Stand By, Stand By

FIVE

A few days before we left, at the start of December, we heard on the grapevine that 500 men of the First Glosters had been sent to Ulster in response to the latest upsurge of violence. It certainly sounded as though we were going to get some action.

Several of the lads went berserk over their packing, insisting that they take almost every single object they possessed. We knew that our accommodation was going to be basic — no more than a series of Portakabins inside a warehouse — yet they seemed hell-bent on having their fridges, TV sets, microwaves and God — knows-what with them. There was no limit on what we were allowed to take — the bulk items went ahead by road and ferry, leaving us with only our ops kit — all the same, I didn’t go in for much heavy stuff; for one thing, I didn’t think I’d need it, and for another, I didn’t want to strip the cottage just as the girls moved in. In the end all I took was my Technics stereo system, minus the speakers, because I reckoned they’d piss off my neighbours in a close-quarter environment, and in any case I’d recently invested in a pair of Stax headphones whose sound quality put the speakers in the shade.

A Puma came into camp on the Monday afternoon, and lifted the twelve of us away over the Welsh mountains. Looking across the cabin, I was glad to see the grizzled, close-cropped head of Tom Dawson, the sergeant major, who was coming as our second-in-command on the final posting of his career. I suppose that in a way he was a father figure to us all, and, maybe because I had no parents of my own, I’d benefited more than most of the guys from his wisdom and long experience.

We put down to refuel in a shit-hole of a depot on the coast, and then did a flit across the sea. The crossing gave me time to reflect on the set-up at home. Tracy and Susan had moved their things in the day before, and we’d piled Kath’s clothes into the small spare bedroom. The three of us had spent that night in separate rooms, as proper as could be. In the morning I’d shown the girls how to work the central heating system and how to manage the wood-burning stove. I’d amassed a big store of logs, so they had plenty of fuel. ‘For God’s sake don’t burn the place down,’ I told Tracy. ‘That’s the only rule.’

At that stage I don’t think she’d said anything to Susan about her long-term plans; all Susan knew was that they had somewhere to live for the next few months. But when we were alone for a moment Tracy said again, ‘When you come back, I’ll be waiting for you.’ That gave me a big kick, of course, but I was still disturbed by the speed at which everything had happened. Kath had been killed on 28 July, and we were now only just into December. Four months. I kept telling myself that it wasn’t me who had written Kath off. I hadn’t done anything to get rid of her. Fate, or whatever, had snatched her.

My soul-searching didn’t last long. Soon we were over the coast and landing in the camp on the outskirts of Belfast. Inside the warehouse, the first thing we saw was a man with pink hair. ‘For fuck’s sake!’ cried Pat. ‘What’s this? A poofters’ convention?’ But an old SAS hand, who’d been there for a couple of months already, assured us that it was only one of the Det guys who’d tried to dye his fair hair brown but had got the mixture wrong. The senior wrangler explained that it was perfectly legitimate for members of the Det to change their appearance for cover purposes. This fellow, however, was going to have to stay out of sight for a few days, until he got himself sorted.

Apart from the pink head, our immediate surroundings weren’t that cheerful, but Pat and I got cabins next to each other and soon settled ourselves in. Some previous occupant of mine must have been a freak for Pirelli calendars, because it was tits and bums on every wall. Rather than rip them down and have bare cream-coloured panels all round, I left them where they were, gradually persuading myself that in some respects the June bird looked remarkably like Tracy.

The best that could be said for our set-up was that everything was under one roof: not only our cabins, but also the briefing room, armoury, MT depot, canteen, bar, showers and bogs were situated within the warehouse. To me it had a claustrophobic air, but the guys who handed over to us assured us that you soon got used to it. One feature nobody had warned us about was the rats. That first evening a sudden yell of outrage went up, and we ran out of our cabins to see a guy called Ginger Norris pointing up into the roof.

‘Look at that!’ he roared. ‘The biggest fucking rat you’ve ever seen!’

Sure enough, there on one of the girders perched a vast rat, a real monster, and, when a volley of trainers went up at it, all it did was move a tier higher and sit there polishing its whiskers, cool as a pint of Stella. ‘Jesus Christ!’ cried Ginger. ‘Never mind the PIRA or anybody else, the next thing’ll be we’ll all go down with lepto-fucking-spirosis.’ He was all for taking out the rat with his Sig, until somebody pointed out that we’d be even worse off if he shot the roof full of holes and let the rain through.

‘It’s those wankers of cooks,’ explained one of the old hands. ‘They sling all the leftover food in open bins out the back of the cookhouse, and the rats eat themselves stupid. It’s like giving them a free run of the menu at the Dorchester.’

‘Why don’t we get some cats?’ I suggested.

‘Cats?’ said Ginger derisively. ‘Cats? Rats this size would have them for breakfast.’

