by Andy McNab
Des landed a final flurry of punches and the compound fell silent.
64
Guatemala had been making claims on Belize since the eighteenth century, and F Troop was part of the UK battle group stationed as a deterrent against incursions. There were four guys on aircraft crash standby with the Puma helicopter crew at any given time. The rest of us were out patrolling the border.
I craved that time away from the camp. Garrison life was boring, and neck-deep in bullshit. All there was to look forward to, apart from heaving the baked-bean tins, was tea and toast at 1100 in the sergeants' mess.
We went in four- or six-man patrols, dropped by helicopter, and spent ten to fourteen days on the look-out for Guatemalans.
The maps consisted of vast areas of closely packed contour lines, which were hills, covered in green, which was jungle. There were no proper roads, and very few tracks.
High humidity combined with sweltering heat meant that in theory there was a definite limit to how much kit a man could carry; the maximum should have been around 15 kg, but it could be much more. Mess tins were thrown away, because they were pretty useless things anyway. All that was needed was a metal mug, and a small non-stick frying pan, ideal for boiling rice in.
The most popular weapon to take into the jungle was the M16 or the M203 version that had a 40mm grenade launcher attached under the barrel. They rarely needed cleaning, so we didn't have to waste time and energy trying to keep our weapon in good condition.
One guy never used to touch his M16 at all, out of principle. He said, 'I know that it's going to work, I know that the weapon's reliable, so I don't need to clean it.' And the fact is, if you squeeze the trigger and it goes bang and a round comes out of the end, that's all you want.
I loved our contact with the locals – when it eventually happened. Every time we walked into a village near the border they would scatter. The Guats used to come over the river and steal their women at gunpoint, and to the villagers one set of jungle camouflage looked very much like another.
The kids didn't care if we were Guats or Brits: they just hoped we were there to give them something. They didn't understand us and we didn't understand them, but we had some good fun. The rest of the time they ran around between the huts, or on the small football pitch that was the pride of every village.
Some of these places were just starting to get generators, and visits from American Peace Corps volunteers. Like modernday missionaries, these fresh-faced twenty-year-olds were bringing in hygiene and preventive medicine, and the lot of the villagers was improving – or so the volunteers said.
The fact was they had lived like this for thousands of years. And now they had new illnesses, a new culture – and religion. The kids now wanted to wear Levi's and smoke American cigarettes instead of spending their lives surrounded by wallowing pigs and scrawny chickens. As soon as they were old enough, they left. You couldn't blame them, of course, but I sometimes wondered whether the price they paid was to have the soul sucked out of them.
There was a commotion in the corridor.
'F Trooooop!'
I'd have recognized that voice anywhere. Tiny had perfected his Snapper impression over the years. He'd come out for a few weeks to cover the changeovers.
He shoved his head round the door, pointed at my fat bandaged knee and laughed. 'I told you you'd hate this place. Some good news, though. Frank's on the Circuit.'
65
Frank must have thought the old guy with the white beard had sprung a miracle. If he'd gone without a job any longer, he'd have been forced behind the counter at McDonald's after all.
He'd been hired by one of the security companies to train up a protection team in Athens. The principal went by the name of Vardis Vardinoyannis.
'Richest man in the Aegean.' Tiny spread himself out on the bed opposite mine. 'Owns Motor Oil. Always under threat, always protected. Extremists have already dropped his brother.'
If Vardinoyannis was that much of a target, no wonder they'd snapped Frank up. He was one of the best shots the Regiment had ever produced.
He hadn't been doing himself many favours over the summer. He'd tried out all sorts of religious groups in his quest to find a replacement for Seven Troop. He even sang in a happy-clappy band in the shopping precinct on Saturday afternoons. Lots of the guys had seen him, and that sort of news travels fast. I supposed you couldn't fault a guy for praising the Lord in public with a smile and a couple of tambourines, but I wondered if he knew how much he might have been denting his prospects.
Tiny had made himself comfortable. 'Can you imagine him with the protection team? All those big black handlebar moustaches, and then suddenly up pops this little mop of ginger.'
The image made me smile, but it meant this Greek, or whoever was advising him, was pretty smart. Anyone planning a hit on the principal wouldn't pay much attention to Frank. The handlebar moustaches would draw their fire.
That's why female bodyguards were so highly valued. They simply don't look like part of the protection package. But she's not carrying the principal's sandwiches around in that briefcase: it's a Heckler & Koch MP5K that can be fired from the carrying handle; or maybe the whole briefcase is made of Kevlar as a ballistic shield.
