by Andy McNab
Chris just stood there: water off a duck's back. He was the boss and this was what we were going to do.
After he'd finished the orders, I took Frank to one side. 'Listen, mate, I'm with Chris on this one. I'd rather be judged by twelve than carried by six.'
Frank had calmed down and even smiled. He sat back on the sofa. 'It's not always as black and white as that. I'm not going to kill them. We're there to arrest. We'll do that before they get their hands on any weapons.'
'Then you'd better make sure you take the right decision at the right time, or one of us will get dropped.'
He looked at me very calmly – too calmly for my liking. 'God will guide me, don't worry.'
I left him, and did worry. Not about the job – fuck it, if it kicked off on the ground, we'd deal with it. I worried about Frank. God and our kind of work didn't mix easily. Al had obviously found the right balance for himself. I didn't think Frank had.
Yet, for all that, I admired him for the way he stuck to his principles. It must have been tough to have a conviction that went against the grain of an organization he loved. I knew that, deep down, he didn't really want to get out. He was cutting off his nose to spite his face, and it annoyed me. But, as he'd said, Christianity had been pissing people off for years.
The job was cancelled the afternoon before Chris took the first patrol out. Maybe TCG decided the job wasn't worth it, maybe the head sheds were worried about Frank. We never got to see what Frank would do when push actually came to shove, but by then, I felt, the final nail was already in his coffin.
51
There was a bit of edge between Chris and Frank after the reactive OP job that never happened, but Frank didn't force the issue. Then he was taken off ops for a while to run the desk while Minky was away. The focus of the piss-taking now shifted from his religion to his past as a signaller.
The whole army ran on the tribal system. It bred loyalty and a feeling of belonging that never left you. You could take the boy out of the Green Jackets, but you couldn't take the Green Jackets out of the boy . . . And that was the way it had to be. No one should forget where they'd come from – unless they were a signaller, of course.
By March we were all back in the UK. After a couple of weeks' leave, we were getting ready to go to Oman. Apart from Frank: he was getting ready to go.
I couldn't see the sense of not fighting to keep him in: the Regiment was always keen to recruit good men, and it invested a fortune in training them. Just getting a trooper like me to the point at which I had patrol and entry skills cost more than it did to train a fast-jet pilot, yet when we said we were going to leave, no one asked us why or tried to change our minds.
Frank was an experienced corporal who was about to be made up to sergeant. He may have bored us rigid about God making his decisions for him but he was still one of the best when it came to planning and preparation. And I couldn't help feeling the whole God thing was a phase, maybe even an escape from something.
And he'd brought a hell of a lot to the party. Until he singlehandedly opposed the policy, signallers were only allowed to do a three-year tour with the Regiment then had to return to their units. Not only did Frank get the policy changed of scaleys only being allowed to do one three-year tour with the Regiment, he was responsible, too, for the Regiment changing the way they used pistols in CQB (close quarter battle), bringing their standards of combat shooting to a new level.
Frank had come back with phenomenal pistol skills after an exchange tour with Delta Force in the States. Delta had taught him the Weaver Stance, a method developed by Deputy Sheriff Jack Weaver during freestyle pistol competition in the late 1950s. It was adopted by the FBI, then the US military.
'The Weaver' allowed you to shoot much faster and more accurately. Instead of standing square-on to the target with both arms out straight, you stood side-on with your firing arm out straight and the other bent and pulling back. The isometric tension produced by pushing out with the stronger hand while pulling in with the weaker provided excellent recoil control when the weapon was fired.
Getting old and bold to accept this new Yank method was hard, but the results spoke for themselves. Frank stood his ground, as he did on everything, and got it accepted. Thanks to him being as much of a pain in the arse about the Weaver Stance as he was about his God, troopers could now double-tap a head shot over five metres with four inches of barrel. If Winston Churchill had been around, he might have said that never had so much been owed by so many to just one bornagain ginger-haired nutcase.
If you decided to leave an infantry battalion, where a soldier's training would have cost about three quid and a Mars bar, the CO would have sat you down and said, 'Stop, think about it. Think about what you're doing . . .' The Regiment's response seemed to be 'There are thousands who want to take your place, so see yer.'
Then again, maybe they know that from the moment there's doubt in your mind it's time for you to leave. Mentally, you've already gone.
52
We held the traditional auction of Al's kit. Even lads from other squadrons came along to the Paludrin Club, our Naafi in the Lines. Whatever his family didn't want was on display. Chris conducted the proceedings.
There was everything from a pair of socks to the air tank from his diving kit. People buy at stupid prices. The cash either goes to the next of kin or, if it was the dead guy's wish, towards a squadron party. Most of us, including Al, had written it into our will, and had also set aside five hundred quid to foot the party bill.
