Lethal Shot

by Robert Driscoll

  I felt then – and I still do – that keeping up with the restrictions of Card Alpha was a lot of responsibility to put on young shoulders.

  * * *

  Considering we had once been R1 – the rapid-response unit – I was frustrated at how long it took actually to get everything ready. We weren’t this all-singing, all-moving, all-dancing dealer of death that you might imagine. There was this methodically slow and very frustrating process that had to be worked through. From the tip-off in April it took nearly five months to get all the ducks in a row. Even then we still had a lot of practical jobs to do. Luckily for me, mine happened to be amazing.

  One of the reasons for the slow response was that a lot of the equipment from Arbroath was going to Kosovo by sea. When it reached mainland Greece it would be transported by train up through Macedonia and on to Pristina. This system had been in use for a while but recently one of the trains had been raided. Nothing to do with the war, just bandits seeing an opportunity to acquire some very expensive hardware. Because the next shipment to be loaded onto a train was coming direct from Company HQ – which, as a signaller, is where I worked – it was decided that the cargo needed protecting. There were 600 people in Arbroath who would have killed to have gone. Being one of the signals team I already had a foot in the door.

  A planeload of men from HQ were flying out to Pristina to set up. En route, thirty of us were dropped off at Thessaloniki in Greece with our weapons and kit. I didn’t know what to expect. It wasn’t a trip back to the 1940s.

  Immediately, what first caught our eye was this vast supply train, about half a mile long, which had clearly been in service since the Second World War. There was a steam engine at the front and behind that there was one normal passenger carriage followed by six or seven flatbed trucks, each one loaded with things like Land Rovers, sea containers and, identifiable under their covers, radar dishes and even missiles. Then came another passenger carriage followed by half a dozen more flatbeds, and so on, almost literally as far as the eye could see. And thirty of us were there to guard it.

  I assume there’ll be others.

  Beyond the train was a giant hangar, similar to constructions at the Arbroath base, where we were greeted by other marines. We were issued with ammunition and, crucially, our brief.

  ‘Basically,’ we were told, ‘you’re going to ride on the train, and every time it stops get out and look menacing.’ Followed by, ‘Good. Here’s your Card Alpha.’ Almost immediately I felt we were under pressure to abide by it.

  Because the port had been commandeered by us, it was largely empty. The only other people there, apart from marines and the Greek train driver, were protesters. I was a bit taken aback that they were allowed to wander through the port and yell in our faces. I was surprised that they were brave enough to do so, as well. It turned out that anti-NATO feelings had been running high in the region for some time. It wasn’t directed towards us personally. Even so, I saw each one of the protesters as a potential threat. You only need one to take it further than verbal assault.

  Finally we were put on the train.

  ‘Where’s everyone else?’ I asked.

  ‘This is it. Just you.’

  We’d all been issued with radios and two hours into our journey mine crackled. It was the sergeant. We were making our first stop. Get ready.

  Before the train had fully slowed we were leaping out of the carriage and spreading ourselves out alongside the train.

  With the various border checks and drop-offs and driver switches, we were called into action every few hours. I say ‘action’. As the journey wore on I found myself studying the people around us when we stopped, almost willing one of them to have a go. I just wanted to get involved. When we got into the mountains of Macedonia, there was a distinct sense that this was bandit country. On board, the sarge told us to be extra vigilant. At the next stop I prayed they’d have another go at stealing our cargo.

  They didn’t.

  There were enough people milling around mysteriously to convince me that if the train weren’t guarded then they’d be all over it. But no one was prepared to fight for it. They were strictly opportunists. For three days we repeated the same high-alert procedures. For three days we encountered nothing but locals staring at us like we were a travelling circus.

  In the end most of our stops were conducted at night with no civilian interaction.

  On arrival, our contact met us at the station and I and my two signals colleagues, Scott and Smudge, were driven into Pristina in a Land Rover. That might sound like a smooth, well-run operation but for me it jarred. We’d just gone three nights without sleep. We were trained to the point of breaking in how to wipe out enemy targets. And we’d been on high-alert for eighty hours. All of us in the back were twitchy as hell, looking for possible antagonists.

  The driver picked up on it.

  ‘Guys, you can relax. We’re okay here, trust me.’

  I wasn’t sure whether to believe him. I didn’t want to, either. Where was the threat I’d been promised?

  The further we drove into Pristina the more I realised he was right. It didn’t look or feel like hundreds of opposing troops had torn through the city a year earlier. It actually felt like another Greek holiday destination, one of the ones a bit more inland so with fewer Brits. It was certainly as hot as down south. I wondered whether the rebels had put their fighting on hold until the weather got cooler. I couldn’t wait for them to start up again.

  Our destination was a military camp near the airport. We were met and told to wait. Four hours later someone came to show us around. Obviously a big emergency situation had called them away.

  When we were dumped again somewhere else I quickly learned the truth. There had been no emergency. We were just another logistical problem, no more pressing than getting a load of cardboard boxes shifted.

