Immediate Action (37 page)

    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.