by Andy McNab
I crunched the old Defender into gear and pulled out onto the road. It rattled a bit, but it would look after me nicely as the temperature dropped. The truth was I loved these wagons. Whatever you threw at them, they were up for it. I’d driven the 109 in Belfast as a Green Army squaddie. I’d thrown a Series IIA Pinkie – stripped of doors and windscreen and tooled-up with smoke grenades, twin GPMGs and a Milan wire-guided missile launcher – around the Middle East.
Father Mart’s 110 didn’t have the firepower of the Pink Panther, but it wasn’t covered in the outrageous so-called ‘camouflage’ paint either. As Trev hadn’t needed to tell me, nobody in this neck of the woods would give it a second glance.
First stop was an outdoor equipment store in Abergavenny. I parked in Frogmore Street and was one of the first punters through the door when they opened. I was already kitted out for a Russian winter, so I didn’t need any extra clothing, but I wasn’t about to go for an action replay of our pre-Selection adventure.
I gathered up an ice axe with a nice sharp pick, a folding shovel and a pair of crampons with the kind of claws that would have been at home in Jurassic Park. I added a first-aid kit, two boxes of hexy blocks, matches, a mess tin and a water flask. I already had a pocketful of Father Mart’s Yorkshire Teabags, so all I needed now were some protein bars, in case it was a while before he could conjure up my next full English with all the trimmings. I bundled the whole lot into a daysack.
I threw in a spare pair of socks and some discounted waterproof gaiters for luck, then paid cash at the checkout. That always brought a smile to the face of every trader, particularly since the Crash, but it wasn’t the reason I did it.
American Express used to boast that flashing their plastic said more for you than cash ever could, and that was why I hadn’t used a credit or charge card for as long as I could remember. Even before my stint as a deniable operator with the security services, I’d never fancied my movements being traced via my financial transactions. And I hadn’t enjoyed those embarrassing moments at the supermarket checkout when my payment wasn’t authorized.
I’d picked up a turbo-charged debit card during my Zürich stopover that meant I could turn my back on all that shit. It was a sleek black thing without any embossed numbers, which delivered money from my Swiss account at any ATM worldwide. Because the link between me and my bank vault was routed through a randomly selected, ever-changing configuration of about twenty-six separate servers, the very sharply suited gnome who’d handed it to me in its little velvet pouch claimed that my privacy was guaranteed.
Next up was a visit to Go Mobile. The NSA had been tracking cell phones for nearly a decade, which meant GCHQ and any number of bad guys had too – you could even trace an iPhone with your iPad, these days – but I’d decided to ignore Trev’s instruction twice over. My iPhone was zipped into an inner pocket, but I wasn’t sure which network would have the best signal on the hill. I bought a Samsung G3 and three pay-as-you-go SIM cards, each with a different network, as back-up in case everything went to rat shit.
I’d been caught in the open without comms more than once when the weather closed in, and it was never a good day out. And the GPS systems on these gizmos were now reliable enough to save me having to unfold an Ordnance Survey map every ten minutes and bring out a compass.
A shaft of sunlight burst through the swirling grey cloud as I slung the sack into the wagon and aimed us in the direction of the main to Brynmawr. There was an internet café fairly close to the centre that had come in useful to me from time to time. It also served the best Americano outside Colombia. Words like Wi-Fi, Twitter and Instagram didn’t yet feature in Father Mart’s vocabulary, and I needed to check stuff out.
The patch of blue sky had headed east by the time I got there. I made my way past a line of plastic fliers, emblazoned with giant daffodils, which flapped their ‘Welcome’ message in the strengthening breeze.
I was met by a beaming Welshman and the smell of frying bacon as soon as I opened the door, so added a pig roll to my coffee order. A large one. I’d only recently had breakfast, but I had time to kill, and you never knew when you might need some extra calories. I was also pretty sure that for an hour or two I was going to be a whole lot warmer in there than I would be for the rest of the day.
The Welshman handed me my change and waved me across to a row of keyboards and computer screens. And, yes, he was happy for me to crack the Samsung straight on the charger and bin the packaging.
