by Andy McNab
Sometimes demos became a pain in the arse. It was okay doing things that needed to be done, but instead of being the counterterrorist team, we sometims became the demo team.
The teams were becoming more and more fed up so that instead of training, they were jumping through hoops for all and sundry during the demo season. We didn't mind doing it for customs and excise and police firearms teams-but teams of rugby players or doctors and nurses? Even the fitters who were laying carpet in one of the messes had a morning out; the joke was that someone was obviously getting his front room done for nothing. It came to the point where the only people left in Hereford that we hadn't done a demo for were the Women's Institute.
The guests would ask some really daft questions.
"How much do your gloves cost?" I was once asked.
"One hundred and fourteen pounds," I said, plucking a figure out of thin air. "Give or take a few bob."
It got to the stage where we started to stitch each other up to relieve the boredom. One of the better ones was during the pallet displays, for which all the vehicles were moved out of the hangar and the weapons and equipment laid out on show. A member of each part of the team would then talk about his kit and task.
I was doing the talk on the assaulters and had sorted out my pallet. I had all the clothing, body armor, abseil kit, the lot, and the weapons that any member of the assault group would be taking, and there was Fat Boy, who was dressed up in the kit. As I talked about a weapon, he would bring it to bear.
Everybody's looking; it's all rather impressive. Fat Boy drew his pistol, then the shotgun, and there were knives and all sorts coming out all over the place.
Earlier in the day I had gone over to the sniper team's pallet when they weren't around and had left a tennis ball on their display.
When Eno started talking about the different ammunition, it would be good to see him get out of it. When I came back, I didn't realize I'd been stitched up myself.
I carried on with the waffle and saw an old boot in the middle of my display. Everybody was rolling up on the other pallets. The Regiment head shed were giving me bad looks; they were not impressed.
I moved on to point out the weapons, and there was a plastic water pistol. I couldn't do jack shit about it.
Luckily nobody asked what it was for because I would have been obliged to pick it up and say, "It's to shoot people with," and give them a squirt.
One memorable day the Prince and Princess of Wales and the Duchess of York came down to Hereford. The purpose of the visit was familiarization with the Regiment, so if the shit hit the fan for them, they'd know what to expect when the boys came screaming through to rescue them. But also it was a fun thing, a good day out for us. A day like that was good for them, too; they could let their hair down away from the press, and without having to shake hands, pick up flowers, or make small talk with Jonathan Dimbleby.
One of the demos that we gave them was how we could covertly enter a building and get to the hostages in total darkness.
They were sitting in bne of the large CQB rooms listening to an explanation of how we trained: "As you can see, we can control the light levels, from full to total darkness."
The lights were now off.
"Sometimes the team has to operate in total darkness because there may be no power or the terrorists have control of the lighting."
We were going in wearing NVGS. It was like looking at a negative with a green tinge. The goggles give a weird perspective; if you go to grab something, you might be out by an inch, so it takes constant practice.
Going up a step, we'd have to exaggerate our movements to make sure we didn't trip up; to walk, we'd place a heel gently and run the outside of the heel all the way along the outside of the foot, then gently place the boot down, and then go with the next one.
Sometimes I couldn't hear what I was doing; I was trying to breathe shallowly; even the noise of the NVG, a tiny whine, sounded fearsome because it was right next to me.
Nice and gently, taking our time, we slowly moved toward the table where they were sitting, all the time thinking, What if we screw up?
We're supposed to be the smoothy clockwork operators.
The lights went on, and standing over the royal visitors was an assault group in full kit carrying MP5SDs, trying to breathe slowly and look casual. The Royals particularly liked that one.
We staged mock sieges to rehearse the Royals in the procedures we would go through in the event of a terrorist attack. The exercises were very realistic, and they didn't always go according to plan.
During a demo of a building assault, the Royal party was aboard Range Rovers as part of the attacking force, watching others who were fast-roping from a helicopter onto the roof. The Agustas were zooming in, lots of bangs, lots of firing, the big mass assault on the embassy.
Suddenly, as the helicopter lifted away, a bloke in black kit tumbled out and fell fifty feet onto the roof, his body being hidden from view by a three-foot-high perimeter wall.
The blokes said they heard Prince Charles say, "Oh, my God, a man's been killed!"
Almost immediately what should have been a dead body jumped to his feet, dusted himself off, and continued with his task. Everybody looked at one another, openmouthed.
Later that day the Regiment became trendsetters. Diana was going to be in a room where flashbangs were going to go off. Flashbangs are noisy things; they are designed to disorientate you and make you want to curl up in a ball and wait for your mum to come and get you.
As it went off, she turned and one of the maroons hit her in the head.
There was the smell of burned hair and lacquer, and our army pensions suddenly didn't look any too healthy.
The only lasting damage was to her hair, which was badly burned.
Days later the press and Royal fashion watchers noted that Diana was suddenly sporting a new, shorter hairdo. There could be no comeback.
