by Andy McNab
I stuck both elbows out to keep symmetry. If I'd only stuck one out, the air would grab it and I'd start spinning.
I wasn't perfectly stable, but I was all right. Rob was there somewhere, just feet away, but I couldn't see him. My eyes were filled with the alti readout on my left wrist.
At 3,500 feet, I pulled the handle. The pin that secured the canopy came away. I checked I had the ring in my hand. Not that I needed to: the pack on my back was rattling from side to side as the spring pushed the drogue (small chute) clear to catch air and pull out the main canopy. Then the para-cord lines bounced off my back and, BANG, the canopy grabbed air. I was Bugs Bunny sprinting round a corner straight into a whack from a frying-pan.
27
I wasn't as worried as I should have been about where everybody else was in the sky. I was busy enough sorting myself out.
I heard another canopy crack open, so someone must have been close. I looked up to make sure I had a canopy rather than a big bag of washing about eighteen feet above me. The ends of the canopy still hadn't fully inflated. I grabbed hold of the brake lines, ripped them from the Velcro on the risers just above each shoulder and pumped them hard.
I looked up, going through the drills. Everything was where it should be as the parachute fully inflated. But, fuck, my bollocks hurt! The leg straps had worked their way into my groin and it felt like someone was giving the bad boys a violent squeeze.
I checked around my airspace, ready to take evasive action. There was no one else around, no other parachutes turning left when they should have been turning right, screaming in towards me. That was it. All I had to do now was enjoy the ride.
I could see the instructors under their square canopies, swooping like buzzards round their pupils as we fell towards the earth beneath our steam-driven PB6s, with no control beyond left or right turns.
Vehicles made their way along the A40 like toys. Sheep the size of cotton-wool buds were sprinkled across the fields. The guys manning the drop zone (DZ) kicked off blue smoke. We needed to turn into the wind when we landed.
There was nothing else to do, suspended in the silent sky, but before I knew it, I was getting ground rush. As you get level with the horizon, you realize how fast the hard stuff is coming up to meet you. You're dropping at 20 m.p.h., the same as jumping off a ten-foot wall. I tucked myself into the parachute-landing-fall (PLF) position, knees bent, feet together, ready to accept the landing.
I hit the ground and rolled. Sort of. There wasn't any time to savour the moment. I had to field-pack the canopy into the big green nylon bag I had stuffed down the front of my overalls, drop it off with the RAF riggers, jump in a wagon and scream back to Brize Norton for another drop. We were doing three a day and getting debriefed in between.
The first few jumps felt clumsy and unnatural; then I started to get the hang of things. We were jumping 'clean fatigue': no Bergen, no weapon, no equipment, no oxygen gear. Before we graduated to Pau we had to be able to control ourselves in the sky: left turn, right turn, back and forward flips, track, spin, and recover from any kind of unstable exit.
Freefall is a combination of acrobatics and aerodynamics, and it can't be mastered in a classroom. Like learning to ride a bike, you just have to get out there and do it. You can be taught the physics of balance, but after that, as Snapper would have said, it's all about barrel tiiiime. And until the grown-ups took the stabilizers off, we wouldn't be going to Pau.
A lot of the manoeuvres were like trampoline work. For back flips, you tucked your knees into your chin, pushed your arms down in the air and threw your head back. The world was blue sky, then green, then blue again before we flared out back into the frog.
To achieve horizontal movement – tracking – you held your arms near your sides like a swept-wing jet, and made tiny correcting movements. You could generate enormous speed this way, and end up travelling much faster than someone falling vertically at terminal velocity.
Even after a week of it I felt the same exhilaration each time I left the aircraft. It wasn't just the freefall itself. It was passing the point of no return. Mobility Troop could pull over and stop to sort out a problem. Mountain Troop could find another route over their lump of rock, or come back down. Boat Troop could get out of the water or even float on it. But Air Troop? There was no going back once you'd exited the aircraft. Unless you were Frank, of course, and had the angels on your side.
28
Monday morning, week two, we were in the crew room, just coming to the end of our daily brief. It was going to be very much the same sort of stuff to start with, lots of 360s and somersaults, staying with the instructor, making sure you completed the manoeuvre and stopped directly in front of him.
A bellow echoed down the corridor outside. 'All right, mate?'
Even if I hadn't recognized the voice, I'd have recognized the fart that followed.
A burst of laughter was followed by a soft Geordie accent telling Nish to get his arse to shut up and go and fetch some brews.
We walked out to the rigging shelves to collect our gear. Frank, Al and Nish were in a huddle with the instructors. They obviously knew each other well.
Al looked over at me and shook his head. 'Fuck me, a crap hat in the brotherhood. What next?'
Everyone laughed, even the SBS lads.
