by Damien Lewis
‘Won’t be a moment too bloody soon, boss,’ Sergeant Smith interjected. ‘Where’s he come from, Dad’s bloody Army? The sooner he bloody well goes back there the better.’
Sergeant Phil ‘Smithy’ Smith had served under Kilbride as his second-in-command (2iC) for four years, and over that time the two men had become inseparable. It was an odd partnership – Smithy, the punchy, barrel-chested, shaven-headed cockney sergeant, and his rangy public-school boss who wore his hair too long for Major Thistlethwaite’s liking. Smithy had spent his youth skiving off school and hunting rabbits in the Kent woods, and he had the cunning of a born tracker. And despite his lack of formal education Smithy was an excellent sounding board for some of Kilbride’s more maverick ideas.
Six months ago Smithy’s role as second-in-command had been taken over by Captain Bill ‘Bronco’ Berger, an American operator on secondment to the SAS. Captain Berger was a towering six-foot hunk of muscle and bone, with a massive hook of a nose and deep laughter lines around his eyes. As a captain he held a rank senior to Kilbride’s but an American operator had never commanded an SAS troop so Smithy had volunteered his 2iC position. As far as Bill Berger was concerned, he didn’t give a rat’s shit what place he got within the unit. Every man was treated pretty much as an equal.
Captain Berger was the oldest man in Four Troop, being in his early thirties, and had more accumulated combat experience than any of the others, Kilbride included. He was a veteran of the Green Berets Mobile Strike Force in Vietnam. For six years he had led a unit of local Motagnard tribesmen in behind-the-lines action against the Vietcong. He had taken part in the ultra-secret Project Delta, fought a desperate rearguard action during the Tet Offensive, and led a daring strike into the A Shau Valley.
The end of the Vietnam conflict was less than four years back, and the war was still raw in people’s minds, especially Captain Berger’s. He rarely if ever talked about it. Recently he had become the first US soldier ever to undertake SAS selection, which he had passed with flying colours. He was now spending a year with them so that he could return to the US and advise their own equivalent unit – Delta Force.
‘The goddamn Major can blow it out his ass,’ Captain Berger remarked, picking up on Smithy’s comment.
Kilbride smiled. ‘What worries me most is the lack of time we have to prepare for this Beirut mission. I suggest we break into three groups, each assigned a different area of responsibility for mission preparations. Okay?’
Kilbride glanced around the faces of the men in his unit. Six were regular SAS (including himself) and one was the big American. Then there were two lads from the Special Boat Service (SBS), the sister regiment to the SAS. As the first part of this mission was going to involve a sea assault, Kilbride was glad to have the SBS guys with them. He had a sneaking suspicion that their specialist fighting-on-the-water skills just might come in handy.
‘Bronco and I will deal with the intel side of things,’ said Kilbride, nodding in the US captain’s direction. ‘We’ll be trying to get some answers about what it’s like on the ground in Beirut. I’m presuming we’ll need to blend in and make like locals, so I want everyone wearing unmarked combats and taking Arabic headscarves with them. Smithy, I want you and two others to deal with weaponry. I want maximum firepower, and you’ll have to beg, borrow and steal whatever we don’t have in the stores. Take Paddy Moynihan with you on the explosives side, and bear in mind that we may have to blast our way into a steel bank vault. So we’ll need a shed-load of plastic explosives.’
Smithy rubbed his hands together excitedly. ‘No problem, boss.’
‘Sure, I’ve precious little experience blowing up banks,’ Paddy Moynihan remarked. ‘Not a lot of call for that in the Irish Republic, end of story.’
Smithy snorted. ‘End of bloody story! Fairy tale, more like. Every man and his dog knows the IRA funds itself with bank jobs.’
‘Mortars are an issue,’ Kilbride continued. ‘No way are we going to lug a bloody great eighty-one-millimetre tube and baseplate in there. Smithy, take Jock McKierran and see if you can’t frighten the regular-army boys into letting us have something smaller and more useful.’
‘How about a couple of wee sixty-millimetres?’ Jock McKierran volunteered. ‘That should do the trick.’
Matt ‘Jock’ McKierran was a real man-mountain – six foot four tall and eighteen stone of Scottish beef, all topped off with a shock of red hair. He played rugby for the British forces and had on occasion sat on the reserve benches for the Scottish national team. Being the strongest man in the Troop, he was usually saddled with carrying the eighty-one-millimetre mortar’s baseplate strapped to his rucksack. An easygoing giant of a man, he never seemed to complain about being used as the unit’s packhorse, which endeared him to Kilbride no end.