They had signed a disclaimer that was now in B Squadron's inter In Tsodilo Hills, Botswana, 1986.
Members of 6 and 7 Troop in Okavango, 1986. mil FN 9MM pistol, stripped. FNITRH Pictures Heckler & Koch 9MM MP5SD.
Heckler Koch Pictures est room: "No member of B squadron will be committed to the Tower if any of the demos go wrong."
Nobody-least of all the other members of the Regiment-could believe what had happened to the bloke who fell from the helicopter, and it was only in the club later that we learned the truth about Superman. Unknown to anybody but the team in the heli, he had hidden himself behind the wall.
Then, at the right moment, the lads in the heli had ejected a dummy dressed in black kit.
As well as all the training that was done for once we were on the target, we had to practice the call-out system and moving to an incident; we had frequent exercises enabling the different agencies and personalities involved in any hostage incident to practice their bits.
Mrs. Thatcher had long been a fan of the Regiment.
After refusing to allow the government to give in to the terrorists' demands during the embassy siege, she had personally sent in the team to bring it to an end.
She might as well have had a bed space down in Hereford; she always seemed to be there. I respected her nononsense approach, and she laughed at the jokes. She might have been the only one walking around the camp wit I a andbag, but she was as tough as any man when it came to the crunch. She was in the CQB house once when we burst in and pumped live rounds into targets either side of her. One of her aides curled up into a ball.
Maggie looked at him and snapped, "Get up, you fool."
There was a lot of liaison with different units of the police. We did major exercises where everybody was involved, from the Prime Minister down, because everybody had to be tested. It was no good having all the soldiers-the coal face workers-practicing their techniques and practicing cooperation with other organizations, if the people who were sitting up there in C.O.B.R (Cabinet Office briefing room) listening to all the information and making dec
isions weren't practiced, too. So we'd do exercises where C.O.B.R would take command and direct operations from a bunker under Whitehall, the idea being to put Mrs. Thatcher and her team and everyone else down the chain under as much pressure as possible.
There had been a big exercise a couple of years before in the States, and some of the Regiment went over as guests to observe. The incident was of national importance involving the National Security Council, the presidential committee that commits the troops. But the problem was, the council didn't actually assemble to join in the exercise. There was a debrief afterward, at which one of the Regiment blokes stood up and said, "The exercise was excellent; all the different organizations worked together and any little problems are now ironed out. However, where was the President?" It was ident and his advisers who had to make the decithe Pres sions, and they had to be getting hit with the problems exactly the same as everybody else.
In the UK everybody from the Prime Minister down was hit with the problem at the same time as we were and had to make decisions. So it wasn't just the S.A.S going in to kick ass; it was everybody working together toward the same aim-a negotiated surrender. The last thing any of us wanted was to start putting charges on buildings and go screaming through shooting people-or, even worse, getting shot at. It's dangerous.
Nobody's jumping up and down with excitement to go and do that sort of stuff; he might be killed. However, if it's got to be done, okay, that's a fair one, off you go, and if the people in command, up to government level, have practiced alongside those at the sharp end, then at least the blokes are happy that the decision has been taken by people with experience.
During one tour I was on the thirty-minute team. I was in town shopping when I got a call on my bleeper. By now I had a 250 cc Yamaha; I took it steady going over the bridge this time. As I rode in, all the hangar doors were open and vehicles were moving to the ammo bunker to load up.
There would be maximum activity as blokes were loading their ops bags into the wagons, which held everything an assaulter could wish for.
Everything was laid out behind the wagons ready to go at ahy time.
Once everyone had loaded up we moved into the t:rew room to find out what was going on. We were all eating our crisps apart from Slaphead, who saved his during the week for his kids. For some reason they always seemed to be the most horrible flavors like Prawn cocktail.
Maybe the army had a deal with Smiths or the head chef had a sense of humor.
The SSM came into the crew room and said, "About an hour ago there was a call out for four men, including the second-in-command, to go over the water. We've just received another call, Andy. I want you to be thirdin-command on it."
He gave us a brief.
"The Israeli trade commission was. holding a conference at grid six-three-two-four-five-six, map sheet onethree-five. This morning the Islamic Jihad got into the building and is holding hostages. We are stood to, waiting for the word to move. The O.C and his group have already moved by one-zero-nine (Agusta helicopter).
Steve is waiting with the second one-zero-ninei for the second-in-command and sniper commander. The rest of us will wait for the go."
My chest felt tight as we were driven to the heli pad; in the normal course of events I wouldn't have been tasked with the 3 i/c's job until at least my next tour. I felt honored but daunted. I didn't want to fuck up.
The second wave of slime (Intelligence Corps personnel) were waiting for us by the 109. They were an integral part of any operation ever since the Prince' s Gate siege had demonstrated the value of good and accurate intelligence. During the lead up to the actual assault, specialists from M15 had been tasked with drilling holes in the walls and inserting tiny microphones and cameras to gain a detailed picture of who was where inside the building. But the information about the construction of the building was piss poor, and the walls turned out to be too thick for the probes to penetrate. The result was that although the blokes had a model of the construction of the building, they did not know exactly where the terrorists were.
