Stand By, Stand By

by Ryan, Chris

  ‘When they were put away, the power of the Medellin cartel declined, and narco-terrorism subsided for some time. But all that happened was that the Cali cartel came up in its place, and the drug trade kept on growing. Cocaine paste continued to pour in from Peru and Bolivia. The Colombians refined it at clandestine laboratories hidden deep in the jungle, and exported pure cocaine to countries all over the world, but mainly to North America.

  ‘In the early days, couriers called mulas – mules – were used to smuggle the drug out in small quantities, but now that’s all gone by the board. Today, it’s big time. The Cali cartel has developed a system of flying planeloads out to islands in the Caribbean, then loading ships destined for Europe.

  ‘As I said, the scale of it defies imagination. In the mid-eighties Escobar alone was reckoned to be worth two billion dollars. The funny thing is, he grew up the happiest kid you could imagine, in a strongly religious home. But then he got expelled from school and drifted into crime – stealing tombstones, stealing cars. Before he was twenty he was into contract killing. Then he started driving coca paste from the Andes to the laboratories in Medellin. He made so much money that by the time he was thirty he’d bought a hacienda for over sixty million dollars.

  ‘The irony of it is that at the height of his criminality he was seen as a great philanthropist. He built hundreds of new houses for slum-dwellers in his area, and they all thought he was a saint. A very complex guy, by the sound of it: with one hand he was building hospitals for the poor, and with the other he was having whole families assassinated. One of his favourite methods of killing a man was by forcing a red-hot spike into his brain.’

  He paused, looking round at our group of ten. Then he added, ‘That’s Colombia for you. Of course, none of this is directly relevant to your mission. You’re not going to be fighting the Cali cartel or chasing Escobar. At least, I hope not.’ He laughed.

  ‘Apart from the drug cartels, there are a number of terrorist organizations battling for purely political ends. In other words, Colombia is not an easy country to govern. The president, Cesar Gaviria, has just announced an entirely new constitution, but that doesn’t by any means guarantee stability. In fact, he has every need of a highly efficient bodyguard – and no doubt that’s why he’s called upon your Regiment for assistance.’

  The next couple of weeks were pretty hectic. I was still on the SP Team, of course, and still training every day, half-expecting a call-out. In the intervals, I was working out what we needed in the way of stores and equipment, and the other guys on the team were going up to the Team Tasks’ Cell in camp to sort out the materials they would need for teaching the various lessons. Videos, slides, diagrams, paperwork – everything was stored in made-up packs, stacked in pigeon-holes that stretched from floor to ceiling. We also had a talk from the MO on the various filthy diseases to which we might be exposed: yellow fever, typhus, tetanus and rabies, to say nothing of AIDS.

  In the evenings there was a special refresher course in Spanish, and the teacher from Cardiff who’d helped us earlier came up a couple of times to give us a flying start. In particular, she put us right on some of the ways in which Colombian Spanish differs from the language on the mainland – for instance, that ll is pronounced as y, rather than ly, and that a c before an i or an e sounds like 5 rather than th. She also produced some cracking local expressions, like carajo (shit), jincho (pissed) and cabron (arsehole or jerk). Of course, Tony could have told us these and a lot more, but coming from old Maria, they made a great impression. I told everybody to get stuck into their Spanish, because I knew that an important element in Operation Bluebird would be winning the hearts and minds of the Colombians. If we could communicate with them properly on a person-to-person basis, and establish good relations, the chances of their government ordering British arms and equipment some time in the future would be that much greater.

  We seemed to need a mountain of kit. For our personal weapons we took MP 5 Kurtzes – the short-barrelled version of the sub-machine-gun – as well as Beretta pistols, a couple of 53s and a couple of 203s – combination weapons with an automatic rifle in the top barrel and 40mm grenade launcher below. We also loaded up a terrific amount of ammunition, because we’d heard there was a shortage out there. Also, we’d heard that the Colombian jundis – the ordinary soldiers – couldn’t shoot for pussy, and needed a lot of training purely in weapon skills. So I signed for pallets full of ammunition boxes – 7.62 rounds for their Galil rifles, and 9mm for the MP 5s and Berettas – as well as a load of PE4 plastic explosive, and saw it all packed into steel Lacon boxes along with hundreds of targets and our personal heavy gear. If we’d known what was going to happen we’d have taken jungle kit – but as far as we could tell at that point, we were merely going to spend six or seven weeks in a reasonably civilized camp. I don’t know what it was that made me pack my Magellan GPS – the hand-held global positioning system that communicates with satellites and tells you your location on the face of the earth to within a few feet. Maybe I thought I would show off the miracles of western technology to our students in the jungle.

