Stand By Stand By

by Chris Ryan

  Inside each car there was a comprehensive comms system, with the radio tucked away in the glove compartment, a pressel-switch down by the handbrake, and a microphone slotted into the sun visor. For normal covert operations we’d listen through our earpieces, but there was also a loudspeaker fitted into the glove compartment for when the shit hit the fan. ‘If you get into a chase, and the villains know you’re after them, there’s no point in trying to stay covert, so you switch to the speaker,’ somebody explained. ‘Equally, if you start to take incoming, and the windscreen goes, your earpieces are the last thing you need.’

  I didn’t appreciate quite what the cars would do until I went out for a familiarization drive. The one I had was an old Rover 2000 known as the Bluesmobile. It looked drab and decrepit, as if it was well past its scrapby date, and when we started out I thought I was driving a tank, so heavy did it feel. But as soon as I got out on to the ring road and put my foot down – that was something else. In a few seconds we were doing 150 m.p.h., with a good bit in hand, and only a buildup of traffic far ahead made me ease off. Thereafter I took things more steadily and concentrated on getting familiar with the radio system. One lesson I learnt from the run is that a G3 is a brute of a weapon to take in a car: too long to fit down neatly beside the driver’s seat, and difficult to bring up quickly. I’d already heard of an occasion when a G3 had slipped so that the muzzle landed on the accelerator pedal, and the driver suddenly found himself heading off into the sunset at a great rate of knots. Now I saw the wisdom of bringing an HK 53, which would fit comfortably under the seat.

  Our familiarization was supposed to last for the first couple of weeks, but in the event things turned out less leisurely. One evening I was in my cabin, with Eric Clapton keeping the world at bay, when through the music I heard a call on the tannoy: ‘Standby team into the briefing room.’

  In half a minute all ten of us had assembled.

  Tom Dawson, the second-in-command, was in charge. ‘Right, lads,’ he began. ‘We’ve got a fast ball. Operation Eggshell. It’s a babysitting job, with a few strings attached. There’s a hit going down on a senior political figure, timed for 2230 tonight. The boss is at TCG, getting details. Basically it’s a city job, in East Belfast. We need four guys to babysit and six to deploy in the intercept cars.’

  He turned to me. ‘Geordie, you’re to command the house party. The address is Knocklofty Park. There’s no time for an on-site recce, so you’ll need to take a good look at the map and get your arses down there a.s.a.p. Covert approach from wasteground behind. If you want to grab something to eat you’ve got twenty minutes. Final briefing at 2000, and roll immediately after.’

  Because I’d already eaten, I had plenty of time to sort and check my kit: HK 53, side-arm, magazines for both, torch, knife, wire-cutters, covert radio. We’d go in wearing civilian clothes, but with our ops waistcoats on. I told all my guys to bring a pair of clean trainers for when we got inside the house; even if the people you’re looking after are about to be blown to kingdom come, they don’t take it kindly if you mess up their carpets. I also packed a roll of heavy-duty polythene and one of lightweight black cloth, for doctoring up a lookout room when we established ourselves in the target. (With film slanted across a room from ceiling to floor and the back wall blacked out, you can move around without somebody outside being able to see you.) Then I thought, if the old people are going to be in the house, we’d better take flak-jackets for them, just in case shrapnel comes through the floor or one of the doors. Also we needed a couple of big medical packs.

  At 2000 the boss, Captain John Mason, was still down at TCG, so our final briefing came from Tom.

  ‘Just to confirm details,’ he began. ‘The PIRA’s target is Freddy Quinlan, the Unionist MP. He’s already at home with his wife. He’s been offered the chance to leave, but he’s declined. He’s that way: doesn’t rate the opposition, stupid bugger. Normally he has no security on the house whatsoever, not even any cameras. But that’s his lookout.

  ‘Our information is that the PIRA are planning a rocket attack. Probably a drive-past. They’ll launch an RPG7 to take out the front door, then follow up on foot to finish off anyone who has survived. That means your guys, Geordie, will want to be upstairs with the family. At the same time, it’s vital that you preserve an impression of normal activity. The curtains will be drawn, but we want people to move around the house naturally for as long as possible. OK?’

