First Into Action (27 page)

When I arrived at the garrison, I was given the job of briefing the SAS troopers on the layout of the ground immediately surrounding the hide and how we thought the ASU might pick up the weapons. The Cookstown garrison was a squalid outpost with the atmosphere of a place on the edge of the world. It was one of those pre-fab camps hastily constructed out of concrete breeze-blocks, corrugated metal and anti-mortar nets strung over dozens of Portakabins spread about the compound. A constant drizzle sprinkled on to the garrison and mud was tracked everywhere, as much inside the structures as outside – there were few concrete pathways connecting the buildings and the soldiers had given up wiping their feet. The resident soldiers had provided us with damp, cramped, well-worn cabins to rest in and wait in out of the weather until it was time to leave. Nothing would happen until nightfall and so, my briefing over, I sat back on one of the metal bunk-beds, put my feet up and read the dog-eared pages of a book I had found amongst the Det collection. I always carried a book around with me for moments such as this. There were half a dozen SAS troopers in the cabin checking over their M15 Colt commandos – a short version of the M16. I noticed how young several of them were – my age, I decided. I must have looked a lot older to them. Unlike them, my hair was long and dirty and my face unshaven. With their preparations complete they sat around waiting for nightfall.

The young ones looked bored and had obviously not been in the job long enough to adapt to the waiting hours. I figured they were newly badged. It took a few years in this business to learn how to relax and deal with inactivity.

‘What time’s scoff around here?’ one of them asked me.

We even had a different language from the SAS. For scoff we said scran. We had a wet, they had a brew. We went for a yomp, they a tab. We went to the head, they the shitter. I checked my watch, deciding whether or not I was hungry.

‘We can eat now if you want. I’ll show you where the cookhouse is.’ I used their terminology. I wasn’t about to hint I was even a Marine, let alone SBS.

Three of the young warriors followed me across the camp to the cookhouse and, after filling our plates from the self-service counter that provided food virtually twenty-four hours a day because of the constant in-and-out of patrols, we sat around a table together and ate. I didn’t speak, but they, surprisingly for SAS around non-badged types, were quite chatty. This was further proof of their short time in the unit. I decided they could not have been in the SAS more than six months and probably less. This might well have been their first tour with the regiment. Much of their chat was about life in special forces, and mostly for my benefit. They were proud of the fact they had got into the SAS, and why not? As the meal progressed they grew more comfortable with me. I showed interest. I was indeed interested. I always regarded the SAS as an organisation I might like to have joined had my life been different and had I ended up in the Army. They might never have talked with a regular soldier in the same relaxed way, but in their eyes I was somewhat special forces, if only in a limited way. I got the impression they were trying to recruit me.

One of them asked if I had given any thought to joining the SAS after my tour with 14 Int. They suggested my experience would be an advantage. All I had to do was get through a gruelling selection course, they explained.

I soon began to relish my position and played on it a little. I could not resist it. They were just young and full of it. As they went on about the unique opportunities the SAS enjoyed over every other branch of the armed forces, one of them mentioned HALO jumping. That surprised me as I did not think any of them had been in long enough to do the high-altitude parachute course.

‘You’ve done HALO then, have you?’ I asked.

‘Well, no, not yet. But we’re on a course as soon as we get back.’

We had finished eating and I would have to leave the camp soon so I decided it was time to burst the bubble.

‘You’ll love it,’ I said. ‘It’s a great crack.’

They looked at me questioningly.

‘How would you know?’ one of them asked.

‘I did one a couple of years ago,’ I replied. I had over a hundred jumps under my belt by then.

That threw them.

‘You RAF then?’ another ventured. RAF parachute instructors and path-finders were the only others who did HALO apart from the SBS.

‘No. SBS.’

There was a moment of silence.

‘How long?’ another asked.

‘Four years.’

They knew that little they had said about their job was news to me. I remained sitting for a moment longer to enjoy their discomfort before finally wishing them luck that night and leaving.

Any embarrassment they felt was nothing compared to how they would feel several hours later.

