I knew them both well; Euan and I had been working against them for years. I got on the net and confirmed the ID.
Everybody was in place. Alpha would be in the control room with the senior policeman, people from the Foreign Office, people from the Home Office, you name it, every man and his dog would be there, everybody wanting to put their tuppence-worth in, everybody with their own concerns. We could only hope that Simmonds would be looking after ours. I’d only met the Secret Intelligence Service desk officer for Northern Ireland a couple of days earlier, but he certainly seemed to be running our side of the show. His voice had the sort of confidence that was shaped on the playing fields of Eton, and he measured his words slowly, like a big-time attorney with the meter running.
We wanted the decision made now. But I knew there would be big debates going on in the ops room; you’d probably have to cut your way through the cigarette smoke with a knife. Our liaison officer would be listening to us on his radio and explaining everything that we were doing, confirming that the team was in position. At crunch time, it was the police, not us, who’d decide that we went in. Once it was handed over to the military, Kev would control the team.
The frustration was outrageous. I just wanted to get this over.
By now Farrell was leaning against the driver’s door, the two men standing and facing her. If I hadn’t known differently I’d have said they were trying to chat her up. I couldn’t hear what they were saying but their faces showed no sign of stress and now and then I could hear laughter above the traffic noise. Savage even got out a packet of mints and passed them round.
I was still giving a running commentary when Alpha came back on the net. ‘Hello all call signs, all call signs, I have control, I have control. Golf, acknowledge.’
Kev acknowledged. The police had handed over; it was Kev’s show now.
The targets started to move away from the vehicle and I clicked the pressel four times.
Golf came back, ‘Standby, standby!’
That was it, we were off.
I let them walk towards the main square, and then I got up. I knew we wouldn’t lift them here. There were far too many people around. For all we knew the players might want to go out in a blaze of glory and start dropping the civilians, take them hostage, or even worse, go into kamikaze mode and detonate the device.
Alpha came back on the net. ‘Hello all call signs, all call signs – cancel, cancel, cancel! I do not have control! Cancel! Golf, acknowledge.’
At once I heard Kev’s not-so-formal reply: ‘What the fuck’s going on? Tell me – what’s going on?’
‘Wait . . . wait . . .’ Alpha sounded under pressure. There were voices in the background. ‘All stations, all stations, the police need another ID, they need to be sure. Golf acknowledge.’
What do they want, introductions? ‘Hi, I’m Danny, bomber and murderer, I enjoy travelling and working with children.’
We were in danger of losing them if we didn’t act soon.
Alpha came back: ‘All stations, ATO is moving to check the vehicle. Delta, we need that confirmation.’
I acknowledged. There was obviously some flapping going on in the ops room. The boss was getting a hard time from the police and it sounded like a chimps’ tea party in there.
The terrorist team would be crossing the border within minutes. Once they were on the other side, they could detonate the bomb with immunity.
I was now on the other side of the road, and wanted at least to get parallel to them so that I could see their faces again. I had to reconfirm the players, then stick with them.
More activity on the net. I could hear the tension in Alpha’s voice now, telephone lines ringing, people milling about.
Kev cut in: ‘Fuck the ops room, let’s keep on top of them until someone somewhere makes a fucking decision. Lima and Zulu, can you get forward?’
Zulu came on the net for himself and Lima, very much out of breath: ‘Zulu and Lima, we . . . we can do that.’
‘Roger that, move up, tell me when you’re there.’
Kev wanted them beyond the health centre. They were running hard to get ahead of the targets; they didn’t care who saw them, as long as the players didn’t. But we still hadn’t got control.
Kev came back on the net: ‘Alpha, this is Golf. You need to get your finger out now – we’re going to lose them. What do you want us to do?’
‘Golf, wait, wait . . .’
I could still hear noise in the background; lots of talking, more telephones ringing, people shouting instructions.
Everything went quiet.
‘Wait . . . wait . . .’
All I could hear now was the background noise of Alpha on my radio, plus my pulse pounding in my head. Then, at last, the voice of Simmonds – very clear, a voice you wouldn’t argue with. I heard him say to Alpha, ‘Tell the ground commander he can continue.’
‘All call signs, this is Alpha. I have control. I have control. Golf acknowledge.’
Kev got on the net, and instead of acknowledging, said, ‘Thank fuck for that. All call signs, if they get as far as the airport, we’ll lift them there. If not – on my word, on my word. Zulu and Lima, how’s it going?’
They came back on the net. ‘That’s us static at the junction. We can take.’ They were at the intersection of Main Street and Smith Dorrien Avenue, the main approach road to the crossing into Spain. The players were moving towards them.
I could lift off soon. I’d done the job I’d been brought here to do. I prepared myself for the hand-over.
But then they stopped.
Fuck
. ‘Stop, stop, stop!’ I said. ‘That’s Bravo One, Two and Echo One static.’
Everybody was closing in.
Come on, let’s lift them here and now
.
Savage split from the other two and headed back the way they’d come, towards the town centre. It was all going to rat shit. We had two groups to control now and we didn’t know who had the initiation device.
Kev arrived to back me. On the net, I could hear the other two players being followed towards the border by the rest of the team as I moved in to take Savage. He turned left down an alleyway.
I was just about to get on the net when I heard a police siren, followed by gunfire behind me.
At the same instant Euan came on the net: ‘Contact! Contact!’
Then more shots.
Kev and I looked at each other. What the fuck was going on? We ran round the corner. Savage had heard the shots too and turned back towards us. Even at this distance I could see his eyes, big as plates and jerking like he was having a seizure.
There was a woman pedestrian between us. Kev shouted, ‘Stop, security forces! Stop!’
