Immediate Action

by Andy McNab

  Possible contact. Stand by." Eno never flapped; his voice was calm and relaxed.

  If they were putting the masks on and walking toward him, as far as he was concerned he'd been compromised-but maybe not yet. He hadn't seen any weapons, so it was pointless doing anything at the moment.

  Very casually, he started to describe what was going on: "They're still coming towards me."

  We were getting out of the cars; we had to start closing in, but we had to do it in such a manner that it didn't compromise what was going on.

  It might be a false alarm. They might just walk past and go and do something else; then we'd follow them. As they got closer to him, Eno couldn't talk. I started to walk quite fast toward him.

  Alpha got on the net: "November, check."

  Eno gave him two clicks.

  "Are they still coming towards you?"

  Click, click.

  "Have they still got their masks on?"

  Click, click.

  It went quiet for a while. I was still walking fast. As I got to the area of the cars, I could see down the alleyway. I always used to carry my pistol tucked down the front of my jeans. I remembered the story Mick had told us about the boy getting pushed in the Shantello; the only thing that had saved him as he rolled was having his pistol to the front. I took my gloves off as I walked and threw them on the floor. If I had to draw my gun, I'd lift my jacket with my left hand as high as it would go, with a big aggressive motion, then draw my pistol with my right. I was expecting to see these boys going down the alleyway to Eno and opening fire, but I saw jack shit.

  All of a sudden Eno came on the net. "They've gone right; they've gone down the side of the garages."

  As I looked down the line of the fence, to the right of me was a line of garages. I knew they'd gone down there and were walking behind the garages. They didn't have the weapons; those were still in the coal shed. So what were they up to?

  Brendan was coming from another direction, walking along the back of the garages. As soon as he heard that they'd turned right, he did a quick about-turn and walked off. He didn't want a head-to-head.

  However, he now had these three masked boys behind him.

  He landed up %walking about ten meters in front of them, down the same roadway. He could hear them getting closer and closer. He could hear them talking.

  "That's it-they're right behind me. Stand by for a possible contact."

  I knew Eno was off to my left-hand side somewhere. I wanted to make sure I got behind these people. Then I heard Brendan: "I have from the front. I have from the front."

  I said, "That's Delta backing you, Hotel."

  Dave 2 said, "Golf's mobile."

  Wherever we went now, Dave 2 would make sure he was following us with the motor. We kept on walking.

  They weren't talking and were fairly aware. The alleyway was a well-used thoroughfare that linked two sets of gardens; it wasn't suspicious for us to be there. The ground was pitted asphalt, littered with old cans. Looking to the left, I saw people doing their dishes at mistedup kitchen windows.

  "Golf, Delta, check."

  Click, click.

  "Are you still backing?"

  Click, click."

  "Are they still along the back of the garages?"

  Click, click.

  "Are they still hooded up?"

  Click, click.

  The garages went on for about sixty or seventy meters. As they got to the end, they turned right. Brendan kept on going straight; I came on the net and said, 'They've gone right towards the main [main road."

  Brendan said, "Roger that. I'm going complete. I'm going to my car."

  I said, "Delta has unsighted. Wait. That's unsighted, Delta checking."

  I got to the edge and turned right, just catching them out of the right-hand side of my vision. They were opening up a garage right at the end. But they didn't have masks on. I carried on walking and said,

  "That's the three Bravos; they're at the very end garage, and their masks are off. I do not have."

  I had to keep going straight. This was worrying; nobody had got them now. Were they going to drive off?

  Dave 2 parked up on the other side of the road and was looking down. He came on the net: "Golf has, Golf has."

  I said, "That's Delta going complete," and headed for my car.

  Dave was giving a commentary on what was going on: They went into the garage, put the light on, were in there for a-bout two minutes, mucked around with a car inside, came out, and closed the door.

  "That's them now walking back to the house."

  Then Eno picked them up. "November has. They're now going complete the house [into the house], with no masks on."