  The best feature of our preparation was that each of us got an extra payment of £3,000 in travellers’ cheques. Described as an overseas allowance, it was an addition to our normal pay – a kind of bonus for going abroad. For me it came just in time, as the loss of a month’s pay had left me struggling, and I put all but £500 straight into the bank. The money also consolidated the feeling that I was back in the fold.

  Several of the other guys also stashed their unexpected loot, but a couple kept all the money on them, determined to blow it in the night-spots of Bogotá and buy emeralds, which were rumoured to be incredibly cheap. They were the financially incurables. As somebody remarked, ‘Giving that amount of money to fucking Johnny’s like giving whisky to an Indian.’ When Johnny announced that in Bogotá night clubs the girls danced on the tables and didn’t wear knickers, the place was in an uproar. What with the money, the promise of a hot climate, and the language, the lads were getting a bit above themselves. As they went about the camp I could hear the most outrageous greetings: ‘Buenas tardes, Shitface. ¿Como esta?’ and ‘On your bicicleta, cabron.’

  On the day we were due to fly, Tracy took the morning off so that we could spend some time together, and we had a scene uncomfortably like the one with Kath before I went to the Gulf.

  ‘It’s only for two months,’ I said, ‘and there’s nothing dangerous about it. All the same, we’d better know were we stand. Don’t get upset, but I’ve changed my will.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘If I’m run over by a bus in Bogotá, you get everything, including the house. Except for Tim’s trust fund. That stays the same.’

  ‘That’s fantastic. But, Geordie?’

  ‘What?’ I saw Tracy looking at me in a peculiar way.

  ‘Don’t do anything stupid this time. It’s not fair on me and Tim.’

  ‘Of course I won’t.’

  Still she was looking at me with a strange expression. ‘Geordie,’ she said, ‘I want you to have this.’ She reached into the pocket of her jeans and brought out a blue velvet box.

  I took it and opened it. Inside was a little silver figure on a chain, small, but heavy and solid for its size.

  ‘Wear it round your neck,’ she said.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘St Christopher. The patron saint of travellers. He’ll bring you luck. He’ll bring you back safe.’

  ‘But where did you get it?’

  ‘I bought it, stupid!’

  ‘You shouldn’t have bothered.’

  ‘I wanted to. Put it on.’

  I slipped it over my head and gave her a kiss.

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ she said.

  ‘What’s that, love?’

  ‘It’s just that I seem to be pregnant.’

  ELEVEN

  It’s an old joke in the RAF that Lockheed, manufacturers of the Hercules C 130 transport, solved th
e aircraft’s noise problem by putting it all inside. When you hear a Herc fly over it doesn’t sound too bad, and even at close quarters the scream of the four turbo-props is tolerable. Inside the back, though, it’s a different matter. The high, penetrating whine bores into your head, and after seven or eight hours even earplugs and defenders can’t keep it out of your brain.

  That was what we had to contend with – three consecutive marathon flights of eight, eight and five hours respectively. The pull-down seats along the sides of the fuselage are impossible to sit on for more than a few minutes, so the guys slung their parachute-silk hammocks and crashed out in them, swinging along to the rhythm of the aircraft. Most RAF crews would have gone ballistic at people taking such liberties with their aircraft, but our particular crew was dedicated to special forces missions, and we knew several of them personally, so more or less anything went. It was also possible to make the odd comfortable nest among our Lacon boxes. Looking at the steel trunks, all padlocked and labelled and held down by heavy-duty netting, I reflected on the weight of the kit we were taking. The boxes of ammunition were four-man carries, and many of the others weren’t much lighter.

