First Into Action (25 page)

9

South Armagh, near the border, was part of my patch. It is considered the most dangerous operational area in the province, and known as ‘bandit country’ because the IRA are more aggressive here than anywhere else. They are capable of mounting mortar or RPG7 (rocket-propelled grenade) attacks, then hopping across the border into Southern Ireland to avoid pursuit by Army or police, knowing they cannot be legally followed. They are most notorious for their ability to muster a dozen or more armed men at short notice and even mount military-style border patrols. They place road-blocks on quiet country lanes to stop cars and question the occupants. This is intended as a demonstration of strength for the locals. I saw an air photograph of one such road-block showing sixteen heavily armed, hooded men copying the tactical procedures the British Army uses when manning its vehicle control points. These heavily armed road-blocks are the one thing that undercover operators, out driving alone, fear most.

If suspicious activity, such as one or two strangers wandering the countryside, is reported to the local PIRA commander, by a farmer for instance, a heavily armed PIRA response team can be quickly assembled, especially close to the border. 14 Int, who often operate along the border, usually in pairs when on foot in rural areas, have the highest respect for bandit country.

By the end of my first year with the Det, I was running several operations on my own, under the overall command of the Det CO. Some operations last years, and the manpower for each was rotated, which meant that operatives were involved in more than one at any time. It was left to the individual if he wanted to run his own operation or not. On average, given a detachment of twenty operatives, only a handful liked to run their own ops. The others remained on call as ready manpower and were always kept busy. They were either ‘on the ground’, servicing for an operation, or de-servicing from the previous job. On the occasional nights off some operatives visited pubs in safe areas, but generally they were content to stay in the Det and have a few beers, read a book or watch television. An operative usually waited until he had accumulated eight or nine days before flying home for R&R. This leave was calculated at one day off per week which meant we got out of there every couple of months, unless there was an operation running that required all of the manpower.

Crossmaglen, a notorious border town in South Armagh, was ominous to me because of its dark history. I had many experiences in and around that town over the years, prior to 14 Int and after. The Army camp in the middle of the isolated market town was like a Wild West US cavalry outpost under constant threat of attack. It was a magnet for trouble. The actual border was a skip and a jump from the outskirts, making it an attractive target for the IRA. Many soldiers had been killed over the years, in the camp as a result of mortar attacks, in the town from hidden bombs, and in the surrounding countryside from booby-traps or snipers. The first time I visited the camp I stayed there for a couple of nights, and the night after I left it was hit by mortars. The Army was wise to that form of attack by then and suspended nets several feet above all the structures to prevent the mortars from penetrating before exploding – this cut down the damage and danger to life considerably. Nobody was killed in that particular attack, but one young regular Army lad of eighteen lost an arm. He’d arrived that morning from England having just completed basic recruit training the week before. He was on the next flight back to his mum, minus the arm and was a civvy again a few months later.

For undercover operatives, Crossmaglen was a town you might drive through once in a day. Try it a second time in a short period and you could expect to be followed out of it, and if you were not careful, to run into a road-block several miles down the road.

Early one morning I was on the border, on foot, not far from Crossmaglen. It had been snowing during the night and now that it had stopped the land was frozen and as still as a black and white photograph. The operation was the observation of a lone farmhouse suspected of being used as a staging area for arms coming over the border. I was with my regular and most preferred partner when on foot, Max, a large Dorset country boy who played prop for the Royal Marines, his parent unit.

Max was the perfect partner. He was experienced and highly professional, quick to react in dangerous situations and relentless in any physical task. He was cold and dangerous to anyone he didn’t like, and in my experience you had to be a pretty bad person for Max not to find something likeable about you. Max would beat down a brick wall with his head and fists to help a friend in trouble and would do the same to get to anyone who threatened his friends. He had missed out on much of his schooling, having spent his youth working on his father’s farm. He had a Dorset-cum-Cockney accent and was aware of his academic shortfalls, but you put your life in your hands if you pointed that out to him less than diplomatically. However, determined to improve his mind, or to be precise, his eloquence, he decided to make use of the two years with the Det by adding to his vocabulary. His plan was to learn one new word every week. He figured that in two years, if he stuck with it and could remember them all, that would give him about a hundred new words.

His method was to open his dictionary at random, stab his finger at the page and choose the nearest word he liked the sound of. Once he was satisfied he fully understood its meaning he would fit it into his conversation during the week as often as possible. If the word didn’t come up in everyday chat he would start a conversation that included it.

‘The chef ’as ’is kitchen much more
ergonomic
these days, don’t you fink?’ was a comment he came up with over breakfast one morning.

Few of us knew the meanings of most of the words he chose. Even the Det commander, a highly educated university graduate, was lost on one or two that Max came out with. His pronunciation didn’t help. And many of Max’s sentences – lots of little words with the one, huge, unheard-of word in the middle – were therefore followed by long, thoughtful silences from the rest of us. I learned quite a few words myself during our partnership, though I could use few of them in everyday conversation.

As dawn broke, I emerged from the snow-covered bushes in my grubby clothes – a donkey jacket over a thick woolly polo-neck and jeans with thermals and longjohns underneath. My long hair was matted and my beard still had bits of food in it from the previous night’s meal, which had been eaten cold in a frozen ditch. Max had suggested a good time to break down the OP would be at
crepuscular
light. He’d used the word about eight times during the four-day OP and I was well acquainted with its meaning by now.

We were moving out at early light as opposed to dark because a booby-trap had been triggered by an animal a few days earlier and the area was suspected of harbouring others. We wanted to be able to see where we were walking. I picked up my M16 and backpack filled with field equipment and headed off by myself to do a recce of the pick-up point on the road a hundred yards away. Max would catch up after he had packed away the optical equipment and brought in our own explosive devices that we always placed around our position to cover from blind attack routes (a lesson learned from the O’Sally incident). The devices were miniature claymore mines – shaped charges that fired hundreds of tiny shards of metal outwards, fired by pressing a small hand generator. If anyone was going to sneak up on us, good luck to them.