Since then the Regiment had collated a massive database on computer that included such essential information as the thicknesses of walls and doors in buildings that were possible terrorist targets and the designs of all military and civilian aircraft. The computer was portable, so wherever an incident occurred, we could take it with us and access the information. If we called up a certain hotel, for example, we'd get a 3D image of the interior on the screen.
Intelligence gathered on the numbers and location of people inside the building could then be added as it came to hand. Possible methods of entry could also be suggested to the computer, which would then plot the best method of moving through the building. If the design of the building was not on the database, we could punch in details such as the construction of the outside walls, the number of windows, and the location of various rooms. The computer would then "design" the interior and provide a probability factor for accuracy, altering both as more information was added. It seemed the slime had every map, drawing, and picture of every ship, aircraft, and building in existence.
I liked going in the heli with Steve until he started to talk about squash. He was mad on the sport, and to make it worse, he was good at it. Squash was very popular in the Regiment; at lunchtime the courts looked like the scene at a major tournament.
We arrived at the location just outside Liverpool, a large private park with its own massive mansion house; from the air I could see lakes and well-manicured lawns.
We landed alongside the other 109. One of the slime was there to take us to the holding area.
"It's not as good as we would want, but it will do," he said.
On the way there we passed scores of police, fire, and ambulance crews, all with their vehicles and their own jobs to do. The holding area turned out to be two large rooms in an old outbuilding that had been taken over and used as incident control. The rooms were more or less derelict, with concrete floors and cobwebs at the joins of the walls and a damp, musty smell of cat's piss, but at least there was electricity.
In one corner were a couple of bogs with high cisterns and rusty metal chains.
The rooms must both have been about twenty-five meters by twenty; it was a building cut in half with a center wall and two doors.
The first priority was to meet up with jack, the squadron O.C. He was easy to spot-very tall, very wide, and with a nose that would have put General de Gaulle's in the shade.
"This is the briefing area," he said. "Next door will be the admin area. The I.A vehicles will be placed on that hard standing to the right; everything else on that grass area there."
Nobody else would be allowed to park near the ops vehicles, and the area would be kept clear of all clutter.
In the briefing area the slime and signals advance parties were sorting everything out. There was a long line of six-foot tables on which were boards that would soon have pictures of the target plus the X rays (terrorists) and Yankees (hostages).
Plans of the building were being pinned up as more information was given by the police. Steve and Jerry, the other pilot, did the sensible thing: got some tea and talked squash while they waited for their support team to arrive.
"Let's go to the main incident room and get permission to go forward and see the target," I said.
I took a walk to the main building with the O.C and Bob, the sniper team commander. Bob was the first member of the Regiment I'd ever seen, in Crossmagien.
He had since become troop sergeant.
It seemed that the mansion had been renovated and turned into a conference center much the same as the target, which was about a kilometer away. It was very plush with deep carpets, beautiful wood, and leather furniture and a fine central staircase. The scene put me in mind of a place that a film company had taken over.
All the Gucci furniture had been moved to the side, and there were wires fixed to the floor with masking tape and running up the staircases, telephones ringing, policemen and wom
en rushing around, and, like us, people in civilian clothes with ID cards pinned to their jackets.
Every sector had its own little cordon. To come out of our holding area cordon and into another, we had to go through a police checkpoint. The slime had pinned ID cards to us. Within the main building there were other places that we needed other clearances to go into. It was chaos; everything was still getting jacked up.
The O.C introduced us to a woman police officer who was one of the incident controllers. She called the forward control point and said,
"Our friends are on their way down to see you."
I returned to the briefing area with Bob and Jack and saw the two pilots. Squash talk had finished now and they were looking at some air photography that had just come in. Steve had decided to get his pipe out and slowly kill everyone. Each time he left it the thing would go out, so he had to relight it, causing clouds of smoke to form above him.
The squadron O.C and I got a radio each and did a quick roadie's sound check-"One two, one two"-to each other and moved off toward the inner cordon. All the radios were secure comms, so no one else could listen on our net.
We must have been stopped and checked three times at different points along the route. Once there we wanted to get as close as possible to the target. The O.C wanted to start thinking about the deliberate options, how he was going to get his teams on target and what he wanted to happen when they were there. On these phases we had the advantage over the terrorists.
Bob was looking for the best places to put his snipers.
They needed to be as far away as possible for concealment but close enough to play the kind of detail that was going to be required.
For my part, I was looking for the best Way to get the team in and control the target thirty minutes after they arrived, which was the 3 i/c's job.
We got to the control point, a group of gray police Portakabins, each with a black-and-white checked line around it. It had been raining, and our shoes were muddy. I tried to scrape most of it off as we entered.