Stand By, Stand By

by Ryan, Chris

  That helped bring them on side. But it was when we started on car drills that we really got a good spirit going. Until then the Colombians tended to feign indifference, especially the ones who’d already had some training from the Yanks. They thought they knew it all, and weren’t interested in learning anything new. But when they heard what we were actually saying, and saw that our methods were far superior, they came over to us in a big way. For instance, the Americans had taught them that if they got attacked from one side, all they had to do was turn in that direction and assault the enemy. When we showed them how to pepperpot outwards, and come in from different angles under covering fire, they were mightily impressed.

  The other thing that chuffed them was unarmed combat. At first they were laughing at Murdo because of the dark-red colour of his hair and moustache, and the tattoos which covered him from the neck down. (When he showed them the pair of eyes on his arse, they fell down laughing.) Soon they were calling him ‘El Mono’ – the ape. But when he invited them to attack him, one after another, he decked the lot, or tied them in such knots that they were very soon crying for mercy. Then he started to divulge a few secrets of holds and so on, and their respect for him became enormous.

  What they didn’t realize was that Murdo was one of the few Jocks never known to take a drink; to him, fitness was a creed, and his obsession with it gave him a strong practical interest in medicine. On this trip he acted as our medic, treating several of the Colombians for minor injuries – most of which he’d inflicted himself. All this made him very popular with the locals.

  Another cause of amazement to the Colombians was Marky Springer, generally known as Sparky because he was our principal signaller. Over six foot tall, thin as a piece of wire, and covered in dense black hair, Sparky looked like a bloody great spider. He didn’t drink either, and, unlike Murdo, he was fanatically mean about money. Tight as a gnat’s arsehole, he hoarded every penny, and never went out to celebrate. Yet he, too, was a first-class operator, able to turn his hand to many skills.

  Driving techniques and range-work were taught by Stew McQuarrie, one of the ugliest members of D Squadron, and a renowned piss-artist, given to drowning his sorrows in case he should catch sight of himself in the mirror. With his wiry bleached hair and permanently wrinkled forehead, he looked a picture of misery. The great thing about Stew, though, was that even if he got smashed out of his mind one evening, he’d be there on the dot in the morning, ready to give his all. In spite of the beer he put away, he had the steadiest of hands, and was one of our best marksmen.

  As I walked round watching the lads at work, and listening to them teaching, I felt pleased with the way things were going. But the experience also made me realize that, competent as they all were, there is no such thing as a typical SAS guy: they are all individuals, all very different.

  As for the Colombians, they liked it best when we started showing them close-protection formations, such as the closed box (in which they formed tightly round the main man) or the open V (with two guys watching for any threat from the front, ready to stop anyone coming inside, and another guy always on the main man’s shoulder).

  By the end of the first week our guys had settled in well. Everyone was walking around saying ‘¡Carajo!’ instead of ‘Shit!’ and ‘Jodido’ in place of ‘It’s fucked‘. At the start of a lesson they’d crack off with ‘OK, para bolas!’ rather than ‘Pay attention‘, and they’d learnt that ‘mamar gallo’ meant to take the piss out of somebody.

  After work, the trainees talked endlessly about drugs. The fact that Escobar was in the nick had them well wound up, and they kept telling stories about him: how in his prime he’d been earning a million dollars a day; how he’d established a full-scale zoo, with rhinos and elephants, at his estancia; and how he’d mounted one of his early cocaine-running aircraft on top of an arch over the road leading to his house, as a kind of trophy.

  The drug war was on everybody’s mind, and one evening we had another brief, this time from an officer of the Colombian anti-narcotics unit. A lot of what he said was already familiar to us, but when he got down to the nitty-gritty he became much more interesting. Talking of Escobar, for instance, he described a telephone conversation in which the drug baron had been speaking to his wife. When she protested about screams she could hear in the background, Escobar shouted, ‘Just keep that fellow quiet until I’ve finished my conversation.’ It transpired that the man yelling was losing his fingers, one by one, to a pair of bolt-croppers, because he was suspected of having lifted a few thousand dollars from one of the bulk payments. If that fellow erred again, the narcotics officer told us, not only he, but his whole family, would be executed – children, wife, parents, the lot.

