food with  a hexy burner sitting in  the  stainless  steel
sink. The kettle came from my room in the block.
     Next  payday  I got a microwave,  so  anything  that  went  ping  after
forty-five seconds, I'd  be eating it. I got  a telly, then a small  stereo,
and that was  about it, the ultimate singley's place: bare walls, a chair, a
bed,  and a  china  ornament of  a cat the previous  owner  had left on  the
mantelpiece.
     The garden was overgrown, and  I didn't have  a  lawn mower or tools; I
had  to borrow them from a  friend who lived around the corner. I bunged all
my washing in the laundry at camp. I  had my Sunday dinners at work as well,
or I'd go down to the pub that put out trays of sausages and clear them out.
Otherwise it  was Chinese takeaways all  the way, collected from the town in
my  decrepit  Renault 5.  However, I  was  happy. I  was  one  of Thatcher's
children.
     Roundabout Christmas time  I got talking in a bar one night with a girl
called Fiona. The conversation came around to where we both lived.
     "I've bought a house near the camp," I said, naming the road.
     "Number four."
     "I  don't believe it!" she laughed. "I live at number two. You  must be
my next door neighbor!"
     She told me that she came from Hampshire. She'd moved up to Hereford to
be with her partner, but the relationship hadn't worked out. She didn't want
to go home, so she rented the house and was working in the town.
     She  was tall,  with  long brown hair,  and very  confident.  We really
enjoyed each other's company and started going out. I  thought, This is good
news-a new house, a microwave,  and now a  new girlfriend. What more could I
need?  But no  sooner  had we got together than  it  w'as announced that the
squadron was going to Africa.
     The chief opposition force to the apartheid regime in South Africa  was
the African National Congress. It had been crippled by the arrest of  Nelson
Mandela and his colleagues in the early sixties but revived after the Soweto
riots in 1976. Each time the government banned a  moderate  black opposition
group, the A.N.C's membership swelled. In 1980 it began a successful bombing
campaign, attacking plants manufacturing oil from coal.
     In  December  1982 the South African military raided Lesotho and killed
forty-two members of the A.N.C in Maseru. In May 1983 a car bomb outside the
Ministry of  Defense in Pretoria killed nineteen people and injured over two
hundred,  including  many  black civilians.  The bombing campaign  increased
after the 1984-86 riots.
     There were scores  of  attacks  throughout South  Africa, killing  many
people.
     Then,  in  June  1985,  South African  forces  carried  out a  raid  on
Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. Several ral homes were raided, and twelve
men, allegedly A.N.C members, were  killed in their sleep. The South African
government alleged that Botswana  territory was  used by A.N.C guerrillas to
launch attacks inside South Africa, including recent  mine  blasts that  had
killed white  farmers near the border. Botswana rejected the claims, arguing
that it  did  its  utmost to  prevent A.N.C  military activities inside  its
territory.
     Botswana appealed to the British  for help; the appeal  was approved by
Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe and a  . Regiment squadron of eighty men
was to be sent to train Botswana's soldiers to defend their  country against
border raids  by  Big  Brother. Selected  soldiers  from the  BDF  (Botswana
Defense  Force) would  be  given  special training, including techniques  of
aggressive  counterattack to neutralize South  African raiding  parties.  We
were told the training would take  place  in the north of  the country, well
away from the South African border.
     We would not be involved in any contact with the S.A.D.F (South African
Defense Force).
     The Botswana Defense Force's mobility was shortly to be enhanced by the
arrival  of a  number  of  helicopters to be  provided by  the  U.S under  a
ten-million-dollar military aid program. The U.S  was also providing special
training in counter intelligence  techniques to the Botswana security forces
to  offset penetration by  South African agents; the skills  we  taught them
would  also  make it easier for the BDF to detect any counterinfiltration by
A.N.C guerrillas.
     We finished our planning and preparation for the job.
     Everything, we  were told, was  TS (top secret). The squadron would  be
flying from Brize  Norton to  Kenya, because that was not  an unusual  troop
movement.  From there we'd  all be  splitting off into little groups, making
our way into Botswana by different timings and routes.
     We got to Kenya and split up. Six  of us  stayed in  the  country for a
while;  others were going  off  to other  African countries for  a few  days
before starting to  filter  into  Botswana to our squadron RP. Some  of  the
blokes  went  off on safaris while they were  biding their  time;  I mooched
around with Ben, a jock who'd just joined the squadron.  We went  to a place
called the Carnivore,  a big meat-eating place  where you  could eat as much
meat  as  you  wanted  for about tuppence. I  stuffed myself  and  got  food
poisoning and had to spend the next two days in bed.
     The six of us finally got  on a plane to Zaire. We spent  a little time
mooching around there, then flew to Zambia. The country was chockablock with
Russians.
     They all looked  like bad Elvis impersonators from the  seventies, with
greased-back hair, sideburns three-quarters  of the way down  the  face, and
unfashionable suits and plastic shoes.
     We  wandered around Zambia departures looking at the Russians,  and the
Russians  were looking at us. They knew who we  were,  and  we knew who they
were. The  official cover  story for us was that we were a seven-aside rugby
team  on  tour. Nobody questioned us about it,  which  was probably just  as
well. I could have been hit over the head with a rugby ball at that time and
I wouldn't have had a clue what it was.
     And the seven-aside story was a bit dodgy as well, seeing as there were
only six of us.
     We  ended  up sharing  a small  propeller aircraft with  three  or four
Russian  "officials"  and  a  Russian  pop music  band that  was  ostensibly
traveling around all the military units. The drummer had fallen straight off
the cover of the Woodstock album, dressed in flared loons, a headband, and a
Cat Stevens T-shirt. judging by the way he was air-drumming on the  magazine
on his lap, he was no more a drummer than I was JPR Williams.
     We eventually got to a small metal airstrip in the middle  of Botswana.
A few blokes  from the squadron were already there; some  of them,  I  could
see, were nursing injuries.  The squadron O.C and Fraser turned u ; Fraser p
had broken his collarbone and was walking around with his arm in a sling.
     We   got  in   some   vehicle   and  went  off  to  the  squadron   RP,
which-inevitably-was an aircraft hangar.
     Over the next couple of days  the rest of  the  blokes trickled in from
all over the place. Some came in  from  Zimbabwe and were in a right  state.
They'd had a day out in the sun, and Toby, better known as  Slaphead, having
been bald since he was aged about nine, had gone up on the roof of the hotel
and fallen asleep. The front half of his  body was totally  burned, and  his
face and forehead were already starting to peel.
     While we were waiting,  the ice-cream boys organized an  Islander turbo
aircraft that could take seven of us at  a squeeze, and off we went jumping.
We wanted to  learn infiltration techniques in that part of the world, going
in against not  too  sophisticated  radars. I jumped my arse  i off over the
next three or four days, getting back into the swing of free fall, going  up
to twelve grand, leaping out and just basically having fun.
     On one particular jump I was going out as a "floater."
     An Islander has only small  doors,  which meant that everybody couldn't
exit  at the same time.  We  were only jumping  at twelve grand,  so it  was
important to get all seven of us going off at the same time.
     The technique  was for various floaters  to climb outside the  aircraft
and hold on to whatever bits and pieces they could.
     I was rear floater, which should  have entailed  putting  my left  hand
onto the left-hand side of the door, wedging my left foot against the bottom
corner of the doorframe and  then swinging out  and holding on with my right
hand to a bit of fuselage. However, I screwed up.
     As I swung  out, I lost my  footing and fell, going straight  into free
fall  long  before  the planned exit. To make  matters worse, I was over the
town.
     There was no way I was going to be able to track to get the distance to
reach the DZ, so  I pulled quite high, hoping I'd be able to use  the canopy
to go in. With the wind behind  me the canopy gave about twenty-five  knots,
but I was  losing too much  elevation. Soon I would have to turn  back  into
wind to land. I scanned the ground, trying to sort myself out.  There seemed
to  be nothing below but  high-voltage pylons and  cars speeding  along  the
roads, then masses of people running out of buildings to look at this little
thing dangling from a big blue canopy.
     I  just  managed to clear a line  of pylons and hit the street, landing
between cars.  It  was a  really bad landing; I hit my arse  hard,  and  the
canopy enveloped me. Immediately hundreds of little hands started tugging at
the fabric,  shouting  and laughing joyously. I had  visions of my parachute
being ripped to shreds and shouted the first thing that came into my head.
     "Okey-dokey!"
     A  hundred voices  replied,  "Okey-dokey!  Okey-dokey!  "  I rolled the
canopy up and sat at the roadside,  chatting to all my new  friends, while I
waited for a wagon to come and pick me up.
     "Okey-dokey?"
     "Okey-dokey!"
     The conversation was still going when the vehicle arrived, and for days
after that all anybody would say to me was "Okey-dokey!"
     We moved to the camp where we were going  to be  based. We got our camp
beds  or air beds out, spread out our sleeping bags, and made our own little
world. The camp was a group of old, run-down buildings.
     Very much like  everything else  in Africa, the walls had holes in them
and the plaster was coming away. We rigged up some lights  to the generator,
and  that meant  we could read.  Fiona had bought me a book called The Grail
Romances, I'd read Holy Blood, Holy Grail just to give me enough information
to give Frank Collins a hard time about the religion and had ended up really
gripped  by  medieval history.  Poor  Fiona had trooped around  hundreds  of
churches, forts, and motte-and-bailey castles with me.
     They'd been used to a lot of South African incursions in the area.
     Basically the S.A.D.F would come out of South Africa, chuck a left, and
go  up  into  Angola along the  Caprivi  strip. There  was  quite  a lot  of
attention initially when we arrived; people were unsure of  what we were and
who  we were.  To these villagers, if  there  was a white eye and a gun,  it
meant a South African.
     After a while we'd wake  up in the mornings and there'd be hundreds and
hundreds  of villagers along the fence line. They'd  turned up for freebies.
Now and again I gave them the  sweets out of the  compo rations and a can of
tuna or something. They  seemed  quite desperate,  as  if it was  starvation
stakes; there were lots of shiny cans everywhere, and they wanted them.
     Then,  of all things, an ice-cream van  turned up  one day. It was just
like Blackpool, with  the old ding-dong  chimes.  He  must  have traveled at
least a hundred miles  to  get there; perhaps he'd heard that 7 Troop was in
town.
     We spent a week planning and preparing. A character called Gilbert, the
snake man, was brought in  to show us  all the different types of snakes-the
ones that were poisonous and the ones that weren't.
     "There are two ways of dealing with a bite," he said.
     "The first is  to  dress the wound and  try  to get all  antidote.  The
second is to lie very still in your sleeping bag and wait for death."
     We were standing around in a circle  while  this boy  brought different
snakes out of their bags. All of a sudden a particularly mean-looking fucker
with a  deep  hatred of men  in  shorts and flip-flops hurled itself out  of
Gilbert's hands  and  was off,  spitting  venom in  all  directions.  Within
seconds all the rough-tough S.A.S men were hanging off trees and vehicles or
sprinting toward  the  perimeter fence.. This was one very pissed-off snake;
when  it couldn't  find  a man  to  attack,  it started to  eat one  of  the
vehicles, trying to sink its fangs into the tires.
