The other part of Peter Low’s duties was to find a “holding area” for the SAS men to use when they arrived. A holding area has to be private, enclosed, and quickly available, with access for vehicles and telephone communication. An empty warehouse down on Eagle Wharf was traced, and the owner agreed to let the police borrow it for a “training exercise.”
The warehouse had big sliding doors that could open to admit the vehicle convoy and close to keep out prying eyes, a floor area ample enough to accommodate a mock-up of the house in The Hayes, and a small glass-sided office to use as an operations room.
Just before noon an Army Scout helicopter swished into the far side of Ipswich municipal airport and disgorged three men. One was the commanding officer of the SAS Regiment, Brigadier Cripps; one was the operations officer, a staff major with the Regiment; and the third was the team commander, Captain Julian Lyndhurst. They were all in plainclothes, carried suitcases with their uniforms inside, and were met by an unmarked police car that took them straight to the holding area, where the police were establishing their operational center.
Chief Superintendent Low briefed the three officers to the best of his ability, which was to the limit of what he had been told by London. He had spoken to Preston on the telephone but had not yet met him.
“There’s a John Preston, I understand,” said Brigadier Cripps, “who is the field controller from MI5. Is he about?”
“I believe he’s still up at the observation post,” said Low, “the house he has taken over opposite the target dwelling. I can call him and ask him to leave by the back and come here to join us.”
“I wonder, sir,” said Captain Lyndhurst to his CO, “whether I might not go up there right away. Give me a chance to have a first look at the ‘stronghold,’ and then I could come back with this Preston chap.”
“All right, since a car has to go up, anyway,” said the CO.
Fifteen minutes later, the police stationed on the hillside across the estuary from Eagle Wharf pointed out the rear door of No. 9 to Lyndhurst. Still in civilian clothes, the twenty-nine-year-old captain walked across the rough ground, hopped over the garden fence, and went in through the back door. He met Barney in the kitchen, where the watcher was brewing a cup of tea on Mrs. Adrian’s stove.
“Lyndhurst,” said the officer, “from the Regiment. Is Mr. Preston here?”
“John,” Barney called up the stairs in a hoarse whisper, as the house was supposed to be empty, “brown job here to see you.”
Lyndhurst mounted to the upstairs bedroom, where he found John Preston and introduced himself. Harry Burkinshaw muttered something about a cup of tea and left. The captain stared across the road at No. 12.
“There still seem to be some gaps in our information,” drawled Lyndhurst. “Who exactly do you think is in there?”
“I believe it’s a Soviet agent,” said Preston, “an illegal, living here under the cover of James Duncan Ross. Mid-thirties, medium height and build, probably very fit, a top pro.”
He handed Lyndhurst the photograph taken on the Damascus street. The captain studied it with interest.
“Anyone else in there?”
“Possibly. We don’t know. Ross himself, certainly. He might have a helper. We can’t talk to the neighbors. In this kind of area we could never stop them gawping. Before they left, the people who live here said they were sure he was living alone. But we can’t prove that.”
“And according to our briefing, you think he’s armed, maybe dangerous. But too much for the local lads, even with handguns, mmmm?”
“Yes, we believe he has a bomb in there with him. He would have to be stopped before he could get to it.”
“Bomb, eh?” said Lyndhurst with apparent lack of interest. (He had done two tours in Northern Ireland.) “Big enough to make a mess of the house, or the entire street?”
“A bit bigger than that,” said Preston. “If we’re right, it’s a small nuke.”
The tall officer turned his entire gaze from the house across the street, and his pale blue eyes held Preston’s. “Bloody hell,” he said. “I’m impressed.”
“Well, that’s a plus,” said Preston. “By the way, I want him, and I want him alive.”
“Let’s go back to the docks and talk to the CO,” said Lyndhurst.
While Preston and Lyndhurst were getting acquainted at Cherryhayes Close, two more helicopters, a Puma and a Chinook, had arrived at the airport from Hereford. The first bore the assault team, the second their numerous and arcane pieces of equipment.
