The Big Breach (5 page)

Finally, because we would shortly learn to parachute, we had to pass P-company, a brutal fitness test taken by the Parachute Regiment as a test of suitability for parachute training. It required explosive strength and power rather than the stamina of SAS selection and I was sorry to see that after going so far a couple of guys failed this last hurdle. The handful of us who remained were `badged' in a simple ceremony by the CO (Commanding Officer), a colonel in 22 SAS, and accepted into the regiment. It was a proud moment for me, but it needed to be kept in perspective. Our selection process was a stroll in the park compared to the far more arduous and drawn out selection of the regular army's 22 SAS regiment, and our standards of soldiering were much lower. We were awarded an identical beret, but that was about the only thing that was equal between the two regiments.

Between TA weekends, my first priority was to get fit enough to pass SAS selection. Most mornings I arrived at Booz Allen & Hamilton after running twice around Hyde Park, then clock-watched until the evening when I could escape to the nearby Lansdowne sports club for a couple of kilometres of swimming. My lifestyle priorities were very different from my colleagues', who dedicated their spare time to eating and drinking, and I felt little sense of identity with them, exacerbated by the sense of achievement in getting badged. Every morning at my desk I wondered what motivated them in their daily struggle to climb the corporate ladder. Ernst Goldstein was particularly inscrutable. He only had a few more years to wait to receive a fortune that was held in a trust fund until his 30th birthday and although he earned a hefty salary as a management consultant, he lived as if he had already inherited big money, borrowing heavily to support a lavish and extravagant lifestyle. He spent hours on the phone, mostly chatting to friends organising expensive parties and occasionally to clients whom he oleaginously addressed as `Sir'. Whenever his trimphone rang, his hand shot out like a striking cobra, reaching the receiver before the first `tring' had finished, and he answered `Goldstein speaking' with irritating eagerness. While the whole office was working late one night on a `vitally important' project, I sneaked over to his cubicle while he was absent and glued down his trimphone receiver with a couple of blobs of superglue. When he returned a few minutes later with the managing director and started enthusiastically discussing a cashflow spreadsheet, I rang him on the internal line. As usual, his hand shot out like a frog's tongue for the receiver, but this time it came back with the phone attached, clattering into the side of his head. Worse, because the cradle had not been tripped, the telephone would not stop ringing. Goldstein went berserk, waving the still-ringing phone around as if he were trying to shake a mad dog off his arm. At last, with a manic desperate yank, he ripped the receiver away - only it came away with the top half of the telephone, spilling wires and bells on to the desk. The office was in uproar by now, but Goldstein was oblivious. He put the receiver to his ear and, oleaginous as ever, replied, `Goldstein speaking.' The managing director stalked off, trying not to lose his dignity by bursting into laughter.

Shortly afterwards, I resigned. The writing was on the wall even before the trimphone incident. The managing director realised that I was not interested in the job and started playing games to make life unpleasant. One evening he arranged a meeting with me at 0730 the following day, forcing me to get into the office unusually early. Then he rang in to tell me that his train had been `delayed'. It was a relief to get out of the oppressive company, and besides it gave me more time for courses with the Territorial Army.

We were obliged to learn to parachute, and I signed up for the next available basic course at RAF Brize Norton. Two weeks and twelve jumps later, the RAF awarded me my coveted SAS parachute wings. I also got myself on a signals course, learning how to operate the encrypted PRC319 radios and high-speed morse, and completed a basic German course.

I had also just passed my motorcycle test and bought a battered old 800cc BMW trail bike. Inspired by Thesiger's adventures, I wanted to experience the vast emptiness of the deserts for myself. I got a Michelin map of the Sahara from Stanfords map shop, strapped a few jerry cans to the side of the bike, packed up some camping gear and set off on a freezing April morning for Africa.

The trip went smoothly until the end of the tarmac road at Tamanrasset, about halfway down Algeria. The soft sand exposed the inadequacies of the heavily laden motorbike, my inappropriate tyres and lack of off-road motorcycling experience. I covered only five miles on the first day, continuously bogged down in the soft sand or heaving the heavy bike upright after crashing. After one severe fall the forks bent backwards so far that the front wheel rubbed on the engine casings. There was no option but to dismantle them and turn the stanchions through 180 degrees in order to get going again. The wheel no longer fouled the engine but the bike was even harder to handle. Luckily the next morning another big crash straightened the forks out so that the bike handled properly again.

