by Chris Ryan
‘Get in a line, fellas!’ Terry Monk, one of the other instructors, shouted. Monk had been in the Training Wing since the invention of the wheel, and it showed. His face was worn and cracked and rugged, and he had a smile so straight you could strike a cricket ball with it. ‘Two ranks deep! Have your Bergens placed in front of you ready for inspection. Get a move on! This is Selection, not some stroll in the park.’
‘Lambs to the fucking slaughter, boys,’ the chief instructor chuckled, smiling cruelly as the students dragged their knackered bodies over. ‘Look at these useless cunts.’
Porter glanced at the chief instructor. Bob McCanliss had a face with more creases in it than an old shirt, and a large birthmark on his right cheek that resembled a burn mark. Porter had only transferred to the Training Wing a month earlier, joining on a two-year cycle from Mobility Troop. But he’d seen enough already to know that Bob McCanliss was a sadistic bastard.
Most of the instructors knew there was no point being too hard on the students. The bar was already set very high on Selection. Sometimes not even a single student passed. The bar didn’t need to be set any higher. It was the instructors’ job to select the best men available for the Regiment, and over a period of months guide them through an intense process that would turn some of them from highly capable squaddies into elite operators in the world’s leading SF unit.
But some of the instructors acted like glorified drill sergeants. Guys like McCanliss.
Everyone in the Training Wing knew McCanliss had failed Selection at the first time of asking. Fifteen years ago. He’d thrown in the towel. Voluntarily rapped out midway through Selection. He’d tried the next year and passed, but McCanliss couldn’t escape the reputation he earned from quitting first time round. They had a special name in the Regiment for guys who chucked in the towel on Selection. Retreads. The other Blades had a deep suspicion of retreads. Being an operator was about more than being fit and tough and dedicated. It was about your state of mind. That was the difference between a Blade and a regular squaddie. The guys in the Regiment never quit. They kept going, even when their bodies were screaming at them to stop. The thought of giving up never entered their minds.
Unlike the retreads.
Unlike Bob McCanliss.
Now a retread was running Selection and taking out his rage on the students. McCanliss seemed to think it was his personal mission in life to fail as many of the students as possible. Porter didn’t know why. Maybe he thought it added an extra inch to his dick by fucking with the students at every opportunity. On the big runs and circuits the chief instructor beasted them rotten, punishing them mercilessly and generally messing with their minds. They hated his guts.
So did Porter.
‘Worst fuckers we’ve ever had on Selection, this lot,’ McCanliss continued in disgust as the students got into line. He looked to the other instructors, rubbing his hands in anticipation. ‘I wonder how many of these pricks we’ll fail today, eh, lads? At least half, I reckon.’
Porter clenched his jaw as the students formed into a line two ranks deep. He fought a powerful urge to slog McCanliss in the guts. There was tension hanging in the air as Porter ran his eyes across the line of students. Some of the young guys stared anxiously at the forbidding mountains. Others were deep in thought. The atmosphere reminded Porter of the moments before the start of the Grand National. Everyone was tense and bristling with nervous energy. Everyone dreading the pain they were about to suffer, but at the same time just wanting to get on with it.
I know the feeling. I was in their boots once.
Eleven years ago Porter had tried out for Selection, passing at the first attempt. Eleven years, but sweet Jesus, it felt more like a lifetime. Back then he’d been a promising young Blade with a loving wife and a newborn baby girl, and a glorious career in the Regiment ahead of him.
Then Beirut had happened, and everything had gone south.
McCanliss cleared his throat and addressed the students.
‘Right, lads. This is what’s going to happen. Once your Bergens have been checked for weight, you’ll be given a colour. That’s your group. Staff Porter’s group will be leaving first.’ He glanced at Porter, shot him a genuine fuck-you. ‘Your starting point is that red telephone box.’
He pointed across the empty road at the Storey Arms, thirty metres away. The place looked like a low-grade European youth hostel. A Welsh flag fluttered in the breeze outside and a sign outside read, ‘Canoflan Y Bannau. The Storey Arms Centre.’ The two Land Rovers the instructors had driven down from Sennybridge were parked up outside the white-walled buildings. The Training Wing CO sat in one of the Landies, working the radio and trying to establish a link with the RV at the top of Pen y Fan.
