by Andy McNab
At night, you'd see them lurking in doorways, usually in white armbands so they could identify each other if things kicked off. Everybody was wary of the DAS, and that included us. This was the drug capital of the world, and if you were in the secret police that didn't mean you'd turn down the odd line or two. Some of those lads were totally out of control, but they had the badge of authority – and a 9mm machine-gun at the ready.
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A Merc pulled in at the kerb as we arrived, and bodyguards swarmed from the other vehicles in the cavalcade. The door opened and a pair of gold-tipped cowboy boots hit the pavement, followed by the principal, with slicked-back hair, an Armani suit, lots of gold, and a fur-coated beauty on each arm. It was like a scene from Miami Vice.
Gaz and I embarrassed ourselves for a moment, gawping at the women – the air-con was always on low in those limos: what was the point of trousering all that drug money if you couldn't drape your women in mink? Then we sliced a few balls down the driving range and tucked into T-bone steaks the size of cartwheels before wandering off in search of a bar that had the fight on.
We'd just turned down an alleyway towards a neon club sign when we heard gunfire about twenty metres ahead of us. Three or four short, sharp bursts. We hugged the walls for cover and drew down our weapons. We weren't looking for a fight, but we'd shoot and scoot if it came to it.
Five or six guys with Mini Uzis were silhouetted against the neon. I caught a glimpse of white armbands and heard laughter as they slung something onto the back of a pick-up.
'Fucking hell,' Gaz said. 'They're dropping the kids again.'
A tarpaulin covered the load. All that would be left were some bloodstains on the paving, and that was nothing unusual. We knew what was going on, but nobody talked about it. They called it social cleansing, as if it was some kind of rodent-eradication programme. Fuck knows where they dumped the bodies. They probably became pig feed.
Gaz looked like he wanted to take them on.
I shook my head. 'Soon as they see weapons they'll hose us down. Time to go.'
The DAS boys would be sparked up after their little spree, and they wouldn't worry too much about taking out a couple of extras.
I shoved my pistol back down my jeans. 'Come on, mate, let's bin it.'
The moment we moved, half a dozen kids who'd been hiding near the pick-up jumped up and ran straight towards us. They couldn't have been more than six or seven, but it was difficult to tell. Cartwheel-sized T-bones weren't on the menu for those guys.
The DAS lifted their 9mms but spotted us at the end of the alley in their arc of fire. They set off after the kids, shouting for them to stop.
Gaz tucked away his weapon just in time. The kids surged around us and we slid them between two wheelie-bins to get them out of the way. There was nowhere else to run.
The DAS drew level with us, sweating like pigs. They'd obviously been doing a lot of killing tonight. Each had a Mini Uzi on a sling over one shoulder, pointing straight at us. We kept our hands in view.
Our Spanish was good, but I pretended it wasn't. 'Inglaterra! Embassy! Inglés! Británico!'
Neither of us looked remotely like Our Man in Colombia. Drug-dealers, maybe; diplomats, unlikely.
The kids cowered at our feet. The stench coming off them was unbelievable. But the DAS couldn't give a fuck about them now. This was a different kind of challenge. The smallest and skinniest one hollered and jabbed his Uzi at us like it was his index finger. Every time he did so, the sling dropped further down his arm until it was taut.
His finger was on the trigger.
If he had the safety off, he could be zapping us any second.
'Inglaterra!'
The kids were whimpering.
Then one of the lads by the pick-up yelled up the alleyway. My Spanish was good enough to know he was saying they'd be severely in the shit if they dropped a couple of unarmed civilians from the embassy.
They stared at us, well pissed off, then turned and stalked away.
The kids stayed huddled between the bins.
I told them to scarper but they didn't budge.
Gaz pulled some US dollars from his pocket. As soon as they spotted them they saw the light. They grabbed the money and legged it back up the alley. They turned right, away from the embassy district. We watched them scatter in a blur of scabby feet and ripped T-shirts. Then, thinking about it, we ran a couple of hundred metres too, in case the DAS lads had second thoughts, decided to drive round the block and pick up the arseholes who'd fronted them. I didn't fancy ending the evening in the back of their pick-up.
We dived into the busiest bar we could find. Hundreds of locals were bunched around three different TVs. Gaz had already spent ten dollars so the Heinekens were on me.
We toasted each other with a clink of the bottlenecks on a job well done, but the celebrations were short-lived. Tyson beat Williams by a technical knock-out in the first, and remained undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.
We'd been cut off from the rest of that world, fighting our own little war. By the time we got back from Colombia, there was a big new one going on that we'd heard nothing about. Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, and the whole Regiment was gearing up to return to its desert roots.