  "Alpha, roger that."

  We didn't have a clue what was going on. This was often one of the big problems facing us: We saw things, but we didn't know what they meant because we'd seen only a portion of the action. Why had they got masks on? Why had they taken them off? Had they just canceled something? Had they canceled it because they'd seen us? Or were they just doing a drill? But why practice with the masks on?

  None of our questions was ever answered. The four of us had to lift off, and another team came in to take over; we were overexposed in that area now and might have been compromised.

  When we got back to the briefing room, the Boss said, "We're not going to put a tech attack in. We're going to lift it tonight."

  The other team was now covering the weapons. The R.U.C went down and searched a lot of houses, lifted the weapons, and that was the end of that. We never found out why the boys had their masks on.

  Some of the characters got so much into the work that they didn't want to leave. Some blokes were on their third or fourth tour, completely caught up in it. There were some weird guys there as well, who couldn't cut between real life and what was going on in their work.

  I knew I was starting to get totally engrossed. It was exciting being in the'Bogside on a Saturday night at eleven o'clock, watching known players come out of the pub, lining up and getting their food.

  Even if we weren't working, we'd go down for some "orientation," walking around and getting to know the places and the people. After a while we got comfortable in these well-hard areas and could tell instinctively when something was up.

  Dave was well on the road to the funny farm. The sink overflowed in his room while he was out. When he came back, the carpet was totally sagged up. Dave's remedy wasn't to take the carpet up or open the windows and let it dry out; it was to go and buy a huge bag of mustard and cress seed and sow it. Then he turned the heater up, closed the door, and proceeded to live in a room full of crops. "Want to know how to survive, Andy?" he said to me once. "Never eat anything larger than your own head, anything that you can't pronounce or spell, or tomatoes."

  Sometimes such bizarre things happened on operations that I'd wonder if I was in a dream. It appeared once that at some point in the next few days, at pub kicking-out time, some buses were going to be hijacked from the bus station, put across the street as barricades, and burned. We put in a number of reactive OPs so that when it happened, the H.M.S.U (R.U.C Headquarters Mobile Support Unit) could steam in and do their business-and if the police couldn't get there, we'd be the last resort.

  We split up into three gangs of two and were in positions from where we could trigger it. Me and Eno had MP5s and 9MM pistols. To get as close as we could, we decided to crawl into the scrubland where the concrete area of the bus depot ended, right on the edge of the compound itself.

  If we did get compromised, we'd have it that we were on the piss, so we each took a couple of cans of Tennants lager, the ones with the picture of the woman on the back. We sat down and nursed Penelope and Samantha, keeping our eyes on the target.

  Everybody started streaming out of the pubs and getting on the buses to take them out to their little enclaves around Strabane. There was a taxi rank nearby as well, and it was the typical Friday night scene. All the boys were pissed up, trying to chat
up fat slags who smelled of outrageous cheap perfume and were more interested in shoveling large pizzas into their faces than in getting laid.

  The next thing that caught our attention was two women, hollering and shouting with each other, laughing away and smoking. They were coming toward us, giggling about needing a piss.

  We came up on the air and said, "Stand by. That's two echoes [women] coming towards us. Wait out." . The next thing we knew, the pair were virtually standing over the bushes we were hiding in. Then, still cackling and shouting, they squatted and opened fire.

  I was number one on a -oh on the shore of Lough Neagh. The nearest town was Glenavy on the eastern shore.

  The ops officer brought us in and gave us a briefing.

  "There's the general area." He tapped a map. "Somewhere around the shores of the lake there, and going up in the fields in this area here, there's a fearsome hide.

  Apparently there's shotguns, radios, all sorts of shitprobably a complete A.S.U's worth of equipment. We're going to keep going in, night after night, until we find it.

  What I want you to do now is plan and prepare a CTR for tomorrow night."