  From Brize Norton the plane lumbered across the Atlantic to Gander, in Newfoundland, where it went tits-up on the runway, so that we had to kill time while its load was transferred to another. The next hop took us to Belize, north of Panama, where it was stinking hot. Finally we flew down to a military airfield somewhere in the west of Colombia, the flight being timed so that we came in at the dead of night, when nobody would see us.

  After so many hours cooped up, the lads were pissed off to find that they weren’t allowed to leave the aircraft. Instead, some immigration official came on board to stamp our passports. When we heard that we had to fly on for another couple of hours to a little-used military airfield way out in the country, the pilots were even more pissed off, as they’d never seen the place before, and it had no proper runway lights. But in the end there was no problem, and we finally staggered out into the warm tropical darkness at about 0400, just in time for a shower and a nap before breakfast.

  Daylight revealed that the camp was built on level ground, and that the perimeter fence enclosed a large area of maybe fifty acres. Beyond the wire, scrub had been cleared back for another hundred yards or so, and then dense secondary jungle took over. In the far distance, above the trees, we could see bare rocky mountains. The buildings were all new, made of concrete, and reasonably well finished, with mosquito screens over the windows, doors that fitted, and showers that worked. The only trouble was, the place was alive with flies, big spiders and geckos; instead of rats, as in Belfast, it was lizards, going like smoke up and down the walls, racing across the walkways and disappearing into holes among the rocks.

  We spent most of day one sorting ourselves out. We went for a run round the perimeter and did a bit of phys to get the flight out of our systems. The dry season, known as the verrano, was coming to an end, but the weather seemed to be holding up. Early morning was relatively cool, but by eleven or so the heat had built into the high eighties, even though we were 3,000 feet above sea-level, and for us, not yet acclimatized, the temperature was quite oppressive. That didn’t stop the guys lying out after lunch and sunbathing in their shreddies. They’d immediately spotted the possibility of acquiring a serious tan; I also saw the possibility of getting seriously burnt, and I let it be known that if anyone was careless enough to roast himself, he’d be seriously fined. Because we didn’t want to make ourselves conspicuous by wearing any kind of uniform, we’d decided to go for shorts and T-shirts, and that in itself presented a problem, as our necks and knees were glaringly white.

  Another plus was the big swimming pool, which we could use whenever we wanted. The canteen, which we shared with the Colombians, was an attractive, airy place, but at first most of the guys couldn’t take the food at all. It seemed to be beans and chillis with everything, and by the end of the day most of us were racing for the bog. As everyone was expressly ordered to put used paper into a bin, rather than down the pan, the shit-house was not a place in which to sit thinking fine thoughts.

  Peter Black spent that day with us to see us in, and came with me and Tony to meet his opposite number, Captain Jaime Ortiga – a smooth guy, dark and Indian-looking, with a pencil-thin moustache. He was all smiles as he ushered us into his office. The room was bare, with whitewashed walls and a single big fan turning slowly overhead. The only decoration was a colour photograph, mounted and framed, on the wall behind the boss’s desk. It showed a middle-aged guy in a peaked cap with a red band, and about three hundredweight of medals on his chest.

  Have a go, I thought. Break the ice. So, summoning my best accent, I asked, ‘¿Hay el Presidente?’

  Captain Jaime looked hellishly startled. He spun round as if someone had driven a pin into his arse, saw the photo, and suddenly realized what I had said. The moustache spread out in a wide smile.

  ‘¡Si, si! El Presidente Gaviria! ¿Habla castellano?’

  ‘Un poco.’

  ‘¡Muy bien!’

  That little exchange put him in high good humour, and, with Tony interpreting, he gave us a very civil welcome to the base. I was pleased to find that I could understand almost everything he said, even if I got a bit tongue-tied when trying to answer questions. I heard him ask Tony how he came to have such fluent Spanish, and Tony kept out of trouble by saying that he’d learnt it as a child.

  The captain told us that the group he wanted us to train consisted of forty-two DAS officers. Some were new to bodyguard work, but others had already been partially trained by the Americans. Suddenly he broke into English to say: ‘We no like Americans. British better! British tactic better!’ No doubt he meant it as a compliment. I was watching Tony’s face, and saw one eyebrow go up by about two millimetres.