     I had  no idea how it was recaptured and put back  in  its bag; my view
was a  bit restricted from the roof  of the ice-cream  van  a hundred meters
away.
     The locals  were  starting to  pester us  good style  now. It  happened
almost every time we went into  a place where Westerners  had been  working;
people would  be expecting us  to give  them stuff,  and if  we didn't, they
hassled and  poked. They were given so much aid from so many sources that in
the  end  it  wasn't  something  that they were  grateful  for; it  was just
something that they expected as of right.
     The best aid foreign nations could have been giving them was education,
to show them how to be productive  themselves. Instead  all  we did was give
them six hundred tons of wheat to salve our consciences. But in doing so, we
created a nation of takers, who were not contributing to their  own country,
their own economy.
     We decided one day that we'd all had enough  of being hassled and told,
"Give me, give  me, give me." Out came the hexy  blocks,  which we cut  into
little cubes.
     These were then smeared  with jam and  arranged on plates.  Then, every
time we were crowded, we fucked them off with our confections.
     They grabbed the stuff greedily and threw it down their necks.
     After about three  crunches the  taste of the hexy got to them and they
spit it out with much gagging and choking. Nobody came back for seconds.
     Being free fall troop and waiting to get into our stage of the game and
try  to defeat all these radars, we were very much  left to our own devices.
We spent our days doing our own  weapon training and  just generally mincing
around. When  a squadron went away like this, weights  turned up, punch bags
started hanging from trees.  People would do a run around the  compound  and
then  a routine  with the apparatus; a circuit might  be two  minutes on the
bag, two  minutes'  skipping,  two  minutes' rest,  then two minutes  on the
weights,  two minutes' skipping,  two  minutes'  rest.  You'd do  maybe  ten
circuits and then warm down with another run.
     The other troops  started  to disappear off to do their tasks, and then
it was decided that we should go with 9
     Troop, who were up in a hill range called the Tsodilo hills. We set off
in vehicles for the two- or  three-day  mooch  across  the  Kalahari desert.
Tracks ran across vast, empty, flat plains of scrub and dust.
     On the second day we came to  a crossroads  of tracks in  the middle of
thousands of acres of sandy scrubland.
     A little mud hut had a sign up saying it was,a cafe. The proprietor, an
old fellow in his eighties, was mincing around on a hammock. We went in, but
there were no tables  or chairs, or, come to  that, electricity.  just a few
bottles of Fanta on  a shelf and a sign that must  have been at least twenty
years  old,  advertising  Bulmer's cider from Hereford.  Once we'd felt  the
temperature of the Fanta bottles we left them where they were but negotiated
with the old boy for the sale of the sign, which we mounted on the dashboard
of the 110.
     We got to 9 Troop's position on the afternoon of the third day.
     It  was weird terrain, totally flat and then these  mountains that rose
abruptly out of the ground. I wasn't the only one to notice that they had an
eerie air about them.
     "I did this area for geography A level," Tiny said.
     "There are thousands of rock paintings in and  around the hills, scenes
of  eland  and giraffes  painted by  desertdwelling  Bushmen hundreds, maybe
thousands of years ago.
     When, we arrived,.most of the troop were out on the mountain.
     There  was a  bit of  a flap on as someone had injured his back and was
being  carried down to the camp. It was Toby. Slaphead  was a veteran of the
Falklands, Northern  Ireland, and countless  fights up north as a policeman,
all  without injury;  now  he had  jumped eighteen  'riches  off  a rock and
damaged his back so badly he 'was on a stretcher.
     He was in fearsome pain and had to have more morphine.
     Tiny yelled,  "Not  yet,  wait!" to the medic and  went running to  his
bergen. He came back  with  a camera and  said,  "Okay, you can do it  now."
Slaphead's face was screwed up in pain as he got the good news.
     The picture would go  into B Squadron's interest room as soon as we got
back.
     Eno by now was on the radio sending the Morse message  that we needed a
helicopter. As usual, he was Mr. Casual about the whole affair.  He had been
told one day by the police that his sister had been murdered; he just  said,
"I think  I'd  better go to London then." It wasn't that  he didn't care; he
just didn't get excited about anything.
     The weather started to change. The sky was thickening with dark clouds,
and the  wind was getting up;  there was a smell of rain-wet earth. A  storm
was coming; this was worrying as it could affect a heli's chances of getting
in.  Slaphead  had been  stabilized, but  he needed to be  taken  to a  good
hospital.
     His  new KSBs (boots) had been taken  off  and were by the side  of the
stretcher. I knew he took the same  boot size  as I  did,  so I went  up and
said, "You won't be needing these anymore on this trip, will you?"
     Slaphead told me where to put the boots, and it wasn't on my feet.
     Things started to settle  down; a heli was being  arranged, and Eno was
still on the radio standing by. Then another drama started.
     It was  about two hours before last light, and there was no sign of Joe
Ferragher and  Alan,  the new troop officer. The troop were just starting to
mutter dark thoughts about the incompetence  of  new ruperts  when  somebody
spotted  a  flashing light on the  mountain. We got our  binos out and could
just  see  somebody  on  a  ledge.  No  one knew  for sure what it  was, but
everybody knew something was wrong.
     Eno  was back  on  the radio again, leaning back  on  a  canvas  chair,
cigarette in one hand,  Morse  key in the  other. Three or four  of Mountain
Troop got radios and their kit and drove over to the mountain.
     As all this was happening, the heli turned  up. He couldn't do anything
about the blokes on the mountain; he couldn't get that far in.
     The weather was still threatening to give us a storm,  and the sides of
the tents were blowing out. Most of 7
     Troop felt quite helpless as we didn't have the skill to climb; we just
waited to see if any more help was needed.
     "Might as well have a brew and sort  our kit out," was Charlie's answer
to  the  problem. We had been there for about three hours by now  and hadn't
even got our kit off the wagons because of all the excitement.
     We could hear on the radio that Ivor was  now with them on the mountain
and needed everyone's help.
     About five feet seven inches and  wiry,  Ivor was a mountain  goat from
somewhere up north. He  came  from an armored regiment and  had been at  the
embassy ana the Falklands. He wasn't one to mince his words on the net.
     "Joe is  dead," he said. "The Boss is  going to be  taken down by Harry
and George. This is what I want to happen. ', He wanted  everyone to get  as
far up the  mountain as possible and meet  him coming down. How he was going
to do it we had no idea, but we started up toward him.
     The storm now looked as if it was just teasing us.
     There was  a little rain but nothing to worry about,  apart from  time.
The heli didn't want to leave at night; we had to get a move on or  it would
leave without Joe, Slaphead being the main priority now.
     It was  about two hours before Ivor got to us. He was in shit state; he
was  sweating  heavily  and covered in grime, he had cuts on  his elbows and
knees, and his face and arms  were bruised  from the effort of moving a very
heavy Joe off the  mountain.  He had put  Joe into  a mountain stretcher and
then started to absell down. It was a major feat of strength to kick himself
and Joe over the overhangs. He should have got a medal that day. We took the
body the rest of the way down. The heli then had two bodies on board instead
of the one they had expected.
     We  learned that a device used to attach a person  to the rock face had
given way, and Joe had gone  bouncing  down the hill until he got stopped by
his next "safety."
     The Ross had climbed down to Joe and tried to save him, but it was  too
late.  However,  a casualty  is not dead until he is  confirmed dead,  so he
tried anyway.
     Charlie had got hold  of  the troop's rum that Joe was in charge of and
said, "He isn't going to need this now.
     Let's have a drink on the old fucker."
     So we had a drink on him  and hoped that  the rupert  was  okay. He was
quite  shaken up. It is not  the  best of  introductions to have  your troop
senior die on you and then maybe think that everyone  blames you-which  they
didn't.  It seemed that  life  on  a mountain  didn't suit him; about  three
months later he moved to our troop.
     Maybe it was the thought of all that ice cream.
     We  were  sitting under a baobab tree,  a weird, muscled sculpture with
branches like roots sprouting white, starlike flowers, drinking the rum  and
talking about the  locals. "The  Bushmen have great respect for the baobab,"
Tiny  said. "Pick its flower, they say, and a lion will eat you. These hills
are sacred to them, too. It's taboo to kill an animal that lives here."
     One of 9 Troop said, "Joe was out  in  a one-ten yesterday  and'shot an
antelope for  us to eat. Apparently  his death came as  no  surprise to  the
locals."
     As I  lay in my biwi bag that  night, looking past a  bright moon to  a
gleaming Milky Way, I was a believer.
     I had never been particularly worried about dying. We all had to die at
some stage; I just  wanted it to be nice and quick; I didn't  want it  to be
painful. I didn't have any big religious notions about death.
     I liked  to think there was something  after  it,  a place or dimension
where I'd find all the information I'd ever wanted to know,  such as  what a
Love Heart tasted like and all the other great secrets of life.
     That was the only advantage that I could see.
     I'd always been sure that I was going to die early in life anyway.
     I'd always  had  that  feeling,  ever since  I  was a kid.  I'd  always
thought, I'm going to live till I'm about fifty-five, and  that will be  it.
Didn't stop me being a sucker when the pension salesman came around, though.
     When mates died, I  was upset initially, but after that it was okay. It
was more  upsetting  if they died in a drastIC way, but  the  fact that they
were dead,  there were no problems with that. What  was horrible  and a real
pisser was if people died or got severely injured  and impaired for the rest
of  their lives for  no reason. It  was always unfortunate when  people died
during training. We'd lost  quite a  lot of  people through drowning in  the
jungle;  river  crossings  were  the  number one  killer  in  the  Regiment.
Sometimes I  thought, Hell,  we're practicing things that  are  going to  be
dangerous enough on the day, so why  tempt Providence?  But if that attitude
was allowed  to prevail,  we  would  lose  all  the  advantages of realistic
training.
     Joe had to be taken into South Africa to get  a  British Airways flight
out,  and this  would unfortunately entail a  delay. Barry,  the storeman at
Squadron HQ, hosed down one of the six-foot tables, sorted Joe out on it and
cleaned him  up, then got all the  meat  out  of  the freezer and stored him
inside it instead; he then organized a huge feast to eat all the meat before
it spoiled. When all the arrangements had been made, they got Joe in a motor
and drove him into South Africa.
     From there he was put in a coffin and flown home.
     Meanwhile  we had  work to do. We were flown in a I up  to  the shuttle
service of little Islander aircraft h Okavango, a vast  expanse of lakes and
river  systems  that borders  on the Caprivi strip, the  area of  drama with
South African forces. The plan was for us to join forces with 6 Troop, who'd
been up there for weeks.
     The average contact in that sort of  bush, even though it looked pretty
sparse, was about five meters. Everybody was carrying his personal choice of
weapon  that he considered would  be good at such  close ranges-SLR, 203 and
M16, and shotgun. Mine was a 203.