‘A pair of sixty-millimetres?’ Kilbride queried. ‘Like where from?’
‘Och, the Israeli Soltam’s used by both sides in the Lebanon,’ McKierran replied, with a wicked grin. ‘A canny piece of kit if you can get yer hands on one. Weighs in at a fraction of the eighty-one-millimetre.’
‘Sounds perfect,’ said Kilbride. ‘Right, next I want a team pulling together all the non-lethal gear. Think about the operating environment: apart from the infiltration by sea, it’s going to be entirely urban. We’ll be operating in a built-up area, so it’ll be very different from roughing it in the middle of an Irish bog – no offence intended, Paddy.’
‘Sure, and none taken.’
‘The bank is in the heart of Beirut’s Green Line, a total no man’s land. I presume we’ll be basing ourselves in a bombed-out building, which means no electric lighting, clean water or food. What are we today, the nineteenth of January? That means we’ll be leaving here the night of the twenty-first, which is a Wednesday, arriving off the coast of Lebanon on the twenty-second. The best time to hit the bank is going to be at the weekend, when it’ll be closed. Beats me how they’re keeping it up and running, but that’s what the Major told us …’
Smithy snorted. ‘The bloody Major wouldn’t know his arse from his elbow, not even if he was playing tennis with the one and shitting out the other.’
Kilbride smiled at his sergeant’s turn of phrase. ‘If we don’t hit the bank at the weekend, I reckon it’s a no-show. In which case they’ll pull us out. So we need to be prepared for a five-day op – let’s say rations for a week, just to be on the safe side. I can’t see us risking hot drinks or food, not with Christian and Muslim militias hunting each other down across the city. They’ll smell us a mile off if we start brewing up. So it’s hard routine, I’m afraid, lads.’
‘Sure, your British army rations are feckin’ shite, whichever way you take them,’ Paddy Moynihan remarked. ‘Hot or cold it makes no difference – end of story.’
‘Better than bleedin’ potatoes, though, ain’t it?’ Smithy retorted. ‘Which is all you Paddies ever eat …’
‘Okay, other non-lethal kit,’ Kilbride announced. ‘We’re hitting a civilian bank with four security guards: so we want maximum surprise and minimum casualties. I want two dozen thunderflash grenades made up, and a couple of Mossberg shotguns so we can blast the hinges off the doors. Plus I want tear-gas grenades and respirators.
‘Surveillance gear,’ Kilbride continued. ‘We’ll need night-vision units, but that’s big and bulky kit so we’ll take just two in case one goes down. We’ll need a couple of pistol-grip microphones – they’re good for up to three hundred yards and should give us the range we need. Ron, you did a lot of surveillance work with the South African military – this kit’s your baby, along with Tony Knight. Take the microphones with the collapsible umbrella cone, ’cause they’ll pack down smaller, okay?’
Ron Boerke glanced up from where he was fiddling with a Rubik’s Cube. They had recently become all the rage and Boerke seemed addicted to the plastic puzzle.
‘Not a problem,’ he confirmed, in his clipped South African accent. He looked across at Tony Knight. ‘Leave it with us.’
Ron ‘Bushman’ Boerke was the sixth man to be allocated a task, and Kilbride had teamed him up with Tony Knight for a reason. Boerke was a hard man, brought up in the harsh environment of the Transvaal. He was a quiet, taciturn individual, with pale skin and pale blue eyes. He was only slightly smaller than the big Scot, McKierran, but his frame was lean and wiry and he was renowned as a bush fighter. Boerke was known to be a loner, a man of few words whom no one crossed lightly. Kilbride felt certain he would keep Tony Knight in hand – at least until they departed for the Lebanon.
If there was a troublesome member of Kilbride’s unit Tony Knight was it. Small in stature, sandy-haired and prematurely balding, he had a big chip on his shoulder. He resented anyone senior in rank, and especially those – like Kilbride – who came from a more privileged background. He was the least popular man in the unit, and no one knew much about his upbringing, except that he’d had a troubled Essex childhood. He had a face pitted with the scars of adolescent acne, and the lads joked that he still had a squeeze before bed each night. That had earned him the unfortunate SAS nickname ‘Nightly’.
