Soldier E: Sniper Fire in Belfast

by Shaun Clarke

  Cranfield just grinned. ‘You’ll have time for one more before closing,’ he said. ‘Then you have to be good boys. So! Why this emergency, late-night briefing?’

  ‘Do tell us, boss!’ Lampton responded.

  After glancing automatically at the sombre Captain Dubois, Cranfield turned back to his men. ‘The first thing I should say is that you twelve are here only as an advance party. In a few weeks the whole of D Squadron, numbering seventy-five men, is going to be shipped in, but in the meantime you have to carry the load – and over the next couple of weeks that could become rather heavy.’

  ‘Then give it to the British Army,’ Gumboot said. ‘They’re all brawn and no brains.’

  Captain Dubois flushed, then managed a tight grin. Cranfield, whose grin was more genuine, waited until the laughter had died down before continuing: ‘The second thing I should tell you is that we’re not just here for routine patrols. Our brief is to cleanse Belfast and south Armagh of the IRA – completely, once and for all.’

  When the surprised murmuring had subsided, Sergeant Lampton said: ‘That sounds pretty ambitious, boss.’

  ‘Ambitious, but not impossible. I feel that we’re now in a position to poke a hole in the dam wall, then split it wide open. We have some of the most important IRA men in our sights and we’re going to take them out. When we’ve done so, we’ll have dealt a decisive blow to their morale and won ourselves a propaganda victory of such dimensions that it could turn the tide wholly in our favour.’

  ‘Just how important are these men, boss?’ Ricketts asked. ‘And who are they, exactly?’

  ‘We have reason to believe they’re the four-man PIRA active service unit that recently topped ten of our best sources.’

  Ricketts glanced quizzically at Sergeant Lovelock, who offered a slight, knowing grin. Then Ricketts returned his gaze to Lieutenant Cranfield. ‘Is it true that those deaths may have been the cause of Corporal Phillips’s suicide?’

  ‘This subject was raised at the last briefing, Sergeant, but it’s still not up for discussion. The reason for Corporal Phillips’s suicide remains unknown, though we assume it was stress. I’m not at liberty, however, to discuss the work he was doing,’ He nodded at Sergeant Lovelock, who stood up, walked around his desk, and distributed the manila folders to all the troopers. ‘The men we’re after,’ Cranfield said, ‘are PIRA members Michael Quinn, Patrick Mulgrew, Seamus McGrath and John Houlihan. You’ll find photos of them in those folders, along with intelligence reports on each individual. Quinn is the leader of this four-man ASU. Our job is to take them out as soon as possible.’

  ‘And put them in Long Kesh?’ Lampton asked.

  ‘No,’ Cranfield said, taking a deep breath and slowly letting it out again. ‘Our job is to cancel them completely without breaking the law.’

  The men glanced at one another, surprised. Some of them tried to cover their discomfort at the silence by studying the photographs in the folders. Eventually Parker broke the silence in his customary flat tones: ‘What’s the strategy, boss?’

  ‘For this operation,’ Captain Dubois said, ‘you men are going to be kitted out tomorrow. At dawn the day after, the army is going to do a cordon-and-search sweep of the lower Falls Road, with particular emphasis on the street where Michael Quinn lives. Quite deliberately, we’re going to make this sweep more thorough than most, using hundreds of troops and making a great show of searching every house – after throwing their occupants temporarily out into the street and frisking the men on the pavements, in full view of their wives and kids. While all this is going on, causing a great deal of confusion, a four-man SAS team will take over the attic of the house of one of our touts, located directly opposite Quinn’s place. At the same time, army surveillance specialists will be planting miniaturized audio and video recording devices in Quinn’s house.’

  ‘Why not just place the OP in Quinn’s attic?’ Jock asked.

  ‘Because Quinn’s a hard man, very experienced, and that’s the first place he’ll check when we leave. Nor can we bug his phone in the ordinary manner. But he won’t think to look for other miniaturized surveillance devices, some of which will be interacting with the surveillance equipment in the OP across the street.’

  ‘Understood, boss,’ Jock said. ‘What about the rest of us? The remaining eight.’