     The BDF were armed with the Galil, Israel's answer to the AK47.
     It  was  a  very  good  weapon, simple to use and to  clean, and with a
simple  and reliable  action.  People could  learn  it quickly,  but its one
drawback was its weight; it was a bit heavy for the  troops of  many  of the
countries that used it.
     The other equipment that we'd taken with  us was  minimal-as ever, only
as  much as we could get into a bergen. As in the jungle, we'd need just two
sets of clothes-a dry set and a wet set. As well as that I took a poncho, in
my  case  an  Australian  shelter sheet  that crumpled  up really  small,  a
hammock, and an American poncho liner, an  excellent bit of kit similar to a
very  thin  nylon duvet. The rest  was  food, water, bullets, ahd  a bit  of
first-aid kit.
     We were there to practice a two-troop camp attack in the swamps.
     The  camp we were training on was  an alligator farm i'n the  middle of
nowhere.
     Members of 6 Troop  went out and did the recces, spent a couple of days
putting OPs on it, and got all the information back.
     We  were living  on a little spit of land within the swamps, among beds
of  fast-growing papyrus. Over the  years, as the hippos  had  come  up onto
these little  islands, they had obligingly created perfect landing slips for
our  Geminis.  We  could  drag  the inflatables  onto the spit  and  conceal
ourselves and our equipment in  the reeds and operate  from there. There was
no way anyone would find us.
     Everybody was cammed up and carrying belt kit and weapons as we climbed
into the boats and set off into the darkness. One boat  was up ahead as lead
scout.
     Aboard were two people-one driving, one navigating.
     The cox was Solid Shot.  As a member of Boat Troop he knew  what he was
doing. He would just let the motor run  on its own revs and guide it through
the reeds and obstructions. It was amazing how little  noise was made by the
motors.
     The other member was the Boat  Troop Boss, the  rupert who passed in my
Selection.  He  was  from some  armored recce unit  and was quite funny  and
likable. He would be checking with Solid Shot on navigation.
     Solid Shot  was soon to be a fellow officer. When we got back from this
trip, he was going to be commissioned as Captain Solid Shot, so he wasn't so
thick after all. We were all very happy for him.
     We were moving along at little more than tick-over  pace; the Yamaha is
remarkably quiet if you're just trogging along without revving it up.  As we
got closer to the target, the engines were cut off, and we started paddling.
     Sandy and I were up at the front of the second boat.
     With his, blond Brillo pad hair  under a very  large bush hat he looked
like one of the Flowerpot Men. Our job was to cover the first boat, which we
could  just about see up  ahead in the  darkness. We wanted lots of distance
between boats in  case of a contact, but at the same time we had to keep  in
visual touch. If we started losing contact, it would all go to a gang fuck.
     We  were mooching  along, no sound except for the occasional slurp of a
paddle in the water,  when suddenly, from  near the lead boat, we heard what
sounded like an explosion. It was followed by another, and another, and then
we could see the foaming white of violently disturbed water.
     The lead  Gemini stopped, and so did we. The  whole two troops were now
just floating in the water and being  taken slowly downstream. We then heard
what sounded like the roar of a steam engine.
     We heard the  sound again, and this time it was getting closer, a deep,
outraged bellow that told us we were about to be thrown out of the party.
     Next thing  we heard was "Fuck,  fuck, fuck!" from the  lead boat  as a
massive head and shoulders reared out of  the water and took a bite into the
rubber. Luckily the inflatables were constructed in sections, so that if one
did get a puncture, it was only that section that went down.
     There,was  an  ominous sound'of rushing water,  and my eyes strained in
the darkness to  see the  threat.  An ugly head arrowed toward  us, erupting
into an explosion of foam and jaws the size of a Mini.
     Sandy said, "Fucking hell!" and everybody in the boat paddled so fast a
man could have water-skied behind us.
     As the  deep,  honking  voices  receded behind  us,  I realized  I  was
drenched-whether from swamp water, exertion, or sheer terror I didn't know.
     The snorting and thrashing of the hippos would  have compromised us, so
we had no alternative but to turn back and try to find another route in. Our
time on  the target would be severely  cut as a result, because we had to be
in and  away  again before first  light, needing darkness to get back to our
hide position, the troop L.U.P.
     We eventually got to the area of  the attack. The  blokes from the lead
boat jumped on others, and we dragged the bitten vessel along behind. It was
the first time I'd been in an attack where people couldn't stop laughing. It
had been a ridiculous scenario: two troops of the world's  finest, screaming
along  the  Okavango waterways  armed to  the  teeth,  going  in  to  do  an
aggressive act, stopped in their tracks by a hippo that had the hump.
     We had  a very interesting few more weeks  in Botswana, during  which I
learned  the  Afrikaans  for  "Let's get  the  hell  out  of here!"  and the
Botswanan for "Look at that springbok run."
     At the end  we had a big  barbecue back  at  the squadron RP. It was as
much a drink for Joe as  anything else, and  during  the course of the night
things were getting out of hand. A thunderflash (training grenade) came over
the  roof, then  another. The locals  were  still shitting  themselves about
S.A.D.F incursions, and the explosions did not go down well.
     The  SSM  shouted,  "That's enough. The  next one who  throws  one gets
R.T.U'D [returned to unit]."
     Two minutes later, BANG!
     The SSM went  running around the area looking for the flash banger, but
no one could be found. A few of us saw who he was but said nothing.
     The following morning the squadron O.C got everyone together. "You have
until midday to come forward," he said.  "If not, there will be no  R and R,
and from now on you will provide security with the Botswanans."
     We all knew who it was, but no one said a word.
     The O.C finished with the words "He has to make up his  mind if he is a
man or a mouse."
     The Botswanan Mouse  was born. We got pissed  off with the restrictions
that were imposed on us as  a result  of this blokes irresponsible  behavior
and even more pissed  off with him. He  deserved to be R.T.U'D, but everyone
had a  strange and probably mistaken sense of  loyalty. He was flapping good
style, however, and quite rightly so.
     No one ever exposed  the  identity of the  mouse. Every group of people
has  someone  they  don't  like or want to work  with. When  we  returned to
Hereford, as well as  Slaphead's  pictures in  the interest room, there were
several cartoons of the mouse, and he continued to reap what he had sown.
     M  n entire squadron  of the Special Air Service was 14 on the team" in
the UK for six to nine months, on permanent standby. After a buildup of four
to  six weeks,  which  included  training with  the squadron  still  on, the
commitment was  handed over; it might have been only  eighteen  months since
the  blokes  were  last on the tearr, but there  was always something new to
learn.
     The team  consisted of two subteams, Red and Blue, each with an assault
group and  sniper group. Having two teams meant that two  incidents could be
covered at once; there were  also  contingency plans for other  squadrons to
produce teams if there were more than two incidents that had to be covered.
     The assaulters were the people with all the black kit on who go jumping
out of  helicopters and banging down doors; they tended to work in  four-man
teams, but this was  flexible depending on the target. One  of  the  assault
groups was the M.O.E (method of entry) team, responsible for making  up  the
explosive charges for the rest of the team to use.
     There  was also  a signals  setup. As  well  as look  after  the team's
equipment they  had to provide comms  from  anywhere in the world,  as there
were also  commitments overseas.  As some of them  were required to enter  a
target with the team, they trained alongside us.
     The  medic carried the world's biggest  trauma pack. If there was a man
down, the firefight still had  to go  on;  it  was the medic's job to get in
there and start getting some fluid into him and managing the trauma.
     Until everything went bang and an attack went in, the sniper group were
the most important people. They were on the target, giving  the  rest  of us
real-time information. They, too, were trained as assaulters.
     The squadron HQ comprised  the  O.C,  a major,  and the SSM,  a warrant
officer, who were responsible for both teams.
     I found being on constant standby no more of a problem than it  must be
for a  doctor;  we were on call and  we lived with it. We each had a bleeper
and didn't go anywhere without it.
     Seven Troop was  always  part  of  the  Red  team, which was  wonderful
because the squadron HQ was next to the Blue. If there were any bone jobs to
be done, the head shed would just nip next door; we  were fifty meters  away
in our own hangar.
     First  thing in the morning we'd meet up in the  crew  room. Some would
have run in or  have  already  done  their training  in the  gym. It  was  a
personal thing;  no one ever told us to do it; however, the  day we couldn't
do our job  because we had  lacked the self-discipline to go and train, we'd
be standing on Platform 4.
     Cycling was very popular at one stage, and some mornings it looked like
the Tour de France coming into the main gate. I preferred  to run in from my
house, have a shower, then go and have  a brew in the crew room. It  had the
look of a seventies-built school staff  room, with a TV and  magazines  that
were six  months  out of date, army soft chairs with horrible colored  nylon
covers, and mugs that were badly stained by coffee. It  stank of stale  tea,
coffee, and cigarettes.
     One of us would go to the  cookhouse in a Range Rover  and pick up some
tea in Norwegians and the packed lunches-brown  paper bags that contained  a
typical school  lunch of  soggy  rolls, Yorkie  bar, and  crisps.  By  eight
o'clock  we'd have  eaten everything and  would  start  discussing the day's
training.
     "What are we doing today then, Gar?"
     Gar was  in  his mid-thirties, an ex-Green  jacket, and had been in the
Regiment for  years.  He  was very  experienced over  the water  and  really
switched on. Recently divorced,  he was reliving his youth; he was immensely
sociable, tailor-made for B Squadron. He wore Armani suits and jermyn Street
shirts; even the sergeant major called him  Champagne  Charlie.  At the same
time, however, he was very sensible, and not the  right bloke to get on  the
wrong side of. Everybody  tried to be best mates with  Gar; get  in  his bad
books and you were in trouble.
     There was no messing about; he'd just sort you out on the spot.
     On 5 September  1972,  eight men belonging to the Palestinian terrorist
group  Black September burst into a room  in  Munich housing eleven  Israeli
athletes. They shot two of them and  held the others hostage, demanding  the
release of P.L.O prisoners held in Israel and members of the German Red Army
Faction held in West Germany. They also wanted a plane to fly them to Cairo.
     The  West  German   government,   which  had   no   specially   trained
counterterrorist  forces, gave in to the terrorists' demands after a day  of
negotiations. They were flown in two helicopters to a military air base, and
as they prepared to board the aircraft, army snipers opened fire. Visibility
was  bad, and  the snipers were positioned too  far away. The terrorists had
time to blow up both helicopters, killing the nine Israelis.
     In order to  avoid such  a  debacle in  the LJK, the British government
turned to the  Regiment. A CRW (counter revolutionary warfare)  wing was set
up that would be  responsible for  training every member  of the Regiment in
counterterrorism techniques-among other things.
     CRW  was still  the  continuity  of  the CT  (close  target) iding  new
equipment, training, and buildings.
     team, prov If there was  no training requirement  coming  from CRW on a
particular day-for example, going to see the London Underground, visiting an
airport,  or  looking at  major  venues where heads  of state were likely to
meet-we would conduct our own.
