by Matt Johnson
Another one of my weaknesses. But, well, I was younger then.
I wandered back to the Rover, recovered my pistol from beneath the driver seat and slipped it into my shoulder holster. The V8 engine roared into life at the first turn of the key and I headed off for base.
After seeing the dickers in the Cortina, I had already decided to play it safe and take a different route back to base. There was a detour along the eastern route out of Castlederg. It turned south and then drove parallel to the road by which I had arrived. I kept my hat on until I was away from the built-up area. The country lanes were normally deserted.
Held up for a short while by a slow-moving tractor, I had to accelerate to make up time. I was doing fifty on a single-track lane when a sudden movement in my rear-view mirror caught my eye. A blue Cortina was fifty yards behind and gaining fast.
The hairs on my neck stood up again. It was definitely the car I’d seen earlier. But this time there were four occupants.
My heart started to pound as the adrenaline pumped into my blood stream. It was time to be away. I hit the accelerator hard.
The road straightened out. The Cortina had now caught up and was again about fifty yards behind. In my mirror I could see the front-seat passenger leaning out of the window holding an AK47.
I immediately reached under the dash and activated the emergency locater beacon. Within seconds an alarm would be raised at GCHQ satellite monitoring. A back-up team would be on their way to me in minutes. That wasn’t going to help me now, though. However quickly they scrambled, the helicopter could not fly fast enough to make a difference. The Starship Enterprise was what I needed.
The rear screen of the Rover smashed as rounds from the AK47 punched through it. Instinctively I ducked.
I was going to have to fight for my life, and do it alone.
Chapter 6
As the glass from the broken window sprayed around me, I hit the gas.
The gearbox of the Rover kicked down, the powerful engine quickly putting space between me and the gunmen. I must have been doing eighty. It was too fast. The lane was narrow, high verges and thick hedges. If I met another tractor around the next bend I wouldn’t need to worry about my pursuers.
I searched my mind for an idea of what to do. I was a soldier and, supposedly, a trained driver. This should be a simple choice: run or fight. Adrenaline was preparing my body but clouding my thoughts; I tried to order them: if I crashed the terrorists would have me cold. So that was it, running wasn’t an option. I eased off the speed. There was nothing for it: I would have to meet them. But it would be on my terms. A plan began to take shape in my mind. I had to have an edge over them. What I needed was a nice blind bend.
I guess I was maybe a hundred yards in front when I found one. There were high trees on both sides with steep banks in front of them. If I stopped, the Cortina driver wouldn’t be able to get past me.
As I rounded the turn, I hit the brakes hard then yanked up the handbrake and swerved. The Rover slewed across the lane with the driver’s door facing away from the oncoming Cortina.
‘Thank fuck,’ I said out loud. It was the first time I’d completed the manoeuvre successfully.
With the road now blocked, I rolled out of the Rover and onto the road as fast as I could. Raw fear either motivates or immobilises. Luckily for me, it was the former. I was moving fast and my repeated exercises on the ranges were paying off. In a fraction of a second the Beretta was out of its shoulder holster and I was crouched behind the engine block, ready. Ready? By Christ, my hand was shaking even more than my heart was pounding.
The Cortina screeched around the bend and locked up.
I’d already decided the front-seat passenger with the AK47 was my greatest threat. As the Cortina skidded to a halt it presented me with a clear target by throwing him against the windscreen.
I aimed as best I could, firing six rounds. The windscreen exploded in a shower of glass. There were screams of pain and the sound of a male voice shouting.
The assault rifle skidded across the tarmac towards the Rover. My ears began to ring and the smell of cordite entered my nostrils. My senses felt alive, alert, excited. It was the first time I had aimed a pistol at an enemy, the first time I had taken on a live target.
I fired another three rounds, this time through the driver’s side of the now broken windscreen. I saw the outline of a body jerk back as the bullets struck home. Two more men appeared from the back seat, both of them small. The one on the driver’s side rolled out onto the bank; he had another AK47 in his hands.
Nine rounds fired, I thought; that left six in the magazine. Five for the last two gunmen and one for me. Either that or I took off for the hills. I wasn’t about to be taken prisoner.
I heard the sound of a drum beating loud in my ears. Then, I realised what it was. I could actually hear the rapid beating of my heart as the blood pumped through my veins. All my earlier apprehension and fear had gone, replaced by excitement, survival instinct, blood lust, I’m not sure exactly what; but I was now into the combat. And I’m not ashamed to say that I loved it. To fight and win is what every soldier trains for and I was doing just that.
I’d lost sight of the two surviving gunmen. Realising they must be behind their car, I quickly crawled around the front of the Rover. The familiar staccato crack of an AK47 broke the silence as the remaining windows of the Rover exploded. I had to take out that AK, and fast.
A barrel appeared above the rear of the Cortina. I crouched and fired over the bonnet of my car, using the strength and solidity of the engine for protection.
I put three more bullets through the rear of the terrorist car and then held my fire. There was nothing solid to block the 9mm rounds, they would have passed straight through the thin metal and plastic. Everything became quiet.
Three rounds left. Nearly time to run.
