Seven Troop Read online

  At last there was a smile and a laugh as he lit up, took a quick drag and took it out again. He stretched out a hand. 'All right, mate?' His accent was Sarf London, like mine, but I already knew that that was where the similarity ended.

  Ken was a big-time Bruce Lee merchant, who'd represented the UK in martial-arts competitions all around the world. I'd been warned he'd fight you for a bite of a Mars bar.

  I'd done a bit of Mr Lee stuff myself, but only to get girls. At the age of fourteen I was hormonal. I might have slept in a bathroom, but without hot water in the house that didn't count for much. I started to have a shower every night down at Goose Green swimming baths, just in case I had the chance to stand next to a girl.

  I wore fresh market socks and was kissably clean, but I was also overweight. I always had been. And the girls didn't seem to go a bundle on fat boys smelling of Brut in fluorescent orange socks. I needed something more.

  The craze swept the country. People would roll out of the pubs and into the late-night movie, then come out thinking they were the Karate Kid. Outside the cinemas, curry houses and Chinese takeaways of Peckham on a Friday night, the pavements were heaving with guys head-butting lampposts and each other. I joined a club like everyone else, got into running and the weight fell off. The way of the dragon worked for me. But, of course, I didn't tell Ken any of this. He'd have wanted a fight to see how bad I was.

  I also knew that because Ken had come from the green slime (Intelligence Corps), he had done quite a few jobs on the dark side, jobs that never got talked about. Maybe that was why he'd been sent away to learn German.

  Ken leant back into the Astra and retrieved his MP5 from the rear foot well. 'All right, then, this crap hat had better get out the way. Time to showcase your talents, Andy boy. Get your weapon and go rear right.'

  'What?'

  'Get in the fucking wagon – four-man contact drills.' He turned to Frank. 'For fuck's sake, brief him up.'

  24

  Frank followed me back to the Range Rover and I grabbed my gear. I loaded my MP5 and shoved the pistol into my jeans before jumping in behind the driver's seat. Al came in next to me. None of us used seat-belts, and we were all sitting on wet seats and broken glass.

  'Met Ken, then?'

  Nish jumped into the front left and Frank reversed past the Range Rovers. 'All right, mate. You on your freefall soon?'

  Frank had his left arm over Nish's seat. He leant back and waffled away to Al about a girl his wife had lined up for him. She was also helping decorate Al's new house.

  Nish wasn't impressed. 'Al, you don't need the Collins escort service. Bin the jumper, get a decent shirt and go down town with Hillbilly.'

  Frank stopped the car about a hundred metres from the range.

  Nish turned to Al. A light switch had been thrown in his head.

  'I know why they're trying to get you a woman.' He pointed at Frank.

  'It's him. He wants to do his pastor stuff on you. Be the man who marries you!'

  The rest of the squadron had set off for the top of the berm and stood or crouched over the wet soil with their brews. Ken was jumping up and down at the entrance to the range, shouting for us to get on with it. Frank hit the gas. 'Here we go.'

  Nish stared through the bungeed window as Frank put his foot down. 'Give us a nice skid, Frank. Put on a show, eh?'

  As we screamed into the range a fireball kicked off in front of us, followed a split second later by a loud boom.

  Nish got his weapon into the shoulder. Frank hit the brakes and the rear end slewed round on the wet shale. He battled to keep the car pointing forward as we skidded towards the fireball.

  I could see Figure-11s in front of us on the forward berm. Nish kicked off his MP5 in short bursts through the windscreen. The pressure waves banged against my ears and spent cases bounced off the ceiling and onto my shoulders and head.

  Al's door was open before we came to a stop, and he was gone. So was I, running four or five metres to the side to dodge the rounds the car would take in an ambush.

  Nish finished off his mag through the shattered glass and jumped. Frank bailed out as well. Fire and manoeuvre: someone's always got to be firing while others are moving. That way, you're killing enemy or, at the very least, keeping their heads down so you can advance.

  I cleared the line of fire and moved forward, past the front of the car, stopped, and kept double-tapping the nearest targets. The fire was still burning around it.

  Frank sprinted past me, stopped and fired. He did short bursts, three or four rounds.

  There was movement to my left, the other side of the car, and a lot more firing. It never stopped as we all kept moving to target.

  I squeezed the trigger and nothing happened.

  'Stoppage!'

  Frank wasn't stopping to cover me. He kept moving forward.

  I had to draw down on the pistol. I kept firing, holding the MP5 in my left hand but still putting down good double taps, both eyes open, glued to the target.

  It took just a few seconds but we were right on top of the targets now. We kept double-tapping into every one. Different landscape, same principle: fire and manoeuvre, keep going forward, keep hitting the enemy.

