The Steering Group

by M. J. Laurence

  Trying to understand this innovative role I had been assigned by the Steering Group with Keith was nothing short of remarkable after the whole Russian campaign. It was like I had been amalgamated into some sort of compromised unit, my work dovetailing into Keith’s domain of Middle Eastern operations, which now, looking back, must have been planned but was not something I had ever anticipated. But beyond everything I was becoming more and more lost in trying to find my real self and ‘my’ life again, whatever that was supposed to be. My life felt in disarray professionally but was now overthrown by emotions drawn out from my relationship with Anna, who had become so central to everything I wanted in life. It’s a strange thing love, sometimes you have to be apart from it to truly appreciate it, and sometimes it hurts so bad you wonder what the hell it’s all about and want nothing to do with it. But always, every human seeks it, yearns for it and those who are lucky enough to have tasted it would trade anything to get it back should it ever be lost to them. I had fallen deeply in love with Anna, of that there was no doubt in my mind. However, my thoughts often turned to Anatoly, whose family had simply been erased from the book of life following the orders issued to satisfy the appetites of bigger wolves. My masters and my architects had left Anatoly alone in life, allowed to live, if only for a short time, but ultimately unable to cope with being alone. My dear friend was safe now, free from life’s troubles and no longer afraid for the future. I remain honoured to have known him. He was a true and loyal friend and for that at least I am eternally grateful.

  Looking back, I know Cdr Brown realised what he had found in the boy all those years earlier and his little bet must have paid off handsomely with those who gathered in heavy cigar-clouded, leather armchair filled rooms where the hands of the righteous never get dirty, rooms where whispers of dirty deeds are muttered under pungent brandy laden breaths, conjuring devious conspiracies, faces hidden behind large newspapers, big egos and political careers. I had begun to feel I had become the weapon of choice in the Steering Group’s toolbox, a responsibility I didn’t want anymore but at the same time strangely enjoyed. I had been carefully crafted under supervision, from being bed-shaped and broken as a boy in to a merciless assassin with the ability to be nameless and perfectly unattached to anything that could become an embarrassment to the Crown. I had exceeded all expectations, taking a childhood friend from pen pal to defection with no apparent regard for his or my own safety, not to mention our families’. I guess it was what I had always wanted. To be wanted, needed but simultaneously unattached from the responsibility and accountability of my actions, keeping business simple, allowing maximum autonomy on my part but kept on an extendable lead from London. Yes, I enjoyed being important, valued and needed despite the nature of my work, which was really starting to make me feel more and more angry and resentful. This made opening up to Anna so very difficult and still does. Sometimes life is too complicated to explain and the worst events in our lives are best left to suffer the silence only found in the grave.

  I stood on the upper deck of the Essex daydreaming, feeling the ship’s vibrations through my feet, and as always found myself drifting in thoughts back to the Atlantic Star, and this immediately made me ready for a new adventure. As we left the wall, all ties to the UK were released as the ropes fell into the water like sleeping snakes, only to be hauled taught and heaved back aboard the support ship’s decks. We were slowly dragged out of our berth by the tugs, aptly named Forceful and Powerful, then sailed through Plymouth Sound with four small landing craft following us like signets following their mother. The landing craft were to be recovered later in deeper water, initiating the start of the work-up and training packages we must endure as we made our way en route to the Gulf. I remember my last moments being up top on the aft sponson waving to Anna from the flight deck. Well, I was pretty sure it was Anna, hard to tell from such a distance, a distant figure that was standing on the banks of Mt Edgcumbe, alone and apart from the other families waving to a shrinking tower block of cold grey steel with so many amputated souls aboard.

  Souls lost to the Crown, the service and to the inevitability of change. Change within themselves, changes to their families, deaths and births, marriages, birthdays, and all manner of celebrations and bereavements to be lost to the slow and unrecoverable passage of the ship throughout its time away. Such is the consequence and irretrievable cost of all military deployments. Torn from their families, all who would return home after this deployment would age and become changed. Some would change as much as day is from night, others just enough to start a conversation which would be in private, hidden and silent to the world, an admission of a change to a loved one, but an admission never to be spoken of again. But for some men on this ship they would become unseasonably matured, moulded and misshapen from their previously sun-casted shadows to grow into darker more deformed silhouettes, silhouettes that would lurk in their minds waiting for a traumatic remembrance of their experiences yet to pass.

  Before going below decks I waved to Anna one last time. This moment, this image, now branded into my mind was going to be the only key I would hold on to, a key to get back from the darkness and shadows that were set to consume my mind in the months ahead. Descending into the bowels of the ship I started the process of trying to forget, to forget about life with Anna and mentally switch everything over to mission mode in order to just get on with it, I suppose. To put love behind me, focus on the job and return home alive and to that planned exit from the Steering Group. I am sure each man has his own coping mechanisms for the separation from loved ones beset by the anxiety of the mission to come. However, an exit plan from all the complexities, the mental terrorism and paranoia that now surrounded me was becoming my third and fourth level mental escape. I could start to feel the end approaching, it was in the post. I knew this had to be my last deployment. I wasn’t the boy I had once been, the once brave young soul, brave enough to venture into the shadows without any regard for the consequences. I had awoken and I was very aware of what I was now doing; it wasn’t a game and I had to fight to survive this time.