To the left of the Storey Arms stood a public phone box and an old stile and a waist-high stone wall. Next to the wall was a sandstone trail that snaked up the side of the mountain, twisting through heather and long grass. The starting point of the Fan Dance.
‘The course completion time is four hours ten minutes,’ McCanliss went on. ‘You lucky bastards get the extra ten minutes because it’s Winter Selection. Be back at that gate with your DS in exactly that time, or under. Anyone who comes in late, even by a minute, tough shit. You’re binned.’
McCanliss searched the students’ eyes. They were staring apprehensively at the gate. He cleared his throat and continued.
‘Your Bergens will be weighed throughout the course. So any smart fuckers thinking of trying to empty their Bergens along the way, don’t even try. Anyone found to be in possession of an underweight Bergen will be given one of these beauties.’
The chief instructor hefted up a rock he’d been holding. It was the size of a brick. He raised it high above his head, so all the students could get a good look at it. McCanliss’s expression suddenly darkened and he fixed his gaze on a stocky student in the front rank. Porter recognised the lad. Stubbs. The instructors were constantly making notes on the students, identifying the ones who had the qualities necessary for thriving in the SAS. Stubbs had it in spades. And now McCanliss was glowering at him with obvious rage.
Silence fluttered across the car park as McCanliss stepped towards the student. The chief instructor narrowed his eyes to knife slits. His facial muscles twitched, as they always did when he was on the verge of losing his rag.
‘What the fuck was that?’ he snarled.
Stubbs blinked. ‘Staff?’
‘Did you just drop a piece of litter, Stubbsy?’
Stubbs glanced around him. Swallowed hard. ‘No, staff.’
McCanliss simmered. His face twitched horribly. ‘Calling me a liar, is it?’ He pointed to a foil chewing gum wrapper on the tarmac. ‘What the fuck do you call that, then?’ He stepped closer to the student. ‘Is that what you do on an op, Stubbsy? Be scruffy and leave signs all over the fucking place? Sacking offence that, Stubbsy.’
Stubbs’s mouth opened and shut but no words came out. Around him the other students shifted anxiously on their feet. McCanliss glared at Stubbs and pointed to the ground.
‘Cunt,’ he hissed. ‘Get in the position, and don’t stop until I say so.’
Stubbs opened his mouth to protest. Then he thought better of it and reluctantly dropped to the ground and started banging out the push-ups. At the same time McCanliss swivelled his gaze towards the other students, his eyes burning with hatred.
‘Which one of you dopey wankers saw Stubbsy drop that litter, then?’ No one spoke. McCanliss’s face shaded red. The veins on his neck bulged like tense rope. ‘None of you? Right, either you’re all blind or you’re not fucking alert. You can’t be half asleep in the Regiment. This is the SAS not the fucking Boy Scouts. Get in the position right now. All of you.’
The other seventy-four students grudgingly hit the deck. One or two shot angry stares at Stubbs. Then McCanliss gave his back to the students, smiling with satisfaction. He nodded at Terry Monk.
‘Do us a favour, Terry. Once these cunts get to fifty, get
’em on their feet and weigh their Bergens. I need to check in with the CO. See if we’ve heard anything from those two idiots at the RV yet.’
As he shaped to turn away McCanliss caught Porter eyeballing him. The chief instructor turned towards him. He shot Porter a look like he was sucking on a bag of dicks.
‘The fuck are you looking at, Porter?’
Porter shrugged. ‘I thought the idea was to pass people on Selection, Bob. Not fail them all.’
McCanliss said nothing for a beat. His facial muscles twitched.
‘Did you, now?’ he spat. ‘Well, I’ve got some fucking news for you, Porter. We’re not here to have tea and biscuits with these tossers.’
‘We’re not here to fuck with them either, Bob.’
McCanliss glowered at him. Porter stood his ground. The chief instructor stepped closer. The veins on his neck threatened to explode. He dropped his voice so low it could have crawled under the belly of a snake.
‘I’ll tell you something, Porter. Even the worst of these pricks would make a better operator than you. I wonder what our Keith would have said, if he’d heard you were on the Training Wing.’
