Bloody Heroes

by Damien Lewis

  At 2.20 p.m. the captain of the QE2 gave the order to ‘Stop engines’ and made his announcement to the passengers that a bomb threat had been received the previous evening. British soldiers were about to parachute into the sea and search the ship. Until this time, none of the ship’s passengers had been any the wiser to the drama being played out all around them. By the time the C-130 reached the QE2 the weather had taken a turn for the worse. Conditions were well beyond safety limits for parachute jumps into water, but the mission had to go ahead regardless. In a highly unorthodox manoeuvre, the C-130 had to make two drop runs, descending to below the three hundred feet cloud base to get the ship visual, then claw its way back into the overcast sky.

  All four men made the jump – including a rather relieved looking Captain Williams – and were picked up by the QE2’s lifeboat. The search of the liner turned up one suspicious container, which was blown up, but it turned out to be a false alarm and no bombs were found. The $350,000 in cash was delivered to a pickup point, which was covertly staked out by the FBI, but the blackmailer never called to collect his cash. And the QE2 sailed on to dock safely in Southampton.

  Afterwards, the operation was analysed and dissected in detail by the SBS. The results of that analysis were used to help draw up an operational model for any future assaults on a ship at sea. But that was then and this was now. The 1972 QE2 assault had been a four-man jump to board a friendly ship that was stationary. Mat and the rest of the lads were well aware that they faced a very different threat: they were assaulting a hostile ship crewed by terrorists and sailing the high seas.

  Just as he was dropping off to sleep Mat felt a tug on his sleeve. The SBS doctor was handing him a couple of white tablets and a plastic cup of water.

  ‘What’re these?’ he asked, sleepily.

  ‘NAPS tablets,’ the doctor replied. ‘Sort of an antidote, just in case there is any nasty stuff on board that ship.’

  Mat glanced around at the other lads in his team to see if they were taking the tablets. He had heard all the horror stories about the NAPS (nerve agent pre-treatment set) tablets British soldiers had been given at the start of the first Gulf War. They were being blamed in part for Gulf War syndrome, the mysterious illness that some of the Gulf veterans had been suffering from ever since.

  ‘Bottoms up,’ said Mucker, with a grin, as he threw the tablets into the back of his throat and took a gulp of the water. That decided it for the rest of the team, and Mat, Jamie and Tom quickly followed suit.

  ‘Which of you guys is the medic on your team?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘That’s me,’ Mat volunteered.

  ‘OK, take these with you when you go in,’ the doctor said, handing Mat a couple of British Army mark 1 antidote kits, which included two spring-driven injectors. ‘Those are shots of atropine,’ he added, pointing to the two phials of liquid. ‘I take it you know how to use them?’

  ‘No worries, doc,’ Mat replied.

  He knew very well what atropine was for. It was the only known antidote to nerve poisons. Holy fuck! So that was what they feared was on board that ship – some sort of nerve agent.

  Pretty shortly, all of Mat’s team started to feel sick – nauseous and feverish – and they could only put it down to whatever was in the NAPS tablets. As they tossed and turned trying to get some sleep, they cursed the doctor. Eventually, Mat, who was feeling the worst of all, gave up trying to sleep and started to double-check his assault gear. His body was having a bad reaction to the cocktail of drugs that the NAPS tablets contained. But on top of the nausea and fever, something else was bothering him.

  As he sat there messing around with his gear, Mat kept replaying in his mind the last time he’d been into action alongside the SAS. Several months earlier, they’d been on a joint marine counter-terrorism training exercise with the Hereford lads. But while the Hereford lads were very good on land and in the air, marine operations – like assaults against a vessel on the high seas – weren’t their speciality. Three SAS lads had either forgotten to take their STASS (short-term air supply system) emergency breathing bottles with them, or deliberately chosen to leave them behind. Either way, it was a mistake that had almost cost Mat and his mates their lives.

  The ship that they had then been practise-assaulting was called the Maiden, and she was steaming off the Bournemouth coast with a skeleton crew on board. Mat had been on the lead chopper, a Chinook CH47, and he’d had three blokes from the SAS alongside him plus ten fellow SBS. As they had come in alongside the Maiden the chopper had flared out to a hover. All the guys had been standing in line ready to fast-rope down on to the vessel and waiting for the aircraft’s loadmaster to give them the Go! Go! Go! But suddenly Mat had heard what sounded like rounds from a paintball gun slamming into the side of the chopper – ‘Pzzzt! Pzzzt! Pzzzt!’

