I think we all lay awake that night listening to the sound of the air conditioning howling through the punkah louvres and the roar and gentle vibration through the ship as jets took off on their undisclosed sorties before trying to catch just a few zzzzs. A naval mattress and a cooked breakfast were most welcome. It was now, after spending many months being cut off from the world and deliberately focusing on the mission, that my mind turned back to thoughts of Anna. I had excommunicated myself from her but the truth could not be hidden from my heart.
Lying on my bunk, the utter realisation was that nothing else mattered because when you know your soulmate has come into your life everything else is just an addition to the main event. This of course was a paradox, an absurd ideology, because during this trip to Bosnia I had tried my hardest to push Anna out of my life. Now, you have to understand that although I loved her so very much I needed to know where her breaking point was. What a prick. I know, I know. I had to test the water to see how much this girl could tolerate. I even wrote to her whilst I was away on deployment, trying, in a not too delicate way, to end the relationship. I guess what you need to understand is that in an awful way I was trying to protect her from who I was and what I did for a living, all the necessary lies and deception and the inevitable fallout that would follow later in life. I couldn’t see it ending well after the latest assignments by the Steering Group.
Eagle’s next assignment took her back to the Balkans during the Yugoslav Wars for the rest of the mid-1990s and then she later made up the coalition contingent monitoring no-fly zones over southern Iraq. She returned to the Balkans under the NATO flag to battle Yugoslavian elements and conduct humanitarian missions. My time on board her was to take a different turn and encompass a different role the Steering Group wanted me to undertake, and one I was wholeheartedly grateful for – to engineer and perfect the transition and defection of Anatoly into the UK.
The Steering Group
Chapter 10
Interregnum
On my return from Bosnia, Anna very graciously came round to my parents’ house to meet me. At the time my parents were living in a bungalow on the posh side of town; they had moved when things had been going well for Dad at work. The underlying reason, though, was to get away from Curly and all his hellish noise and the DIY ventures he’d embarked upon whilst I had been working overseas for the Steering Group. Fucking Curly! All those memories! I think if they had stayed in that old house too much longer, Mother would have ended up in a mental asylum. The bungalow wasn’t anything too fancy, a 3/4 bed with a conservatory and reasonable garden in which stood my dad’s shed. My dad spent most, if not all, of his spare time in that shed. He would sit in the freezing cold smoking stubbies (butt ends out of the ashtray) whilst he built the most amazing model ships, two of which I still have in my office to this day. They are actually worthy of a maritime museum such is the detail and quality of the craftsmanship. I used to like sitting in that shed, smoking enough Benny Hedgehogs to infuriate my mother badly because we both stank of cigarette smoke. Sometimes Dad wouldn’t even be allowed into bed at night because he stank so much. He would be ordered to have a bath and this could be as late as midnight!
Times had been hard and Dad had been out of work for some time. I guess my parents were not only pleased to see me and my older brother when we came home (my older brother Phil was serving in the army), for the company, but also because Phil and I would always fill up the larder from Asda to last them the month. My younger brother and sister were still at school and it was hard to see our parents struggle as it caused so many upsets. Money, the root of all evil and all that. It’s so easy to say money isn’t important if you’ve got plenty of it. For me and my brother, spending £150 at the supermarket was just a night out on the beer when we were away, but to our parents it was a lifesaver. They had but £10 a week to spend on grocery shopping whilst begging on the dole.
My dad would have to prove to some young girl down the DHSS office every week that he’d been job hunting. Fucking bitch – I could quite happily have shot her after the way she spoke to my father one time I accompanied him into town, just no respect. I think the real low point was one weekend when I had come up on the train because I had left my car at another base. We had to walk into town with my dad to get the fucking shopping. We walked all the way into town in the pouring rain (a good couple of miles) and lugged that fucking shopping all the way home. It was just a really miserable point in time to say the least, for all of us. Not being in work is so demoralising and it takes away a man’s self-worth. It had crippled my dad mentally and stolen his self-respect. Although, he always wore a shirt and tie even when he cut the grass! Old school, I guess.
