by Chris Ryan
Back in the bar I muttered, ‘Time to thin out, lads. We could have a problem. I’ll see you.’
‘Where’s your admirer?’ asked Pat.
‘Just having a little nap.’
With that I said good-night to Fred and moved off casually. On the way home I tried to make sense of the yobbo’s aggression. Tracy had said something about recently breaking up with a boyfriend… but no — she would never have been friends with a turd like that. And anyway, how could he possibly associate me with her? She and I had never been seen together in town. I decided that there was no connection; it was just normal jealousy of the Regiment coming out. All the same, the incident made me realize how much the girl was on my mind.
FIVE
A few days before we left, at the start of December, we heard on the grapevine that 500 men of the First Glosters had been sent to Ulster in response to the latest upsurge of violence. It certainly sounded as though we were going to get some action.
Several of the lads went berserk over their packing, insisting that they take almost every single object they possessed. We knew that our accommodation was going to be basic — no more than a series of Portakabins inside a warehouse — yet they seemed hell-bent on having their fridges, TV sets, microwaves and God — knows-what with them. There was no limit on what we were allowed to take — the bulk items went ahead by road and ferry, leaving us with only our ops kit — all the same, I didn’t go in for much heavy stuff; for one thing, I didn’t think I’d need it, and for another, I didn’t want to strip the cottage just as the girls moved in. In the end all I took was my Technics stereo system, minus the speakers, because I reckoned they’d piss off my neighbours in a close-quarter environment, and in any case I’d recently invested in a pair of Stax headphones whose sound quality put the speakers in the shade.
A Puma came into camp on the Monday afternoon, and lifted the twelve of us away over the Welsh mountains. Looking across the cabin, I was glad to see the grizzled, close-cropped head of Tom Dawson, the sergeant major, who was coming as our second-in-command on the final posting of his career. I suppose that in a way he was a father figure to us all, and, maybe because I had no parents of my own, I’d benefited more than most of the guys from his wisdom and long experience.
We put down to refuel in a shit-hole of a depot on the coast, and then did a flit across the sea. The crossing gave me time to reflect on the set-up at home. Tracy and Susan had moved their things in the day before, and we’d piled Kath’s clothes into the small spare bedroom. The three of us had spent that night in separate rooms, as proper as could be. In the morning I’d shown the girls how to work the central heating system and how to manage the wood-burning stove. I’d amassed a big store of logs, so they had plenty of fuel. ‘For God’s sake don’t burn the place down,’ I told Tracy. ‘That’s the only rule.’
At that stage I don’t think she’d said anything to Susan about her long-term plans; all Susan knew was that they had somewhere to live for the next few months. But when we were alone for a moment Tracy said again, ‘When you come back, I’ll be waiting for you.’ That gave me a big kick, of course, but I was still disturbed by the speed at which everything had happened. Kath had been killed on 28 July, and we were now only just into December. Four months. I kept telling myself that it wasn’t me who had written Kath off. I hadn’t done anything to get rid of her. Fate, or whatever, had snatched her.
My soul-searching didn’t last long. Soon we were over the coast and landing in the camp on the outskirts of Belfast. Inside the warehouse, the first thing we saw was a man with pink hair. ‘For fuck’s sake!’ cried Pat. ‘What’s this? A poofters’ convention?’ But an old SAS hand, who’d been there for a couple of months already, assured us that it was only one of the Det guys who’d tried to dye his fair hair brown but had got the mixture wrong. The senior wrangler explained that it was perfectly legitimate for members of the Det to change their appearance for cover purposes. This fellow, however, was going to have to stay out of sight for a few days, until he got himself sorted.
Apart from the pink head, our immediate surroundings weren’t that cheerful, but Pat and I got cabins next to each other and soon settled ourselves in. Some previous occupant of mine must have been a freak for Pirelli calendars, because it was tits and bums on every wall. Rather than rip them down and have bare cream-coloured panels all round, I left them where they were, gradually persuading myself that in some respects the June bird looked remarkably like Tracy.
