Immediate Action (30 page)

    On the net we heard the local unit's QRF being called forward by Fraser to cordon off the area, hoping that the players from the bomb team were still in the area feeling like trapped rabbits.

    We could tell by the radio traffic that there were far more chiefs than Indians. Some of their Land Rovers were in ditches because of the ice.

    All they knew was that. there were casualties and terrorists in the area. Every time a tree moved it was reported. There was a danger of our being shot by our own QRF.

    There were short bursts of gunfire in the distance. Every time we got on the net: "What is it? What is it?" We wanted to react. Fraser came back each time. "Stand down, stand down." It was the QRF, firing at shadows.

    There was a good chance that the boys could still be in the area, but the QRF were multiplying the problems, and if any more time was wasted, we might lose them.

    Ken was severely pissed off and got on the net: "Get this to the QRF: We will contain this area. They are to stay where they are. They are not to fire at anything unless one of us tells them to or they are being fired at.

    No patrols, no movement; stay in the vehicles. Tell them not to react to anything until they're told."

    We were well insulated, but my feet 'and hands were stiff with cold.

    Every few steps I was slipping on the ice.

    Fraser said, "The QRF have reported movement in some hedgerows by the river. Are there any of our call signs down by the river, over?"

    Silence.

    Frank said: "Me and Andy will take that."

    "Roger that. Frank's going down to the river. Ken, acknowledge."

    "Ken, roger that."

    Frank said, "Andy, what I want you to do is just keep I moving forward and scanning the hedgerow with your night sight.

    I'll be behind you with mine, and we'll get these boys out."

    I switched my sight back on, took a deep breath, and started moving.

    It was eerily quiet. I could hear the ice cracking on the grass.

    I was in a semicrouched position, safety catch off, butt in the shoulder, picking my feet up really high, trying not to breathe too hard, trying to keep the noise down, trying to keep as small as possible. Frank was about five to seven meters behind, aiming just to my right so he could take anybody on. Because he was detached, it would be easier for him to react.

    I was listening in on the radio, making sure I knew where everybody was.

    By now an ambulance had turned up, and it had its blue light flashing.

    It was a fair way away from us, but as the light spun around, it was catching us like dancers in a disco strobe. I thought, Fucking hell, this is a good day out this is.

    I took two or three steps, stopped, ran my night sight up and down. We moved on, stopped, moved on. At any moment I was expecting to hear a burst of gunfire and to feel the rounds thud into my body.

    It wasn't a nice feeling at all.

    Big drainage ditches ran alongside the hedgerows. It was pitch-black; visibility was shit; there was lots of commotion, lots of noise in the distance. Running around in there somewhere were terrorists who'd just had a contact. They would be flapping, they would want to get out of it, and they would be armed.

    It was only after about twenty minutes that I thought: Shit, I've drawn the short straw here, haven't I? I'll take all the rounds and Frank lands up shooting them.

    We found nothing.

    After a few days pieces of the puzzle started to come. together.

    Antoin Mac Giolla Bride was an ex-Southern Irish soldier and a well-known terrorist since he was first arrested with a rifle in 1979.

    His A.S.U (active service unit) had planned to lay a land mine, consisting of beer kegs crammed with low explosive, in a culvert at the entrance to the hotel. By the time we got the call the bomb was in place.

    As Al's car drove past, they must have heard it and hidden.

    Unfortunately the car stopped just feet from two of the boys. As he sent the Schermuly up, they must have seen his silhouette and opened up.

    Al took rounds but managed to turn and fire back.

    Then he fell.

    They moved off and got to the banks of the Bannagh River. One of them jumped into the water to cross to the other side. The river was only about twenty feet wide, but it was in flood, and there were deep pools.

    When he got over, he couldn't find his companion. He'd drowned further downstream.

    The troop was a close-knit group, and Al Slater's death put all of us on a downer. It's never easy losing somebody you know, but there's not a lot you can do about it, you've got to get on with it. Within about two days the jokes were being cracked.

    We were going to have a Christmas piss-up. The troop invited all the different personalities from the police force and other organizations that we had dealings with.

    One of the policemen there, a fellow called Freddie, had lost his left hand in an accident and had a Gucci replacement strapped onto his stump.

    It worked on electrodes, and gave him the capability to flex his fingers to grasp things, but unfortunately the arm occasionally developed a mind of its own. It would be all right when he put it on, but then all of a sudden the electrodes would short-circuit and the fingers would be flexing all over the place like something out of an old B movie. We all used to think it was great.

    We were thinking about getting him a present, and there was much humming and hawing about what it should be. The best we could come up with was a regimental plaque, but Ken said, "That's crap. Don't worry, I'll sort it out."

    Freddie turned up at the do, and there must have been 150 or so people present.

    Ken got up with a small parcel in his hand, wrapped in fancy paper and ribbons.

    "Well, Fred," he said, "this is just a little something to say thanks very much for all the help and support this past year. We hope this will come in handy, and rather than give you something really bone like a plaque to hang on a wall, we thought we'd give you something much more practical."

    "Thanks very much," said Fred. He started to undo the ribbons and paper, which took him ages because Ken had used four layers of wrapping just to fuck him up. At last, after Fred had got a decent sweat on wrestling with ribbons and sellotape, our gift was finally revealed in all its glory-a can of WD40.

    Freddie took it really well, rolled up his sleeve, and had a little squirt.

    I bought Al's Barbour jacket at the auction; it would have been cheaper to have bought a brand-new one, but that's how it goes.

    Nobody was worse affected by Al's death than Frank Collins.

    "I've seen a lot of mates die during my seven years in the Regiment," he said, "but this has hit me the hardest."

    Maybe Al's death was the first big test of his Christian faith.