‘What’s the deal with the night-vision units?’ Tony Knight queried. ‘They get whited-out by a car’s headlamps and weigh a bloody ton. Nothing wrong with the British Army Mark One Human Eyeball, is there?’
‘Ron’s the surveillance expert,’ Kilbride replied. ‘What d’you reckon, Ron – worth having the NVGs?’
‘There’s no question. We take ’em, man,’ said Boerke, which put an end to the matter.
Like many South Africans, Boerke added a clipped, staccato ‘man’ to the end of most of his phrases. This was not the drawn-out, laid-back ‘man’ of the hippie 1960s: it was more a pointer to the manhood he shared with whoever he was talking to.
‘We’re operating at close quarters in an urban environment,’ Kilbride continued. ‘So we need to concentrate on brute force rather than accuracy. I want each man with an M16 and underslung grenade launcher, which as a combo packs an evil punch. And I want one person with a GPMG, just so we’ve got some heavier firepower. Bronco, that’s you – if you’re okay with the big machine gun?’
‘Sure thing, buddy,’ Bill Berger replied, giving a wide, gap-toothed grin. ‘Boy, the number of times I wished we had the Gimpy in Vietnam …’
‘Last thing, I want some sixty-six-millimetre anti-tank rockets,’ Kilbride added. ‘Let’s say one for each man if we can carry that many.’
‘Jesus, nine of ’em. Why so many, buddy?’ Bill Berger queried. ‘That sure is one hell of a lotta firepower.’
‘In case we’re not invited into the bank and we have to blast our way in,’ Kilbride replied. ‘I’m presuming we can break in quietly. But if we do have to blow that bank apart I want the kit to do it. Plus both sides of the conflict have a few old Soviet tanks, so we want to be able to take one of those on if it comes looking for us.’
‘Buddy, us nine guys are gonna be packing a bigger punch than any unit I ever served with. And that includes the Mobile Strike Force when we hit the Vietcong in the A Shau Valley.’
Kilbride gave a wicked smile. ‘But I bet the Vietcong weren’t holed up in a bank vault with a steel door twelve inches thick.’
Sergeant Smith eyed Kilbride. ‘Boss, you seem pretty certain we’ll be hitting that vault.’
Kilbride shrugged. ‘If the order comes through for us to hit it, then we’d better be ready for anything …’
Smithy held Kilbride’s gaze. ‘Like getting our hands on fifty million dollars’ worth of gold? Is that what you mean, boss?’
‘You said it, Sergeant,’ Kilbride replied, giving nothing away. ‘Anyone got any idea how much fifty million in bullion weighs? Come on, Paddy, that’s your area of expertise, isn’t it?’
‘Sure, are the jokes about Irish bank robbers going to last the whole feckin’ mission?’ Moynihan replied. ‘’Cause they just get funnier and funnier each and every time—’
‘Less of the blarney, Paddy – just tell us how much it bloody weighs,’ Smithy cut in. ‘Every Irishman I ever met was a robbing, thieving bastard so you’re bound to know.’
‘Sure, well, let me think now. When was the last time I stole fifty million in gold? It was that bank in Limerick, wasn’t it now? Or was it that one in Dingle? Either way, I think me and me brothers managed to carry it out of there in a couple of wheelbarrows …’
‘Bet you had to get rid of the bloody potatoes first, though.’
Bill Berger spluttered into his tea. ‘I gotta come to Paddy’s defence here …’
‘Must’ve been a tough decision,’ Smithy continued, ignoring the big American. ‘Wheelbarrow full of potatoes, wheelbarrow full of gold … Now, which do I bloody go for?’
‘Hang on a goddamn minute,’ Bill Berger cut in. ‘My ancestors are Irish, and when the folks go home to Kilkenny they reckon the food’s real fine over there. Darn sight better than your English chow, that’s for sure.’
Smithy stared at the big American in mock disgust. ‘Just goes to show how much you bloody Yanks know about real food.’
Kilbride held up his hands to silence them. On one hand he liked to see all the piss-taking – it meant that his men were relaxed despite the pressure of the coming mission. On the other, he knew that a clock was ticking, and there was one hell of a lot to do before their departure for Beirut.
‘Right, back to the job in hand. On arrival in Beirut we’ve got a Lebanese contact who’ll guide us in to the bank. So the two biggest challenges are these: one, the route in from the submarine drop-off point to Beirut itself; two, how we get in and out of the city without being rumbled by either side. The plan we put to Major Thistlefuck has us going in disguised as a guerrilla force, but I’m open to anything on this one …’
Ron Boerke plonked down his Rubik’s Cube on the mess table. He’d just solved it by arranging each face into a distinct block of solid colour.
