Bodyguard (8 page)

Job done – though I was all up for another day on the piss with the heavies! In fact, the overt crew told me we had enough footage. I wasn’t needed any more. What a weekend.

At the airport, I was getting ready to chill my way home in Business Class when, to my disbelief, I saw half the Windsor Chapter in all their gear preparing to board. If it was anyone I spoke to yesterday – and fuck, I was so pissed, how would I know – my cover story wouldn’t have held. At least I wasn’t wearing any equipment. It would be professional suicide to try to take the covert cameras in the hand luggage.

I managed to avoid them. I knew they would be in cattle class. I think that underlines how important it was for Craig Summers always to fly in style at the BBC’s expense! 

And for what? We had flown to the other side of the globe for what was eventually just forty-five seconds of footage. I flipping loved it and, more to the point, I felt natural in the part! Who wouldn’t? I had been on the ultimate boys’ weekend, and I wanted it to kick off. The truth is that nine times out of ten, undercover stuff is pretty
tedious
– but you always have to be on your game for that winning shot.

When I saw the show, I was really disappointed by how little they had used. In this business, I was learning fast, you were only as good as your next hit. My ego was crying out for the glory, and any great
Panorama
with my name high in the credits meant that I removed one more ankle chain from the desk marked Health and Safety and strolled over to the office marked Undercover. I was desperate to be as important as Simpson, and I would always go the extra mile to get there for the BBC.

I don’t mind admitting that, on this occasion, I got carried away in the part. I love spending other people’s money doing a job but, equally, if I had sat there on lemonade all day, nobody would have talked to me. The only way to get involved was to become them – I had no problem with that. I wanted to see them get their guns out, or start lining up the coke, but it was sufficient that they bragged about it on camera. I described it to Sue as a stag weekend. There was no need to file report after report when we got back. Jason and I had a quick debrief and that was all. If anything, though I didn’t know it at the time, the whole weekend would make a mockery of what followed.

M
y stock had remained high after Friendly Fire – I was entered for a Rory Peck Award and the
Panorama
show on Iraq won a Royal Television Society Award. John and Tom had travelled to Washington and amazingly got access to a female pilot from the crew who had dropped the bomb on us. We were able to confirm that the Special Forces had called in the strike.

Since then Tony Loughran had quit the Beeb and Bob Forster began to leave me alone. Caroline Neil called the shots and I felt that she was the one to protect me. She understood that needs must and she knew how ops worked. It was the beginning of the BBC’s formation of a proper High Risk Team. Finally I was moving from safety to security.

I had been back to Iraq several times and Afghanistan, too – indeed my last trip prior to Boxing Day 2004 was as late as 9 December. When I returned, I was whittling down the time to Christmas. We were done for the year at the office, and I hated all that bullshit anyway. I couldn’t wait for the next mission.

Such is the random nature of breaking news, even I was taken aback to wake up on Boxing Day and find that disaster of the highest order had devastated one of the most beautiful places in the world. Instantly, I was transfixed by the story and alive to the possibilities. I didn’t move on 26 December. As with Friendly Fire, it was like a movie but very real indeed, watching those waves leap out of the 
ocean, knocking houses and vehicles for six. I flicked from the Beeb to Sky to ITN and back again like a junkie. I watched swimming pools being swamped, the water climbing up the balconies of hotels towards people who couldn’t imagine they were in danger. It didn’t matter how tough you were; you couldn’t not have feelings. But through it all I was weighing up the possibilities.

One report in particular kicked me into action. I saw John Irvine on ITV, holidaying in Thailand, on the beach with the sea going out only for him to grab his kids seconds later as it charged back in. That was it. I need watch no more. I had to get out there.

This wasn’t the usual Craig Summers cup of tea, and I wasn’t sure they would send me. They saw me as a bombs, bullets and bastard kind of guy. It wasn’t a war zone or football thugs on the piss – this was natural disaster on a biblical scale. I rang the planning desk. My old mate Malcolm Downing was working the Christmas period and we had a first-class relationship. Of course, because it was Christmas, I knew we had a skeleton staff. I told him straight – I was happy to deploy as soon as possible – and I told Sue the same. I even packed my bag. Malcolm gave me what he could. At this point they didn’t really know what was going on and he would call if I was needed.

‘I’m ready to go; it’s not a problem.’ I put the phone down,
sketching
out my next adventure. This was going to be massive. Malcolm was right though. Nobody knew how big at this stage. I also phoned Paul Greeves. ‘We should be out there – it’s right up our street and it calls for a military operation,’ I pitched.

I had to get on that plane, and years of being on standby for military ops that might or might not happen told me only I could be the logistics guy at a moment’s notice.

