by Chris Ryan
‘If you think he’s seen you, the golden rule is: peel off. Tell everyone else and get lost. Things go tits-up when somebody thinks he’s OK and carries on. If you do that, all you manage to do is confirm to the target that surveillance is on him, and he may go to ground for weeks. OK, then, listen to this.’
He switched on an audio-tape — a hissing, crackly recording of a live operation. Every time a new voice came in he moved the corresponding white counter, and after every report he shifted the black target to a new position, all the time throwing in explanations of his own.
‘I’ve got the trigger on Bravo One’s house,’ said the first voice. ‘At the moment he’s complete.’
‘In other words, he’s indoors,’ said the instructor.
Then, a moment later, the voice said, ‘Stand by, stand by. The door’s open. Oh no. Nothing. It’s his wife going to the bins.’ Another pause. Then, ‘Stand by, stand by. That’s Bravo One leaving. He’s foxtrot northwards.’
‘He’s walking up this street here,’ the instructor explained, sliding the black counter upwards.
The voice came in again. ‘He’s wearing black on blue. Heading for the Drover’s Arms on the corner. Now he’s turning right…’
Another voice, a Scottish accent: ‘Yeah, I’ve got him. I can take him down Commercial Street. He’s foxtrot eastwards. Now he’s joined up with Bravo Two. They’ve both gone complete in Charlie One, a bronze Escort. Can’t get the number.’
‘Both targets are in the car,’ said the instructor, placing a yellow disc on the board.
A few seconds passed, and the Scots voice returned: ‘Charlie One mobile eastwards towards Green Three.’
Then came another voice, measured, authoritative, the controller: ‘Steve, are you covering Green Three?’
‘On Green Three, facing north.’
‘Prepare to take over Charlie One…’
As I listened, I felt the hairs on my neck rise up. The process was fascinating in itself, but in my mind’s eye I was part of a team in West Belfast, tracking two players through the seedy Nationalist areas — maybe the Falls Road or Andersontown. The guys in the car were leading us towards Gary Player and a major contact. Any moment I might set eyes on my No. 1 enemy.
The soundtrack fell silent. ‘If you’re driving,’ the instructor said, ‘the one place you don’t want to be is in the car behind the target. Keep two or three cars back. If people are doing something they didn’t ought to be doing, they’re forever looking behind them in their mirrors. If you do find yourself behind, for Christ’s sake peel off at the first opportunity and get someone else to take over.’
‘Stop, stop, stop!’ called a new voice from the tape. ‘Charlie One has pulled up in a lay-by at 489346. Bravo Two is foxtrot towards a telephone kiosk…’
The lads were getting excited by the idea of going across the water, and enthusiasm rose still higher whenever guys came back with stories of live operations. Several concerned the ace sniper who was doing shoots in the border area and in Belfast, taking soldiers out with a .50 rifle — a fearsome weapon which could put a round straight through a man’s chest, flak jacket and all, at five or six hundred metres. The sniper was highly skilled and well organized. From the way he operated, the Det concluded that he had been trained in America. He had a lot of dickers — lookouts — who would check that an area was clear before he ventured forth. Then, if all was well, he’d come out and do a shoot on an army patrol. The only man known to have survived an attack from him was a soldier who’d been on patrol in West Belfast. The incoming round hit his SA 80, which he was holding across his chest. The weapon disintegrated, and parts of it (or of the .50 bullet) flew upwards, ripping chunks out of his face; but at least he wasn’t killed.
The Regiment had set out to get the sniper by staging a come-on, posing as a green army patrol. The idea was to egg him on and keep him on the air so that the radio specialists could DF him and find out where he was based. It was dicey as hell, but it nearly worked. A few of the Regiment guys dressed up as ordinary soldiers and went through the motions of mounting a patrol. As they came into the target area, through their earpieces they could hear a dicker commentating on their progress.
