Soldier E: Sniper Fire in Belfast
Page 20
It was a broad, flat expanse filled with water tanks, TV aerials and litter. Plaster had fallen off the brick walls and thick dust covered all.
The sniper was leaning on the front wall, peering into the sights of his .303 Lee Enfield bolt-action sniper rifle. So dedicated was he, so intent on his work, that he didn’t even hear Danny’s approach until he was practically standing over him.
‘Security Forces,’ Danny said. ‘Don’t move!’
The man jerked his head around and looked up in surprise. He was a hard man, all right, with a scarred face and gelid gaze, his surprise soon giving way to fearless contempt. He studied Danny for a moment, taking note of his baby face, then grinned crookedly and said: ‘Who the fuck are you kidding, boyo? Could you shoot me this close up?’
‘I just might,’ Danny said, lowering his submachine-gun and removing his Browning from its holster. He raised the handgun and aimed it right between the man’s eyes. ‘What do you think?’ he asked.
Still kneeling on the ground, the man turned away from the wall. He deliberately swung the barrel of his rifle towards Danny, resting the stock against his hip for support.
‘I think you’re about eighteen years old and couldn’t shoot someone this close.’
‘You may be right,’ Danny said.
When the man swung the barrel up higher, preparing to fire, Danny calmly squeezed the trigger of his Browning, putting a burst into the man’s chest, directly over the heart. He was punched into the wall, his rifle clattering to the floor, and was dead before the reverberation of the gunshots had faded away.
Danny holstered his handgun, put down his sub-machine-gun, searched the dead man, carefully removing any papers that would help to identify him, then picked his sub-machine-gun up again and walked slowly, cautiously, back down the stairs.
Ricketts and Gumboot had also just reached the second floor when they saw an SAS trooper being flung off the roof and crash with a dreadful thud on to the concrete sixty feet below. They stopped momentarily, frozen with shock, as Jock raced away from the protection of the armoured pig, across the open road, to check that the fallen man was actually dead. Then the sniper fired again, wounding Jock in the arm, making him jerk violently sideways and fall to his knees.
‘Oh, those bastards!’ Gumboot exclaimed softly. ‘I better go back down.’
‘No,’ Ricketts said. ‘Taff’s beaten you to it. He’ll take care of Jock and …’ He couldn’t finish the sentence, not yet knowing exactly who’d been thrown off the roof, so he just shook his head and said: ‘Come on. Let’s get the hell up there.’
They ran up the remaining stairs and arrived at the third floor just as Dead-eye was advancing towards them. His face was covered with a respirator and he was using the butt of his Colt Commando to beat his way through a crowd of men who were coughing and vomiting in clouds of CS gas. Some of them were falling to the ground and gasping like beached fish.
When Dead-eye reached Ricketts and Gumboot, just out of range of the CS gas, he removed the respirator from his face and said: ‘They threw Martin off the roof when he shot and killed one of them.’
‘He killed one?’ Ricketts asked.
‘Yes,’ Dead-eye said. ‘A kid.’
‘Oh, Christ!’ Ricketts said ‘This could cause a lot of trouble.’
‘We can counterbalance the kid’s death with the story of our man thrown off the roof,’ Dead-eye said in a cold-blooded, pragmatic manner. ‘That should make them shut up.’
‘Fuck,’ Ricketts said, feeling shocked and unsure of himself. ‘This is one filthy war.’
‘It’s a pisser,’ Gumboot said, ‘but we’re stuck with it. Now let’s get the hell out of here before those bastards recover.’ He nodded towards the hard men now choking, vomiting and collapsing in the gas-filled walkway.
‘Right,’ Dead-eye said. ‘Let’s go.’
They hurried back down the stairs and out into the road where the fires from the Molotov cocktails were flickering out and two RUC trucks were disgorging men wearing flak jackets and carrying anti-riot shields and truncheons.
As the Quick Reaction Force men raced into the block of flats, sealing off both exits, Jock climbed shakily to his feet, holding his wounded arm, and Taff carried Martin’s dead, smashed-up body back to the armoured pig.
Ricketts, Dead-eye and Gumboot formed a protective circle around Jock as he crossed the dangerous stretch of open ground.
They broke apart and spun around, preparing to fire, when they heard the sound of gunfire on the roof.
‘That fucking sniper!’ Gumboot exclaimed.
‘No,’ Ricketts said, ‘It was a weapon firing on the roof, but it wasn’t aimed at us.’
‘It was either Danny firing at the sniper,’ Taff explained, ‘or the sniper firing at him.’
‘He’s a good kid,’ Dead-eye said with a rare, if veiled, display of admiration. ‘He’ll be OK.’
