Eno was at the bottom of the garden, down a little walkway that ran between some garages and the garden itself. He was tucked in to one side; if he got discovered, he'd just pretend that he was having a piss and then walk away. This was where all the CQB training and skills came in; it was deciding when the situation demanded that you pull that gun.
He whispered, "November's got the trigger. I'm down the bottom of the path, between the garages and the gardens."
"Alpha, roger that. November's got the trigger."
Eno was going to stand there in the dark, about fifteen meters from the weapons. If there was no need to move until midnight, he wouldn't.
Brendan was further down the road in a car, ready to back Eno if anything happened. Dave 2 and I were just swanning around, me in my eight-year-old Volkswagen GT waiting to respond.
I parked up. It was now about five-thirty in the evening, and all the streetlights were on. Smoke started to pour from the chimney pots, and I could, smell burning peat and coal. The field across the road was a jumble of wrecked cars and roaming horses. It was starting to drizzle.
I got out of the car and said, "That's Delta going Foxtrot.
"Alpha, roger that-Delta's going Foxtrot."
I heard: "That's Golf going Foxtrot."
We were all off to the Spar shop down the road. I bought my "blending-in" items-a can of Coke and a copy of the Sun-and lounged against the wall. Dave 2 bought a bag of chips from the van outside and joined me for a brief chat.
I drove around the block, parked up somewhere else, and went for a walk.
It was about seven o'clock when I heard Enos voice, calm as ever: "Stand by, stand by.
That's two Charlies coming in."
He gave the registration numbers and descriptions of the cars.
"That's three Bravos coming out. One with long dark hair, jean jacket, and jeans; one with a blue nylon parka and black trousers; one with a green bomber jacket and blue jeans.
"It's looking all very businesslike," he said. "It isn't a social thing. They're very aware. Something's on."
I sat in the car, reading the Sun and drinking my Coke.
Alpha acknowledged. Other call signs went mobile, orbiting around Eno.
About twenty minutes later I heard: "Stand by, stand by. That's three Bravos Foxtrot towards the car. That's at the cars, still going straight. They're walking towards me. They're starting to put masks on. Possible contact.
Possible contact. Stand by." Eno never flapped; his voice was calm and relaxed.
If they were putting the masks on and walking toward him, as far as he was concerned he'd been compromised-but maybe not yet. He hadn't seen any weapons, so it was pointless doing anything at the moment.
Very casually, he started to describe what was going on: "They're still coming towards me."
We were getting out of the cars; we had to start closing in, but we had to do it in such a manner that it didn't compromise what was going on.
It might be a false alarm. They might just walk past and go and do something else; then we'd follow them. As they got closer to him, Eno couldn't talk. I started to walk quite fast toward him.
Alpha got on the net: "November, check."
Eno gave him two clicks.
"Are they still coming towards you?"
Click, click.
"Have they still got their masks on?"
Click, click.
It went quiet for a while. I was still walking fast. As I got to the area of the cars, I could see down the alleyway. I always used to carry my pistol tucked down the front of my jeans. I remembered the story Mick had told us about the boy getting pushed in the Shantello; the only thing that had saved him as he rolled was having his pistol to the front. I took my gloves off as I walked and threw them on the floor. If I had to draw my gun, I'd lift my jacket with my left hand as high as it would go, with a big aggressive motion, then draw my pistol with my right. I was expecting to see these boys going down the alleyway to Eno and opening fire, but I saw jack shit.
All of a sudden Eno came on the net. "They've gone right; they've gone down the side of the garages."
As I looked down the line of the fence, to the right of me was a line of garages. I knew they'd gone down there and were walking behind the garages. They didn't have the weapons; those were still in the coal shed. So what were they up to?
Brendan was coming from another direction, walking along the back of the garages. As soon as he heard that they'd turned right, he did a quick about-turn and walked off. He didn't want a head-to-head.
However, he now had these three masked boys behind him.
He landed up %walking about ten meters in front of them, down the same roadway. He could hear them getting closer and closer. He could hear them talking.
"That's it-they're right behind me. Stand by for a possible contact."
I knew Eno was off to my left-hand side somewhere. I wanted to make sure I got behind these people. Then I heard Brendan: "I have from the front. I have from the front."
I said, "That's Delta backing you, Hotel."
Dave 2 said, "Golf's mobile."
Wherever we went now, Dave 2 would make sure he was following us with the motor. We kept on walking.
They weren't talking and were fairly aware. The alleyway was a well-used thoroughfare that linked two sets of gardens; it wasn't suspicious for us to be there. The ground was pitted asphalt, littered with old cans. Looking to the left, I saw people doing their dishes at mistedup kitchen windows.
"Golf, Delta, check."
Click, click.
"Are you still backing?"
Click, click."
"Are they still along the back of the garages?"
Click, click.
"Are they still hooded up?"
Click, click.
The garages went on for about sixty or seventy meters. As they got to the end, they turned right. Brendan kept on going straight; I came on the net and said, 'They've gone right towards the main [main road."
Brendan said, "Roger that. I'm going complete. I'm going to my car."
I said, "Delta has unsighted. Wait. That's unsighted, Delta checking."
I got to the edge and turned right, just catching them out of the right-hand side of my vision. They were opening up a garage right at the end. But they didn't have masks on. I carried on walking and said,
"That's the three Bravos; they're at the very end garage, and their masks are off. I do not have."
I had to keep going straight. This was worrying; nobody had got them now. Were they going to drive off?
Dave 2 parked up on the other side of the road and was looking down. He came on the net: "Golf has, Golf has."
I said, "That's Delta going complete," and headed for my car.
