Stand By Stand By

by Chris Ryan

  From time to time I briefed our landlord on the latest situation. At 2220 the lady of the house offered us a brew, made from an upstairs kettle, which we gratefully accepted, one at a time. ‘So long as you don’t damage anything,’ she kept repeating. I promised her that we’d be as careful as we could, but said that I couldn’t vouch for our friends on the other side.

  Minute by minute, the time ticked on. My mind was flying round in circles: Kath, Tim, Tracy, Gary Player . . . It was too much to hope that he would have been assigned to carry out tonight’s hit. Almost certainly he was too senior to take part at the front: he’d be sitting back safely in some command post. But by God, if any player appeared down there in the hall, there was only one way he’d ever leave the building, and that was feet first, in a bag.

  Then at 2235, came the call we’d been expecting. ‘Delta Three. Suspect black Volvo mobile towards target. Sun roof is open, so anticipate drive-past rocket attack. Estimate time to target one minute.’

  ‘Roger,’ answered Delta Control.

  Then it was our boss: ‘Zero Alpha. Assault imminent. Confirm prepared.’

  ‘Hotel One,’ I answered. ‘Roger.’

  ‘Delta Two,’ came a Welsh voice. ‘Confirm Volvo mobile to target. Westwards down Craven Avenue. Estimate thirty seconds.’

  ‘Zero Alpha to Hotel One,’ said the boss. ‘Stand by, stand by.’

  ‘Hotel One, roger.’

  I nipped into the back bedroom. ‘On the floor, please,’ I said. ‘They’re coming.’

  There was something pathetic about seeing the old couple go stiffly down on their knees on their double mattress, then lie flat, tucking themselves in against the flank of their own bed. Jimmy yanked another mattress off the bed so that it covered them, then lay down on the outside of the pair, a human wall.

  I dived into the front bedroom, closed the door and laid my HK 53 along the wainscoting, where I could put my hand on it in the dark. The other two guys were already on their backs in the makeshift sangar.

  I don’t know how many seconds passed. I imagined the rocketeer climbing to his feet in the passenger seat, head through the sun-roof opening, bracing himself as the wagon swung round a corner. In my mind I saw him bring up the awkwardly long launcher and settle it into his shoulder. Suddenly I thought of a German friend who loathed all Volvos, and, whenever he saw one, shouted, ‘SCHEISSAUTO!’ This one was a shitcar, all right.

  I caught one more Det report, calling the Volvo into the start of our road. Then I closed my eyes and clamped my hands over my ears.

  I just heard the car engine, screaming at high revs in some low gear. Then came the whoosh of a rocket being fired, and an almighty, earth-moving BANG! I felt the floor flex beneath me. The door of our room flew open and smacked back against the end of one bed. From hall and landing came the sound of plaster falling. My instinct was to yell at the top of my voice, to let out the tension, but I fought down the impulse.

  The lights had gone out. The television had been silenced. In a second all three of us were at the banister rail, weapons trained on the hall. The air down there was full of smoke or dust or both. Through it I saw that the front door had gone, and street-lights were showing through an open rectangle. I had my hand on the switch of the ambush lights, but something made me hesitate. If there were any rats incoming, I wanted them well in the trap. But were there any? From outside came a sudden hammer of rounds going down, then more, and more. Then a screech of tyres followed by a heavy impact. We’d got the car, for sure.

  From somewhere under us at the back of the hall came a flicker of ruddy light. Fire. Nothing serious as yet; just enough to give useful illumination. But already I’d come down a notch or two from my peak of tension. The shots outside, and the noise of the crash – everything suggested that the gunmen had gone under.

  Not at all. Movement in the doorway. Two dark, hooded figures ran in, kicked the door of the living room wide and opened up through the gap with submachine-guns, spraying the room with uncontrolled bursts. In the confines of the house the noise was shattering, and the players themselves were adding to it. No silence for them. High on adrenalin, they were roaring obscenities fit to bust: fecking this and fecking that. When one of them flashed a torch round the room and found there was nobody in it, they yelled even louder.