     Instead of  the  head shed running things, one of the team would be put
in charge: "Right, Harry B, you organize a day in the CQB house."
     The head shed could then spend time working alongside us.
     The sniper team would go to the ranges  or train with the assaulters. I
loved the  ranges,  especially in the summer. We used the PM, a 7.62  sniper
rifle,  and  Lapua  ammunition,  made  in  Finland.  The  targets  were "Hun
heads"-just a  picture of  a  head. We always went for head  shots, for  two
reasons: Any terrorist with more than two brain cells would wear  body armor
if he had  the opportunity, and there  was always a chance that  the players
would  be on  drugs and therefore more  pumped up. If they were  shot in the
body, they could be so wired to the moon that they would  still come forward
or start to  kill the hostages.  If they had their  heads  taken off, they'd
drop.
     Within the  Hun head targets was a circle, centered on the area of  the
nose. We'd  start the session  by  firing  just one  round, at  two  hundred
meters, as a confidence shot.
     Some  would  do it standing, some  lying, but we'd all have to  hit the
circle, dead center. It made us more confident to know that the  weapon kept
its zero, even when it had been packed and put  in the wagon; at an incident
we wouldn't be able to test-fire our weapons, so we had to be sure.
     There would  then be lots of  moving target shoots as  far away  as six
hundred meters, and a lot of OP training and urban sniper work.
     The development of a counterterrorist role led to a  number  of changes
at  Stirling Lines. The CQB building  or "killing  house" was constructed to
enable us to  train  in  hostage rescue and covert entry with live amen  ' '
unition, and make entry at any level-anything  from a four-man assault group
to a complete team with vehicles and helicopters. It was a single-story bull
ding with a center corridor  and rooms leading off-large rooms, small rooms,
connected rooms-with  movable partitions and a whole range of furniture.  It
was up to  the individual to arrange the  furniture the way he wanted it and
then put up any barricades.
     The smell of lead  and gunfire seemed to cling to the walls. There were
extractor  fans, but they couldn't keep up with  the amount of rounds fired.
Even with  the lights in the rooms fully on it was still fairly gloomy. Some
rooms  had  bulletproof glass with little portholes so people could look  in
from outside or videotape us.
     It was my turn to organize a day in the CQB house.
     My team  consisted of me, Dave, Fat  Boy, and  a new boy, straight from
Selection, called Tim.
     "Let's do a three-man snatch,"  I  said. "Fat Boy, go and sort the room
out-I don't want you working up a sweat, do I?"
     He went off to arrange the  furniture in the room and put up barricades
for us to  fight through and change the lighting in the room  so we wouldn't
know  what to expect as we entered. He then went and sat down in the room as
the hostage; the terrorists were simulated by Hun heads.
     We started to move to the door. It was always a difficult time, because
there must be absolutely no noise; the object of the three-man  snatch is to
get  so  much  surprise  and speed  on  to  the  target  that  it's  totally
overwhelmed.
     Once we reached the door Dave  and  Tim placed the door charge; we were
right up next to it to maintain the element of surprise when it went off. It
was something that  we practiced  time and time again until we were  used to
being next to charges as they exploded.
     Everyone was  right on top of  one  another,  really  tight  up, weapon
leaning over the shoulder of the next bloke, ready to burst in.
     When everything's quiet, the noise of the respirator sounds outrageous.
I  could hear my breath rasping  in and out and was  trying to slow down and
breathe rhythmically to cut down the noise.
     I  made sure my torch  was working, my pistol wasn't going to fall out,
and the weapons weren't banging together. As number one, once I was ready, I
stood in position, safety catch off; the moment the door opened I could  see
into  it and start to  fire. I had my weapon in the shoulder, ready to  go.-
Tim and Dave were right up behind me.
     Forward and peripheral vision  from inside the respirator is  good; all
my  concentration  was focused forward; all I could hear was the noise of my
breathing.
     I could feel my face starting to get wet with sweat.
     The command was given on the net: "Hello, all stations, I have control.
Stand by, stand by, go!"
     As  the second  "stand by" was  given,  Tim  took  the door  in. I  was
straight into the  room  to take on the  first threat I saw. Reacting to the
situation  in a room is  not so much a  matter of  drill  as  experience and
training.  The terrorists  won't be sitting or  standing  where they ideally
should be; they are not playing our game. It could mean going left or right,
or I might have to fight through a barricade to get to a target. It could be
dark, or the lights might go out just as I entered.
     No  more than  a foot behind came Dave, the number two. He had to react
to two different factors-me and the terrorists.
     As  we  entered,  we were  firing at  the  heads. Dave was  on  auto; I
preferred to fire rapid single shots. It was a matter of personal choice.
     We were firing on the move, and the name of the game was to shoot until
the target was dead. Because we were training and  not dropping live bodies,
I personally would fire until I could  see  enough holes in the  target, and
then  I'd  know that it  was dead. Each man  might get  through  twenty-five
rounds every time he went in, more than he probably would in a real rescue.
     I  moved closer to the target, still firing. I had both  eyes open so I
could see everything that was going on.
     The last  thing any terrorist would see was my  torchlight blaring down
on him.
     Once Dave was  in and firing he might have to move  around the room  to
protect the hostage and  give cover for Tim to do his stuff. He came in with
no  weapons, apart from  a pistol in a holster;  he was shouting through his
respirator at the hostage: "Up, up, up! Move, move, move!"
     as  he picked him  off  the floor by whatever  he  could get  his hands
onollar,  hair,  head,  anythingand.  very aggressively dragged him from the
room. There was no time to mess around. For a snatch to succeed it has to be
all over in a matter  of seconds, and  the  only reason  it is so  quick  is
because of the months-and in most cases years-of practice.
     All four of us came back into the room for a debrief.
     "A bag of shite!" Fat Boy said, smoothing down his ruffled  hair  after
being manhandled by Tim. "Andy, the reason I put that target where I did was
that I knew you'd go for the obvious, when in  fact to the  right of you was
the  real and immediate threat. As  you came  in,  you should have seen that
target straightaway. You fucked it up. Do it again."
     I  was more  than  happy to  practice  it again.  If I had  missed  the
immediate threat in real life, I would probably have been killed.
     After practicing the  same snatch  again, we changed positions  so that
every time there was somebody in the room and three men outside.
     After each session we had another debrief, perhaps watching a videotape
of the proceedings so there could be  no bone excuses, and drinking tea that
tasted of lead because  of the five  thousand or more rounds that were fired
in the  building each day.  The lead fumes get  in the  throat and  nose and
linger all day.
     We  trained for stoppages. It's not the most pleasant  situation in the
world for nothing to happen  when you go  to fire your weapon at a terrorist
five meters away who's bringing  his weapon up at you.  There is  no time to
sort it out; you've just  got to keep both eyes on  the target and draw your
pistol. You have to be quick or you are dead.
     The reason we all went into  the room  as  the hostage was so  that  we
could give an honest account of  what we heard  and saw  from the other side
and gain confidence in the other team members. It takes total trust  to  sit
there, sometimes in the dark, feelin the blast from the .
     MP5s as these people burst  in firing live ammunition  all  around you.
Given the high  number of rounds that  are  fired every day-more than by the
rest of the British Army put together-casualties are very low. All training,
however, must be as realistic as possible.
     It got to the stage where we were so confident with each other  that we
did quite outrageous things  while  training. There  was a fellow called Mel
from B Squadron, at that time  a member of CRW, who was  so confident in the
other  blokes that he would stand between two  targets in a dark  room while
they came in with pistols and torches and fired at the Hun heads beside him.
     Mel was a bit of a fruit. He was trying to get us to wear a new type of
body armor, but we were very skeptical about its effectiveness.
     In the  end he said, "Look,  I'll prove  it  works." He put the kit on,
loaded a shotgun with solid shot, and told one of the blokes to shoot him.
     It took him down, but he was alive. Mel felt he was vindicated.
     On  another team we were  looking at some new Kevlar helmets.  Mel  was
sure that  they  were a good bit,  of kit,  but  we were  saying,  "We don't
mind'the extra weight and discomfort  of having  this Kevlar  helmet on, but
will it take the shot?"
     Mel  put  the  helmet on  and  said to Mick,  the 'ap-slapper, "Listen,
Kevlar's a wonderful material. Shoot me in the head with a nine millimeter."
     Mick said, "Fuck off, behave yourself and have a brew."
     There were no other volunteers, so the event didn't happen. About three
days later the Regiment got a letter from the manufacturers asking what we'd
thought of  the  dummy helmet. Apparently  what they'd  sent  us was just  a
mock-up to demonstrate its weight and the shape.
     There wasn't an  ounce of Kevlar in it. There was talk that a  shot  to
the head wouldn't have made much difference to Mel anyway.
     We'd practice procedures for  Man Down. If  one of our blokes was shot,
we couldn't do anything about it immediately; the  only thing that was going
to save  him was our taking that room or area  as quickly as we could. If we
stopped to sort him out, we'd all die; we must still carry out the task and,
now that he was down, also carry out his job as well.
     We trained for  every eventuality-and trained and trained  and trained.
There  are so many different  types  of buildings, from high-rise blocks  to
caravans, and all  sorts of scenarios in which people could be held. Getting
into an  aircraft, for example, is  a  lot  different from getting  into  an
embassy;  clearing  a  ship is  a lot different from clearing a hotel. For a
start,  the  ammunition's got  to  be  different. If we  started firing ball
ammunitionsolid, full metal jacket  rounds-it would  be  wanging  around all
over the place as it ricocheted off the metal structure; therefore it has to
be able to fragment once it hits metal.
     We, looked at all sorts of vehicles, from coaches to jumbo jets.
     We  practiced getting  up to  an aircraft, then making an entry without
anybody  knowing. The  counterterrorist  team  has to  know how an  aircraft
pressurizes, how it depressurizes, how the system can  be overridden, how to
open the escape chutes.
     People came up with new ideas all the time. One  of the  team once said
for a joke, "How about trying to  climb up the tail and somersault down into
the cockpit?"
     We did.
     There was progression every time a team took over.
     The techniques never stayed the same because what we were trying to get
into and defeat never stayed the same; the technology always moved forward.
     As well as  the assault and sniper groups  practicing among themselves,
the whole team would get together and train for the different "options." One
of these was called the I.A (immediate action), a plan that the 3 i/c had to
organize. He  had  to get all the information available and be  able to give
orders  to one of the  teams  thirty  minutes after  they  arrived; the  O.C
meanwhile would be planning the deliberate options.
     The I.A  was continually updated and changed as more information became
available. If there was a drama and  the terrorists started to  massacre all
the hostages, the I.A would go in as prepared as it could be.
     One of the teams was always  on  standby on  the I.A; within seconds it
could be  stood to, ready  to go in  on  the target. Helicopters  and  Range
Rovers were used to get the team on target as quickly as possible.
     On days when we conducted our own training 'we would try to be finished
by midafternoon. There were no breaks; we just cracked on until it was done.
