Natural Born Heroes

CHAPTER 11

Things you do,

Come back to you,

As though they knew the way.

—RODGERS AND HART, “Where or When”

TOMAHAWKS AND SPEARS weren’t the weapons of choice for the Firm, but luckily, wobble power works just as well with a finger. When the Heavenly Twins began training Churchill’s first class of dirty tricksters, Bill Fairbairn showed them how it’s done.

Fairbairn yanked his pistol and clenched it like … well, like an idiot. He didn’t even aim the thing. Everyone knows you have to lock out your arms and steady the pistol with both hands as you peer down the sights. But Fairbairn just stood there, his knees bent as though they were about to buckle. He clutched the pistol as if he were trying to crush it in his fist and barely raised it to his waist. He looked nothing like an expert marksman or a seasoned cop. He looked more like a confused old man who suddenly found a pistol in his pocket and had no idea how it got there.

Now this, he said, is how you win a gunfight. You’re crazy if you think you won’t be terrified when you face a man who’s trying to kill you, Fairbairn explained, but that’s okay; humans are terrific at turning terror into a weapon. You just need to tap into your natural ability to aim by instinct. Fairbairn believed “instinctive aim” is what made Wild West gunslingers so deadly, and one of his protégés actually went west to find out. Rex Applegate was a U.S. Army lieutenant with unusual credentials; as a boy in Yoncalla, Oregon, he’d chucked bricks in the air as targets for his uncle, a professional trick-shot artist. “These people did not use the sights for many of their acts,” Apple-gate noted—yet when he joined the Army, he found that old-timers like his uncle were better shots than his instructors. Frontiersmen like Wild Bill Hickok had heavier weapons and no formal training, but their quick-draw skills were astonishing.

“Wild Bill was an authentic Western gunman who actually killed a lot of men in combat,” Applegate learned. “I was still searching for that essential fact: how did they do it?” The Army assigned Applegate to study close-combat techniques, and one of his first stops was Wild Bill’s final stomping grounds, in Deadwood, South Dakota. In the county courthouse, Applegate found a packet of Wild Bill’s papers. “One was a letter from an admirer asking in effect, ‘How did you kill these men? What was your method or technique?’” Applegate relates. “That was exactly what I was looking for.” Luckily, Hickok had never mailed his response. In Hickok’s own handwriting, Applegate read: “I raised my hand to eye level, like pointing a finger, and fired.”

Like pointing a finger … “This was very intriguing,” Applegate would recall, “but it wasn’t made clear to me until I started my training in combat handgun techniques under a couple of gentlemen named William E. Fairbairn and Eric A. Sykes.” The Twins, it turned out, had come up with the same technique after a lucky accident. One night, fifteen of their Shanghai policemen had raided a crime gang’s headquarters. When Fairbairn inspected the building the next morning, he found it ringed with head-high booby-trap wires. His officers had passed right under without seeing them. In a flash of insight, Fairbairn understood why: whenever they tensed, they instinctively dropped into a crouch. It must be the same reason, Fairbairn realized, they also clutched their pistols in a death grip.

“You will be keyed up to the highest pitch and will be grasping your pistol with almost convulsive force. If you have to fire, your instinct will be to do it as quickly as possible, and you will probably do it with a bent arm, possibly even from the level of the hip. The whole affair may take place in a bad light or none at all,” Fairbairn predicted. “It may be that a bullet whizzes past you and that you will experience momentary stupefaction, which is due to the shock of the explosion at very short range of the shot just fired by your opponent.”

What Fairbairn was observing would be identified years later as the Sympathetic Nervous System response, more commonly known as the fight-or-flight reflex. Your knees bend, your heart pounds, your hands clench and jerk up in front of you, your vision tunnels toward one threat, and your body squares to face it. This is your lower brain—your animal self—coiling you like a spring to either strike or sprint for cover. Before Fairbairn arrived in Shanghai, police guidelines dictated you should ignore your animal self and get composed before shooting. But while you’re composing, the other guy is firing. “If you take much longer than a third of a second to fire your first shot,” Fairbairn warned, “you will not be the one to tell the newspaper about it.” No wonder nine Shanghai patrolmen were killed in a single year. “There is not time,” Fairbairn realized, “to put yourself into some special stance or to align the sights of the pistol, and any attempt to do so places you at the mercy of a quicker opponent.”

You can’t fight natural instinct, he decided. But you can make natural instinct fight for you. So the Twins came up with a new, fear-as-a-weapon approach, and brought it with them when they returned to Britain. “The man who can use his weapon quickly and accurately from any position without using the sights is the one who will stand the best chance of not going out feet first,” the Twins announced. “It can be done and it is not so very difficult.” The trick is making your pistol an extension of your fascia. And for that, you only need to point your finger.

When you sense menace, your body craves balance. That’s why a scare puts you instinctively into the pose of a tightrope walker—knees bent, hands up—but there’s another effect: your arm can locate a threat like a compass needle finding true north. The biomechanics make sense: to avoid getting knocked over by an attacker, your body weight has to be ready to instantly shift from two points of support—your feet on the ground—to three: your feet plus the attacker you’re about to hold at arm’s length. Your hand can’t wait for a command; it needs its own defensive directional system, a fascia-based response.

Fairbairn called it “the impulse of the master-eye.” Pick a spot on the far wall, he’d instruct his recruits. Cock your thumb and finger like an imaginary pistol. Now pull—yank up your hand and quick-draw toward your target. Don’t think, don’t aim; just move. “Observe carefully now what has taken place,” Fairbairn would say. “Your forefinger, as intended, will be pointing to the mark you are facing squarely.” To convert that impulse into deadly force, Fairbairn concluded, you just need to point your gun the same way.

“We were not taught to hold the gun out at arm’s length or with two hands but to draw the gun and hold it tucked into your navel with the gun pointing straight ahead,” one of the Twins’ students, Robert Sheppard, would explain. “Wherever you looked, your gun moved round towards the target you were looking at.” SOE recruits who’d handled a gun before bristled at the point-and-shoot system. It was ugly and humiliating. They didn’t look like brave lawmen, aiming carefully with locked-out arms and two firm hands. They looked like scared punks trying to sneak off a shot without getting spotted.

But Fairbairn’s partner, Bill Sykes, knew how to deal with doubters. “I’ve seen that chap turn round with his back facing the target and hit the bull’s eye from between his legs,” Sheppard would recall. “I’ve seen him do that.”