So, here was Anna standing on the family driveway. I knew I had been a terrible communicator and was fully aware that she was possibly there to end the entire relationship. It was without doubt the weirdest thing ever for Anna to come over to my parents’ house that day. I’m not sure if I was simply surprised or secretly happy to actually see her in the flesh as I had been sure I had pushed her away so hard by this point and it was all unrecoverable. I was ready for the argument and the deserved anger that might ensue. However, anger was and never has been in Anna’s character. Instead, whilst waiting for me at my parents’ house she disclosed a letter I had wrote, to my mother, who naturally said to Anna that she should stay with me, that there was a good boy underneath all the silence and I wasn’t serious about ending our relationship. Give love a chance, give her son another chance. Anna and I were boxing clever, each with our own hidden knowledge of the other. I deflected the conversations and invited Anna to escape my parents’ place after an hour and several polite cups of tea and go with me to an inn called Ye Olde Bell in a really peaceful country village, just to talk.
Ye Olde Bell is an old country coaching inn and is still there today. We sat in the snug part of the bar surrounded by the dark oak wood furniture and panelling strewn with pictures and ornaments from times gone by, stereotypical of a true old English pub. Great pictures and memorabilia of the harvest and of the hunt. Elegant English gentlemen in red tunics aloft their majestic horses sipping a whisky before the chase, hounds at their heels waiting patiently for the bugle to be blown. We sat and ordered a drink. The room smelt of old extinguished coal fires and tobacco smoke, not in a dirty or unpleasant way but more rather in a relaxing homely manner that must have greeted weary travellers and coachmen of a bygone era in only the most welcoming of ways. How they must have enjoyed the welcome of hot food and a warm hearth to sit in front of to warm themselves after being out on the Great North Road in all weathers (Ye Olde Bell is actually on the old Roman Great North Road).
I’m sure that during that ride in the car Anna was thinking, I need to tell him it’s over unless he changes. She had been out with friends the night before and had met a man called George who was waiting in the wings should things not work out with me. Anna had surely reached the end of her patience with me. A woman needs to be able to communicate with her boyfriend, especially in a long-distance relationship. She needs to know you’re always thinking of her and that she comes first. Shit, I got all that wrong, and got a full lecture and a heap more in that pub. There was no holding back, and she calmly let me know what a shit I had been, and she was right. I pulled out a cigarette and took in the heavy smoke as Anna gently released her frustration. I tried to drown myself in the nicotine. This was a new emotion for me, a new sensation. I wasn’t able to cast aside my real feelings, I couldn’t paperclip this. I was not able to simply walk away or ‘remove the problem’ as I had with anything and everything else that I didn’t agree with. My greed for success and my selfishness to be No. 1 in everything at work just felt miles away; and besides that, attitude doesn’t work in a relationship. Funny old game. I can’t deny I wanted to be back at Poole most of the time I was at home, as being with the lads was less complicated and infinitely easier to navigate.
The only thing that really happens when a relationship
breaks down is you become a shipwreck whose heart is open to anything to fill the void of real love; this is usually coupled with a dramatic increase in alcohol consumption once the shit news has been shared with the guys at work. I wasn’t really ready to go back on the market, not that I’d ever really been on it in the first place, or ever for that matter, in my life. To be honest, all this was new feelings for me. We sat in a short but not uncomfortable silence with me twisting off the spent tobacco ash from the cigarette into a clean ashtray, exposing the red embers. Even when things weren’t right between us, I couldn’t help but lose myself in the loving pools of her eyes and be consumed by the safe knowledge that she was my soulmate. I was incomplete without her. In that moment of doubt, I was hit by the tsunami of emotion that is love, whatever that is. I think it’s beyond poetry and all that shit. I think true love is a vacuum of wasted time, a void of time that you never knew existed until it’s brutally pointed out by a random person who transpires to be your true love. You then suddenly allow her into your life to fill all that is empty in your life. Then you desperately yearn to fill your life with that person with every waking moment, to stop a vacuum ever forming in your heart again.