Our first couple of days were spent on orientation, getting to know Belfast itself. Even though I’d made several visits to my in-laws in Helen’s Bay, and had come into the city centre from the east, I’d never been in West Belfast, and now I was appalled by the sheer squalor of the place. I’d seen endless pictures of it on television, of course, and I was familiar with the crude murals of black-hooded figures painted on the sides of buildings; but nothing had quite prepared me for the pure grot — the scruffiness, the meanness, the ugliness, the filth.

Our own senior guys drove us around the softer areas of the city in unmarked cars; but the hard areas were out of bounds to such vehicles, and the only way we could get a look at them was by courtesy of the RUC, who gave us tours, two at a time, in the back of their armoured Land Rovers.

That meant, first of all, getting infiltrated into one of the fortified police stations — an experience in itself. The one Pat and I went to was defended like Fort Knox with high, anti-rocket wire-mesh screens, mortar-proof walls of reinforced concrete, and closed-circuit television cameras bristling from every rooftop. Driving in, we passed through three separate manned gateways; then, to enter the building, we went round a couple of corners — thick walls set at right-angles to each other to cut down the chance of blast penetration.

Inside, a sergeant gave us a quick tour, mainly of the ops room, where radios crackled and the walls were covered with large-scale maps dotted with coloured pins. This station, said our guide, had been attacked more than a hundred times, with rockets, mortars, sniper fire and coffee-jar devices, or petrol bombs. ‘They fired an RPG7 from the distilleries into the canteen, so they did,’ he told us. ‘There were no fatalities, but quite a few people were injured. Then they tried to float a bomb down the stream which passes under the station in a tunnel. We have a cage on either end, and cameras, but still they were going to try it. Luckily the Special Branch got wind of what was happening, and they aborted the attempt.’

From one of the sangars — high, fortified towers — we had a great view over the city. Everything looked peaceful enough, yet still our guide could speak of nothing but attacks. One great merit of the station’s position, he explained, was that it had a school and a housing estate right behind it. These made the PIRA reluctant to fire mortars in that direction, because the weapons were notoriously unreliable, and an overshoot that caused civilian casualties would create very bad publicity.

We ventured out on patrol in a police Land Rover. A constable drove, and a sergeant called Martin kept up a running commentary from the passenger seat. We crouched in the back, craning forward to peer out through the armoured glass of the windscreen, with a third RUC man scanning through the small aperture in one of the rear doors.

Here, on this corner, a rocket attack on a police Land Rover had cut an RUC sergeant nearly in half. Here a lad had tried to throw a bomb over the wall into a police station, but he’d dropped it, and it blew off his arm. Here, on the Falls Road, was the infamous Rock Bar, where members of the PIRA would meet for a pint. Here they had staged a burglary on a library, and as a policeman approached to investigate they’d opened up on him with an M 60 machine-gun. Here was Rose Cottage, inhabited by a harmless old pensioner. Under the pretence of befriending him, IRA men had offered to decorate a room for him, and in the course of doing so they had built a false wall, shortening the room by about five feet and creating a major weapons hide, later discovered by the Royal Marines.

We were patrolling as a pair, in company with a second vehicle, never far from it, in case one or other suddenly needed help. Martin was frequently on his radio: ‘Six Five, roger. We’re just going to Sebastopol… We’re passing Berlin.’ Every now and then our partner vehicle would drive past in the opposite direction, as the pair wove intricate patterns through the sordid, run-down streets. Again and again Martin said, ‘The whole of this road is divided, Green Nationalists on one side, Orange Protestants on the other.’ But he kept emphasizing that most of the population was perfectly normal: ‘There’s so many decent people here. The proportion of bad ones is very small.’ Nevertheless, he agreed that he was constantly on the lookout for familiar faces, trying to spot known players and work out their patterns of movement, and after an hour I felt the entire place was poisoned by hatred.

Back in the station, Pat and I went off to have a piss. The nearest gents was tucked away on the floor below, and Martin came down to show us the route, leaving us to find our own way back. As we emerged, a man in civvies was coming along the corridor towards us — quite an old guy, with grey hair — and as I glanced at him I felt a prickle of recognition. In the same instant his face gave a flicker as he recognized me.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I know you, surely.’

‘Yes — we met in Hereford.’

It was Chief Superintendent Morrison, the RUC man who’d talked to our course at LATA.

‘Geordie Sharp,’ I said, ‘and this is a colleague, Pat.’

We all shook hands, and Morrison said, ‘Have you a moment for a chat? This is my office, right here.’

He pointed at a door beside us. Instinctively I said, ‘D’you want to go on up, Pat? I’ll be with you in a couple of minutes.’

Pat got the message and thinned out. The chief ushered me into his office, large but bare, and gestured at a chair in front of the desk. ‘Take a seat. Just come over?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, I hope you have a successful tour.’

I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that. Was it just innocent good wishes? I said, ‘Thanks.’

He started fiddling with a glass paperweight. Then, looking steadily at me across the desk, he said, ‘I believe you lost your wife in the Queensfield bomb.’