Al's parachute went for hundreds; I landed up with his Barbour jacket for something like four times what it would have cost in a shop – and I didn't even wear waxed jackets.
There was one more ceremony to be performed. During an evening down town Frank was presented with a glass tankard and a nine-inch statue of a trooper in freefall gear. 'Here you go,' Chris said, with a sniff. 'See you around.'
Everyone asked Frank about the Sri Lankan job he'd lined up, but mostly what they wanted to know was: 'Why are you getting out?' He fielded every question with the usual platitudes.
On our second day back from leave, Frank came into the Lines to collect his kit. Each squadron had its own block, but the combination of industrial carpet tiles and meshed-glass fire doors provided a unifying theme. The living accommodation consisted of one-man rooms with white Formica cupboards, a sink, a bed and a couple of shelves; there were showers and toilets at the end of the corridor.
The bottom floor of B Squadron's block was mainly for lads who lived out but needed somewhere to store their kit. People cycled in or ran, had a shower, got dressed. The singlys lived on the top floor, but usually not for long. This was Thatcher's Britain. Everybody was encouraged to get out and buy a house, and Hereford was probably the only place where a soldier could do that. Special Forces pay was good, and you knew that, fingers crossed, you'd be based there until you were forty.
My room faced Frank's across a corridor. I was sorting out my gear for Oman, and he was packing his plywood MFO (Movement, Forces Overseas) box. I was going to give him a hand bunging it in the back of his estate car.
It was about eight o'clock and everybody else was out for the night. I looked at him in his tracksuit as he minced about inside his locker. 'Frank, this Sri Lankan job, it's not exactly godly, is it? You could stay here and do the same thing, couldn't you?'
He didn't look up from his packing. 'Ah, but I can't stay, can I? I want to move on and find a church, remember?'
'Man can't live by bread alone, eh?'
'Yep, you got it. I've still got to pay the mortgage, and the kids are going to need shoes. Maybe I'll go to college when I'm sorted, study theology.'
'Become that ayatollah?'
He stood back from his MFO and smiled.
I nodded at the beret and the other stuff in his hand. 'You won't need that stable belt now, will you?'
The new-style belts were much thinner than the old ones, and the metal buckle with the winged dagger was tinnier. Being a new boy, that was
what I'd been saddled with.
It disappeared into the box with everything else.
'Are you leaving because of Al? Is that what this is about?'
He shook his head. 'I told you. I don't belong here any more. Something else is filling my life.'
'Ah, right. And you're still immortal, are you?'
'We all are.'
'So that night Al died, how come you sent me ahead to flush them out of the hedgerow?'
I thought at first that God hadn't given him the answer to that, but I was wrong. 'Because I wanted to be the one to kill whoever killed Al.'
He then went off on one about Ken, the job that night, and why Al shouldn't be dead.
Fuck this. I felt all right being part of the squadron. I'd been there nearly a year now and my feet were firmly under the table. I'd proven myself. Besides, I'd been a sergeant in the infantry before I'd come here. I'd already killed, had already had to make hard decisions on operations.
'Frank, I've got to tell you – everybody always has a better plan than the one that's going to be used. Why? Because they know it's never going to be put into practice, so they can say what the fuck they like. They can gob off till the cows come home that their idea is better. And you know what? It gets even better with hindsight – the plan that never has to be used.'
I found myself ranting, because he was wrong.
'The fact is we all need a leader. Ken was the boy that night. He was there making the decision, one way or the other. You're just angry and frustrated, mate. You're angry with Al for being a Christian all along and not telling you. You're angry because he's dead. You may even be angry because you and your God couldn't save him. But you really need to get over it.'
Frank didn't answer. He turned away.
'So, you giving me that stable belt, or what?'
After several long moments he fixed me with his cornflower blue Bambi eyes.
'No.'
53
April 1985
Oman
We landed at Seeb International, just outside the capital, Muscat. I was excited about the three months that lay ahead. The whole squadron was going to practise desert warfare, and the Ice Cream Boys would be working beneath clear sunny skies. There was a lot of operational stuff like HALO (high altitude, low opening) to be done, but Nish was generally talking up the fast glide, the freefall part of the trip.
Most of the squadron had been to the Middle East before, whether on operations, team jobs, or training someone else's army. They were at home here, and I was finally feeling at home with them. I saw a lot of Nish's friends.
We stood around on the tarmac waiting for our transport and trying out our new sunglasses. You don't get country briefs when you go away: you're expected to have done your own homework. I'd found out that Qaboos bin Said al-Said had overthrown his father in 1970 with a bit of British help, and had ruled as sultan ever since. The population was about three million, and the borders stretched over a thousand kilometres. It was a big old place.