Just before she had chance to say ‘It’s over’, I interrupted and said:
“Anna… what would you say to us getting married and buying a house together?”
Anna was completely taken aback, shocked. She had been sitting waiting for the ‘let’s end it’ conversation that simply didn’t happen. That conversation wasn’t actually on the menu for me, instead I opened a door for Anna to marry me and become a military wife. A different world, an unexpected one and probably a little scary, but one I think she was actually very keen to explore. It was easier now that we were able to sit face to face and look into each other’s eyes and see into each other’s hearts. The deal was negotiated very quickly by my agreeing to buy a house in Nottinghamshire! To be fair, living in Nottinghamshire was cheap and away from all the noise I so dislike about big towns and cities. It came with only one caveat, that we would move to Plymouth (or wherever I was stationed) within two years. Now, believe it or not, we went down the estate agents that weekend and bought a house. We saw one property we liked the look of in the display window, arranged to view and bought it that very day. Anna had her own place in Doncaster but, me being me, I wanted us to buy a house together. I didn’t want to live in her place, I wanted us to have the right start where there was no ‘mine’ ‘his’ or ‘hers’, just ours.
It should be Anna writing these paragraphs about how fucking dreadful I was at keeping in touch all the time I was in Bosnia. I hadn’t really kept in touch apart from our time in Malta and then later sending that letter feebly trying to end our relationship. I had spent three years in total dedicated to the Bosnia Campaign in one form or another, three fucking long years. There were many strings attaching the Russians to that conflict and I can’t even begin to describe what that actually means, I can only show you my certificates from NATO and my medal, neither of which will ever replace the time I spent in that hellhole.
There were two agendas behind my poor behaviour, neither of which were gonna make any sense to Anna, and she clearly would have never understood or believed what I had been doing or what I was involved in. It would all sound like lies to her ears. Besides, I had been executing a need to prove to myself (before any firm commitment – and I wanted it to fail) that Anna would be able to deal with the lifestyle, the absences, the not knowing and the poor communications that came with me and the Steering Group, my surrogate family. Seriously, you couldn’t just call home from the battlefield on a satphone, and if you could we wouldn’t have anyway. There was no just flicking off an email on a smartphone or anything like that back then. Besides, N1 and SF operators maintained absolute silence when deployed on ops. Additionally, the Steering Group wanted to see who this girl was and what impact she would have on their asset. Being a lone operator was more beneficial. Independents will do shit that married men wont. It’s a simple statistic. Anna was like a glitch in the machine, a bug in the espionage app.
However, the other side of the coin is that more married men come back from war than single men, and that’s because married men think before they act, have more to lose and take less risk. Single operatives will by nature go further, take more risk because they have more to prove and less to lose. It is this very nature within a person that the Steering Group wanted, because they can train a single man to harness the adrenaline and manage the risks. How marriage would change me was a question probably at the front of their minds whilst on the brink of securing the most valuable defection since the beginning of the Cold War.
All of this would have meant absolutely fucking nothing to Anna, especially as she was and still is a woman who is good, kind, gentle and faithful, and completely in the dark as to what I was, who I was and what I really did for the navy. Fucking N1 Naval Intelligence operator, my arse, I could hear her say! It means absolutely nothing to a woman that you’re doing some serious shit in an unpronounceable place, all hidden behind a silhouette of deception and lies. The idea of being completely honest was always there but completely inappropriate and fucking dangerous, not just for Anna but for her family, me, the team and the Steering Group – none of whom officially existed, but we did, and we all remain targets in our own rights to this very day. All that aside, who’d fucking believe it anyway?! It would be on a scale of saying to your future wife: “I need to tell you I’m actually a rock star” or something equally as ridiculous. I don’t think so.