Just south of the dusty and derelict Algerian village of In-Guezzam, I reached the Niger border, marked by a dilapidated wooden hut flying a faded Niger flag and housing a small army detachment. A handful of saffron-robed Tuareg desert traders waited outside, their camels snorting in a patch of shade provided by a sun-bleached awning. The Niger border guards, supervised by a hefty-looking captain dressed in khaki and sporting a set of sunshades, were poking through the Tuaregs' bundles. On the other side of the hut three immaculate BMW motorcycles bearing German number plates were neatly parked. Their owners were camped out alongside, lounging under a flysheet with a few books and magazines, cooking a meal. They looked bored, as if they had been there for some time, and were not much interested when I rode over to greet them. `How long have you been here?' I asked.

`Three days,' answered a tall, crew-cut Aryan type, dressed in expensive-looking motocross gear. `That bastard,' he nodded at the fat Captain, `vill not let us through,' he spat.

I tried to lighten his mood with some small talk. `Good trip down?' I asked cheerfully.

The German looked at me, then my bike, examining its damage. `Jah,' he paused for emphasis. `We have not fallen off once.' I left them to get back to their magazines and went over to introduce myself to the fat captain.

Glaring at me through his dark glasses as I approached, he bristled with animosity. The Germans must have had a few slanging matches with him and perhaps he expected trouble from me. `Attendez-l…,' he snapped, indicating me to go back and wait with the other motorcyclists.

I didn't protest, but in my bad French asked how long I should prepare to wait. His anger abated as he realised that I was not seeking a confrontation. Approaching a bit closer, I noticed that he wore French army parachute wings on the breast pocket of his shirt. `Ah, vous ˆtes parachutiste,' I said, affecting a tone of respect.

His anger subsided like a spoilt child presented with a lolly. He drew himself to attention, puffed out his chest and proudly announced, `I am the most experienced parachutist in the Niger army,' and told me the alarming stories of his eight jumps.

The simple piece of childish flattery was enough. After half an hour, the captain stamped my passport and waved me through. Riding away southwards, in the one wing-mirror that remained intact, I could see the Germans remonstrating angrily with the captain that he had let me through before them.

Stopping a few days later in Agades, the first town on the southern side of the Sahara, I was drinking a beer at a small outdoor bar when another motorcyclist approached. His front wheel was buckled and the forks badly twisted, so the bike lolloped like an old horse. He dismounted painfully, dropped the bike on the ground rather than putting it on its sidestand, came into the bar and ordered a large beer. He turned out to be an orange-packer from Mallorca called Pedro and over our beers we laughed at our various crashes. He spoke no French, so the next day I translated while the local blacksmith straightened out his bike, then we rode together down to Lom‚, the main port and capital of Togo. There my trip was over and I put my battered bike on a Sabena cargo plane back to Europe, but Pedro continued his tour of West Africa. A few years later I visited him in Mallorca, and he told me what happened next. Whilst waiting on his bike at some traffic-lights in the lawless town of Libreville in Sierra Leone, two men had pulled him down and robbed him. Gratuitously, one had also bitten him hard on the cheek, leaving not only a vicious scar but also infecting him with the HIV virus.

I arrived back from the Sahara just in time to go on a NATO-organised LRRP (Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol) exercise in Belgium. All NATO countries were invited to send their LRRP troops to the exercise: there were American Rangers, German Fernsp„htruppen, Danish Jaeger troops, a reconnaissance troop from the French Foreign Legion, Spanish special forces bizarrely carrying umbrellas as part of their field kit, Greek special forces with bright green camouflage cream applied like a clown's mask, unhappy-looking Dutch conscript special forces, Portuguese, Canadians and Turks. We were there as the British representatives. Ian, a former Royal Tank Regiment sergeant was our PC (Patrol Commander). Mac, a scouser, was lead scout and Jock, with a barely comprehensible Scottish highland accent was the fourth member of our patrol. Ian appointed me signaller, meaning I would have to carry the PRC319 VHF radio, DMHD (Digital Message Handling Device), code books and OTPs (One Time Pads), an SA80 5.68mm rifle, SUSAT telescopic day-sight, image-intensifying night-sight and all my personal survival kit. With a static-line parachute on my back, a reserve parachute on my chest and all this equipment bundled up and hanging off the front of the parachute harness, it was nearly impossible to walk to the Transall transport aircraft for the flight to the DZ (Drop Zone).