Dead-eye was rarely wrong.
When Danny materialized, smiling shyly as he told them that the sniper was dead, they all piled gratefully into the armoured pig and were driven back to Bessbrook.
There, while still trying to adjust to the deaths of Frank Lampton and Martin Renshaw, they learned from Captain Dubois that Lieutenant Cranfield had been found at first light, his body riddled with bullets, lying near the dead bodies of PIRA activists Michael Quinn and Mick Treacy.
As the latter pair had been killed with 9mm bullets, six in Quinn, the other seven in Treacy, it was believed that they had both been shot by Cranfield just before he was killed.
It was also believed that Cranfield’s Browning, which had not been found at the scene of the killings, had been stolen by his executioners.
The identity of Cranfield’s executioners had yet to be ascertained.
‘Last but not least,’ Dubois told the assembled men, ‘I should inform you that for reasons to do with recent events, you will all soon be transferred back to Hereford. D Squadron will arrive a few weeks later and take over your duties. That’s all. Dismissed.’
‘Thanks a million,’ Jock whispered.
The men left the briefing room, went straight to the NAAFI canteen, steadily drank themselves into a state of sleep-inducing oblivion, then staggered back to their makeshift beds in the Portakabin being used as sleeping quarters. By lights out, they were snoring.
All except Ricketts.
Deeply shocked by the death of Lampton, his best friend since Oman, and also disturbed by the manner of Renshaw’s death, Ricketts had trouble sleeping. When at last he did so, after much tossing and turning, he had the first of the nightmares that would haunt him for years to come.
Chapter 18
The remaining members of the SAS troop were shipped out of Belfast as quietly as they had been shipped in and returned to their Hereford HQ. A few weeks later, when the shock waves from the death of Lieutenant Cranfield had died away, the full complement of D Squadron 22 SAS arrived in Belfast amid a great deal of publicity designed to intimidate the IRA.
The two PIRA youths responsible for Cranfield’s death were later caught, convicted and jailed in the Republic. In prison, one of the assassins admitted to Cranfield’s controller that he had been present at the ghastly torture of Cranfield, but that the SAS officer had bravely refused to talk.
This knowledge went a long way to restoring Cranfield’s tarnished reputation with the other members of the Regiment.
Having learnt from the mistakes of the first small group of SAS men in Northern Ireland, D Squadron chalked up a more satisfying record of counter-terrorist successes, reaping a rich harvest from the seeds sown by their relatively inexperienced, path-finding predecessors. Nevertheless, things did not go smoothly at first, even for D Squadron.
In April 1976 a four-man SAS team was set up in two OPs for surveillance of the house of Peter Cleary, an IRA ‘staff captain’ who lived near the border. During their many long days and nights in the OPs, the four soldiers had very little sleep and were exposed to the bitter
elements.
Early one evening, shortly after a helicopter landing at Crossmaglen was attacked by the IRA with rockets and machine guns, the troopers arrested Cleary in his house near Forkhill, a mere fifty metres north of the border.
Cleary was taken to a nearby field with a five-man SAS escort, to await the arrival of another helicopter. According to one of the soldiers, all of the SAS men but one were used to help guide the chopper down with the aid of torches, which meant that Cleary was being guarded by just one trooper. Seeing his opportunity, he grabbed the soldier’s rifle by the barrel and tried to pull it away. The soldier squeezed the trigger three times, hitting Cleary in the chest and killing him instantly.
As being ‘shot while trying to escape’ is an old military cliche often covering summary execution, few Republicans believed the SAS version of Cleary’s death. Though the authorities put the death down to ‘insufficient manpower’ and ‘a lack of handcuffs’, the IRA alleged that Cleary had been murdered.
This was another set-back for the SAS.
D Squadron, however, then scored a major victory over the IRA. In early 1977, a young lance-corporal of the Royal Highland Fusiliers was killed by an IRA mortar bomb at Crossmaglen. The only clue to the identity of the killers was a dark-blue Datsun with a black vinyl roof, seen in the vicinity at the time of the incident and believed to be a scout vehicle for the ASU mortar team.
Midway through that month, late one Sunday afternoon, the vehicle was spotted again near the border. A hooded man carrying a bandolier of ammunition and a sawn-off shotgun got out of the car and walked in the direction of the hidden SAS patrol set up to entrap him. When one of the patrol rose to challenge the man, he raised his shotgun to fire. The SAS trooper opened fire first, killing the terrorist.
Immediately, the SAS trooper came under fire from a number of hidden gunmen using high-velocity Armalite rifles. The shots missed their target and the trooper ducked for cover. At the same time, other members of the SAS patrol fired back, aiming at the muzzle-flash of the enemy weapons and eventually forcing the IRA men to flee. When the SAS team went in pursuit of them, they found a trail of blood beside the road.
