First Into Action (37 page)

To cap the day off, one of the SAS troopers, who had jumped with the stick after the containers, was missing. He was a sergeant major and, in all the drama with the crates, no one had seen him since he left the aircraft. A search was carried out by the French military and when by midnight there was no sign of him, the worst was feared.

The following morning, as a French Army search party was leaving the camp, the sergeant major arrived through the front gates carrying his bundled-up parachute. It turned out he had extremely poor eyesight and had been hiding the fact from the Regiment. Had they known, his field days would have been over and he would have been stuck behind a desk for the rest of his career. His routine was to jump as normal, then on his way down, take his glasses from his pocket, pull off his goggles, put on his glasses, then replace his goggles over them. He could then see the ground and his altimeter.

On this occasion, he had fumbled and lost his glasses in free-fall. He had not jumped with full equipment and therefore had no automatic opening device. He had no choice but to estimate his altitude generously and pull his chute, then take a guess on a direction. On landing, he packed his chute and made his way, his bearings all mixed up, to a small country lane, where he thumbed a lift off a passing farmer. When he was picked up, he either didn’t explain where he wanted to go well enough in his limited French or the Frenchman had a wry sense of humour, or perhaps he was feeling a little vindictive. The farmers were compensated for any damage done by jumpers, but they still did not like it and had no choice in the matter – military training had to take place somewhere. Whatever the reason, the sergeant major was apparently dropped off even further away and was eventually picked up by the gendarmes late that night wandering through a small town with his parachute.

The SBS were often placed on standby alert for immediate operations around the world, but these nearly always fizzled to nothing more than a long, boring wait in some hangar, aboard a ship, or on an airborne aircraft. I did enough of these standbys – threatened hijackings of ships that turned out to be someone with a plastic gun, or a coup in some banana republic that ran out of steam before it got to our embassy and threatened its staff. But that was the job. Hurry up and wait.

It was with this sceptical attitude that one day, whilst on a command course back in good old CTC, I received a warning order to stand by for a move to the South Atlantic because the Argentinians had just attacked the Falklands. The Royal Marines Falkland Islands detachment trained at Poole before heading south and so I knew a couple of the Marines who had put up such a good fight, defending against all odds, killing several Argentinians without sustaining any losses themselves before sensibly surrendering. But now that all of them were on their way back to the UK after a brief confinement, I fully expected that the politicians would sort the situation out without the need for military retaliation. Most of us did. We under-estimated both the situation and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s toughness. The Argies obviously did the same regarding the latter.

At that time, the Guatemalans were threatening to make moves on Belize and there was a rumour that the Spanish were rattling sabres towards Gibraltar, which they wanted back. Thatcher had to send a message to the world making it clear that, although a shadow of our former might, we were not ready to let the hyenas tear us apart just yet.

I was given the choice of quitting the course and heading down into the South Atlantic or staying put. If anything did develop, I was assured I could follow on later. The choice to remain was an easy one as I fully expected the teams to be back in a few days or weeks after a long, boring sea trip. As it hotted up and war looked inevitable I was ordered back to Poole, but only to discover I was to be part of a twenty-man SBS team who would be held back in reserve.

There was one bit of news that made it even harder to be left behind. Special forces were going to the Falklands some six weeks ahead of the task force, to pave the way for the invasion. Perhaps it was because of our advertising campaign, or our vast improvement or the fact the Falklands were islands and water was our business. Whichever it was, the SBS was going in behind the enemy lines – and ahead of the SAS by some three weeks. We were going to be first in, but I was not to be part of that. It was the most bitter pill of my career.

14

It was a frustrating time for the twenty of us left behind in England while the rest of the SBS plied their trade in the South Atlantic. We weren’t the only ones – the SAS also left a lot of men behind to cover their counterterrorism responsibilities.

I was in fine company, though. Many of those in Poole with me were amongst the most respected men in the Branch. We liked to think we were some of the best as well, since the CO had ordered that the core of men who remained in reserve were to be equal to any task that might arise elsewhere in the world, related or not to the war in the South Atlantic. Of course, the part about all the best staying behind was rubbish, but we needed to find some consolation.

It was not easy being so far away from the rest of the squadron while they were at war. We prayed something would come from us being stuck back in the rear. Maybe something else would happen elsewhere. Threats to British interests did not cease just because we were busy in the Falklands. But to our disappointment, during the conflict no significant actions took place which required our response. We were kept busy reacting to a few possibles, but all the standbys turned to nothing.

My team commander was Paul (Coke to his friends), unequivocally one of the finest SBS operatives in our history. Coke had already received a BEM for his work in the SBS. Several years earlier, when the SBS was called on to provide a team of divers to photograph the underside of an Eastern Bloc ship, Coke was selected as the primary operative. The last diver on record to have tried it, Buster Crab, was never seen again, but Coke successfully carried out the job with his usual high standard of expertise and professionalism.

I was pleased to be in Coke’s team, because if any important task came up he would be most likely to be selected first. The other two members of our team were Steve, from my submarine experience, and Fleck, who had hung Jenson over the side of the oil platform. Every day Coke would go into the ops room to bug the ops staff for jobs and find out what was going on down south. The mood was sombre to say the least as we moped around the now deserted lines.

We tried to keep our minds off things by practising climbing techniques and room entries in the killing house, or on diving trips along the coast, staying close to Poole in case we were needed. But it was difficult to remain focused on an exercise when so much was going on elsewhere for real. Coke tried to distract us by turning the exercises into fun. For instance, the dives would be planned as serious compass swims but would turn into lobster-and crab-hunting expeditions, and the room entries would evolve into home-made wax-bullet shoot-outs in the dark with flashlights – a precursor to the paint-ball games civvies play. But even turning the SBS headquarters into some kind of special forces Butlin’s didn’t help. All we wanted to do was get stuck into the war.

