The One That Got Away - Junior edition

by Chris Ryan

  London! That wasn’t what I wanted at all. My only concern was to get back to Saudi and find out what had become of the rest of the patrol. But I realized that if I did fly in to London, I’d only have a very short time there – the Regiment would want me straight back in Saudi, for debriefing.

  The embassy guys offered to get a taxi down to the hotel, but as it was only a couple of hundred metres away, I said I could walk. Yet when the DA set off at a normal pace, I couldn’t keep up with him. I padded slowly along the pavement, and anyone I passed looked down at my stockinged feet in some surprise. As we arrived at the hotel, the porters standing around in the lobby also glared at my feet.

  ‘We may have a bit of trouble here,’ the second secretary said, ‘as you haven’t got a passport. They don’t normally let anybody book in without identification. But I’ll see if I can square it away.’

  Sure enough, the guy on the desk wasn’t amused. ‘No, no,’ he kept saying. ‘No passport, no room! He cannot book in.’

  The second secretary began muttering about going back to the embassy and spending the night there. He said that to get a passport made out he’d have to contact the chargé d’affaires. A photo would have to be taken, and it couldn’t be done until next morning.

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a telephone number from the police. The boss guy said if I had any trouble, I was to ring them.’

  ‘No, no,’ said the defence attaché hurriedly. ‘You can’t do that. Don’t ring them. Don’t involve them any more. In fact, we’ve got a cellar bedroom in the embassy, and you can sleep down there.’

  ‘No,’ said the second secretary. ‘The place is filthy. He can’t go in there.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ barked the DA. ‘He’s just roughed it for eight days. He’ll be all right.’ Then he added, ‘At a pinch, he can have my bed.’

  We didn’t seem to be getting far, so the second secretary said, ‘Where’s that telephone number?’

  He got on the phone to my friend in the secret police, and within five minutes two Mercedes screeched to a halt outside. A swarm of men ran in. It looked like a raid by the SS in a Second World War film; some of them were wearing long black leather trench coats.

  With them was the interpreter. He came running up to me, grabbed me by the arm and moved me to one side. ‘Chris,’ he said quietly. ‘In two minutes, you’re going to sign the book. Sign with a name that you can remember, and give any address you can remember. Everything will be all right. If you get any more trouble, ring me again.’ He then had a word with the second secretary.

  I turned round, and there were three blokes giving the hotel manager behind the desk a hard time. His eyes were going round in circles, and he was nodding like a robot.

  ‘I’ll see you later,’ said the interpreter, and then the secret police party walked out.

  I went back up to the desk.

  ‘Yes, yes. Sign here, please. Anything I can do for you, sir?’

  I gave my surname as Black, and made up some address near Newcastle. The man snapped his fingers for a porter, and two guys grabbed my bags. The diplomats said, ‘We’ll see you in the morning,’ and up I went.

  By then it was after 2 a.m. and the past twenty-four hours had been the longest of my life. I’d really been looking forward to getting into that room. Once I close the door, I thought, I’ll be free of worry and danger for the first time in ten days. I’ll be able to lie down, chill out, and go to sleep.

  But it didn’t work out like that. As soon as I was alone, I started worrying about the rest of the patrol. I’d hoped that some of the guys would have escaped into Syria ahead of me. Either that, or they would have been lifted out by chopper, back into Saudi; but now these possibilities seemed unlikely. If the five had been rescued, and three guys had still been missing, the Regiment would surely have alerted the Syrians to look out for us, and warned the Damascus embassy. I’d come up like a bad penny, but nobody else had. What had happened to the others? Were they dead, or hiding up somewhere? Were they still on the move? If they were, they must be in a bad way by now.

  I was so wound up that I felt I was still on the run. I got out my notebook and began scribbling reminders about what I’d done. I’d brought the book with me in case I had to take down a radio message or compose one. Until then, I hadn’t made a single entry, for fear that I might be captured. But now I went back one day at a time, logging details to refresh my memory, and working out where I’d been at various times.

