The Exit Club: Book 3: The Professionals

by Shaun Clarke

  Diane glanced at the grinning Paddy. ‘Then perhaps we’ll meet again,’ she said, turning back to Marty.

  ‘I can’t imagine where.’

  ‘Paddy says you’re a very dear friend, so we might meet right here, some time in the future.’

  ‘That won’t be for a long time, Miss Lavery. Not until I come back from…’

  He stopped himself short, but she had noticed the slipup. ‘Ah! So you are going away! Now where might that be?’

  ‘A regular little bloodhound,’ Paddy said. ‘Never trust a reporter. Marty’s lips are sealed tight, my dear.’

  Diane smiled. ‘I’m not as bad as he makes out, Marty. Naturally, I can’t help asking questions, but I’m sure you can deal with that.’

  ‘I’m sure I can,’ Marty said, attracted to, and disconcerted by, that steady green gaze and slightly teasing smile, her combination of shrewd intelligence and girlish flirtatiousness. Clearly, she was a woman of broad experience, both in and out of bed. ‘So who do you write for?’

  ‘I freelance for The Times and the Telegraph. Plus some work for various European newspapers. As Paddy said, it’s mostly politics. Profiles and interviews. The deepening immorality of our political parties, right and left. Increasing government repression. The growing links between politics and big business – that kind of shit.’

  ‘Which is why she’s interested in the SAS,’ Paddy said. ‘So don’t tell her a damned thing.’

  ‘Why the SAS?’ Marty asked. ‘We’re not political. We’re just a bunch of highly trained soldiers, doing what we’re told.’

  ‘You’re a quasi-secret regiment,’ Diane corrected him.

  ‘Secrecy’s vital to national defence, Miss Lavery, and not just used to cover up corruption. There’s nothing corrupt about the SAS. We’re an honourable regiment.’

  ‘It’s MrsLavery, actually.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘My husband and I have been separated for years, but we never divorced.’

  ‘Oh… I see.’

  She smiled at him, not concerned. ‘Anyway, I’m not at all sure that there’s such a thing as an honourable regiment. Mind you, Paddy did tell me that you’re one of the most moral men he’s met. So I thought, since you’re a moral man loyal to the SAS, that you’d be particularly interesting to talk to… My, my, Marty, you’re blushing!’

  Indeed, he was: his cheeks were burning. ‘I’m not all that moral,’ he insisted. ‘I’m just a working-class git who’s been treated well by the regiment and I believe I should do my best in return. That’s all there is to it.’

  ‘That sounds terribly moral to me,’ Diane said.

  ‘And bloody boring,’ Marty said.

  ‘Not boring,’ Paddy said. ‘I never said you were boring. I just said you were a highly principled man and an exceptional soldier.’

  ‘A moral man and highly principled,’ Marty said, embarrassed but also starting to enjoy himself. ‘You make me sound like Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Not Jesus Christ and not boring,’ Paddy said. ‘You have a flamboyant streak tied to old-fashioned moral values, which means there must be a lot of inner conflict, which means you’re not boring.’

  ‘Me flamboyant? You’ve got to be joking! I’m really pretty conservative.’

  ‘Bullshit! I knew you were flamboyant the moment you told me about taking your new wife on a single night’s honeymoon at the Savoy Hotel. Then, of course, in Cairo, you were often seen in the gambling casinos, which was another notable display of flamboyance for someone picking up a lowly private’s wages. And dare I remind you of Tiger Lil’s?’ He turned to Diane Lavery. ‘The most popular soldier’s brothel in Cairo. Not content with spending his money there like the other humble soldiers, he rented his own room and girl for most of his fortnight in Cairo. I thought that showed remarkable initiative as well as flamboyance and – ’

  ‘It also shows a certain wickedness,’ Diane interjected, staring boldly, teasingly, at Marty.

  ‘He said he didn’t want VD,’ Paddy explained, ‘though in fact he simply didn’t want a girl who was on the conveyor belt. He needed a woman all to himself, a regular girlfriend, to convince himself that she wasn’t really a whore.’ He turned back to face Marty. ‘And you’re still like that, my friend, even all these years later. Why, you even married a Chinese Malay, despite official disapproval, which just shows that…’ He tapered off, embarrassed. ‘Damn it, Marty, I’m sorry. I truly am. I didn’t mean to remind you…’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Marty said, though the pain had rushed back in, reminding him that Ann Lim and Ian were gone and would never be coming back. Reminding him, also, that he had seen too little of his wife and child because he was posted overseas so often. Though Ann Lim had never expressed resentment, he had always felt guilty. He felt that guilt now.