‘OK,’ said this Ulster voice, ‘there’s a patrol coming down the road. They’ll be in your field of view in about thirty seconds.’
The sniper did not answer. There was a pause, then a sudden change of emphasis. ‘Jaysus!’ said the Ulster voice. ‘There’s something wrong here. They’ve got the wrong fecking weapons. They’ve got G3s, not SA 80s. The fellers are older, as well. They don’t look like squaddies at all.’
The sniper realized immediately that the patrol was an SAS one. All he said was, ‘I’m pulling off.’ With that he fell silent, and the attempt at DF-ing him failed.
That wasn’t the end of it, though. The Regiment tried again; this time they went to the lengths of taking a black fellow over, to make the patrol look still more realistic. They carried SA 80s, so that everything seemed pukka. It was quite an elaborate operation, with some guys airborne in a chopper and others deployed on the ground around the periphery, to block the sniper in if they got a line on where he was set up.
Again the patrol was listening out as the dickers commentated on their approach, but this time, to their consternation, they heard the shooter say, ‘Right, I’m ready to fire. I’ll take the second fecker from the front.’ At that they did a bomb-burst, and every man hit the deck in a different direction. Then they upped and ran like stags, all over the place. They didn’t collect back at the emergency rendezvous for more than an hour, and by then the gunman had once again melted into the night.
Of all our training, it was the range practices that I enjoyed most. Partly it was because I had become quite good with a pistol; but beyond that, in putting down live rounds I felt I was getting closer to my objective than on any of the rest of our activities, realistic though they were.
For pistol training we’d head out to the range at 0900. A couple of the guys were detailed to collect ammunition from the stores and lug the heavy metal boxes to the range hut. One man would go round putting up the red flags, to show that live firing was in progress, and the rest of us would sort out the targets.
The range had high stop-banks of soil thrown up in a horseshoe shape, so that you could fire at targets round three sides of it. Old railway sleepers were set into the ground, with holes drilled into them so that targets could easily be set up. We’d start by firing off two or three magazines just to get comfortable. Everyone had used pistols earlier in their training, so they all knew which their master eye was and how to take up a proper, easy stance: semi-crouching, with — for a righthander — the left hand cupped round the outside of the right, supporting it.
If rounds started going low, you knew you were snatching at the trigger — and the instructors had a special drill for correcting that fault. One of them would say, ‘Hey, try doing the old ball and dummy with me.’ Then he’d stand behind the shooter and load his pistol for him, sometimes putting live rounds in the magazine, sometimes leaving it empty, so that the man pulling the trigger didn’t know if it was going to go off or not. That way, if he was flinching and snatching, the instructor could see the end of the barrel dip, and try to rectify the fault.
After the guys had sorted themselves out and got their eyes in, everyone would have a brew from the urn by the target shed. Then the instructor would move on to drawing from holsters. He’d line up the lads in front of the targets and call, ‘UP!’ Everyone would draw, fire a quick double-tap, then re-holster the pistol. Then we’d turn through ninety degrees to the right or left, and at the second command we’d draw, swivel and fire. Next we’d turn the other way, shoot from that position, and finally face backwards, so that we had to spin through 180 degrees.
Then we’d do some walking practice — maybe four of us at a time. The aim was to get everybody nice and confident, walking with their hands at their sides, in a relaxed attitude. Then at the comma
nd ‘UP!’ we’d stop, draw, whip round and fire, all in a split second. If the targets were numbered, and we were walking in pairs, the instructor might yell ‘ONE AND FOUR!’ whereupon we’d have to engage those two targets. When each practice finished, the instructor would say, ‘OK, guys, paste up,’ and we’d go forward to stick coloured patches over the bullet holes.
At some stage, as we were firing, he’d yell ‘Stoppage!’ and we’d go down on one knee, hitting the release button of the magazine as we went; we’d whip the magazine out, slot another in, and be firing again as we came back up. In a contact, our lives might depend on the speed with which we reacted, and I practised until I could do the change in less than three seconds.