  This far into the system you get tired and adopt OCD traits on top of everything else because you slowly become fearful of making a mistake or forgetting a minor detail that could jeopardise the mission or the lives of your team members. I had become a prolific checker, always checking everything was functional, operational, serviceable and ready for immediate deployment. But it had spilled over into my personal life too. Anna had noticed me checking the front door was locked four or five times before we drove away to get shopping, returning to check the cooker, the upstairs windows, the washing machine, whatever. It’s funny sometimes but equally a fucking nightmare to live with. I took time with Cheesy and Keith to discuss it. Apart from all the piss-taking it wasn’t anything new to them as all the team had started to develop little interesting and weird personality traits. We let it be a point of fun rather than read too much into things. The trouble is, such things had started to play on my mind, and once you allow a thought to formulate in your mind it stays there for a very long time. Thoughts such as fear or uncertainty are especially dangerous if you let them set up camp in the dark alleyways of the mind. There they will stay until they have poisoned the entire world in which you pretend to live, all truths questioned, doubts exacerbated, strengths questioned and weaknesses exposed. That is why the team was so important – they were the only ones who could ever understand a conversation of this kind and keep it truly confidential whilst being fully supportive and above all keeping you functional.

  I had decided in my mind whilst alone on the upper deck that this deployment was going to be different. In my mind, now that Anatoly was gone, out of the picture and no longer part of the team, so to speak, I didn’t really care too much for how the rest of the list was completed, nor was I too upset at the lads being so keen to get some trigger time. These boys were different to me, they really were the best operators, hard motherfuckers, whereas I think at this point I had bec
ome tame by comparison. I remember sitting in my office at the stern and watching Plymouth slowly disappear into the silhouette of the Devon and Cornwall coast, hoping this would be my very last trip away and already yearning for hearth and home. I had to make it my last trip. Whatever it took, the team and I were going to remove all the ink from the Steering Group’s list. I was tired. My mental cloud was at full capacity. There was no need for all that training now, there was no deceptions or layers of lies to fill my mind or time, this was simply a kill mission. No deception, no lies, no agendas or false friendships, just find the targets and get the hell out of there. The control layers in my mind were now all personal and more complex. It was time to start thinking about looking out for the team and bringing them all home, and less about the list.

  I sat with Cheesy and Keith the many evenings we spent at sea and we had a laugh as we pretended how much we were looking forward to getting back in theatre, in the ‘zone’. Cheesy hadn’t so much changed as developed into a more complicated person to understand. There was some new anger in Cheesy that I hadn’t seen before. In our time apart, he had metamorphosised into a colder but more focused and sharpened SF operator. He had a short temper that I had never seen before. Perhaps shit had gone wrong in that last assignment I hadn’t witnessed. Maybe I was seeing the same strain, the same cracks in Cheesy as I was experiencing myself. Maybe we were all just getting a little older, a little more battle hardened. Perhaps we were all a little more tired than we cared to admit, more conscious of what we were involved in and the risks. The risks of what we did as intelligence and SF operators that were of no consequence to us previously and were so easily dismissed in the past, now seemed heavy and upon us in full force; like a yolk that was slowing us down, we seemed to be running through mud at times as we made our preparations. As the chaos man in our team we were gonna need a few diversions to pull off a full degloving of the remaining list members and the other targeted groups. Cheesy just sat back and smiled and simply said, “Hey, it’s gonna be a sweet ride so enjoy it.” I knew after he said this that he had reached the end; the lack of concern for his or anyone’s life meant that he was dangerous, still reliable, a machine, but a percentage of unpredictability had entered into him that would either be advantageous or disastrous when the time came.

  Back to routine. The Andrew is great at routine, and it was great that I was sailing with Marcus as the conductor of this new orchestra. I took the time that first evening to call on Marcus in his staterooms to discuss my requirements for the upcoming ops. Talking with Marcus alone was not like a military planning meeting, we just gently discussed what we both needed to do and how we both should leave sufficient flex in our planning for the unknown. Marcus was kind of gentle in his conversations about the brutalities he expected; for example, he would look at a map or point at a known terrorist bunker on a satellite image and simply say something like:

  “Do you think your team could possibly make that go away if we put you close enough?”