The best that could be said for our set-up was that everything was under one roof: not only our cabins, but also the briefing room, armoury, MT depot, canteen, bar, showers and bogs were situated within the warehouse. To me it had a claustrophobic air, but the guys who handed over to us assured us that you soon got used to it. One feature nobody had warned us about was the rats. That first evening a sudden yell of outrage went up, and we ran out of our cabins to see a guy called Ginger Norris pointing up into the roof.
‘Look at that!’ he roared. ‘The biggest fucking rat you’ve ever seen!’
Sure enough, there on one of the girders perched a vast rat, a real monster, and, when a volley of trainers went up at it, all it did was move a tier higher and sit there polishing its whiskers, cool as a pint of Stella. ‘Jesus Christ!’ cried Ginger. ‘Never mind the PIRA or anybody else, the next thing’ll be we’ll all go down with lepto-fucking-spirosis.’ He was all for taking out the rat with his Sig, until somebody pointed out that we’d be even worse off if he shot the roof full of holes and let the rain through.
‘It’s those wankers of cooks,’ explained one of the old hands. ‘They sling all the leftover food in open bins out the back of the cookhouse, and the rats eat themselves stupid. It’s like giving them a free run of the menu at the Dorchester.’
‘Why don’t we get some cats?’ I suggested.
‘Cats?’ said Ginger derisively. ‘Cats? Rats this size would have them for breakfast.’
* * *
Our first couple of days were spent on orientation, getting to know Belfast itself. Even though I’d made several visits to my in-laws in Helen’s Bay, and had come into the city centre from the east, I’d never been in West Belfast, and now I was appalled by the sheer squalor of the place. I’d seen endless pictures of it on television, of course, and I was familiar with the crude murals of black-hooded figures painted on the sides of buildings; but nothing had quite prepared me for the pure grot — the scruffiness, the meanness, the ugliness, the filth.
Our own senior guys drove us around the softer areas of the city in unmarked cars; but the hard areas were out of bounds to such vehicles, and the only way we could get a look at them was by courtesy of the RUC, who gave us tours, two at a time, in the back of their armoured Land Rovers.
That meant, first of all, getting infiltrated into one of the fortified police stations — an experience in itself. The one Pat and I went to was defended like Fort Knox with high, anti-rocket wire-mesh screens, mortar-proof walls of reinforced concrete, and closed-circuit television cameras bristling from every rooftop. Driving in, we passed through three separate manned gateways; then, to enter the building, we went round a couple of corners — thick walls set at right-angles to each other to cut down the chance of blast penetration.
Inside, a sergeant gave us a quick tour, mainly of the ops room, where radios crackled and the walls were covered with large-scale maps dotted with coloured pins. This station, said our guide, had been attacked more than a hundred times, with rockets, mortars, sniper fire and coffee-jar devices, or petrol bombs. ‘They fired an RPG7 from the distilleries into the canteen, so they did,’ he told us. ‘There were no fatalities, but quite a few people were injured. Then they tried to float a bomb down the stream which passes under the station in a tunnel. We have a cage on either end, and cameras, but still they were going to try it. Luckily the Special Branch got wind of what was happening, and they aborted the attempt.’
From one of the sangars — high, fortified towers
— we had a great view over the city. Everything looked peaceful enough, yet still our guide could speak of nothing but attacks. One great merit of the station’s position, he explained, was that it had a school and a housing estate right behind it. These made the PIRA reluctant to fire mortars in that direction, because the weapons were notoriously unreliable, and an overshoot that caused civilian casualties would create very bad publicity.
We ventured out on patrol in a police Land Rover. A constable drove, and a sergeant called Martin kept up a running commentary from the passenger seat. We crouched in the back, craning forward to peer out through the armoured glass of the windscreen, with a third RUC man scanning through the small aperture in one of the rear doors.