‘That’s right.’

‘I’m so sorry. I know it was an own-goal, but there’s no consolation in that. Very likely the device would have killed even more people if it had gone off where they meant it to. I think I told you over in England, we’re up against real bastards here, evil bastards. What I didn’t say to your course was that I’ve lost my own brother to them, and his son, my nephew. So I can imagine how you feel.’

‘Thanks,’ I repeated.

‘Sympathy’s not much use. I’ve learnt that over the years. But you have mine, and if there’s anything I can do to help, you’ll let me know.’

Even as he spoke, an idea was opening up in my mind.

‘That’s very good of you,’ I said, and then I added casually, ‘I don’t suppose you know who did it — who was responsible for the bomb?’

‘I’d have to check. Why?’ His lined, grey face softened into a smile. ‘D’you fancy going after them or something?’

‘No, no.’ I forced a smile in return. ‘I just thought it might help somehow, to know.’

‘Of course. And if I did find out any information, what would I do with it?’

‘Maybe you could send it care of my father-in-law. That would be the safest.’ I gave him the address in Helen’s Bay.

‘Good enough. And now maybe you’d better rejoin your colleague. I’m pleased to have seen you again.’

I went back to the ops room feeling like a conspirator, busy with my own thoughts — only to find that the others were talking about a subject of intense interest to me: the way in which leading players protected their houses. Many had closed-circuit TV cover front and back, Martin was saying, and most reinforced their front doors with steel plates and big, heavy, old-fashioned iron bars which could be swung or slotted into place at night, making it impossible to force an entry. Often they’d have an inner door as well, with an air-lock between the two in which they could scrutinize visitors. Then, at the bottom of the stairs, they’d have a cage or grille of heavyweight weldmesh, so that they could seal off the upper floor. That way, they were safe from all but the most determined attacks.

The troop’s eight intercept cars were monsters in disguise. They looked quite ordinary, but under their sedate exterior lurked mighty engines and any number of refinements. Some of the engines had merely been hotted-up, but others had been replaced by more powerful units altogether. The extra punch was needed because the cars were carrying a huge amount of weight in the form of armour — at the front, along the sidepanels, and behind the two back seats. To manage all this, as well as four blokes and their gear, rifles, shotguns, assault kits, door-charges and so on, the springs and shock-absorbers had been uprated. Even so, the belly-plates were liable to ground when you went over bumps like sleeping policemen, sending out showers of sparks.

Inside each car there was a comprehensive comms system, with the radio tucked away in the glove compartment, a pressel-switch down by the handbrake, and a microphone slotted into the sun visor. For normal covert operations we’d listen through our earpieces, but there was also a loudspeaker fitted into the glove compartment for when the shit hit the fan. ‘If you get into a chase, and the villains know you’re after them, there’s no point in trying to stay covert, so you switch to the speaker,’ somebody explained. ‘Equally, if you start to take incoming, and the windscreen goes, your earpieces are the last thing you need.’

I didn’t appreciate quite what the cars would do until I went out for a familiarization drive. The one I had was an old Rover 2000 known as the Bluesmobile. It looked drab and decrepit, as if it was well past its scrapby date, and when we started out I thought I was driving a tank, so heavy did it feel. But as soon as I got out on to the ring road and put my foot down — that was something else. In a few seconds we were doing 150 m.p.h., with a good bit in hand, and only a buildup of traffic far ahead made me ease off. Thereafter I took things more steadily and concentrated on getting familiar with the radio system. One lesson I learnt from the run is that a G3 is a brute of a weapon to take in a car: too long to fit down neatly beside the driver’s seat, and difficult to bring up quickly. I’d already heard of an occasion when a G3 had slipped so that the muzzle landed on the accelerator pedal, and the driver suddenly found himself heading off into the sunset at a great rate of knots. Now I saw the wisdom of bringing an HK 53, which would fit comfortably under the seat.

Our familiarization was supposed to last for the first couple of weeks, but in the event things turned out less leisurely. One evening I was in my cabin, with Eric Clapton keeping the world at bay, when through the music I heard a call on the tannoy: ‘Standby team into the briefing room.’

In half a minute all ten of us had assembled.

Tom Dawson, the second-in-command, was in charge. ‘Right, lads,’ he began. ‘We’ve got a fast ball. Operation Eggshell. It’s a babysitting job, with a few strings attached. There’s a hit going down on a senior political figure, timed for 2230 tonight. The boss is at TCG, getting details. Basically it’s a city job, in East Belfast. We need four guys to babysit and six to deploy in the intercept cars.’

He turned to me. ‘Geordie, you’re to command the house party. The address is Knocklofty Park. There’s no time for an on-site recce, so you’ll need to take a good look at the map and get your arses down there a.s.a.p. Covert approach from wasteground behind. If you want to grab something to eat you’ve got twenty minutes. Final briefing at 2000, and roll immediately after.’

