First Into Action (13 page)
The second version comes from the hostage.
As the explosions rocked the building, Norman burst into the room with his primary weapon on aim. The hostage was standing with his hands in the air assuring Norman that all was well and indicated the lone terrorist, lying face down on the floor across the room, shaking in fear, with his gun tossed away. Norman let his MP5 swing aside, pulled out his pistol, casually walked over and shot the terrorist in the head.
It’s a strange phenomenon that allies a hostage with his would-be executioner against a man risking his life to rescue him, and it’s not an uncommon one, either.
Norman was decorated for his uncommon bravery. I bumped into him a few times over the years after my first job with him, all in different parts of the world. He actually came down to Poole once to do part of an SBS course and to learn something about us pond-dwellers. He was a likeable bloke. He eventually died alone in Northern Ireland one night, drunk behind the wheel of a car, after crashing into a bridge.
One afternoon our liaison officer brought in a tip-off about a weapons cache discovered hidden in the cemetery of a small village way out in the countryside. It was dark by the time an SAS and SBS team dropped off half a mile from the location and moved cautiously in to inspect it. There was always a possibility that the IRA had set up the tip-off themselves and booby-trapped the cache. Live ambushes were not the IRA’s style and they were especially cautious if a quality unit was operating in their area. (When the Paras or Royal Marines moved into an area for their four-month stint, the IRA bad boys usually moved out until they had gone. A member of the Provisional IRA once told me the Paras and Marines are more aggressive than other regular Army units and react more positively when attacked.) The inspection of the cache had to be done quickly, quietly and in darkness. After the area had been checked for booby-traps, weapons were indeed uncovered in a hole under a concrete slab behind an old gravestone.
The cache consisted of a selection of pistols and rifles in mint condition, wrapped in plastic and placed tidily in a canvas weapons bag. But the hide had not been weather-proofed for long-term storage. That meant either the weapons were being taken out and serviced regularly, or they were in transit and this was just a temporary, short-term location. Perhaps they were being kept serviced for an upcoming close quarter assassination (CQA) in the immediate area, or they were on their way to an ASU in another part of the province. Either way it was likely someone would come for the weapons soon. It was too late to mount a full surveillance operation which would have been ideal to discover the weapons’ ultimate destination and the players involved. The only option was to mount an immediate ambush on the site for that night, while a plan of action was devised for the following day.
Open ambushes at night in Northern Ireland are technically more complex than in conventional wars for reasons both physical and political. The ambushers have to find a place from where they can clearly identify targets but without the risk of being seen themselves. This means no obvious locations and away from all possible routes to the target area. The ambushers must also have a clear view of the target, not just to identify characters, but to identify precisely what they are doing – do they have weapons and are they a threat? The observers must ascertain beyond a doubt the target’s legal eligibility for lethal engagement.
If a courier arrived to pick up the weapons, he (or she) would probably observe the hide for a while and circle it before moving in, and this they can do nonchalantly, especially if they are locals, since they have every right to be there. The courier might arrive with an accomplice for cover, posing as a courting couple, for instance. Ambushers, therefore, not only have to maintain a clear view of the target, they have to be hidden from view from every approach.
There was a very good chance an amorous couple arriving in the graveyard might be genuine as it is the national pastime of the Northern Irish to ‘bag off’ in the open air at night. Families in Ireland are generally large, and especially in small towns and villages it is not unusual for offspring to stay at home until they are old enough to get married themselves. This means the houses are always relatively crowded. Bearing in mind that there are often religious restrictions, any member of the family wanting to engage in sex had to do it outside and usually under cover of darkness. A car parked in a lonely spot with two people in it is not an uncommon sight in Northern Ireland. In some towns, where out-of-the-way car parks are in short supply, you can expect to find the few there are fairly packed with cars, especially soon after pub closing time, many of them rocking and squeaking. These are ideal places for special forces drop-off vehicles to park up and wait. Some operatives found that night-scopes helped pass the time in these situations, and it was sometimes necessary to get your own car rolling a little so as not to be the odd one out.
The ‘Troubles’ are not a war, they’re a police action and every soldier is essentially a deputised police officer used to carry out tasks the police are not trained for. Special forces were originally sent over because the sectarian killings, on both Protestant and Catholic sides, were getting beyond the control of the regular Army and RUC. Since the recent Troubles began in 1969, in the years before special forces ‘officially’ arrived in early 1976, there had been over 1,400 killings. But the SAS and SBS in their conventional modes were not the ideal force for this politically sensitive conflict and were often the proverbial bull in a china shop. Understandably, we became the IRA’s number one priority to eliminate, because destroying them was our only reason for being there. Killing any of us would give them kudos and make them look more deadly and more professional. What’s more, we were politically safe in so far as there is little pity from the general public for special forces lost in Northern Ireland, only curiosity. Unconventional soldiers operating secretly and independently have a romantic aura of expendability.
There were strict rules of engagement to adhere to before shooting an IRA terrorist and breaking them could result in jail. Rules are designed to make games more sporting and the rules for engaging the IRA appeared to have been designed with that in mind. The IRA naturally saw themselves as soldiers and insisted that we did, too. Fortunately for them, we didn’t. Our rules obliged us to treat them as regular criminals, which means they were innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. This worked greatly to their advantage, for if they had been given true enemy soldier status all we would have needed to have done was pull them in off the streets (we knew who most of them were) and place them in POW camps. We had the upper hand in training, equipment, manpower and technology, but that was balanced out by the IRA always being allowed to make the first move. Overtly killing members of the IRA by the rules was almost as difficult as it was for them to kill us (which most often was purely by chance encounter on their part).