‘I’ll be in touch,’ he flat-batted me back. ‘We should be across it as a team.’

It was clear that it was part of the world that nobody really knew much about – and it had happened at a time when the world had gone to sleep. I know this would cost us four or five days. Most people 
didn’t even know what a tsunami was. I was so thick that if I hadn’t been presented with a Japanese flag at the Hong Kong Sevens earlier that year by a team called Tsunami, I wouldn’t have known either!

Once again, I waited for the phone to ring and, once again, the silence was deafening. The fact that I don’t like Christmas – Sue calls me Scrooge – made it worse. Normally I would have gone to the football if West Ham were playing at home but, even though they were only at Fulham, I abstained. My mind was working overtime – and not to my pleasure. I could see the reporter Andrew Harding working out of Singapore, filing by videophone. I knew, as well, that the Delhi Bureau would handle Sri Lanka. I saw Jonathan Head, the Tokyo correspondent, and it was clear we were pulling in everyone on that side of the world. I was glued to the net and the rolling news; Sue was watching repeats of
Noel’s Christmas Presents
. I was chuffed we were there but felt the moment slipping away.

Most of the Beeb had eyes on Phuket in Thailand – that’s where the majority of Brits had homes or had chosen to holiday. In the early stages we were largely dependent on mobile phone footage. I soon learned that Ben Brown had flown out with Duncan Stone on camera. My phone never rang. I had it by my bed permanently switched on. At five in the morning, I would still be checking to see if the office had called. The story was leaving me behind.

Frustrated, I gave up watching the TV news and hit the gym, resolved that if nobody had called me after my workout, I would ring again. I knew that they would need help with the stories, food on the go, and that sickness was a problem. They had no logistics hub.

‘I know you want to go, Craig,’ Malcolm told me when I finally got through. ‘I know we need to organise equipment, food and tents. Let me establish what’s going on and I will call you.’ Same again. I didn’t see why there was a delay. ‘When can you go?’ he asked.

‘Now,’ I answered.

He told me he would do his utmost to get it sorted. For the first time, I thought I might be going. I rang my old mate George Booth 
at the Outdoor Adventure Shop – we had served together, of course, like all my old mates. I asked when he was next open. He told me tomorrow. That was 28 December. I said I would come the next day, but heard nothing from work for the next forty-eight hours. My stuff was laid out at home ready to go. I took myself to the gym again to fill the time. I didn’t ring Paul Greeves.

God, I wanted to, but I didn’t want to piss him off. I had played my hand, and I couldn’t overplay it. I distanced myself from the news. I knew the story was drying up. I could see that they were doing live feeds now, and that they were coming off dishes not videophones. I also spotted Rachel Harvey from the BBC in Jakarta out in Thailand and Sri Lanka – that told me the infrastructure was in place. Once again, my moment was passing.

By the time I made my token visit down the M3 to Poole in Dorset to see George I had almost given up. Of course, as was always the way, I was twenty minutes from the shop when the phone rang. It was Paul.

‘Newsgathering want you to fly to Banda Aceh in Indonesia to assist with the setup – 45,000 lives have been wiped out.’

‘Yep, no problem,’ was all I could think of to say.

I was on the plane.

‘You fly at 18.15,’ he finished the call.

Bloody hell. I rang Sue immediately – she was tearful. This wasn’t like me heading to a war zone. It was Christmas and everyone had seen it on the news. It had cut right through. She changed her shift there and then to get home and get me back to the airport. I was driving faster and faster to get to the shop and straight back out to London. I marched round the store like a machine, bought X, Y and Z and apologised to George. Within half an hour, I was back on the road home.

My phone that never rang was now doing so off the hook. Even my flights changed – there had been two available via Singapore and I was offered
£
5,500 on BA or
£
3,500 on Singapore Airlines. On this occasion, I didn’t fly with the world’s favourite airline. 

I was now due out at 21.00, but had to hit Heathrow by 18.15 to meet the supplies. We needed what we call ‘grab and go bags’ (enough supplies for a couple of days) plus tents, showers, and water
purification
. That was your classic disaster pack and, God, we didn’t know how many we would need.

At home, I had grabbed everything I’d previously laid out – I always packed for two weeks and made the rest up. Just after I finished, there was a knock at the door. The BBC had gone from apathy to overdrive in hours. It was a courier with a massive bag of stuff.

‘I thought I was picking this up at the airport,’ I told him.

‘You are; this is another one,’ he replied.

It had all gone nuts. I took a moment to have a peaceful bath, mindful that I might not shower again for weeks. Then, Sue drove me to Terminal Three in silence. Deep down she didn’t believe I was actually going. I did my usual trick of laying out an incentive on our return. I talked up a trip to our place in Spain. I never gave a second thought to whether that would come off or not.

