by Andy McNab
The fastball made sense now. The Khmer Rouge had driven several million Cambodians, desperate to escape the killing fields, across the border into Thailand. The enormous refugee camps that had sprung up were a huge financial drain on the Thais, and an even bigger source of social unrest. The only way they could get the refugees to return to Cambodia was to replace the Khmer Rouge.
Ordinarily the world's policemen would have stepped in, but the CIA and their associates were finding it almost impossible to obtain political clearance for black operations, these days. The new Freedom of Information Act made it harder to keep the skeletons in the cupboard, and American public opinion wouldn't have stood for planes laden with body bags coming back from South East Asia all over again. They offered the Thais money and intelligence, but no other support.
That was where we came in.
They could have helped the Thais launch a conventional attack, but that would have risked a very expensive and openended commitment. It might also have provoked a reaction from the Vietnamese, who had their own Cambodian agenda. They had invaded in 1979 and installed their regime in Phnom Penh, but most of the rest of the country was still in Khmer Rouge hands.
A secret training camp was set up near the border, and over the next few months Hillbilly and a number of others flew out to Bangkok, met with the Cambodians, then went forth to generate mayhem.
The operation led to the Khmer Rouge's very first military defeat. Whitehall was able to 'maintain the UK's interests overseas' and the Cambodians were able to build on that success; by September 1989 they had forced the Vietnamese to withdraw. That, with the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan in February of the same year, signalled the end of the Cold War.
Minky went to give Eno the bad news and I finally made contact with Nish. I hadn't heard him so upset since the night Al was killed.
'I knew he was due back in the next couple of days . . .' His voice cracked. 'I just left a message on his answering-machine to give me a shout as soon as he got in.'
His breathing became more laboured. I pictured him gripping the phone in one hand and a fistful of cigarettes in the other.
I didn't know how Hillbilly had died, or even where. The official version was that he had been found in his hotel room.
Nish was none the wiser. 'All the squadron would say is that he was on a team job and had a heart-attack. But I ain't buying it.'
Nor was I. Heart-attack? The boy didn't do drugs or steroids, and was mega-fit.
'You all right, mate?'
He wasn't crying, but he was close. 'Yeah, fine.'
We never did find out how Hillbilly died, and I suppose we never will. I'm certain about one thing, though: it doesn't take six weeks to get a guy's body back to the UK if he's died of a heart-attack in a hotel room.
Eno and I had a can or two the next day. I muttered Frank's line about the tiger and the sheep. That was about all we could do. We couldn't even go to the funeral in Hereford when Hillbilly's body eventually came home because we were still on operations.
Nish managed to pick himself up, and headed off to Swaziland with Harry. They'd joined a task force of ex-Regiment and Intelligence Corps guys set up to combat the rhino and elephant poachers. They identified the dealers, unmasked corrupt officials and trained the anti-poacher units. When Harry asked if he was up for the job, he jumped at it. It was right up his street, and I guess it helped to fill the vacuum left by Hillbilly's death.
Schwepsy was also out and about. He was well established on the Circuit, which meant that not too many days would go by without somebody somewhere being called an 'orrible little man.
Des was finally allowed to get out after the Belize punch-bag disintegrated and there was nothing left to pummel. He and his family were in Washington DC. He was BGing Saad Hariri, the son of the man being tipped as Lebanon's next prime minister.
Saad was in his early twenties and went to Georgetown University. The family didn't like high-profile security. They wanted close protection, but subtly provided – a Regiment speciality. Des could look good in a Turkish brothel or the White House, as long as he kept his tattoos under wraps. They'd scare the shit out of the First Lady.
Frank wrote me a letter while I was still over the water to say he was praying for Hillbilly and he was as glad as I was that Nish wasn't on his own. Sir Ralph Halpern had been in the limelight: we'd all been reading the red tops and loving every minute. 'Five Times a Knight', as he was now known, had been catapulted from the financial section onto the front page after his girlfriend, Fiona Wright, had sold her kiss-and-tell memoirs. I'd asked Frank for the low-down, but he wasn't telling.
He said life was really good. He was working a week on, a week off, and still driving flash company cars. He'd joined the congregation of All Souls at Langham Place, and was no longer doing the happy-clappy thing. My Terry Waite joke had led him to the Anglican Church, and he wanted to become a minister.
I couldn't imagine Frank in a dog collar. He still only ever wore Rohan trousers, a checked flannelette shirt, and a knitted tie.
'Why the tie, Frank?'
'Because when I buy a train ticket people treat me differently.'
You had to be happy for him. Like Des, he was living his dream.
The letter ended with an invitation. Frank, ever the optimist, wondered if I'd like to come to his ordination, whenever that was going to be.
81
March 1989
None of the troop I'd first met in Malaysia was still around. They'd all been killed, had got out, or were away on long-term jobs. After training the Det, Tiny had disappeared onto Planet Spook. Chris had gone to the Wing, then back over the water to run the troop.