  'Stop! Stop! Stop!'

  I applied safety and spun round to see Ken striding towards us. He had a cigarette in his hand. The rest of the squadron had had their show and started to move – or get pushed – down the berm. Snapper shouted them on. 'Let's get to worrrrk! The helis are comiiiing!' He added his own debrief on the attack: 'Shiiiite. Only four point five for styyyyle.'

  Ken turned to me. 'See you after the freefall, yeah?'

  'OK.'

  Tiny and yet another big tall guy sorted a Mazda saloon. He gave me a nod. 'You've met Ken, then, eh?' He snorted with laughter.

  The tall one broke away from what they were doing and came up to me. He put out a shovel-sized hand and smiled. 'Cyril.' He had a slight lisp and looked like the oldest man in Hereford, let alone Seven Troop.

  'Hello, mate – I'm Andy.'

  'I know.' He smiled again. 'See you over the water, yeah?'

  I walked back to the wagon. Snapper was still hollering and shouting. 'Get a fucking move on – we're burning dayliiiight . . .'

  25

  Brize Norton was even more fun the second time round. There were just four Special Boat Service (SBS) guys and me on the course. Technically, we were already part of the brotherhood, and the instructors treated us almost like mates. I nearly felt sorry for all the baby paratroopers getting marched around on the static-line course. Nearly.

  Most of the instructors were members of the Falcons, the RAF display team. They apologized straight away that the stuff they were going to teach us was outdated. 'We have to go by the manual, even though it was obsolete before it was printed.' On top of that they didn't jump the same rigs as us, but we had to start somewhere. For all I cared, we could have used the ones Noah had on the Ark.

  I liked having long hair in preparation for Northern Ireland. I liked wearing my sand-coloured beret. I felt how an actor or singer must feel when they hit the big-time, though of course I didn't show it. I still had a lot of learning to do. The RSM's words rang in my head: 'Wind your neck in, look and listen.'

  The boy soldier who'd started out in September 1976 with no intention of being in the army long had certainly fucked up on that plan. The first three months in the Infantry Junior Leaders Battalion (IJLB) at Shorncliffe, Kent, had been nothing but marching, bullshit and being shouted at, but I'd had constant hot water, my own bed and locker, and we even did our bit to keep the defence budget down. At IJLB you could only use three sheets of toilet paper: one up, one down, one shine.

  More than the material comforts, I liked being part of something, the way the training sergeants shouted words like 'we' and 'us'. I couldn't understand why some lads didn't stay the course. Maybe they had something better to go back to.

  Even the teachers who had to take lads like me, who were well below
their reading and writing age, made me feel special. My very first day in the education block changed my life. The captain, an old sweat who had come up through the ranks and now wanted to pass something on to the new generation, came into the classroom of twenty zit-faced, uniformed sixteen-year-olds and pointed out of the window.

  'Out there, the other side of the wire, they think you're all as thick as shit.' He stopped and looked at us as if we were going to disagree. I certainly wasn't. I was in the infantry because no one else in the army would have me.

  'Well, they're wrong. The only reason you cannot read or write is because you do not read or write.'

  He wandered between the desks, checking all the raw, pockmarked faces. In the army you shaved even if you didn't have to.

  'But as from today, young soldiers, that stops.'

  Not only did the army educate me, they even paid me to be angry and fight. I became the junior army welterweight champion – something I certainly wasn't going to tell Ken about. It all began because of the company 'boxing' competition. It wasn't boxing as Muhammad Ali would have known it. The army called it 'milling'. You had two minutes to beat the shit out of the other lad. If you won too easily, you went in and fought again; if you lost too easily, you went in and fought again; and if you didn't hold your ground, you went in and fought again. After six or seven bouts IJLB had found its boxing team.

  It suited me down to the ground. They wanted me to fight and kill people, and gave me a great life and an education in return. I loved it. At last I had found something I was good at. I even won the Light Division Sword for the most promising boy soldier. For me, each day was better than the last.

  The freefall lessons at Brize Norton were one-to-one, and my personal instructor was called Rob. The first thing he asked me was what troop I was going to.

  'Seven.'

  His face creased up. 'You know Nish?' I asked.

  They certainly did. The military freefall circuit was small. With Nish being a Red Fred and them being Falcons, they'd done a lot of jumps together, civilian and fun events, as well as military.

  The first few lessons were a bit awkward for all of us. I felt strange learning for the sake of learning, and they felt strange teaching the stuff. I'd really thought the bullshit-baffles-brains bit was behind me. The basic problem was that freefall was driven by the sport rather than by the military. The sports clubs were where all the rigs and techniques were being perfected. They were adapted for military use, but it took a very long time. Usually it was the other way round. Military technology drove civilian technology, certainly in time of conflict.