Then it would be back to the team hangar, clean the weapons, drink more tea,
ensure everything  was ready to go  in case of a call out, and  close  down.
Some of the blokes would then go training or go home and  make an attempt at
fixing their  leaky guttering. Those of us with any  sense would go downtown
for a brew and talk  about how close we were to our football pools syndicate
winning on Saturday.
     Another commitment for the team was to be ready at a moment's notice to
go  over the water to reinforce the troop.  I used  to enjoy this; it got us
away for a few days or even weeks.
     Sometimes if there  was  only a small number required, it was a case of
first  come,  first  served.  There was a callout on a  Saturday morning;  I
jumped into my aging  Renault  and screamed off  to work; my foot  was right
down to the floorboards, gunning the vehicle at speeds of up to 50 mph along
the straight.
     I knew the Puma would be flying in to RP with the team  who were going,
and within ninety minutes  we'd be in  the  province-as long as I got to the
camp  in the first  place. As  I approached  the  main  bridge in  town that
crosses the river Wye, I had a bang, clipping a Mini Metro with my left-hand
wing. The other driver insisted on doing all the paperwork, and there was no
way I could run away or tell him who I was.
     just  as we  finished exchanging particulars,  I saw the Puma  lift off
from the camp.
     The CQB house was always on the list of tourist attractions at Stirling
Lines, and visiting VIPs were  generally given a demonstration of  firepower
and entry techniques. All  chief  constables were  given  demos so that they
understood the Regiment's capabilities, as were the many other organizations
that needed to know the type of product we could supply.
     Sometimes demos became a pain  in  the  arse. It was okay  doing things
that needed to be done, but instead  of being the counterterrorist  team, we
sometims became the demo team.
     The  teams  were  becoming more and  more  fed  up so  that instead  of
training, they were jumping through hoops for all and sundry during the demo
season. We didn't mind doing  it for customs and excise and  police firearms
teams-but teams of rugby players or doctors and nurses? Even the fitters who
were laying carpet in one of the messes had a morning out; the joke was that
someone was obviously  getting his front  room  done for nothing. It came to
the point where the only people left in Hereford  that we hadn't done a demo
for were the Women's Institute.
     The guests would ask some really daft questions.
     "How much do your gloves cost?" I was once asked.
     "One hundred and  fourteen pounds," I  said, plucking a  figure out  of
thin air. "Give or take a few bob."
     It got to the stage where we started to stitch each other up to relieve
the boredom.  One of  the  better  ones was during  the pallet displays, for
which  all the vehicles were  moved  out of  the  hangar and the weapons and
equipment laid  out on show. A member of each  part  of  the team would then
talk about his kit and task.
     I was doing the talk on the assaulters and had sorted out my  pallet. I
had all the clothing, body armor, abseil kit, the lot, and  the weapons that
any member of the assault group would be  taking, and there was Fat Boy, who
was dressed up in the  kit. As I talked about a weapon, he would bring it to
bear.
     Everybody's  looking;  it's  all  rather  impressive. Fat Boy drew  his
pistol, then the shotgun, and there were knives and all sorts coming out all
over the place.
     Earlier in the day I had gone  over to the sniper  team's  pallet  when
they weren't around and had left a tennis ball on their display.
     When  Eno started talking about the different  ammunition,  it would be
good to see him get out of it. When  I came back,  I didn't realize I'd been
stitched up myself.
     I  carried on with the waffle and saw  an old  boot in the middle of my
display.  Everybody was rolling up on the other pallets.  The  Regiment head
shed were giving me bad looks; they were not impressed.
     I moved on  to  point  out the weapons,  and there was a plastic  water
pistol. I couldn't do jack shit about it.
     Luckily nobody asked what it was for  because I would have been obliged
to pick it up and say, "It's to shoot people with," and give them a squirt.
     One memorable day the Prince and Princess of  Wales and the Duchess  of
York came down to  Hereford. The purpose of  the  visit was  familiarization
with the Regiment, so if the shit hit the fan for them,  they'd know what to
expect when the boys came screaming through to rescue them. But  also it was
a fun thing, a good day out for us.  A day like that was good for them, too;
they could let their hair  down  away from the press,  and without having to
shake hands, pick up flowers, or make small talk with Jonathan Dimbleby.
     One  of the demos that  we gave them was how we could covertly enter  a
building and get to the hostages in total darkness.
     They  were  sitting in bne  of  the large CQB  rooms  listening  to  an
explanation  of how  we trained: "As you  can see, we can  control the light
levels, from full to total darkness."
     The lights were now off.
     "Sometimes  the team has to operate in total darkness because there may
be no power or the terrorists have control of the lighting."
     We were going in wearing NVGS. It was like looking at a negative with a
green tinge.  The  goggles  give  a weird  perspective;  if  you go to  grab
something, you might be out by an inch, so it takes constant practice.
     Going up  a step, we'd have to exaggerate our movements to make sure we
didn't trip up; to walk, we'd place a heel gently and run the outside of the
heel all the way along  the outside of the foot, then  gently place the boot
down, and then go with the next one.
     Sometimes I  couldn't hear what I was doing;  I was trying  to  breathe
shallowly; even the noise of the NVG, a tiny whine, sounded fearsome because
it was right next to me.
     Nice  and gently, taking  our time, we  slowly  moved toward  the table
where they were sitting, all the time thinking, What if we screw up?
     We're supposed to be the smoothy clockwork operators.
     The lights went on, and standing over the royal visitors was an assault
group in full kit carrying MP5SDs, trying to breathe slowly and look casual.
The Royals particularly liked that one.
     We staged mock sieges to rehearse the Royals in the procedures we would
go through  in the event  of a  terrorist  attack.  The  exercises were very
realistic, and they didn't always go according to plan.
     During  a  demo of a building assault, the Royal party was aboard Range
Rovers as part of the attacking force, watching others  who were fast-roping
from a helicopter onto the roof. The Agustas were zooming in, lots of bangs,
lots of firing, the big mass assault on the embassy.
     Suddenly, as  the helicopter  lifted away, a bloke in black kit tumbled
out  and fell fifty feet onto the roof, his body being hidden from view by a
three-foot-high perimeter wall.
     The blokes  said they  heard Prince Charles  say, "Oh,  my God, a man's
been killed!"
     Almost immediately  what should  have been  a  dead body jumped to  his
feet,  dusted  himself off, and continued with his task. Everybody looked at
one another, openmouthed.
     Later that  day the Regiment became trendsetters. Diana was going to be
in a room where  flashbangs  were going  to  go  off.  Flashbangs are  noisy
things; they are  designed to disorientate you and make you want to curl  up
in a ball and wait for your mum to come and get you.
     As it went off, she turned and one of the maroons hit  her in the head.
There  was the smell  of  burned hair and  lacquer,  and our  army  pensions
suddenly didn't look any too healthy.
     The only lasting damage was to her hair, which was badly burned.
     Days later the press  and Royal fashion  watchers  noted that Diana was
suddenly sporting a new, shorter hairdo. There could be no comeback.
     They had signed a  disclaimer  that  was now in B  Squadron's  inter In
Tsodilo Hills, Botswana, 1986.
     Members of 6 and 7 Troop in Okavango, 1986.
     mil FN 9MM pistol, stripped. FNITRH Pictures Heckler & Koch 9MM MP5SD.
     Heckler  Koch  Pictures est room:  "No  member of B  squadron  will  be
committed to the Tower if any of the demos go wrong."
     Nobody-least  of all the other  members  of the  Regiment-could believe
what had happened to the bloke who fell from the helicopter, and it was only
in  the club later  that we learned  the truth  about Superman.  Unknown  to
anybody but the team in  the  heli, he had  hidden himself  behind the wall.
Then, at the right moment,  the lads in the heli had ejected a dummy dressed
in black kit.
     As  well as all the  training  that was  done for  once we were  on the
target, we had to practice the call-out system and moving to an incident; we
had frequent  exercises enabling the  different  agencies  and personalities
involved in any hostage incident to practice their bits.
     Mrs. Thatcher had long been a fan of the Regiment.
     After  refusing to  allow the  government to give in to the terrorists'
demands  during the embassy  siege,  she had personally sent  in the team to
bring it to an end.
     She might as  well  have had a bed  space down in  Hereford; she always
seemed to be there. I  respected her nononsense approach, and she laughed at
the jokes. She might have been the  only one walking around the camp wit I a
andbag, but she was as tough  as any man when it came to the crunch. She was
in  the CQB house once when we burst in and pumped live  rounds into targets
either side of her. One of her aides curled up into a ball.
     Maggie looked at him and snapped, "Get up, you fool."
     There was a  lot of liaison with different units of the police. We  did
major exercises where  everybody was involved, from the Prime Minister down,
because  everybody  had  to  be tested.  It  was  no  good  having  all  the
soldiers-the  coal  face workers-practicing their techniques  and practicing
cooperation with other  organizations, if  the  people who were  sitting  up
there  in  C.O.B.R  (Cabinet  Office  briefing  room)  listening to  all the
information  and  making  decisions  weren't  practiced,  too.  So  we'd  do
exercises  where  C.O.B.R would  take command and  direct operations  from a
bunker under Whitehall, the idea being to put Mrs. Thatcher and her team and
everyone else down the chain under as much pressure as possible.
     There had been  a big exercise a couple of years before in the  States,
and some of the Regiment went over as guests to observe. The incident was of
national   importance   involving  the  National   Security   Council,   the
presidential committee that commits  the troops.  But the  problem was,  the
council  didn't  actually  assemble to join  in  the  exercise. There  was a
debrief  afterward, at which one of  the Regiment blokes stood up and  said,
"The exercise was excellent; all the different organizations worked together
and  any  little  problems  are  now  ironed out.  However,  where  was  the
President?" It was  ident and his advisers who had to make the decithe  Pres
sions, and they had to be getting hit with the problems  exactly the same as
everybody else.
     In  the UK  everybody  from the Prime  Minister down  was hit  with the
problem at the same time as we were and had to make decisions.  So it wasn't
just  the S.A.S  going in to  kick ass; it  was everybody  working  together
toward the same aim-a negotiated surrender. The last  thing any of us wanted
was to start putting charges  on buildings and go screaming through shooting
people-or,  even worse, getting shot at. It's dangerous. Nobody's jumping up
and  down  with  excitement to go and  do  that sort of stuff;  he might  be
killed. However, if it's got  to be done, okay , that's  a fair one, off you
go,  and if the people  in  command, up to government  level, have practiced
alongside those at the sharp  end, then at  least the blokes are  happy that
the decision has been taken by people with experience.
     During one tour I was on the thirty-minute team. I was in town shopping
when I  got a call on my bleeper. By now I  had a  250 cc Yamaha;  I took it
steady going over the bridge this time. As I rode in,  all the hangar  doors
were  open and vehicles were  moving  to the ammo  bunker  to load up. There
would  be maximum  activity as blokes were  loading  their ops bags into the
wagons, which held everything an assaulter could wish for.
