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  Nish would have been able to ram them and take them down, if it hadn't been for a group of school kids waiting for the bus. Bags and books lay strewn across the pavement as they threw themselves into ditches or tried to run across the road.

  One girl froze like a statue in the middle, still gripping her lunch box. Nish nearly lost control as he swerved to avoid her.

  'Paralleling the M1 – I'm on the old main road to Belfast.'

  He was on a long straight. Now the Renault could take them.

  Eno returned fire again as Nish closed. Cyril was in the foot well, on the net to Ken.

  It was good news. 'We're on the same road, ahead of you.'

  Ken was in the front and pulled Chris's seat-belt on for him. 'RAM IT!'

  Chris hit the gas as the yellow target came into view.

  'Can't do it, Ken. We're too fast!'

  The closing speed was over 150. Everyone would die. Ken wasn't worried: he would come back into this world as a bull. But Chris didn't have much faith in reincarnation. He spun the vehicle and blocked the road. The Escort screamed towards them, swerving up a bank at the last minute and around them. Chris jumped out of the Lancia and fired bursts into the rear of the van.

  Ken pushed his door open and tried to jump out at the same time as Chris, but his seat-belt held him back. Two rounds shattered his door window a split second later. But for the seatbelt, he'd have had the Viking's death he wished for.

  Nish managed to avoid the Lancia by throwing his car into a big slide.

  'Got him, got him, still ahead.'

  Sixty . . . seventy . . . eighty . . . The Renault accelerated and was closing.

  The van took a sudden left. Nish hit the brakes, trying to slow enough to follow.

  Cyril was on the net. 'Ken, they've turned left, turned left. We can't take 'em.'

  Vital seconds were lost as Nish battled to turn the Renault. The van was now back on narrow roads, concealed by hedgerow.

  The two vehicles combed the area until they were nearly out of fuel. The army and the RUC moved in to control the panicking locals who just wanted to get to school and work without dying. TCG called the job off.

  The van wasn't found until later. The ASU had dumped it in a farmyard, grabbed a hostage, cut the phone lines and continued on foot across fields to avoid roadblocks, before taking another car.

  Back at the warehouse, it became clear why TCG had called off the job. An innocent bystander had been killed in the operation. Frederick Jackson had been leaving a timber yard; he was waiting to pull out onto the road as the mobile intercept passed him. One of our rounds had ricocheted off the road and gone through the car door. It entered Mr Jackson's body and exited through his neck. The car rolled back and re-parked itself. He was sitting there for ten minutes before anyone in the yard realized what had happened.

  The mood in the bar that night was sombre. Even with hundreds of hours of training, shit could happen. Soldiering wasn't a science. The X factor was the enemy. You couldn't tell them what to do so that they fitted in with your plans. Like Napoleon said, if you planned for A and B the enemy would always do C.

  Frank, of course, prayed for Mr Jackson. I listened to him through the wall. 'But what else could we do, Lord? We're here stopping evil.'

  Nish, Frank and I had a chat about how much the three of us probably had in common with that ASU.

  Even as a Bible-basher, Frank had no problem seeing them as the bad guys. 'They use violence to prevent the democratic process, and they kill indiscriminately.' He shrugged. 'They have to be stopped. Simple.'

  Nish raised an eyebrow. 'But I can see where they're coming from. If you'd been born a Catholic here and had to put up with the shit they have, you might be waving an Armalite too. Fuck me, to think it's only an accident of birth that I'm not shooting at Father Frank.'

  They were both right. If I'd been brought up in the Bogside estate I would have been in PIRA. But coming from one in South London, I'd ended up in the army instead.

  39

  There was a lot of hurry up and wait.

  Sometimes nothing would happen for a week, although we were always on standby. If something kicked off and they wanted guys on the ground quickly, we even had our own helis parked outside. Tiny was really pissed off that Nish had totalled his pride and joy. Nish thought it was a much better stitch than just filling up the ashtrays and hanging a few bogeys on the rear-view.

  During the lulls, there were only so many games of squash or fights you could have in one day. The lads started climbing the walls, especially when Nish tried to get to grips with a few chords of 'The House Of The Rising Sun'.

  Frustration was expressed in many ways, but most often in stitch-ups. Minky got over the prawn incident only to have a couple of kippers stuck behind the bars of his electric heater. Nish and Tiny went at it big-time, to the point where I'd be looking under my bed before I got up in the morning in case I was going to detonate something.