BGs had to be pro-active, too, not just waiting for an attack but always anticipating one. What if a car rammed our vehicle a bit further down the road there? What if someone opened up from the crowd just feet away? You had to think like that otherwise you were the rabbit in headlights. The Seven Ps came into play with a vengeance.
Good VIP protection wasn't about a lot of heavies looking hard and picking their teeth with stilettos – that's just the show-business version. It was about the stuff you didn't see. It was about making sure that every detail of the principal's movements – where he was going to be, what he was going to do, when he was going to do it – was kept out of the public domain.
Family details, work locations, all that sort of information had to be kept tight. Vehicles had to be secured at all times so no devices – explosive or tracking – could be placed on them. Where did the post go to be checked and verified before it was handed to the principal? It wasn't just letter bombs they had to worry about: gases could be used in a postal attack. If the principal had a drink in a pub, the VIP protection team had to make sure that the glass came home with them, or was washed there and then; poisons could be designed to target a particular human using a sample of their DNA.
Everything had to be protected. If you missed one small component, your principal could be dead.
A businessman was targeted for months on end in Lebanon, but his security was excellent. He never went out without a team, and they always varied the route. The terrorists couldn't get near him, and the vantage-points from where they could see into his compound were too far away for a long-distance shot.
His PA lived outside the compound, in another part of the city. She drove to work in a Citroën 2CV and parked in the admin compound. Gent that he was, her boss came out every morning, regular as clockwork, and helped her inside with her briefcase.
One night, while the 2CV was parked outside her apartment, the players rigged it up with an IED. They trained binoculars on the compound from two kilometres away, and as soon as he went out to open the door for her they kicked it off. They were both killed instantly. All it had taken was just one chink in the armour.
Tiny propped himself up on one arm. 'You'll never guess what else. He got baptized in the Wye before he went away. Big marquee job on Bishop's Meadow.'
The river bisected Hereford. Bishop's Meadow was a park on its banks, with a shingle shore. Frank and his wife had literally taken the plunge. The church rigged up a big tent and turned it into a three-ring circus. Crowds came to see this baptism in the middle of town. Even Central Television was there.
66
Hereford
April 1986
Six weeks of X-rays, injections and physio later, the football around my knee joint deflated withou
t the doctors having had a clue what had caused it. Maybe something had bitten me. There was a week or two more of bruising and creaking, but then I was back in business.
I was promoted to lance-corporal. The extra pay came just in time for me to be able to afford the house Hillbilly had told me about. It was a Westbury starter home: two gas fires on the ground floor, no central heating, and walls so thin I could hear my next-door neighbours flush the toilet. I didn't care: it was mine. Only a matter of time, I said to myself, before I fulfilled my boyhood dream of a place with an acre of land and its own moat.
Chris had already faded from the troop by the time I got back from Belize. By March I was running around Hereford, not doing much except training and wondering if Hillbilly had known that the previous owner of my house was about to walk away because he was shagging her, while the rest of the squadron was running around all over the planet on team jobs.
In June 1985, South African forces had carried out a raid on Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, and twelve alleged ANC members were killed in their sleep. The South African government claimed that ANC guerrillas used it to launch attacks inside South Africa; there had been several mine blasts, which had killed white farmers near the border. The Botswanans said that they did their utmost to prevent ANC military activities inside its borders. They turned to the Brits for help, and I was told to learn Swahili.
I joined Eno, whom I'd met over the water, and about half a dozen others down at the education block each day. The course tutors were a mixture of guys from the Education Corps who were only four lessons or so ahead of us, and two Anglican missionaries who spent more time reminiscing about the good old days than they did teaching us the language.
I didn't mind: it was fun. And I was getting a second patrol skill. If I passed, I'd get extra pay. Every penny helped. The asking price on the house had been twenty-five grand, but the big-time negotiator from South London had haggled it down to twenty-four and a half. To save on bills I still hadn't had the gas reconnected, and boiled water for brews with a hexi burner in the stainless-steel sink. The kettle came from my room in the block.
My furniture consisted of a microwave, a telly, a small stereo, a chair, a bed, and a china ornament of a cat the previous owner had left on the mantelpiece. I didn't need a radio. The party wall became a speaker when my neighbours listened to Radio 4. I bunged all my washing in the laundry at camp, and survived on food from work or cartons of egg fried rice that I collected from the town in my ever-decaying Renault 5. For all that, I was happy. I'd become one of Thatcher's children.