  Holy fuck! The fuckers are shooting at us, was the first thought that’d flashed through his head. That wasn’t in the bloody mission brief.

  But a split second later he’d realised with a shock that the noise was actually the rear rotor of the CH47 hitting the ship’s superstructure – the Pzzzt! Pzzzt! Pzzzt! being the sound made by the rotors shearing off as they smashed into the steel mast and rigging. Immediately, the chopper started yawing over and going down towards the sea. The hold of the giant aircraft was filled with the ear-piercing whine of the massive turbines straining to keep the aircraft airborne, while one set of its giant rotor blades spun round and round, shattered and useless. Suddenly, the calm in the rear of the chopper had been replaced by frenzied chaos, as fourteen blokes started to frantically rip off their fast-rope gloves and struggled to remove their respirators (gas masks).

  Pulling a knife from his belt, Mat began slicing through his webbing and his MP5 machine-gun strap, in an effort to get some of the weight off him before the stricken chopper plunged into the heavy seas below. But just at that moment, the three Hereford lads had made a break for the door. Luckily, the CH47’s loadie (the loadmaster) was faster than they were and slammed the door lock into place. Mat and some of the other SBS lads dived on the SAS blokes and wrestled them to the floor of the stricken aircraft.

  Mat was well aware that if the SAS lads jumped then they were as good as dead. The chopper was still some hundred feet or more above the water and the three SAS soldiers were carrying a lot of heavy kit. They would plummet into the sea like stones. Even if they did survive the drop, they were still at least half a mile out from the shoreline – which was one hell of a swim when weighed down with several dozen pounds of cumbersome, waterlogged gear. And, presuming they did survive the fall, once they surfaced they could easily have the Chinook going down on top of them. The chopper’s rotors – which would still keep on churning even under water – would chew them up into little pieces.

  ‘Let me outta here! Fucking let me out!’ one of the SAS lads was screaming.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, NO!’ Mat roared, as he held him down on the floor. ‘Fuckin’ sit down and get ready, cos we’re ditching.’

  ‘But we’ve no fuckin’ STASS bottles!’ the SAS bloke cried out.

  ‘Get back in your seats. Share air with our guys. Remember your ditching-at-sea drill.’

  Just at that moment, the pilot of the stricken aircraft had come in over the intercom. ‘As you can tell, we’re in a spot of bother,’ he announced. ‘I’m going to try and put her down on the shoreline but brace yourself for the impact just in case we go down in the drink.’

  Somehow, the pilot had managed to keep the chopper more or less level, steer it away from the ship and turn it back towards the beach. But not for long. By the time Mat and his mates had got everyone strapped into their seats the chopper was less than seventy feet above the ocean waves. They could feel the aircraft losing power and accelerating into a slide towards the sea. Suddenly, there was a sickening impact as the underside front of the chopper ploughed into the water, the force of it throwing the men forward in their seats. Within seconds, the massive machine was sinking fast. A
s it did so it began a slow-motion somersault, the top-heavy turbines and rotors flipping the aircraft upside down and dragging it, roofwards, towards the seabed.

  Every special forces soldier dreads the moment when a chopper carrying him ditches in the open ocean. He may have trained for it over and over again – learning the strict evacuation procedure that must be followed – but that only makes it marginally less terrifying. The eleven SBS and three SAS soldiers remained strapped in their seats as the chopper plunged towards the seabed, waiting for it to hit rock bottom. Suspended upside down as they were in their seat straps, the water started gushing in all around them and was soon up to their necks. Now was the time to use the STASS bottles.

  The STASS gas canister was strapped to the operator’s chest webbing, for ease of access in an emergency. Now, each operator grabbed his beer-can-sized STASS bottle, clamped his lips around the rubber mouthpiece, squeezed the emergency operating ring and started to breathe. Only in this case, in marked departure from standard operating procedures (SOPs), the three SAS lads had no STASS bottles with them and were forced to share air with their buddies from Poole. A STASS bottle provides about twenty good, deep breaths of air – less, if you’re hyperventilating with the shock of a crash landing at sea.