I admit I had been a complete bastard. But for all the bad shit, underneath I wanted to know if she really loved me and at the same time wanted her to walk away because I knew how fucked up it was all going to be in the end marrying me. The fucked-up abused kid, who had got himself a bigger life immersed in all the utter reality of war, political warfare and all the deception of the service, the doughnut, the circus and all the potential this dark world of being an intelligence operator could offer to a young man willing to risk it all, was now trying to be Mr Joe Average. There was going to be some collateral damage, some serious fallout eventually should I survive the endgame and complete the list and make it to retirement.
No matter how many missions I completed or how many successes were applauded by the Steering Group, it all amounted to nothing. What I had become was as dry as a desert by comparison to the true belonging to Anna who was my eternal love. The reality I actually faced was that the Steering Group would eventually use me up and discard me should I become less useful or, God forbid, become a casualty either in the field or mentally. All this was unlike the eternal love of Anna which was now within my grasp and offered freely to me with no small print or any requirement to complete a set of trials or training courses or a hideous list. To have a real family, a wife and a lover, is something the Steering Group could never offer. Their family was just another foster family for me, a stepping stone to belonging. Subconsciously I knew all this and had suddenly begun to resent this reality that had surfaced after meeting Anna.
Looking back, for all I was and for all that I am today, I fucking love this woman. The thing that still fucks me up above all things is the fact that no matter how messed up my spaghetti-wired brain is, the one strand holding it all together is the bit that knows without doubt I love her. She was and is my soulmate. We argue and fall out, but fuck I could never live without this woman. She is stronger, wiser and more caring and loving than I will ever deserve. She is the only living person who I can trust with my life. The Steering Group only had its own desires and agendas at heart.
She was my link to the here and now, to normality and a conduit back to life outside the Steering Group. She was already at this early stage in our relationship keeping the Russian family deaths from the door of my mind, allowing me to focus on my dear friend Anatoly’s defection and his last chance for life; a chance for me to do something good in payment for the list I’d had to fully execute. She kept my mind op
en to the tasks in hand and gave me reason to keep going, but more importantly a reason to return home. Anna’s most important role was to allow me to believe I could return to my own true life and not be afraid or ashamed of all the bad paint, the damage or the graffiti made on the canvas of my life. Underneath all the damage and unwanted smearing of the portrait of my true self was still just a boy who was deeply in love with a girl and wanted to be free – free not only from war, terrorism and the Steering Group but to have the security of a lifelong companion which I now had fixed in my mind as a minimum reward for my work. I wanted that reward before I quit. Freedom for my mind would not be easily acquired no matter how hard and deep I tried to hide everything. But let me tell you, there is no cure, not even time, that will take away the memories and the fear of the future.
We moved into our new home together after three months. I had to sell my Jaguar and trade down to a Vauxhall to help pay for shit. There went my dream car. Anna hated the Jag anyway, it never impressed her. I remember when I first got it, I raced over to pick her up to take her out for a meal at an upmarket Chinese restaurant and released all my excitement about the car in a short telephone conversation, saying I had a surprise for her. Anna was expecting a ring for her finger, not me getting a new car. It wasn’t the evening she had expected, but we had a great meal. I still loved the car!
The time finally came when I had to pluck up the courage to ask Anna’s father for permission to marry her. I’ve always been a bit old-fashioned in that respect and thought it would be one of the few things in life that was worth getting right. I drove over to his house in Doncaster and damn near bit my lip off building up the courage to go and knock on his door. John was an ex-Coldstream Guardsman and a retired police officer, so plenty of self-induced pressure not to fuck up! John’s reaction was nothing short of remarkable. He simply leapt to his feet in approval once I had asked the question. I’ve always liked John because he did his bit, wore the uniform and served in Kenya, the same as my father, so he became my surrogate dad in more ways than one.
The Steering Group Page 33