Saddlebags had become an instructor, running Selection. Same as anywhere else, once you'd gone, you'd gone. The new faces took over.
The day after I got back from Northern Ireland, a team of us were scrambled to Cyprus. Terry Waite's little trips to Beirut hadn't quite worked out the way he'd hoped. He'd been chained to a radiator for two years and it looked like we'd have to go in and unfasten him. The plan was a smash-and-grab: the helicopter pilots were giving us fifteen minutes on the ground to shoot our way in, do the business, and bundle him aboard. In the end, we had more stand-tos than brews as we hung around in an RAF hangar, and were finally sent home. Maybe it suited the powers-that-be to leave him where he was.
I was glad Frank hadn't taken my advice and asked Waite for a job: he might have ended up sharing a radiator.
I hadn't seen much of the Ginger One. While I'd been over the water, he'd been all over the shop. He'd fallen out with Sir Ralph and moved on to Mohamed Al Fayed. But Sir Ralph still owed him a bonus. Bizarrely, he had an opportunity to confront him about it while he was on the Al Fayed team. The Burton boss was in his gym, having swapped Fiona for a running machine. Frank went at him like a righteous terrier and chewed him into submission. He got his cash. If he ever did become a minister, I pitied his parishioners. When he brought out that collection plate, they'd be handing over their houses.
I got back from Derry a 'complete soldier', finished a threemonth demolitions course, and was then sent to learn Spanish. At least I knew why this time. A new team job had been running in Colombia for the last six months. G Squadron were there at the moment, and two B Squadron troops were set to take over.
The cocaine trade alone was worth twenty billion dollars more than the combined wealth of McDonald's, Microsoft and Kellogg's. The coca leaf grew like a weed all over the Andes, but Colombia was where it all came together. You only had to look at a map to see why. It joined Central America to South America and had hundreds of small airfields and harbours within reach of both the eastern and the western seaboard of the USA.
Colombia was one big coca warehouse, and its thousands of square miles of rainforest were peppered with primitive drug-manufacturing plants (DMPs) where the leaves were processed into paste and then white powder. They were thrown up from bits of wood and palm, and easy to camouflage.
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sp; The Medellín and Cali cartels were awash with money. At one stage, Pablo Escobar, the leader of the world's most powerful drugs cartel, offered to pay off the country's national debt if the Colombian government just left him alone. Their private armies had every weapon on the planet: heavy weapons, RPGs, heavy machine-guns, ground-to-air missiles and helicopters. Cubans and former Israeli Special Forces trained them. There were fire fights at every level of the drug business, from dealers on the streets to pitched battles against the anti-narcotics police or security forces. In Colombia, the drugs war really was a war.
With twenty thousand drug-related murders a year, it had become the most dangerous place on earth. The most frequent cause of death for a Colombian adult was gunshot wounds. It was a social problem, but it required a military solution.
82
The Regiment had trained with America's Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the US Coast Guard, and run operations inside the UK to thwart IRA attempts to raise funds through drug-dealing. Margaret Thatcher offered to help, and the Regiment became part of what was called the First Strike Policy. Stop the manufacture of drugs at source, the theory went, and they wouldn't end up on our streets.
The strategy was to attack the drug-manufacturing plants in the same way we would an enemy airfield. The objective was to destroy both the pilots and the aircraft. Technology is easily replaced; skilled humans aren't. And the more chemists and technicians we could take out, the better. A new DMP could be set up in two or three days; it wasn't so easy to get hold of the people to operate them.
The job was top secret. No one was to know what was going on, or where we were flying when we left Brize Norton one Sunday morning. The reason we couldn't tell anyone, we discovered, was because Downing Street wanted the Sunday Express to have an exclusive. 'SAS IN COLOMBIA' was splashed all over their front page the day we left. The picture showed some G Squadron boys kicking in a DMP door.
Our new staff-sergeant appeared. Gaz was just short of six foot, with wavy brown hair. He was so fresh-faced he looked like a fourteen-year-old with stubble – and, recently divorced and immensely sociable, he was bent on reliving his youth. Gaz was tailor-made for B Squadron. Even the sergeant-major called him Champagne Charlie. He wore Armani suits and Jermyn Street shirts; if Hillbilly had been alive, the town would have been a nightmare with the two of them on the prowl.
Gaz was an ex-Green Jacket, as were his brother and his dad. And they'd all either been in the Regiment or were still. Everybody wanted to be best mates with him: with his family connections, he was SAS royalty. It was only a matter of time before his mum turned up for Selection too.
Gaz had left the Regiment for a couple of years. He'd departed as a corporal and immediately been given a troop on his return. Some of the guys in the squadron were bumping their gums because he'd PVRed to become an outboard-motor salesman, then jumped two ranks when that didn't work out.