From behind the Cortina, a small man stood up. He looked very young, no more than a teenager.
The moment I saw his face, I knew him. Not half an hour before, I had been looking at his picture. It was Richard Webb, one of the new local IRA cell.
He raised his hands. They were red, bright red. He was either badly wounded or covered in blood from one of the others.
‘I surrender,’ he screamed at me. ‘I give up. Don’t shoot, don’t shoot.’
I should have shot the kid there and then. Most of the guys in my troop would have done. In the heat of battle there was no way to judge how dangerous this apparently unarmed boy actually was. Most of my nightmares since have ended with him pulling a hidden gun and shooting me.
But for some stupid reason, I held my fire and called out to him. ‘Where’s the other one, where’s your mate?’
Silence.
Webb walked slowly forward, his hands high in the air. He looked like a very scared child.
I shouted again. ‘Lie down on the ground.’
He stood still. I could see he was that petrified, he couldn’t do anything. Where the hell was that other one, I thought.
The lull was broken by wild rifle shots. The fourth terrorist limped around the front of the Cortina firing the AK47 from his waist, his leg bleeding profusely as he launched a desperate last charge.
This time, I was more controlled. I fired just twice, it was all I could risk. The first round missed. I held my breath, gripped the Beretta tight and prayed. The second round struck home, middle of the chest. He dropped like a stone.
But as he did, one of the bullets from the AK ricocheted under the floor of the Rover and hit my left boot. The force spun me around and dumped me on my back.
As I fell, I caught sight of Webb running away.
I was now exposed. I had one round left. That would be for me if the attack wasn’t over.
I waited. The pain in my foot was manageable but, as I tried to stand, I soon realised that I was going nowhere. It felt like the bullet had gone straight through my heel.
For the next fifteen minutes I hobbled and then crawled to the
edge of an adjacent copse. As the anaesthetic effect of adrenaline lessened, the pain increased.
I soon started to run out of energy. Locating a large tree, I sat down with my back to the gnarled trunk.
I checked my boot. There were two small and jagged holes near the heel where it looked like a fragment of the AK47 round had gone straight through. Although the pain was intense and I was losing blood, I breathed a sigh of relief. A direct hit could easily have taken my foot off.
As I sat back to wait, I considered my options. I needed to stay close to the Rover to ensure that the rescue team could find me, but I also faced the possibility of young Richard Webb returning with some mates. He would have seen me go to ground and would know that I was hit.
I decided to give it twenty minutes. After that time, if no help had arrived I would make myself scarce.
My heart rate slowed as my breathing returned to normal. In the distance I could hear a metallic clicking as the engine of one of the abandoned cars cooled down.
I checked the Beretta. There was a round in the chamber and, just as I had expected, the magazine was empty. I had counted right. One left for me.
Behind me, several birds in the copse burst into song. I figured that they must have been silenced by the recent gunfire and that now, realising that the commotion had subsided, they considered it safe enough to resume their normal behaviour.
In the tree above me, a wood pigeon cooed. It was a good sign. I had a look-out, a pair of eyes with a view that would be scanning the local field for any sign of approaching danger.
A faint throbbing noise reached my ears. I checked the sky and listened. The familiar thud of a helicopter rota grew slowly louder. I allowed myself a smile. Help was on its way.
The rescue team helicopter soon hovered over the lane. I dropped the Beretta into its holster, raised my arms above my head and hobbled out to greet them. My pigeon sentry took off across the field, his personal safety now far more important than looking out for me.
With the helicopter above me and with the effect of adrenaline starting to wear off, I lay down on the grass.
A few moments later, I winced as a medic began cutting my boot off.
‘The bullet’s gone straight through, missed the bone by the look of it,’ he said, cheerfully.
A Parachute Regiment Sergeant loomed over me, the pistol in his right hand pointed at my head. ‘Who are you, mate?’ he demanded.
I explained.
‘Well, with respect, boss, you’ve made a right mess here. You on your own?’
‘Fraid so.’
‘Well you slotted all three. You done well, you done bleedin’ well. Give us a few minutes and we’ll have you loaded up and out of here.’
My body sagged as the morphine syrette the medic had pushed into my thigh took effect. Lying there in the dirt, soaked in sweat with the smell of cordite and blood in my nostrils, the prospect of a bath and a warm bed seemed like paradise. And there was always that secretary.
A few days later, as I limped into the squadron debrief, I gracefully accepted the ribbing I was due on account of forgetting to take a spare magazine.
But my decision to use a Beretta was vindicated. With a smaller magazine, the Browning would not have had the firepower to get me out of the jam. The Beretta did.
From that day until the day I left the army, that pistol never left my side.
The threatened attack on ACC O’Keefe never materialised. He was kind enough to send me a personal ‘thank you’ note in which he accepted that when it came to putting fear in the minds of the terrorists, I may well have made my point.
And Richard Webb? The RUC picked him up less than a day after the attack. Sick and still shaking, he was caught hiding in a cow shed.
Chapter 7
The SAS Regiment were used to having soldiers around recovering from one kind of injury or another. The medical staff rated me P3: temporarily unfit for military duty.