  It was agreed that we would start training next morning. With the preliminaries settled, Black set off for Bogotá in a Land Cruiser, together with his diplomatic bag, the radio codes and so on. The drive was said to take about four hours. He told us he was going to be based in the Hostal Bonavento, a small hotel near the British Embassy in the northern quarter of the city. He reckoned he’d be spending a good deal of time at the embassy, in the office of the defence attaché, which had a direct satellite link with the UK. Since we had a portable satcom set with us, keeping in touch with him would present no problem.

  Training started on day two. Startled out of their wits by Murdo McFarlane’s reveille, the home team shambled out on to the barrack square at 0630, all shapes and sizes in white T-shirts with little DAS logos on them and dark-blue trousers.

  We formed them up in three ranks, comprising three groups of fifteen, fifteen and twelve. At my request, Tony put over a little spiel about the requirement for physical fitness and strength in BG work, and the need to be able to heave bodies around in quick time. I could see one or two of the Colombians looking fairly sick, and when we set them running round the perimeter wire, the fatties soon fell away behind. By the time we’d given them a dose of circuit-training they looked about done-for; but after a shower and breakfast they came out spruce enough for training proper. We were hoping to pass them all out in the end, so we wanted to nurse them along.

  At an early stage we explained to them that the team which eventually emerged would have two elements: the bodyguard itself, which would surround the president and give him close protection, and the counterattack squad, which would range out ahead of him whenever he was on the move, making a show of its weapons and letting everyone know that it had real teeth. I’d expected the majority of them to prefer the second option, and I was surprised to find that most of them thought it was the BG work that was really macho. They thought they were defending God, and all wanted to be the man who saved the president’s life – i.e. in the bodyguard itself. The idea of going CAT really pissed them off. At a later stage we planned to split the course into two main streams, but for the time being we tried to teach all of them a bit
of everything.

  They certainly needed some instruction, most of all in the use of weapons. Some were OK with their pistols, but when it came to rifles and machine-guns they were useless. I could see that they were actually scared of the weapons, and sometimes shut their eyes when they pulled the trigger. They were also excitable, and inclined to be bloody dangerous. There was one short-arsed guy considered even by his mates to be a bit cracked in the head. His name was Alejandro, but they referred to him openly as ‘El Loco’ – the loony – so we did the same. One day I had him firing his Galil on automatic when suddenly he gave a yell and dropped the weapon, which went on blasting off of its own accord, leaping about on the ground and sending rounds winging away into sundry parts of Colombia. Fortunately there were only half a dozen rounds left in the magazine and nobody got hurt. When I tore into him for letting go, El Loco protested that the gun wouldn’t stop firing when he released the trigger – and when we stripped it down, we found that the sear had indeed broken.

  To sharpen up their powers of observation, we laid out a special lane through the jungle surrounding the camp, putting down things like compasses, small pieces of map, matchboxes and other objects that wouldn’t normally have been there. We then made them walk down the lane, one at a time, taking notes of what they’d spotted. To keep them on the ball we made a few booby traps out of trip-wires connected to thunderflashes.

  I also gingered them up with a few little explosives. The aim of working with plastic explosive was to make them aware of the damage a car-bomb could do, and to teach them what to look for when they were clearing an area – to keep eyes open for suspicious packages or anything out of the ordinary. They were fascinated when I broke some eight-ounce sticks of explosive out of their wrapping paper and started to knead them in my hands. When I proposed to set fire to a lump of the stuff they were poised for the off; and when I did ignite it, they disappeared like shit off a shovel into the jungle, because PE 4 burns with a merry roar and an intense orange flame. They weren’t to know that it can’t explode if ignited, unless it’s in a bloody great lump of thirty pounds or more. Later we got the wreck of an old car out into an area surrounded by rocks, and, working on the principle of P for Plenty, I put a charge of nearly five pounds underneath the chassis. When the students saw the whole thing rise to the height of the tree-tops, they were chuffed to bollocks.