  Finally, after what seemed like an age, there was a heavy Crunch! as the chopper hit rock bottom, followed by the groaning of collapsing metal as it settled on to the seabed. Quick as they could the men grabbed a breath from their STASS bottles and unbuckled their seat belts. Then they kicked out the emergency escape windows, took one last look in the murky gloom to get their bearings and headed for the open sea. It is still possible to use the STASS bottle as you swim, by holding it in one hand and taking short breaths. But in this case, Mat and two of his mates found themselves swimming buddy-buddy fashion with the three SAS lads, and sharing the last of their air with them as they made a break for the surface.

  Luckily, the pilot of the CH47 had managed to nurse the stricken chopper close enough to the shoreline so that she had settled in relatively shallow water. All of the SBS and SAS soldiers and the aircrew made it out of the aircraft and to the surface alive, whereupon they had a short swim to the safety of the shore. But they’d been lucky. If the chopper had ditched a few seconds earlier and a few hundred metres further out to sea, it could have been a completely different story.

  As Mat repacked his explosive charges and assault gear into his rucksack, he thought about those SAS boys and why they had failed to bring their STASS bottles with them. On the coming mission they would be crossing miles of open sea before they hit the target ship. If one of those choppers ditched in the drink it would be a long way down to the seabed. And no one would be offering to share their STASS bottles – for to do so would be akin to signing one’s own death warrant. Putting his worries to one side Mat rolled over on his camp bed and decided to try to get some sleep.

  As the seventy men of the assault force spent a restless night at Yeovilton, their target, the MV Nisha, was steaming doggedly up the English Channel towards London. But how had British intelligence – and hence the SBS and SAS – been alerted to the potentially lethal cargo this unremarkable ship was feared to be carrying? Following the terror attacks of 9/11, allied intelligence networks – chiefly American, British and Norwegian – had been tracing the whereabouts of twenty merchant ships dubbed the ‘phantom fleet’. As passenger aircraft had been put to such horrific ends in the New York terror attacks, so it was now feared that cargo ships plying the world’s seas could be the next weapons of mass destruction in al-Qaeda’s arsenal. And by early November 2001, the ship that was at the focus of the most intensive scrutiny was the MV Nisha.

  The MV Nisha was a battered old tramp steamer – a ‘tramp’ being a ship that moves from one port to another, depending on the business she obtains. In August and September 2001, she had been shuttling back and forth across the Red Sea between Africa and the Middle East. But on 4 November, the Mauritius Sugar Syndicate advertised a 26,000-tonne sugar cargo that needed to be taken from Port Louis, to the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery, in Silvertown, east London. On 8 November, the MV Nisha departed the Red Sea bound for Mauritius to collect the sugar cargo and ship it to London.

  But for some time now there had been trouble brewing in the otherwise peaceful tropical paradise of Mauritius. The authorities there had recently been forced to declare that the Islamic group Hezbollah was operating a terrorist cell in their country, and planning to attack Christian churches and government buildings. The US Embassy, based in Port Louis, the Mauritian capital, had issued a terrorism alert to its citizens living in Mauritius and to any tourists planning to visit this popular holiday destination off the east coast of Africa. And the Mauritian government had begun rushing through new anti-terrorism legislation designed to enable it to outlaw groups like Hezbollah.

  On the morning that the MV Nisha was steaming out of Port Louis bound for London, a Mauritian Security Services source reported to his CIA handler with some highly sensitive information. He proceeded to tell the CIA agent that a large quantity of Lannate, a pesticide, had been procured by two Hezbollah operatives in Mauritius. The Mauritian authorities had been placed on high alert, but the Lannate had already been spirited out of the country. It had been secreted on board a merchant ship, the MV Nisha, which had just set sail for London with a cargo of sugar.

