by Andy McNab
Her mother picked up the receiver, out of breath.
"Just happened! A couple of minutes ago!"
"All the arms, all the legs?"
"Yes."
"What is it?"
"It's a girl. She's beautiful. I don't know the weight yet, but everything's fine."
A girl!
I knew her name was Kate. We'd already worked out what it was going to be. It was quite a shock. It wasn't high elation. I felt numbed; I just thought, I'm a father now-and it must have been very smoky in the departures lounge that day because as I put the phone down, my eyes were watering.
I joined the others on the aircraft, and Paul said, "She had it?"
"Yeah, it's a girl."
"Congratulations, mate." He shook my hand, all smiles. "It feels great, doesn't it?"
Even Paul, who lived his life somersaulting from good time to good time, could remember what it felt like. He had a passion about his daughter that I'd never been able to understand; it seemed so strange, coming from him. This bloke who didn't seem to care about anything, just having fun and working and really going for it, down in his heart and at the back of his head, continuously, was his daughter. Now I understood.
Now I knew exactly how he felt.
One of the benefits of going on a team job was that we traveled club class, so it was straight into the little bottles of champagne as we toasted my good news. It was a long flight, and the six of us got quietly pissed.
For weeks I was waiting for more news. Letters always had to go to Hereford for collation and were then sent on to an embassy or a consulate or the agency that we were working for in whichever country.
It took awhile for them to get to us, and I was gagging for a picture.
At last two letters turned up. I could feel that there were pictures inside. As I ripped open the envelopes, blokes gathered around.
Two-Combs looked over my shoulder and said, "She's beautiful, isn't she?"
"Fuck off," I said. "She's all greasy and covered in mucus.
However, yes, she is."
Then we all sat around cooing and admiring.
It was a really shifty job for me, tucked away on the side of a mountain for weeks on end, wishing that I was back in Hereford. But you have to make a positive out of a negative, which in this case was that at least it was another part of the world I hadn't seen.
I came back in late May 1987, having lost two stone. with dysentery, but not in such a bad way as was Two-Combs, who was diagnosed as having typhoid.
Two days later they decided it was a rupturing appendix.
We got back to the camp and unloaded all the kit. Fat Boy phoned his wife to come and pick him up and said he'd drop me home.
As we drove around to the house, I saw the curtain twitch, and then Fiona came out onto the path with a bundle in her arms.
I gave Fiona a kiss, then took the baby, all wrapped up and asleep. I peeked inside the shawl and saw her face for the first time.
I had a shock; her lip looked deformed. However, the most beautiful deformed baby in the world.
"What's wrong with her?" I said. "Is she all right?"
"She's only sucking her lip." Fiona laughed. "Don't worry, she's perfect."
Mr. and Mrs. Fat Boy came over, clucking like two hens. They were as smitten as I was, and that was the start of it; for the next few years they were producing children like people possessed.
It was wonderful to have some time with Kate. I spent hours watching her little hands all clenched up, and I kept thinking: I made that! I hated the time that she was asleep and willed her to wake up; I soon learned that all they're doing at that age is sleeping and shitting, but that was beside the point.
Eno and I got an approach to take a two-year sabbatical from the Regiment and join the "Det," an intelligence unit operating in Northern Ireland. I was on the M.O.E team at the time, and Eno was on the sniper team.
We were having an administration morning in the crew room, dragging our kit out, scrubbing it' and cleaning weapons. The clerk came over and said, "Andy and Eno, the squadron O.C wants to see you."
"Have we fucked up anywhere?" I said.
"I don't think so."
Eno looked as nonchalant and unconcerned as ever; he was so unflappable his heart must have only just about ticked over.
The Boss was sitting at his desk. "Right," he said, I.C what would you say if I said to you, Do you fancy going over the water for two years with the Det?"
We both said, "No way."
The Det had once wanted a Regiment bloke to go and hide in Dungannon, watching people go in and out of a betting office. The OP was compromised by kids, and the bloke got away, but the Det wanted him to go back the next day and do exactly the same. The ops officer of the Det was overheard saying, "It doesn't really matter if he gets compromised because he's not one of us."
John, who was running the troop, heard about this and went over and sorted it out in his normal persuasive manner.
Now it appeared that two blokes from each squadron were getting approached and asked if they wanted to go.
Most of them were saying no; in the end the CO called in all the squadrons and said, "The Det is something that you will do. The skills that they've got, we must have back. We're starting to lose it, yet we're the ones that developed it. One way or another we will regain that skill. It's all part of becoming a complete soldier; we need complete soldiers." He was quite a forceful characp ter. You either loved him or hated him; there was no in between.
A few days later we were called back to the O.C. "You have two options," he said. "You're either going over the water for two years, or you're going nowhere. You volunteered for the Regiment; you volunteered for operations. This is an operation; if you're refusing to go on operations, you're not staying in the Regiment."
So that was us off to the Det then.