  ‘Yes,’ said the officer, in his fractured English, ‘I am sorry, but life is a little cheap in Colombia. You know, last year the narcos want to kill one sapo – an informer, literally a toad. They hear he is in the police station. Next to it is some apartments. So what do they do? They bring a truck full of explosive. Park it outside. Big bang. End of police station. End of apartments. One informer dead. Also two hundred other persons dead. ¡Maravilloso!’

  He also said they’d recently caught a notorious torturer called Gonzales whose speciality was sawing off his victims’ heads in front of their families. It wasn’t that he wanted to conceal anybody’s identity, just that he enjoyed dismemberment.

  We didn’t have much in the way of entertainment, but while everything was relatively new that hardly mattered. One advantage was that there seemed to be no threat from guerrillas or other nasties, so that security was totally relaxed. In the evenings we could stroll down the road to the nearest village, where there was a bar cum restaurant which served incredibly cheap meals. For the equivalent of about fifty pence we could eat to bursting point, and the local beer was about fifteen pence a bottle. We could tell from the label that the stuff was brewed just down the road, and it cleared your gut like paint-stripper; but you could get nicely wrecked on it just the same.

  For our first few days we reckoned the national sport must be cycling. Every time we went out of camp we saw streams of fanaticos flying down the road like the clappers on racing bikes. Then one evening we went to the pub and found that a big soccer match was on. A huge television screen had gone up in one corner of the bar; the picture was diabolical, and so was the sound, which was turned up to about 2,000 decibels, but the place was packed with fans, roaring like lunatics. By the time the right team won, they were dancing on the tables. This led to our discovery that the nation was soccer-mad, and that Captain Jaime was a keen supporter of the team he called ‘Espurs’. Unfortunately none of our lads could match his knowledge or answer his questions about the club’s latest exploits, but soccer always made a good subject for casual conversation. At least we’d heard of Captain Jaime’s hero ‘Gary Leeneker’, Spurs’ skipper, and when the local radio station reported that his team had been defeated by Nottingham Forest in the semi-final of the Rumbelows’ League Cup, we were able to sympathize.

  It was at the end of our second week that we went up to Bogotá. When work finished on Thursday night, we declared a long weekend and prepared to head for the bright lights. Many of our trainees came from the capital, and they couldn’t wait to get back there, so they set off ahead of us in their own cars, promising to meet us at our hotel and show us the best places to buy emeralds and leather goods.

  Peter Black had been down to see us once, but he’d called off a second visit on the pretext that the international situation was difficult, and that he needed to be in the embassy. He’d booked us into the Hostal Bonavento for the nights of Friday and Saturday.

  We set off in two Land Cruisers early on Friday morning, with Colombian drivers, in high spirits and full of expectation. After two weeks on the edge of the jungle, everyone was ready for a bit of the old vida regalada, or, as some call it, high life. Everyone, that is, except Sparky Springer, who preferred to stay in camp on his own, eating shit, and refused to spe
nd a single centavo if he could avoid it. Since he was easily the most proficient guy on the 319 radio, it was no bad thing that he stayed on site.

  By third-world standards the road was pretty good, with only the odd mega pothole to double up the Toyota’s springs, and the main obstacles to progress were pack-animals and buses. Donkeys and mules were plodding along under huge burdens, often with loads so wide that they took up as much space as a car. The peasants leading or riding them mostly wore dark-coloured hats like pork pies, with little turned-up rims, although some of the women had their heads swathed in black scarves.