     Everything was laid out behind the wagons ready to go at ahy time.
     Once everyone  had loaded  up we moved into the t:rew room to find  out
what was going  on.  We were all eating our crisps apart from Slaphead,  who
saved his during the week for his kids. For some reason  they always  seemed
to be the most horrible flavors like Prawn cocktail.
     Maybe the  army had a deal with Smiths or the  head chef had a sense of
humor.
     The SSM  came into the crew room and said, "About an hour ago there was
a call out  for four  men, including the second-in-command,  to  go over the
water.  We've  just   received  another  call,  Andy.   I  want  you  to  be
thirdin-command on it."
     He gave us a brief.
     "The  Israeli  trade  commission  was.  holding  a conference  at  grid
six-three-two-four-five-six,  map  sheet  onethree-five.  This  morning  the
Islamic Jihad got into  the building and is holding hostages. We  are  stood
to, waiting for the word  to move. The O.C and his group have  already moved
by one-zero-nine (Agusta helicopter).
     Steve   is   waiting   with   the   second   one-zero-ninei   for   the
second-in-command and  sniper commander.  The rest of  us  will wait for the
go."
     My chest felt  tight  as  we were driven to the heli pad; in the normal
course of events I wouldn't have been  tasked  with the 3 i/c's job until at
least my next tour. I felt honored but daunted. I didn't want to fuck up.
     The second wave of slime  (Intelligence  Corps personnel) were  waiting
for us  by the  109.  They were an integral part of any operation ever since
the  Prince' s  Gate siege had demonstrated the value of  good  and accurate
intelligence. During the lead up to the actual assault, specialists from M15
had  been tasked  with  drilling  holes  in  the  walls and  inserting  tiny
microphones and cameras to gain a detailed picture of who  was where  inside
the building. But the information about the construction of the building was
piss  poor,  and  the walls turned out  to be  too thick for  the  probes to
penetrate.  The result  was that although the  blokes  had  a  model  of the
construction of the building, they did not know exactly where the terrorists
were.
     Since then the  Regiment  had collated a  massive database on  computer
that  included  such essential information as  the thicknesses  of walls and
doors in buildings that were possible  terrorist  targets and the designs of
all military and civilian  aircraft. The computer was portable, so  wherever
an incident occurred,  we could take it with us and access the  information.
If we called up a  certain hotel,  for example,  we'd get a 3D  image of the
interior on the screen.
     Intelligence gathered on the numbers  and location of people inside the
building could then be added as it  came to hand. Possible methods  of entry
could  also be suggested to  the computer,  which would  then  plot the best
method of moving through the building. If the design of the building was not
on the database, we could punch in details such  as the  construction of the
outside walls, the number of windows, and the location of various rooms. The
computer would then  "design"  the interior and provide a probability factor
for  accuracy, altering both as more  information  was  added. It seemed the
slime  had  every map, drawing,  and  picture  of every  ship, aircraft, and
building in existence.
     I liked going  in the heli with Steve until he  started to  talk  about
squash. He was mad on the sport, and  to make it worse, he  was good  at it.
Squash was very popular in the Regiment; at lunchtime the courts looked like
the scene at a major tournament.
     We arrived at the location just outside Liverpool, a large private park
with its  own  massive  mansion house; from the air  I could  see lakes  and
well-manicured lawns.
     We landed alongside the  other 109. One of the  slime was there to take
us to the holding area.
     "It's not as good as we would want, but it will do," he said.
     On the way there we passed scores of police, fire, and ambulance crews,
all with their  vehicles and their own jobs  to do. The holding  area turned
out to be two large rooms in an old outbuilding that had been taken over and
used  as incident control.  The  rooms  were  more  or  less derelict,  with
concrete floors  and cobwebs at  the  joins of the  walls and a damp,  musty
smell of cat's piss, but at least there was electricity. In  one corner were
a couple of bogs with high cisterns and rusty metal chains.
     The rooms must both have been about  twenty-five  meters  by twenty; it
was a building cut in half with a center wall and two doors.
     The first  priority was  to meet up with jack, the squadron O.C. He was
easy  to  spot-very tall, very  wide,  and with a  nose that would  have put
General de Gaulle's in the shade.
     "This is the  briefing area," he said.  "Next  door  will be the  admin
area. The I.A  vehicles  will be placed on that  hard standing to the right;
everything else on that grass area there."
     Nobody else would  be allowed  to park near  the  ops vehicles, and the
area would be kept clear of all clutter.
     In the briefing area the slime and signals advance parties were sorting
everything out. There was  a  long line  of  six-foot tables  on which  were
boards that  would  soon  have pictures  of  the  target  plus  the  X  rays
(terrorists) and Yankees (hostages).
     Plans of the  building  were  being  pinned up  as more information was
given by the  police.  Steve and Jerry, the other  pilot,  did  the sensible
thing: got  some tea and  talked squash while  they waited for their support
team to arrive.
     "Let's go  to the  main incident room and get permission to  go forward
and see the target," I said.
     I  took a walk to the main  building with  the  O.C and Bob, the sniper
team commander. Bob was the first member  of  the Regiment I'd ever seen, in
Crossmagien.
     He had since become troop sergeant.
     It  seemed  that  the mansion  had  been  renovated  and turned into  a
conference center much the  same as the target, which was  about a kilometer
away.  It was  very  plush with deep  carpets, beautiful wood,  and  leather
furniture and a fine central  staircase. The scene put me in mind of a place
that a film company had taken over.
     All the Gucci furniture  had been  moved  to the side,  and  there were
wires fixed  to the floor with masking  tape  and running up the staircases,
telephones ringing, policemen and women rushing around, and, like us, people
in civilian clothes with ID cards pinned to their jackets.
     Every sector had its own little cordon. To come out of our holding area
cordon and into another, we had to go through a police checkpoint. The slime
had pinned ID cards to us. Within the main building there were other  places
that  we needed  other clearances to  go into. It was chaos;  everything was
still getting jacked up.
     The O.C  introduced  us to a  woman police  officer who was one of  the
incident controllers.  She called the forward control  point and  said, "Our
friends are on their way down to see you."
     I  returned  to the briefing area  with  Bob and Jack and  saw the  two
pilots.  Squash  talk had  finished now and they  were looking  at some  air
photography that had just come in. Steve had decided to get his pipe out and
slowly kill everyone. Each time he left it the thing would go out, so he had
to relight it, causing clouds of smoke to form above him.
     The squadron O.C and I got a radio each and did  a quick roadie's sound
check-"One  two, one  two"-to each  other and moved  off  toward  the  inner
cordon. All the radios were secure comms, so no one else could listen on our
net.
     We must have  been  stopped and checked three times at different points
along the route.  Once there we wanted  to get as close as  possible to  the
target. The O.C  wanted to  start thinking about the deliberate options, how
he was  going  to get his teams on target and what he wanted  to happen when
they were there. On these phases we had the advantage over the terrorists.
     Bob was looking for the best places to put his snipers.
     They needed to be  as  far away as possible for concealment  but  close
enough to play the kind of detail that was going to be required.
     For my part,  I  was  looking for the best Way to get  the  team in and
control the target thirty minutes after they arrived, which was the 3
     i/c's job.
     We got to the  control point, a group of gray  police Portakabins, each
with a black-and-white checked line around it. It had been raining,  and our
shoes  were muddy.  I tried  to  scrape most of  it off as  we entered.  The
Portakabin was pretty spartan inside and freezing  cold, despite an electric
two-bar fire-no taxpayers' money  used extravagantly here. The place smelled
of coffee, cigarettes, and the stink of burned dust when an electric fire is
first turned  on. The windows were steamed up;  people were  wiping them  so
they could see out.
     Every  time  somebody moved  Portakabin rocked backward and forward; it
hadn't been stabilized yet.
     Inside were the negotiators and the world's supply of policemen.
     The areas were pointed out to us on a  sketch map,  and then our escort
turned up to take us as far as the nearest police sniper.
     The boy was well and truly pissed off. It was  cold and wet, and he was
lying in the mud with only a roll mat for insulation.
     "I've been waiting to be stood down for the last hour," he said.
     "What have you seen?"
     "Not  a  thing.  When  we arrived, all  the  curtains were closed,  and
there's been no movement anywhere."
     I said, "If the curtains are the same as the ones in the main house, we
won't be able to see much tonight either."
     We stayed for  about  an hour, moving around the building as much as we
could. I peered through my binos, having a good look at the target.
     It was a  large, square  Georgian  building, with very clean-cut lines,
much like  the  main mansion house itself. At  the  front  were large double
doors and windows on either side on the ground floor.
     Above that there were three windows on each of the next two stories.
     The roof was flat,  with  a little two-foot wall around the edge, but I
could see two large skylights. It had  a gravel driveway  coming  up to  it,
which opened up either side; around the back were outhouses and garages.
     A quick word with Steve-and the slime, and I would be  ready. I  walked
back in the mud, wishing that I had brought my wellies with me.
     Standing near  where  the snipers would soon be  positioned with a good
view of the building,  I did  a quick  appreciation of how I  was  going  to
implement the I.A.
     We would  have to travel up to the target by  vehicles  because  of the
distance from  the holding area. Once we got there, did we then move on foot
to get on to the target? No; there was too much open space between the cover
and the target. There were some woods and little hedgerows dotted  around in
this  vast park  area, but the  nearest lot of  cover was a row of buildings
down at the bottom of the driveway.
     A run up from there would take too long, expose everybody, and possibly
compromise the  whole operation. So it would  have to be  one of two things:
all in by helicopter or all in by vehicle, or a combination of the two.
     We had two 109s, which could take a maximum of  six blokes  each, which
meant they couldn't  get everybody on target. I wanted to hit as  many parts
of  the building  as I could at the same  time so there was  no time for the
people inside  to  react,  so-it was going  to  have to be a combination  of
vehicles and helicopters, depending on the latest information at the time.
     The first wagons were now arriving after their Formula  One race up the
Me. As everybody came in,  he was told where the holding area  was and where
he was  to lay out his equipment. Soon there was a long row of blankets in a
straight  line; on  top of all of them was all  the equipment out of all the
vehicles.  The  blokes unwrapped the MP5SDs  and  Welrods  from their weapon
bags,  together  with axes, crowbars,  hammers, shields, half  shields, full
body shields, ladder sections. The only wagon that was not emptied  out  was
the  M.O.E  wagon,  which  was  full  of  explosives  and  bits  of wood and
polystyrene for making up charges.
     They knew  where  they were going to sleep-the holding  area. All  they
wanted to know now was where the bogs were and where they could get a brew.
     With the arrival of the team the briefing area got busier. There seemed
to  be wires, radios and  telephones being tested  everywhere. I was sitting
over  the  marker board, putting call  signs to vehicles and telling  blokes
where those vehicles  were  going and what would happen once they got there.
The more I wrote down before  I gave the formal set of orders, the easier it
was for me, because then everybody  already had an idea of what he needed to
do.
     As I was  writing it  down, people were  coming in and  leaning over my
shoulder: "How many vehicles needed?"
