by Jason Elliot
Then he goes into the house and returns with the AK. We run through a similar routine, as he explains that a rifle is in fact less risky to deal with than a pistol. The defender can move past the point of danger – the muzzle – and prevent the rifle returning to its target by moving in close and blocking it. The bulky foresight on the muzzle of an AK also makes it ideal to grab, and allows the defender to control the weapon. As the attacker goes down, a few jerks on the barrel is usually enough to break his grip.
‘Once it’s yours, you can decide what you want to do,’ he says.
We try this out from the front a few times, at increasing speeds. H recommends a succession of kicks to the attacker’s knee and sharp pulls on the barrel of the rifle. We move on to the variation from behind. He jabs the muzzle into my back and shouts, ‘Move it!’ and I turn and strike the barrel, feeling the outer side of my palm connect with the foresight. But I hit it too hard, and the skin on the edge of my hand splits open like a banana peel. I finish the move, but there’s blood streaming over our clothes. H shoulders the AK with one hand and squeezes the sides of the cut together.
‘Bad luck,’ he says, ‘but I think you’ve got the hang of it.’ He leads me indoors, still holding the bloody hand, which drips over the kitchen floor. He stretches a few surgical strips across the wound, then binds it up in a bandage.
‘Lucky the memsahib’s away for a few days. She can’t stand the sight of blood.’
Life at home after our sessions together seems quiet. I study the weapons manual, practise stripping the AK, the Makarov and the Browning, and wonder how the Jehovah’s Witnesses might react if I came to the door with an AK at the ready. I perfect the skill of trapping small rodents, because the organisation of night-time ambushes in secondary jungle is not really practical in my garden, with the help of another manual H has lent me called Operational Techniques Under Special Conditions. I also force myself to run, and begin to shave seconds off my circuit times, though the margin is proving disappointingly difficult to improve on. My thighs are in fierce protest after the slopes of the Beacons, and running makes my calf muscles hurt all day long. I’m in constant discomfort.
The following week, my training with H follows the same pattern. His wife Sally is away again, visiting family over the weekend, and we have the house to ourselves. We walk and run long circuits in the mornings and go over practical skills in the afternoons. In the evenings we add more detail to the overall plan.
H says we’ll need to practise car drills too.
‘If our opsec is up to scratch, no one who doesn’t need to will ever know what we’re doing. But we have to plan for worst-case scenarios.’ He’s right. It’s not impossible that someone might try to rob us. In Afghanistan there are unofficial checkpoints where we might be held up, or worse. ‘Best way to deal with a bogus VCP is to never get into one,’ says H. ‘Next best is to turn around fast. Last resort is to drive through.’ We agree that driving through vehicle checkpoints isn’t such a great idea because trigger-happy Afghans are inclined to shoot at the occupants, rather than the tyres, of disobedient vehicles, and Afghans tend to be good shots. The problem of banditry has been much reduced by the Taliban, but their Arab allies affiliated with al-Qaeda are known to be cruel and frequently ruthless, and make Afghan bandits seem kindly.
One morning, another week later, he reverses his Range Rover into the centre of the driveway, and we stand by it as he speaks, imagining the scenario of coming under attack on some lonely stretch of Afghan road.
The interior of a vehicle, unless it’s armoured, offers no protection at all, which makes getting out fast a priority. H explains that a high-velocity round has no difficulty going through the body of a car and that the only part of a normal vehicle which can provide cover is either the engine block or the wheels. Since you can’t manoeuvre from behind an engine block, that leaves the wheels.
‘There’s just one problem,’ he says, asking me to lie down behind one of the wheels and imagine that I’m trying to return fire. Between the ground and the underside of the car is a thin strip of space, beyond which the ground obscures everything. The only thing I’ll be able to shoot from this position is our attacker’s toes.
‘You can’t see a bloody thing,’ I say.
‘Exactly.’
At that moment I hear a rapid panting in my ear as H’s terrier runs up and begins feverishly licking my face.
‘Jeffrey!’ hisses H. ‘Get out of it! Fuck off!’ The dog persists, so he leads it back into the house and, apologising, settles down beside me again.