Outboard-motor salesman? I couldn't believe they fell for that story. Apart from anything else, it was such a bad one.
Gaz was one of the guys who'd suddenly resigned from the Regiment in '82. Soon afterwards, Russian helicopter gunships had started falling out of the skies all over Afghanistan.
83
We started training the anti-narcotic police shortly after we arrived in Colombia. We had a ten-man patrol each, and took them through every facet of jungle warfare – surveillance and counter-surveillance, aggressive patrolling, OPs, close-target recces and demolitions. They were all right, those lads, considering they were just doing it to feed their families. They didn't really want to be out taking on the cartels, and we sometimes had to coax them into working.
Once we'd spent a month training them up, each two-week patrol was tasked to cover four square kilometres of rainforest. When they found a drug-manufacturing plant, they'd carry out a CTR and plan an attack. The other three patrols would RV with them. But they were nearly always unsuccessful.
The problem was that we had to radio every operational detail to Bogotá, and that included the timings and taskings for the helicopter gunships. They would keep out of hearing distance until we attacked, then be on target within two or three minutes to take out any runners. The DMPs were often sited by rivers so the lads could have getaway boats at the ready; some even cut a landing zone (LZ) out of the rainforest and had a heli standing by. It was the Hueys' job to hose them down.
But Escobar's boys had thought of that. Palms were greased and the helis overflew the DMP minutes before we attacked. As soon as they heard the rotor blades, everybody would leg it. We destroyed the empty camp, but that didn't mean much.
It wasn't our only problem. The ANP (anti-narcotics police) weren't too keen on camp attacks. To make themselves feel better, they wrapped coca leaves round sugar cubes and sucked them the night before. By the time we'd positioned them at the start line, they were ready to sing and dance all the Broadway hits.
Then Gaz took control of the Bogotá situation. He was the only person we were in touch with. When we found a DMP, our comms went directly to him. He would tell everybody else where to go and what to do at the very last minute. We also took control of the ANP situation. Once they'd gathered at the troop RV we made them our prisoners, and ensured they didn't smuggle in any coca leaves or sugar after we'd checked their kit.
The strike rate went through the roof. Chemists and technicians were getting dropped big-time. We'd hit a camp, kill as many as we could and melt back into the jungle while the media were helicoptered in to photograph a handful of smiling Colombian policemen.
For all our successes, the ocean of drugs was so vast that whatever we did was just a raindrop. You could only restrict the trade; you couldn't eliminate it. The drugs barons' billions bought them too much insulation.
After every couple of patrols, we headed off for a day or two of R&R. Bogotá was probably the most exciting city in the world. There was nowhere else I could think of where grandscale lawlessness met such a tidal wave of drug money head-on. The war wasn't only in the jungle: it was here on the streets.
The big appeal of Bogotá, as far as we were concerned, was the food. We lost a huge amount of weight on the pig swill we were given in the jungle so we'd spend a couple of hours in the shower at the Dann Norte or the Cosmos Hotel, then head down to one of the restaurants in the embassy district.
That particular Saturday, we were hoping to catch Carl Williams taking the world heavyweight title from Mike Tyson on a bar TV. The next day, we were going to watch a bullfight in the old part of town. The bullring was the size of Wembley. The steaks weren't much smaller.
I was clean, freshly shaved and smelling frou-frou. I picked up my 9mm and shoved it down the front of my jeans. We were out on a social, but in that part of the world you didn't leave home without one. I shoved a spare magazine down the side of my shoe and folded over my sock to keep it in. Gaz did the same.
The pavements were bustling. Blacked-out Mercedes swept along the potholed roads, narrowly missing the kids who lived like feral cats in the craters where the sewers had collapsed. Their skin was black with grime. Their hair hadn't been washed or combed for years. The Colombian government reckoned there were ten thousand street kids in this city alone, living in parks, under bridges and in sewers, stealing and begging to stay alive. They were called los desechables – the disposables. In some areas these small hungry thieves drove customers away from local businesses. The traders' solution was to hire local death squads to clean up the streets. Thousands had been murdered.
We headed for a steak and fish place with a Scottish theme and an indoor driving range in the basement. You could take a swing between courses. We'd been there many times, and we always steered clear of the fish. Bogotá was high up on a mountain plain. The sea was miles away.
Instead of street-lighting, this part of town had huge flaming gas torches. If you could see one, you knew you were in the right place – unless you were a desechable, in which case you knew to keep well away. The area teemed with Departa
mento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS), the national security police. Their remit seemed to be to look after civil servants, politicians and drug-dealers – people with money, basically.
They were always in civilian clothes, but they didn't exactly keep a low profile. During the day DAS cars would scream between the lanes of traffic on the decaying boulevards, bristling with Mini Uzis. The traffic parted like the Red Sea did for Moses.