  After thanking his informant in the usual way, the CIA agent turned his attention to analysing the intelligence that had just fallen into his hands. What was its significance? he asked himself. How could Lannate be of use to Hezbollah? Could the pesticide somehow be deployed as a weapon of mass terror? If so, the ultimate target of such an attack would appear to be London, as that was the final destination of the vessel. Of course, there was always the possibility that the MV Nisha might be hijacked by the terrorists en route and forced to change course. But any self-respecting terrorist would know that an abrupt change of course by the ship would attract the attention of Europe’s counter-terrorist authorities. No. There was little doubt in the CIA agent’s mind: the target of an attack by the MV Nisha had to be London.

  Within a matter of hours the CIA agent had started to build up a picture of the potential terrorist threat. Lannate, he discovered, is the trade name for a pesticide whose chemical name is methomyl. Methomyl comes from a class of chemicals called carbamates, some of which are nerve poisons. They disrupt nerve signal transmissions by blocking the human enzyme acetyl-cholinesterase. Such nerve poisons were first discovered by German scientists in the 1930s. They were subsequently developed by the Nazis during the Second World War to make the nerve agents sarin, soman and tabun. After the war, several acetylcholinesterases, including methomyl, were developed as pesticides for use in agriculture. Though less deadly than the nerve agents, methomyl has ‘acute mammalian toxicity’. In other words, it is very poisonous to humans.

  In fact, long before the CIA agent’s suspicions were aroused methomyl had been identified by allied intelligence as one of several chemicals that could be utilised by terrorists to create a ‘poor man’s chemical weapon’. Methomyl can be absorbed through the skin, is harmful to inhale and can kill if swallowed. The effects of methomyl poisoning are disturbingly similar to those of a nerve agent attack: stomach cramps, involuntary urination and/or defecation, muscular tremors, staggering gait, pinpoint pupils, slow heartbeat, difficulty breathing, convulsions, possible coma and death.

  But any terrorist wishing to deploy methomyl as a chemical agent to attack London would first have to ‘weaponise’ the highly toxic material. This would involve transforming the chemical into a form that could enter the bodies of targeted people in sufficient quantities to kill them. The only way of doing this over a large area would be to contaminate the air that people were breathing. In the case of a solid such as methomyl, this would mean dispersing the chemical as an airborne cloud so fine that it would be blown by the wind on to the target. If a terrorist could find a way of doing just that, then an
attack utilising methomyl could cause widespread terror, injury and death. And it just so happened that the main cargo of the MV Nisha – sugar – burns fiercely once set alight. In fact, sugar is a well-known ingredient, when mixed with certain other commonly available chemicals, of the improvised explosive devices frequently used by terrorists. The question the CIA agent was forced to ask was this: was the ship now steaming its way towards London some sort of crude, but massive, chemical bomb?

  Two days after the MV Nisha had set sail, the CIA agent decided it was time to pass his intelligence up the food chain to his bosses at the CIA’s HQ, in Langley, Virginia. From there, the agent’s report was passed to the CIA’s sister organisation in the UK, MI6. Once MI6 officers started to examine the CIA’s report, it immediately started ringing alarm bells with them. MI6 analysts now began to scrutinise the MV Nisha themselves, tracing the exact route the ship would take to reach its final destination, the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery in London.

  The agents quickly realised that the MV Nisha would have to travel along the Thames, passing by Canary Wharf, the home of London’s tallest building and its City financial district. The potential terrorist scenario was becoming ever more terrifying: a cargo ship pulling into a Thames-side dock, carrying terrorists ready to detonate a poor man’s nerve agent bomb in the heart of London. The consequences of such an attack were unthinkable. Such a device had the potential to kill and injure thousands, poisoning a huge area of London and forcing the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of terrified people from the largest city in Europe.

  For a full seventy-two hours prior to the SBS being warned of the MV Nisha assault, an RAF Nimrod MR2 surveillance aircraft had been shadowing the vessel as it ploughed its way up the Atlantic, off the French coast. The Cabinet Office Briefing Room had been placed on full alert, so that it could provide strategic command and control for any measures that would need to be taken against the ship. Government ministers and top MOD officials were deliberating how best to deal with the perceived threat, as the ship steamed onwards towards London. The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was being kept informed of every twist and turn as the terrorist drama unfolded. With the MV Nisha rapidly approaching the British coastline, there was only one way that she could be stopped: a lightning assault by the combined forces of the SBS and SAS.