by Andy McNab
As for Frank, I wasn't sure if he knew that he had finally admitted he'd fucked up by getting out. I felt uncomfortable about him going off to play soldiers again. He'd got what he wanted, I thought: his church, his frock, his flock. I felt proud of him at weddings with all his gear on. He looked the business, especially now he had a decent tie.
You have to nail your colours to a mast at some stage, and it seemed Frank's hammer was still wavering in mid-air. Now he worried me almost as much as Nish did.
94
I'd met up with Nish a couple of times between his attempts to drum up support for the skydive from space and freefall gigs in Spain. While he and Harry, the Royal Marina Adonis, were busy sunning themselves, I was working on a BG job in the north-west of England, just outside Blackpool. Nish's shiny new brochure landed on my doormat and told me his jump was going to be from a ten-million-cubic-foot helium balloon. It said:
Fibre-optic cameras in [the parachutist's] helmet and a microwave transmission device on his body will allow viewers to see exactly what he sees as he reaches speeds of over 800 m.p.h. International bestselling authors Tom Clancy and Frederick Forsyth have agreed to provide commentary during the live TV coverage and subsequent documentary.
I gave him a call to take the piss. He sounded happy. He said he'd done a deal that meant NASA were finally on board.
'What sort of deal?'
'I've got to help Harry get a scientist and his gear up a mountain.'
'Which mountain?'
'Everest.'
NASA had developed the Tissue-equivalent Proportional Counter to measure levels of solar radiation and their effect on the skin. It had already been used on several Shuttle missions, but the spacecraft moved too quickly to register any useful results. The scientist, Karl Henize, was going to measure the level of radiation reaching the Earth's surface at various altitudes during the climb. The data would be shared by NASA and High Adventure, Loel Guinness's company.
'Done any climbing yet?'
'It'll be on-the-job training. You sort of put one crampon in front of the other, don't you?'
Rather him than me, but he was looking forward to it and I was pleased for him.
Next time I saw him, a few weeks later, Nish just wasn't Nish. He'd lost a lot of weight, which I put down to training – combined with the fact he was trying to give up smoking. He sucked fruit gums non-stop, but it wasn't working. He'd get through a packet, then celebrate with a couple of cigarettes.
Frank was right: his condition was a cause for concern. He wasn't that happy-go-lucky any more. All his oomph had gone. He even seemed a little slow on the uptake, like he was thinking a bit too much before speaking. And he looked like shit.
I still hadn't met Anna. She was in her early twenties, about twelve years younger than him and, in Nish's words, 'exotic'.
Her father really was Russian, and her mother Filipina. And she really was studying to become a doctor. She could speak Italian, play classical music, all that gear.
She'd come over a couple of times after Nish had got back from DC, and must have liked what she saw. She had approached Bristol University, and was continuing her medical studies there. The strange thing was that there weren't any pictures of her in his house – but maybe that was because the place was so full of brochures and skydive from space shit.
'I don't have time.' He shoved another fruit gum in his mouth. 'Overworked. Know what I mean?'
'You'll be fucking overworked when you start humping up Everest.'
Nish wasn't the only one who had me worried. Frank was giving up St Peter's and thinking about joining the army full time as a padre. It wasn't very Christian of him. Who was I going to have my McSummits with from now on?
Nish went off with Harry, and Bravo Two Zero was published in November. It went straight into the bestseller charts, and ended up the biggest-selling war book of all time. I couldn't believe it. Not even the publishers had expected it be so successful.
It was during that first month of success that the problems started. Armchair generals were filmed muttering that I was giving away secrets and endangering national security. These so-called experts had no idea that the book had been cleared. I read articles that said the MoD were dismayed by the revelations. I couldn't make any sense of it.
'It's what sells newspapers, Andy.' The man next to me on the back seat of the staff car jabbed a finger at one of the offending broadsheets on my lap. 'Don't let them worry you.'
I wasn't about to argue with such a high-ranking member of the defence staff, especially as we were on the way to Sandhurst, where I was to deliver the Christmas lecture.
95
February 1994
Nish was still away; I hadn't seen him since he'd left for Everest last autumn. Frank had disappeared off the face of the Earth. This happened all the time; it wasn't as if we lived a nine-to-five existence and made a point of seeing each other at the end of the working day. Like bad pennies, they'd turn up. No news was good news.
Or so I thought.
I was overseas when I heard rumours that Nish had killed somebody. I couldn't get hold of Frank, Andrew, Harry, anyone reliable. In the end I had to phone the Lines. I got passed from pillar to post, and everybody had a different version. Nish had killed a man. Nish had stabbed a woman. He was in prison in France. He was in hospital in England.