‘If you stick your head up over the wheel, you’ll have a better view.’
That makes sense. Steadying my imaginary weapon over the bonnet of the car, I line up on an enemy sheep in the field beyond.
‘Get the idea?’ H retrieves the AK, puts it on the rear seat, and we get into the car. ‘Most important is to agree who goes where, so we don’t end up on top of each other. Let’s say we’re coming under fire from my side. You go back, I’ll go front. Shall we try it?’
I throw open the door and tumble out, slamming it behind me instinctively just as H is trying to dive out. He blocks it with his hand and peers at me over the edge of the seat with a tolerant look I haven’t seen before.
‘Best not to slam the door in my face. Let’s try again.’
We return to the seats.
‘Last one out gets the AK. Enemy left – go!’
H rolls out of the passenger side and crouches behind the front wheel as I follow, grab the AK out of the back and position myself behind the rear wheel, firing imaginary rounds at our attackers.
‘Better,’ he says.
‘You must feel pretty vulnerable with your head sticking out like that,’ I say.
‘You do,’ he replies. ‘That’s why you don’t want to be there too long.’
We install ourselves back in the car.
‘Now we’ll withdraw under fire.’ He points around the garden. ‘I’ll move to that tree while you give covering fire. When I say, you move along the same path until we’re both behind the rhododendrons. When one of us is moving, the other is firing.’
‘Got it.’
We tumble out again at his signal. Bang bang bang bang bang! H runs to the tree. Then I follow as he covers me from the bushes beyond. Bang bang bang bang bang! We end up lying beside each other thirty yards from the car.
‘Fine,’ he says. ‘But I probably would have shot you. You ran through my line of fire. Try to keep a sense of where I am.’
Leaving me feeling like a small child, H disappears inside his garage and emerges with two black nylon waist packs.
‘Here,’ he says, handing me one of them, ‘your go bag.’ From the weight of it I know the Browning is inside. We check the weapons, which are unloaded, and put the packs on the bonnet.
‘You’ll usually have something like this on an op,’ he says, unzipping the main pouch of his bag. ‘Medical kit, E & E stuff, money, maps, heli marker for your exfil, and some other bits and pieces – it depends on what you need at the time. We’ll pretend these are ours and keep them under the seats.’
We stash the bags behind our heels and pretend once again to be heading into an ambush. If we’re expecting trouble, the best place for the Browning is on the seat under one’s leg, which saves having to scramble about for it. I copy him as he slides the weapon under his thigh with the butt facing out.
The Brownings are in our hands as we dive out again, then bound in turn across the drive into the garden.
‘Good, but you forgot the bag.’
But I’m learning. We repeat the drill several more times, upping the tempo each time until we’ve covered all the combinations. Speed, aggression and determination are the keys to success, he says. If there are only a few attackers, a concerted counter-attack with a high rate of fire from the AK can turn the tables, but it has to happen quickly.
We break for tea and H starts his ritual note-taking at the kitchen table. We draw up some g
eneral notes on security, with a plan to refine them as we go along. He draws a map of the ideas we need to understand. He lists the possible threats we’ll face, and how to defeat or minimise our vulnerability to them. He’s concerned with communications and transport, and getting safely from A to B, and not letting our plans be known to others. The level of detail borders on obsessive, but being methodical is what gives the SAS its reputation.
H talks at length about vehicle security: not choosing taxis which offer themselves, avoiding fixed routes, not getting boxed in when in heavy traffic, how to carry out a quick inspection of a vehicle to see if it’s been tampered with, code words for agreed sites, identifying safe havens to divert to in an emergency, and the need for back-up plans.
I realise he’s working his way through his own version of a military orders plan at combat-team level. This is generally written up under several headings. The first is ‘Ground’, which identifies the physical terrain, both generally and in detail. ‘Situation’ details friendly and enemy forces in the area of the operation, as well as the political layout. ‘Mission’ defines the scope of the operation, summed up in snappy language: kill X or destroy Y. ‘Execution’ goes into the details of routes, movement, RVs, action on target and exfil procedures – how to get home again. ‘Service Support’ deals with weapons, rations and equipment and how to get them to and from where they need to be. There’s another standard heading, which I can’t remember.