  I picked up the Hasselblad cameras and jumped into the Gazelle; minutes later we were flying over Lough Neagh, the largest lake in Europe. While we did a normal flying pattern, I took pictures.

  We spent hours pondering over the photographs, trying to look for natural points that would be markers, or natural areas to put a hide.

  It could be in the corner of a field or, say, the third telegraph pole along where there was a big lump of stone. it was daunting. The area covered a square kilometer of hedgerows and shoreline. It was summertime; we weren't getting more than six hours of darkness, which meant we had to get in there, use the six hours, and get out again, not leaving any sign in the fields; all the crops were up and would easily get trodden down and leave sign. And then we'd have to go back the next night. I And the next.

  The ops officer was Pete. He looked like Mr. Sensible Dad, happy owner of a Mini Metro and frequenter of B&Q, and wearer of Clark's shoes, Tesco, trousers and V-neck jumpers-180 degrees from my look of Mr. Bag o'Shite. He said, "You're going to be there all month by the looks of things. just tell us what you want by four o'clock, so I can start organizing it."

  I sat down and looked at all the options. Because this place was so isolated, there was no way we could get vehicles in to drop, us off, for us then to patrol in. The only way we were going to get in was by Scotty beaming us-or via the lough. The only way we were going to get in from the lough was by boat, and the only people who were going to do that were the Regiment.

  I said to Pete, "You're not going to believe this. I want two boats over with some blokes."

  He went away shaking his head. Two hours later he said, "Right, we've got a Chinook coming over with A Squadron Boat Troop. They'll be waiting for you."

  I was happy. "I'll also need six blokes."

  "Okay, there's you and Dave two, and I'll get another four on it.

  I've got a Wessex coming in to pick you up and fly you down to meet up with A Squadron. The QRF you've got are two call signs of H.M.S.U."

  All in all, there were just over a hundred people involved, plus the expense of flying A Squadron over for the recce. Pete said, "This is the most outrageous recce we've ever done. You'd better find it!"

  When we landed in the Wessex, there was a hive of activity at the SF base. The H.M.S.U had turned up. Because of some of the experiences we'd had with the army QRF, the Regiment and Det now always used the H.M.S.U. We had a really good relationship with them: We'd go to their houses; we knew each other; we got on really well. On jobs like this it tended to be the same faces every time.

  A Squadron were on the team; they'd taken all their black kit off, got hold of the boats, and got on the Chinook. They thought it was great. I found them pumping up their boats, checking the engines and putting dry bags (diver's dry suit) on. They didn't have a clue yet what was going on. All they'd been told was to get over here and sort themselves out.

  The H.M.S.U were unloading their bags into the accommodation. They would stay here and come screaming out in their armored Sierra 4x4s if Dave 2 and I were in the shit. They were expecting to be there for the next two week and. were smacking their lips at the thought of all the sovertime.

  I got everybody together and explained what was going to be happening.

  "We're going to leave from here in the two Geminis. Once we get to the dropoff point one of the Boat Troop boys will swim and check the shoreline to make sure everything's all right for us to land.

  "Once we've landed, A Squadron will stay where they are, with Rick and Eno. Dave and myself will then start going forward to do the CTR. The general route we're going to take is along the hedge line here, then start working our way north.

  "You can see on the map the checkpoints I've marked.

  When I reach them, I'll radio back to the boats so you'll know where I am. If we find a hide, then depending on the time, I'll call in Rick and Eno, and they'll put in the technical attack. If not, the cutoff time stays as it is and we'll come back tomorrow night. Easy!"

  It looked more like a fighting patrol than a recce patrol. We had two boats, A Squadron were in their dry bags ready for the swim; two Det blokes in each boat, both in full uniform, bergens on, carrying G3s, all cammed up and ready to go for it.

  We all trundled down to the boats, only to discover that the edge of the lake further down was lined with civvies with fishing rods. I'd wanted to start trogging down the river toward the lake so that just as it was last I light, we'd have traveled some of the distance. Instead we had to sit there, waiting for the fishermen to go home.

