by Damien Lewis
‘Roger that,’ the two men replied.
Seconds later Mat and Jamie were back out in the icy blast of the sea wind, charging down the metal stairway to target deck three, below them. As they did so, they heard a series of massive explosions rippling through the lower decks of the ship. It sounded as if grenades were going off, although whether it was friendly forces letting them off or the enemy attacking, neither of them was sure. The shock wave from the blasts below blew open the ship’s door up ahead of them, leaving it swinging crazily on its hinges.
Without a moment’s hesitation, the two men charged through the open doorway and headed down a set of metal steps, which led into a corridor going through to the crew’s mess. With their MP5s held at the shoulder they switched on the powerful torchlights attached to their weapons and entered the darkened mess room. As the torch beams groped ahead in the echoing darkness they swept the cavernous space for targets. But the room appeared to be completely deserted.
Just after Mat’s team had hit the ship’s bridge, Team 2, coming in directly behind them, had hit the radio room to their rear. Teams 3 and 4 had hit the ship’s cabins on the third floor, while Teams 5 and 6 had hit the second floor, where the crew’s quarters were located. As soon as the first CH47 had pulled away from the MV Nisha, its men successfully on board ship, the second had taken its place. And to either side of the vessel the two Lynx attack helicopters had moved in close, their sniper teams combing the decks below them for any terrorist targets.
The MV Nisha was assaulted by air and by sea; the SBS fast roping from Chinooks and using the rigid inflatable boats (RIBs) to establish a foothold on board. Black-clad figures swarmed onto the vessel as she crashed through the waves with the RIBs being thrown about like toys alongside. It would have been a horrendous way to assault a ship in training, let alone for real and in mountainous seas.
Once safely over the sides, the four seaborne teams had been tasked with securing the ship’s cargo holds – the most likely location of any chemical weapon. Two teams were now passing through the bowels of the ship, one on either side, working from the bow to the stern and breaking their way through the sealed bulkheads. This was tense, difficult and physically challenging work. The cargo holds were pitch black and airless. The men moved along slippery walkways, metal gantries and ladders. Their torch beams pierced the gloom, searching for enemy figures or for any signs of a bomb. One mistake could be fatal, as they would fall into the bowels of the ship.
Meanwhile, the other two RIB teams were working their way through the ship in the same direction, but above decks, in the open cargo area. While they might not discover any bombs up there, they had every intention of capturing or killing any terrorists hiding out in this part of the ship.
Barely two minutes into the assault and the attacking force of SBS and SAS soldiers had swamped the MV Nisha with fire teams going in from every conceivable entry point.
Back up in the ship’s mess Mat and Jamie were making their way towards the exit now. As they did so, Jamie’s torch beam caught on something swirling, amorphous, glowing white as it snaked its way up the metal stairwell below and into the mess room. What the fuck is that? Jamie wondered. But before he could act, he was engulfed in the wraith-like substance and had sucked a first, burning gasp into his heaving lungs. As the gas – for gas it was – seared its way down inside him, Jamie felt like his windpipe was collapsing, choking the very breath and the life force out of him. He clutched at his throat and turned to Mat to cry out a warning.
‘Get your fuckin’ ressy on! It’s fuckin’ gas!’ he tried to shout, but the words just seemed to be strangled in his throat and came out in a rasping, suffocated whisper.
In the next second, Jamie lunged for Mat, grabbed him and tried desperately to drive him back out of the mess area towards the open deck. But already it was too late, as Mat had just taken the first gulp of the gas into his hungry lungs. For a split second Mat stood there, uncomprehending, wondering why he couldn’t breathe any more and why Jamie was trying to rugby-tackle him and force him back out of the mess room. And then he caught sight of the thick, white, oily fumes dancing in the light of his torch beam. And suddenly the realisation hit him like a sledgehammer.
Holy fuck, it’s gas.
