meant doing so in conditions akin to a massive sandstorm and while keeping completeradio silence so that the Squadron’s movements couldn’t be traced by an enemy using electronic tracking.
    It meant learning to do so under the permanent threat of attack, and always being ready to use vehicle fire-and-maneuver drills to extract from an enemy ambush. It meant learning what amount of fuel the wagons burned over what type of ground, how much water a man needed in what conditions, and what type of driving techniques various terrains required. But most challenging of all was learning how to do all of this at night, when driving with no lights—on “black light”—and using night-vision aids to render the desert into a fluorescent green video-game daylight.
    Delta Jim and his fellow American operators had been given a Pinkie and a quad between them, so they could fit in with the rest during Squadron’s training. The American operators had deployed to Kenya complete with loads of top-notch equipment, including state-of-the-art weaponry, body armor, and GPS. They were used to driving hulking great Humvees, which like everything else American were built extra-large. Now they had to squeeze themselves, plus all of their gleaming gear, into the cramped confines of a jeep that was completely open to the elements.
    For an ex-Para like Delta Jim, being in a Land Rover again was like coming home. But the rest of Jim’s team were seriously nonplussed. They were used to their Humvees,