‘ “Command and Signals”,’ says H. ‘Radios, mostly. Who talks to who, when and how. We won’t be calling in much air support. Just checking in with London from time to time.’ He waves a pen over the notes. ‘And we need to think of a cover story for our time in-country. Something short term.’ This is my task. He then explains how I should apply for a second passport, which can be left hidden in a safe place in case we’re parted unexpectedly from our things.
His wife has prepared a dinner for us in advance. We eat and then devote the evening to familiarising ourselves with the weapon that lies behind the whole operation.
‘Might want to study this,’ says H, putting a bulky manual in front of me. It’s the American DoD training documentation for the FIM-92. The pages are marked secret, and there are several hundred of them.
‘The Sovs would’ve killed to get their hands on this a few years back,’ he says, tapping the cover.
‘They were the first to find out the hard way what the Stinger could do,’ I say, thinking of the missile’s deadly effect on Soviet airpower in Afghanistan.
‘Not quite,’ he corrects me. ‘The Yanks gave us some of these when we were down south in the Falklands. There was only one bloke from the Regiment who knew how to use the Stinger, and he was on that Sea King that crashed in the South Atlantic. A trooper in D Squadron managed to shoot down an Argentine fighter, though he was bloody lucky. That was the first combat kill with the Stinger.’
Its portability and reliability make it one of the most desirable weapons in the world. It is strange to think of the most advanced anti-aircraft technology of the time being hauled around Afghanistan on the backs of donkeys and camels. The Stinger’s role in the final humiliation of the Soviet army was never really acknowledged.
The earliest Stinger models didn’t distinguish between enemy or friendly targets: anything in the Afghan skies was fair game. The long thin missile is fitted into a fibreglass launch tube, and then attached to an assembly made up of the trigger and the infrared antennae, which looks vaguely like a toaster. A small battery unit is clipped in place, and when the missile has locked onto its target, a small speaker gives out the signal to fire. In case there is too much noise for it to be heard, a vibrator buzzes in the cheekbone of the firer. There are a number of checks and sensors that indicate whether the weapon is serviceable.
We need to know these things, and we go over them in detail.
Several hours later H gathers up our paperwork and locks it in a small safe. Then, when it’s time to turn in, he waves a hand over his bookshelves and invites me to have a browse.
‘You might like this one.’ He pulls down a book about the Regiment and fans the pages until he reaches the chapter devoted to the campaign in Oman. There’s a selection of photographs taken at the height of the conflict, but the images of the soldiers don’t look like conventional portraits. The men wear beards, ragged-looking uniforms and frayed caps or Arab shemaghs; cigarettes dangle from their lips, and many of them look too old to be soldiers in any case.
H points to a photograph of a fearsome-looking bearded man with a sunburned face under a combat cap. A bulky general purpose machine gun and dangling belt of gleaming ammunition hang from his shoulder.
‘That’s the Ditch,’ says H, looking fondly at the photograph. ‘Gentle as a kitten. And that’s the Monk.’ There’s another photograph of a man wearing what looks like a monk’s hooded cassock. From the shadows of the woollen hood, a faint and enigmatic smile on the lean face does seem to confirm a contemplative temperament. Only the M16 assault rifle cradled protectively in his arms suggests a different calling.
He turns the pages again to show me a photograph of a young man peering over the sights of an 81-millimetre mortar in a dusty-looking sandbagged gun pit. His bare upper body is deeply tanned and he looks very fit. It’s H, twenty-five years earlier, up on the Jebel near Medinat al-Haqq.
‘We used to play with that mortar a lot.’ He smiles. ‘Just to let the Adoo know we could put down a round on a sixpence if we wanted to.’
It’s very strange. As a teenager I owned the same book and pored over its pages, never imagining that one day I might know the names of the anonymous soldiers who looked out from them.