There were three sports rigs on the shelves, much smaller than ours, and three plastic Pro-Tec helmets, the kind canoeists wear. Ours were much heavier Para Reg pudding basins.
Nish picked one up and grinned. 'Don't need much.' He tapped his skull with his knuckles. 'Tough as a coconut.'
It was Al's turn to smile. 'Thick as, more like.'
Nish dived into one of the neat white RAF lunchboxes and took out an orange. He threw it to Frank before coming over and studying my rig as if he was the resident expert on Antiques Roadshow. 'We came in on one of the 109s – he's waiting to pick up the CO, so we thought we'd cadge a lift and get a couple in.' He grabbed one of the sports rigs. 'Besides, old Father Frank wants to have a one-to-one with his boss . . .'
I watched the three of them rig up over their baggies – civilian jumpsuits, multicoloured and a lot looser, designed to grab air – in the back of the C-130. They had handles on the bottoms of the legs and on the forearms so they could grab each other more securely during relative work – something I wouldn't be learning till the last third of the course. Then they got their Pro-Tecs on and ran through the drills, exactly as the instructors had said the pros did. It was almost like watching a t'ai chi session: they slowly raised their hands and mimed the pull, looking up, then down at their rig, tugging the imaginary handle that would cut away the snared canopy. Then they went into freefall again, and pulled their reserve.
When we were over the DZ, Rob signalled me forward onto the ramp as usual. As I turned to him, I saw that the other three weren't facing back into the aircraft like I did, but forward, and bunched up really close to each other, immediately behind Rob, for a mass dive exit. They were coming with me.
Frank bit into the orange to clamp it in his mouth.
I thought, OK, not a clue what the fuck's going on.
Rob gave me the ready, set, go. I jumped and looked up to get eye-to-eye before I got stable-on-heading to start my exercise.
Nish, Frank and Al were directly behind him. They flew down to me, all smiles, apart from Frank. He still had a face full of orange.
They linked arms just off to my right. I still had to get my exercise done within the fifty seconds of freefall. I did my left-hand 360, making sure I stopped facing Rob. Rob nodded. I did a right-hand 360, and just overshot him. I managed to correct it and got a nod.
Nish pushed out his legs to catch air and the three of them slid towards me. Their heads were so close together they were almost touching.
Frank opened his mouth and let the orange go. It bounced about between their heads for three or four seconds before it was caught in the air and pushed out of the vortex.
My arm shook. Rob had grabb
ed hold of me and was gesturing. I still had exercises to do before 5,000 feet.
I did a forward roll, then a backward roll and banged out of it to stable-on-heading. Nish gave me a big thumbs-up, back-flipped out and tracked away with a wave. Frank turned, drew his arms back like a delta wing, and screamed across the sky. Al did a forward flip that took him into a rapid descent.
I checked my altimeter. It was just coming up to 4,000 feet.
Looking down at the handle, I grabbed it and waited for 3,500 before pulling down and away.
It turned out that not everyone was looking forward to going to Pau as much as I was. One of the SBS lads, the biggest, tallest, strongest on the course, one of those annoying guys who just naturally shit muscle, started to look a bit worried about it and kept asking the instructors what other units would be there.
'A couple of companies from 2 REP,' was the answer. The Deuxième Régiment Étranger de Parachutistes (2 REP) or 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment, was part of the world-famous French Foreign Legion. They served as its elite rapid-reaction force. There was never any shortage of volunteers for 2 REP, but selection was tough and restricted.
The SBS lad went very quiet. I guessed it was because he was a hard nut; maybe he didn't want to come up against the Foreign Legion and find himself lacking.
When we got there, he hid half the time and never went to the cookhouse. He lived on chocolate bars and scraps his mates brought back. It was his loss: 2 REP were great lads; they wanted to know all about us, and we wanted to know about them. They had shaven heads, but looked rather Gucci with their porte-monnaies and smart clothes. Many of them were Austrians, maybe grandkids of the hundreds of Nazis who joined the Legion in 1945 and went off to fight in Vietnam. They were hard, but we got on all right with them. Most were well educated; they spoke good English and French, as well as their own native language.
Our lad still wouldn't show his face. I thought he was a bit strange, but fuck him. Chances were I wouldn't see him again. It was only on the final night when we went down town to a fish place that he finally confessed. He'd gone AWOL from the Marines before he went to France. When he did the big romantic thing and joined the Legion, he eventually landed up in 2 REP. He only did three of the five years to which he'd committed himself. 'I just got bored.' He pushed a big lump of fish round his plate, the first real food he'd seen in two weeks. 'So I did a runner from them as well, went back to the Marines, faced the court-martial, did my prison time, went back to my commando and eventually got into SBS. When I was offered the freefall course I couldn't turn it down because every man and his dog wants to get onto military freefall. Going back to France was bad enough, but then I found out 2 REP were going to be here . . . And then it got even worse. I spotted one of my mates who'd joined up at the same time. It's something like a ten-year sentence when they catch a runner – hence all the Mars bars . . .'