  At last I got my head down. But still I was tossing and turning, my mind full of disturbing images – of my comrades wandering in the desert, or worse still being killed.

  In the end, though, I fell asleep – only to be dragged back by the phone ringing just after 3 a.m. It was the defence attaché on the line, speaking in hushed whispers.

  ‘What happened to the Charlie Oscar Delta Echo Sierra?’ he breathed.

  ‘What?’

  He repeated himself.

  ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘What happened to the codes?’

  Suddenly I realized that he was trying to be covert, spelling out ‘codes’ like that. Also I realized that it must be High Wycombe who were asking for the information. Whenever we encrypt a message, we put it into code, then burn the cipher and smash the encryption device. In fact, Legs had carried our cipher equipment. He had burned the codes and smashed the device when we were first compromised.

  ‘One of the other lads had them,’ I said. ‘He burned them. I never had them at all.’

  ‘OK,’ he said, and rang off.

  That was when I knew for sure that nobody else had come out.

  In the morning I ordered breakfast from room service, and ate some fruit salad and a roll. I still didn’t want anything substantial, but I drank pints of fruit juice and tea. Compared with the day before, I felt quite good. Then the Brits came to collect me, and I hobbled back to the embassy, shuffling along the pavement in my stockinged feet, with my shoes under my arm.

  By the time we arrived, the place was full of people. The chargé d’affaires had appeared, and there were two British girls on duty, one dealing with communications, the other a typist. I chatted to them for a while, then they put me up against a wall in my shirt and tie to take a black-and-white passport photograph with a Polaroid camera. ‘Better be careful,’ somebody said. ‘We’ve only got two frames left.’ But the first shot came out well, so they trimmed it, stuck it into a blank passport and stamped it. There I was, fixed up with a ten-year passport. The whole thing seemed so amateurish that I felt I was being given a Second World War escape kit.

  During the morning some questions came back from High Wycombe. I mentioned that I’d walked through some installation which looked like a signals complex.

  ‘No,’ the second secretary said. ‘That’s not a signals complex. That’s the yellowcake processing facility at Al Qaim.’ He knew everything about the place – even the number of the Iraqi regiment guarding it. The latticework towers I’d seen on the high ground were for defence, not communication: the cables slung between them were in fact chains, to prevent attacks from low-flying aircraft.

  ‘What’s going on there?’ I asked.

  ‘We don’t know exactly. Some sort of nuclear processing.’

  ‘What? I drank some water coming out of that place, and it tasted terrible.’

  ‘Effluent,’ he said. ‘Nuclear effluent.’

  I felt my insides go cold. Had I swallowed some radioactive waste and contaminated myself, maybe with fatal consequences?

  Later we headed down to the airport to buy a ticket and get me on the flight to London. I got as far as the check-in desk, but there the guy stopped me because I didn’t have a stamped visa showing when I’d entered the country. I couldn’t argue with him, and I ended up back at the embassy. It looked like I’d have to stay in Syria for a couple of days.

  I went off with the defence attaché to see about a visa. We visited a building which was full of tiny offices. We were pass
ed from pillar to post. All in all we saw about twenty people. ‘Well,’ the final official said, ‘if you haven’t got an entry visa, you can’t leave.’

  So we’d wasted the whole morning. I said to the DA, ‘Why not phone my friend in the police again?’

  ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘we can’t do that.’

  So I waited till I was away from him, and asked the second secretary the same question. He put through a call, and very soon a message was on its way from the police to the visa building. When we next went down, I collected my exit visa without difficulty.

  The next flight out was in two days’ time – but now things had changed. Instead of returning to the UK, I was told I’d be flying to Cyprus, where I’d be put onto a Hercules that was coming across from Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. From Cyprus I was to fly to the Saudi capital, spend one night there, and then return to the squadron at Al Jouf. That suited me much better. All I wanted was to get back to the squadron, so that I could find out about the rest of the patrol, and brief any other guys who might be going in.