Quick as they could the two men stumbled back outside, choking and coughing their guts up, dragging at their respirators and trying to unhook them from their webbing. As they did so, Mat found himself wondering – in a dislocated, unearthly sort of way – exactly which type of nerve gas they’d just been hit by. Was it sarin? Tabun? Or soman? Or maybe the deadliest of the lot – VX? And how long had they left to live? They’d known what they’d been doing when they’d come in unprotected like this, without their respirators on. And oddly enough, there was no real fear now, just a desperate urge to get it over with, one way or the other. As Mat dragged his gas mask over his head and down on to his face, the first waves of nausea swept over him and suddenly, a jet stream of vomit went spattering into the front of the mask.
Cursing himself and wondering how it could all have gone so suddenly to rat shit like this, Mat fumbled in his chest pouch for his medical kit. Kneeling on the deck, his fingers numbed by the cold, he scrabbled inside his medical bag for the syringes of atropine antidote that the SBS doctor had given him the night before. As he did so, he glanced over at Jamie, dreading what he would discover. He half expected to see his best mate lying on the deck, twitching and writhing in his death throes, shitting and pissing himself as the nerve poisons coursed through his blood, cauterising his veins and blowing his nerve endings all to fuck.
But while the big man was bent double choking his lungs up, he appeared to be pissing himself laughing at the same time.
What the fuck? Mat found himself thinking, in shock and confusion. What the fuck? He’d finally got his hands on the atropine syringes, but at the same time Jamie seemed to be going totally fucking insane. Jamie? JAMIE? WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?
‘It’s nothin’ …’ Jamie rasped in a hoarse whisper, as he tried to explain to Mat what was happening. ‘It’s …’ his words tailed off into a fit of mixed coughing and laughter, before he turned and vomited all over the deck.
Just then, an icy blast of sea wind cut around Mat’s face, blowing both the reek of the vomit and the fog of confusion away. With a blinding flash of realisation Mat suddenly understood what it was that Jamie was finding so bizarrely, shockingly funny. Relief and ecstatic release flooded through him, as Mat recognised the smell of the gas. It was a type of gas that they’d used countless times before during SBS training.
This ain’t no fucking nerve agent, Mat found himself screaming inside his head, joyfully. It’s CS. It’s CS. It’s only fucking CS. As Mat and Jamie stumbled about on the deck, choking their guts up, the two men turned tearful faces to each other, pissing themselves laughing as they did so.
CS gas – more commonly known as ‘tear gas’ – is a highly debilitating crowd control agent, but it is largely harmless at the end of the day. Some of the lads must’ve been letting off the CS rounds down below, and that was the gas that Mat and Jamie had stumbled right into. The two men felt an overwhelming wave of relief flood through them now that they knew they were going to live. They cleared out their respirators of vomit and got them well and truly strapped on. There was still a major task ahead of them – the taking down of any terrorists below decks on that ship.
As they prepared to head back into the mess room, they were joined by Tom and Mucker. Their two fellow SBS soldiers had just been relieved on the bridge by one of the follow-up fire teams. Pretty shortly now the command and control element would be taking over on the ship’s bridge, and the SBS/SAS assault force would be one step closer to their overall objective of stopping the ship.
Mat, Jamie, Tom and Mucker headed back through the mess room and down into the crew’s quarters. As they advanced along the ship’s corridor they ran into the lads from Team 4, who were preparing to shoot the locks off a cabin do
or. Boom! Boom! Boom! Three rounds from a pump-action shotgun went slamming into the wood and metal door frame, immediately followed by a boot smashing the door open. A split second later a CS gas rip round had been fired inside, and thick white smoke started pouring out of the room.
Bang on cue, three Team 4 lads sprang inside the cabin, their weapons at the ready. Just seconds later, two enemy figures were thrown out into the corridor, coughing and choking as the CS gas took a hold of them. They were dressed only in their underwear and pyjamas, and must have been taken completely by surprise.
‘GET DOWN!’ a Team 4 operator screamed, as one of the prisoners tried to get to his feet and flee. While the words were distorted and muffled by the gas mask, his meaning was crystal clear, the menacing pump-action shotgun showing that the SBS operator meant business.