'Any idea how I can get hold of Frank Collins? I think he's with the TA up north.'
'He's with 5 Airborne Brigade.'
I got him on the military extension at Aldershot. 'What the fuck's going on, Frank? He's killed a guy?'
'No, no, no. A guy died on the Everest trip. Nish was with him.'
'Thank fuck for that – I had visions of him locked away and—'
There was a brief silence at the other end of the line. Then: 'He has been. It was his girlfriend he tried to kill.'
'Anna? What the fuck's he playing at?'
'I don't know. He stabbed her. She's still alive. He hadn't slept for days. He had a complete breakdown. He thinks everyone's out to kill him. He thinks Anna's the devil. He's paranoid . . .'
'Where is he now? What can we do?'
'It's all been taken care of. He's been in an asylum in Chamonix.'
'France?'
'They were on holiday with Harry and his girlfriend.'
'He been charged?'
'I don't think so. They brought him back to the UK. I'm praying for him.'
'They?'
'Harry, Des and Schwepsy. They hired lawyers to get him out of there and into a London clinic. He's getting great support, but he's lost his mind.'
His nightmare had started on the Everest trip. There were twenty-four of them on the attempt to climb the North Face. The NASA guy, Karl Henize, was a keen amateur climber. Nish was the only inexperienced one.
Henize was an astronaut-scientist. He'd been on the support crew for Apollo 15 and Skylab missions, orbiting the Earth something like 120 times. During the Skylab-2 mission, he had been responsible for operating the Shuttle's robot arm, and conducting several scientific experiments. He was also a big-time astronomer with loads of technical papers to his name. He'd discovered more than two thousand stars, designated by the letters 'HE' in star catalogues. The boy was a bit of a star himself.
They were all humping up the North Face of Everest when, at about 17,000 feet, Nish began to suffer a severe headache. By 18,000 feet he was dropping behind. His head pounded. He vomited. His pulse rate shot up to 100 beats per minute. It was altitude sickness. His only chance was to go back down to base camp, reacclimatize, and start again.
He recovered after a couple of days and set off again to meet the rest of the lads, who by now were way above 20,000 feet. They'd stopped to acclimatize for a week before the next bound.
Nish was at 24,000 feet when he met Harry and a couple of other lads coming down. They were carrying Karl in a Gamow bag, a portable hyperbaric chamber. Through the small plastic window, Nish could see that his lips were blue and his ey
elids were fluttering.
The bag had to be continuously pumped about once every five seconds – not to maintain pressure, but to flush fresh air through and prevent CO2 build-up. At some point the next day, it was Nish's turn on the pump. He talked to Karl about his time in Africa with Harry, trying to keep his mind working even if his body wasn't. It was to no avail. They buried Karl on the mountainside under rocks and shale, as he had requested.
Nish was physically shattered and also devastated that yet again someone had died on his watch. And his problems were far from over. No sooner had he left one nightmare behind than he came home to another.
Nish and Anna travelled to France to spend New Year with Harry and his girlfriend, who lived just outside Chamonix. By the time they arrived, Nish was convinced she was the devil, and was out to kill him. He wasn't eating, in case her plan was to poison him. He was skinny as a rake now, a shadow of his former self. He also hadn't slept for seven days. He was a soldier; he was on stag, waiting to be attacked. He had to be really clever and manoeuvre around her, because he knew she could read his mind.
They picked up a car at the airport and headed for Harry's place. Anna drove. Again, Nish had to be hyper-vigilant. At any corner she might drive off the road and throw the car down the mountainside. They'd burst into a ball of flame, and because she was the devil, she would walk out of the blaze with not a scratch on her and he'd be burnt to a crisp.
As they came into Chamonix, Nish spotted a group of gendarmes on a street corner. He got her to stop the car. He jumped out and ran over to them, fucked, emaciated, face gaunt through lack of sleep. He couldn't speak French, and they couldn't speak English. He pushed and shoved to try to help them understand, but something seemed to be getting lost in translation. Why didn't they understand she was trying to kill him? She'd cast a spell over them; they were now on her side.
As the confrontation escalated into a gangfuck, Anna phoned Harry. He turned up just in time to save Nish from being arrested or beaten.
Harry got them to their hotel, but Nish just lay there on stag: his eighth night in a row without sleep. In the twilight hours it came to Nish that he was the chosen one, and must take up the sword against evil.
In the morning, Anna confronted him. 'Nish, you must eat something.' She tossed him a tangerine.
Not a fucking chance. He threw it back at her and she caught it.
She's sharp, he thought. As she would be: she's the devil.