  All this had taken maybe four seconds. By the time they ran back into the hall, the flames below us were bigger and giving better light. They illuminated our targets just enough. The range was point blank, and they never even looked up. Two short bursts from each of us, and down they went. In the flickering light I’d gone for the mass of their upper chests, but one of them caught it in the head as well when he fell forward. I saw the armour-piercing rounds rip his balaclava open, and pieces of skull fly out.

  Another volley of rounds spurted from the other man’s weapon, but only because in going down he’d pulled the trigger inadvertently, and the rounds smacked harmlessly into the wall at floor level. As he crumpled on to the carpet, I gave him a quick double-tap in the head. The body gave a couple of violent jerks, then lay still.

  For several seconds we didn’t move. We were safe in the smoky darkness, and in a brilliant position. If fifty players had followed the first two in we could have dropped them all. The reek of cordite filled the air. Suddenly there was noise and movement above us – a creak, a snap, a rustle, a tearing sound. I faced upwards to see a big chunk of plasterboard fall away from the ceiling and plummet on to the stairs, where it burst and bounced down in smaller pieces, raising another cloud of dust, as if a shell had landed.

  ‘Jimmy!’ I yelled.

  ‘Aye,’ he called from the back bedroom.

  ‘Your people all right?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Keep them there a minute.’

  Now I did turn on the ambush lights, so that they illuminated the hall and caught the smoke, which was rising in clouds. Through it I could see the two bodies lying hunched against the wainscoting, one either side, and the blood seeping out over the pale carpet. Both men had fallen on their weapons, which were buried beneath them. I felt for my pressel with shaking fingers.

  ‘Hotel One. Two X-rays dead on target. White demolished. No home casualties. Get the QRF up!’ I knew I was shouting, but I couldn’t help it.

  The leader of the fire-party was also shouting. Everyone was trying to get on the air at once.

  ‘Zero Alpha,’ said the boss firmly. ‘EVERYBODY WAIT OUT! Now. Hotel One. Is your area secure?’

  ‘Hotel One, roger. Area secure.’

  ‘Roger. Hotel Two. Is your area secure?’

  ‘Hotel Two. Two dead X-rays. One RPG. One side-arm. This area is now secure.’

  ‘Zero Alpha. Inform all stations. QRF coming in now. Stand by for pick-up.’

  Covered by the other two, I stepped cautiously down the stairs. The shreds of the front door hung from its hinges, but the centre of it had been blown clean out. Cold air was wafting in through the hole, and carrying with it the rising wail of an ambulance or fire engine.

  My immediate concern was to stop the house burning down. Luckily it turned out that the only things on fire were some old newspapers and magazines, and the extinguisher, ancient as it was, soon put them out.

  The Quinlans were amazingly resilient. They stumbled out of their bedroom looking like startled owls, white-faced, hair on end, eyes wide. ‘So long as you don’t damage anything,’ the old girl had said. Now their hall and everything in it had been destroyed. Pictures had been torn from the walls and blown into a heap of shattered frames and glass at the far end. The grandfather clock had been reduced to matchwood. Two chairs and a table were fit only for the fire. Plaster and paper had been ripped out of the walls in horizontal strips. The kitchen, also, was a wreck. I suppose the old people were in shock, but they seemed incredibly philosophical about the damage.

  With their directions, using our torches, we found the fuse boxes and trip switches in the kitchen, but the system must have suffe
red major damage because it wouldn’t come alive again. Perhaps it was just as well.

  All of a sudden Pat began to laugh. ‘No fucking damage!’ he gasped. ‘Fucking roll on!’ He was laughing so much he had to sit down. In a couple of seconds I was helpless as well, doubled up, in hysterics. I knew it was a reaction to release of tension, caused by an excess of adrenalin, but that didn’t help me stop. I realized that the Quinlans must think us incredibly callous, or crazy, or both – but again, that was no deterrent. Only when an RUC officer stuck his head round the door and said, ‘What’s so bloody funny, then?’ did we manage to pull ourselves together.