‘Those blokes were the real deal,’ says H, nodding solemnly. ‘They don’t make them like that any more.’
We leave the house in the morning while it’s still dark. The Brownings are hidden in the go bags at our feet, and the AK under the rear seat. We’re heading for an abandoned quarry about half an hour west of Hereford, practising the anti-ambush drill on the way, throwing the car onto the verge and positioning it between us and our imaginary attackers. Then, as the sky is beginning to brighten, we turn from the main road onto an unsurfaced track. At the end of it the ground opens out into a wide flat stretch of chalky subsoil, criss-crossed by waterlogged bulldozer tracks. Beyond it rises a pale amphitheatre of stone about sixty feet high.
I cut the engine and H takes two rolled-up targets from the car. We walk across the open ground and fix the targets to the soft stone with tent pegs. We count a hundred paces and I stand on the spot we mark, while H takes the AK from the back of his car. He clears the mechanism, hands me the weapon and feeds three rounds into the magazine. From his pocket he takes a small box of yellow foam earplugs, which we squeeze into our ears.
‘Let’s zero the sights. Put three rounds on the black circle.’
The black circle, the size of a small plate up close, looks tiny. I line up on the speck of black and squeeze the trigger. The rifle bucks as if knocked by a hammer from below. I’ve forgotten how loud guns are.
‘One,’ says H. I fire again. ‘Two.’ And again. ‘Three. Clear it.’
We jog to the target. One round is a foot off to the left. This is probably the first. The other two are a few inches apart, in line with the centre but six inches too high. We jog back to our firing position, where H makes an adjustment to the foresight and feeds five more rounds into the magazine.
‘Centre of the target. Five rounds rapid.’
The AK rises and falls. I fire at the end of each downward lull and try to keep the rhythm even. My cheekbone, which I’ve been holding too close to the butt, is throbbing as if someone’s punched it, and despite the earplugs my ears are ringing.
‘Not bad,’ says H, grinning as we pull the pegs from the target. ‘Must be the quality of instruction.’ There are three small holes in the centre circle and two others within the second, all vertically aligned within a few inches. He looks at his watch. ‘Let�
�s see how you do with the other fellow.’
We walk to the car, put the AK back under the rear seat and retrieve the Brownings. H has also brought a plastic bag with a dozen empty beer cans, seven of which we now set on a sloping stone shelf running across the face of the quarry. We take ten paces towards the car and turn around.
‘When you’re ready,’ says H. ‘Double tap on each. Remember not to yank the trigger.’
I cock the Browning and fire at each can in turn. Four of the seven are sent spinning. Three remain stubbornly in place as little fountains of chalk erupt behind them.
‘Needs a bit of work,’ says H. We gather up the empty casings, then the cans, and fix them back on the shelf.
‘Show me how it’s done then,’ I say.
H cocks his pistol and tucks it into his belt above his left hip with the butt facing forward, and lets his coat fall in front of it. Then, in a single movement of astonishing swiftness, he draws his coat away with his left hand, pulls the weapon out with his right and begins firing with his knees slightly flexed. There’s hardly a pause between targets, each of which disappears as he works from left to right. By the time I look back from the targets to see him removing the magazine from his pistol, less than five seconds has passed. H says nothing but throws me a satisfied wink. Then he pockets the Browning and scoops up the empty casings.
‘We’d best be going,’ he says.
‘I enjoyed that,’ I say.
‘Me too.’ He looks at his watch again and gives me a pensive look. The sky has brightened in the east, but around us the land is silent.
‘I was just thinking,’ he says. ‘Shall we try the anti-ambush, and live-fire the Brownings? We could come from up there,’ he motions to the dirt track that winds upwards beside the quarry face, ‘drive in close, and retreat this way.’ There are some dips and mounds in the ground behind us, and roughly fifty yards from the quarry face is a long intervening ridge of bulldozed rubble about four feet high. It’s the perfect hiding place to retreat to from the car. ‘Just aim for the same place where the targets were. Imagine each one’s an Adoo with an AK. Let’s get those cans so we can scarper afterwards.’