  ‘Quinn has a country cottage in south Armagh,’ Cranfield said, ‘not far from here, close to the border. While the covert OP is keeping tabs on his comings and goings in the Falls, including what’s said and done inside his house, the remaining eight men will do the same in two rural OPs located near the cottage – one overlooking the road between the cottage and Belfast, the other on the road that leads to Dublin.’

  ‘For what purpose?’ Martin asked naïvely.

  ‘Both the cottage and the house in the Falls Road are used for Quinn’s ASU meetings. Based on information received from the three OPs regarding his plans and movements, we’ll decide just when and where to take him and the other three out. It has to be both lawful and highly public, so the time and place must be right. Any questions?’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ Ricketts said. ‘Who does what?’

  ‘You’ll be told that tomorrow morning when you report to the Quartermaster’s stores after breakfast. The rest of the day will be spent on weapons testing, familiarization with the surveillance equipment, and general instructions regarding, in particular, the urban OP. A final weapons and kit inspection will be made tomorrow night, immediately after dinner. After the inspection, no one will be allowed to drink or even visit the NAAFI canteen for any reason.’ When the moans and groans had died away, Cranfield asked: ‘Any more questions?’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ Gumboot said. ‘If we’re not allowed to drink tomorrow, can we go and get pissed right now?’

  ‘It’s your last chance, trooper. Just make sure you put those folders in your lockers before you go out. Also make sure you thoroughly acquaint yourselves with their contents by tomorrow evening. Right? Class dismissed!’

  Leaving the briefing room, the men returned to their bashas, where they locked the manila folders in their lockers, then hurried out for a few more pints in the NAAFI canteen.

  Chapter 8

  Saracen armoured cars, armoured troop carriers, or ‘pigs’, and RUC paddy-wagons penetrated the lower Falls, headlights beaming into the morning darkness like the flaring eyes of prehistoric beasts. The convoy rumbled ominously past police stations and army barricades along the Falls Road without interference, then broke up into separate columns that turned into three parallel side streets to begin the early morning cordon-and-search sweep. Within minutes the area was surrounded and the three streets were blocked off.

  His attention drawn not by the rumble of the advancing vehicles, but by an approaching helicopter, a dicker looked up, saw what was happening, and shouted a warning, his youthful voice echoing eerily in the silence.

  Almost immediately, his mates materialized out of dark doorways and narrow, littered alleys of torture and death to add their bellowed warnings to his own.

  Even as sleepy citizens started opening their front doors, many still in their nightwear, British Army and Parachute Regiment troops poured out of the armoured pigs, into dark streets streaked with morning light. Wearing DPM clothing and helmets, but bulked out even more with ArmourShield General Purpose Vests, or GPVs, including ceramic contoured plates, fragmentation vests, and groin panels, they looked like invaders from space. Even worse, they were armed with sledgehammers, SA-80 assault rifles, and Heckler & Koch MP5 sub-machine-guns – the latter particularly effective for use in confined spaces. Others, the ‘snatch’ teams, there to take in the prisoners, looked just as fearsome in full riot gear, including shields and truncheons.

  RUC officers trained at the SAS Counter Revolutionary Warfare Wing at Hereford, wearing flak jackets and carrying either 5.56mm Ruger Mini-14 assault rifles or batons, jumped out of the back of the paddy-wagons and surrounded their vehicles as the soldiers and pa
ratroopers raced in opposite directions along the street, hammering on doors with the butts of their weapons and bawling for the people to come out.

  British Army snipers clambered up on to the roofs from lightweight aluminium assault ladders and from there gave cover with Lee Enfield .303-inch sniper rifles. Wearing earphones, they would be warned of any likely trouble spots either by officers on the street or by the Royal Marine Gazelle observation helicopter that was now hovering right above the rooftops, its spinning rotors creating a fierce wind that blew the rubbish in the gutters across the street.

  ‘Get out, you Fenian bastards! On the pavement!’

  When Lampton, Ricketts, Gumboot and Taff looked out through the half-open doors of their Saracen, they saw the soldiers roughly pushing angry women and dazed children aside to grab their menfolk and haul them out on to the pavement. Other soldiers were forcing their way inside the houses to begin what would almost certainly be damaging searches of the premises. When front doors were not opened on request, the soldiers with the sledgehammers smashed them open. As the older male residents of the street, most still in pyjamas, were pushed face first against the wall and made to spread their hands and legs for rough frisking, women screamed abuse, children either did the same or burst into tears, and the youthful dickers further along the street hurled stones, lumps of concrete and abuse.

