by Andy Farman
With the carcasses of Paul Fitzhugh’s sheepdogs removed, two-man sniper teams chose un-obvious firing positions from where they could completely cover all possible escape routes, if not all of the buildings sides, between them. Once they had ‘gone firm’ the entry teams moved to their jump off points in the farmyard.
A very long way from the man who a few years previously had been mounting ‘Queens Guard’ at the Royal residences in full ‘glory order’, scarlet tunic, tweeds, bearskin etc., Pete ‘Sav’ Savage today resembled a cowpat. Or at least an inconspicuous part of a field studded with the aforesaid deposits. Cows are a less vocal hindrance to covert rural ops. With little to occupy their days except chewing the same old thing, immobile humans, invisible to the naked eye, seem to be an irresistible form of distraction in the cattle’s mind. It is most frustrating to have taken several hours’ getting into position, dug an O.P below a hedgerow, hidden the resulting spoil and got all of the team secreted away, only to have a Bovine appreciation society gather with the dawn. Fortunately the same kit that bamboozles dog’s noses also works on other species of God’s creatures.
‘Sav’ and his oppo had gone firm at 0222hrs. Dick French beside him was his spotter and his back up with a 7.62mm belt fed ‘Gimpy’. The elderly General Purpose Machine Gun had been replaced in infantry sections by the LSW. The LSWs lighter, magazine fed ammunition and its fixed barrel were a serious step back in most soldiers’ eyes. The LSW could not provide the necessary weight of fire needed. Its 5.56mm ammunition lacked the stopping power of the 7.62mm round and constant pauses to change magazine's cuts its rate of fire. Once its barrel overheated it was a useless lump of ironmongery until it cooled down again. With the gimpy it was a simple business to clip fresh belts of ammunition onto the end of the one being fed through the gun and swap the barrel over with one of several spares carried. Wherever possible, units of the British armed forces kept the gimpy despite the incompatibility of the ammunition it now meant for small arms.
Dicks GPMG was more than capable of stopping a mass breakout toward them, quite literally, dead in its tracks.
Sav had the superb Accuracy International .338 calibre rifle known simply as the L115A1in the British Army and this was topped with an American D-141 night sight. With the butt pressed into his right shoulder and barrel resting on its bipod he scanned the buildings ahead of him. At a fraction under 15lbs bare, the weapon was heavy enough on its own but with its telescopic sight and five round magazine, filled with armour piercing tungsten tipped rounds of ammunition it would tax an unfit man. Beside the armour piercing rounds Sav also had more standard ‘Ball’ ammunition, but with limited information on the target he intended to be prepared for the worst. Next to him Dick had the gimpy rested before him whilst he also scanned the buildings. Although there were twelve fellow troopers in amongst the farm buildings they could only see two, crouched beside the back wall of the barn.
In the same fashion that microphones had been placed on the house in St Johns Wood the troopers had wired the farmhouse. A recce of the other buildings and out houses had not revealed any surprises. All the suspects were confined under one roof.
A mile away Major Craig Thompson, the G Squadron commander, the Deputy Chief Constable of Essex and the Chief Superintendent for that area listened whilst all stations reported in. Major Thompson was concerned at the lack of movement from within the farm. To all appearances it was indeed a working farm, yet there were only the sounds of sleeping men. He would have expected some movement by now.
A Royal Signals sergeant informed him that the London targets were awake and one arrest had already been made without alerting those in the house.
“Do you relinquish operational control, sir?” he asked the Deputy Chief Constable.
“I believe the moment has arrived Major”.
Two signatures made it official. Taking a headset he informed the London operation that he intended to go in five minutes at 0430hrs exactly. London agreed and both operational commanders passed the word to the troops.
There had been a disagreement on how to handle the situation earlier. Whether to telephone the occupants of the addresses once cordons were in place and negotiate their surrenders or assault the buildings without warning. Unlike many of his staff the Commissioner of the Met had spent considerably longer in front line policing than the minimum two years. Pussy footing about with terrorists who’d butchered his unarmed officers went against the grain. That however had not been his line of argument. He stated, with some justification, that the suspects were heavily armed, ruthless and giving any kind of warning would further endanger lives.
St Johns Wood, London: 0427hrs
Carmichael had finished dressing and had put the kettle on for himself. The coffee percolator bubbled and hissed with Alexandra’s favourite start to the morning. Striding to the kitchen window he pulled open the curtains in order to behold the new day.
“Shit!” breathed a black clad police officer of the team about to assault the rear of the address. PC Tony Stammers froze motionless in a crouch on Carmichael’s herbaceous border; he kept his head down and attempted to imitate a lethally armed garden gnome. Lying prone and using the garden hedges as cover the remainder of his team were less than impressed. Carmichael had been interested in the state of the sky rather than the progress of his Liliflorae and dropped the curtains back into place. Scuttling sideways into cover the gnome mimic received a thump on the top of his helmet.
“Next time you hug the cover, you don’t take short cuts!” hissed his sergeant and emphasised the salient point of his argument with a second, harder blow. Constable Annabel Perry, the errant SFOs partner, was looking at him with a despairing look on her face.
