Soldier L: The Embassy Siege

by Shaun Clarke

  As Jock and the other three Blue Team members scrambled through the window, a revitalized Harris sat up on his haunches and shouted excitedly after them: ‘Go on, lads! Get the bastards!’

  By now, Phil and Alan, of the Red Team, had made their way across the smoke-wreathed stairs of the first floor. There they heard shouts from an adjoining office – that of the Minister’s secretary.

  Rushing in, they found the police hostage, PC Lock, struggling violently with a bearded terrorist who was holding an RGD5 hand-grenade in one hand and a Skorpion W263 Polish sub-machine-gun in the other. Though clearly in pain, PC Lock was wrestling gamely with the bearded terrorist, holding his right wrist to prevent him from hurling the grenade and falling with him over the furniture in a noisy mêlée. Lock had drawn his own .38 Smith & Wesson revolver and was trying to put it to the terrorist’s head with his free hand, but either he just could not manage it or he was reluctant to kill at close quarters.

  As the two men wrestled furiously, Phil grabbed Lock with his free hand and jerked him away from the terrorist, whom he recognized instantly from photographs as the leader, Salim.

  ‘Trevor, leave off!’ he bawled.

  As Phil turned away from Lock, Salim, who had almost fallen over, was trying to regain his balance. Before he could do so, the lance-corporal fired a burst of automatic fire at his head and chest and his fellow SAS man, Alan, did the same, both using their MP5 sub-machine-guns. Hit by fifteen bullets, Salim was thrown backwards like an epileptic having a fit and smashed down through the furniture to lie face up in the rubble on the floor.

  He died instantly, becoming the martyr he had long dreamed of being.

  Heading across the first-floor landing towards the rear of the building, past burning curtains, through pockets of smoke, and brushing against other hurrying, bawling SAS soldiers, Phil and Alan tried the door to the Ambassador’s office.

  ‘Locked!’ Phil said into his throat mike.

  He was raising his MP5 to blow the door open when it was opened from within and he found himself face to face with a youthful terrorist armed with a Browning.

  Before Phil could fire again, Alan, just behind him and to the right, fired a short, savage burst from his MP5. The terrorist screamed and staggered back into the room, then Phil threw a stun grenade after him. The combined blast and flash threw the terrorist even further back and made him stumble blindly. Alan fired a second time, making the terrorist scream out again, but instead of falling he gained the strength of the desperate and staggered deeper into the smoke-filled room, eventually disappearing.

  ‘Shit!’ Alan cried, squinting to see through the condensation on his respirator lenses, as well as through the smoke.

  ‘He’s still alive, he’s wounded and he’s desperate,’ Phil said to his mate. ‘And he’s got a weapon.’

  ‘We can’t see a damned thing in there,’ Alan said.

  ‘We can’t let that bastard get away.’

  ‘So let’s go in after him.’

  They advanced into the room, but as they entered the smoke, Phil felt himself choking.

  ‘Shit!’ he spluttered. ‘It’s CS gas and it’s penetrated my respirator. I’m choking to death. I’ve got to get out of here.’

  Coughing harshly, he staggered outside, ripped his respirator off, breathed the air, which was filled with the less noxious smoke from burning curtains, then placed his respirator back over his face and took deep, even breaths.

  ‘Anybody got a light?’ Alan shouted into his throat mike, now trapped in the dense smoke in the room and not able to see a thing.

  Jock, on his way up from the ground floor, heard Alan’s cry for help. Hurrying up the stairs, he found Phil about to re-enter the smoke-filled room.

  ‘Let me go first,’ Jock said. ‘I’ve got a torch bolted to my MP5.’

  Turning on the torch and holding the MP5 as if about to fire from the hip, he advanced into the room with Phil beside him. When he moved the sub-machine-gun left and right, up and down, the thin beam of light from the torch illuminated the darkness and, eventually, Alan.

  Not wishing to speak, Alan used a hand signal to indicate that he thought the terrorist was hiding in the far left corner of the room. Nodding, Jock moved towards the trooper, waited until he had fallen in beside him and Phil, then led them carefully through the dense smoke, aiming the barrel of the MP5 left and right, up and down, lighting up the darkness and, more dangerously, pinpointing his own position to the hidden enemy.