  The QRF arrived, cleared the street and cordoned it off. Suddenly the house was full of people, among them a couple of firemen, and the Scene of Crimes Officer, who began taking measurements and statements, and chalking on to the landing carpet the positions from which we’d fired. A photographer took pictures of the bodies. They weren’t looking all that pretty. One had the skull split clean down the middle, over the cranium. The armour-piercing rounds had opened up his head like a melon. Grey brain was showing through the gap, and the scalp had slid over to one side, crumpling the face into folds. The eyeballs were bulging out of their sockets. Brain and blood were spattered over the wall behind. Both terrorists looked very young. As the bodies were being bundled into bags I asked the RUC man if he knew who they were, but he shook his head. ‘From the Lisburn ASU, by all accounts,’ he said, ‘but beyond that, I’ve no idea.’

  Back in the warehouse we held a big debriefing. It turned out that our own reactive OP had nailed the Volvo, killing both the driver and the guy who fired the rocket. They’d captured not only the rocket launcher, but two AK 47s and a couple of side-arms as well.

  At first we were baffled about how the two-man assault party had escaped detection, and where they’d come from. The car had not stopped or even slowed down, so they couldn’t have been in it. The mystery was solved by a search of the front garden, which revealed that they’d lain up in the shrubs either side of the front path. They must have slipped in there immediately after dark, before our surveillance was in place, and stuck it out for nearly five hours.

  In any case, the bag for the night was four, and everyone was really chuffed that the operation had gone down. After the wash-up we all got in the bar together – RUC, the Det and us – for a few celebratory beers. By then the Det and the RUC between them had identified the dead terrorists, but the names meant nothing to me.

  Among those celebrating was the guy with pink hair. When I got close to him, I began to think I’d seen him somewhere before.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I’m sure I know you. Where could it have been?’

  ‘Two Para,’ he said immediately, with a grin. ‘Aldershot.’

  ‘Right, right!’

  Suddenly we were on net. His name was Mike Grigson, and though we’d never really met we’d been in the same company for a brief spell. We began to exchange chit-chat, and hit it off well. He’d done a year with the Det already, and obviously knew the score. For the past few days he’d been taken off outside duties and given some role in the head-shed, until he was fit to appear in public again.

  ‘What went wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘Duffed up the fucking mixture, didn’t I?’ he said cheerfully. ‘That’s the trouble with being fair-haired – I stand out in a bloody crowd. I was trying to do something about it.’

  As for myself, I couldn’t make out whether I was on a high or a low. One moment everything seemed terrific, because it had all gone according to the book; the next, I felt terrible at having killed, or helped to kill, two people. Yet perhaps the worst thing was the realization of how difficult my self-appointed task was going to be. A major operation, with all the stops out, had accounted for four lowly paddies. How was I ever going to get near Mr Big on my own?

  A couple of pints later I bought Pink Mike a drink and asked casually, ‘So, who were those players tonight?’

  ‘Nobody much. Rank and file from the Lisburn ASU.’

  ‘Had you seen them before?’

  ‘The two in the car, yes. The driver and the rocketeer. Not the others.’

  ‘How d’you recognize them?’

  ‘We’re out looking for them all the time. That’s our job. Besides, we’ve got dozens of mug-shots in the ops room. Covert pictures, but some of them pretty good.’

  ‘Could I have a look at them sometime?’

  ‘You’re not supposed to, really. But maybe we could fix it. Why?’

  ‘Just curious, that’s all.’