  That evening, back in the hotel, I had a meal in my room and went to bed. But still I couldn’t relax: the missing guys were too much on my mind. It felt really bad to be sitting in Damascus, unable to contribute any information which might help with their recovery.

  Back in the embassy next day, I was chatting to the two girls. One of them suggested I’d be more comfortable chilling out in her flat. As we sat there talking, I said, ‘D’you mind if I take off my shoes and socks, and have another look at my feet?’

  By then the cuts had dried up a good bit, but they still weren’t a pretty sight, and when I stripped the dressings off, they were horrified. Until then, I don’t think either of the girls quite realized what I’d been through. They imagined I’d just been for a bit of a walk. Anyway, they were full of sympathy – and it was good just to sit there and let my feet breathe.

  My fingers were nearly as bad as my feet. I still had no feeling in the tips, and when I squeezed my nails, pus kept oozing out. So I asked if she’d got a scrubbing brush, and went to the basin and scrubbed my fingers really hard. It was total agony, but I got the dirt out from under the nails, and all the pus, until blood was running freely. Then I rinsed my hands off. I hoped they would now begin to heal. Obviously I should have seen a doctor, but the embassy had no medic in residence, and a message from High Wycombe had told me not to make contact with anyone outside.

  The embassy people did their best to entertain me. The DA’s assistant, a sergeant, took me out for a drive round the heights of Damascus and showed me some of the military installations. We chatted about my escape. ‘You’re going to get a medal for this,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘It was nothing special.’

  Until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me that I’d done anything exceptional. I’d just been for rather a long walk. The job we’d been tasked to do had proved rather more difficult than expected – but I’d had to go through with it all the same.

  When the time came to leave, my weapon and ammunition obviously had to stay behind, but I wanted to take the TACBE and the night-sight, because I knew that those things were in short supply back at the squadron. But the second secretary made me leave them, in case they aroused suspicion and got me pulled in for questioning at the airport.

  When I went to board the Syrian Airlines aircraft I kept my bag with me, but as I reached the top of the steps, the steward said something aggressive to me in Arabic and threw it back down to the ground. As I went in through the door, I could only hope that someone would put it on board. On the plane, my seat was right at the back. As soon as we were airborne, with the no-smoking lights still on, everyone lit cigarettes. I’ve never been on an aircraft so full of smoke; you couldn’t see from one end of the cabin to the other.

  I didn’t care about any of that. I was just relieved to be leaving Syria. Even in the hands of the embassy people, I’d never felt entirely safe. Damascus had a dangerous air about it, and memories of the mock-execution out in the desert kept me on edge.

  It seemed crazy to be flying to Cyprus. The island lies more or less due west of Damascus, and it was east that I wanted to be heading. But the flight lasted less than a couple of hours, and soon we were coming in to land at Larnaca.

  All the while I had only one thing on my mind: what was the score back in the squadron?

  The defence attaché had arranged for me to be met in Cyprus, and once I’d collected my bag – which I was relieved to see had got on board OK – and got it through customs, I was met by a guy from the Joint Intelligence Company. He didn’t know who I was – just that I was passing through. As he led me across to a car, he said he was taking me to a family who’d agreed to put me up. Once we were rolling, he asked if I needed to see anybody.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I need to see a doctor.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Well, for starters, I think I drank some poisonous water. Also, my feet are in bits. And look at that.’

  I held out my hand to show him my fingers, which had not only lost all feeling in the tips, but now seemed to be turning blue. He gave me a strange look, but I didn’t tell him where I’d been.

  We drove into a nice-looking housing estate, with guards on the entrance, and I was met by an RAF squadron leader, who introduced me to his Scottish wife and their two young kids. No questions were asked; obviously they’d been briefed. They just welcomed me and sat me down.

  ‘Can I make you something to eat for tea?’ the wife asked. ‘It won’t take a minute. EastEnders is on the telly.’