  The buses were going faster than the carts and donkeys, but not much. Just to look at, they were quite an eyeful, because every square inch of the bodywork was painted in brilliant colours, hot reds, yellows and blues. A lot of the decoration was in formal patterns, but often, in the middle of a panel, there’d be an elaborate picture – a view of mountains, a stretch of coastline, a church or a bridge. Every vehicle must have taken hundreds of hours to paint. They were grossly overloaded, stuffed to the gills with passengers, and most were leaning drunkenly to right or left, with half the suspension knackered. Black diesel smoke poured from their exhausts, and the slightest uphill incline dragged them down to about 20 m.p.h., if not to a halt.

  Some of the hilly country we went through was farmed, but thousands of acres were still scrub. Beside the road peasants were selling fruit and bottled drinks from little shacks made of corrugated tin. Every village had a whitewashed church with a big cross above it, and all along the roadside were shrines to the Virgin Mary, with statues set in little arched recesses. As we progressed through a mountain pass, we saw that some of the shrines were hacked out of the living rock. Everything looked primitive and peaceful, and it was hard to imagine that the country was in the grip of narco-war.

  As we trundled along I tried to think forward. The Colombians wanted the grand finale of our training to take place in Bogotá. The idea was that a team of our best recruits would show off their newly learnt skills by taking the president himself, or maybe his deputy, straight through the centre of the capital in a three-car motorcade, with a big, armoured limo in the centre, to the national stadium. Even though that great event was still a month or more ahead, I was keen to see some of the course over which it would take place.

  For almost all our four-hour journey we were climbing, so the air became progressively cooler. Peter Black had warned us that we might feel faint at first, because the city’s nearly 9,000 feet above sea-level, and if you go up to that height quickly you can suffer from lack of oxygen. Maybe the drive had been slow enough to allow us to acclimatize; whatever, we simply felt relieved to escape from the heat.

  The run-in to Bogotá was across a level plain, with a haze of smog ahead of us, and big mountains dominating the eastern skyline. Our first sight of the city was a severe let-down. Along the sides of the road there was a straggle of tumbledown shacks, which gradually thickened up into a vast and incredibly sordid jumble. Corrugated tin, parts of old cars, wooden boards, inverted bathtubs, doors, canvas, sheets of metal, plywood and cardboard – you name it, the Colombians had used it to run up their hovels. Mangy-looking dogs were nosing about the heaps of garbage. Tethered donkeys stood around, eyes shut, ears back. ‘Shitsville!’ cried someone – and so it was. These were the notorious barrios, or slums, that people had kept telling us about. Even passing through with the car windows closed, we got the impression that the place must stink to high heaven.

  Soon, though, we were through the worst, and into an area that was still poor but at least had proper buildings. Our driver, Simon, who spoke a few words of English, had been proposing to head round the western outskirts to our destination in the northern quarter, but I told him to go right through the centre, so that we could get a look at it. Shiny high-rise blocks loomed ahead, and after a few more minutes we came to the centre itself. Another world. Suddenly we could have been in any prosperous European or American city – Frankfurt, Brussels, Chicago. Gleaming skyscrapers of glass and steel soared into the sky, and at street level the shops were as glossy as could be, full of expensive clothes, furniture, video cameras, hi-fi and other electronic equipment. Cafes, bars, restaurants and cinemas jostled in between. The contrast with the slums was incredible.

  The city had been built on a grid system, with the main streets running north and south; but every one was jammed solid by cars and buses. With so many engines ticking over, the pollution was horrendous. The combination of smog and altitude made it difficult to breathe. Whenever lights changed and a mass of traffic surged forward, every driver clapped his hand on the horn and kept it there, so that the noise was outrageous as well.

  ‘We’ll need to watch ourselves here,’ I said as an old woman narrowly escaped death under the wheels of a cement truck. ‘They don’t give a flying monkey’s for pedestrians.’

  ‘Sure don’t,’ Tony replied. ‘And the other thing you need to watch out for is pickpockets. See all those kids – those street urchins? Gamines. They’re partly beggars, partly thieves. While one’s accosting you, another slides up and tries to snatch your wallet.’