  Over the next two days it got better, even though I was just learning how to put on the basic rig. Our first jump was to be a very straightforward freefall from 12,000 feet, taking about fifty seconds, under a round canopy called a PB6, very similar to the static-line parachute. Then we'd progress to the TAP, an antiquated bit of kit that still wasn't a square chute like the sports ones the instructors were using. It looked more like a quarter of an orange. All you could do was turn left or right.

  26

  On day three, the ten of us took our places in the back of a C-130. I wasn't scared; I just didn't want to look a dickhead. I was going to jump, no problems with that, but I didn't want to cock it up.

  Everybody was going through the drills, even the professional jumpers who'd been doing it for years. Mentally and physically, they're dry drilling all the time, simulating pulling their emergency cutaway of the main rig and deploying the reserve. It doesn't mean they're scared, just that they're thinking about the future.

  We all sat in the plane with our arms in the air, as if in freefall, miming as we chanted in our heads, 'Thousand and one, thousand and two, check the canopy . . .' And if it hadn't opened, we mimed looking for the cutaway pad on the right of the rig, pulling that, then pulling the red reserve handle on the left.

  I checked both my wrists. In training we carried two altimeters, great big things that looked like they'd been salvaged from a Lancaster bomber.

  By the time we'd got to about 6,000 feet it was already getting really cold. I started to feel light-headed as we climbed to 12,000 and the air got thinner still. This was the maximum height we would jump from without oxygen. At just 10,000 feet – less than the height of Mont Blanc – the amount of oxygen present and the pressure at which it enters the body is not enough to keep you operating at maximum efficiency. As you go higher hypoxia – lack of oxygen – kicks in, followed by unconsciousness and death.

  Nobody was talking. We'd have had to yell to make ourselves heard. The noise inside the aircraft was deafening. We weren't sitting in first class, waiting for the drinks trolley to arrive.

  When the time came, the tailgate slid downwards. Sunlight streamed in, along with the rush of the slipstream. I thought of Frank. He'd have loved this. He'd have seen it as a message from God.

  Way below us, Oxfordshire was bathed in sunlight. As the pilot manoeuvred left and right, I could see tree-lined roads and buildings.

  Rob pointed me onto the tailgate. When I got there, I turned around and he pushed me backwards until the balls of my feet were right on the edge of the plate and my heels were en route to Oxfordshire. He gripped the front of my rig and fixed me with a stare as the slipstream battered my jumpsuit. We had to have eye-to-eye as the aircraft lined up and he steadied me. His eyes swivelled left and right for the jump light.

  'RED ON!' he screamed, into my face.

  I nodded.

  'READY!' The green light must have come on.

  'SET!' He pulled me so I rocked forward.

  'GO!'

  I leant away from him and launched myself backwards off the tailgate, feet first. I adopted the standard 'frog' position – knees bent at ninety degrees and arms outstretched, level with my shoulders. I fell straight down, eyes fixed on the aircraft above me as normal wind forces took over from the slipstream.

  Rob's face was just a foot from mine. One second between jumpers equated to well over a sixty-foot gap. He must almost have jumped on top of me, but I hadn't been watching. I was too busy trying not to fuck up.

  I didn't tumble. I kept looking ahead. The aircraft was way above us and getting smaller by the second. I concentrated on keeping in line with Rob. He was about ten feet away now, level with me and staring hard.

  I was still more or less stable-on-heading and I wasn't tumbling. I allowed myself a moment to enjoy the pure adrenalin rush of falling at terminal velocity. It was like standing up through the sunroof of a car doing 120 m.p.h. The wind pressure was doing its best to rip off my jumpsuit. I grinned and my cheeks blew out. My whole face rippled. I started to wobble and flailed my arms to compensate. I nearly inverted.

  Keep looking at Rob!

  His face resembled a pug's, complete with flapping jowls. I guessed mine wasn't much different.

  I was now supposed to pick a point on the ground and check I wasn't moving left or right of it. I might be stable-onheading, I might be pointing the right way, but I might also be drifting right or left. I wanted to fall straight down, not sliding backwards or forwards, left or right. Everything below me was tiny. I focused on a bend in the A40 dual carriageway. I was going down straight – I thought . . .

  I checked my altimeters non-stop. As soon as I reached 4,000 feet I went in for the pull. Physically looking down at the red steel ring on the right of the rig, I brought my left hand up above my head and gripped the handle with my right. I wobbled and started to turn, but it was nearly pull time and I wasn't sure how to rectify it now I was out of the frog.