The team was under the temporary leadership of the deputy team commander, a veteran staff sergeant named Steve Bilbow. He was short, dark, and wiry, tough as old boot leather, with bright, black-button eyes and a ready grin. Like all the senior NCOs in the Regiment, he had been with them a long time—in his case, fifteen years.
The SAS is unusual in this sense also: the officers are almost all on temporary assignment from their “parent” regiments and usually stay two to three years before returning to their own units. Only the Other Ranks stay with the SAS—and not all of them, just the best. Even the commanding officer, though he will probably have served with the Regiment before in his career, serves a short term as CO. Very few officers are long-stay men, and they are all in logistics/supply/technical posts in SAS Group Headquarters.
Steve Bilbow had entered as a trooper from the Parachute Regiment, done his tour, been selected on merit for extension of assignment, and had risen to staff sergeant. He had done two fighting tours in Dhofar, sweated through the jungles of Belize, frozen through the countless nights in ambush in south Armagh, and relaxed in the Cameron Highlands of Malaya. He had helped train the West German GSG-9 teams and worked with Charlie Beckwith’s Delta group in America.
In his time he had known the boredom of the endlessly repeated training that brought the men of the SAS to the ultimate peak of fitness and preparation, and the excitement of the high-adrenaline operations: racing under rebel fire for the shelter of a sangar in the hills of Oman, running a covert snatch-squad against Republican gunmen in east Belfast, and doing five hundred parachute jumps, most of them HALO jobs—high altitude, low opening. To his chagrin he had been one of the standby team when colleagues stormed the Iranian Embassy in London in 1981, and he had not been called on.
The rest of the team comprised one photographer, three intelligence collators, eight snipers, and nine assaulters. Steve hoped and prayed he would lead the assault team. Several unmarked police vans had met them at the airport and brought them to the holding area. When Preston and Lyndhurst arrived back at the warehouse, the team had assembled and were spreading their gear on the floor before the bemused gaze of several Ipswich policemen.
“Hello, Steve,” said Captain Lyndhurst, “everything okay?”
“Hello, boss. Yes, fine. Just getting sorted.”
“I’ve seen the stronghold. It’s a small private house. One occupant known, maybe two. And a bomb. It’ll be a small assault, no room for more. I’d like you to be first in.”
“Try and stop me, boss,” Bilbow answered, grinning.
The accent in the SAS is on self-discipline rather than the externally applied kind. Any man who cannot produce the self-discipline needed to go through what the SAS men must will not be there for long, anyway. Those who can do not need rigid formality in personal relationships, such as are proper in a line regiment.
Thus, officers habitually address those they command, apart from each other, by first names. Other Ranks tend to address their commissioned officers as “boss,” although the CO gets a “sir.” Among themselves, SAS troopers refer to an officer as “a Rupert.”
Staff Sergeant Bilbow caught sight of Preston, and his face lit up in a delighted grin. “Major Preston ... Good heavens, it’s been a long time.”
Preston stuck out a hand and smiled back. The last time he had seen Steve Bilbow was when, in the aftermath of the shoot-out in the Bogside, he had taken refuge in a safe house where four SAS men under Bilbow’s comman
d had been running a covert snatch-squad. Apart from that, they were both ex-Paras, which always forms a bond.
“I’m with Five now,” said Preston, “field controller for this operation, at least from Five’s end.”
“What have you got for us?” asked Steve.
“Russian. KBG agent. Top pro. Probably done the spetsnaz course, so he’ll be good, fast, and probably armed.”
“Lovely. Spetsnaz, eh? We’ll see how good they really are.”
All three present knew of the spetsnaz troops, the crack Russian elite saboteurs who comprised the Soviet equivalent of the SAS.
“Sorry to break up the party, but let’s get the briefing under way,” said Lyndhurst.
He and Preston mounted the stairs to the upper office, where they met Brigadier Cripps, the major in charge of operations, Chief Superintendent Low, and the SAS intelligence collators. Preston spent an hour giving as thorough a briefing as he could, and the atmosphere grew extremely grave.