I shrugged off my Gore-Tex jacket, bunged it over a chair and loosened my fleece.
The first site I tuned into was ARRSE, the unofficial Army Rumour Service. It gave squaddies the chance to do what they did best: honk about everything and everyone.
The SAS references, not surprisingly, had more to do with the number of ferrets we had to bite the heads off to pass Selection than what actually went on behind closed doors. Halfway down the postings on the News Forum someone claiming to be SBS (user name: Coldfeet) asked if anyone had heard about a fuck-up behind the wire at Credenhill. He’d been met by a storm of abuse from the party faithful, mostly accusing him of Small Bollock Syndrome. A Crap Hat wondered if one of the Boys in Black had got tangled up in his abseil rope; another thought he might have dropped his ice cream. There was no reference to the CQB Rooms.
Elsewhere, a girl called Rosie with a Good Sense Of Humour was looking for Fun Times with A Hero In Uniform, and the Old and the Bold queued up to applaud Guy Chastain’s posthumous VC. The colonel’s boy had sacrificed himself to save the lives of his men on an op in Afghanistan, and the old man had sparked up a fund-raising campaign for a statue. I didn’t know quite what to make of that. On the one hand, I’d have loved a dad who cared enough to keep my memory alive. On the other, I’d always believed that, in war, shit happens.
I scanned the headlines on the Telegraph and Sun sites, and the Mail Online, but there was nothing much there either. A page-three girl, who called herself Victoria Crossley, claimed to have had a Brazilian in the shape of the legendary medal. The caption writer said that he’d be happy to share her firing position anytime.
I stopped to take a sip of the Americano, then gave my full attention to the pig roll. As the fat seeped out between the layers of bread and dribbled over my fingers, I thought life didn’t get much better than this.
5
You could drive to Grwyne Fawr Reservoir from Abergavenny through the Mynydd Du Forest, but I never put my trust in cul-de-sacs without good reason. And Trev hadn’t invited me up there to draw attention to myself. I turned left onto the Crickhowell road, and the remnants of last night’s hail crunched beneath my tyres as I skirted the western edge of the Black Mountains. There was snow on the high ground, and the sulphurous tint to the light promised more before the day was gone.
I pulled off the main some distance short of Talgarth and wound my way up the back lanes, through patches of woodland. I parked not far from the church at Llanelieu. I’d first spotted it when Trev and I had found our way out of the Elephant’s Arsehole, and gone back later when I’d started getting excited by medieval history. God no longer paid St Ellyw’s formal visits, even on Sundays, and it had never been on Father Mart’s beat, but I figured his wagon wouldn’t be out of place there. And I wanted to see if the loft was still painted blood red.
The 110’s rear door gave a squeal of complaint as I went back to sort out my kit. That was when I noticed the graffiti. In the coating of mud beneath the Defender label someone had added ‘of the Faith’ with a wet fingertip.
I decided against taking my Russian tank commander’s hat. I’d bought it from a stall when Anna and I had been wandering around an open-air market near Gorky Park. The sheepskin earpieces made it the warmest thing I’d ever owned, but if you wore that kind of gear outside Eastern Europe you just looked like a dickhead or a Chelsea fan.
I threw the shovel and all the other shit that I’d bought into the daysack. I might not need any of it, but I’d spent a fair chunk of my adult life
running around with thirty-five-kilo packs on my back so it was hardly going to slow me down. I fastened the gaiters, tightened the straps on the sack, grabbed my ski gloves and was ready to put one foot in front of the other.
My first objective was the bothy beside the stream that fed the reservoir. I didn’t go straight there, but I didn’t zigzag like a lunatic either. Trev was playing Secret Squirrel, but as far as the rest of the world was concerned, I was a well-equipped walker in search of the best vantage-points from which to enjoy the breathtaking scenery.
Once I’d left the sheep grazing in the churchyard behind me, there was no sign of another living thing on the hillside. I stepped from tussock to tussock, their tufts of grass crisp with frost beneath my Timberlands. We used to call them baby’s heads when I was a squaddie, and I could never quite shake the image from my mind.
