Immediate Action (26 page)

    "You use your secret weapon: a good, loud Irish 'Fuck off!"-and nine times out of ten they'll take you as one of their own."

    Nosh said, "It's okay for you, you already have a bone accent."

    The training went on for weeks. We did everything from CTR skills to fast driving drills, shooting out of cars and shooting into cars, and I loved every minute of it.

    I was picked up at Belfast airport and driven to our location. The smells and sounds inside the building took me straight back to Crossmaglen: fried eggs and talcum powder, music and shouting. Four or five dogs mooched around the place, looking as if they got fed to no end.

    "Finished your leave, have you?" said a familiar voice behind me, followed by a resounding fart. "About fucking time. They said they were sending some wanker from the Green jackets."

    "Hello, Nosh." I grinned.

    He'd just come out of his room and was wearing a pair of jeans, flip-flops, and an old clinging T-shirt. His hair was sticking up, and there was a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. At least he had his teeth in.

    Brew?"

    I followed him over to the brew area just outside the living accommodation. The Burco boiler looked as if it was kept going twenty-four hours a day; next to it was a big box of NAAFI biscuits and jars of coffee and sugar.

    "How's the ice-cream boys then?" I said.

    I'd eventually solved the mystery of that nickname, discovering that the Air Troop had always had the piss taken out of them. Wherever there was a camera, said everybody else in the squadrons, the Air Troop would be posing in front of it-usually with shades and a deep tan. It stemmed from the way we had to operate. When there was troop training or squadron exercises, Mountain Troop would go and live on a mountain, Boat Troop might go down to the dark and murky waters of Poole Harbor and paddle about in the freezing cold, but we'd have to go where the clear skies were, and that happened to be where the sun and Cornettos were too, so a few jumps, then rig and jumpsuit off, get an ice cream and walk around in shorts and flip-flops, looking good. No one said it 'Would be easy. There was one exception, and that was G Squadron Air Troop, which was known as the Lonsdale Troop because they were forever fighting one another. They even fought a pitched battle on a petrol station forecourt one day because they couldn't agree about who should get out of the minibus and do the filling up.

    "Seen anybody yet?" Nosh said. "The ops room is up the top there. just leave your kit here. Fuck knows where you're sleeping. I think you're going in Steve's room. But if you go upstairs and see who's up there, they'll be able to sort you out. Tiny got his bike nicked in London, so he's really fucking pleased about thatmake sure you ask him about it because he gets all bitter and twisted. What's even worse, I'm living with him now, and he hates it. Got to go now, Blockbusters is on."

    Nosh, I discovered that evening, after finding myself a bed space in Steve's room, was still a nose-picking exmember of the civilized human race, living in a disgusting world of gunge. If he didn't like something on the television, he picked his nose and flicked the bogey at the screen. The glass was covered with things.

    "He's decided he wants to learn the guitar," said Frank. "He spends all his free time knocking out 'Dueling Banjos." Not that you'll be able to tell. It sounds like 'Colonel Bogey' to me."

    "Talking of which," Steve said to me, "don't look inside the guitar."

    "Why not?"

    "Just don't."

    I did. To judge by the volume of the crop, it was a miracle Nosh's head hadn't caved in.

    Besides fatting, picking his nose, and strumming, his other passion in life was eggy-weggies and Marmite soldiers. Every night he'd go to the cookhouse to get his boiled eggs and Marmite toast; then he'd come back, do the crossword, watch the telly, have a fag and a fart, and go to sleep.

    Johnny Two-Combs was also with us, from Boat Troop. There still wasn't a hair out of place. The last time I'd seen him was in a bar in Hereford. He was wearing a black polo-neck jumper, a yellow shirt over that, and black trousers. He went up to a girl and said, eyes half closed and half flickering, doing his best Robert De Niro, "I just want to tell you that you have the most beautiful eyes."

    It was the most ridiulous chat-up line I'd ever heard.

    Half an hour later he was escorting her into a cab.

    Colin had been in charge of the troop when I went to Malaya.

    Getting words out of him was still like drawing teeth; it would just be a sniff and "That was good," or a sniff and "That was shit."