The only way we could legally kill one of them was to catch him in an act that could reasonably be judged as an immediate threat to life. It was within the murky confines of that particular rule that we lurked, waiting patiently, ready to bring down the axe without hesitation the instant the opportunity arose.
That is why, in the early hours of the morning, still pitch-black, when a lone figure stepped out from the trees, climbed over the low stone wall into the graveyard and towards the weapons cache, he came under our heartless gaze. There should have been a skull and crossbones to warn him, like those on the edge of a minefield. He strolled through the graveyard like the neophyte he was, his senses dull, alerting him to nothing. His experiences of the Troubles were obviously limited to riots, in a crowd of hundreds, throwing bricks and petrol bombs at troops lined up behind plastic shields. He had no doubt heard of the SAS, but he would have nothing to do with them until he made the big league and joined an ASU, if that is what he dreamed of. As he walked between the headstones, his silhouette was in the night-sights of two assault weapons in the hands of two men who could easily take on hundreds just like him. I say easily because he was only fifteen years old.
The SBS and SAS operatives could not have known that, not in the cold, green fuzzy light of a weapon’s night-scope. They were simply watching a suspected terrorist in a graveyard heading for a cache of weapons, waiting for him to comply with a rule of engagement which was to hold a lethal weapon in his hand. Once he did that he was a threat to life. It was unlikely he intended to shoot anyone at that very moment, but how many more rules do you give to the other side? Do you let him run away with the gun and risk losing him, or do you wait for him to shoot someone first? How much more of an advantage do you give them? If we played by their rules we would grab him now, beat and kick him near unconscious on the ground until most of his teeth were knocked out, bundle him into a car and take him to a lonely spot, then drag him into the middle of a field where his gurgled pleas could not be heard. In the dark of night we would surround and beat him some more with fists, boot and pistol-butt until his face was shredded and broken, until flaps of hair-covered skin lifted to expose his white skull in places, until one of his eyes had burst and was hanging out, and the mud around him turned crimson with his blood. Then we would ignore his hardly discernible plea for a priest to hear his last confession as he knew he was about to die, alone, filthy and surrounded by men who hated him wholeheartedly. Then one of us would place a pistol against his head and fire empty chambers and be amused each time he flinched, until the last two chambers, which were loaded, blew his head apart. That’s what we would do if we were like them, for that is precisely what they did to Robert Nairac.
It was a standard tactic of the IRA to employ children to carry arms. During the riots in the cities, it was not an uncommon practice for a sniper, after shooting a soldier, to drop the weapon and run, making him an unarmed target and therefore illegal to shoot. A child was instructed to pick up the gun and run away with it, his instructors knowing full well that soldiers, even though adhering to the strict rules laid out in the yellow card which every one of them carried, won’t shoot a child, even one holding a gun.
The choice of using this particular kid in the graveyard to pick up the weapons was especially sad as he was mentally retarded. He knelt by the gravestone and struggled to move aside the concrete slab. The crossed hairs of the two night-scopes focused on him as he reached deep into the hole. He struggled to pull out the heavy sackcloth and plastic-wrapped bundle and let it rest on the ground. He was putting a lot of effort into getting closer to his own death. If he had left the bundle tied up he would have been safe. He could have carried it away as it was and he would have just been followed and the operation moved on to another stage to catch the recipients. But he was simple and curious and perhaps he had never seen a real gun before. He untied the string and let the bundle roll open. The ends of each weapon were placed in pockets to hold them in position. He touched the rifle that took his fancy most and slid it out of its pockets. He picked it up and gripped it in his hands. His life belonged to us now. There was no question of a reprieve. The kid lifted the rifle into his shoulder to see how it felt. The pads of two index fingers, neither of them his, touched the crescents of two black triggers and took first pressure. In seconds the kid’s soul would be homeless. Whatever he saw in the night sky through the sights of his weapon was the last thing he saw. The quiet was shattered by two sharp reports. One bullet passed through his chest as another took the side of his head off.
When the operatives closed in to check their work, any satisfaction they felt faded when they saw they had killed a mere boy.
The true irony of it all came to light during the police inquiry that follows all incidents. It turned out the retarded boy had nothing to do with the IRA whatsoever. His family was in fact Protestant. He had found the arms cache by accident that morning while playing in the cemetery and had run off home to tell his father. The father ordered his son never to return to the cemetery and then did what he believed was right and phoned the police, who in turn handed it over to us.
It seemed there were often long periods of inactivity on the IRA’s part, but the truth was we were getting less and less information from the RUC’s Special Branch, who were growing disenchanted with the increasing number of SAS (and SBS) cock-ups. During these quiet times and to justify us being in Northern Ireland, the ruperts would scour the lower level intelligence trails in the hope of finding something we could build a task on and create our own operations. To my knowledge we have never had any real success at that level without the help of the RUC or Military Intelligence. Some of these self-generated operations were nothing more than job-creation schemes. The SBS seemed even more desperate than the SAS to find things to do since we were going through an identity crisis at the time anyway. If an operation was anywhere close to water we had to go way over the top and make it more difficult than it was just to prove we were the only unit for the job. One operation consisted of two teams which canoed in from a submarine drop-off to recce a coastline when it would have been a great deal easier and safer to yomp in across country. That fact was proved when one of the canoes capsized on landing, resulting in the team having to be extracted over land the following day (by the 14th Intelligence Detachment) because they were suffering from hypothermia. Another SBS operation involved setting up a series of OPs on the small islands and coastline of Lough Neagh to log the movement of boats, in the hope that we might see one off-loading arms. Nothing came out of it after hundreds of man-hours in sodden, water-logged positions freezing our nuts off. It was not the conditions that made it so boring as much as the ever-present feeling that we were totally wasting our time.