  Finally, we were picked up and ferried to a building where we found the various bunks that would be home for the next seven months. There were more empty beds than not. That was to change over the next few weeks, however, as the personnel from Arbroath began to arrive. It was weird, seeing familiar faces coming into this unfamiliar setting. Then it was time to get to work.

  Once again, I was singled out.

  * * *

  Every unit to arrive brings its own equipment. Since our task was to maintain and operate the signals, that’s a lot of equipment. There were three of us signallers in Z Company so actually we had a lot of responsibility compared with the majority of marines over there.

  On day 1 we were instructed to install radio equipment at a location in Pristina. It was five miles away. The kit was just about portable with three people. Two of us were told to get on with it. On foot.

  It was eerie leaving the base. We had learned the route off by heart although I had my maps at hand. The fact that we were allowed out in a pair was alien to all my training – everyone’s training. After about a mile we moved into a more urbanised area. By coincidence another patrol was passing. There were sixteen men, all armed to the teeth, all ready to react to any threat. They looked at us, we looked at them.

  ‘Do you need cover?’ one of the lads asked.

  ‘I don’t think so. Do we?’

  They had a chat. ‘No, you’ll be all right.’

  Bizarre, really. We were patrolling – not even that, more ‘walking’ – through a war zone in smaller numbers than we used to guard RM Condor. Over five miles in enemy territory you could be attacked a hundred times. Especially if you were carrying hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of specialist equipment. But, since nobody had been attacked, the planners had decided it was okay for us. I grew to be happy with the decision but that first day was nerve-racking, I admit.

  By the time we got further into the city it was apparent that the Kosovans were getting on with their lives as best they could. Shops were open, offices were busy, there were even schoolkids here and there. And what they all had in common was that they took no notice of me. If a
bloke kitted out for full-scale warfare walked past me with a cocked rifle I’d bloody well take notice. They were obviously conditioned for a lot worse.

  I was installing kit at various sites but the main place was Z Company command, in an old police station. It was single-storey, comprising seven small rooms, individually built from steel faced with concrete and breeze-blocks. Design-wise it reminded me of some of the Greek homes I’d seen on the journey up. There was a roof of terracotta tiles but otherwise it could have been built in Thessaloniki.

  It wasn’t oversupplied with windows, but two of them we kitted out with black blinds. That was our ops room. There was a board on the wall filled with maps covered in Day-Glo sticky labels and Post-it notes containing the highest sensitivity intelligence. It was pretty low-tech, I suppose, but it did the job.

  The walls in the radio room were covered with info as well. Photos of persons of interest, sites of activity, basic intelligence. In the middle of the room was a wooden desk – like everything else, shipped over from the UK – where one of the three signallers would sit.

  Once all of 45 Commando had arrived we settled into a rhythm. Working eight hours on, sixteen off, I rotated with my two Z Company colleagues in the radio HQ building listening to and recording all the transmissions coming in from the various patrols out on the streets. Having had ten days or so of setting up and familiarising myself with our surroundings, I could picture where most of the reports were coming from, which helped syphon the critical information from the distractions.

  My role was purely functional. I would sit, headphones on, listening and transcribing. Everything was recorded but it was my job to sift through and extract the essential stuff as it went live. Not all messages would be important. Much of the radio traffic was mundane. It was my role to prioritise messages, then pass the ones I’d selected to the person sitting next to me, the duty officer. It was he who would take my reports and make a decision whether to push them further up the chain of command. If that was the case I’d be tasked with constructing a message in ‘marine speak’, something as clear as mud to any casual observer but absolutely to the point for anyone at Company HQ.

  In training the duty officer had usually been a corporal. For most of my early shifts in situ, however, I found myself working with the building’s officer in charge (OIC), Captain Steve McCulley.

  Given that there were only three of us in the room at a time, plus the intensity of the work, you get fairly close to your colleagues. Despite his superior rank Steve was more approachable than most. It turned out he was really into his fitness as well, particularly cycling, so we started training together with the other signallers, Smudge and Scott, as well as a few corporals.

  Hobnobbing with the bosses seemed perfectly natural, considering the cramped working conditions and the small number of us doing that crucial work. In fact, such fraternisation between the ranks was widely frowned upon.

  Obviously we never got the memo about commissioned officers and marines not mixing because the group of us made a good team outside and inside the cramped offices. Steve had a knack for discerning the important kernels of information buried in quite long reports, and I became expert at condensing them into digestible communiqués for HQ. Yet, as the weeks turned into months, I realised I was suffering a bit of cabin fever. My role was important, I knew that, but the excitement – the hands-on stuff – was happening outside our breeze-block walls.

  If it was just me going stir crazy I’d have had to suck it up. Luckily, Scott and Smudge felt the same, so we worked out a new rota so that each week two of us would do twelve hours on and twelve off. That left the third limb spare. This is where sweet-talking and calling in favours came in. All three of us just wanted to go out on patrol, which meant speaking directly to the corporals in charge. I’m not sure how by-the-book it was, but since each corporal had good working relations with us, they bought into it. We were all familiar voices, if not faces. They knew we could be trusted. And they could always use an extra body.