  No shots were fired at him and eventually, in that thin beam of light, Jock, Phil and Alan saw a hand, then a face … and then a Browning.

  The wounded terrorist was sprawled on a large sofa near the bay window overlooking the garden. He was covered in blood. When he weakly took aim with the pistol, his hand shook and wavered uncertainly from left to right.

  The three SAS men all fired their Heckler & Koch MP5 sub-machine-guns simultaneously, stitching the terrorist repeatedly, throwing him into convulsions, making him writhe dementedly and shake like a rag doll in the hands of an angry child. Pieces of torn upholstery, foam-filling and feathers exploded from what had been a luxurious sofa, only to drift back down like snow on his bloody remains.

  This time, hit by twenty-one bullets, the terrorist did not survive.

  At the rear of the building, on the third floor, some Red Team members were still in serious trouble. On the outside wall, just below Ken Passmore, Staff-Sergeant Harrison remained trapped in his abseiling harness, dangling and kicking ever more frantically 75 feet above the rear terrace. To make matters worse, flames from the fire were now roaring out of the general office window and starting to burn up his legs. To avoid being burnt even worse, and also to avoid choking in the billowing smoke, he had been kicking himself away from the wall, as if on a swing. However, this helped very little, for each time he swung back to the wall, he found himself in the smoke and flames again.

  ‘Cut me loose!’ he finally bellowed in desperation.

  ‘Jesus, boss, I…’

  ‘Just do it!’

  Aware that if he cut the nylon rope, Harrison could plunge to a brutal death, Ken was reluctant to do so. Nevertheless, with the fire in the third-floor room growing stronger and the flames licking out through the window to coil up on the wind and attack the staff-sergeant, Ken saw that he had no choice. He therefore withdrew his Fairburn-Sykes commando knife from its sheath and, with a great deal of effort, being himself trapped in mid-air and scorched by the flames, hacked through the nylon cord snagged in the descendeur.

  ‘Any second now!’ he bellowed as the last threads were shredded.

  Harrison fell through the flames onto the balcony. Burnt and blistered, but free at last, he smashed the third-floor window with his small, belt-held sledgehammer, hurled in some stun grenades, and swung himself into the smoke-filled interior of the large general office, where, according to their briefing, most of the hostages were held.

  The room was empty. It was also locked, barricaded and piled high with inflammable material that had just been ignited by the flash-bangs.

  Nevertheless, when Ken had followed him into the room, Harrison advanced blindly with his trooper through the dense smoke and flames until he reached the locked door, which he recognized only after tracing it with his fingertips. Already in a temper because of his bad start, he blew the locks apart with a couple of shots from his Browning. The locks gave way in a hail of dust and wood splinters, but the doors, barricaded from the other side, remained firmly locked.

  ‘I’m going to try another route,’ Ken said.

  Retreating to the balcony, he clambered across to an adjoining window ledge. From there he could see inside the room, where a terrorist was striking matches to set fire to paper piled up against the wall. Before the terrorist could look up and see him perched on the ledge, Ken smashed the window and hurled a stun grenade. The explosion shook the terrorist and temporarily blinded him; so, although he managed to raise his pistol to fire, he fled from the room
instead.

  Still perched on the window ledge, Ken aimed his MP5 and fired from the hip.

  The weapon jammed.

  Cursing, Ken drew his Browning, clambered off the ledge, dropped into the room, and went after the terrorist, the former mechanic Shakir Sultan Said. He lost the terrorist temporarily in the smoke, but then saw him racing into what Ken knew, from his frequent rehearsals with the plywood model of the Embassy, was the telex room, where most of the male hostages were held. It was off to the right across the landing, which was covered in smoke.

  Unseen by Ken, another terrorist, Shakir Abdullah Fadhil, the group’s second in command, had just run into the room with Badavi Nejad and Makki Hounoun Ali, when Said, fleeing the trooper, also reached it. Seeing the unarmed male hostages huddling fearfully together in the corner of the room, Fadhil swept them with a burst of automatic fire from his Skorpion W263 sub-machine-gun, causing them to turn into a shuddering mass of bloodstained protoplasm in which, for the moment, it was impossible to tell who had been hit and who spared.