A narrow country road ran alongside the length of the field where the weapons were hidden. The SAS plan was to catch the ASU in a pincer movement. The ambushers would allow the ASU to park up on the road, walk into the overgrown area, unload the cache and bring the weapons back to their car. When the ASU moved off the SAS would drive at them from both directions and trap them. If the ASU went on the offensive, the SAS would cut them down. I am not entirely clear as to what happened on that dark road that night, and not surprisingly the SAS were reluctant to discuss it in detail. Everything appeared to go as planned until the ASU car pulled away from the cache with the weapons.

I believe the tailing SAS car closed in too early once again. When the blood is up, the fear of losing the prey is often greater than the fear of losing one’s life. This country road had a vehicle pass along it once an hour or so. When the ASU saw the headlights of a car move in behind them as soon as they left the hide they were not for a second going to put it down to coincidence. They abruptly stopped and climbed out with their guns at the ready. The SAS stopped some thirty yards from them and clambered out likewise. The ASU opened fire for only a few seconds before taking flight into the fields. The second SAS car, the other side of the pincer, arrived and its troopers spilled out. A shoot-out took place but it appears to have been only between the two SAS groups. Fortunately, once again, none were killed, although this time one of the sergeants was shot in the arm before a halt was called. The ASU escaped.

Max and I sat in my car in a quiet layby a mile away listening to the débâcle over the radio.

‘Another home goal,’ I said.

Max took a moment to form a sentence he’d been trying to fit into a conversation all day.

‘Insouciant sods, in ’ey,’ he said.

I might have agreed but I didn’t know what it meant.

It was the RUC who eventually intervened on 14 Int’s side regarding the issue of SAS takeovers. After several more incidents on other operations with similar results, they began withholding information from the Det if the SAS were going to take over at the climax. As a result, the situation changed in favour of 14 Int. The SAS were still to be involved in ambushes, but only at the request of the Det commanders, and then usually alongside 14 Int operatives.

10

Mr Tallyho came back on to the scene early in my second year with the Det. I had not seen him since the O’Sally ambush. He looked exactly the same. His drab, grey raincoat and patent-leather shoes were probably the same ones. He had segs in his shoes now – the curved metal pieces you can buy to hammer into the heels and tips of worn shoes. I noticed them because my father always used them on our shoes. The tips, sides and heels of my school shoes were always liberally dotted with them. I sounded like a tap-dancer when I walked. They were lethal on hard surfaces, especially when jumping off the platforms of the old-style open-backed double-decker buses. I would skid for several yards, and if I went back too far on to my heels I would end up on my backside.

I wondered why Tallyho was wearing them as they were tactically unsound. But then, Tallyho was not a soldier. He never thought in those terms. I wondered if he had ever used his gun apart from a brief training period on the range. And what had he done for work before this job? Perhaps they had taken him straight out of college many years ago. I could not imagine him doing anything else, not now, anyway. If this conflict ever truly ended I expect he would move on to the next one, or back to diplomatic spying for MI5 or 6. Perhaps he already worked in other parts of the world doing similar tasks for military intelligence in between jobs in Northern Ireland to give him a break. And what would he do when he retired, if he lived that long? I was never likely to discover the answers to these questions. He never said anything unless it was connected to the task in hand, and then just enough to tell you what his immediate needs were.

Tallyho had been brought in because we had been working on an operation that was in danger of going tits-up. We needed his particular brand of expertise, though as it turned out, not in the way I, or anyone else in the Det for that matter, ever expected. The irony, though we never knew it at the time, was that Tallyho was the main cause of the problem in the first place.

The operation was against a man called Macaleany who was a high-ranking member of the Provisionals. Macaleany was an ASU commander who was up for promotion to brigade level, but he was having a little problem qualifying for that upgrade. We needed him to get that promotion because we were going to use it to our advantage. Therefore, the problem holding him back became our direct problem. It was his wife. He suspected her of infidelity and wanted to dump her. But if he did that it was unlikely he would get the new posting. The PIRA godfathers were good Catholics and would not look favourably upon him if he divorced her. It was also their reasoning that if a man could not manage his own household he could not be trusted with a high command.