Intending to take Berria her morning coffee in the bath Carmichael raised one foot to mount the stairs when several things happened at once. Having climbed rubber clad storming ladders at the front and rear bedroom windows four SFO’s stormed through the flying shards of glass to toss stun grenades onto the landing and over the banister rail. Carmichael dropped the china cups and saucers he had held and was reaching down for a small handgun in its ankle holster at the sound of the windows shattering. Berria had been rather more switched on, she knew that what would come next would be mind numbing. Placing hands across her ears she slid below the water’s surface to muffle the sound. Four stun grenades went off with two of them within three feet of Carmichael, temporarily ruining his vision and hearing. Despite the pain in his ears Carmichael raised the gun in front of himself defensively and that was the sight that greeted the first two officers to burst through the front door.
Berria emerged from below the surface of the bath water the second she judged all the grenades had finished and heard two gunshots, so close together that the sounds almost merged. Fishing below soiled undies in the linen basket she withdrew and cocked an Uzi sub machine gun and extended its wire stock before opened the door to the landing.
On hearing the sound of a weapon being cocked Tony Stammers was bringing his MP5 around to bear on the direction of the sound and hesitated, for just a milli-second, at the sight of a dripping wet and naked blond in the bathroom doorway. The floral wallpaper on the wall at his back sprouted several holes but his ballistic body armour stopped both the rounds that struck him at chest height, however the round that pierced his left bicep shattered the bone behind it. Annabel Perry had also heard the Uzi being cocked but she had dropped prone at the sound. Alexandra Berria’s only burst of fire was cut short as Annabel shot her between the breasts. The butt of the sub machine gun remained in her shoulder but Berria came out of the aim and stepped backwards drunkenly with a wide eyed and open mouthed look of surprise on her face until the back of one leg struck the bath tub and she sat down heavily upon its edge. By accident or designed the muzzle of the Uzi swung toward the prone officer. Instantly Annabel raised her point of aim and shot Berria again, this time below the right eye. Alexandra was left draped over the edge of the bath with her head below water now turn
ing slowly crimson, and legs akimbo, sticking over the edge.
At the foot of the stairs Carmichael was staring up at the ceiling whilst one of the officers who had shot him applied direct pressure on a wound dressing.
With the building secure, para medics from the London Ambulance Service entered. Having told Carmichael’s carer to save his energy they moved on up the stairs and gave the same advice to an officer working on Berria.
The Fitzhugh farm, Essex
Major Thompson would have been relieved to a degree to have known that after cleaning and reassembling their weapons the Irishmen had gotten very drunk by way of celebrating the blow they had struck for Irish unity. Paul Fitzhugh had also got himself drunk after watching the same television news footage as his house guests, but for different reasons. He had taken himself off to the barn and continued drinking alone amongst the bails of winter feed. The trooper’s recce had not discovered him in the recess where he had fallen asleep with a bottle of Jameson’s for comfort.
Unlike the police method of entry in London the Army assault was far more spectacular. Breaching charges blew in the doors and windows whilst the salvo of stun grenades that followed immediately after created havoc amongst the rudely awoken occupants.
Contrary to left wing media press reports, British soldiers are not mindless killing machines. They do not shoot a man just because they are ordered to; neither do they kill a man because he bloody well deserves it. They shoot to kill rather than wound for the simple reason, that trying to emulate the Hollywood stunt of ‘winging’ an opponent or trying to shoot the gun from an enemy’s hand, is a quick way to get yourself, and your mates killed.
Two terrorists had weapons in their hands and both were shot. The remaining three were unceremoniously thrown to the floor and cuffed with hands behind their backs before being dragged downstairs where a medic had felt for a pulse on one of their number and abandoned any further effort on him. The second gunshot casualty would never know it, but his life would be saved by a British soldier his own age, born and raised just a quarter of a mile from where he himself had been born and brought up in Belfast.
Paul Fitzhugh woke up to the sound of explosions and gunfire. Staggering to his feet and lurching to the barns door he caught sight of a black clad trooper, face obscured by a respirator, the very vision most people conjure up when they think of the SAS. Fear injected adrenaline into his system and he ran to the back of the barn where he was grateful he had not got around to securing a section of the corrugated aluminium wall, loosened in the previous winter’s storms. Bitterness was also welling up in him. The false picture of himself as a noble freedom fighter had crumbled the previous night and his life was now ruined by the people he had allowed to manipulate him.
Dick was the first to notice the rear wall of the barn move. Sav had been covering the left side of his arc of fire when Dicks urgently hissed
“Barn, lower right!” caused him to bring his aim around and down. In the differing shades of green that make up the view through a night sight, crystal clear images are not present, Sav could see the shape of a person crawl through a gap in the wall with an object in its hand. Speaking quickly into his headset microphone, Dick alerted all stations on the net.
Paul had crawled through the gap where the loose section of wall just permitted enough room for his bulk. Across the two fields ahead of him lay a small copse, to his mind that represented safety. Looking back over his shoulder at what had been his family’s home for generations he elected to vent his feelings before running for it.