Something like a knife moved through Porter. The memories came flooding back, stabbing at him. Beirut, 1989. A hostage rescue op. Porter’s first mission after he’d finished continuation training. A British businessman called Kenneth Bratton had been taken hostage by Hezbollah operatives demanding missile systems in exchange for his release. The government refused to negotiate and called in the Regiment to sort out the mess. The mission should have been a straightforward evacuation job, but it had quickly descended into a giant clusterfuck. In the sweat and chaos of the firefight Porter had spared the life of one of the Arabs guarding the Brit hostage. A kid, no older than twelve or thirteen. Instead of slotting him, Porter had knocked the kid unconscious.
Only the kid hadn’t stayed down. Minutes later he was back on his feet and putting down rounds on the rest of the team. Three good Blades had died that day. Steve Rashford. Mike Jones. Keith Dunleavy. Porter had blood on his hands. Regiment blood. The kind you could never wash away.
Every now and then Porter saw their faces. Sometimes it was nothing more than a flash of blood. Other days he’d see their brains splattered across the windshield, or their twisted bodies lying slumped in the streets in Hereford. So he turned to the bottle to block out the nightmares. Self-medicating, Regiment-style. On a good day he took a bottle of Bushmills to numb the pain. On the bad days, he needed two. He’d managed to hide his drinking from the other lads, but Porter knew he couldn’t keep it up for much longer. He was struggling to hold it together.
‘You’re nothing but a cunt,’ McCanliss hissed at Porter under his breath. ‘A sad, washed-up old cunt with two missing fingers. Our Keith would be turning in his grave if he knew you were on the team.’
Porter suddenly exploded. He grabbed McCanliss and took him to one side and shot the instructor a cold, hard look. He spoke in a low voice so the students wouldn’t overhear the two Blades arguing.
‘Listen, you fucking retread. Mention Beirut again and I’ll knock you back to that time you were on easy duty, sitting in that nice comfy office while we were out doing the proper ops. Got it?’
McCanliss twitched with rage. Porter had hit a nerve and he knew it. The guy had avoided seeing action in Iraq and Bosnia. He’d spent his career on the sidelines while the other lads got all the glory, and that niggled McCanliss. The chief instructor simmered, but kept his fists by his sides. There was no way he’d lash out. Not in front of the students. He stepped into Porter’s face and scowled.
‘Don’t forget who you’re fucking talking to, Porter.’
Porter smiled. ‘Is that a threat, Bob?’
McCanliss simmered. ‘Nah. It’s an invitation. After the Fan Dance. I’ll see you in the gym. Me and you’ll sort it out then. I’ll drop you so fucking hard you’ll be pissing blood for the next month.’
‘A retread with a pair of balls on him. Got to be a first, that.’
Porter released his grip and turned away from McCanliss before the guy could get another word in. He’d taken enough shit from the chief instructor for one day. McCanliss didn’t know what he’d gone through. None of the lads did. He’d been put in a sticky situation that day in Beirut. If I’d slotted the Arab kid, I would have been prosecuted for war crimes for killing a minor. I had no fucking choice. Bottom line, it was down to Porter to live with his inner demons. But he wasn’t putting up with anyone else passing judgement on him. And definitely not some jumped-up retread who’d been sipping coffee in a nice warm office while the other guys in the squadron had risked their lives.
McCanliss beat a quick path over to the Landies, glancing back at Porter and starring daggers at him. Terry Monk ordered the students to their feet and stepped towards the first guy in the line, holding out a set of handheld scales. He handed the student the scales. The lad attached the hook to his Bergen and hefted it up. Monk checked the weight, making sure he was within the regulation limits. Then he took the scales and moved onto the next guy in line. At the same time one of the other instructors set up a tea urn in the corner of the car park.
It started to rain. Porter looked up and squinted at the clouds. They were black and low and heavy, like bulging sacks of coal about to split down the middle. It was going to piss it down this morning, Porter realised. That icy January rain that cut right through to your bones.
SIX
0641 hours.
Nine minutes later, the twelve guys on the SP team arrived at the Storey Arms.