  Soon I realized that the system of street names, or rather numbers, could hardly have been simpler. All the big roads running north and south, parallel with the mountains, were called carreras, or avenues. The streets running across them at right-angles were calles. We were heading north on Carrera Septima, and the further we went, the higher the number of the calles became, rising from single figures in the centre. As we inched our way forward, Simon kept up a running commentary, pointing out sights of interest.

  On one corner, where crowds of people were milling about among some stalls on the pavement, he pointed and said, ‘These men selling esmeralda.’

  ‘Emeralds in the street?’

  ‘Ciertamente,’ said Simon indignantly. ‘Every day.’

  I had a sudden vision of an emerald necklace flashing on Tracy’s skin. Wouldn’t green stones look fabulous on her freckled neck, framed by that chestnut hair?

  The Calle numbers kept rising, through the twenties, into the thirties and forties. Our hotel, the Bonavento, was way out on Calle 93, but conveniently placed within a few blocks of the British Embassy on 98. The further north we drove, the ritzier the surroundings became; from the number of big houses set back inside walled compounds, it was clear that we were entering the smart residential area of the city. There were also fancy-looking restaurants by the dozen.

  The Hostal Bonavento turned out to be smaller than I’d expected, and they tried to pack us in three to a room; but I insisted that we got four rooms altogether. That meant one lot of three and three pairs, and I went into a room with Tony. We dumped our kit, had a wash and went for a quick lunch. I’d already arranged to go round to the embassy at 2.30, and I wanted Tony to come with me; but I told everyone else that they could fix their own programmes, provided they were back at the hotel and fit to travel in time for our return journey at lunchtime on Sunday.

  I think at the back of my mind I’d been hoping that the embassy would be a beautiful old colonial building, standing in the middle of a walled garden. Far from it. It was merely a suite of offices on the fourth floor of a modern tower block, with the amazing name the Torre Propaganda Sancho. Having sat on our arses for four hours we opted to walk round there rather than take a taxi.

  The air was thin, all right. Even tabbing at a normal pace made us pant. Because we’d heard that the Colombians clocked visitors as they went into the embassy we’d decided not to turn up together; so a couple of blocks away we split and I went on ahead.

  Inside the foyer of the propaganda tower a receptionist took my details, gave me a visitor’s badge, and directed me into the lift. ‘Embajada Británica’ said the elaborate gold writing outside the door on the fourth-floor landing. I rang the bell and waited, not quite knowing what to expect. There was quite a long pause before anything happened, and I was on the point of ringing again when the security system clicked
into life and a woman’s voice said, ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Sergeant Sharp to see Captain Black.’

  A buzzer sounded and the door opened. Inside, waiting to receive me, stood an amazingly attractive woman, simply dressed in a white shirt and black skirt, with long, dark hair and a distinctly Spanish look about her oval face, olive skin and black eyes. She was older than me, I reckoned, but not much.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, smiling and holding out an elegant hand, ‘I’m Luisa Bolton. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, but our receptionist’s off sick, and I’m having to double.’

  Her English was perfect, but with a slight Spanish intonation. I introduced myself, and explained that Tony would be with us in a moment. Then I asked, ‘What do you do normally, then?’

  ‘Communications – that’s my job. Come in, anyway. Peter’s with the ambassador for the moment. Will you have some coffee?’

  She led the way into an ultra-modern office, leaving a trail of some weird perfume behind her, and I perched awkwardly on a swivel chair among the fax-machines, teleprinters and word-processors while she went into a little annexe and set a coffee percolator on the go. A plate-glass window gave a dramatic view of the nearby mountains to the east, with expensive-looking properties clinging to their lower slopes. On the opposite wall the only decoration was a huge coloured print of a condor with its wings outstretched. The picture must have been ten feet wide, nearly life-size.