Not Seven Troop, sadly: B Squadron were scheduled to take over the counter-terrorist (CT) team. Gaz was in charge, and I was his second-in-command.
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November 1990
As the drums kept beating across the Gulf, every TV screen was filled with footage of Coalition forces preparing to put Saddam back in his box. American generals gave daily press calls to CNN in the Saudi desert about the urgent need to stop the rape and murder of Kuwaitis and kick out the Iraqi invader, while Saddam was telling another CNN crew he didn't know what the fuck they were on about.
Saddam promised the Americans the Mother of All Battles. The media loved it. Cameras in both corners of the ring! They hadn't had that in the Falklands.
Back in the UK, B Squadron were in a dark mood. It looked as if our stint on the CT team would take us into the spring of 1991 and beyond, and by then it might all be over. The Regiment was planning to be in the Gulf for the long haul. Not only were we going to miss the start of the war – for Special Forces the most important part, because we'd be involved before it was even declared – but we might also be stuck on the CT team for yet another tour: the three squadrons in Iraq might not be able to disengage.
There was stuff going on in Hereford that had never happened before. Regimental HQ was preparing to move to Saudi, lock, stock and barrel. The communications centre was huge, and its equipment was dug in below its quarters. Scaleys lived like moles down there, receiving and transmitting signals twenty-four/seven. It was a huge undertaking, but with three squadrons committed to one operation, it had to be done.
The Regiment wasn't geared up for the scaling of weapons and kit. We were strategic troops, 'set to task'. There were green ops, very much like the impending Gulf War, with lots of weapons, vehicles and all that aggressive, kinetic stuff. There were black ops, which the CT team were part of. Finally there were grey jobs, the team jobs with long hair and trainers. We suddenly needed three squadrons' worth of green stuff, which was proving hard to get hold of.
We in B Squadron got on with our job, which was preparing for Islamic extremists to attack the UK mainland in retaliation for the invasion.
I was responsible for IA (immediate action). If the thirtyminute team got called out, I would grab an Agusta and a couple of signallers and fly straight to any incident – be it a hostage situation or helping the police blow in a few doors to get into a house and make arrests.
As the Coalition armies massed on the Saudi border, A and D Squadrons were already behind enemy lines. The CO called us into the Regimental HQ briefing room and announced that G Squadron would take over the team earlier than expected and B Squadron would deploy to the Gulf. We would deploy half a squadron at a time. The first to go would be the Red Team, wh
ich was us. Thank fuck for that: I was going to get involved in this war after all. It was why I'd joined the Regiment in the first place, having missed out on the Falklands.
But, first, four of us had to head off to Tucson, Arizona, to visit the world's biggest aircraft graveyard. We were meeting up with some Delta patrols to practice methods of entry.
The place was like a mechanical sunset community. Thousands of aircraft had been mothballed and shrinkwrapped. The air was clean and dry, ideal conditions for military equipment and human beings in their twilight years.
Rows of ground-attack helicopters, fixed-wing fighters, bombers, you name it, stretched to the horizon. There were a few square miles of civilian aircraft, too, and those were the ones we were interested in. They'd been seized during drug operations or from African countries that had defaulted on their payments. We were allowed to blow up the ones that were beginning to show their age. I hoped the pensioners in their retirement homes wouldn't get wind of it or they'd be flapping good style.
We spent a very happy two weeks climbing like monkeys over 747s with the Delta lads until we'd got it just right. These guys were on the CT team Stateside, and were also bracing themselves for terrorist attacks.
We flew home via Washington DC. The UN Security Council had just passed Resolution 678, authorizing military intervention in Iraq if that nation did not withdraw its forces from Kuwait and free all foreign hostages by 15 January 1991. The TV screens at the embassy on Massachusetts Avenue were stuffed with US generals and plucky young soldiers telling the world how keen they were to implement it.
A technology expert talked about the first page that been written for something called the 'World Wide Web'. The Conservative Party had chosen John Major to succeed Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. In Germany, which had reunified a month ago, the very last section of the Berlin Wall had been demolished.
The military attaché mentioned that Des Doom was still in town, running a BG contract. Some of us thought it would be a good idea to hang around for a couple more days to see him, and familiarize ourselves with the Washington landscape, just in case. The embassy bought it. We didn't tell them we just needed time to shop for Cannondale mountain bikes, which were half the price there.
A gang of us piled into an embassy vehicle and headed out onto the Beltway. Des really was living the dream: his house was a plush executive mansion with a long gravelled driveway and lawns carved out of the Virginia woodland; there was a huge Lincoln Towncar out front, and the obligatory basketball hoop – not an improvised punch-bag in sight.