Did he have to eat all of it? he wondered. If he ate all of it, it was going to kill him. If he only ate a bit, it might appease her. He might manage to stay on her good side, so she wouldn't turn him into a ball of flame. But once that was done, she'd have to die. He'd have to kill her. If not, she would also kill his son, Jason.
The four of them hit the slopes, and by now Nish was pleading with Harry not to leave his side, not even when he went to the toilet. Harry was the only person he could trust to protect him. He knew Harry was too smart to be taken over by Anna and drawn into her web.
On the drive back Nish started barking at the moon. He couldn't contain his thoughts any longer. He told the three of them that Anna had to die, and he explained his plan. As they came into Chamonix, Harry pulled up at a hospital where he knew one of the doctors.
Nish saw at once that Harry and his girlfriend had fallen under Anna's spell. They were now on her side. He couldn't hang about. He had to kill her before another moment was lost. As they walked into the hospital, he grabbed a pair of scissors from a tray and lunged at her. The blades glanced off her head and dug into her shoulder. He pulled them out as she went down screaming. He needed to get them into her eyes to kill her quickly.
Harry took Nish to the ground, just as the scissors sank into Anna's chest.
Nish was triumphant. 'Did I kill her? Did I kill her?'
Harry held him in a headlock until help arrived. Nish was sedated. The police handcuffed him and took him to a psychiatric clinic. He was locked in a white-painted room that reminded him of an ice cave. It had a ventilation hole high in one wall. The shining white guard who always stood outside was an iceman.
96
July 1994
I banged on the door of Nish's house in Hereford. I could hear the mid-morning talk-show waffle coming through the windows. He never actually watched the programmes. He just wanted them on so the noise and flickering screen stopped him thinking too deeply.
Even his smile of greeting was laboured. He was painfully thin. His whole body shape had changed. He would have been more at home on an Oxfam poster than an ad for Calvin Klein. His eyes were wet and dull, not sharp and feral. The wolf had fled.
As we headed past the brown sofa and the minging duvet he spent his life curled up beneath, a Daz commercial sparked up on the TV. 'You need to get hold of some of that, mate. Give that duvet a treat.'
He hardly ever left the front room. His world revolved around that brown velour sofa peppered with cigarette holes, and the duvet that looked like he'd found it on the towpath.
Overflowing ashtrays and plates of half-eaten toasted cheese sandwiches covered almost every horizontal surface in the kitchen. At least the drugs were making him hungry – after a fashion.
That wasn't the only side effect. He was like a zombie a lot of the time, yet he couldn't sleep. He had muscle spasms and shakes, a dry mouth and blurred vision. Chlorpromazine, one of the cocktail of anti-psychotic drugs he was taking, was a stupefier. It made him drowsy and lethargic. He still thought the whole world was against him, but he couldn't be arsed to do anything about it.
The kitchen looked like he'd furnished it from a car-boot sale, which he probably had. Cups and mugs were piled in the sink waiting for the washing-up fairy to visit. His white plastic garden chair still stood opposite the fridge. He would sit there and have a conversation with it if there wasn't anything on TV. He liked having a chat with the fridge now and again; it agreed with everything he said.
All the windows were shut, and the place stank of cigarettes and farts, but it wasn't funny any more.
Nish could only recall brief flashes of what had happened after the stabbing. He had a memory of lying on the floor with people holding his arms and somebody sitting on his back. He could hear Harry's voice, telling him everything was OK, not to fight it. The floor was cold against his cheek, and there was a strong smell of polish and disinfectant. For a while he thought he was back in the corridors of Para Depot as a young recruit.
Anna recovered and flew back to America, but things were touch and go for Nish. The French doctors wanted him sectioned; the police wanted to bring charges. His head was a car wreck. From the window of his ice cave, he had become preoccupied with fixing which way was north. He wanted to know if he had to cross the Alps to reach safety. He knew it was going to be difficult, dressed in just pyjamas and a dressing-gown, but these things had to be planned down to the last detail.
Harry had slipped into international-rescue mode. He called Des, Schwepsy, Loel Guinness and Saad Harari, Nish's old boss from Washington. The best Parisian lawyers were trying to sort something out.
Weak light penetrated the greasy net curtains behind the sink as he picked about in the landfill with nicotine-stained fingers. He scratched his stomach through his open denim shirt. 'Want a brew?'
'Yeah, why not, mate? But you going to give them a rinse this time?'
The milk would be off, as usual, and at least a dozen diseases clung to the bottom of each mug. Outside in the garden, the fence was still down after last year's storm. The grass was high enough to hide a hippo. The poor guy was fucked. It was all he could do to turn on the tap.