  SIX

  Ten days or so after that, just before Christmas, I had the evening off, and drove out to Helen’s Bay to see the family. It was easy enough to get away – all I had to do was clock myself out and enter my business as ‘Socializing’. I booked out one of the admin cars on the wall-chart in the ops room – a dark-blue, two-litre Sierra with the callsign Tango Four – and marked up my destination and time out, which was 1735. The car had normal covert comms; in the event of an emergency while I was out in the vehicle, the head-shed would still have the means to recall me, in the form of a bleeper which I carried in my trouser pocket. If that went off, I was to contact base immediately. The device had a switch that could be put on to ‘Pulse’, so that if a call came in a tight situation you could feel it rather than hear it, and no one else’s attention would be attracted. As an extra precaution I took along my Walther PPK; there seemed practically no chance that I would need it, but out there you can never tell.

  It was already dark when I pulled out of the base and set off north-eastwards. The rush-hour traffic was heavy, and to make matters worse the bypass had been closed; at the time I assumed it was the result of an accident, but later I heard that there had been a punishment shooting incident which had left vehicles strewn all over the main road. Rather than be late, I took a risk and cut through a hard area which I knew was out of bounds. I realized this was a stupid thing to do, but I thought I could get away with it for once.

  My luck was out. Travelling down the Falls Road, I saw a street protest ahead. Twenty or thirty people with placards were demanding political status for prisoners. I didn’t fancy the look of the crowd, or the thought of the dickers who might be hanging round its fringes, so I took a right into Beechmount Drive and Ballymurphy Street, across Beechmount Avenue (‘RPG Avenue’ to its fans), and so back into the Falls and Divis Street, before making my way out to the Sydenham bypass and the Bangor road.

  As I drove, my mind was on recent events. Operation Eggshell had been followed by an inquest, very similar to the one staged at LATA, at which we’d given evidence from behind a screen. Our training had stood us in good stead. The terrorists had been caught fair and square; three had actually fired weapons, and the fourth had had an AK 47 in his possession, as well as a Browning pistol. So we had no trouble justifying the action we took. Oddly enough, the stress of the operation had brought on a recurrence of my nightmare, but the dream came only once, and in a less frightening form than before. All through it I remained aware that it was only a dream, and at the back of my mind I knew I was in control.

  Tango Four was quite speedy when it got going, but none too quick off the mark. On the floor in front of the passenger seat I had a present for Tim – a box-kit of solid wooden figures, pieces and blocks with sockets cut out of them which built up into a fire engine, with a crew riding on top and a ladder perched above them. The smooth solidity of the kit appealed to me, and I felt sure he’d like it too. My only worry was that it might be a bit young for him, he was growing up that fast. I’d managed to go over several times, and I could see him changing from week to week.

  Maybe I was thinking too much about him, or about the procedures in court. Maybe I had just dropped my guard because I was off duty. Either way, I had reached Holywood, only a few miles short of my destination, before I became aware that I was being followed. For some time I’d been half-noticing an odd pair of headlights behind me, the left-hand or kerb ligh
t showing much yellower than the right. Sometimes they were one car behind, sometimes two. Suddenly I realized that they had been there for an unhealthy length of time.

  I thought, Shit – I should never have taken that short-cut. Whoever they are, they must have picked me up in West Belfast. Ahead on my left I saw the bright lights of a line of shops, facing on to the main drag but set back from it in a small road of its own. I flipped on the indicator, pulled in and cruised slowly along, peering out sideways as if in search of some particular shop. Several had closed already, but a few were still open.

  The uneven lights copied my move. The car came into the lay-by and crawled along, hanging back. Out on the main road again I accelerated hard, only to see a big roundabout ahead. I went into it fast, using gears and engine to brake. As I decelerated, the lights closed rapidly from behind. Instead of going straight on – as I’d been planning – or turning off, I held the gear-lever in second and kept the car in a tight right-hand turn, tyres squealing, all the way round. Glancing to my right across the mound of the roundabout, I caught a side-on glimpse of my tail. Under the street lights it looked a sickly mid-green, and pretty much beaten up – an old banger. It could have been a Cortina, but I wasn’t sure. There were two guys in the front.

  As I popped out on the Bangor road again, the lights were still behind me. No doubt about it now. Bloody hell! My neck began to crawl. I was after them – or rather, one of them – but they were also after me.