All Sav had a chance to see was the figure in his sight’s rise up on to its knees, bringing back its arm in preparation to throw the object it held.
Paul Fitzhugh, the last in the line of Essex Fitzhugh’s never completed the action of lobbing the empty whiskey bottle. The .338 round, intended for use in piercing the otherwise bullet proof shutters the farm may have had, entered his body seven inches below his left armpit and exited in the centre of his back taking part of his heart, left lungs tissue and ten vertebrae to pebble dash the barn wall. The round itself carried on through the aluminium sheet wall, passing completely through a tractor engine block beyond and lodged in the old brickwork of the Fitzhugh ancestral home.
Southampton, England
Svetlana placed an empty, though brand new suitcase on top of the bed and rolled her head in wide circles to clear the knots a sleepless night had formed. There had been a series of quick stops in London to collect hers and Constantine’s own pre-positioned escape stashes after dumping the thief and informing the authorities before driving to Southampton.
As an ‘Illegal’, Svetlana had two locations, one in London and the other in Scotland where she had fake passports and genuine credit cards in false names. Her employers knew nothing of these; it was her own insurance policy against capture should it ever have come to that. She also had a clean firearm and £1000 cash, not that she ever wanted to have need of them. The single shot zip gun Constantine loaned her on that first day was also hidden about her person.
Constantine was not expected to ever have to make use of such precautions; he was covered by diplomatic immunity. His job description at the embassy was in effect that his superior never got his hands dirty, contacted agents or ran risks. He was the go-between/fall-guy for the military attaché. They both had the same information available to them but if something went wrong it would be the deputy military attaché, who was caught or named and then deported.
The day after the meeting with Carmichael and Berria, Constantine had known that he was in trouble. There was no way either of the pair would forget he had spoilt their entertainment, not with their history and boss, so he had formulated a contingency plan. In case of emergency there was cash and credit cards for ‘blown’ agents, and he of course knew the location of these dead drops He could only use them once and so just before midnight the previous evening, after collecting the £5000 cash he then walked to the nearest cashpoint machine. Drawing out the total daily cash on all the six cards Constantine waited seven minutes until the new day had begun, he then withdrew a further nine hundred on each. Sixteen thousand four hundred pounds was more money than he, a mere major, had ever seen before. With a thick marker pen he had written the pin number for each on the back of the corresponding card. Heading north, with Constantine on the lookout for down and outs they made a present of each one to each bagman and bag lady they saw. Confident that his superiors would not cancel the cards immediately, in the hope the transactions would trap him, they then picked up the M25 circular motorway and drove anti-clockwise around London to Southampton. For a time anyway, he hoped to throw the hunters off the trail.
Constantine had left the hotel right after booking them in to find food, and buy an early paper. There had been no news on the radio regarding the information he had passed to the police. He wished he had instructed Carmichael and Berria to stay in the Essex farm with the Irish but it was too late now to fret about it. He would have been far happier had they all been under one roof when the British came to call. Breakfast was not for two hours’ and they were both famished. Svetlana hit the shower before climbing between the sheets of the double bed and was asleep in minutes.
Returning to the hotel, armed with a pair of fast food breakfasts, Constantine had let himself into the room to find it held only the one bed, and that was occupied. Warm muffins and maple syrup were quickly disposed of and washed down with watery coke because the ice had melted, how he detested capitalism at times, using the minimum ingredients augmented by frozen water to make you think you had your money’s worth.
He looked over at the mass of reddish brown spread over both pillows. Despite the fatigue he felt his pulse quicken as he gazed upon the sleeping form. With a rueful shake of the head he bypassed the bed and washed, before using a towel as a pillow and the spare blanket that was provided, to make his bed on the floor. In a few minutes, he too was sound asleep.
The Commissioners Office, New Scotland Yard, Londo
n: 1000hrs 25th March
Old Scotland Yard near Westminster Bridge took its name from being stood upon the site of where the old Scottish embassy had been located back before the United Kingdom had been a united kingdom, but a relatively short walk from Victoria train station along Victoria Street, SW1 will bring you to the newer headquarters of the Metropolitan Police. The entrance to this statement of 1960’s architecture is on a small side road called rather ridiculously ‘Broadway’. Police officers refer to the building either as ‘NSY’ or as ‘C.O’ after the headquarters of the year 1829, which had been a not overly large house located at 4 Whitehall Place and known simply in its day as the ‘Commissioners Office’.
This morning the current holder of that office was looking rather in need of a properly cooked breakfast and twelve hours’ uninterrupted sleep. The prime minister along with the commander of land forces (UK), the Head of SIS, the CIA Head of Station (London) and the Home and Foreign secretaries were sat in comfortable chairs in his office.
Ostensibly the PM was present due to the killing of the police officers in Rotherhithe the previous day as the nights operations were as yet not public knowledge. When the debrief details had arrived from those operations the commissioner had prepared a briefing for the PM, that had been 0730. The commissioners temper had been severely taxed by the PM’s delaying his arrival until arrangements had been made to exploit the occasion as a photo opportunity outside the main entrance.