In the old days, with a division of responsibilities in Northern Ireland between MIS and M16, intelligence generally was piss poor. As a result, in 1972, the army established its own secret intelligence gathering unit, which was given the cover name 14th Intelligence Unit, or 14 Int for short. Recruits were taken from regular army regiments and put through a course that lasted several weeks and covered elementary techniques of covert surveillance, communications, and agent running.
Selection forInt, known to us as the Det, emphasized the need for resourcefulness and psychological strength. There was not much call for the physical stamina needed for the Regiment. It was designed to find people-usually officers and NCOs in their mid to late twenties, in all three of the services-who were able to carry out long-term surveillance, sometimes only a few feet from armed terrorists.
My appreciation of what was going on at the time was that the Det was looking for a role beyond Northern Ireland. They started saying they could do all our forward recces for us in dangerous areas around the world, but that was a load of nonsense. All their training was for Northern Ireland; they couldn't go forward and do our recces because they didn't know, for example, what our mortars or helicopters and troops would require. Little wonder they were called the Waits-short for Walter Mittys.
The Regiment decided that they were going to get people to go into the Det as part of their normal regimental career. You needed an aptitude, but Eno and I didn't even want to be tested. There was a lot of antifeeling about the Det, a feeling of "them" and "us."
Four of us drove up-me, Eno, a fellow from D Squadron called Mac, and Bob P from G Squadron.
None of us wanted to be there; we all felt press-ganged.
The first person I bumped into was Tiny. "I'm on the training team." He grinned. "You can call me Staff."
Eno said, "You can shove that right up your arseStaff." We knew all the training teams, all the cooks, everybody who worked there.
"The next six months are going to be really intensive," the DS said.
"There is no time off. The only time you will leave this camp is when you're working.
If not, you stay in ca
mp. There are reasons for that, and we're not going to explain them at the moment."
The four of us looked at one another and thought, Fuck this.
For the first couple of nights we were sitting there like dickheads.
Finally Mac said, "I'll get on the phone to my wife, she'll come down and pick us up."
We put our running kit on and made it look as if we were going for a run on the training area. We jogged down the road, got in the car, and shot off to Hereford.
Another time we organized a lift with some of the team who happened to be training in the same area as we were. The getaway was planned as intricately as a proper operation; the only problem was trying to stop people giggling as we drove out of the gate.
I got home most nights by eleven and had to leave the next morning by six, but it was worth it. I was all bitter and twisted, and cheating the system made me feel better.
After a month of this the Det head shed got wind of it and decided we needed gripping. We were becoming quite anti and a law unto ourselves.
Mac got binned from the course, which only made me even more resentful.
After so long in the Regiment, living in an adult system, all of a sudden we went back ten years, and I hated it. He was chuffed to bits to be back on the squadron; the moment he got back, however, he was told he was on the next course, starting from scratch.
The rest of the people on the course were not supposed to know who we were, but this didn't work because there were people on the course who had done Selection with us and failed, as well as people from our own regiments. One evening I was-sitting in the cookhouse with Eno and Bob P, slagging everybody down in Swahili. A couple of G Squadron came in, got their food, and spotted us. "Oi, Andy, how's it going?" They came over, sat down, and we carried on chatting.
"How's it going in the Waits, then? You got your sneaky beaky kit yet?"
"Men, yeah, it's really good.".
I made sure they knew we were press-ganged; I didn't want anybody thinking we'd volunteered for this cowboy stuff.
"Oh, well, see you later," they said. "We're down the town now-it's Friday night. What are you doing tonight? You boys have fun polishing your pistols.' They left, and I didn't think any more about it. About a week later a couple of B Squadron blokes saw us in the gym and said,
"Remember last week, when you were talking to G Squadron boys? They got a severe fine.
Somebody saw you talking together and said it's compromising!"
It only got us more sparked up and annoyed. This whole thing really was a pain in the arse' Because the course catered for anybody from anywhere, the lessons started with things like "This is a bergen."
They had to do it, but we were spending this month being taught stuff that we'd been doing for years.
I'd never been so bored. At last, however,"the training progressed to skills that were new to me, and I started to get a bit interested. We learned different surveillance skills, countersurveillance skills, how to give as much information as possible on the net in the least number of words. Their CQB course was pure pistol work; for us, there was no stress, no strain, it was great.
We'd be on the ranges all day, come back and do surveillance skills or CTR skills at getting into factories and houses. Sometimes it was like a comedy of errors, people getting stuck halfway through windows and collapsing with laughter.
Everybody was given an alternative identity, keeping the same initials, and the same Christian name, and something similar to our real name so we didn't forget it. Working under an alias, we'd always sign our name in a way that reminded us what we were doing; perhaps it was a pen of a striking color or one that w-e kept in our right-hand breast pocket rather than the left.
We learned the skills of covert entry into a house to look for equipment. We learned how to follow a man and his family for weeks to find out what their routines were, where they went, who they did what with, trying to establish a time when we could get into the house.
Does he go to a social club every Saturday night with his wife and kids?
Maybe on average he gets back at I about midnight, so you've got between eight and midnight to get in. But that's not good enough. if it's ' in July, it's not going to get dark until half ten. So you might have to wait a couple of months, or get a time when he goes away, maybe to visit his parents for the weekend.