Because I’d already eaten, I had plenty of time to sort and check my kit: HK 53, side-arm, magazines for both, torch, knife, wire-cutters, covert radio. We’d go in wearing civilian clothes, but with our ops waistcoats on. I told all my guys to bring a pair of clean trainers for when we got inside the house; even if the people you’re looking after are about to be blown to kingdom come, they don’t take it kindly if you mess up their carpets. I also packed a roll of heavy-duty polythene and one of lightweight black cloth, for doctoring up a lookout room when we established ourselves in the target. (With film slanted across a room from ceiling to floor and the back wall blacked out, you can move around without somebody outside being able to see you.) Then I thought, if the old people are going to be in the house, we’d better take flak-jackets for them, just in case shrapnel comes through the floor or one of the doors. Also we needed a couple of big medical packs.

At 2000 the boss, Captain John Mason, was still down at TCG, so our final briefing came from Tom.

‘Just to confirm details,’ he began. ‘The PIRA’s target is Freddy Quinlan, the Unionist MP. He’s already at home with his wife. He’s been offered the chance to leave, but he’s declined. He’s that way: doesn’t rate the opposition, stupid bugger. Normally he has no security on the house whatsoever, not even any cameras. But that’s his lookout.

‘Our information is that the PIRA are planning a rocket attack. Probably a drive-past. They’ll launch an RPG7 to take out the front door, then follow up on foot to finish off anyone who has survived. That means your guys, Geordie, will want to be upstairs with the family. At the same time, it’s vital that you preserve an impression of normal activity. The curtains will be drawn, but we want people to move around the house naturally for as long as possible. OK?’

I nodded, and he went on, pushing a large-scale town plan across the table towards me, ‘Your covert approach will be through wasteland behind the house. It’s the former grounds of a mansion, gone to seed. We’ll get you dropped off here’ — he pointed with a pencil — ‘and it’ll only be a short walk in, three hundred metres at the outside. Between the edge of the park and the back garden is a wooden panel fence. Don’t go over that, in case the players have eyes-on from behind one of the adjacent properties. Get under it, or through the bottom. The back door of the house will be open for you. OK?’

Again I nodded. ‘How do we recognize the house and garden from the back?’

‘There’s a World Wildlife Fund panda symbol hung over the outside of the fence.’

‘What about the telephone? Is the line bugged?’

‘Possibly. Special Branch have told Quinlan to carry on taking normal calls, but obviously not to mention the operation.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘Anything else?’

‘A rocket will probably blow the hell out of the electrics and leave the house dark. We’d better take some ambush lights as an emergency back-up.’

‘Good thinking.’

Tom went on to brief the car-teams and the QRF. I listened with half an ear, studying the map. The old park or garden showed up as a sizeable green blob in the middle of massed streets and houses, but there was nothing to be learnt about it from where we were. The drop-off point was on the far side of the park from our destination, so all we needed to do was cross the wasteground in an easterly direction.

As soon as Tom finished, the signals corporal went through his own plan. The boss’s callsign for the night was Zero Alpha, and our house team was designated Hotel One. We were also assigned a chatter-net on a different frequency, so that if necessary we could talk to each other without cluttering up the main channel. Our car units were Mobile One, Mobile Two and so on. The house was designated ‘the target’, the back door was ‘Red’ and the front door ‘White’. Some of our guys were to mount an OP in a garden across the road — that party had the callsign Whisky. The Det, with various Delta numbers, were already out on surveillance.

A few minutes after eight a grey van pulled into the warehouse. The legend on the panel said, ‘NORTHERN IRELAND ELECTRICITY VAN — Engineering Department’, and the vehicle had a big sliding side door, excellent for an unobtrusive exit. My house team piled in and set off. With the pair of ambush lights and power-pack, my bergen was going to be quite a burden, even though we were going on such a short operation. I’m sure Pat spoke for all of us when he said, ‘I don’t like the thought of this fucking rocket coming in.’

‘Neither do I,’ I told him. ‘But as long as the house is reasonably substantial we’ll be OK upstairs.’

Peering forward through the windscreen, I said to Titch, the driver, ‘You will bring us in with the door on the kerb-side, won’t you?’

‘No sweat.’

Twenty minutes of twisting and turning through the city brought us to our objective.

‘Here’s the park now,’ said Titch. ‘I’m just running down the side of it. The lay-by’s a couple of hundred yards farther on. Stand by to debus.’

The moment he stopped I hit the handle, slid the door and was outside, landing in a shallow puddle. I took a quick look round. It was pretty good: a smallish recess at the edge of the suburban road, screened by bushes. Some traffic was passing, but none very close. Immediately behind us were the old iron railings of the mansion’s grounds, topped by two strands of barbed wire. Rather than risk getting hung up I cut through them, peeled them back and went over the railings, quickly followed by the other three. Titch had got out and opened the bonnet of the van. I saw him peering about under it with a torch, tugging at electric leads as if checking for a fault. As soon as we were clear he slammed the bonnet shut and drove off. I was pretty sure nobody had seen us.