  ‘Shit!’ Gumboot burst out inside the safety of the Saracen. ‘I thought this was supposed to be a fake raid, just put on for our benefit.’

  ‘They have to make it look real,’ Lampton informed him, ‘so the only soldiers who know about us are the ones taking us into O’Leary’s house. This is the real thing, Gumboot.’

  ‘Bloody nasty,’ Taff said.

  ‘Right,’ Gumboot replied. ‘Those soldiers are acting like fucking thugs.’

  ‘It’s because they’re frightened,’ Taff said. ‘They haven’t the time for consideration. They can’t avoid the women and children, the enemy could be anyone, some of the houses could be booby-trapped, one of the dickers might have a gun – and so on.’

  ‘Right,’ Frank Lampton said. ‘In this kind of situation you could get shot in the back by an invalid in his bed, stabbed in the stomach by a housewife with a breadknife, or blown up by a booby-trapped bathroom door – you just never know. So their only thought is to get in and out as quickly as possible and to hell with the rest of it.’

  ‘That’s why they smash the doors down and tear the houses apart,’ Ricketts said. ‘They’re not gonna hang about being polite or helping to rearrange the furniture afterwards. They go in, take the house apart and leave. It’s not nice, but it works.’

  Looking out of the Saracen, they saw two of the soldiers grab a suspect in pyjamas, haul him away from the wall where he had been frisked, and push him roughly into the centre of the road, where an RUC guard hit him with a truncheon and forced him up into a paddy-wagon. A single shot rang out, followed immediately by the sound of breaking glass.

  ‘Mick bastard!’ a soldier bawled as he cracked a man’s head with the butt of his SA-80, making him topple back and drop the pistol he’d just fired wildly in the air, doing damage only to a window.

  When he straightened up, the man turned out to be no more than a teenager. He removed his hand from his temple and looked in amazement at the blood on his fingers, before being jerked sideways by the soldier, then kicked brutally towards the RUC officer, who drove him up into the paddy-wagon like someone using an electric prod on a cow.

  ‘Get in there, you murdering Fenian bastard!’ the RUC man exploded, giving the youth a last blow with the truncheon as he stumbled into the vehicle. Elsewhere, soldiers with riot shields were herding groups of men against the wall and using truncheons to force their legs apart.

  ‘Hands against the wall!’ one soldier was bawling. ‘Spread those fucking legs! Now don’t make a move!’

  As other soldiers poured in and out of houses, sometimes smashing their way in with sledgehammers, housewives in curlers screamed abuse and attacked them with their fists, children ran about like wild animals, some laughing, some crying, and the dickers further along the road kept throwing stones and lumps of concrete at the line of soldiers forming a cordon of riot shields across the street.

  Just as another couple of men were prodded up into the paddy-wagon visible outside the Saracen, Sergeant Lovelock appeared at the half-open doors with a group of paratroopers behind him. ‘OK,’ he said, waving his right hand. ‘Out you get. Half of your kit’s already been taken in and we’ve no time to waste.’

  The four-man SAS OP team climbed out of the Saracen. Like most of the regular Army troops, they were wearing DPM clothing, but with camouflaged soft combat caps instead of helmets, and leather and Gore-tex Danner boots instead of standard-issue British Army boots. They did not have their bergens, as these would have been spotted instantly, so were carrying only what kit they could manage on their belts, in their pockets and in their hands. This included fourteen days’ high-calorie rations, mostly chocolate and sweets, on the basis of two days per one day’s ration. In bivvy bags on their belts they carried spare underwear and a first-aid kit; and, also on the belt, flashlights and binoculars. They carried as well extra ammunition for the only weapons they were allowed on this operation: their standard-issue 9mm Browning High Power handguns and the short 9mm Sterling Mk 5 submachine-gun with retractable butt and 34-round magazines, which they were now carrying openly.