The surveillance had to be on him all the time, to make sure that when he did go to the club with his wife and kids, his wife didn't leave early to put the kids to bed. We had to have actions on what would happen if we got in there and somebody came home unexpectedly?
It took weeks and weeks of preparation.
We had to learn how to use all sorts of cameras, including infrared equipment that would enable us to photograph serial numbers and documents-and to photograph photographs. It was a far cry from my days in the camping shops of Peckham.
I discovered it was quite an intense time, getting into somebody's house-the pressure of doing it as quickly as possible yet at the same time- being methodical and not cutting any corners, because you knew that the result of carelessness could be somebody's death. By the end of the course I had learned many different methods of planning and preparation and had acquired a whole new range of surveillance, technical attack, and covert CTR skills. I realized that I was fortunate, and I looked forward to putting them all into practice over the water.
Just before it was time to leave, Fiona and I had a chat.
"I've got five days off," I said. "Do you fancy getting married?"
"Why not?"
Indeed, why not? We were a family. By now we'd moved house again, into one of the new estates on the edge of Hereford, and everything looked perfect.
Dave, the patrol commander from Keady in my Green jackets days, was best man. He did his duties, then spent the rest of the day trying to seduce the witness, one of Fiona's friends. Kate was the bridesmaid.
It was Kate's very first Christmas. We went to stay at a house on the south coast. Kate wasn't sleeping very well, which I thought was great.
I got the pram out at midnight, wrapped her up well, and we went walking along the coastal path until six in the morning. She fell asleep after the first half an hour, and as I walked, I just looked at her beautiful little face and clucked like a hen.
When we got back, she woke up again, so I put her in the car and we went for a drive. I kept checking over my shoulder to see that she was all right. She had fearsome big blue eyes that stared at me from inside all the wrappings of woolens and a bobble hat. It was a very special time.
In the next two years I would only see her for a total of twelve weeks.
"Jerking," the planting of miniature transmitters inside weapons, more correctly known as technical attack, had started in the late seventies and offered an extra option to the security forces when they found an arms cache.
The idea was that the devices would be activated when the weapon was picked up, and the terrorists' movements could then be monitored.
I'd settled into the Det and was really enjoying it. Eno and I were sent to the same Det, which was working around Derry city and surrounding county. At half past six every night we had "prayers."
All the operators came in, and we ran through administrative and operational points.
It was Easter time. We had a bar in a hut, hundred of cans stacked up and working on a trust system. Everybody was getting a bollocking for a party that had happened the weekend before. The Det had a strong reputation for being outrageous,in the bar, so much so that the windows were detachable for partes There was a strange ritual in the bar for any new member that arrived; everybody saved up his empty cans and the Det O.C would come in and say, "Welcome to the Det.
Here we have a celebratory pint of Guinness." You had to drink it while they pelted you with empty cans. The party was one of these welcoming things for two scaleys that had turned up, but it got totally out of control. One of the blokes had a Duran Duran haircut that he was really proud of
; the others held him down and started cutting it; he jumped to his feet and started punching people out. They got two planks of wood and turned it into a cross. They tied him on, hoiked it up, and left him hanging there.
We put into practice all the skills that we had learned during the buildup: covert searches of houses, office blocks, shops to gather information. It was a kick, without a doubt, going into somebody's house, finding information, and getting back out again. In the hard housing estates, places like the Bogside, Shantello, the Creggan, it was no easy operation to get into places, and it would take days, and sometimes weeks, of planning for a job that might take only thirty seconds to carry out.
At the end of the day it was inevitable that the IRA would discover that its weapons were being 'arked.
These people were not idiots; they had scanning devices and all sorts.
We were all playing a game. They knew that the weapons were being tampered with; they knew that their buildings were bugged. They would use countermeasures, which we would then try to countercounter.
Another possibility open to us was to replace bomb-making materials found in the hides.
A novelist wrote a book in which the coffins at an IRA funeral were bugged so that the intelligence services could hear what was being said; from the moment it was published, it became an IRA procedure that every coffin and body were scanned with location devices.
By now it was the summer of 1988 and Fiona was running around looking for a new house. Prices were going bananas, spiraling out of control.
We made an absolute fortune in the space of a few months; a woman cried on the telephone because she was too late in buying the house.
"We'll now buy the biggest house we can with our money and do it up," I said.
She found us a place while I was away, in a village about six miles from Hereford. The house was bigger but needed some work done to it. It was really exciting.
I came back on five days' leave, and as soon as I got back, we moved in.
We got cracking. We went down to the plant hire place and hired everything from strimmers to chain saws for our five-day blitz.
As soon as it was light, we started on the outside; as soon as it was dark, we started on the inside. At four-thirty one morning I painted the garage door, and at ten at night was stripping wallpaper in the living room. I loved it; it was family life: I now had a three-bedroom detached house, a garage, a couple of trees in the garden. As a young kid I had lived in council houses or my auntie's house, and now I was looking at this wonderful 'lace, and it was mine.