There were two huge bags waiting for me – we really had gone from shoddy to hyperactive. Check-in was hectic, and I was never one to linger. I went straight to the Virgin Gold Card Lounge. That’s the benefit of having your wife work for the airline. It was New Year’s Eve. On the flight, I was out like a light for seven hours. The next thing I knew I was through Singapore and checking into the Mandarin Hotel in Jakarta. I went straight to the bar for a beer.

The world’s media had concentrated on Thailand for the past week – that was where the first footage had come from, and John Irvine had turned the spotlight onto that coastline. Everybody had missed the real story – there were actually 250,000 dead and unreported on in a little place called Banda Aceh, which was where I had to get to.

‘Can I get on that flight?’ I asked Jason from Associated Press, who had been looking after things for us as the attention shifted countries. The answer was no. 

I had no idea where I was going, what I would find when I got there or what I was going to do. I just knew I had to get there
yesterday
. There was only one flight a day to Banda Aceh and most of it was filled with aid and aid workers. To get it, I had to get to Medan, some 600 kilometres adrift. That was the only flight I would be getting in the morning.

When I arrived there, a freelance producer from Sydney by the name of Paul picked me up, drove me to the hotel and briefed me. He had been there since 30 December, acting as our Logistics Coordinator; the fact that we were relying on a guy from Oz should tell you how stretched we had become, how slow we’d been, and how far away from the story we still were as fallout from the tsunami entered its second week. If I thought the images I’d seen up to now were bad, Paul told me, then I needed to prepare myself. The worst was yet to come.

At the Garuda Plaza Hotel, he warned that I had missed today’s flight to Banda Aceh and I couldn’t go anyway unless I had a Blue Card to travel.

‘Can we drive?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he told me, condemning me to another day twiddling our thumbs.

I was concerned that everybody would be packing up by the time I had made it out here. Far from it – it was a cat-fight to get on this one plane a day. I rammed every possible idea at Paul to get the maximum information for what lay ahead – I even asked if we could get there by boat now that the waters had receded. I needed to know how the hell I could get a vehicle of supplies in there ready for when the main team arrived. I still had a nagging worry, as you do in places like this, that the plane would take off without me.

It was warm, humid, and I had been on the road for three days. In that time, I had slept for just seven hours total. This was only the beginning. Like the soldier I still was, I unpacked my kit then packed it again. I knew I had to be ready to move at a moment’s notice – 
always expect nothing to happen, then for it all to kick off in seconds. Inactivity followed by panic was the order of the day.

Because of the time difference, it was impossible even now to get my head down. Calls were coming in from London and around the globe at any given moment. Paul Greeves – I learned – was on his way out behind me. I got the word to set up an operations base in Medan and to work with Paul when he got there, organising convoys of supplies in; to brief new arrivals as teams changed over; and to create the hub – you had to go through Medan to get the story. We definitely needed to do this – Australian Paul was inundated with requests that it wasn’t his job to deal with. The sooner London Paul got there, the better.

On 2 January, I was first to check in at the airport – this was now Day Nine. Everybody wanted to make that 09.00 flight – I don’t think it mattered if you were booked on or not. It was chaos. Of course, there was no sign of the flight being called and nobody was saying anything. As I sat around waiting, wondering, I couldn’t believe what I saw next. I hadn’t been told about it.

Coming towards me from across Departures was a friendly face I knew only too well. Straight in from Bangkok, onto Jakarta and down to Medan, it was the BBC’s Ben Brown. I asked him how things had been in Thailand – very grim was all he would say. They had now realised that the story was moving on. Something had triggered with the reporter Rachel Harvey, who was based near the epicentre; she knew that what she was watching on the TV didn’t ring true. It was down to her that all roads now led to Banda Aceh, though of course they didn’t – every route in bar this solitary flight was blocked.

I was pleased to see Ben and his cameraman Duncan but he looked worse than I did. When I first spotted him, I didn’t know him at all. He looked like a bedraggled man dragging a suitcase across the airport. Of course, he had no paperwork either, nor did he know he needed any. Ben would have got the flight anyway and argued the toss at the other end. He would tell them the world needed to see this 
story. As we were delayed, Aussie Paul took him back into the city to the Press Centre to get him accredited. He was back within the hour and the flight was still waiting to go.

We knew little of Banda Aceh – it was heavily Muslim and a good diving place. That was it. It would, from this moment on, forever remain in the history books.

I could barely imagine what lay ahead as Ben painted the picture of Thailand, full of makeshift morgues, each with bodies piled high, all bloated through their intake of water. Beaches had been washed away. Both Ben and his cameraman Duncan in all their years had never seen anything like it. We now knew that was nothing compared to what was coming.