  And so each week one of us would go out with a patrol, then another the second week, then the third of us the week after that. Then we’d repeat the process. It was purely a timetable cooked up between the three of us signallers, with Steve’s blessing. We all just wanted to play to our strengths – and to be able to say that we had got our hands dirty.

  The work was varied. On patrol we carried out a lot of vehicle checkpoints, searching cars, as well as lots of patrolling around the various areas.

  On one of my first patrols we were called to a village where shooting had been reported. We arrived mob-handed, and found the owners of two farms shooting at each other. It was like watching a bad cowboy film. They were literally hiding behind their own little walls then popping up every so often to take a shot.

  My first instinct was, Identify the victim – suppress the aggressor. This was quickly followed by, I have no fucking clue who is who.

  All this goes through your mind extremely quickly. Luckily, as soon as they saw us all the farmers threw down their weapons. We didn’t even have to raise our voices. Once the locations were secured we brought the interpreter in. What, we wanted to know, could possibly have led to this fight to the death?

  ‘One farmer says a cow from the other farm strayed on to his field.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Yes.’

  To a certain extent the people of Kosovo humoured us, or even toyed with us. One of our jobs was confiscating unlicensed weapons. Sometimes our doing so would be the result of a stop-and-search in the street, but more usually it was based on some intel passed via Steve. The first raid I did proved quite fruitful. We came away from one row of houses with boxes of pistols and rifles. Outside I said to the translator attached to the patrol, ‘These look so old I’m amazed they even work.’

  The translator shrugged.

  ‘You don’t think they give you their sexy weapons, do you?’

  After the Reservoir Dogs approach to settling neighbourly disputes, and now this, I thought I’d seen it all. Virtually the next patrol I had to revisit that opinion.

  Wherever you go around the world you will find traditions that seem at odds with your own upbringing. Part of our Pre-Deployment Training had focused on this. However much I read about ‘blood feuds’, though, nothing prepares you for seeing the reality.

  Dating from the fifteenth century, Kosovo’s blood feud law or krvna osveta gives a victim legal authority to right a wrong with equal fury. For example, if a truck driver mows down and kills a little girl, that girl’s father is entitled to take the life of one of the driver’s children. Depending on whether you arrived in Kosovo by birth canal or international flight, it’s either logical or barbaric.

  I saw a few nasty retaliations which both parties accepted were ‘fair’, although in the main, these were few and far between. What I didn’t know is that they were saving their grievances for something called ‘Blood Sunday’.

  It was madness itself. For one day the whole country exploded. If you’ve seen the film The Purge – a horror story in which for one day there are no laws – it might give you some idea of what we were up against. From the crack of dawn we started receiving reports of people being gunned down in the street in broad daylight. We arrived at the scene of the first incident and questioned some witnesses, who all casually gave us the name of the murderer. One asked us why we were interfering in justice.

  My next call was to intervene again between two neighbours. In this instance the so-called justice system was struggling. One of the neighbours had posted a grenade through the other’s letterbox. No one was killed or injured. Rather than accept this ‘justice’, the victim then went after his neighbour with all guns blazing. Apparently it all got very tasty. When we arrived, though, the area was quiet. Foolishly, I thought our presence had quelled them into stopping. Not true. They’d just run out of ammo.

  The best we could do was hand the lot over to a group of British police who had been brought to Koso
vo to mentor the local force. This hardly improved matters, for their hands were tied as much as ours. What can you do when the whole country thinks that summary justice – a.k.a. violent revenge – is okay? When even the Kosovo police had taken the day off just to settle vendettas of their own

  Not everything was so alien to us, however. There was a genuine Mafia presence in Pristina, which is more or less the same as a Mafia presence anywhere in the world. We did a lot of work with other governmental departments, simply supplying information that we had collected about vehicles and their whereabouts. Everything we learned was passed up the line via our colleagues stuck back at HQ. Every so often an order for action would be passed back as a result.

  One of the worst Mafia crimes was human trafficking. There’s an argument that Card Alpha should have been rescinded for these particular perpetrators. It seemed that every week I was out on patrol we would shut down another pimp or ‘body dealer’. The most spectacular of these events occurred in the spring of 2000. I was with a Z Company patrol on a joint operation with the local police, targeting a building on the outskirts of the city. It was another Greek-looking construction although taller, two storeys high, and it had a high wall around its perimeter that in itself was enough to raise our suspicions. In conjunction with the Kosovan National Police we stormed the gate, then the front door. The latter was easier said than done. The door was of reinforced steel, so we had to call up the boys with the big toys. Inside we found a room full of naked, scared girls. They were all hooked on drugs, and all behaved in a strangely over-familiar manner with the lads rescuing them. To this day I wonder whether they remember anything about that raid. And whether they managed to stay away from that lifestyle once we had left.