Here, on this corner, a rocket attack on a police Land Rover had cut an RUC sergeant nearly in half. Here a lad had tried to throw a bomb over the wall into a police station, but he’d dropped it, and it blew off his arm. Here, on the Falls Road, was the infamous Rock Bar, where members of the PIRA would meet for a pint. Here they had staged a burglary on a library, and as a policeman approached to investigate they’d opened up on him with an M 60 machine-gun. Here was Rose Cottage, inhabited by a harmless old pensioner. Under the pretence of befriending him, IRA men had offered to decorate a room for him, and in the course of doing so they had built a false wall, shortening the room by about five feet and creating a major weapons hide, later discovered by the Royal Marines.
We were patrolling as a pair, in company with a second vehicle, never far from it, in case one or other suddenly needed help. Martin was frequently on his radio: ‘Six Five, roger. We’re just going to Sebastopol… We’re passing Berlin.’ Every now and then our partner vehicle would drive past in the opposite direction, as the pair wove intricate patterns through the sordid, run-down streets. Again and again Martin said, ‘The whole of this road is divided, Green Nationalists on one side, Orange Protestants on the other.’ But he kept emphasizing that most of the population was perfectly normal: ‘There’s so many decent people here. The proportion of bad ones is very small.’ Nevertheless, he agreed that he was constantly on the lookout for familiar faces, trying to spot known players and work out their patterns of movement, and after an hour I felt the entire place was poisoned by hatred.
Back in the station, Pat and I went off to have a piss. The nearest gents was tucked away on the floor below, and Martin came down to show us the route, leaving us to find our own way back. As we emerged, a man in civvies was coming along the corridor towards us — quite an old guy, with grey hair — and as I glanced at him I felt a prickle of recognition. In the same instant his face gave a flicker as he recognized me.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I know you, surely.’
‘Yes — we met in Hereford.’
It was Chief Superintendent Morrison, the RUC man who’d talked to our course at LATA.
‘Geordie Sharp,’ I said, ‘and this is a colleague, Pat.’
We all shook hands, and Morrison said, ‘Have you a moment for a chat? This is my office, right here.’
He pointed at a door beside us. Instinctively I said, ‘D’you want to go on up, Pat? I’ll be with you in a couple of minutes.’
Pat got the message and thinned out. The chief ushered me into his office, large but bare, and gestured at a chair in front of the desk. ‘Take a seat. Just come over?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, I hope you have a successful tour.’
I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that. Was it just innocent good wishes? I said, ‘Thanks.’
He started fiddling with a glass paperweight. Then, looking steadily at me across the desk, he said, ‘I believe you lost your wife in the Queensfield bomb.’
‘That’s right.’
‘I’m so sorry. I know it was an own-goal, but there’s no consolation in that. Very likely the device would have killed even more people if it had gone off where they meant it to. I think I told you over in England, we’re up against real bastards here, evil bastards. What I didn’t say to your course was that I’ve lost my own brother to them, and his son, my nephew. So I can imagine how you feel.’
‘Thanks,’ I repeated.
‘Sympathy’s not much use. I’ve learnt that over the years. But you have mine, and if there’s anything I can do to help, you’ll let me know.’
Even as he spoke, an idea was opening up in my mind.
‘That’s very good of you,’ I said, and then I added casually, ‘I don’t suppose you know who did it — who was responsible for the bomb?’
‘I’d have to check. Why?’ His lined, grey face softened into a smile. ‘D’you fancy going after them or something?’
‘No, no.’ I forced a smile in return. ‘I just thought it might help somehow, to know.’
‘Of course. And if I did find out any information, what would I do with it?’
‘Maybe you could send it care of my father-in-law. That would be the safest.’ I gave him the address in Helen’s Bay.
‘Good enough. And now maybe you’d better rejoin your colleague. I’m pleased to have seen you again.’
I went back to the ops room feeling like a conspirator, busy with my own thoughts — only to find that the others were talking about a subject of intense interest to me: the way in which leading players protected their houses. Many had closed-circuit TV cover front and back, Martin was saying, and most reinforced their front doors with steel plates and big, heavy, old-fashioned iron bars which could be swung or slotted into place at night, making it impossible to force an entry. Often they’d have an inner door as well, with an air-lock between the two in which they could scrutinize visitors. Then, at the bottom of the stairs, they’d have a cage or grille of heavyweight weldmesh, so that they could seal off the upper floor. That way, they were safe from all but the most determined attacks.
