by Chris Ryan
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 wire. 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 were 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.
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 th
e 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.