Now that Mat’s fire team had made visual contact with the Team 4 lads they could safely move on to their secondary target without fear of a friendly-fire incident (getting mistaken for the enemy and shot by their own side). Giving the thumbs up to one of the Team 4 lads, Mat indicated by hand signals that they were coming through – advancing through Team 4’s TAOR and then moving on towards their next target.
‘Alpha One One, coming through,’ Mat announced, switching from his team-specific radio frequency to that which enabled him to communicate with the other fire teams and with headquarters.
‘Alpha One Four, roger that,’ came back the reply from the Team 4 leader.
As Mat and Jamie moved past the Team 4 lads, the prisoners were lying on the floor gasping for breath and puking their guts up with the CS gas swirling all around them. They were also shivering uncontrollably, but whether from the cold or the shock of it all Mat wasn’t certain.
Poor bastards, Mat thought to himself, as he watched the prisoners being plasticuffed by the Team 4 lads. He knew himself what it was like to be CS-gassed now, and it wasn’t a pleasant experience. It would take one hell of a hardened terrorist to resist that sort of wake-up call, Mat reckoned. And that was the intention. Hit them with such overwhelming force so as to make any sort of resistance impossible. And – no mistake about it – right now it seemed to be working.
Mat still found himself feeling a twinge of pity for the prisoners. Not all of them would be terrorists, he reasoned. Some were probably just regular seamen: they would have no idea why the Black Death had suddenly descended upon their ship. The terrorists would probably be few in number and holed up in the cargo area, where any bomb was likely to be situated. Mat made a mental note that when his team had completed their tasks and secured their targets, he would come back and fetch the prisoners out on to the open deck, where they could get some fresh air into their lungs.
Carefully, Mat led the way down the corridor ahead, which would take his team directly into the rear of the ship’s quarters. As he did so Mat knew that they were about to move into a part of the vessel that had not yet been secured. As their torch beams probed ahead in the darkness a white figure suddenly came crashing through one of the doorways to Mat’s left. It turned and then came charging in his direction. Just as Mat was about to open fire, the figure must have spotted him, as it stumbled to a halt. For a split second there was a tense and potentially deadly stand-off, as Mat and the figure stared at each other. And then Mat realised with a shock that the figure was one of their own, black-clad operators – but somehow he seemed to have got himself covered from head to toe in a thick white scum. And for some reason his gas mask was missing.
There was the faint crackle of radio static in Mat’s earpiece. ‘Alpha One Five, you frobbers,’ came a breathless voice on his radio. It was the man in white up ahead of Mat identifying himself. ‘Let me the fuck past, will you?’
As his team stood aside, Mat realised that he recognised the figure in white goo. He had an unmistakable Geordie accent that Mat knew well. It was ‘Stretch’, one of the SAS lads that he knew from previous operations. Recently, they’d been on a week-long quad-bike training course together. What the hell had that crazy bastard been up to this time? Mat wondered. He was clearly trying to get away from all the CS and find his way to the fresh air outside the ship.
Once they’d pointed Stretch towards the open deck, Mat led his team onwards, taking care as they probed deeper into hostile territory to the rear of the ship. Finally, they came to a heavy metal bulkhead. It was locked and it looked like it might be barring the way to somewhere important. Opposite the bulkhead was a storeroom of some sorts, but a quick search revealed it to be deserted. Still, as it did contain several crates of booze Mat made another mental note: to return once the action was over and help themselves to a few bottles. The team had been shown plans of the MV Nisha during the mission briefings. But they hadn’t gone into enough detail to map out every room, so they had little idea what was behind the heavy bulkhead.
Mat signalled that he wanted the bulkhead blown open. Kneeling down before it, Jamie set the charges and all four of them stepped back to take cover. Immediately, there was a massive BOOM! A cloud of smoke and debris went thundering down the corridor, and then the metal doorway toppled outwards into the walkway with a loud crash. The second they were inside the room, MP5s and pump-action shotguns at the ready, Mat’s team realised what they had found.