‘We had a similar situation in Botswana, when I was with the South African Defence Force,’ he announced quietly. He glanced at Kilbride. ‘We had to hit a high-value target. Diamonds, man. A big stash of diamonds in the hands of the rebels. We “borrowed” some Red Cross vehicles and used those as our cover. I say we do the same thing here, in Beirut.’
‘You really think no one’s going to notice?’ Tony Knight demanded in disbelief. ‘Course they fuckin’ are. A load of hairy-arsed blokes sat there in their combats and armed to the teeth, claiming to be Red Cross doctors. Or is it nurses we say we are? Get real.’
‘Think about it, man, before you open your mouth,’ Boerke replied coldly. ‘It’s not difficult – you engage your brain before speaking … You don’t wear combats, you wear white medical gowns. Someone acts dead, and lies in the back. Maybe that’s your job, Nightly – you wouldn’t find it difficult. There’s not much difference between that and the way things are now, is there? You keep your weapons and whatever you’ve stolen from the bank hidden with the dead man, where no decent soldier will ever start looking.’
Smithy shook his head and grimaced. ‘What, we load up a bunch of meat wagons with gold bullion instead of corpses? You’re a real sick bastard, Bushman, you know that?’
Boerke narrowed his eyes. ‘You can’t stop talking about that gold, can you, man? If the Red Cross ruse works, who gives a damn?’
‘It’s a pretty evil idea but it does have merit,’ Kilbride remarked. All of a sudden the situation had the potential to get ugly, and he wanted to move things along. ‘It depends on the availability of Red Cross vehicles in Beirut, and that needs checking.’
‘They have the vehicles, man,’ said Boerke. ‘Beirut is crawling with Red Cross – and with the Red Crescent, for that matter.’
Kilbride eyed the lean South African. He had a sneaking suspicion that Boerke had deep connections with South African intelligence, which had to mean with the Israelis, too.
‘How do you know?’ he asked.
Boerke reached out for his Rubik’s Cube and started to mix up t
he coloured faces. ‘I make it my business to know.’
‘Y’know, if we’re gonna go for it maybe it’d be better to be Red Crescent,’ Bill Berger volunteered. ‘Kinda more acceptable to the Muslim side of the conflict.’
‘What is it with you Yanks and the bloody Muslims?’ said Smithy. ‘You want to be one, or something?’
‘Way you Brits jerk the other guy’s chain all the time it’s a wonder you ever get any fightin’ done,’ Berger growled. ‘And one more thing – what Boerke’s proposing has gotta be unlawful. I mean, the Red Cross wrote the goddamn rules of war. There’s sure as hell gotta be a clause in there somewhere saying the military shouldn’t go impersonatin’ doctors.’
Boerke levelled his cold gaze at the American. ‘What are we, man: special forces or the United bloody Nations? In war you do what you have to.’
Berger held the lean South African’s stare. ‘You think we pussyfooted around in ’Nam?’ Whilst he respected the South African as a soldier, he’d never warmed to him. ‘We broke more rules than you guys ever dreamed of, and broke more heads whilst we was at it.’
‘I don’t scare easily, Captain,’ Boerke retorted. ‘And what you did in Vietnam is your own affair. All I’m saying is the Red Cross ruse will work, so let’s use it.’
‘And I ain’t tryin’ to scare you, buddy,’ Bill Berger growled. ‘If I was, you’d know about it. In fact, I appreciate your plan. I’m just making us aware of some of the pitfalls, that’s all.’
‘There are no pitfalls. Let me tell you something, man. In Beirut neither side takes any prisoners – not even women and children. You want to steal a load of gold bullion from under the noses of the Beirut militias, you’d better have a plan that works.’
‘Now who’s going on about thieving the bloody gold?’ Smithy cut in. ‘You got gold on the brain, Boerke.’
‘I take my cue from you, Sergeant,’ Boerke replied, without missing a beat. ‘One more thing. The Red Cross use foreign medical staff – always. It’s one of their principles. So no one will suspect anything if a group of foreign Red Cross medics pitch up in Beirut. It’s about the only cover that will work for us. Posing as a guerrilla force is fine – until you open your mouth, that is. Then it’ll get us all killed.’