The man they had shot turned out to be a twenty-year-old labourer, Seamus Harvey, from nearby Drummakaval. He died less than 200 yards from the site of an ambush in which three British soldiers had been killed just before the SAS arrived to set up their OP.
According to one unnamed source, some of Harvey’s wounds were caused by an IRA Armalite rifle later used to murder a UDR corporal.
Because of these operations, IRA attacks in south Armagh ended for almost a year.
The SAS soldiers who had been caught by the Gardai when trying to cross the border into the Republic were returned from Hereford by RAF transport to be put on trial in Dublin. Throughout the trial, they were guarded by a senior SAS officer who let it be known that he feared for their lives. After a tense two days in the courtroom, three judges found the men guilty of entering the Republic without permission, but cleared them on the more serious charge of possessing firearms to endanger life. The weapons used as evidence during the trial were therefore returned to the SAS and the troopers were freed and flown back to Hereford, via RAF Northolt.
This was another victory for the SAS.
Celebrating in the bar at Hereford, Sergeant ‘Dead-eye Dick’ Parker, Corporal Phil Ricketts, and Troopers ‘Jock’ McGregor, ‘Gumboot’ Gillis, ‘Taff’ Burgess and Danny ‘Baby Face’ Porter raised their glasses in a toast. Then, though they normally didn’t discuss the dead, or those who ‘beat the clock’, they somehow raised the name of Lieutenant Cranfield, agreeing that although he had certainly been a ‘big-timer’, he had made amends for it by showing exemplary courage during his final, terrible hours.
‘He was a decent man at heart,’ Ricketts said, ‘but too wayward, or impulsive, for his own good – or for the good of the Regiment.’
‘I agree,’ Jock said. ‘Even if he’d survived, he’d never have been invited back to the Regiment after serving out his first three-year stint.’
‘No way,’ Gumboot said.
Perhaps in order to avoid the names of the late Frank Lampton and Martin Renshaw, the former widely respected, the latter more reservedly so, they discussed the relationship between the SAS and the intelligence services in Northern Ireland. Their conclusion was that it was complex, bewildering, sometimes unsavoury, and too often deadly.
This led them back to Captain Dubois of 14 Intelligence Company and the mystery of his love-hate relationship with Lieutenant Cranfield.
‘That Captain Dubois outsmarted Cranfield,’ Ricketts explained, giving utterance at last to one of the many thoughts that had haunted him in past months and led to an increasing number of nightmares. ‘I think he knew what he was doing all along. He understood that Cranfield was an unusual kind of SAS officer – impetuous, sometimes thoughtless, prepared to break all the rules – so he set him up to take out Michael Quinn … and to do so in a way that would make us look culpable, while absolving the Army from all blame.’
‘Well, he certainly succeeded,’ Taff offered. ‘You’ve got to admire him.’
‘Who dares wins,’ Dead-eye said.
Discover other books in the SAS Series
Discover other books in the SAS Series published by Bloomsbury at
www.bloomsbury.com/SAS
Soldier A: Behind Iraqi Lines
Soldier B: Heroes of the South Atlantic
Soldier C: Secret War in Arabia
Soldier D: The Colombian Cocaine War
Soldier E: Sniper Fire in Belfast
Soldier F: Guerillas in the Jungle
Soldier G: The Desert Raiders
Soldier H: The Headhunters of Borneo
Soldier J: Counter Insurgency in Aden
Soldier K: Mission to Argentina
Soldier L: The Embassy Siege
Soldier M: Invisible Enemy in Kazakhstan
Soldier N: Gambian Bluff
Soldier O: The Bosnian Inferno
Soldier P: Night Fighters in France
Soldier Q: Kidnap the Emperor!
Soldier R: Death on Gibraltar
Soldier S: The Samarkand Hijack
Soldier T: War on the Streets
Soldier U: Bandit Country
Soldier V: Into Vietnam
Soldier W: Guatemala – Journey Into Evil
Soldier X: Operation Takeaway
Soldier Y: Days of the Dead
Soldier Z : For King and Country
This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
First published in Great Britain 1993 by Bloomsbury Publishing
Copyright © 1993 by Bloomsbury Publishing
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise
make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means
(including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying,
printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the
publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The moral right of the author is asserted.
eISBN: 9781408841556
Visit www.bloomsbury.com to find out more about our authors and their books You will find extracts, author interviews, author events and you can sign up for newsletters to be the first to hear about our latest releases and special offers
filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share