He ushered us into a lounge the size of a football stadium. The fireplace was wider than my whole front room.
'Great to see you all.' He handed round the Jack Daniel's with a big grin. 'You know I've got Nish working with me?'
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Nish was going flying the next day – did I want to come along?
'Flying? Where did you learn?'
'Africa. Come on, it'll be a laugh.'
We met up the next morning. He lived at the bottom end of Massachusetts Avenue, the street all the embassies were on, in a very smart apartment. There was half a Mars bar and a can of Coke in the fridge, and that was about it, apart from a big pile of dirty cups in the sink and, of course, an overflowing ashtray. Otherwise it was completely bare.
We leapt into his company Saab. He drove like he was going for pole position in the Indy 500. I was amazed he hadn't been caught. Anything over sixty here and the police were usually all over you.
'I thought you were too busy in the bush, doing your David Attenborough bit with Harry . . .'
'There was downtime. Never took the test, though. I wanted a commercial licence and my instrument rating, so I came over here.'
The explanation was wrapped in a cloud of cigarette smoke.
The airstrip was forty-five minutes away. The morning frost had melted by the time we pulled up outside a small clubhouse. Several private aircraft sat in front of a couple of hangars. The two guys who ran the place knew Nish well. As he paid his ninety dollars for the hour's rental, one of them treated me to a huge grin and some prime Dick Van Dyke Cockney. 'You'll need your motor over there in the hangar, mate.' He didn't tell me why.
We drove to what I was hoping would be a state-of-the-art Jet Ranger with leather upholstery and a bar, but which turned out to be a tiny Robinson two-seater.
'Do us a favour, will you, mate, while I do the pre-flight checks?' Nish threw his fag end out of the window. 'Grab the leads out of the boot.'
'What the fuck you on about? We going to jump-start this thing?'
'Yeah.' He threw the map at me. 'You can navigate as well.'
He opened the bonnet and made the connections, then hopped into the cockpit. His pre-flight checks seemed to consist of adjusting his arse in the seat and getting another cigarette on the go. The heli coughed and belched black exhaust, then the rotors kicked off. I retrieved the jump leads and moved the car out of the way.
Nish gobbed pilot stuff into the radio and we lifted off.
'Where we going?'
'Back into the city. You're going to love this.'
Nish said he did this a lot to keep his hours up. He had his eye on a plane he was going to buy with the cash he'd made from this job and fly back to the UK.
'Across the Atlantic? Fuck me, what is it? An executive jet?'
'Nah, I'll bung a couple of jerry-cans in the back.'
Nish was in his element now we were airborne. We followed the Potomac river into the city. We were coming in low – very low – but that was the law here. Ronald Reagan airport was within spitting distance of the White House and aircraft were landing and taking off all over the place, so we almost had to roof-hop to keep out of the way.
'Any other city you have to be miles high. And in Europe, certainly London, you need two engines so you can clear habitation if one fails.'
We were coming in to the city limits. I could see nothing but freeways feeding it with cars. There'd be no clearing habitation if this thing failed.
I talked a bit about the Regiment, told him things must be going downhill because I'd been promoted to sergeant. The Gulf came up, but I changed the subject when I saw Nish getting pissed off because he wouldn't be there. 'You still going for that record?'
It was like I'd opened a floodgate. 'Yeah.' His face lit up. 'Gonna beat Joe Kittinger's jump.'
'How high was it?'
'I've told you a million times. Twenty miles. Come on, keep up.'
'And he survived?'
'Of course he did, you dickhead. It's not a record for dead people.'
I knew very little about the attempt, apart from stories told in freefall circles. Nish knew everything, down to the insideleg measurement of the guy's space suit. Joseph Kittinger was a US Air Force captain who'd jumped from a helium balloon with an open gondola 102,800 feet above New Mexico on 16 August 1960. He'd looked like the Michelin Man, but without his space suit his blood would have boiled and his organs exploded.
Towing a small drogue chute for stabilization, he fell for four minutes and thirty-six seconds, reaching a maximum speed of 614 m.p.h. – close on the speed of sound – before opening his parachute fourteen minutes later at 18,000 feet. Pressurization for his right glove malfunctioned during the ascent, causing his hand to swell. He set records for highest balloon ascent, highest parachute jump, longest drogue-fall, and fastest speed by an un-powered human through the atmosphere.
The jump was made in a rocking-chair position, descending on his back, rather than in an arch, because he was wearing sixty pounds of kit on his arse and his pressure suit naturally formed that shape – it was designed for sitting in an aircraft cockpit – when it inflated.