  However, as this equipment was insufficient for a lengthy urban recce, the rest of their kit was being carried to the OP by an escort patrol of paratroopers. Some had already entered the house opposite and were making their way slowly along the single loft space of the terrace to O’Leary’s loft, located right opposite Quinn’s house. Those men, and some of the paratroopers, were taking the rest of the kit, including water in plastic bottles; spare radio batteries; medical packs; extra ammunition; 35mm cameras and rolls of film; tape-recorders; thermal imagers and night-vision scopes; an advanced laser audio surveillance transceiver; brown, plastic-backed notebooks and ballpens; sleeping bags; packs of moisturized cloths for cleaning their faces and hands; towels; toilet paper; and sealable plastic bags for their excrement and urine.

  ‘Let’s go!’ Lovelock said.

  Protected by the ring of heavily armed paratroopers, half deafened by the roaring of the helicopter hovering directly above them, Ricketts, Lampton, Gumboot and Taff raced across the road, through bawling RUC officers and watchful soldiers, past Saracens and pigs, up on to the pavement on the opposite side. There, while British Army soldiers dragged reluctant men and women out of their homes, the paratroopers pushed their way into one of the houses. Once inside, a couple of them proceeded to ‘search’ the place by noisily sweeping ornaments and bric-à-brac off tables and cupboards, removing drawers and tipping their contents on to the floor, and generally smashing the place up. Meanwhile, the others led the four SAS men upstairs to the trapdoor already opened in the floor of the loft.

  Forming his hands into a stirrup, a hefty paratrooper said, ‘OK, up you get.’ One by one, the four SAS men placed a foot in his joined hands and were hoisted up into the dark loft. The rest of the paratroopers followed suit, leaving only the big one standing below the trapdoor, surrounded by the rest of the kit required for the OP. While the paratroopers on the ground floor continued to wreck the house by way of searching it, the big paratrooper below the trapdoor handed up the kit piece by piece. When it was all in the loft, the men divided it between them and then ‘mouse-holed’ their way along the terrace, practically the whole length of the street, until they met up with the others already in the cramped space in O’Leary’s roof.

  ‘This is it,’ Sergeant Lovelock said as the paratroopers laid the rest of the kit and equipment down around the edges of the loft space. ‘And there’s your peep-hole.’ He pointed to where a slate nail in the roof had been removed and replaced with a rubber band that allowed the slate to be raised and lowered, thus providing a spy-hole for th
e naked eye, binoculars, cameras or thermal imagers. ‘At this moment one of our specialists is placing a miniature surveillance probe near the ceiling of the adjoining wall in the house next door to Quinn’s without the occupants knowing a thing. That, combined with your advanced laser system, should enable you to hear, see and record everything that goes on in Quinn’s place. Any questions?’

  ‘No,’ Sergeant Lampton said.

  ‘OK. We’ve got to go now. Good luck.’

  Lovelock patted Lampton on the shoulder, then, using a hand signal, ordered the paratroopers to follow him back along the terrace to the open trapdoor by which they had entered. This they did, dropping down one by one through the small, square hole until they had all disappeared. When the last of them had gone, Ricketts, who had followed them this far, replaced the trapdoor, checked that it was secure, then returned to join the others above O’Leary’s house.

  Lampton was looking through the peep-hole.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Ricketts asked.

  ‘They’ve got Michael Quinn out on the pavement and he’s going apeshit. The soldiers have just left the house next door, so the probe must be planted. I think the Army will start pulling out now, taking a few prisoners with them for show. Yep, they’ve just taken Quinn. They’ll pretend they came here to get him. They’ll take him to Castlereagh, put him through the wringer, then eventually release him and let him come home, thinking he’s fooled them again. I don’t think he’ll even check his own loft. He seems to think this is genuine. The fact that they’ve also arrested the tout who owns this place will make the raid seem even more genuine.’ He turned away from the peep-hole and motioned Ricketts over. ‘Here, take a look.’

  ‘Start unpacking this gear,’ Ricketts said to Gumboot and Taff. ‘And remember that from this moment on we have to be quiet as mice.’

  ‘I thought it was the tout’s house,’ Taff said.

  ‘It is, which is certainly a help, but loud noises could be heard in the adjoining houses, so we have to keep it down.’ He glanced at the adjoining loft to the right and said, ‘That’s going to be your bog, so be particularly quiet there, as it belongs to the house next door.’ Catching Lampton’s grin, he went to the peephole, raised the slate and looked down on the street.