  I nodded, and he went on, pushing a large-scale town plan across the table towards me, ‘Your covert approach will be through wasteland behind the house. It’s the former grounds of a mansion, gone to seed. We’ll get you dropped off here’ – he pointed with a pencil – ‘and it’ll only be a short walk in, three hundred metres at the outside. Between the edge of the park and the back garden is a wooden panel fence. Don’t go over that, in case the players have eyes-on from behind one of the adjacent properties. Get under it, or through the bottom. The back door of the house will be open for you. OK?’

  Again I nodded. ‘How do we recognize the house and garden from the back?’

  ‘There’s a World Wildlife Fund panda symbol hung over the outside of the fence.’

  ‘What about the telephone? Is the line bugged?’

  ‘Possibly. Special Branch have told Quinlan to carry on taking normal calls, but obviously not to mention the operation.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘A rocket will probably blow the hell out of the electrics and leave the house dark. We’d better take some ambush lights as an emergency back-up.’

  ‘Good thinking.’

  Tom went on to brief the car-teams and the QRF. I listened with half an ear, studying the map. The old park or garden showed up as a sizeable green blob in the middle of massed streets and houses, but there was nothing to be learnt about it from where we were. The drop-off point was on the far side of the park from our destination, so all we needed to do was cross the wasteground in an easterly direction.

  As soon as Tom finished, the signals corporal went through his own plan. The boss’s callsign for the night was Zero Alpha, and our house team was designated Hotel One. We were also assigned a chatter-net on a different frequency, so that if necessary we could talk to each other without cluttering up the main channel. Our car units were Mobile One, Mobile Two and so on. The house was designated ‘the target’, the back door was ‘Red’ and the front door ‘White’. Some of our guys were to mount an OP in a garden across the road – that party had the callsign Whisky. The Det, with various Delta numbers, were already out on surveillance.

  A few minutes after eight a grey van pulled into the warehouse. The legend on the panel said, ‘NORTHERN IRELAND ELECTRICITY VAN – Engineering Department’, and the vehicle had a big sliding side door, excellent for an unobtrusive exit. My house team piled in and set off. With the pair of ambush lights and power-pack, my bergen was going to be quite a burden, even though we were going on such a short operation. I’m sure Pat spoke for all of us when he said, ‘I don’t like the thought of this fucking rocket coming in.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ I told him. ‘But as long as the house is reasonably substantial we’ll be OK upstairs.’

  Peering forward through the windscreen, I said to Titch, the driver, ‘You will bring us in with the door on the kerb-side, won’t you?’

  ‘No sweat.’

  Twenty minutes of twisting and turning through the city brought us to our objective.

  ‘Here’s the park now,’ said Titch. ‘I’m just running down the side of it. The lay-by’s a couple of hundred yards farther on. Stand by to debus.’

  The moment he stopped I hit the handle, slid the door and was outside, landing in a shallow puddle. I took a quick look round. It was pretty good: a smallish recess at the edge of the suburban road, screened by bushes. Some traffic was passing, but none very close. Immediately behind us were the old iron railings of the mansion’s grounds, topped by two strands of barbed wi
re. Rather than risk getting hung up I cut through them, peeled them back and went over the railings, quickly followed by the other three. Titch had got out and opened the bonnet of the van. I saw him peering about under it with a torch, tugging at electric leads as if checking for a fault. As soon as we were clear he slammed the bonnet shut and drove off. I was pretty sure nobody had seen us.

  Inside the park it was like being on an island, dark and peaceful, with the city traffic roaring and grinding round in the distance outside. As I waited for my eyes to acclimatize, one of the Det guys came up on the radio with, ‘Delta Two, a dicker’s just walked down the street past White.’

  ‘Sounds like the job’s going down OK,’ I whispered. ‘We’d better get in there.’