  Inspired by this gross act, Badavi Nejad emptied his .38 Astra revolver into them as well.

  The Embassy doorman, Abbas Fallahi, at least knew that he had been hit – and saved. Checking for wounds as he crouched with the other frightened hostages, some of whom were now covered in blood, he discovered that he had only been saved from death because a 50-pence coin in the right pocket of his jacket had deflected the bullet. Fallahi was just uttering profound thanks for his salvation when a canister of smoke, fired from the other side of Princes Gate, smashed through the window of the telex room, hitting him and knocking him to the ground as the room filled with smoke.

  Having helped in the attack, Badavi Nejad dropped his pistol in panic and wriggled his way in amongst the surviving hostages. As he was doing so, Fadhil was throwing his sub-machine-gun through the window and emptying his pockets of ammunition. Said, being the last to enter, could think of nothing to do other than stand in the smoke-filled room with his finger crooked inside the pin of a grenade.

  Ken, now being followed by Harrison, heard the shots and screams of the victims as he charged towards the telex room. Even as he was rushing towards that sound, some of the surviving hostages were wriggling away from the group on the floor, grabbing the discarded weapons and ammunition of the terrorists and throwing them out of the window into the street below.

  With his MP5 in his left hand and his Browning in his right, Ken reached the telex room, kicked the door open and immediately turned the corner, crouching, gun raised in a classic CQB stance. When he saw the figure to his left, grenade in hand, he quickly fired a single round at the head. Entering Said’s skull just below the left ear, the 9mm bullet exited through his right temple, blowing out blood, bone and brains, and killing him instantly.

  Emerging from the general office and following the sound of shooting, Harrison, still in a raging temper, soon reached the telex room, where he found one dead terrorist, one dead hostage and two badly wounded men.

  ‘Who’s a terrorist?’ he heard himself bawling angrily before he could stop himself. ‘Who’s a terrorist?’

  Receiving no reply, he grabbed the first English-looking person he could find and jerked him roughly to his feet.

  ‘I’m not a terrorist. I’m Ron …’

  Before the caretaker could say anything, Harrison, despite the dreadful pain of his burns, threw him roughly across the room towards the door where, he knew, other SAS men would manhandle him, none too gently, down the stairs, through the library and out onto the rear lawn where, like all the others, terrorist and hostage alike, he would be laid face down on the ground and trussed up like a chicken.

  ‘Who’s a terrorist?’ Harrison shouted again, hardly recognizing the sound of his own voice. ‘Who’s a damned terrorist?’ An Iranian face looked up from the smoke-wreathed, blood-soaked group on the floor. ‘You!’ Harrison bawled. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘The cultural …’

  ‘Who are the terrorists?’

  Jock and GG burst into the telex room as the Iranian on the floor pointed tentatively at two men sitting with their backs to the room and their hands on the wall. Before Harrison or anyone else could say anything, Jock and GG fired a sustained burst at the two men, hitting one in the head and the other in the neck and pelvis, punching both of them forward face first into the wall, where they slid shuddering down to the floor, leaving a trail of blood.

  ‘Stay there!’ Harrison bawled at the others. ‘Don’t move unless instructed!’ He turned to Jock and GG. ‘Let’s check them quickly for weapons, then get them out of here. Keep your eyes peeled for terrorists.’

  The first thing they did was separate the wounded and the dead from those still untouched. Among the hostages attacked by the terrorists, Dr Afrouz, the chargé d’affaires, had been hit by two bullets, one of which passed through his right thigh; Ahmed Dagdar, the medical adviser, had been savagely wounded by six bullets; and another member of staff, Ali Samad-Zadeh, had been killed outright.

  As nothing could be done for the last-named – or indeed for the dead terrorist already identified as Shakir Sultan Said – GG, as a medical specialist, temporarily staunched the wounds of the two wounded hostages with field dressings. Satisfied that he had done all he could here, he left the room with Jock to take part in the evacuation of the building and the ‘undiplomatic reception’ outside on the back lawn.