Nish and Hillbilly were still over the water, but I was hearing strange things. Nish kept having run-ins with the head shed over there, and his wingman, Hillbilly, kept having to fend them off. Nobody was too sure what it was all about. Maybe it was Nish's incessant guitar playing. Maybe he and Hillbilly just didn't like the command structure. There were always problems in a troop made up of guys from different squadrons who hadn't grown together.
Things wouldn't have come to a head like that in Seven Troop. It was small; everybody knew each other; everybody had a voice. Every troop was like that, except the composite over the water. For whatever reason, it sounded like one of the operations people, the guy who was doing the equivalent of Minky's job at the time, had it in for Nish, and Nish wasn't exactly turning the other cheek. He'd been given a couple of chits as warnings: a third strike and he'd be out. I couldn't understand it. This wasn't like Nish. He was far too intelligent, articulate and funny to let himself get into those kinds of arguments. I hoped his wingman could sort it out.
I hadn't heard much about Frank now he was in Athens, so I was really pleased to bump into him again. I was halfway through the six-week Swahili course and wandering round with a fistful of vocab cue cards, mumbling away to myself like an idiot, when he shouted to me from the other side of the road. We landed up in the Grapes again.
Frank looked a lot better than he had last time, and insisted on buying. 'It's all right.' He tapped his jacket. 'I've got some drachmas left over.'
'About time.'
We chatted about various people he hadn't seen for a while, and the big topic of the moment, the nuclear reactor that had exploded at Chernobyl in the Ukraine. Wales and the area round Hereford were thought to be vulnerable to fallout.
'You still on the Athens job?'
'That's all finished.' He handed the barmaid a tenner. Music blared. One or two other lads gave the Bible basher a nod of recognition. 'I had fun in Greece but it was time to go.'
I didn't ask why. The BG world was very fickle. You could get binned because the principal didn't fancy the smell of your aftershave. Or you had a job for life because he liked playing chess with you.
Frank didn't look at all worried. He had other things on his mind. 'Guess what happened while I was in Athens, though? I finally got to talk in tongues.'
'Oh, right . . . I didn't know you were trying.'
'Yeah, for months. I was going to the Pentecostal Church here, and failed dismally. I was beginning to think I was being punished for some sort of sin in my past.'
I shrugged. There were probably a few to choose from.
'Then all of a sudden one Sunday I opened my mouth and words I'd never heard before came spilling out.'
'I know that feeling.' I held up my cue cards.
'Not Swahili, you twat. I was speaking in tongues. I was talking to God.'
'That's all well and good, mate, but he ain't going to pay you for it. Why don't you give Terry Waite a call? Sounds like he could do with some close protection while he tries to get those Yanks out. And you could do the tongues stuff together, eh? You wouldn't even need an interpreter.'
I started doing a bad impression of a TV evangelist waving his arms at the sky.
It got a smile out of him. 'I don't think he'll be into tongues. He's an Anglican. But, anyway, I've got another job.'
He put his glass back on the bar. He'd seen the expression on my face. 'I was surprised they'd let a Bible basher back on the Circuit as well. It's with Ralph Halpern, the guy who runs the Burton chain.'
I wasn't sure who he was talking about, but Frank couldn't wait to fill me in. 'Britain's most highly paid executive. He's on a million a year plus.'
A radical splinter group of the PLO had issued threats against Europe's top Jewish businessmen, and Halpern didn't want to take any chances. Because no specific threat had been issued against him, he didn't qualify for Special Branch protection. He had to hire his own.
Frank looked smug. 'I was only going to be there for two weeks but they kept me on.'
The music was starting to bounce off the walls. Frank moved a bit closer. 'We're moving to Bobblestock. I'm a yuppie now. Earning good money. Company cars too – BMWs and Mercedes. Things are going great.'
Bobblestock was one of the new estates springing up around the town. Hillbilly probably held deposits on all of them.
'Good stuff. So, still no regrets about getting out?'
He took a bit too long to finish his pint, put down the glass and wipe his lips.
'Nope. Not one.'
67
The Swahili bit the dust for one reason or another, and we started our squadron build-up to take over the team, part of which meant being on standby as back-up for the troop over the water.
The landscape had changed over there. From 1976 to 1983, only nine PIRA players had been shot by the Regiment, but we were taking the war to them, these days, and they were standing their ground. They had plenty to fight with. Once they'd been starved of weapons and ammunition, but now they were awash with Armalites, Semtex, and even heavier stuff like RPGs, machine-guns and flame-throwers. The thank-you letters were being sent on a regular basis to other terrorist groups like the PLO, and rogue states such as Libya – as well as to thousands of naïve Americans.