An American SEAL operative, Chuck, who was attached to us at the time, had to suffer our frustrations every day. He knew what it was like. While he was stuck in England with us, many of his comrades were operating in Central America. He organised a barbecue at his house one evening and invited many of the wives of the men who had gone down south in an effort to cheer them up. Unfortunately a couple of the more dim-witted wives got drunk and started slagging us off for reasons that totally eluded me.

‘So, are you lot the cowards who wouldn’t go to war, then?’ one stupid tanked-up bitch shouted from across the room surrounded by a few of her smirking friends.

It was all I could do to stop Fleck from grabbing her and throwing her over Chuck’s garden fence.

The mood was such that I think the ops room would have invented a job just to keep us off their backs. An opportunity finally came when Coke and I were called into the ops room to receive a warning order.

On entering the ops room we were greeted by the ops officer, who briefed us on the proposed mission. My eyes lit up when I saw the map on the wall behind him with several coloured pins in it. It was not of the Falklands, but Argentina itself. We were told that Thatcher had stated that if one more battleship was hit by an Exocet missile, the mainland airfields would be bombed. Coke, myself and three others were going to be dropped off the coast of Argentina by submarine to set up a series of observation points to watch airfields and report on fighters departing towards the battle fleet. We were put on standby to go for several weeks, but as the attacks tapered off it was decided to cancel the op. That left us even more frustrated. The SAS had done a similar operation using a helicopter insertion through Chile. It was a complicated mission requiring the helicopter to be burned on landing followed by a long yomp to the targets. It would have been more clandestine for us to enter the country by sub, and would have been less of a yomp, but for some reason the SAS got to do it their way.

Our own man in GHQ in London was an SBS captain better known to us as Bluetop. I’m not sure why he was so named, but he was small and he did buzz around a lot. To his credit he worked feverishly against higher-ranking SAS officers (an example of how badly represented we were in London) to find us things to do. One day, Bluetop flew excitedly into Poole with a task he had managed to secure for us. We were to fly out to a European harbour in a top secret mission to sink a South American merchantman.

The makers of the Exocet missiles that had claimed so many British lives in the South Atlantic had assured the British government that no more of them would be sold to Argentina. Military Intelligence obviously didn’t believe them, and were well aware of the route that containers of Exocets continued to take overland to the foreign harbour where they were loaded on to merchant ships bound for Argentina.

We actually got to the point of stepping into the water the other side of the harbour from one such merchant ship and, wearing our bubbleless breathing apparatus, planned to compass-swim half a mile to the ship and place high-explosive limpet mines on its hull. But literally at the last minute London decided not to extend the conflict into European waters and we were ordered to pull back and let it sail unmolested.

Instead we were to fly to Gibraltar and wait for the South American merchant ship to pass through the Pillars of Hercules and into the Atlantic, where we planned to attack it in international waters. Our task was to capture it from the air, landing on it from helicopters, take off the crew, and then plant explosives and sink it. Once again London decided to cancel the op at the last minute. Their argument was they believed the conflict would be won by the time that actual batch of missiles arrived in Argentina. Their gamble proved to be correct.

The cancellation of the ship assault from the air was a disappointment because it was a technique we had pioneered for years and had rehearsed often, but had never had a chance to try out for real. The closest we had come in the past was when an Iranian frigate, being built in Scotland for the Shah of Persia, tried to set sail having been detained by the government when Ayatollah Khomeini took over that country. Just before it planned to sail, the captain lost his nerve and decided not to risk it.

No military force in the history of the world had as yet captured a ship from the air and sunk it. The SBS naturally wanted to be the first to succeed in this complex and dangerous operation since it was we who had pioneered the modern techniques. Our chance was finally to come.

The
Narwal
was a 1,300-ton Argentinian fish-factory ship that had been shadowing the South Atlantic battle fleet as it zig-zagged around the Falklands prior to the main invasion. There was no hard evidence at the time that the
Narwal
was spying on the fleet, but it was believed that its purpose was to direct the Argentinian air force on to it.
^*
However, it was well within the exclusion zone placed around the fleet and, after it refused to acknowledge several warnings to back off, the fleet’s commander ordered that it be destroyed.

The weather was horrendous that day, as it was for most of the conflict. Two Harriers were dispatched to take out the ship, but because of the exceptionally foul weather, low cloud-base and poor visibility, it was a much more difficult task than it would otherwise have been. When the Harriers reported their difficulty in engaging in
Narwal
, an SBS team was hurriedly formed and flown off in search of it in two Sea King helicopters. Their mission was to board the ship, remove the crew, and sink it.

The team was led by an SBS sergeant named Alfie, who was Rhodesian by birth. Alfie was a wiry, experienced and capable operative known for his loyalty and consideration for his men as well as his cheeky sense of humour, especially in tight situations. He demonstrated this latter quality to such a degree on this ship assault that his fame within the SBS is assured.

The team was well aware of the problems facing this operation. First of all, they knew little about the ship itself beyond a sketchy description from the Harrier pilots. Neither did they know what defences it had if any, how many crew there were, and what obstructions were on the deck and superstructure. This last factor was most important as it strongly influenced the choice of boarding point.

Another problem was the helicopter pilots the assault party would use. The SBS team were going to carry out a specialised maritime anti-terrorism (MAT) assault technique that usually required hours of rehearsals on the part of the pilots because of the precision flying it involved. But the only pilots available at such short notice had never operated with the SBS before, nor had they rehearsed roping down a team on to a pinpoint, even in calm weather conditions. This was to be a ‘by the seat of your pants’ operation for everyone involved.