  At last light we paddled our way down river until we got on the lough, then opened up the engines. The Geminis bounced up and down in the chop, the Boat Troop wearing their PNGs (passive night goggles) as they navigated us to the dropoff point. It was totally dark, and I felt as if we were on the sea. Finally the engines stopped, and they started paddling in a bit. Two blokes, each with a weapon, jumped into the water in their dry bags and fins and disappeared.

  The flash of their red torch told us that they had cleared the beach. We paddled into the edge, and the boats ' were tied up. We put our bergens on and set off, carrying photography kit and large radices so we could communicate with the rest of the patrol. I thought there was no way we'd find it on the first night, but at least we'd have a rough idea of the ground and could come back time and again and dissect it.

  At about twelve-thirty we were moving up a hedge line. Ahead of us in a corner of the field we could make out the shape of what must have once been an old workshop or farm building. The ends were semicircular and built of breeze blocks, and the roof had been corrugated Iron.

  The metal sheeting was rusty and full of holes and in most places had fallen down onto old lengths of wood, broken bricks, bottles filled up with mud. Sitting to the right was a rusting 1950s-style tractor without tires. Debris lay all around: empty paint tins, rolls of

  I

  moldy old carpet, plastic fertilizer sacks, and little piles of rubble.

  About fifty meters beyond was a row of four or five traditional-looking terraced houses, probably built in the days of tenant farming. The people who lived in them now perhaps still worked the land-but obviously weren't very tidy.

  As we started to walk closer, we, had a good look at the layout of the buildings. Obviously they would have to be searched at some stage, but that 'would take a night in itself. Then I spotted something that had been obscured from our view by the dead tractor. A number of large-diameter four-foot-long plastic drainage pipes, each with a male and female end, were stacked up against the building. There were three on the bottom of the pile and two on the top, but the strange thing about the arrangement was that the ends against the wall were draped over with newspaper. At what should have been the open ends of the pipes was a small pile of bricks; above that were pieces of corrugated iron that looke
d out of place, because they just didn't look ramshackle enough. I looked at the stack and thought, No, it's far too obvious; we've got that as a marker; let's carry on with the patrol and go and see what other possibles there are. Otherwise we could spend all night doing this because it would take a long time to dismantle, and if it turned out not to be a hide, we'd have lost a lot of valuable time. We kept on going and were looking at a small culvert that ran under a track. We checked a rubbish tip area, looking for large drums. It was a pain in the arse because it had to be done slowly. We had to make sure we didn't leave sign.

  Dave 2 came up and said, "Tell you what, let's go back and have a look at that marker. You never know."

  The site was surrounded by long grass. Some of it on the right-hand side had been trodden down, but that meant nothing. We went around the edge, crouched down, and looked. We studied it for about five or ten minutes to make sure that we could recognize exactly how it looked. I took some I.R photography of it.

  We then started to take off the top layer of wriggly tin. This was quite a pain in the arse: There was the risk of noise, and as we moved each sheet, it scraped against the others. It was also slightly dug into the mud, so to make sure that the earth was still nicely presented, it was a lift, a push up and a bring out. As the wriggly tin started to come off, Dave 2 would pass it to me, and I would then lay it out on the ground in order so we knew exactly what bit of which went where.

  As soon as we had also got a couple of the bricks out of the way and there was just enough room to peer inside, Dave 2 got out his Maglite torch and shone the tiny beam down into the pipes. He couldn't see anything. We started pulling off more bricks, one by one. It was like a surgical operation; I was laying them in a specific order so I knew which went where and we could put them back exactly as we had found them.

  Dave was taking his time, looking at every brick before he lifted it up.

  He took one brick off-nothing.

  Another-nothing. Then all of a sudden he leaned back, gave me a thumbs-up, and whispered, "Bingo!"