  ‘Anyway,’ Paddy continued, trying to lighten the conversation. ‘Flamboyant, puritanical, daring and full of initiative. Not boring at all, my friend. Indeed, if you weren’t in the SAS, I’d surely hire you myself.’

  ‘Hire me for what?’ Marty asked, keen to change the subject. ‘Just what are you planning to do in Civvy Street?’

  ‘TV,’ Paddy replied. ‘Television’s the coming thing. It’s big already, but it’s going to be even bigger and used for much greater things.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘TV’s going to become the quickest and most powerful medium for swaying public opinion and educating the masses. This is as true for the Third World as it is for the West. So, to capitalize on it, I’m forming a film production company to make propaganda documentaries that can be sold to Third World and Middle East governments. Naturally, we’ll offer our services only to democratic heads of state who’ll use our films to combat growing communist influence in their countries. I think that’s worthwhile, don’t you?’

  ‘I didn’t know you cared,’ Diane said dryly.

  ‘I do,’ Paddy responded. ‘I believe in my country, I believe in democracy, and I believe that those are the values the SAS fights for. So I’ll continue the fight in the private sector by producing my films.’

  ‘You’ll also get to travel a lot,’ Marty said.

  ‘Exactly,’ Paddy said.

  After a brief silence, Diane gave Marty a warm smile and then turned back to Paddy. ‘Propaganda can be dangerous and easily bent. If you’re going to make those kind of films, you’re the one who’ll need principles.’

  ‘He has them,’ Marty responded without hesitation. ‘He has them in spades. Much more than me, in fact. He’s your moral man, Diane.’

  ‘He’d better be,’ Diane said without irony.

  ‘Anyway,’ Paddy said, grinning cockily, ‘that’s what I’m planning, so if you decide to retire early, Marty, I’ll give you some kind of job. Right now, however, I’d best be getting back to my other guests. I’ll see you both later.’

  ‘Right,’ Marty said.

  When Paddy had left them to return to the main party, which was increasingly noisy, Diane turned back to Marty. ‘Propaganda, no matter how it starts, invariably turns out crooked in the end. I think Paddy’s going to have to watch his step.’

  ‘Paddy’s the most moral man I know. If he does it, he’ll do it right.’

  ‘You really do respect him, don’t you, Marty?’

  ‘Yes. He taught me everything I know.’

  ‘And of course he’s a moral man.’

  ‘Yes, he is.’

  ‘And do you really believe the SAS is a moral regiment?’ she asked with a steady gaze.

  ‘I believe it’s evolved along moral lines and operates on strict principles. I think it tries to instil those principles in its men, which makes it something special.’

  She stared thoughtfully at him for some time, then nodded and smiled.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you’re a moral man.’

  Marty placed his empty glass on the cluttered table behind him. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I have to go now. I’m not really up to parties these days and – ’ />
  ‘Yes, I know. Paddy told me about your wife and child. I’m really sorry, Marty. It must be terribly hard for you.’

  Shocked that Paddy had told her that, but oddly touched by her comment, Marty nodded and sighed. ‘It’s okay. I get by.’

  ‘Here.’ She reached into her shoulder-bag and withdrew a calling card. ‘Take it. I know I’m being bold, but I’d really like to see you again, when you get back from wherever itis you’re going to. Please, Marty, take it.’

  He took the card and glanced at it, not really seeing it, then slipped it carefully into his wallet.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Thanks. Now I’ve got to be off.’

  ‘You take care.’

  ‘You, too.’ He crossed the crowded room to say goodbye to Paddy and Angela. After wishing them good luck for the future, he started leaving the room, but glanced back just before he left and saw Diane Lavery’s steady green gaze, following his progress. He waved at her and then walked out, still filled with the grief and pain of his dreadful loss, but surprised that she was there in his thoughts. He felt oddly renewed.