They pulled up in three civvy Range Rovers they’d driven down from the Regiment HQ. Engines chainsawing, headlamps burning in the bleak winter light. The Range Rovers skidded to a halt close to the four-tonners at the far end of the car park, twenty metres downstream from the students. A few moments later, the twelve operators climbed out from the motors and grabbed their helium-filled Bergens from the backs of the Range Rovers. They were decked out in a mixture of civvy and army clothing, and each of them was packing a Sig Sauer P226 semi-automatic pistol strapped to a thigh holster. Among the operators was a Jock with a shock of prematurely greying hair. He wore a deep frown and small, dark eyes that peered out at the world as if from behind a veil of cigarette smoke. John Bald, the meanest Blade in the Regiments, was spitting mad. And it was all Eddie Stoop’s fault.
Twenty-four hours ago Bald had been looking forward to his first training exercise as assault team commander on the Red half of the SP Team. The Regiment’s counter-terrorist unit was split into two groups of equal size, Blue and Red. The Blue guys were the three-hour response team. That meant they had to be rolling through the gates at Hereford within three hours of a terrorist incident being reported. Blue had the guys from Mountain and Air Troop. Red was the thirty-minute team. Their guys came from Boat and Mobility Troop. Both teams regularly trained at the Killing House down at Pontrilas, a multi-storey mock-up building that the SAS used to practise deliberate action drills using live rounds. Bald had been desperate for his first op at the Killing House to run smoothly. And then Eddie Stoop had gone and fucked things up.
Stoop had been fooling around with the wife of one of the other guys on the team, Bill Bowen. Nailing another Blade’s missus was a big no-no in the Regiment, for obvious reasons. Blades operated in tight-knit groups. The last thing you needed was one guy holding a grudge against someone else on the same team. Eddie Stoop found that out the hard way. He’d taken a round to the back of the head during the training exercise. Bowen had put the drop on him, claiming that Stoop had stepped into his line of fire. Which Bald knew was bullshit, but there was no way of proving it either way.
Red Team had been suspended, pending an internal investigation. And now Bald was being hung out to dry. His first test as assault commander had gone south. Big-time.
‘Good morning for the Dance, eh, Jock?’ the operator next to Bald said, grinning inanely. Bald turned and glared at him. Steve Stoner was a burly Shef
field lad with a permanent smile plastered across his mug, and an easygoing manner that really pissed Bald off. Stoner was the kind of guy who could find the silver lining in any cloud. Even when those clouds were grey as fuck and it was pissing it down across the Brecon Beacons.
‘If you say so,’ said Bald.
He sighed and shook his head. He’d only agreed to join in with the Blue Team guys on the Fan Dance to clear his head after yesterday’s shitstorm. But as the skies turned grey as coal and the icy rain stabbed him in the face, Bald was starting to think that this was a really bad idea.
Should’ve stayed at home, John. Stayed away from Stoner and the other twats. They’ll be gloating over your failure. Taking the piss out of you.
They passed the students. Some of the guys glanced in awe at the veteran Blades in their midst. Bald just ignored them and strolled on.
Stoner nodded at the students and said, ‘McCanliss had better go easy on these lads this morning. Can’t push the students too hard in these conditions, Jock. One of ’em might come down with hypothermia.’
Bald shrugged. ‘Yeah, well.Nature’s way of saying you’ve failed Selection.’
‘You’re a mean bastard, Jack.’
‘Someone’s go to be.’
They beat a path across the tarmac towards the instructors. Half a dozen of them were standing in a loose group around the tea urn, helping themselves to steaming hot brews. Among them Bald noticed a vaguely familiar face. Noticed the two stumps on the guy’s left hand. Bald then did a double-take. Turned to Stoner.
‘Christ,’ said Bald. ‘Is that Porter? What’s he doing here’
Stoner nodded. ‘Didn’t you hear? He transferred to the Training Wing a few weeks ago.’
‘Fuck me sideways. He’s aged a lot.’
And he had, thought Bald. The last time he’d seen Porter the pair of them had been on an op in Serbia. Just over half the squadron had been deployed to the region during the Bosnian war, wearing UN berets and armed with SA80 rifles to blend in with the regular squaddie units. Their orders had been to hit the paramilitary units that had been propping up Milosevic’s regime, slaughtering Muslims in the surrounding villages. That had been almost eighteen months ago. Bald hadn’t seen him since.