The bothy was a tiny stone-built affair with a slate tile roof, tucked into the hill above a weir. During the summer it virtually disappeared from sight among the greys and greens and browns of the surrounding landscape. Today it stood out against the dusting of snow.
There was no smoke leaking from the chimney above the wood-burning stove, so I decided it was a good moment for a brew. I filled my flask from the stream and scooped up some more water with my brand-new mess tin.
Once inside, I broke a chunk off a hexy block and watched it bring the water to the boil. Being out of the wind with some of Father Mart’s Yorkshire Tea inside me was all I needed right now, so I wasn’t about to frighten up a roaring fire. I might do that if I had to later. I wasn’t sure I’d make it back past the reservoir before last light, but there was a track that I could follow all the way along the ridge.
I fished out the Samsung and tried each of my new SIM cards in turn, selecting the network with the best signal, and tapped its number under ‘A’ in my iPhone address book. There was plenty of room for it. I never kept anyone’s contact details. The few I needed were already safely tucked away inside my head, and I didn’t need to advertise them. Old habits died hard.
I’d always thought these mountain refuges were brilliant. Some of them were originally constructed for itinerant workers during the Industrial Revolution. Now they offered shelter to dickheads like me and Trev if we took the trouble to find them on the map before setting out – or bumped into them by accident when we’d somehow managed to dig ourselves out of the shit.
We’d celebrated our escape that night by carving our initials into the mortar beside the chimney, as you do when you’re a thoughtless little prick who’s glad to be alive, but someone had got busy with the Polyfilla and whitewash long since, and covered them over.
As I sat and listened to the swollen stream cascading over the rocks outside, I wondered which route Trev had chosen for today, and what had made him so jumpy that he couldn’t just meet for a brew in Hereford.
6
Trev was a bit excitable at times, but he didn’t fuck about. And he was always there when you needed him. Before the Gulf we’d mooched around in Colombia together. In the late eighties and early nineties it had been responsible for providing the lion’s share of America’s multi-billion-dollar cocaine supply, and for fuelling a fearsome percentage of indigenous fatalities. The year we went, there were three thousand drug-related killings in one town alone – which was why the locals were almost as keen to nail the cartels as the DEA was.
A bunch of us had piled into a Hercules C130 and headed down there via Newfoundland. Once we were in country, we debussed into cattle trucks.
Our initial task was to train the Colombian militia, then to help them wipe out as many drug-manufacturing plants as we could ID and locate. Since it took two hundred kilos of leaves to produce one kilo of coca paste, the DMPs were thrown up as close as possible to the growing areas.
They were mostly hidden in jungle, heavily guarded, and crisscrossed by tunnels and escape routes, but our biggest obstacles were corruption and wholesale slaughter. A 12,000 per cent markup from production cost to street value buys a lot of informers, and in a world where you were either on the payroll or dead, fully operational DMPs had more often than not turned into ghost towns by the time we got to them.
Fair one. We were just visiting; the militia had to live there. We didn’t have to worry about our wives being raped and killed, and our kids being hosed down on the way to school. We had to become more proactive, and strike without warning.
Me and Trev spent weeks on hard routine, kitten-crawling through the undergrowth with a bunch of lads who all seemed to be called José or Miguel, coated with cam cream and mozzie rep, sweat leaking from every pore. Our combats were covered with so much slime we could no longer see the camouflage pattern.
We pinged a complex under the canopy not far from the Darién Gap and moved in for a close target recce, our bollocks and armpits stinging in the jungle heat. There was a heli pad, a processing plant, storerooms, a long, low-roofed Nissen hut where the coca paste was laid out on trestle tables to dry, and accommodation for the white-eyes – the Europeans and North Americans who took care of the chemistry – and the muscle.
Destroying the place wasn’t exactly going to bring the Medellín cartel to its knees, but our guys had enough PE4, clackers and det cord to do the business, and I could see Trev’s eyes brighten at the prospect. He moved towards me on his elbows and toecaps and leaned in close to my ear. ‘Why hang about?’ He hated surprises, all right, but he didn’t mind dishing them out.