  Round the perimeter of the park ran a belt of mature trees, some of them pines. The air was full of the smell of evergreens and ivy. Once through the trees, we came out on to open grass. At the edge of the cover I paused for a look round. Away to our left, a couple of hundred yards off on the crest of a rise, stood the old mansion, dark as dark, a heavy-looking Victorian building with turrets and pointed eaves. The grass we were on must once have been the lawn. Some lawn! Three or four acres, at least. We moved swiftly across it, towards more high trees on the far side. Ahead of us, between the trunks, lights were showing – the backs of the houses in our target road.

  The ground beneath the second belt of trees was choked by undergrowth – diabolical bramble bushes, five or six feet high, interlaced with elder. Rather than crash through the thicket, we tried to pick a way between, only to find ourselves on the edge of a flooded area, perhaps an old pond. Pulling off, we made another approach, and soon came to a six-foot wooden fence along the backs of the gardens. A quick cast to the right brought us face-to-face with the reassuring black-and-white shape of the panda badge.

  ‘Pity to carve this up,’ I whispered, feeling the wooden panels.

  ‘It’s OK,’ answered Jimmy Adair. ‘There’s a drain running under it.’

  He’d found a kind of culvert, and with a few jabs from our collapsible shovel we enlarged it enough for us to wriggle through. The back of the house was only ten metres off: whitewashed walls, several windows, the back-door conveniently screened by a projecting outhouse. A light was showing upstairs, but the curtains of that room were drawn.

  We stood in the shadows by the fence. I held in my pressel-switch and said softly, ‘Hotel One. On Red now.’

  ‘Zero Alpha, roger,’ answered the boss.

  As promised, the door was open. We slipped into a short corridor and locked up behind us, shooting home the bolts at the top and bottom. A smell of cooking hung in the air. We took off our boots, stacked them in a neat heap and put on our clean trainers. Then, leaving the others to cover me, I went quietly forward, HK 53 at the ready, past the kitchen and into the hall.

  The TV was on in one of the front rooms. I knocked on the door, pushed it open a foot or so and showed myself in the gap. The woman saw me first – a small, elderly person with white hair swept back in a bun. She gave a bit of a cry and stood up.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘We’re here to look after you.’

  The husband was a fierce-looking little fellow, with curly silver hair, dark eyebrows, and thick-rimmed glasses; he was wearing a fawn cardigan and matching slippers, like any retired professional. As soon as I saw him, I recognized his face from news bulletins and the papers.

  From the darkness of the hall I asked him if the front curtains were fully drawn.

  ‘Sure they are,’ he said testily. ‘That was the first thing your people told us. We’ve got the old blackout blind pulled down as well.’ As he came towards me he said, ‘This is ridiculous,’ but not in a voice that carried much conviction. I caught a trace of whisky on his breath. He was easily old enough to be my father, so I didn’t feel I could give him too many orders, still less pull him around physically if he became difficult. I was glad to find that his irritation was only bluff; when I assured him that the threat was not only real but imminent, he agreed to move upstairs.

  ‘What I don’t understand is this,’ he said. ‘If you know they’re coming, why the heck can’t you intercept them before they get here?’

  ‘The trouble is, we don’t know where they’re coming from. We have other units outside, and with a bit of luck, they may get to the villains before they do any damage to the house. But we can’t take chances with your safety.’

  Before I could stop her, his wife switched off the television.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘We’d better leave that on.’

  She gave me a look, but went back to the channel they’d been on.

  It turned out that the couple slept at the back of the house – the room in which we’d seen the light – and had another set in their bedroom. As quickly as we could, we got them safely in there, and told them that if they needed to go to the bathroom they mustn’t switch on any more lights.

  ‘Here,’ I said, getting out the flak-jackets. ‘If you don’t mind, put these on. They’re a bit heavy and uncomfortable, but they could just save your lives.’ Then I took the medical packs into the bathroom and opened them up so that the IV kits were immediately to hand.