Inside the park it was like being on an island, dark and peaceful, with the city traffic roaring and grinding round in the distance outside. As I waited for my eyes to acclimatize, one of the Det guys came up on the radio with, ‘Delta Two, a dicker’s just walked down the street past White.’

‘Sounds like the job’s going down OK,’ I whispered. ‘We’d better get in there.’

Round the perimeter of the park ran a belt of mature trees, some of them pines. The air was full of the smell of evergreens and ivy. Once through the trees, we came out on to open grass. At the edge of the cover I paused for a look round. Away to our left, a couple of hundred yards off on the crest of a rise, stood the old mansion, dark as dark, a heavy-looking Victorian building with turrets and pointed eaves. The grass we were on must once have been the lawn. Some lawn! Three or four acres, at least. We moved swiftly across it, towards more high trees on the far side. Ahead of us, between the trunks, lights were showing — the backs of the houses in our target road.

The ground beneath the second belt of trees was choked by undergrowth — diabolical bramble bushes, five or six feet high, interlaced with elder. Rather than crash through the thicket, we tried to pick a way between, only to find ourselves on the edge of a flooded area, perhaps an old pond. Pulling off, we made another approach, and soon came to a six-foot wooden fence along the backs of the gardens. A quick cast to the right brought us face-to-face with the reassuring black-and-white shape of the panda badge.

‘Pity to carve this up,’ I whispered, feeling the wooden panels.

‘It’s OK,’ answered Jimmy Adair. ‘There’s a drain running under it.’

He’d found a kind of culvert, and with a few jabs from our collapsible shovel we enlarged it enough for us to wriggle through. The back of the house was only ten metres off: whitewashed walls, several windows, the back-door conveniently screened by a projecting outhouse. A light was showing upstairs, but the curtains of that room were drawn.

We stood in the shadows by the fence. I held in my pressel-switch and said softly, ‘Hotel One. On Red now.’

‘Zero Alpha, roger,’ answered the boss.

As promised, the door was open. We slipped into a short corridor and locked up behind us, shooting home the bolts at the top and bottom. A smell of cooking hung in the air. We took off our boots, stacked them in a neat heap and put on our clean trainers. Then, leaving the others to cover me, I went quietly forward, HK 53 at the ready, past the kitchen and into the hall.

The TV was on in one of the front rooms. I knocked on the door, pushed it open a foot or so and showed myself in the gap. The woman saw me first — a small, elderly person with white hair swept back in a bun. She gave a bit of a cry and stood up.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘We’re here to look after you.’

The husband was a fierce-looking little fellow, with curly silver hair, dark eyebrows, and thick-rimmed glasses; he was wearing a fawn cardigan and matching slippers, like any retired professional. As soon as I saw him, I recognized his face from news bulletins and the papers.

From the darkness of the hall I asked him if the front curtains were fully drawn.

‘Sure they are,’ he said testily. ‘That was the first thing your people told us. We’ve got the old blackout blind pulled down as well.’ As he came towards me he said, ‘This is ridiculous,’ but not in a voice that carried much conviction. I caught a trace of whisky on his breath. He was easily old enough to be my father, so I didn’t feel I could give him too many orders, still less pull him around physically if he became difficult. I was glad to find that his irritation was only bluff; when I assured him that the threat was not only real but imminent, he agreed to move upstairs.

‘What I don’t understand is this,’ he said. ‘If you know they’re coming, why the heck can’t you intercept them before they get here?’

‘The trouble is, we don’t know where they’re coming from. We have other units outside, and with a bit of luck, they may get to the villains before they do any damage to the house. But we can’t take chances with your safety.’

Before I could stop her, his wife switched off the television.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘We’d better leave that on.’

She gave me a look, but went back to the channel they’d been on.

It turned out that the couple slept at the back of the house — the room in which we’d seen the light — and had another set in their bedroom. As quickly as we could, we got them safely in there, and told them that if they needed to go to the bathroom they mustn’t switch on any more lights.

‘Here,’ I said, getting out the flak-jackets. ‘If you don’t mind, put these on. They’re a bit heavy and uncomfortable, but they could just save your lives.’ Then I took the medical packs into the bathroom and opened them up so that the IV kits were immediately to hand.

Next we took a look round downstairs. The house was solidly built, with floors that didn’t bounce, and walls which felt good when you hit them. The whole place was tidy as could be. I found it hard to believe that the shit was about to be blown out of it. The front door was locked and bolted, but only medium-strong, and it had a half-moon of frosted glass above it. The thought of an RPG7 rocket coming through it was not amusing. The weapon was developed by the Russians more than thirty years ago, in the depths of the Cold War, for the express purpose of taking out British or American tanks; though extremely simple, it was capable of destroying any armoured vehicle, let alone an ordinary car or somebody’s front door. The chances were that if one came through into the hall, it would blow out the back wall of the house as well.