     "I need two Range Rovers and two fast ropes."
     Bob took  his first - two snipers  on the ground and showed them  their
positions; they would start to send information as soon as they were  on the
ground. In contrast with the police, our snipers had  some really  good kit.
Not just overalls and a roll mat for us; we had camoutage DPM coveralls made
of  Gore-Tex;  inside  was a  complete  body duvet,  which was  unbelievably
comfortable. They only had to wear their tracksuits underneath and could lie
out in the mess all  day if  they had to.  The only slight drawback was that
the clothing  was  bulky; from behind, they  looked  like  two Michelin  men
walking  down  the path.  But  they  would  be  grateful for the warmth; the
weather  was still dull and overcast,  a freezing,  stinking winter day that
found its way into any little gaps in your clothing.
     Now I'd had my  chat with Steve and the slime  I was ready to  fill the
board in and get changed myself.
     The team  now knew what time  orders  were and  what  those orders were
likely to consist of, plus what vehicles they had to prepare.
     As well as this, the  M.O.E  team  were looking at the information that
had been  given by the police. They checked, too, with the scaleys, having a
quick look at what measurements and plans they had. Then they started making
charges to defeat the windows, which were plastic-framed and double-glazed.
     The whole place was sparked up now, with everybody involved  in his own
little  world. The team were sorting the equipment  out,  coming in and out,
still in their jeans.
     The scaleys were sitting over their equipment, chatting away.
     They, too, were in jeans and rough wear.
     On ops the assault teams wore three layers of clothing: flame-retardant
underwear, very much  like racing drivers wear; an NBC (nuclear, biological,
and  chemical)  suit  to  protect  us  from  the  gas  we  would  use;  then
flame-retardant  black  coveralls.  After  that   the  bootshigh-leg   cross
trainers, which were also great for free fall. I put my belt kit on; this al
' so  carried  my Sig  9MM pistol, which strapped on halfway  down  my right
thigh.
     I just had to lower my arm and the pistol grip would meet my hand.
     On my left leg I had my mags for the MP5 and Sig, again halfway down my
thigh.
     I had an instant sweat on; to make it hotter, on  came  the body armor.
By now I, too, looked like the Michelin man.  To  top it all, there was  the
ops waistcoat; this carried my radio with its earpiece and  throat mike-some
blokes  used  a mike that  went  into their  respirator, but I  didn't  like
it-explosives,  first  field  dressings, a knife,  an  ax,  flashbangs, plus
anything else that was task specific.
     I  carried a Heckler & Koch MP5, the high-powered 9MM semiautomatic and
automatic weapon. The reason it had  become the basic assaulter's weapon was
that  it  had a closed breech, which meant we  could  have a round up in the
breech   ready  to  fire,  with  the  working  parts  forward-much  like   a
self-loading rifle or an Armalite.
     Most  small machine  guns work on  the  blowback  principle,  where the
working parts come forward to initiate a round, and the gases then push back
the working parts, which stay to the rear unless you pull the trigger again.
The Heckler &  Kochs  are more reliable and have an excellent  rate of fire.
And they're British,  of  all things, Heckler and Koch being part of British
Aerospace.
     Another good feature of the MP5 is its three-round burst capability, so
every time you squeeze the trigger, it  just fires three rounds. Release the
trigger,  squeeze  it  again,  it'll just fire  three rounds. It's the first
three to five rounds that are most effective on any automatic weapon.
     The streamlight torch attached was zeroed to the weapon so we could use
the beam for aiming as well as simply penetrating darkness  or smoke. I used
mine  even in  daylight because  it  was such a  good  aiming aid. There are
little nuts and bolts to enable you to move the torch around; you zero it so
you know that when the  torchlight is on the  target at  so many meters, the
rounds are going to go so high or  so low from  it. In a  dark room Maglites
also have a good blinding effect on the people you're attacking.
     I  had two magazines attached to the weapon: one that was in the weapon
and then a bracket with another magazine just to the side of it, so I didn't
have to go to my main belt kit in a rush. The weapon was slung over the body
on a chest sling so I could climb  buildings, jump  in  and out of vehicles,
and do all the business that I  wanted, without having to worry about it. It
was one of the few times that the Regiment did actually sling weapons.
     At the last moment I would put on my kid leather gloves and respirator;
by then I would just be  a big sweaty mess with  a chest  and shoulders like
Arnie in a  Terminator film. If I was really lucky, I could also find myself
carrying  the "Barclaycard,"  a sawn-off  pump-action shotgun  with the butt
taken  off; it's used to take doors down  by  firing a "Hatton round," which
takes the hinges  out without damaging the people  in the  room. It got  its
name from the advert-"A Barclaycard gets you  anywhere." In the beginning it
came with its own holster, but that proved to be too cumbersome; most of the
teams just put a bungee on it and had it hanging down at their sides.
     By the  time of my orders group  the briefing room was  furnished  with
fold-up canvas  army chairs from the wagons. Some blokes  were sitting down;
some were standing.  People were  coming  in and  out; I could  hear all the
people on the radios in the background.
     They gathered around the board as I gave my I.A orders, white paper cup
in  one  hand  and a  soggy  roll in the other.  Before us were plans of the
building from all elevations, plus air photos and floor plans.
     This  was one  occasion when there was no time for  anyone to  voice an
opinion. There was no Chinese parliament.
     I said, "These are orders  for  the I.A that is in place directly after
these orders.
     "Ground. The building has three floors. At the front there are the main
double doors;  these are plate  glass  with  a plastic frame. The doors have
been covered over with tablecloths so we can't see in. On each side there is
a  window,  then a window above  that per floor; these are all double-glazed
with plastic  frames.  All the  windows  in  the  whole building  have their
curtains  closed. From the main door  there is a  central staircase that has
two flights per floor. On the roof there are skylights that open up into the
main corridor on the top floor.
     After these orders look at the plans and  familiarize yourself with the
rest of the outside; the front is all we are concerned with at the moment.
     "Situation.  Six  hours  ago  members  of  Islamic jihad took  over the
building that was  the venue for a conference sponsored by the Jewish  trade
commission. They are demanding the release of five of their group being held
in Parkhurst prison for  the  attempted  bombing  of the Israeli Embassy. It
seems  that  there  are up  to six  X  rays  and  approximately twenty-seven
Yankees.
     "There are no pictures yet, or  information, on anyone, except that one
of the X rays,  X ray One, is a woman.  From her voice she appears to  be in
her   mid-twenties   with  a   strong   northern   Palestine   accent.   Her
English/American is good. All indications show that the group have split the
Yankees and spread them around the building. No weapons have been  seen, but
it is a reasonable assumption that they have automatic weapons.
     "Deadlines.  Negotiations  have  been taking  place since  ten  hundred
hours. The first deadline is in forty-five minutes' time, at sixteen hundred
hours. They want to talk with one of their group who is in Parkhurst."
     I  then  gave  the  mission  statement,  which  is always  said  twice:
"Mission. To rescue the hostages, to rescue the hostages.
     "Execution. Assault group. Red One and One Alpha,  you are to fast-rope
onto the roof and make an explosive entry through  the skylight.  Your L.O.E
[limit  of exploitation] is the top floor.  I want a link man  on  the first
landing to RP with Two and Two Alpha. Steve, which way are you both going to
approach from?"
     "From the northwest along the tree line, then low over the park."
     "Okay, it will take twenty seconds for the wagons to be on target.
     If you give thirty seconds to target, that will keep us together.
     "Two and Two  Alpha, you are  to  make an  explosive entry into the two
middle-floor  windows. Two,  take  the  left window  on call  sign Tango One
[Range Rover]. Two Alpha  on the right on call sign Tango Two-your  L.O.E is
the middle floor. I want link men to  RP  with One Alpha and to move down to
the first landing and RP with Three and Three Alpha.
     "Three-that's  me-and Three  Alpha are to make an  explosive entry into
the front double doors. Three will go left on call sign Tango One, and Three
Alpha will  take the right on call sign Tango Two. Your L.O.E  is the ground
floor. I want a link man to RP with Two.
     "Sniper group. Sierra One and Two, you are to cover  the call  signs as
they move in from the inner cordon.
     "Sierra Three and Four, you  are to move  forward from the inner cordon
on the standby and cover both sides and rear with G threes.
     "Hostage reception.  The reception area will be in the area of the main
doors. Once entry has been effected you are to move forward.
     "A.T.O [ammunition technical officer] and  medic. You  will  be  called
forward on request. Call Sign Three will RP with you at the main entrance.
     "Tango One and Tango  Two. I  want you to  drive head-on from the start
line  here," I  said, pointing at  the map. "Once you come around the corner
you will come head-on  to  the building. The  distance is  approximately one
hundred fifty meters.  Once  on target you will  cover the teams  in, become
casualty replacement if called; if not, become part of hostage reception. If
we get a stand down from the deadline, I'll bring you forward so you can see
the run-in. Any questions?"
     There weren't.
     "Timings. After these orders I want the teams to  look at the plans and
sort  themselves out. By fifteen thirty five  hours  the I.A.  's ready. The
first deadline is at sixteen hundred.
     "Vehicle  group, at  fifteen-fifty everyone needs to be on  the wagons,
ready apart from respirators. We will then I move in slow time to  the start
1- e. Tango One will lead, in and I'll show you the way.
     The  team will  be stood  to at  the start line  at  fifteen.fifty-five
hours.
     "Heli group,  at  fifteen fifty-five  you need to be  on  board, rotors
turning. Steve, if you are not told  otherwise,  close down at  sixteen-ten.
Any questions? No?
     Right that's it."
     The formal stuff over with, I then talked with my  team and mulled over
the plans.
     "Dave," you make  ohtry. I'll go in number one-Tim  Two, Fat Boy Three,
and Dave Four. Once we clear the hallway we will  go left and take the large
room, then this one here by the stairwell. Once we are all clear I want you,
Tim, to link up with Three Alpha  at the bottom of the stairs, then clear to
the first landing and RP with Two.  Any questions? Good, let's sort our shit
out and load up."
     That was all there was to say because everybody knew the rest.
     We walked out of the briefing area  to the two Range Rovers,  Tango One
and Tango Two, that were going to take us -on to the target.
     "Hello, Alpha, this is Three," I said on the net.
     "That's Tango One and Two moving to the start line.
     Over."
     "Alpha, roger that, moving to the start line."
     "Alpha" was  the coordinating call sign for our base, which would be in
the briefing area and manned by the scaley. "Alpha One" was the commander.
     The blokes were sitting all over the outside  of the vehicles. All Don,
the driver, could see was two  pairs of black legs that belonged to my team,
who were going to  take the first floor. As we moved to the start line under
police escort, I could hear the Agustas' rotors starting to wind up.
     I got out of the Range Rover at the  corner of the row of buildings and
watched as everyone put his respirator on  and  "checked camber"-pulling the
working parts  back slightly on his weapons so that he could see there was a
round ready to fire.