    Frank left the Regiment soon afterward and decided to train to be the ayatollah. However, he wanted to pay off his mortgage before he enrolled at Bible college, and his first freelance job took him to Sri Lanka.

    Frank lasted two weeks. When I saw him much later in Hereford, he said,

    "They had no understanding of right or wrong and thought nothing of wiping out Tamils. Some of the people we trained committed atrocities.

    It was well paid, but I came straight home."

    He then got a BG (bodyguard) job in Athens and worked for Burton chief Sir Ralph Halpern and Harrods boss Mohammed Al-Fayed. finally, when he'd saved up enough, he did the church's version of Selection and passed. After two years of studying he was badged as a fully-fledged vicar, and an excellent one he was, too.

    Debbie had a job, and I assumed she was enjoying it. I didn't know for sure because I was never there.

    I phoned her whenever I could, but every time I'd tell her how I was and never really listened when she told me how she was. I still wasn't getting my priorities right.

    Everything was the Regiment; I loved what I was doing.

    But I was being selfish; I was sacrificing the marriage, and it was my fault. If I came back for R&R, all I wanted to do was go downtown an see all my mates again. Everything I did revolved around them; she was secondary. It must have been outrageous for her.

    I was even stupid enough to start talking about kids when I wasn't even responsible enough to look after my wife.

    But I didn't realize, because I was a dickhead. I didn't know that the marriage was going down; I was too busy wanting to get the skills in, and the big one I wanted was demolitions.

    One of the aims of this twelve-week course is to teach industrial sabotage, strategic tasks, and strikes on defined targets," the instructor said to us. "A typical Regiment task might be to render useless the industrial base of a nation we're fighting against. Their army might be at the front line, but at the end of the day an army's no good if it can't get supplies.

    Attacks on the industrial base also lower the population's morale, which is all good for the general war effort."

    It was gripping stuff, and I couldn't wait to get stuck in. Even as a kid I'd been fascinated by television pictures of steeplejacks dropping power station chimneys I and tower blocks collapsing within their own perimeter.

    I had a little basic knowledge from Selection, and I wanted more.

    Training wing, as well as take Selection, was also responsible for teaching demolitions and all the patrol skills. Joe, the dems instructor, was coming up to the end of his two years in the job, and he really knew his stuff. Demolitions would also be used within other jobs, he said, as a surgical strike: We might want to drop a bridge, railway line, hydroelectric power station or crude oil refinery; or render docks useless, open floodgates, destroy military or civilian aircraft.

    We learned how to disrupt microwave and landline communications within military and civilian environments. "So much damage can be done with just two pounds of P.E," Joe said. "Why send in an air force to destroy a big industrial complex when the same result could be achieved by taking out its power source?"

    If we were going in covertly, we had to know and practice our trade craft-including surveillance and antisurveillance.

    For the first couple of weeks we learned parrot-fashion all the rules, the dos and don'ts, and all the formulas. We weren't going to have our little reference books with us when we were on ops. Joe banged the rules into our heads from day one and tested us every day.

    Every spare moment we had was taken up with learning it all by heart; to a scholar like me, it felt like trying to pour ten pounds of shit into a two-pound bag.

    We earned about all the explosives used by the British Army and others, 'what explosives were commercially available, and where and how we could get our hands on them.

    Having obtained them, we had to know how to use the stuff.

    Industrial sabotage nearly always involves cutting steel.

    However, the explosions are not Hollywood classics: A big blast, a massive fireball, and the bridge comes tumbling down. The hallmark of a Regiment strike would be the minimum amount of explosives to create the maximum damage-unlike my effort with the buttress tree on Selection-because then there's less to carry or make and less to conceal.

    Depending on the type of bridge, the aim was to do specific cuts so that the bridge would collapse under its own weight. To demolish a building, all you do is initiate the momentum of the building falling, and the building itself does the rest.

    We learned how to blow up everything from telecommunications lines to power stations, trains to planes.

    Everything had to be destroyed in such a manner that it couldn't be repaired or replaced-or if it could, then it must take the maximum amount of time.

    Destroying something did not necessarily involve laking it off the face of the earth. It might just mean making a small penetration of about half an inch with explosives into a certain piece of machinery.

    That might be all that's needed to disturb the momentum of the turning parts inside. The machine then destroys itself. The skill is in identifying where the weak part is, getting in there to do it, and getting away again.

    A lot of motorways and structures are built with concrete, so we learned how to destroy it, and that did take a lot of explosives.

    Sometimes it wasn't enough just to take down the spans of bridges; the piers had to be cut as well to maximize the damage. Gaps could be repaired; whole elevated sections of motorway could be replaced in a fortnight, as the Californians prove every time they have an earthquake.

    A large factory or even small town can be immobilized just by taking out an electricity substation. Obviously there are all sorts of countermeasures, and in times of conflict key points will be protected.

    Much of the time, however, the Regiment would not be doing this in a theater of major conflict; we'd be doing it in a small guerrilla war or revolutionary scenario. If the target was protected, that would be just another problem we'd have to get over. We might be putting charges in to go off the following month. In theory a charge could be placed to blow up in five years' time. There are plenty of ways to initiate an explosion, from anywhere in the world.

    We went down to one of the local bridges around Hereford, and each did a recce report in slow time (not covertly). We had a good look at the bridge, measured it out, and did whatever we needed to produce the mechanics of a recce report, wandering around the structure with tape measures and cameras as we worked out how to destroy it. While all the rest of us were doing this technical stuff, Bob, one of the world's most confident men, the sort who not only knows where he's going but also how he's going to get there and what time he's going to arrive, was doing pin steps along the footrail, whistling away as he counted them out.