“Have you any proof there’s a nuclear device in there?” asked Low at length.
“No, sir. We intercepted a component in Glasgow destined for delivery to someone working under cover in this country. The backroom boys say it could have no other use in this world. We know the man in that house is a Soviet illegal—he was made on the streets of Damascus by the Mossad. His associations with the secret transmitter in Chesterfield confirms what he is. So I am left with deductions.
“If the component taken in Glasgow was not for the construction of a small nuclear device inside Britain, then what the hell was it for? On that, I come up with no other feasible explanation. As to Ross, unless there are two major covert operations being mounted in Britain by the KGB, that component was destined for him. Q.E.D.”
“Yes,” said Brigadier Cripps, “I think we have to go with it. We have to assume it’s there. If it’s not, we’ll have to talk to friend Ross rather earnestly.”
Chief Superintendent Low was having a private nightmare. He had to accept the fact that there was no other way but storming the house. What he was trying to envisage was the condition of Ipswich if the device went off. “Couldn’t we evacuate?” he asked, with little hope.
“He’d notice,” said Preston flatly. “I think if he knows he’s ruined, he’ll take us all with him.”
The soldiers nodded. They knew that, deep inside Soviet Russia, they would have done the same.
The lunch hour was gone and no one had noticed. Food would have been superfluous. The afternoon was spent in reconnaissance and preparation.
Steve Bilbow went back to the airport with the photographer and a policeman. The three took the Scout in one single run down the estuary of the Orwell, well away from The Hayes but on a course from which they could keep it in view. The policeman pointed out the house; the photographer ran off fifty stills while Steve took a long pan-shot on video for screening in the holding area.
The entire assault team, still in civilian clothes, went with the police to see the empty house that had been built by the same architects to the same plans as the one on Cherryhayes Close. By the time they got back to the holding area, they could see the stronghold on video and in close-up still pictures.
They spent the rest of the afternoon inside the holding area, practicing with the mock-up that the policemen had helped build, under SAS supervision, on the warehouse floor. It was a hurried construction, with canvas “walls” dividing the “rooms,” but its dimensions were perfect, and it showed up one overriding factor: space inside the house was very limited. It had a narrow front door, a narrow hall, a cramped stairway, and small rooms.
To the eternal grief of the four who were left out, Captain Lyndhurst decided to use only six assaulters. There would also be three snipers—two in the Adrians’ upstairs front bedroom and one on the hill overlooking the back garden.
The rear of 12 Cherryhayes Close would be covered by two of Lyndhurst’s six assaulters. They would be in full combat gear but their uniforms would be covered by civilian raincoats. They would be driven in an unmarked police car to Brackenhayes Close. Here they would disembark and, without asking permission of the householders, would walk through the front garden of the house that backed onto the stronghold, down the side path between house and garage, and into the back garden. Here they would strip off the raincoats, hop over the garden fence, and take up position in the back garden of the stronghold.
“There may be a trip wire in the garden,” warned Lyndhurst. “But probably close to the rear of the house itself. Stand well back. On the signal, I want one stun grenade straight through the window of the rear bedroom and another through the kitchen window. Then unclip the HKs and hold position. Do not fire into the house; Steve and the lads will be coming in the front.”
The rear-access men nodded. Captain Lyndhurst knew that he would not be in the assault. Formerly a lieutenant in the King’s Dragoon Guards, he was on his first tour with the SAS and held captain’s rank because the SAS have no officers under that grade. He would revert to lieutenant on return to his parent regiment in a year, though he hoped to come back to the SAS later as a squadron commander.
He also knew the tradition of the SAS, which is at variance with the convention for the rest of the Army: officers participate in combat in desert or jungle but never in an urban environment. Only NCOs and troopers carry out such assaults.
The main attack, Lyndhurst had agreed with his CO and the operations officer, would be via the front. A van would draw up quietly and four assaulters would step out. Two would take the front door, one carrying the Wingmaster, the other wielding a seven-pound sledgehammer and/or bolt cutters if necessary.