I trudged along the hedgerow to a thicket and placed my M16 and backpack in a ditch where we could wait out of sight for the pick-up car. I gingerly climbed through the prickly thicket – soldiers who wanted to live longer in this part of the world avoided gates, stiles or any easy paths through hedges as they were favourite places to plant mines – and stepped on to a narrow, rarely used road that followed the northern side of the border at this point.

The border was defined by a rickety, sagging, rusty, three-strand barbed-wire fence a few feet the other side of the road. There were no signs indicating that this was the international border between two countries. If you could not read a map you would not know. The surrounding countryside was divided into small fields, some of them no wider than fifty feet by one hundred feet long, the boundaries of which had hardly changed since feudal times when the strip-farmed land was continually subdivided to be handed down from father to sons. The lack of development over the centuries in Catholic areas such as this was a reminder of the root of some of the problems.

There were no habitats in direct line of sight which is why I chose the spot on the road for the pick-up. I looked for a suitable place to stick a signal marker, a common object placed in such a way that only our driver would recognise its significance.

As I crouched to place the marker, I caught a movement a hundred yards away in the otherwise still countryside. Two men were climbing through a hedge into a field across the border directly in front of me. They had seen me too, the road being a few feet higher than the surrounding fields. They kept their eyes fixed on me as they walked towards me, leaving footprints in the thin carpet of snow.

I scanned in search of others. There was no sign. They could have been farmers, but there was something about them, the way they were watching me. A ripple of concern passed through me, but ripples of concern were always doing that in this job. You learned to do nothing unless the skin broke and you were drowning in the stuff. I stood to face them and put both hands in my coat pockets. I did not want to go back for my M16 because it would mean turning my back on them, nor did I want to risk getting stalled by the thicket – if these were boyos they were close enough to run forward and take a shot at me. Anyhow, one of the tricks of undercover work was never to over-react. They might just nod ‘good day’ and pass me by. My left hand went to my hidden radio and my right was through the pocket of my jacket, which I had removed, to grip my 9mm Browning pistol in its holster underneath. I could fire it without having to draw it out of my pocket if I had to, not the most accurate, but definitely the quickest method to get off a shot, which was often all that counted. I wondered where Max was.

The two men also had their hands in their coat pockets. I didn’t recognise them – if they were boyos they were none I had worked against before. They headed directly for me and stopped a few feet apart at the waist-high border fence, their eyes never leaving me. Their breath, like mine, was a thick steam. The width of the country lane was the distance that separated us – them in the Republic, me in Ulster.

They were older, in their forties I reckoned, their faces craggy and weathered. They scanned around, looking to see if I was alone. Both were cool and cordial but I could sense an arrogance and a malevolence. They were definitely suspicious of me.

‘How yer doin’?’ one said.

‘Fine,’ I replied.

‘What ye doin’ out here?’ said the other.

‘I’m waiting for some mates,’ I said.

When they heard my London accent any doubts they had as to who or what I was disappeared. There was only one kind of Englishman who hangs around the Irish border in bandit country at dawn wearing civvies and looking as if he’d been out all night. I could not disguise my English accent – it was pointless trying to. A professional actor would have trouble fooling these people with a put-on accent. That’s why this job was the most difficult intelligence-gathering of its type in the world. You could not ask anyone questions or strike up an innocent conversation without revealing you were not one of them. I felt certain they were boyos, if not official, then highly prejudiced sympathisers. If they did suspect I was a British undercover man – an SAS man, as they called all of us – they would also expect me to be armed. If so they were too confident not to be armed themselves.

‘You’re a long way from home, Englishman.’

As I answered I triggered my radio, which transmitted everything I said.

‘My home goes all the way up to that fence you’re standing behind.’

My voice boomed over the speaker in South Det operations room some eighty miles away and jolted out of his reverie the only occupant of the room, the duty bleep (signaller), who had been sitting back reading a book.

As it was early and my operation, which was closing down, was the only one going on that morning, everyone else in the Det was in bed or having breakfast. The duty bleep wheeled his chair over to the operations wall which was covered with a giant map and looked at the only operation marker on it, on the border, indicating my location. I never met a signaller assigned to the 14 Int Dets who wasn’t as sharp as a razor. They were not trained as operatives, but knew all there was to know about our side of it. He realised I was having a conversation with a local and knew we avoided this type of contact. If I was transmitting the conversation it meant I was trying to tell the Det something.

He punched an intercom which connected him to the rooms of all relevant personnel and said, ‘I think we’ve got a standby! I repeat, standby, standby.’

Bodies dived out of beds or from the cookhouse or TV room and rushed to the ops room. Within half a minute every member of the operations staff was there. ‘Standby’ was the most serious transmission you could send over the radio. Everyone else on the net automatically went silent to clear the airwaves. It meant an operative was about to unavoidably engage with the enemy. The next thing the ops room expected to hear was shooting. The ops staff always felt helpless in these situations because they could hear and talk to a lone operative in trouble, but could do little else to help. And it was not as if the man on the other end of the radio was a stranger, either. We drank, ate, worked, mourned and celebrated together, and all they could do now was listen and hope that when the shooting stopped, it was the familiar voice that came back over the speaker to say he was OK. This was not always the case.

‘Who are you?’ I asked.

There was no doubt in my mind now that they were boyos. The aggression was seeping from their pores. One of them was clenching his jaw, holding himself back, waiting. They had either not quite decided if I was alone, or they were carefully choosing their moment.