Oman was bordered by the United Arab Emirates to the north, Saudi Arabia to the west, and Yemen to the south. The Arabian Sea lay on its eastern coastline, which faced India and part of Iran. The northern coast beyond Muscat, the Musandam peninsula, dominated the Strait of Hormuz, a major political and economic flashpoint in the Arabian Gulf. It was through here that the bulk of Middle Eastern oil flowed daily to run the free world's economy. Capture the Strait of Hormuz, and you could hold the Western world to ransom.
Up north were the vast, rugged mountain ranges of the hot, parched interior, but down in the south, between the sand seas, we were on the same longitude as Bangalore. They even had a monsoon season.
It hadn't taken much to discover the big things here were oil and natural gas, for which the leading customer was Japan. Or that it was a totally Muslim country, although the sultan was liberal. Alcohol was for sale, and in the cities women were allowed to wear Western clothes.
The Regiment had been founded in the deserts of North Africa in the Second World War and operating in Oman for years. Technology might have come on in leaps and bounds, but the principles of desert warfare hadn't. There was this stuff called satnav knocking around, but nobody really trusted it. The military had been using it since the late seventies, but the equipment was bulky and needed lots of power; great if you were on a warship, but not so handy on foot or in a wagon. Smaller satnavs were being developed for Special Forces, but they were still the size of house bricks. Their batteries ran out far too quickly, and the equipment constantly malfunctioned. It wasn't soldier-proof so got regularly smashed. It would never catch on. The best navigation aids were the skills the lads had relied on in the Second World War, when all they'd had were stars, compasses and piss-poor maps.
It wasn't long before the Omani Army turned up with a fleet of British-made Bedford four-tonners and we rattled off into the interior. In the middle distance, huge mountains pushed up against a perfectly clear blue sky. I'd been half expecting sand dunes and Lawrence of Arabia, but this terrain was hard-core. Elbows and knees would get torn to shreds out here.
54
We pushed along a single-track tarmac road across a vast rocky plain that stretched for miles in every direction. Sixteenth-century forts, built by the Portuguese when Oman had played an important role in the slave trade, rubbed shoulders with villages of mud and straw.
After an hour we came to a tented camp in the middle of nowhere. It was protected by wire fences, and looked just like the set of The Great Escape. Schwepsy was going to love this. He could play prison guard.
For the first three days we bedded ourselves in. The old hands had seen it all before, but as far as I was concerned even unpacking a .50-calibre machine-gun and mounting it on a Land Rover was new and exciting. The only thing I wasn't happy with was the early-morning temperature. It took the sun a good twenty minutes to get the place warmed up. I must have lizard DNA.
Tiny quickly developed a routine. The moment he woke, he sat up in his sleeping-bag in our twenty-man tent and shouted, 'I'm bored. Where's Frank?'
He wasn't the only one who missed having him around, if only to take the piss.
'He had to go.' Nish summed up the situation from his bed one morning. 'Frank's trouble is that he's a complicated mixture of happy warrior and embittered pacifist.'
Tiny wasn't too fussed about what Frank was. He still had the second half of his routine to perform. He'd get up, stick his head out of the tent flap, and look back, surprised. 'Turned out nice again!'
It made me laugh every time, but perhaps that was because he wasn't calling me a crap hat any more.
Paul missed Countdown, but I reckon that had more to do with Carol's perky consonants than the mental exercise.
Some of the scaleys missed their workouts so much they rigged up a makeshift gym. They hit the punch-bag stupid every afternoon, then did several hundred chin-ups and went for a run. Ken tried to join in, but the scaleys didn't roll out the welcome mat. They knew it was only a matter of time before he got bored with the bag and was challenging them to a fight instead.
The banter was non-stop. They were scaleys and we were blades or Jedis. The Force was with us. So was the food. A couple of local lads kept us in chapattis, while the cooks knocked up the rest of the scoff on their number-one burners, which flared like rocket jets along a narrow trench capped with huge dixies.
Most of the talk as we shook out was about freefall. The big one was CRW: not the Counter Revolutionary Warfare Wing, but Canopy Relative Work, the trick of flying your canopies towards each other and linking up.
'We need to get the troop stack going,' Nish announced. 'We need a holiday snap.'
Everybody groaned.
'No, we can do this. It'll be a laugh. We get someone to fly base. The second lad wraps his legs into the first lad's rig lines, then slides down them until it looks like he's standing on his shoulders. And so on. We'll have the whole troop stacked by the end of the trip, easy!'