  Chapter Nine

  Dressed like an Arab and with his skin tinted dark, Marty almost felt like an Arab. Having driven up to Crater in his deliberately battered and cluttered Volkswagen Beetle Q, he and Taff Hughes had made their way across the packed, noisy souk, or marketplace, in this particular quarter of Aden and were now sitting in an equally crowded square, sipping mint tea and waiting for their target to emerge from the restaurant across the street. Both men were wearing the flowing Arab futah, a robe with long sleeves that fell loosely over the head to hang from the shoulders, all the way to their feet, which, like other exposed skin, had been darkened with a mixture of coffee, lamp-black, iodine and potassium permanganate to make a colouring similar to that of the local Arabs. This had been applied carefully to their faces, hands, wrists and all the way up their arms, to ensure that no white skin would be glimpsed should the loose sleeves of the futah rise too high on the arm. As they were wearing Arab sandals instead of shoes, they had also dyed their feet, ankles and legs up as far as the knees. Finally, even though they were wearing the Arab head-dress, the shemagh, they had dyed their hair black to ensure that their ‘whiteness’ would not be exposed by loose strands.

  Strapped in the cross-draw position under their futahs was a holstered Browning 9mm High Power handgun that would be used for this ‘double tap’ assassination when their target emerged. They had no other weapons.

  Sitting with Taff at a table deliberately chosen because it was against a wall, though close to the restaurant he was watching, Marty was aware of the fact that to get out of here he would have to retrace his steps back through a rabbit warren of narrow streets and souks, all packed with shops, bazaars, coffee houses, cafés, Arabs and animals. Here in the square, many of the Arabs were playing draughts or other games at tables placed outside the coffee houses and cafés. Others were smoking from opium pipes. Nearly all were drinking mint tea. However, the many alleys that led into the square were filled with burning braziers and pots of cooking food or boiling tea, outdoor tables and chairs, and a veritable flood of Arabs. More importantly, men often herded cattle through the narrow, packed streets, letting them ease their way through the tide of people, including many children and their veiled mothers. That would make getting out in a hurry dangerous and difficult.

  Nevertheless, as he sat there sipping his mint tea and mumbling monosyllabic greetings in Arabic to the Arabs greeting him as they passed by, Marty felt almost regretful that this would be his final ‘double tap’ before returning to Bradbury Lines in Hereford. He had been here for many months now, first up in the Radfan mountains, then in Aden, and now he wiled away the time by thinking back on how he had come to be here, in the middle of this packed square in the highly dangerous Crater area, dressed up and made up like an Arab.

  It was a long way from Borneo.

  Even as he sat there, the war in Borneo was drawing to its close. After A Squadron’s cross-border operations with the Gurkhas, plans had been drawn up for even more ambitious ‘Claret’ raids. However, in March 1966, less than a year ago, a military government had replaced the aggressive President Sukarno and the war eased a little. A treaty was concluded between Indonesia and Malaya the following August, bringing to a definite end an ‘undeclared’ war that had lasted nearly four years, killing over a hundred Commonwealth soldiers, including however, casualties.

  The so-called‘Confrontation’ in Borneo had shown the necessity of having troops who could solve the unique problems raised by an ‘undeclared’ war where British forces could not overtly take the fight into enemy territory. It had also confirmed once and for all that the kind of hearts-and-minds campaign devised by the SAS in Malaya could work wonders where direct members of the SAS. The Indonesians, had suffered five times that number of military action was not a viable option.

  That option, however, was not viable here in Aden where, though the war was likewise ‘undeclared’, it was fought in circumstances that did not allow for heartsand-minds campaigns, being engaged either in the sunscorched mountains of Radfan or right here in the packed streets and souks of the port town of Aden as a very dangerous CQB conflict.

  Marty had spent the previous couple of months either in the SAS forward operating base in Thumier, located in the Radfan region, fifty kilometres from the border with North Yemen, or up in the fiercely hot, parched Radfan mountains of the interior. Flown from RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire to the RAF base at Khormaksar, Aden, in a Hercules C-130 transport, he and the other members of D Squadron were packed into four Bedford trucks, in a column guarded front and rear by British Army Saladin armoured cars, each equipped by British Army Saladin armoured cars, each equipped inch machine gun. They were then driven about a hundred kilometres through the hellish heat of midday, over relatively flat plains of sun-baked limestone, sandstone and lava fields, to the FOB at Thumier.