The instant the door came down, the assault front rank—Steve Bilbow and a corporal—would go in. The door squad would drop their Wingmaster and hammer, rip their HKs off their chests, and enter the hallway as backup for the first pair.
On entering the hallway, Steve would step straight past the stairs to the door to the sitting room on his left. The corporal would race up the stairs to take the front bedroom. Of the backup men, one would follow the corporal up the stairs in case Chummy was in the bathroom, and the other would follow Steve into the sitting room.
The signal for the two men in the back garden to hurl their stun grenades into the two rear rooms, kitchen and back bedroom, would be the crash of the Wingmaster at the front. By the time entry had been made, therefore, anyone in the kitchen or back bedroom should be reeling around, wondering what had hit him.
Preston, who had volunteered to return to the observation post, was allowed to listen to the details of the assault.
He already knew that the SAS was the only regiment in the British Army allowed to choose its weaponry from a worldwide menu. For close assault they had selected the German Heckler and Koch short-barreled nine-millimeter rapid-fire submachine gun—light, easy to handle, and very reliable, with an up-and-over folding stock.
They habitually wore the HK—loaded and cocked—slantwise across the chest; it was held in place by two spring-clips. This left their arms free for opening doors, entering through windows, or throwing stun grenades. When the weapon was needed, a single jerk brought the HK off the chest and into operation in less than half a second.
Practice had shown that to get through doors, it was faster to blast off both hinges rather than take the lock. For this purpose they favored the Remington Wingmaster pump-action repeater shotgun, but with solid heads rather than buckshot in the cartridges.
Apart from these playthings, one of the door squad would need a hammer and bolt cutters in case the door, having lost its hinges, was held on the other side by several bolts and a chain. They also carried stun grenades, designed to blind temporarily by their flash and deafen by their crack, but not to kill. Lastly, each man would have a thirteen-shot nine-millimeter Browning automatic on his hip.
In the assault, Lyndhurst stressed, timing was of the essence. For the hour of the attack he had chosen 9:45 p.m., when dusk would be deep in the Close but it
would not yet be darkest night.
Lyndhurst himself would be in the Adrians’ house across the way, watching the target house and in radio contact with the van bearing his assaulters. Thus he could monitor the approach of the team. If there were a pedestrian moving down the Close at 9:44, Lyndhurst could tell the van driver to hold until the passerby had cleared the door of the stronghold to be assaulted. The police car bringing the two rear-garden men to position would be on the same wavelength, and would drop those two men ninety seconds before the front door came down.
Lyndhurst planned one last refinement. As the assault van cruised up the Close, he would telephone Ross from the Adrians’ house across the road. He already knew that the phone in each of these houses was kept on a small table in the hallway. The ploy was to distance the Soviet agent from his bomb, wherever it was, and to give the assaulters the chance of a fast shot.
Firing, as usual, would come in two fast bursts of two shots each. Although the HK can empty its thirty-round magazine in a couple of seconds, the SAS are accurate enough even in the confused conditions of a terrorist-hostage situation to limit their firing to two-shot bursts, with one repeat. Anyone stopping those four rounds will speedily feel very unwell. Such economy also keeps the hostages alive.
Immediately after the operation the police would move into the Close in strength to calm down the inevitable crowd that would come pouring out of the adjacent houses. A police cordon would be thrown around the front of the target house, and the assaulters would leave through the rear, cross the gardens, and board their van, which by then would be waiting in Brackenhayes Close. As for the interior of the stronghold, the civil authority would take over there as well. A team of six from Aldermaston was due into Ipswich by teatime that evening.
At six, Preston left the holding area and returned to the observation post—the Adrians’ house—which he entered, unobserved, by the rear door.
“Lights have just come on,” said Harry Burkinshaw when Preston joined him in the upstairs bedroom. Preston could see that the sitting-room curtains of the house opposite were drawn, but there was a light behind them and a reflected glow showing through the panels of the front door.
Fourth Protocol Page 40