     The two drivers quickly turned up to the corner and got  down  on their
stomachs. One of them peered around with just  a quarter of his face and one
eye so he could look up the drive and get a mental picture of the run-in. As
soon as  Tango One's driver had had a look,  he got out of  the way and  the
other fellow got down.
     "Alpha this is Three, that's Two and Three stood to, over."
     "Alpha, roger that, One acknowledge."
     "One stood to, out," the pilot said.
     In the background of his radio message I could hear the rotors turning.
     The squadron  O.C would  be with the senior policeman, listening on his
radio and explaining  everything that we were doing and confirming that  the
I.A was stood to.  If the  X rays started killing  the  Yankees,  it was the
police, not us, who would decide that we went in.
     We were there to supply military aid to the civil power, that was all.
     All  the  team sat  on the wagons and in  the helicopters, listening on
their radios and waiting for the deadline.
     Engines and rotors were running.
     It  was  now approaching the deadline. The snipers  were  watching  and
listening intently.
     "Alpha-Sierra One, that's shouting and movement on White One-One," came
one.
     Each window and door had a color and number. I knew he was referring to
the far-left bottom window.
     "Alpha, roger that, shouting and movement on White One-One."
     All the team could hear this on their own radios.
     "Alpha, Sierra One, that's White One-One opening, wait . . . wait . . .
that's  one X ray, possible male, black ski mask with a  green combat jacket
carrying an AK . . . wait . .  .  he's shouting and pointing to  the control
area, over."
     "Alpha, roger that, out to you. Tango One, acknowledge."
     "Tango One."
     "Tango Twoll "Tango Two."
     "One?"
     "One, roger that," Steve said. The rotors were still turning.
     "Alpha One?"
     "Alpha One, roger."
     It was the last chance for a check.  Is my pistol held in correctly? Is
the flap over the pistol so it's not going to fall out?
     Are the magazines secure?
     The  people with  the  window  and  door charges  were  checking  them,
starting  with the clacker: Is  the clacker on  correctly?  Is  it  nice and
secure?  Then, all the way up, following that line. Is the det on  securely?
Is the det on securely to the det cord? Is the charge all complete?
     Is the respirator on  right?  Is the seal tight  between the respirator
and the  coveralls? You don't want to start getting gas down you  because it
hurts. Gas doesn't only affect the breathing system and the eyes; it affects
the skin, it stings severely. Are the gloves on tight? If they were baggy, I
might have a problem as I went to draw MY Pistol or  started manipulating my
MP5 or pistol.
     Everything was secure. I  was holding  on to the  vehicle,  waiting for
that "Stand by!" to go.
     We heard, "Hello, One and  One Alpha,  move to  your holding area, over
"One, One Alpha, roger that, out."
     The helicopters were starting to go up; within the forward control room
the senior policeman must have been a bit concerned about what was going on.
He hadn't handed over control, but he was  saying: "Get the helis up to save
time, so at least once they're in the holding area we can start running them
in."
     At the same time all the snipers were coming on the net.
     "Hello, Alpha, this is Sierra One. That's still more shouting.
     Still more movement.  It  seems now there's movement  on  Two-Two,  the
window above.  Can't identify  anyone;  it's just  movement. I  can see  the
window and the curtains  moving. There's a face at the  windowcan't identify
it, over."
     "Yep, roger that."
     Blokes  were pulling out flashbangs  from  their  ops waistcoats; as we
were  going in, just as we were  approaching  the place, we'd start throwing
them to produce distraction and confusion-the more the better.
     We wanted to disorientate and scare these guys.
     All the engines were running.  Everybody was just waiting for  the  go.
And still we  had more hollering and shouting; the snipers  were bringing in
more information.
     The negotiators would  be  working really  hard  talking  to the people
inside the building-if  they still  had comms with them, that is, and  these
people wanted to talk. They'd be talking to them and at the same time they'd
be giving messages in siga  language  to  everybody  around them in the main
incident room.
     For us on the Range Rovers, it was just a question of sitting  there in
the wagons twenty  seconds away, out  of I sight. Nobody was doing anything;
we weren't talking , y because we had our respirators on.
     I sat back and put my head clown, listening to what was going on.
     I didn't want to waste energy. I just slumped. I had my weapon strapped
over me; I was weighed down  with kit; it would  have been pointless running
around. We couldn't hear  what the negotiators were saying, but I knew  they
would have  been  trying to calm  the situation  down. There was no way that
C.O.B.R were going to let them talk with their people in Parkhurst.
     "Alpha, Sierra One, that's the X  ray back in White One-One, window and
curtains closed."
     "Alpha."
     The  deadline  had passed.  The  negotiators were  doing their bit; the
chief constable  must  have been satisfied  that  the  threat  to  kill  two
hostages at 3:00 P.m. had been successfully avoided.
     "Hello, all call signs, this is Alpha One-stand down the I.A.
     Stand down the I.A. All call signs acknowledge."
     We all acknowledged the Boss and  took our respirators off and made our
weapons safe-an  unload  followed  by a load, without putting a round in the
chamber.
     We drove back with the police escort and  watched the heli  teams  walk
back to the briefing room.
     The place  looked completely  different.  By now  all  the intelligence
collation and signals equipment was on-line.
     There  were more pictures and plans of the building plus information on
the wiring, sewage pipes,  ventilation  systems-more  intelligence than  You
could shake a stick at.
     Also there were a number of photos of one of the  terrorists,  taken by
the technical  teams  of  the Home Office. Now we had  our second terrorist,
called X ray Two,  and a  picture,  There was  nothing  high-tech about  the
scene,  just boards with things stuck on with pins, masking tape, magiboards
with magnets to hold bits up. It was a  very  fluid situation; we  had to be
able to pull information off and replace it quickly.
     Each  of  us had a  white paper cup of hot tea  in our hands as we went
over to the briefing area where the Blue team were waiting. The  slime  were
going to give everyone an update.
     "The situation so far  is, the  negotiators are trying to get  three of
the Yankees exchanged for  food. These are one sixty-five-year-old employee,
the gardener and his two grandchildren, aged six and nine.
     Pictures  are now starting to arrive of some of the Yankees; as soon as
we get them, I'll put them on the board with a description if possible.
     "As you know we now have  an X ray Two. He is a male, approximately six
foot two and fifteen stone.
     There is no new deadline as yet and no more info apart from what  is on
the boards. Any questions?"
     The squadron O.C then took over.
     "The Red team is to  stay  on standby  for the I.A until oh-six-hundred
hours. Orders for  the  team  changeover  will  be  at  oh-five-thirty.  Any
questions?"
     "What are the feeding arrangements?" Fat Boy asked.
     I smiled. So what's new? I thought.
     Everyone looked at the SQMS.
     "There will be a container meal arriving at nineteen hundred hours, and
from then on the police will take over. As soon as I know more, I'll post it
on the board. I'll  make sure the tea urns are filled. Try to save the paper
cups; use your own mugs if you can."
     We filed out  of the briefing room, throwing  our paper  cups into  the
black bin  liners  that  the  SQMS  and  his  storeman  had been putting  up
everywhere.
     There was background noise  of ringing phones and the amplified  voices
of  the  snipers sending back information, relayed through  loudspeakers  so
that  everyone could hear what  was happening.  There was  a general buzz of
people talking to one another and into phones and  radios, and the noise and
echo  of others  moving and  setting  up  more equipment. It was still  cold
inside  the building; there was localized heat as some heaters  were now on,
but I could still see my breath.
     The admin area next door had changed  also. The Red  team had got their
camp beds  out and started to place their  body  armor and belt kits next to
them; then the  books and Walkmans were coming out. As NWe were  the I.A, no
kit came  off apart  from our MP5s and respiratorsI got a camp bed, unrolled
my sleeping bag, but decided it was too early to sleep.
     I went outside between the  two rooms and saw a couple of the Blue team
talking with two policemen  who were part  of a cordon to stop people coming
into our area.
     "It's great for the overtime," one of the policemen was saying.
     He started to talk about the miners' strike.
     "There  was  one force  that  had their  own  T-shirts printed with the
message 'A.S.P.O.M.-Arthur Scargill Pays  Our  Mortgages."'  I went into the
briefing area to see what was going on.
     The squadron O.C was on  the net  to Sierra Two, who was tucked away in
his OP, watching the front and right-hand side of the building.
     "From your position could you get gas into White Three-Two, over?"
     Sierra  Two  said,  "Wait."  He'd  want  to take  another  look  before
committing himself.
     "Alpha One, Sierra Two-yep, I can do that if I  move twenty meters left
before the standby, over."
     "Roger that, out to you. Hello, Sierra One, what's the cover like  from
you to the rear fire escape, over?"
     "Sierra  One, '  there is dead ground up to about sixty meters short of
the fire escape. However, I haven't been there, over."
     "Alpha One,  roger that.  There will be  someone down on your  position
soon, and they will have a look. Out.
     He  was busy  planning  a  number of  deliberate options covering  day,
night, covert, and overt situations.  These  options would have  to be ready
for when C.O.B.R had tu had  enough or the si ation had deteriorated  to the
extent that the police handed the incident over. Planning for the deliberate
attack  could involve anything from an elaborate model being made up for  us
to  look  at to just loads of floor  plans  and masking tape  put out on the
ground to  represent the  area.  We would walk and  talk through everything.
Sitting in were both teams'  2i/cs and their ruperts; they were all part  of
the planning process.
     The team 2i/cs, the senior noncommiss oned ranks, were there because of
their  experience;  the  team  ruperts  were  there  to  suck  them  dry  of
information-to learn, as well as be part of an operational squadron.
     One day  one  of  them would be in the squadron  O.C's seat-a  fearsome
responsibility.
     The Regiment didn't need troop commanders; in 7
     Troop we  didn't  have a troop commander for years. A  troop ran itself
under its senior NCO.  However, what was needed was  squadron commanders,  a
squadron HQ element. With troops dotted all around the  world, somebody  was
needed who  knew where they  were and  what they required. One of the  troop
commanders was one day  going to  be the  squadron commander, so  it  was in
everybody's interests to make sure we trained them up well. For them, it was
another  form of Selection; they did their three-year tour, and if they were
any good, they might get invited back to run a squadron. If they screwed up,
it wasn't their  fault but that of the troop senior or the troop as a whole.
It  was  our responsibility  not just to give the rupert  a hard time-as you
do-but to make  sure that  he was given all the  opportunity in  those three
years to learn as much as possible. It was no different really from training
recruits at Winchester. A bad product was down to us, not the recruit.
     It was the senior NCO, the team senior, who really ran the show.
     He did the day-to-day planning and  all the administration. And  it was
also his job to make sure that the officer knew what was going on, and we as
a team needed to be teaching him as well.
     I got bored and  went back  to my  sleeping  bag to read my  book,  The
Feudal Kingdom of England.
     Then it  was time for  the  container  meal. This  was,  as  predicted,
"Airborne stew"-Meat, potatoes, vegetables, all cooked up together.
     Sometimes there  are paper plates  on