With his left hand, he had to push the woman over to the side and bang her against the wall to keep her out of the way. She was going down, blood pouring from her head. At least she wouldn’t get up and become a target.
She began screaming. We had Kev hollering and screaming at Savage and all the people in the area were starting to scream. It was turning into a gang fuck.
Kev flicked back the right side of his sports jacket to reach the pancake holster over his kidneys. We always put a bit of weight in a pocket – a full mag is good – to help the jacket flick back out of the way.
But I wasn’t really looking at Kev, I was looking at Savage. I could see his hand moving to the right side of his jacket. He wasn’t some knuckle-dragging moron from the back streets. The moment he saw us, he knew the score. It was decision time.
Kev drew his pistol, brought it up and went to fire.
Nothing.
‘Stoppage! Fuck, Nick, fuck, fuck!’
Trying to clear his weapon, he dropped on one knee to make himself a smaller target.
Now is when everything seems to go into slow motion.
Savage and I had eye-to-eye. He knew what I was going to do; he could have stopped, he could have put his hands up.
My bomber jacket was held together with velcro, so at times like this I could just pull it apart and draw my pistol.
The only way a weapon can be drawn and used quickly is by breaking the whole movement into stages. Stage one, I kept looking at the target. With my left hand I grabbed a fistful of bomber jacket and pulled it as hard as I could towards my chest. The velcro ripped apart.
At the same time I was sucking in my stomach and sticking out my chest to make the pistol grip easy to access. You only get one chance.
We still had eye contact. He started to shout but I didn’t hear. There was too much other shouting going on, from everyone on the street and the earpiece in my head.
Stage two, I pushed the web of my right hand down onto the pistol grip. If I got this wrong I wouldn’t be able to aim correctly: I would miss and die. As I felt my web push against the pistol grip my lower three fingers gripped hard around it. My index finger was outside the trigger guard, parallel with the barrel. I didn’t want to pull the trigger early and kill myself. Savage was still looking, still shouting.
Savage’s hand was nearly at his pocket.
Stage three, I drew my weapon, in the same movement taking the safety catch off with my thumb.
Our eyes were still locked. I saw that Savage knew he had lost. There was just a curling of the lips. He knew he was going to die.
As my pistol came out I flicked it parallel with the ground. No time to extend my arms and get into a stable firing position.
Stage four, my left hand was still pulling my jacket out of the way and the pistol was now just by my belt buckle. There was no need to look at it, I knew where it was and what it was pointing at. I kept my eyes on the target and his never left mine. I pulled the trigger.
The weapon report seemed to bring everything back into real time. The first round hit him. I didn’t know where, I didn’t need to. His eyes told me all I wanted to know.
I kept on firing. There is no such thing as overkill. If he could move, he could detonate the bomb. If it took a whole magazine to be sure I’d stopped the threat, then that was what I’d fire. As Savage hit the ground I could no longer see his hands. He was curled up in a ball, holding his stomach. I moved forward and fired two aimed shots at the head. He was no longer a threat.
Kev ran over and was searching inside Savage’s coat.
‘It’s not here,’ he said. ‘No weapon, no firing device.’
I looked down at Kev as he wiped the blood off his hands onto Savage’s jeans.
‘One of the others must have had it,’ he said. ‘I didn’t hear the car go up, did you?’
In all the confusion I couldn’t be sure.
I stood over them both. Kev’s mother came from southern Spain and he looked like a local: jet black hair, about 5 feet 10 inches and the world’s bluest eyes. His wife reckoned he was a dead ringer for Mel Gibson, which he scoffed at but secretly liked. Right now his face was a picture; he knew he owed me one. I wanted to say, ‘It’s OK, these things happen,’ but it just didn’t seem like the time. Instead I said, ‘Fucking hell, Brown, what do you expect if you have a name the same colour as shit?’
As I spoke we put our safety catches on, and Kev and I swapped weapons.
‘I’m glad I won’t be at any inquest.’ I grinned at Kev. ‘You’d better start getting your shit together.’
He smiled as he got on the radio and started to send a sit rep. It was all right for him and the others, but Euan and I shouldn’t have been here. We had to vanish before the police arrived.
The ops room was about fifteen minutes away on foot. I tucked Kev’s weapon inside my jeans and started walking fast.
The mood was subdued aboard the C130 as it lifted from the tarmac at 11 p.m. that night.
Spanish police found PIRA’s car bomb in an underground carpark in Marbella, thirty miles away; 145 pounds of Semtex high explosive and an unattached timing device preset at 11.20 a.m., the time the Gibraltar guard-changing ceremony ended and the soldiers dispersed in the square. The white Renault had been a blocking vehicle after all.
When Simmonds came over, Pat said, ‘As far as we knew they had the means to detonate a bomb big enough to separate Gibraltar from the mainland. All it would have taken was one press of a button. If there’s going to be an inquest, fuck it. Better to be tried by twelve, I say, than carried by six.’
For Euan and me, there would be no guest appearances at any inquest. We were undercover in Northern Ireland with 14 Intelligence Group; it was illegal for its members to operate anywhere else. If either of us had been caught in Gibraltar there would have been a shit storm.
Deafened suddenly by the roar of the C130’s engines, I glanced at Kev, Pat, Euan – and tried to forget what I was going back to. A house isn’t a home when there are no pictures on the walls.
In the Gulf, Pat had a battle cry: ‘All for one and one for all.’ We’d laughed when he used it, but he was spot on. Any one of us would put his life on the line for the others. I cracked a smile; with these guys around me, who needed family? Without a doubt, I thought, this was as good as it was ever going to get.