  16

  Even before the survivors were moved out of the choking atmosphere of the telex room, Harrison, now cooled down, and Ken, still level-headed, tried to identify the ‘worms’ who had wriggled their way into the huddled mass on the floor.

  The hostages, some with eyes streaming from CS gas, others covered in the blood of those killed or wounded, all dishevelled, most in shock, were bundled out one by one, then passed by the chain of Red Team soldiers along the corridor with its smouldering curtains, bullet-peppered walls and blackened carpets, down the smoke-filled stairs, across a hallway reeking of stinging CS gas, all the way out through the relatively untouched library and onto the rear lawn, where darkness was falling.

  The first ‘worms’ were easily identified because they had forgotten to remove their green combat jackets. Others, however, had had the sense to do so and were marched with the genuine hostages down the stairs to the lawn, where the female hostages were already face down on the grass, their hands and feet tethered.

  One of them did not make it that far. As the last of the hostages was being taken from the telex room, the Red Team searched the suspects and were put on their guard by two who seemed too wary and alert to be hostages.

  ‘If they’re hostages I’m Donald Duck,’ Ken said.

  ‘And I’m Mickey Mouse,’ Harrison replied, increasingly impressed by the trooper. ‘Let’s have a talk with them.’

  Leaving both men to the last, they waited until the other hostages had left, then spoke first to the smaller, more nervous of the two suspects.

  ‘Lie down,’ Harrison told him.

  The man did so, stretching his arms above his head without being asked, like someone used to the experience.

  ‘Who are you?’ Harrison asked, standing over him and aiming him MP5 at his spine.

  ‘Student. I am student.’

  ‘I’ll bet you are,’ Harrison murmured. Stepping away, but keeping the suspect covered, he nodded to Ken. ‘Search him,’ he said.

  The trooper did so, running his hands over the suspect’s body, then pushing his legs open and inspecting his crutch. There he saw the glint of metal – something that resembled a pistol magazine – and then a holster tangled up in the trousers.

  ‘Well, well,’ Ken said dryly, ‘what have we here, then?’

  Suddenly drawing his arms in towards his body, the suspect started rolling over onto his back. Before he could do so, Harrison fired a short burst into his back, killing him instantly, and punching him belly down again, onto the floor.

  When Ken turned the body over, he found a han
d-grenade as well as the magazine for a .38 Astra revolver. ‘Little bastard,’ he said. Quickly frisking the body, he came up with an Iraqi identity card, the details of which he read aloud to Harrison. ‘Makki Hounoun Ali, twenty-five, a Baghdad mechanic.’

  ‘A mechanic who carries a .38 revolver,’ Harrison replied. ‘Pull the other one, darling.’

  Harrison turned to grin at Ken, but when he did so, he saw the trooper and his double, standing almost side by side, though one was slightly overlapping the other, slightly transparent, like a ghost.

  At first Harrison was shocked, thinking he was hallucinating. Then he realized that his burns on his legs were hurting dreadfully and that the pain was causing him double vision. Though the pain remained agonizing, he heaved a sigh of relief.

  ‘I’m not feeling too good,’ he confessed. ‘I think I’d better go out and see the medics. Can you handle the rest of this?’

  ‘Sure, boss.’

  ‘Good man,’ Harrison said.

  He turned away to leave the room, felt nauseous, saw two of everything, then fell down through a spinning, light-flecked darkness into oblivion.

  Shocked, Ken leaned over him, checked that he was still breathing and realized that he had passed out from a combination of pain and exhaustion. Using the throat mike on his respirator, he called up the special medical team, asking for a stretcher.

  While the normally sharp-eyed trooper was thus engaged, the second suspect, Fadhil, the second in command, slipped away into the smoke and gathering darkness, where he mingled with the last of the freed hostages on their way down the stairs.

  The members of the Blue Team who had cleared the basement and ground floor had met up with the other members of the Blue and Red Teams from the upper storeys to form the chain along which the hostages were now passed or – as some would later have it – thrown from hand to hand down the stairs and out through the library, then onto the lawn to be trussed up for more intensive body searches and interrogation. Brutal though this would have appeared to the uninitiated, it sprang from the soldiers’ fear that the terrorists might have hidden an explosive charge on one of their own people or on a hostage, as their final response to this attack.