The only firefighting equipment was one ancient — looking extinguisher, but I put this ready, just inside the kitchen. Luckily the stairs started from the back of the hall and came forward towards the front, so that if we did get a rocket through the door, the main blast would be directed through the kitchen and out of the back door, rather than upwards. ‘Let’s get our boots out of the line of fire, anyway,’ said Pat, and we shifted them into a scullery.

Upstairs again, I saw that the landing ran across the back of the stairwell. Kneeling behind the whitepainted wooden banisters, we could cover the whole of the hall. If any assault party tried to follow up a rocket, we could take them out from there, no bother.

I checked all the doors, and once I’d got the layout I detailed Jimmy to remain in the back bedroom with our hosts, in case anyone started trying to come through the rear window. In the front bedroom on the left, facing forwards, we slung a sheet of polythene at a forty-five degree angle, fixing it to the walls with drawing-pins brought for the purpose, so that we could look through the window without being visible from outside. To complete the optical illusion, we pinned our thin black cloth over the rear wall, cutting out background reflection.

Hardly had we done that when Pat, who was looking out, said, ‘Hey, there’s someone coming past.’

In the patchy illumination of the street-lamps we saw a young man in what looked like jeans and a black donkey jacket walk past from right to left. He was trying to maintain a nonchalant appearance, but we saw him take a sideways glance at the target.

‘One of their dickers, I bet,’ said Jimmy.

Sure enough, a moment later the Det came up with ‘Delta Two. That same dicker’s gone back the other way.’

‘Hotel One,’ I called. ‘Established on target.’

‘Roger,’ answered the boss. ‘Stand by.’

I was still new enough to the game to be surprised by the immediacy with which our team’s voices jumped out of the night. I knew that the boss was miles away, at the desk, and that the Det guys were spread out all over town. But from the speed with which people came up on the air, they might have been in a tight ring round the target.

I decided that when, or if, the attack came, we’d go to ground in the blacked-out bedroom and close the door. Then, immediately after the explosion, we’d whip out on to the landing so that we could drop anyone who came into the hall below. We therefore constructed a kind of shelter out of the two single beds, tipping them on edge and tilting the tops inwards against each other, like a tent, with the mattresses on the floor to give some protection from below, and room for us to crawl in so that we had cover in case the ceiling came down. Then I set the two ambush lights out, one on either side of the landing, so that if anyone fired up at them, the rounds would go well clear of our own position. I ran the wires round the landing so that the switch was at the point where I intended to be.

Waiting was no joke. We’d turned up the sound of the TV a bit, so that we could hear it burbling away, and the ever-changing light from the screen flickered out into the hall. Occasionally one of us went down to open or close the living-room door a bit, so that any watcher would see a change in the light showing through the frosted glass over the front door, and conclude that Quinlan and his wife were in or out of the room. When I went down for the last time I left the door shut, as if they were both in the room. Each of those trips downstairs made my hair crawl. What if the players had given the Det the slip, and were lining their rocketlauncher up at that very moment?

In fact, we had plenty of radio chat to keep us abreast of the situation. At 2215 the same dicker made a third pass. He’d taken the trouble to go round in a big circle, so that he came by in the same direction as on his earlier appearance, and gave the casual impression of being another walker going the same way. But the Det knew him too well, and reported a definite sighting. After that, though, no other pedestrians showed, and we guessed the strike was coming up. Our intercept cars had taken up strategic positions in surrounding streets, in case the hit-car escaped immediate ambush, and they too came on the air occasionally, with callsigns India One, India Two and so on.

From time to time I briefed our landlord on the latest situation. At 2220 the lady of the house offered us a brew, made from an upstairs kettle, which we gratefully accepted, one at a time. ‘So long as you don’t damage anything,’ she kept repeating. I promised her that we’d be as careful as we could, but said that I couldn’t vouch for our friends on the other side.

Minute by minute, the time ticked on. My mind was flying round in circles: Kath, Tim, Tracy, Gary Player… It was too much to hope that he would have been assigned to carry out tonight’s hit. Almost certainly he was too senior to take part at the front: he’d be sitting back safely in some command post. But by God, if any player appeared down there in the hall, there was only one way he’d ever leave the building, and that was feet first, in a bag.

Then at 2235, came the call we’d been expecting. ‘Delta Three. Suspect black Volvo mobile towards target. Sun roof is open, so anticipate drive-past rocket attack. Estimate time to target one minute.’

‘Roger,’ answered Delta Control.

Then it was our boss: ‘Zero Alpha. Assault imminent. Confirm prepared.’

‘Hotel One,’ I answered. ‘Roger.’

‘Delta Two,’ came a Welsh voice. ‘Confirm Volvo mobile to target. Westwards down Craven Avenue. Estimate thirty seconds.’

‘Zero Alpha to Hotel One,’ said the boss. ‘Stand by, stand by.’

‘Hotel One, roger.’