By the light of their torch beams they could see that they were in some sort of ship’s workshop, festooned with wires, cables, sheets of metal and every sort of tool imaginable. On the workbench bang in front of them was an old oil drum that had a series of wires attached to it. The drum had a hatch cut in one side by a welding torch, and inside it was packed with what appeared to be bales of cotton wool. With a surge of excitement Mat and his men realised that if there was a bomb-making facility on board this ship, then they had just discovered it. They couldn’t be certain, of course, until the bomb disposal experts arrived. And it wasn’t their job to poke around – just to secure the ship. But it certainly had the looks of a bomb-making facility.
Once they’d checked that the room was clear, Mat told Tom and Mucker to remain on guard until the bomb disposal people relieved them. In the meantime they were to touch nothing and leave the room exactly as they’d found it. Then he and Jamie moved off to clear the rest of their target area. Some five minutes later the team was able to declare deck three clear of the enemy.
As they headed back down the corridor towards the open deck, every cabin that they passed seemed to have had its doors blown off their hinges. Splintered and buckled metal sheets, spent shotgun cartridges and gas canisters littered the floor, and CS gas blanketed the corridor like a thick mist. The prisoners were lying everywhere, face down in the corridor. They were handcuffed to the ship’s rails and any other solid objects. They were all in a state of undress and clearly suffering badly. It crossed Mat’s mind that the MV Nisha below decks had all the makings of a scene from a major action movie. But unlike a movie this was for real and the captured crew members would not be able to survive much more of this exposure – of that Mat was certain.
‘We’ve got to get these blokes outside, or they’re dead,’ Mat said to Jamie. ‘Give me a hand will you, mate?’
The two men helped one of the prisoners to his feet and started to frogmarch him outside. But they had barely taken a couple of steps before the prisoner’s legs buckled. He went down hard on the deck. The CS gas had taken a horrible toll, and the prisoner was dizzy, sick, fighting for breath and freezing cold. Eventually, Mat and Jamie had to half carry him by his shoulders out of the crew’s quarters.
‘Look, there’s a load more of these poor sods down there,’ Mat announced to the Team 4 leader, as they laid the prisoner down on the open deck. ‘You’d better get ’em outside, double quick, mate. They’re dying a bloody death in there from all the CS.’
Within minutes the SBS/SAS assault force had the prisoners lined up face down in the open. Mat counted fifteen in all. Together with the ship’s captain, who was still up on the bridge steering the vessel under guard, that made sixteen p
risoners – which accounted for all of the men that Green Slime had told them would be on board the ship. It looked as if they had captured everyone.
As the first rays of a chill winter’s sun began washing over the ship, Mat could see that the prisoners were in a bad way. In addition to the effects of the CS gas, and the shock, the prisoners were now in real danger of going down with hypothermia – a life-threatening body collapse due to exposure to intense cold. They were dressed in a motley assortment of underwear, pyjamas and workmen’s clothes, and with the serious wind-chill factor out there the conditions were murderously cold. Mat knew about the effects of hypothermia from his medical experience. In the extreme stages, a victim would become totally disorientated. They would become convinced that they were burning up and rip all their clothes off. Victims of hypothermia were often found curled up naked, with their clothes scattered nearby. If Mat and the lads didn’t do something, the prisoners wouldn’t survive for long.
‘Look, it’s bloody Baltic out here and most of these fookers are dressed in their skinnies, and nowt else,’ Mat commented. ‘Take a look in their cabins, Jamie mate. Grab some coats, blankets, whatever you can lay your hands on.’
‘Okey-dokey,’ Jamie replied. ‘Mucker, Tom, lend me a hand, will you? Never know what you might find.’
‘Any porn, mate?’ Mucker asked.
‘What, like a bunch of good Muslims are gonna ’ave a load of porn on board?’ Tom cut in. ‘Get real, mate. Most you’re likely to find is a dog-eared copy of the Koran tucked under the mattress.’
‘What about all that booze in the storeroom, then?’ Mucker fired back at him. ‘Eh? Eh? Reckon we’d find a few rashers of streaky bacon in the galley if we looked hard enough, mate.’
‘Bloody get on with it then, lads,’ Mat butted in. ‘Do something, will you – before these fookers freeze to death. Don’t call us blokes the Special Boat Circus for nothing, do they?’