Speed and accuracy were everything. With the Hun’s Head targets — the silhouette of a German soldier’s head and trunk — it was always the head we aimed at, and up to twenty paces I reckoned I could put a double-tap straight through the middle of the forehead ten times out of ten. With the bigger Figure 11 targets we stuck on small white patches to give us precise aiming marks.
I found it odd that the lads who weren’t actually firing would show little interest in what was going on. They’d sit on the bench outside the hut, chit-chatting away — the young ones would be on about the old trout they’d been humping the night before, the older guys about the extensions they were putting on their houses. As for me, I couldn’t get enough of it. I had grown fanatically determined that if ever my chance came across the water, I wasn’t going to flunk it. I’m sure some of the guys thought I was becoming obsessive, and I suppose I was — but only for a reason about which I couldn’t enlighten them.
* * *
All our training emphasized the need for restraint and split-second timing. Many times in the past (we heard), our predecessors had had to wait until players were actually levelling weapons in front of them before they themselves could fire; if they’d shot sooner, before they were under immediate threat, they could have ended up in court charged with murder. It seemed ridiculous that the dice should be so heavily loaded in the terrorists’ favour — yet that was the way things stood.
I recalled part of old Morrison’s tirade, in which he had lambasted the excessive restraints under which the security forces had to work: ‘When we’ve brought a murderer into the station,’ he’d said, ‘if I so much as cuff him on the ear, that’ll guarantee to put me in court. If I kick the chair from under him, that’s an assault. Even if I lean over the table to emphasize a point, that’s threatening him, and the interview’s stopped because it’s being monitored by the chief inspector sitting in the back.’
In some irrational way, I felt that the normal restrictions did not apply to me. Gary Player had already committed murder, and that was sufficient justification for my taking him out, never mind any further crimes he might commit. At the back of my mind I realized that in planning a personal vendetta I was stepping out of line. The essence of any SAS operation is teamwork, and here I was, trying to crack something on my own.
Working solo, without mates to cover my movements, would expose me to a far greater risk of getting shot or captured. Normally, working in pairs, you cover each other, and you can shoot your way out of trouble. Alone, without a partner, I could easily end up in the shit. I never really faced up to the thought of what might happen if I was captured. Very few of the guys ever did. Deep down, they knew perfectly well that if the IRA got them, they would be whipped south of the border and would probably never see the light of day again. They would die — but not before they had suffered unspeakable tortures. For this reason, some of them privately admitted that if things looked really bad they’d shoot themselves; but most preferred to believe they would come out fighting. I was one of that majority.
Apart from survival, there was also the little matter of identifying my victim. How in hell was I to find out who he was? And even if I did discover his name, how was I to track him down? Such was the force of my anger that I had no doubt I would find him somehow.
One morning a couple of weeks before the end of the course, I was due to have my arm checked by a specialist in the tri-service hospital at Wroughton. By then I was so hyped up that the thought of losing half a day’s training quite pissed me off — but I scented possible compensation in the fact that Tracy might be on duty when I clocked in at the camp Med Centre to pick up my X-rays.
She was. When I appeared, she was on the phone, but before I’d taken two steps into the room she banged down the receiver with a loud cry of ‘SHIT!’
‘Something the matter?’
‘It’s our effing landlord. He’s throwing us out.’
‘That’s tough. What happened?’
She told me she’d been living with a friend, Susan, in a flat on the outskirts of town. They had no proper security of tenure, and now the owner of the house was going abroad and wanted to let the whole place as a single unit. He had given the girls a fortnight to pack their bags.
Listening to Tracy talk, watching her, I thought she had changed. Her face was lit up with indignation, but she seemed more mature, less wild and tarty than I remembered her. Maybe I was influenced by the fact that she’d been very sweet about Kath the first time I’d seen her after the disaster. In any case, I now felt sorry for her.