I nipped into the back bedroom. ‘On the floor, please,’ I said. ‘They’re coming.’

There was something pathetic about seeing the old couple go stiffly down on their knees on their double mattress, then lie flat, tucking themselves in against the flank of their own bed. Jimmy yanked another mattress off the bed so that it covered them, then lay down on the outside of the pair, a human wall.

I dived into the front bedroom, closed the door and laid my HK 53 along the wainscoting, where I could put my hand on it in the dark. The other two guys were already on their backs in the makeshift sangar.

I don’t know how many seconds passed. I imagined the rocketeer climbing to his feet in the passenger seat, head through the sun-roof opening, bracing himself as the wagon swung round a corner. In my mind I saw him bring up the awkwardly long launcher and settle it into his shoulder. Suddenly I thought of a German friend who loathed all Volvos, and, whenever he saw one, shouted, ‘SCHEISSAUTO!’ This one was a shitcar, all right.

I caught one more Det report, calling the Volvo into the start of our road. Then I closed my eyes and clamped my hands over my ears.

I just heard the car engine, screaming at high revs in some low gear. Then came the whoosh of a rocket being fired, and an almighty, earth-moving BANG! I felt the floor flex beneath me. The door of our room flew open and smacked back against the end of one bed. From hall and landing came the sound of plaster falling. My instinct was to yell at the top of my voice, to let out the tension, but I fought down the impulse.

The lights had gone out. The television had been silenced. In a second all three of us were at the banister rail, weapons trained on the hall. The air down there was full of smoke or dust or both. Through it I saw that the front door had gone, and street-lights were showing through an open rectangle. I had my hand on the switch of the ambush lights, but something made me hesitate. If there were any rats incoming, I wanted them well in the trap. But were there any? From outside came a sudden hammer of rounds going down, then more, and more. Then a screech of tyres followed by a heavy impact. We’d got the car, for sure.

From somewhere under us at the back of the hall came a flicker of ruddy light. Fire. Nothing serious as yet; just enough to give useful illumination. But already I’d come down a notch or two from my peak of tension. The shots outside, and the noise of the crash — everything suggested that the gunmen had gone under.

Not at all. Movement in the doorway. Two dark, hooded figures ran in, kicked the door of the living room wide and opened up through the gap with submachine-guns, spraying the room with uncontrolled bursts. In the confines of the house the noise was shattering, and the players themselves were adding to it. No silence for them. High on adrenalin, they were roaring obscenities fit to bust: fecking this and fecking that. When one of them flashed a torch round the room and found there was nobody in it, they yelled even louder.

All this had taken maybe four seconds. By the time they ran back into the hall, the flames below us were bigger and giving better light. They illuminated our targets just enough. The range was point blank, and they never even looked up. Two short bursts from each of us, and down they went. In the flickering light I’d gone for the mass of their upper chests, but one of them caught it in the head as well when he fell forward. I saw the armour-piercing rounds rip his balaclava open, and pieces of skull fly out.

Another volley of rounds spurted from the other man’s weapon, but only because in going down he’d pulled the trigger inadvertently, and the rounds smacked harmlessly into the wall at floor level. As he crumpled on to the carpet, I gave him a quick double-tap in the head. The body gave a couple of violent jerks, then lay still.

For several seconds we didn’t move. We were safe in the smoky darkness, and in a brilliant position. If fifty players had followed the first two in we could have dropped them all. The reek of cordite filled the air. Suddenly there was noise and movement above us — a creak, a snap, a rustle, a tearing sound. I faced upwards to see a big chunk of plasterboard fall away from the ceiling and plummet on to the stairs, where it burst and bounced down in smaller pieces, raising another cloud of dust, as if a shell had landed.

‘Jimmy!’ I yelled.

‘Aye,’ he called from the back bedroom.

‘Your people all right?’

‘Fine.’

‘Keep them there a minute.’

Now I did turn on the ambush lights, so that they illuminated the hall and caught the smoke, which was rising in clouds. Through it I could see the two bodies lying hunched against the wainscoting, one either side, and the blood seeping out over the pale carpet. Both men had fallen on their weapons, which were buried beneath them. I felt for my pressel with shaking fingers.

‘Hotel One. Two X-rays dead on target. White demolished. No home casualties. Get the QRF up!’ I knew I was shouting, but I couldn’t help it.

The leader of the fire-party was also shouting. Everyone was trying to get on the air at once.

‘Zero Alpha,’ said the boss firmly. ‘EVERYBODY WAIT OUT! Now. Hotel One. Is your area secure?’

‘Hotel One, roger. Area secure.’

‘Roger. Hotel Two. Is your area secure?’

‘Hotel Two. Two dead X-rays. One RPG. One side-arm. This area is now secure.’

‘Zero Alpha. Inform all stations. QRF coming in now. Stand by for pick-up.’

Covered by the other two, I stepped cautiously down the stairs. The shreds of the front door hung from its hinges, but the centre of it had been blown clean out. Cold air was wafting in through the hole, and carrying with it the rising wail of an ambulance or fire engine.