* * *
The troop’s eight intercept cars were monsters in disguise. They looked quite ordinary, but under their sedate exterior lurked mighty engines and any number of refinements. Some of the engines had merely been hotted-up, but others had been replaced by more powerful units altogether. The extra punch was needed because the cars were carrying a huge amount of weight in the form of armour — at the front, along the sidepanels, and behind the two back seats. To manage all this, as well as four blokes and their gear, rifles, shotguns, assault kits, door-charges and so on, the springs and shock-absorbers had been uprated. Even so, the belly-plates were liable to ground when you went over bumps like sleeping policemen, sending out showers of sparks.
Inside each car there was a comprehensive comms system, with the radio tucked away in the glove compartment, a pressel-switch down by the handbrake, and a microphone slotted into the sun visor. For normal covert operations we’d listen through our earpieces, but there was also a loudspeaker fitted into the glove compartment for when the shit hit the fan. ‘If you get into a chase, and the villains know you’re after them, there’s no point in trying to stay covert, so you switch to the speaker,’ somebody explained. ‘Equally, if you start to take incoming, and the windscreen goes, your earpieces are the last thing you need.’
I didn’t appreciate quite what the cars would do until I went out for a familiarization drive. The one I had was an old Rover 2000 known as the Bluesmobile. It looked drab and decrepit, as if it was well past its scrapby date, and when we started out I thought I was driving a tank, so heavy did it feel. But as soon as I got out on to the ring road and put my foot down — that was something else. In a few seconds we were doing 150 m.p.h., with a good bit in hand, and only a buildup of traffic far ahead made me ease off. Thereafter I took things more steadily and concentrated on getting familiar with the radio system. One lesson I learnt from the run is that a G3 is a brute of a weapon to take in a car: too long to fit down neatly beside the driver’s seat, and difficult to bring up quickly. I’d already heard of an occasion when a G3 had slipped so that the muzzle landed on the accelerator pedal, and the driver suddenly found himself heading o
ff into the sunset at a great rate of knots. Now I saw the wisdom of bringing an HK 53, which would fit comfortably under the seat.
* * *
Our familiarization was supposed to last for the first couple of weeks, but in the event things turned out less leisurely. One evening I was in my cabin, with Eric Clapton keeping the world at bay, when through the music I heard a call on the tannoy: ‘Standby team into the briefing room.’
In half a minute all ten of us had assembled.
Tom Dawson, the second-in-command, was in charge. ‘Right, lads,’ he began. ‘We’ve got a fast ball. Operation Eggshell. It’s a babysitting job, with a few strings attached. There’s a hit going down on a senior political figure, timed for 2230 tonight. The boss is at TCG, getting details. Basically it’s a city job, in East Belfast. We need four guys to babysit and six to deploy in the intercept cars.’
He turned to me. ‘Geordie, you’re to command the house party. The address is Knocklofty Park. There’s no time for an on-site recce, so you’ll need to take a good look at the map and get your arses down there a.s.a.p. Covert approach from wasteground behind. If you want to grab something to eat you’ve got twenty minutes. Final briefing at 2000, and roll immediately after.’
Because I’d already eaten, I had plenty of time to sort and check my kit: HK 53, side-arm, magazines for both, torch, knife, wire-cutters, covert radio. We’d go in wearing civilian clothes, but with our ops waistcoats on. I told all my guys to bring a pair of clean trainers for when we got inside the house; even if the people you’re looking after are about to be blown to kingdom come, they don’t take it kindly if you mess up their carpets. I also packed a roll of heavy-duty polythene and one of lightweight black cloth, for doctoring up a lookout room when we established ourselves in the target. (With film slanted across a room from ceiling to floor and the back wall blacked out, you can move around without somebody outside being able to see you.) Then I thought, if the old people are going to be in the house, we’d better take flak-jackets for them, just in case shrapnel comes through the floor or one of the doors. Also we needed a couple of big medical packs.