    Eno had been on my first Selection and passed, getting in six months before me. He was from the Queen's Regiment, a rarity in the Regiment.

    Predictably, everybody spoke to him in a camp voice but for some inexplicable reason also shouted, "Three queens, three queens," whenever they saw him. A thin little midget, Eno was a tremendous racing snake, heavily into triathlons. He smoked twenty a day but was so fit that at one championship he stood at the start line with a fag in his mouth.

    "Got to spark myself up, ain't I?" he said. Eno was very much like Colin, never flapped, never got excited, and you had to beat him up to have a conversation.

    Jock was there, too, whom I'd met on Selection. There seemed to be no compromise with him. He had a policy of working really hard, being incredibly serious at work; then when it was fun time, it was outrageous fun time.

    We were at a squadron party once; he went up to the colonel's wife, and he said, "Do you fancy a dance?"

    She said, "Yes, that would be lovely," so Jock walked her onto the middle of the dance floor, pulled out a Michael Jackson mask, and taught her to moon-walk.

    Frank Collins was still Mr. Calm and Casual. He never shouted, never got annoyed. Steve told me he had been one of the youngest soldiers in the Regiment when he did the embassy in 1980. From the first night of the siege he and the rest of the assault team were ready on the roof, dressed in full black kit and expecting the order to go in at any moment. It must have been tense stuffbut not for Frank.

    Apparently he was so relaxed he took a pillow with him to snooze away an hour or two. I knew he was into climbing, canoeing, free fall, and religion, and I found out he was being called Joseph at this stage because he was into carpentry as well.

    "You'll never see Frank when there's nothing going on," Nosh said.

    "He'll be doing the family business."

    He was going down to one of the local timber yards and making tables and cupboards and things that he was going to be taking back to the UK for his house. In fact they were quite good-big kitchen tables and things.

    I was lying on my bed one day, scratching my arse and drinking tea, when Frank came in said, "You bored, or what?"

    "Yeah, I'm doing nothing, just hanging around."

    I "Do you want something to read?"

    "Yeah, what you got?"

    "I've got something with sex, violence, intrigue, you name it, it's got it."

    "Okay, yeah, I'll have a read of it."

    So Frank went to his room, fetched the book, and tossed it onto my bed.

    It was the Bible.

    I'd turned up with big wide eyes. One of the first things I had to do was familiarize myself with the various weapons. Over the water at that time they were using the Heckler & Koch family and the LMG-the old Bren gun, converted to 7.62-as well as GPMGS.

    Pistols were 9MM Brownings and the Walther PPK, known as the disco gun because it was nice and small and therefore easy to conceal.

    If I didn't want to carry my Browning when I was out and about but not working, I could slip the disco gun into my belt.

    Most people would have an M16 or 203, an HK53 5.56 men or MPS, so that whatever job we were doing we could take the relevant weapon-whatever gave the right balance between concealment and firepower.

    I was talking to Tiny in the armory. Every day the weapons had to be checked, and Tiny, the armorer for that day, was showing me the ropes.

    ' "What's the score on this shoot-to-kill policy I keep on hearing about?" I said, half expecting him to say, "Hose the lot down."

    "Is there fuck such a thing?" he said. "If there was, we wouldn't still be here. We'd be back home and they'd be dead. We know where they all are. If someone was giving the green light, we'd just go in and take-them out."

    "Very clear-cut," I said.

    "And totally counterproductive. It's little things like that that bring down governments. Of course at the same time there can't be a shoot-to-wound policy either." Tiny went on. "It would take a laser gun that was self-guiding to the shoulder to do that shit. People's perceptions of what goes on are so wrong. I remember after the embassy, when we were making our statements, there were all these questions coming up, commentators on the TV saying, 'Why didn't they just shoot him in the leg?" How the fuck can you shoot to wound somebody?

    It's impossible. You can't say, if somebody's a hundred meters away, 'Right, I'm going to shoot him in the legs." You just see a mass of body, and if he's shooting at you, you're going to shoot back at him.