My immediate concern was to stop the house burning down. Luckily it turned out that the only things on fire were some old newspapers and magazines, and the extinguisher, ancient as it was, soon put them out.

The Quinlans were amazingly resilient. They stumbled out of their bedroom looking like startled owls, white-faced, hair on end, eyes wide. ‘So long as you don’t damage anything,’ the old girl had said. Now their hall and everything in it had been destroyed. Pictures had been torn from the walls and blown into a heap of shattered frames and glass at the far end. The grandfather clock had been reduced to matchwood. Two chairs and a table were fit only for the fire. Plaster and paper had been ripped out of the walls in horizontal strips. The kitchen, also, was a wreck. I suppose the old people were in shock, but they seemed incredibly philosophical about the damage.

With their directions, using our torches, we found the fuse boxes and trip switches in the kitchen, but the system must have suffered major damage because it wouldn’t come alive again. Perhaps it was just as well.

All of a sudden Pat began to laugh. ‘No fucking damage!’ he gasped. ‘Fucking roll on!’ He was laughing so much he had to sit down. In a couple of seconds I was helpless as well, doubled up, in hysterics. I knew it was a reaction to release of tension, caused by an excess of adrenalin, but that didn’t help me stop. I realized that the Quinlans must think us incredibly callous, or crazy, or both — but again, that was no deterrent. Only when an RUC officer stuck his head round the door and said, ‘What’s so bloody funny, then?’ did we manage to pull ourselves together.

The QRF arrived, cleared the street and cordoned it off. Suddenly the house was full of people, among them a couple of firemen, and the Scene of Crimes Officer, who began taking measurements and statements, and chalking on to the landing carpet the positions from which we’d fired. A photographer took pictures of the bodies. They weren’t looking all that pretty. One had the skull split clean down the middle, over the cranium. The armour-piercing rounds had opened up his head like a melon. Grey brain was showing through the gap, and the scalp had slid over to one side, crumpling the face into folds. The eyeballs were bulging out of their sockets. Brain and blood were spattered over the wall behind. Both terrorists looked very young. As the bodies were being bundled into bags I asked the RUC man if he knew who they were, but he shook his head. ‘From the Lisburn ASU, by all accounts,’ he said, ‘but beyond that, I’ve no idea.’

Back in the warehouse we held a big debriefing. It turned out that our own reactive OP had nailed the Volvo, killing both the driver and the guy who fired the rocket. They’d captured not only the rocket launcher, but two AK 47s and a couple of side-arms as well.

At first we were baffled about how the two-man assault party had escaped detection, and where they’d come from. The car had not stopped or even slowed down, so they couldn’t have been in it. The mystery was solved by a search of the front garden, which revealed that they’d lain up in the shrubs either side of the front path. They must have slipped in there immediately after dark, before our surveillance was in place, and stuck it out for nearly five hours.

In any case, the bag for the night was four, and everyone was really chuffed that the operation had gone down. After the wash-up we all got in the bar together — RUC, the Det and us — for a few celebratory beers. By then the Det and the RUC between them had identified the dead terrorists, but the names meant nothing to me.

Among those celebrating was the guy with pink hair. When I got close to him, I began to think I’d seen him somewhere before.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I’m sure I know you. Where could it have been?’

‘Two Para,’ he said immediately, with a grin. ‘Aldershot.’

‘Right, right!’

Suddenly we were on net. His name was Mike Grigson, and though we’d never really met we’d been in the same company for a brief spell. We began to exchange chit-chat, and hit it off well. He’d done a year with the Det already, and obviously knew the score. For the past few days he’d been taken off outside duties and given some role in the head-shed, until he was fit to appear in public again.

‘What went wrong?’ I asked.

‘Duffed up the fucking mixture, didn’t I?’ he said cheerfully. ‘That’s the trouble with being fair-haired — I stand out in a bloody crowd. I was trying to do something about it.’

As for myself, I couldn’t make out whether I was on a high or a low. One moment everything seemed terrific, because it had all gone according to the book; the next, I felt terrible at having killed, or helped to kill, two people. Yet perhaps the worst thing was the realization of how difficult my self-appointed task was going to be. A major operation, with all the stops out, had accounted for four lowly paddies. How was I ever going to get near Mr Big on my own?

A couple of pints later I bought Pink Mike a drink and asked casually, ‘So, who were those players tonight?’

‘Nobody much. Rank and file from the Lisburn ASU.’

‘Had you seen them before?’

‘The two in the car, yes. The driver and the rocketeer. Not the others.’

‘How d’you recognize them?’

‘We’re out looking for them all the time. That’s our job. Besides, we’ve got dozens of mug-shots in the ops room. Covert pictures, but some of them pretty good.’

‘Could I have a look at them sometime?’

‘You’re not supposed to, really. But maybe we could fix it. Why?’

‘Just curious, that’s all.’