UK Joint Logistics Support Base, Duqm, Oman
EXACTLY 6600 KILOMETRES to the west of Manila, a group of eight tanned, heavily bearded and well-built men climbed into a pair of blacked-out minivans for the short journey to Duqm airfield, close to the shores of the Arabian Sea. Their Heckler & Koch HK-417 rifles, pistols and other equipment were concealed in weapons sacks and stashed beside them on the floor of the vehicles. They were casually dressed, no uniforms, just jeans, mountain boots and polo shirts.
There was little or no conversation. Each man was wrapped up in his own thoughts, most trying not to think of home as they did the mental prep for the mission to come. It wasn’t as if maritime interdictions were something they hadn’t trained for, ad nauseam, for months, working out of the Special Boat Service base at Poole in Dorset or, more often, off some remote, inhospitable, wind-battered stretch of the British coastline. But every mission carried its own risks and many of the older individuals knew of someone who had either returned with life-changing injuries or had not made it back at all.
Few people in Britain, or indeed in much of the Middle East, were even aware that the UK had a semi-permanent military base in Oman, conveniently situated on the Arabian Sea as a jumping-off point for operations in the Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Run by the MoD’s Strategic Command, Duqm had opened in 2018 with a thirty-seven-year lease from the Sultanate of Oman. It had a deep-water port big enough to service Britain’s two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers as well as its fleet of nuclear submarines. Inland from the port, Duqm had its own training area, shared with the Omanis, where the eight men of the SBS had just spent the last few weeks honing their desert-warfare skills. Things had changed since Afghanistan, a landlocked country where much of the SBS had spent more time operating in the rugged hills and barren valleys alongside Afghan Special Forces than they had at sea. But since the chaotic Western withdrawal from Kabul in the summer of 2021 those skills were at risk of being forgotten, hence the desert training.
The men now onboard the Airbus A400M transport aircraft still had sand in their beards and dust in their hair as, twenty minutes later, the plane took off into the wind, circling low over the Arabian Sea then heading almost due east, bound for a discreet corner of Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport. There were no other passengers onboard.