29
November 1984
Belfast
Gloria Hunniford's white perm helmet was perched in front of me on the British Airways shuttle from Heathrow, but that wasn't my biggest buzz. With three days' growth around my chin, long hair, and cheap trainers I'd bought with my clothing allowance, this was the first time I'd ever been to Northern Ireland on a civilian flight. I was normally crammed into the back of a C-130 with a couple of rifle companies on the way to a tour, or in the early years, aboard a Royal Corps of Transport ferry from Liverpool docks. They were the worst. The boats were flat-bottomed for beach landings, which turned the Irish Sea into a rollercoaster – and the ride usually lasted something like fourteen hours. They were literally steam-driven.
Now here I was, sitting with a plastic cup of very black, well-stewed coffee, a dodgy, plastic-wrapped cheese sandwich and a one-finger Twix bar, listening to Gloria waffle away with her mate. Both were wearing some strange perfume, but it was heaps better than the diesel fumes on a ferry or the BO from sardine-packed soldiers in the back of a C-130.
I unwrapped my Twix and used it to stir the tiny carton of milk into the coffee. I read a bit of my newspaper. They were asking readers to write in and rank the most momentous events of the year. There were plenty to choose from. The Aids virus had been identified. The Indian prime minister, Indira Gandhi, had been assassinated. Ten million people were starving in Ethiopia. The Soviet bloc had boycotted the Los Angeles Olympic Games. Michael Jackson had sold billions of copies of Thriller, and the whole world seemed to be moonwalking to work.
Closer to home, and certainly closer to what I was about to be involved in, John Stalker, deputy chief constable of the Greater Manchester Police, had arrived in Belfast in May to begin an investigation into the alleged shoot-to-kill policy of security forces in the region. In September, security forces in the Republic of Ireland had intercepted a trawler, the Marita Ann, off the coast of County Kerry and uncovered seven tonnes of arms and explosives believed to be en route to PIRA. And, just a couple of days ago, PIRA had carried out a bomb attack on the Grand Hotel, Brighton, in England, which was being used as the base for the Conservative Party's annual conference. Four people were killed in the attack and another person died later from injuries received. PIRA issued a statement directed at Margaret Thatcher: 'Today we were unlucky; but remember, we only have to be lucky once – you will have to be lucky always.'
Frank had been lucky just two weeks ago. The madman had walked straight towards a possible PIRA firing point to check if anyone was in position. He had taken a patrol to an isolated house belonging to a part-time member of the security forces. The Tasking and Coordinating Group (TCG) had found out that he was being targeted and would probably be shot as he left the house.
The plan was to set up an ambush outside the house and wait for PIRA to turn up. The problem was that there was only one bit of cover in which to set it up. What if PIRA had got there first and was already in the bushes waiting for the target to leave the house at first light?
Frank's solution was to walk across the 300 metres of open ground between the house and the cover and see if anyone either ran for it or shot him.
They would have been flapping as Frank came towards them. What the fuck was he doing? How many more of them were there? Was it a trap? If they killed him, were they signing their own death warrants?
Frank kept walking, expecting at any moment to get a burst in the face. He finally got to the bushes and parted them. No one was there.
Now the boot was on the other foot. The patrol took up position in the cover. They waited four days, but PIRA never came. Maybe they'd heard there was this guy in the area whose next trick would be to turn them all into pillars of salt.
The seat-belt sign came on, and Gloria autographed one last in-flight magazine for a fellow passenger. I looked out of the window, down at the five-mile sniper range that most people called Belfast. With my new entry skill, I felt a completely paid-up member of Seven Troop and now I was going on ops.
There hadn't been too much of a brief before I'd left. I'd collected my ticket from the squadron clerk, and he'd said someone would pick me up at the other end. And that was that, because that was all he knew.
Al was waiting for me, dressed in a pair of jeans and a bomber jacket. At least he'd ditched the jumper. 'Hello, mate, how you doing?' He sounded as though he had a cold you couldn't climb over, and there was no colour in his face.
We went through our warm and wonderful greeting ritual for the benefit of any prying eyes looking for military targets to shoot at as they left the airport, and walked off towards the car park. We got into a Mazda saloon. Al handed me a Browning and an extra mag. 'It's loaded and made ready – safety catch is on.'
I shoved it under my right thigh. He got his out of his holster and stuck it under his leg and away we went.
Al was straight into his briefing. 'We're going to the troop location. You'll be sharing a room.'
I flapped straight away. He saw it and smiled. 'No, it's OK – nothing involving Bibles or farts. You're in with Paul.'