Even so, it wasn’t until I was in the minibus, half-way to Wroughton, that the idea hit me. For some time I’d been worrying what would happen to Keeper’s Cottage when I went to Belfast. Tony was about to go off on the jungle phase of his selection course; in any case, he wouldn’t want to live out in the country on his own while I was away. I could simply lock the door and go, but I didn’t want the place to stand empty for months on end.
So why not offer the house to Tracy and Susan? I didn’t know whether or not Susan had a car, but Tracy certainly had one, and could easily commute in and out. As long as being out in the wilds didn’t spook them, they could live in the cottage rent-free, look after things till I got back, and give themselves time to find permanent accommodation elsewhere.
At Wroughton there was the usual delay. A backlog of patients had built up, and I was told I’d have to wait half an hour; so I went down the corridor to the payphone and called the Med Centre’s reception.
‘Hi,’ I began. ‘It’s me, Geordie.’
‘What’s happened now? Left your head behind?’
‘Listen — I’ve had an idea about a place for you and Susan. You can have my house. It’s going to be empty from the end of the month, for the best part of a year.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Off the Madley road, about four miles out.’
‘How much d’you want for it?’
‘Nothing. I just need to have it looked after.’
‘Well…’
I could practically see her squirming her neat little arse about on her chair.
‘Tell you what — I could pick you up tonight and take you out to have a look. Susan as well; you’d better both see it. It’s pretty much out in the wilds, on its own. What do you think?’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course. I wouldn’t be ringing otherwise.’
‘What time, then?’
‘Wait one. I’ll be back up from LATA about half seven. Say half-eight. What’s your address?’
She gave it, and then said, ‘There’s no strings attached to this, are there?’
‘Of course not.’
* * *
I was there five minutes early, showered and changed. Naturally I’d said nothing to the guys on the course, but all day I’d been haunted by a peculiar feeling, half guilt, half anticipation. Was I being disloyal to Kath’s memory? There was no denying that I found Tracy attractive. But then I told myself, hell — I’m just trying to fix up a business arrangement, of mutual benefit.
Or so I thought — until she came flying down the steps of the house, all legs and arms.
‘Where’s Susan?’ I asked.
‘She had a date already. But she likes the idea, and she’s given
me power of attorney to do what I think fit. Anyway, her job means she is away a lot, travelling.’
‘Let’s go, then.’
She was wearing a silver-grey track suit, and had a small bag hung over one shoulder. From the scent that wafted off her in the car I didn’t think she’d been running. I had a good look at her profile for the first time, and saw that it matched her manner exactly, being rather pert and perky. On our way out she asked about Tim, and I explained he was with his Gran in Belfast.
‘Is he OK?’
I turned to look at her, and saw her looking steadily, seriously, back at me.
‘I think so. Lucky he’s so young.’
‘That’s right.’
She fell silent for a couple of minutes. But then, as I turned down the lane to the cottage, she exclaimed, ‘Gawd! You said it!’
‘What?’
‘Buried away.’
‘D’you mind that?’
‘I dunno. I’ve never lived in a place like this.’
When we got out of the car she shuddered and said in an aggrieved voice, ‘It’s dark!’
‘What did you expect? It’s night-time.’
‘I mean, there are no lights anywhere.’
‘This is the country. You don’t have lights in the country. Don’t need any. If you eat plenty of carrots, you can see in the dark.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘Honest!’
‘There could be people lurking about out here.’
‘What sort of people?’
‘Rapists. Homicidal maniacs.’
‘There are far more of them in towns. This isn’t the environment for people like that.’
For a few seconds I thought she was going to throw a wobbly, especially when an owl sounded off close by. But in fact things went the other way. Once inside, she responded strongly to the place. She was a city kid all right, but her mind was open, and she was prepared to learn and adapt. She loved the house, saw the mess, gave me a mild bollocking, said she’d take over, and set straight in to clear up the kitchen.