Macaleany suspected his wife’s lover was her childhood sweetheart, who lived down the street. In fact it was Mr Tallyho.

Months earlier, when military intelligence first learned that Macaleany might be up for promotion, Tallyho had been tasked with secretly ‘invading’ Macaleany’s life to find a possible weak link that could be used to gain information from him and perhaps even ‘turn’ him. After researching the childless family who lived alone together in the housing estate, Tallyho decided that Macaleany himself was staunch and un-recruitable. But his wife, a quiet, dreamy, sensitive and altogether unhappy woman, might be a possible ‘in’ and worth taking to the next stage, which was to physically ‘make contact’ with her.

Macaleany’s missus had been with her husband for five years but was lonely and out of love with him. Macaleany was so insensitive to his wife’s feelings that it was only when she stopped having sex with him that he began to suspect she was seeing her lover, although in truth she was seeing nobody. At first Tallyho spent several weeks carefully nurturing an innocent relationship with her, one that was never intended to become in any way amorous. But to his surprise, during one of their ‘chance encounters’, she came on to him and, being the professional he was, looking for any way to take advantage, he encouraged this new turn in their relationship. Tallyho would do anything to get what he wanted. He was a soulless man and his only motive was gaining information.

To imagine Tallyho having sex seemed perverse to me. He just did not appear the type. As well as being totally unattractive, he was grubby, always had a cigarette in his mouth and looked constantly hungover. Had I not been forced to witness him in the act of coitus a few months later I would never have believed him capable of it. Macaleany’s wife was no oil painting either, but it said little for her taste in men. Obviously my understanding of people and what makes them tick still had a lot of maturing to do, because Macaleany’s wife not only found Tallyho sexually attractive, she also fell in love with him. She must have been exceptionally lonely.

It was during Tallyho’s relationship with Macaleany’s wife that their marriage stabilised and even improved. She was happier when she was seeing Tallyho and this was reflected in her everyday life. It appeared that, while making love to Tallyho, she could once again make love to her husband as well and therefore Macaleany ceased to be suspicious of her.

With Macaleany’s upcoming promotion would come an increase in salary. Macaleany planned on using this extra cash to get out of the housing estate and get his wife away from her ex-boyfriend down the street. He borrowed money in advance of his promotion and decided to buy a new family house several miles away in the open countryside. This was exactly what we wanted him to do. It would make it much easier for us to monitor Macaleany.

Sometimes our surveillance methods verged on the bizarre. On a technical surveillance operation in Warren Point, in the holiday apartment of a high-ranking PIRA, we found that the toilet was the only place we could gain quality information. He had a wife and family in Belfast but would meet his lover at the apartment once a week. His lover was our tout. She discovered the best time to get him to talk about work was while they were making love in the toilet, which was his favourite location. He liked to wait until she was evacuating her bowels then enter the small room and get her to do things to him with her evacuated substances while he sat beneath her. Some perverted sod in MI5 wanted a video camera placed inside, but we were spared the task. The sound tapes were enough. There’s nowt as queer as folk.

After several months, Tallyho decided he was not getting the quality of intelligence he wanted from Mrs Macaleany and so he pulled himself off the task and disappeared from her life without a word. Macaleany had not yet been promoted and was therefore not privy to the level of intelligence Tallyho wanted.

When Tallyho left the scene, Macaleany’s wife became depressed and stopped making love to her husband once again. And once again Macaleany began to suspect she was having an affair with her childhood sweetheart.

When Macaleany’s suspicions of his wife’s adultery got to a stage where we thought he might do something drastic, we had to act to save the situation, and pronto. If Macaleany did not get his promotion he could not afford to buy his new house and we would lose a great opportunity to monitor a high-ranking PIRA member. The obvious remedy was to satisfy Macaleany’s wife, who was pining for her lost lover. And so Tallyho was brought back in.