I took a lot of stick from the lads in the squadron. Having a bullet wound in the foot led to the predictable accusations that I’d done it myself. For the next couple of months, even the slightest error or mistake was inevitably met with ‘shot yourself in the foot there, boss’, or something similar.
Take a look at any branch of the army, and you will find plenty of admin tasks and a distinct shortage of people volunteering to do them. Officers and soldiers on ‘light duties’ are perfect for these jobs, so, as soon as I was well enough, I found that my daily commute was from the Officers Mess to HQ Company Administration Office. To get around the camp, I tied my crutches to the side of an old Dawes bicycle and then pedalled with my good leg.
It wasn’t long before I became bored. Watching other people training, trying out new equipment or heading off to a deployment or exercise wasn’t my idea of fun. So when an invitation arrived on the adjutant’s desk for a volunteer to join a training course with the Metropolitan Police, I was the first to put my name down.
Two weeks later, I joined nearly twenty police detectives from various parts of the UK on a National Hostage Negotiators’ Course.
The hostage programme was euphemistically known to us students as the ‘Hello, my name is Dave and I’m here to help’ course, on account of the standard opening that we were required to employ when initiating dialogue with a hostage taker. It was a good course: I learned a lot, including how to take different approaches to terrorists, criminals and the mentally disturbed – the mad, bad and sad, as we termed them. It even included advice on handling individuals who were threatening to throw themselves off bridges or high buildings.
The reason for the SAS being offered a place on the programme was clear. If the wheel came off and a terrorist hostage incident took place, we would be called. Three weeks after the course ended and I had returned to Hereford, that exact scenario occurred.
At 11.30 am on 30th April 1980, a man called Salim Towfigh was at the front of a small group as they approached 16, Prince’s Gate, London: the Iranian Embassy. Salim was surprised to find that the police officer who normally stood outside the embassy was not at his post.
As the small group of terrorists burst in through the front door, they found the PC inside, enjoying a short break and a cup of tea. They fired an automatic pistol into the roof of the reception area.
The Iranian Embassy siege had begun.
Chapter 8
I was sat drinking tea in the Kremlin when the telephone rang.
The Kremlin I’m referring to wasn’t the seat of power of the Russian government, more a rather untidy and dilapidated military building that served as the planning and intelligence base for HQ Company. After the welcome interlude provided by the hostage course, I had returned to my admin role. Like most large organisations, the army has an insatiable appetite for paperwork. My less-than-challenging job was to make sure that the beast didn’t go hungry.
For nearly thirty seconds, the phone kept ringing. A corporal from the Army Ordnance Corps who was supposed to deal with calls was away from his desk making a brew for the CO and one of the squadron commanders, so finally I picked up the receiver.
‘Who’s that?’ said a gruff male voice.
‘Perhaps I should be asking the same question?’ I said.
‘Get me someone from the headshed,’ the voice demanded.
Whoever the caller was, he seemed to be familiar with our local terminology. I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and not hang up the phone. ‘Who’s calling?’ I asked.
‘Colin … is that you? Now stop fuckin’ about and put an officer on. It’s Reg Toms, here. I used to be on A squadron.’
Colin was the name of the clerk who was making tea. I was convinced.
‘You’re speaking to an officer, Reg,’ I replied. ‘What can we do for you?’
‘Uh … OK, boss.’ Reg Tom’s voice took a different tone. ‘Well, it’s not what you can do for me. It’s what I can do for you. Find a television and turn it on. I’m a copper in the Met now. The shit’s hit the fa
n down here, big time. The Iranian Embassy has been taken over by terrorists.’
It took a moment for the words to sink in.
As Reg continued, I waved frantically to Colin to get him to hand me a pen and paper so I could jot down what Reg was telling me: The police in London had responded to a hold-up alarm at the embassy after being unable to raise the PC posted to guard the building. They had arrived at Prince’s Gate to find the PC and a number of staff had been taken hostage.
Reg reckoned it was only a question of time before we got the call. My squadron had just taken over our stint on CRW, the Counter Revolutionary Warfare team. If the Met did ask for help, we would be it.
Colin barged in on the ‘Headshed’ meeting. A few seconds later, he emerged from the CO’s office with instructions to initiate the CRW call-out.
I kept Reg on the line as Tom Crayston, the B-squadron Commander, appeared behind Colin. He looked at me, apologetically. I knew what that meant. Someone was going to have to stay behind, to monitor phone calls, to organise movement of men and equipment … to do the paperwork. With an injury that prevented me from being any use at the sharp end, I was the obvious choice.
‘Sorry, Finlay,’ said Tom.
I shrugged. Although I’d now ditched my crutch in favour of a stout walking stick, I knew I was still something of a passenger.
‘Boss is on the phone to the Met now,’ Tom continued. ‘We’ll take one of the Range Rovers to London.’
‘We’re not waiting to be called out?’ I asked.
‘No. Boss wants two teams of twenty-five. If we can’t get enough people together from B squadron then make up the numbers from anyone qualified who can get here within the hour. I’ll call you with as much as I know while we’re in transit. Get the kit loaded and have everyone on the road by 1400 hours. Clear?’
I nodded.