    It, s not a shoot-tokill policy; it's just reacting to the threat. The problem is, the people who make these sort of comments have never had a gun pointed at them."

    I knew that if I was staring down a barrel, I wasn't going to be firing at their legs. If thiqy ended up just wounded, they'd be lucky.

    That wasn't a shoot-to-kill policy; that was reacting to a perceived threat and saving your own life and the lives of those around you that you had a responsibility for.

    My roommate Steve, also an embassy and Falklands veteran, was originally from the airborne Ordnance Corps, heavy drop, which were based in Aldershot.

    Married with a couple of kids, he was a local lad from Gloucester; the first words I'd hear every morning were, "All roight, boy?" Steve was slightly shorter than I was but much stockier, and he played rugby for the army; as a result, all his front teeth were false. He was one of the original bone shirt people, one of the four drug smugglers who'd come back with us on the British Caledonian flight from Hong Kong. He shared the passion of most of the troop for watching Blockbusters, but had one annoying habit that was all his own. Every time he saw an aircraft he'd say, "See that aircraft? The distance we're oing to walk today, he's just traveled with one sip of his gin and tonic."

    Clive was a singley who'd been a Royal Engineer and was another old embassy and Falklands hand. He kept himself to himself but was very much into cycling and running; he had all the cycling stuff and bone T-shirts.

    Clive's nightly ritual was a pint of beer and a cigar. He was an excellent long-distance runner despite his height; he looked too tall and gangly to move fast. It was very annoying; he looked like this uncoordinated mess on the run, but - he really motored. One New Year's Day Bulmer's had organized a ten-kilometer race. Clive and I turned up with a couple of runners from A Squadron, and I thought it would be really good to beat him, just for once. I'd been doing a lot of training and was feeling really fit; off we went, and for the whole race there was no sign of Clive. I was chuffed to bits that he was behind me and was looking forward to stagging him when he got in.

    Then, as I was running down the hill toward the finish line, I spotted him. He was on his bike all wrapped up in his Belly Hansen, having finished the race and already on his way home.

    Ken was the staff sergeant, the troop head boy, and had been away during Malaya. A southerner from the Intelligence Corps, he was a fellow jap-slapper of Mick's. The two of them had known each other for donkey's years, even when Mick was a civvy; when Mick was shivering in his council flat in Wales after everything had gone bust, half a ton of coal had turned up. Mick had run outside shouting, "No, no, no, don't deliver. I can't afford this!" but the driver had shown him the chit, paid for by a "Ken" in Hereford. It was something that Mick had never forgotten, and he still talked about Ken as the one who had saved him.

    Ken was an excellent troop head shed, always very honest about his capabilities; rather than bluff he wouldn't be afraid to say, "I don't know about this.

    Anybody got any ideas?" He was tall and toothless, having lost his front teeth while jap-slapping for Britain; you'd know when Ken was pissed because his jaw would sag and his falsies would clatter out onto the table. He talked very rapidly and aggressively; somebody would ask,

    "Hey, Ken, give us that newspaper a minute," and he'd say, "Fight you for it." Joking but meaning it. Sade was doing well in the charts and he drooled over her. We used to slag her down all the time and call her Sadie, then wonder why we were walking around with black eyes.

    Ken had brought his dog over with him, a big Doberman. When he went away on operations, he'd say, "Don't overfeed this dog. It gets one scoff a day and that's it." Tiny -used to get trays of sausages and feed this dog stupid until it couldn't move; it would be splayed out all over the place. It would get so exhausted with the amount of food it had eaten that we'd get it into Ken's bed and tuck it in. Ken would come back to find the dog fast asleep in his bed, farting and severely overweight.

    Fraser was the troop sergeant and very experienced, which was good when it came to working with other organizations-communicating with helicopters, for example, if they were going to come in. It was his job to have the overall picture. He had been part of the training wing when I did my first Selection; then he went back to the squadron and I caught sight of him again in Malaya.

    Everybody was after stitching Fraser up. Like Steve, he had been in heavy drop before transferring to Para Reg, and the easiest way to spark him up was to say, "Fraser, when you were in the Ordnance Corps.