Dave was giving a commentary on what was going on: They went into the garage, put the light on, were in there for a-bout two minutes, mucked around with a car inside, came out, and closed the door.
"That's them now walking back to the house."
Then Eno picked them up. "November has. They're now going complete the house [into the house], with no masks on."
"Alpha, roger that."
We didn't have a clue what was going on. This was often one of the big problems facing us: We saw things, but we didn't know what they meant because we'd seen only a portion of the action. Why had they got masks on? Why had they taken them off? Had they just canceled something? Had they canceled it because they'd seen us? Or were they just doing a drill? But why practice with the masks on?
None of our questions was ever answered. The four of us had to lift off, and another team came in to take over; we were overexposed in that area now and might have been compromised.
When we got back to the briefing room, the Boss said, "We're not going to put a tech attack in. We're going to lift it tonight."
The other team was now covering the weapons. The R.U.C went down and searched a lot of houses, lifted the weapons, and that was the end of that. We never found out why the boys had their masks on.
Some of the characters got so much into the work that they didn't want to leave. Some blokes were on their third or fourth tour, completely caught up in it. There were some weird guys there as well, who couldn't cut between real life and what was going on in their work.
I knew I was starting to get totally engrossed. It was exciting being in the'Bogside on a Saturday night at eleven o'clock, watching known players come out of the pub, lining up and getting their food.
Even if we weren't working, we'd go down for some "orientation," walking around and getting to know the places and the people. After a while we got comfortable in these well-hard areas and could tell instinctively when something was up.
Dave was well on the road to the funny farm. The sink overflowed in his room while he was out. When he came back, the carpet was totally sagged up. Dave's remedy wasn't to take the carpet up or open the windows and let it dry out; it was to go and buy a huge bag of mustard and cress seed and sow it. Then he turned the heater up, closed the door, and proceeded to live in a room full of crops. "Want to know how to survive, Andy?" he said to me once. "Never eat anything larger than your own head, anything that you can't pronounce or spell, or tomatoes."
Sometimes such bizarre things happened on operations that I'd wonder if I was in a dream. It appeared once that at some point in the next few days, at pub kicking-out time, some buses were going to be hijacked from the bus station, put across the street as barricades, and burned. We put in a number of reactive OPs so that when it happened, the H.M.S.U (R.U.C Headquarters Mobile Support Unit) could steam in and do their business-and if the police couldn't get there, we'd be the last resort.
We split up into three gangs of two and were in positions from where we could trigger it. Me and Eno had MP5s and 9MM pistols. To get as close as we could, we decided to crawl into the scrubland where the concrete area of the bus depot ended, right on the edge of the compound itself.
If we did get compromised, we'd have it that we were on the piss, so we each took a couple of cans of Tennants lager, the ones with the picture of the woman on the back. We sat down and nursed Penelope and Samantha, keeping our eyes on the target.
Everybody started streaming out of the pubs and getting on the buses to take them out to their little enclaves around Strabane. There was a taxi rank nearby as well, and it was the typical Friday night scene. All the boys were pissed up, trying to chat up fat slags who smelled of outrageous cheap perfume and were more interested in shoveling large pizzas into their faces than in getting laid.
The next thing that caught our attention was two women, hollering and shouting with each other, laughing away and smoking. They were coming toward us, giggling about needing a piss.
We came up on the air and said, "Stand by. That's two echoes [women] coming towards us. Wait out." . The next thing we knew, the pair were virtually standing over the bushes we were hiding in. Then, still cackling and shouting, they squatted and opened fire.
I was number one on a -oh on the shore of Lough Neagh. The nearest town was Glenavy on the eastern shore.
The ops officer brought us in and gave us a briefing.
"There's the general area." He tapped a map. "Somewhere around the shores of the lake there, and going up in the fields in this area here, there's a fearsome hide.
Apparently there's shotguns, radios, all sorts of shitprobably a complete A.S.U's worth of equipment. We're going to keep going in, night after night, until we find it.
What I want you to do now is plan and prepare a CTR for tomorrow night."
I picked up the Hasselblad cameras and jumped into the Gazelle; minutes later we were flying over Lough Neagh, the largest lake in Europe. While we did a normal flying pattern, I took pictures.
We spent hours pondering over the photographs, trying to look for natural points that would be markers, or natural areas to put a hide.
It could be in the corner of a field or, say, the third telegraph pole along where there was a big lump of stone. it was daunting. The area covered a square kilometer of hedgerows and shoreline. It was summertime; we weren't getting more than six hours of darkness, which meant we had to get in there, use the six hours, and get out again, not leaving any sign in the fields; all the crops were up and would easily get trodden down and leave sign. And then we'd have to go back the next night. I And the next.
The ops officer was Pete. He looked like Mr. Sensible Dad, happy owner of a Mini Metro and frequenter of B&Q, and wearer of Clark's shoes, Tesco, trousers and V-neck jumpers-180 degrees from my look of Mr. Bag o'Shite. He said, "You're going to be there all month by the looks of things. just tell us what you want by four o'clock, so I can start organizing it."
I sat down and looked at all the options. Because this place was so isolated, there was no way we could get vehicles in to drop, us off, for us then to patrol in. The only way we were going to get in was by Scotty beaming us-or via the lough. The only way we were going to get in from the lough was by boat, and the only people who were going to do that were the Regiment.
I said to Pete, "You're not going to believe this. I want two boats over with some blokes."
He went away shaking his head. Two hours later he said, "Right, we've got a Chinook coming over with A Squadron Boat Troop. They'll be waiting for you."
I was happy. "I'll also need six blokes."