As dawn was breaking, we were parachuted in our patrols into the flat farmland of northern Belgium. The Belgian army were out in force with helicopters, ground troops and search dogs acting as the `enemy' to track us down. We had to get off the DZ and into cover fast to avoid capture. We got ourselves into a small copse by a pond and I set up the radio while the others mounted stags (look-out) and got a brew on. Within minutes the DMHD had received a string of 40 numbers. After decyphering it with the OTPs and decoding it with the code-book, we had the order to set up an OP (Observation Post) on a road about ten kilometres from our existing location, in order to report on `enemy' traffic movements. To avoid detection, we had to make the distance straight away in the few hours that remained before daybreak.

That would be the pattern for the next four days. A long walk at night, sometimes as far as 40 kilometres, then a lay-up during the day in an OP where we signalled back to the UK command centre our observations of traffic movements of the Belgian army. Between shifts on stag or manning the radio, we grabbed a few hours' sleep.

By the end of the first week, we were all filthy dirty and dishevelled. Camouflage cream and mud was ground into our beards, our fingernails were clogged and our clothing was stinking and soaked with the ceaseless rain. We had also run out of food. Given time, finding food and water would not be much of a problem - there were turnips and potatoes in the fields, water in ditches and ponds. But the DS were piling the pressure on us and we had no time to foray.

The exercise was drawing to a close but the hardest part was still to come. That night we were supposed to make an RV with a `partisan' friendly agent on the other side of the heavily guarded Albert canal. All the bridges would certainly be guarded and there would be foot patrols along the towpaths. We'd heard endless shooting during the night as the Dutch and German patrols, who had started the exercise the day before us, ran into trouble. All we had eaten for the past two days was a few boiled sweets and biscuits that we had got from one of the buried caches, whose locations had been signalled through to us. Our maps showed a pond in the midst of our copse but it was dried up to nothing more than a foulsmelling, mosquito-filled swamp, meaning we also had no safe water.

`We need some food, badly,' announced Ian, to grunts of approval from the others. `Tomlinson, you speak French, don't you?' he said. `Get your civvies on and see if you can get us some food.' At the bottom of my bergen there were some training shoes for use on river crossings, lightweight dark grey Tenson trousers which could double as tactical trousers and a blue Helly Hansen thermal shirt. While I changed into them Jock got some of the foul-smelling swamp water on the boil, picking out the the mosquito larvae, so that I could have a wash and a shave. An hour or so later, I almost looked like part of the human race again. With a handful of Belgian francs in my pocket, I set out for the nearest village.

It was early lunchtime when I got to Zittart. As I strolled into a bar, trying my best to appear casual, one old fellow cradling a glass of Stella Artois glanced up at me and a couple of crew-cut youths sporting downy moustaches were playing pool. At the side of the bar was a small fast-food counter, displaying backlit photographs of chips and hamburgers. I ordered eight portions of hamburgers and chips for the patrol and, while they were frying, got myself a glass of Stella. On an empty stomach my head was soon humming and I found myself chatting to the barman. `Where are you from?' he asked, noting my bad French. The presence of the exercise in the region had been announced in the local press, and any civilian who helped capture a soldier was given a reward, so some imaginative lying was required. `Sweden,' I replied. It was the first non-NATO country that came into my head. I padded out the story, inventing answers to his questions on the hoof. `Yeah, my name is Rickard. I'm an engineer at the SAAB factory in Gothenburg. I'm driving down to Paris with a few friends for a holiday. The car's broken down just outside the village, radiator's boiled over.'