  So there I sat, watching EastEnders and eating eggs, beans and chips. After everything I’d been through, it felt really weird.

  A doctor turned up and asked me what was wrong.

  ‘It’s my fingers,’ I told him. ‘I can’t feel them much, and they keep going blue.’

  He did the squeeze test a few times and said, ‘Well, the colour seems to be coming back. I think you’ve got a bit of frost-nip, that’s all.’ Then he looked at my feet, cleaned them up as much as he could, put zinc oxide tape on them and left me some spare tape. ‘There’s not a lot I can do for you,’ he said. ‘Is there anything else wrong?’

  ‘Well, I was round a chemical plant and drank some of the effluent. Could that be having an effect on my hands?’

  ‘I don’t see how it could. But you ought to have blood tests and other checks when you get back home.’

  When he’d gone, the woman gave me a beer, which went down well, and we sat around chatting. Then, just before 8 p.m., the husband said, ‘Right, I’m off to work. I’ll be back at four in the morning to pick you up.’

  My hostess showed me to a bedroom. ‘Would you like to get your head down?’ she asked.

  ‘Great,’ I said. But first I went to have a bath, because I’d got so sticky on the aircraft. When I stripped off, I was shocked. My legs had gone blue – worse than my hands!

  For a few seconds I was horrified – then I realized what the problem was. The dye had been coming out of my new Syrian cords, onto my hands as well. What a wally I felt, after that scene with the doctor! At least now I knew why I kept turning blue. But no matter what their colour was, my hands weren’t right; my fingers were still feeling woody.

  I got my head down, and the next thing I knew, my host was knocking on my door at 4 a.m. His wife was already up and had made a cup of tea; she was waiting for us downstairs, and as we went out I thanked her for looking after me.

  At Akrotiri airbase we were confronted by an RAF corporal. ‘Where’s your ID card?’ he demanded.

  ‘I haven’t got one.’

  ‘Passport?’

  ‘Haven’t got one.’ (In fact, I had the passport which they’d made out for me in Damascus, but I wasn’t going to show it to him.)

  ‘Name?’

  ‘There’s no name.’

  ‘Well, who are you?’

  ‘I’m a person that’s getting on this flight.’


  Behind me was the squadron leader who’d been looking after me. He was carrying my bags, and now he said, ‘It’s all right. I’ll vouch for him.’

  ‘OK, sir,’ said the corporal, and we walked through.

  By then the flight crew had assembled, and the chief loadie – the flight sergeant in charge of the back of the Hercules – had heard all this. He was quite a big lad, and he stood there watching.

  The squadron leader came in, put my bags down and said, ‘You’ll be going aboard with this flight crew. Soon as they go, you get on too.’ He went across to them and said, ‘That’s some extra luggage you’ve got.’ Then he shook hands with me. I thanked him, and he left.

  The flight crew were all laughing and joking together. I sat by myself across the room, and after a few minutes the flight sergeant came across. ‘Who are you, then?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m not telling you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mind your own business,’ I said, and looked down.

  ‘Who d’you think you are?’

  ‘What’s it got to do with you?’

  ‘If you don’t tell me who you are,’ said the flight sergeant, ‘you’re not getting on my aircraft.’

  ‘If I don’t get on,’ I told him, ‘I guarantee your career will end when this aircraft touches down in Riyadh. Now stop asking questions.’

  It was out of character for me to be so aggressive, but I felt I’d been through so much that I wasn’t going to bow down to anybody. These arguments were typical of what happens if someone tries to push an SAS guy. It’s a privilege, a sort of power for people in the Regiment – they don’t have to tell out siders anything. With officers, obviously, you’re polite, and if they ask for your identity, you just say, ‘Sorry, sir, I can’t tell you.’ Most people have the sense to back off if you tell them in a civil way that they don’t need to know. But there are always one or two who push and push, until it comes to the point when you have to lay down the law.