  The base was little more than a haphazard collection of tents pitched in a sandy area surrounded by high ridges, swept constantly by dust. It was protected by sandbagged gun emplacements nicknamed ‘hedgehogs’ because they were three-inch mortars machine guns. Though the area was inaccessible to fixed-wing aircraft, it contained a flattened area of desert that was being used as a landing zone for two helicopters: a Wessex Mark 1 and a Sikorsky Whirlwind. There was also a motor pool containing Bedford trucks, a couple of Saladin armoured cars of bristling with 25-pounder guns, and Browning 0.5-inch heavy the kind that had escorted the convoy, and some modified 4-by-4 Willys jeeps with armoured Perspex windscreens and Browning heavy machine guns mounted to the front. The larger tents were being used as a quartermaster’s store, armoury, NAAFI canteen and surgery; the smaller tents were for make-do bashas, or sleeping quarters, located near portable showers and boxed-in, roofless chemical latrines, naturally called ‘thunder boxes’. Beyond the tents lay the flat, scorched desert and the purple-hazed mountains.

  ‘A typical FOB,’ Tommy Taylor said, spitting languidly into the dust around his feet, still proud of his corporal status and now pretty confident as a medical specialist. ‘A right bloody pisshole.’

  ‘I don’t mind it,’ Taff Hughes responded. ‘It looks okay to me.’

  ‘You like anywhere that isn’t remotely normal,’ Marty told him, ‘so this place is just another home- fromhome to you.’

  ‘I’ve known worse,’ Taff said.

  Other SAS squadrons had already been and gone, having put down a tribal uprising in Radfan and also protected military traffic on the Dhala Road, which linked Yemen to Aden and was the MSR for the Federal Regular Army (FRA). Replacing those earlier SAS squadrons, Marty and his fellow squadron members, commanded by Captain Michael Keating of the Somerset and Cornwall Light Infantry, were initially tasked with giving back-up to A Squadron in Radfan, beginning with a series of reconnaissance patrols.

  Moving out at first light in Bedford three-tonners driven by men from the Royal Corps of Transport and driven by m
en from the Royal Corps of Transport and inch Bren guns, they had passed through an area scattered with coconut and doum palms, acacias, tall ariatas and tamarisks, then bounced and rattled over parched ground strewn with potholes and stones, until, about thirty minutes later, they arrived at the lower slopes of the purple-hazed Radfan mountain range. From there, wearing DPM (disruptive-pattern material) cotton shirt and trousers, ankle-length rubber-soled desert boots and an Arab shemagh to protected the nose, mouth and eyes from the sun, sand and insects, they had hiked into the mountains, as heavily burdened as donkeys with twenty-seven kilogram Bergen rucksacks, water bottles, ammunition belts, hand grenades, spare batteries for the tactical radio, the ubiquitous Browning High Power Handgun, a wide variety of assault rifles and dismantled heavier support weapons, including various machine guns and mortars.

  The Radfan mountains could sometimes be as hot as 150 Fahrenheit, were constantly windblown and covered with drifting dust filled with flies and mosquitoes. Some of the men vomited from nausea and exhaustion during that first climb up the wind-smoothed rocks of the slopes, often slipping back on loose gravel or tripping in dips and holes covered by sand, soil or shrubs. Eventually, however, they reached the summit, about 4,500 metres high, where they rested from the blazing sun under triangular bashas, made from Yshaped sticks and poncho sheets, quenching their thirst with the juice from euphorbia, the bulbous plant that hangs from the branches of a tree resembling a cactus, and from the plum-like jujube fruit, which could also be eaten.

  After resting, eating, and cleaning and oiling their weapons, which were filled with dust and sand, they were given firing practice under extremely arduous conditions: forced to crawl over sharp, hot rocks that could, as they had been warned, be concealing snakes, scorpions and other venomous insects, and which certainly burned them and cut their skin. They were also taught how to time their shots for when the constantly swirling dust and sand had blown away long enough for them to see their targets clearly and to fire accurately into the sunlight by estimating the position of a target by its shadow, rather than trying to look directly at it.