  Next we took a look round downstairs. The house was solidly built, with floors that didn’t bounce, and walls which felt good when you hit them. The whole place was tidy as could be. I found it hard to believe that the shit was about to be blown out of it. The front door was locked and bolted, but only medium-strong, and it had a half-moon of frosted glass above it. The thought of an RPG7 rocket coming through it was not amusing. The weapon was developed by the Russians more than thirty years ago, in the depths of the Cold War, for the express purpose of taking out British or American tanks; though extremely simple, it was capable of destroying any armoured vehicle, let alone an ordinary car or somebody’s front door. The chances were that if one came through into the hall, it would blow out the back wall of the house as well.

  The only firefighting equipment was one ancient -looking extinguisher, but I put this ready, just inside the kitchen. Luckily the stairs started from the back of the hall and came forward towards the front, so that if we did get a rocket through the door, the main blast would be directed through the kitchen and out of the back door, rather than upwards. ‘Let’s get our boots out of the line of fire, anyway,’ said Pat, and we shifted them into a scullery.

  Upstairs again, I saw that the landing ran across the back of the stairwell. Kneeling behind the whitepainted wooden banisters, we could cover the whole of the hall. If any assault party tried to follow up a rocket, we could take them out from there, no bother.

  I checked all the doors, and once I’d got the layout I detailed Jimmy to remain in the back bedroom with our hosts, in case anyone started trying to come through the rear window. In the front bedroom on the left, facing forwards, we slung a sheet of polythene at a forty-five degree angle, fixing it to the walls with drawing-pins brought for the purpose, so that we could look through the window without being visible from outside. To complete the optical illusion, we pinned our thin black cloth over the rear wall, cutting out background reflection.

  Hardly had we done that when Pat, who was looking out, said, ‘Hey, there’s someone coming past.’

  In the patchy illumination of the street-lamps we saw a young man in what looked like jeans and a black donkey jacket walk past from right to left. He was trying to maintain a nonchalant appearance, but we saw him take a sideways glance at the target.

  ‘One of their dickers, I bet,’ said Jimmy.

  Sure enough, a moment later the Det came up with ‘Delta Two. That same dicker’s gone back the other way.’

  ‘Hotel One,’ I called. ‘Established on target.’

  ‘Roger,’ answered the boss. ‘Stand by.’

  I was still new enough to the game to be surprised by the immediacy with which our team’s voices jumped out of the night. I knew that the boss was miles away, at the desk, and that the Det guys we
re spread out all over town. But from the speed with which people came up on the air, they might have been in a tight ring round the target.

  I decided that when, or if, the attack came, we’d go to ground in the blacked-out bedroom and close the door. Then, immediately after the explosion, we’d whip out on to the landing so that we could drop anyone who came into the hall below. We therefore constructed a kind of shelter out of the two single beds, tipping them on edge and tilting the tops inwards against each other, like a tent, with the mattresses on the floor to give some protection from below, and room for us to crawl in so that we had cover in case the ceiling came down. Then I set the two ambush lights out, one on either side of the landing, so that if anyone fired up at them, the rounds would go well clear of our own position. I ran the wires round the landing so that the switch was at the point where I intended to be.

  Waiting was no joke. We’d turned up the sound of the TV a bit, so that we could hear it burbling away, and the ever-changing light from the screen flickered out into the hall. Occasionally one of us went down to open or close the living-room door a bit, so that any watcher would see a change in the light showing through the frosted glass over the front door, and conclude that Quinlan and his wife were in or out of the room. When I went down for the last time I left the door shut, as if they were both in the room. Each of those trips downstairs made my hair crawl. What if the players had given the Det the slip, and were lining their rocketlauncher up at that very moment?

  In fact, we had plenty of radio chat to keep us abreast of the situation. At 2215 the same dicker made a third pass. He’d taken the trouble to go round in a big circle, so that he came by in the same direction as on his earlier appearance, and gave the casual impression of being another walker going the same way. But the Det knew him too well, and reported a definite sighting. After that, though, no other pedestrians showed, and we guessed the strike was coming up. Our intercept cars had taken up strategic positions in surrounding streets, in case the hit-car escaped immediate ambush, and they too came on the air occasionally, with callsigns India One, India Two and so on.