I nodded. Why indeed?
We surrounded the site, deployed cut-off teams to stop any runners reaching their boats or vanishing into the foliage, and blew it apart. The best news of all was that we didn’t take a single casualty. The Josés and the Miguels were all going to make it back home for tea and sticky buns. The bad guys weren’t so lucky. One boy legging it off the premises with his finger locked onto the trigger of an AK-47 got on the wrong end of a cut-off team, and a white-eye took a round in the chest.
I hauled the boffin out of the dirt, dressed the wound and threw him into the first Huey on the pad. I was rewarded with a blast of hard-core Marseille abuse. Trev chuckled. ‘Mate, looks like we’ve wrapped up the French Connection.’
I blamed myself for what happened next. I sat on my Bergen in the middle of what was left of the DMP, still enjoying the joke, as another wave of anti-narcotic police helis screamed in. The ANP lads were quartering the place, seeking out and destroying the stocks of precursor chemicals before burning the whole installation to the ground.
I’d got a brew on, but not quickly enough for Trev. He was stomping around behind me as I waited for the water to boil. ‘I’m gagging for some Tetley’s, Stoner. Pull your finger out.’
He was still having a moan when I heard a commotion off to my right. The ANP had unearthed two guys who must have hidden themselves during the attack.
They legged it towards the canopy, desperate to get back into cover before they got shot, and I was directly in their way. All mad hair and staring eyes, the one with a gollock headed straight for me. As he raised the weapon I dropped the mugs, and, still on my arse, pushed back on my Bergen to dodge the blow.
I knew I hadn’t moved fast enough. His blade was so close I could see my face in it. Then blood blossomed from two neat holes, one in his forehead, the other in his neck, and he dropped like liquid. A nanosecond later another couple of 9mm rounds were pumped into his mate. The whole thing was over almost before I heard the Browning’s report.
As I straightened, I heard an animal snarl beside my ear. ‘You going to finish making that brew, or what?’
7
I exited the bothy and tabbed south-west, well past the point where the Grwyne Fawr stopped behaving like a stream and started being a full-on river, then flanked the northern edge of the reservoir. An hour or so later I scrambled up through the gorse onto the path that curved across the top of the huge stone dam.
It towered above the next stretch of the valley, and the sight of it never failed to stop me dead.
The times we’d been here since our first Waun Fach adventure, Trev and I used to go straight into Guy Gibson mode at this point. It was impossible not to. Mostly we’d whistle ‘The Dam Busters March’, just like every other tripper. Before we’d deployed for the Gulf, we’d taken it a stage further and danced around on the parapet, pretending to be the German sentry in the Carling Black Label ad, keeping a never-ending succession of bouncing bombs out of our imaginary goalmouth.
We weren’t the only ones to behave like idiots here. Prince William and Prince Harry got a serious bollocking for abseiling down the front of it without the right kit when they were teenagers. The Royal Protection Squad had been given a king-size slapping as well.
But there was no one around now.
The first new flakes of snow began to fall as I passed the strange chunks of overgrown concrete that flanked the dam’s eastern approach. It made the spooky metal gates that creaked open beneath the overhanging fir trees seem even more like something out of a Dracula movie.
I stepped out onto the walkway and into the wind. The blockhouse at the halfway point seemed empty. I wasn’t surprised. I guessed that most of its functions were automated now. I stopped beside it and looked over the rail, as you do when you’ve come to admire the view – first at the reservoir stretching back the way I’d come then down the almost vertical drop on the opposite side, where Tiggy Legge-Bourke and the princes had come to have some fun.
I didn’t have to pretend to be impressed. The water spilled through the arches at my feet, sluiced down the century-old stonework and boiled white when it rejoined the river a hundred and fifty feet below.
I moved out onto the track on the far side of the dam, aiming half left. A loop right about a mile further on would take me into the gully that ended at the Bolthole. The snow was heavier now, but the light was still good. I slipped off a glove, unzipped the breast pocket of my Gore-Tex jacket and took out my iPhone. I wanted to check how much time I had before my RV with Trev.