  No need to discuss details, or what was needed, just the giving out of a blank cheque of authorisation to do whatever was needed. It made things simple; we didn’t need the argument of politics, cost, time or resources, just a simple green light to execute a mission with no prejudice. It was the same deal when Marcus passed me my sealed orders and simply remarked, “Good man,” as he winked and passed me an envelope. We both knew what was required and the orders just made it official. Insertion into the Middle East would be easy enough to achieve and Marcus being Marcus had already drawn up plan A, plan B, C through to Z in order to ensure we got a clean insertion and extraction. The initial design was to enter Jordan at Aqaba on a pre-planned diplomatic visit for the ship, so there would be very little prep required. We would simply join the crew for some sightseeing in Aqaba then slip away into Israel, hopefully picking up the trail of the various targets and the arms dealers in the hope that we the hunters didn’t become the hunted. I had arranged for my old friend Owen to meet us at Petra, from where we would plan a rendezvous with Israeli special forces as our navigational support team and acting dustmen for the first phase of our mission.

  We enjoyed the cruise through the Med and passed through the Suez without any causes for concern, no unwanted onlookers or anything of that nature. The Suez is a dangerous place in so much as you’re just a great big sitting target on a canal that would have made great world news if we or any other ship were attacked. Such an event has the potential to stop all or most of the world’s trade by sea should some of our friends decide to try to sink a ship mid-canal. I have been through the Suez a number of times and the same routine is exercised by the navy. About a quarter of the crew are allowed to go off and visit the pyramids on a sightseeing tour whilst the rest of us sit with the ship as she joins a convoy through to the Bitter Lakes and on to the Red Sea. I remember seeing a ship I was once on making the transit as I raced alongside her on the canalside road in a Range Rover. The ship sailed along the canal but gave the illusion she was gliding majestically over the sand. The first time you see such things really makes you take a moment of pause to fully digest the magnitude of man’s abilities to engineer solutions to insurmountable problems. It always makes a good photograph, and it’s a cool photo to show people back home.

  As always, the ship would allow some souvenir traders aboard for the Suez transit, and so the Gully Gully Man who did the same shit magic trick every time was aboard, to the amusement of all the Suez transit virgin sailors. Although a tense time for the command, it was pretty much a period of downtime for the crew and the RM detachment, who lazed around sunbathing next to the somewhat overdressed gun crews. We took up anchorage in the Bitter Lakes before the convoys passed each other; there is usually two southbound convoys and a northbound convoy each day and the transit takes about 12 to 14 hours. We completed our transit, recovered all crew aboard and headed south through the Gulf of Suez before making our turn north east into the Gulf of Aqaba.

  I had the same feeling every time I turned up towards Aqaba – it feels like you’re on your own for real. You leave the convoys, doesn’t matter that they’re merchant ships, it just feels like you’re leaving behind your friends and the safety of the civilised world. I guess it’s like leaving the herd or something like that. It’s not to say that the entire Middle East is uncivilised, but there is definitely a mental switch that takes place in your mind. It’s a switch to a different way of thinking, your behaviour changes, the mood darkens, everyone gets serious. Deploying to the Middle East on a mission is problematic at best, and when you arrive it’s barren, totally inhospitable and everyone who knows you’re there wants to take a shot at you; they don’t really want you there at all. Well, that’s how it felt as an intelligence alien aboard a British warship. When you enter the Middle East you’re the infidel, and if you’re caught as a spy or an SF operative the least you can hope for is to be branded with that name on your face or forehead. The alternative is possibly to be filmed at your beheading, wearing some orange overalls or some shit like that. Fuck that.

  To be fair, amidst all the negatives there is also an almost romantic notion of adventure and mystery when you enter into this world, which teases the mind into a state of euphoric expectancy. Behind the veil of war there is something strangely beautiful and almost secret about the Middle East. Deep in its hidden culture and society the people can be unexpectedly friendly and genuinely caring in some very bizarre and unnatural circumstances. To share a simple meal in the desert or a coffee and dates under a sheet of corrugated iron and simply smile and enjoy the shade with your potential enemy is remarkably unexpected, but it happens.

  I acknowledge that the missions I embarked upon were intensely serious and dangerous even though at the time they didn’t feel anything other than routine, but it’s the whole culture change that makes it different. It is the images of war sown into everyday lives that makes it so remarkably interesting and alien to our Western eyes. To see so many bullet-strewn buildings, so many limb
less people attending to ruins of homes as if nothing were untoward simply switches your mind over from the normality you thought was normal to a normality that is war. It is best described by Yehuda Amichai, an Israeli poet, to whom I was introduced by an Israeli special forces guy who carried a little poetry book with him everywhere he went. He always gave a recital before we set off on whatever we were about to do. I recall these words…

  “Always beside ruined houses and iron girders twisted like the arms of the slain, you find someone who is sweeping the paved path or tending the little garden”

  These very words for me conjure up all the images I have tried to capture on camera and now in words, but these words portray it better than a thousand pictures. How bizarre that such few words tell a thousand pictures… This makes all the insensible mess make sense, as everything in the Middle East is upside down or back to front to our eyes. I think you have to be born there to understand it all, because to our eyes it’s just a big fuck-up. I guess people just get on with their lives amidst all the chaos; why should they change their way of life just because tanks are driving through the streets? Or perhaps they have seen so many invaders come and go they just don’t give a shit anymore. Maybe the West will finally grow tired of the Middle East after the oil runs out or we have all gone electric.