  It was one of those days. Paul was out doing his own thing, and Frank stuck his head round the door. 'You want to back me in the van?'

  'Yeah.' I got up. 'No drama.'

  Great. I was going to be shotgun for a job. 'When's the brief?'

  'There isn't one. I need somebody to come with me on a shopping trip.'

  'Oh. OK.' I picked up my Browning and a couple of magazines. If you weren't on standby, you could just get into a car and drive into Belfast. We were undercover soldiers; we were big lads, with lots of guns. I still couldn't get used to it.

  I followed him to the admin van. The dirty old yellow thing was as beaten-up as an odd-jobber's van, which was just the way we wanted it.

  'Jump in, you're driving.'

  'Where we going?'

  'The timber yard.'

  'OK.' I had no idea where that was.

  I racked back the top slide to get a round into the chamber of my 9-milly. I jumped into the driver's seat, bunged it under my thigh, and checked I had the other two magazines with me. It was a matter of choice, but I always carried three: one in the weapon, two on my belt. If I needed more than thirty-nine rounds, I was deeper in the shit than a pistol could get me out of. Anyway, the idea was to keep out of trouble, not to get into it.

  We drove out of the warehouse. 'Why do you need me on an admin run?'

  'Cos I'm no longer driving. Not after Tiny.'

  The motor-transport officer was obsessed with chips in windscreens and that sort of stuff, to the point of being terminally anal. He was probably after an MBE. Nish had got into a contact and managed to write off a car in about five minutes, but nothing happened because it was on a job. Yet Tiny had scratched a door on an admin run and was fined the cost of the repair.

  'So, new policy,' Frank announced. 'I'll drive on jobs, but I'm not going to drive any admin.'

  'Oh, right. Cheers, mate – so it's all right for me, is it?'

  'Of course. That's what troopers are for.' Frank was grinning from ear to ear. He was in a good mood. I liked him when he was like that.

  We drove out of the compound and onto civilian roads.

  Frank was still grinning. 'They think I'm weird, you know.'

  'Who do?'

  'You know exactly what I'm on about.' He opened the window and let a bit of air in. The wagon stank of cigarettes and stale farts.

  'You all think my Christianity's some weird kind of madness, but I've got to tell you, mate – we're all mad one way or another. We have a Viking as a boss, there's lads who'll only read about the paranormal, and lads addicted to physical fitness like it's heroin. The only one I know who's normal is Al.'

  'Thanks again – what about me?'

  'You're not normal. You're SAS. That's all you want to be, isn't it?'

  'That's why I'm here.'

  'Exactly. What a bunch of madmen we are. And they let us out on the streets every day with these things.' He patted the 9mm under his thigh.

  'But Al's OK?'

  'Yep, more than OK, the only one with any sense. Aft
er all that stuff that went on in the bar a couple of weeks ago, he sat me down and told me I'm annoying people with my attempts to convert them, including him. But like I told him, Christians have annoyed people throughout history. They annoyed the Romans so much they got thrown to the lions. Dietrich Bonhoeffer annoyed the Nazis. Christians have got to stand up for what they believe.'

  I glazed over, not wanting to listen to the life story of some German I'd never heard of, especially a Christian one. It was hard enough concentrating on not getting fined for scratching this heap of shit.

  'Bonhoeffer – you don't know who I'm on about, do you?'

  'If I was that clever I'd be in the engineers.'

  'He was part of the plot to kill Hitler. They executed him out of spite, even though they knew the war was lost. He was a fat little bespectacled guy, the sort of lad you'd pick on in the schoolyard. But he believed Christians must fight evil in the world, wherever and whenever they saw it. He said churches are unnecessary. All you need to be a Christian is a Bible.'

  'Yours in that Claymore bag? That's your cathedral, is it?'

  He nodded. 'I read it every day. You should give it a go.'

  I couldn't be bothered to answer. Just get back to the jokes, Frank, that's the boy we want to hear. Like any convert to any cause, he was tearing the arse out of it. I realized that religion itself wasn't the problem. It was the fanatics that scared the shit out of me.

  We drove into the timber yard. Frank had a list a mile long of stuff he needed: lengths of 4 × 2, sheets of plywood, sheets of this and that, glue, all sorts of woodwork shit. I didn't have a clue what most of it was. I'd never done it at school, and I wasn't exactly a craftsman – I was a flat-pack-cupboard-from-B&Q man.

  We got back to the warehouse but Frank directed me to the range hut just outside. It was a corrugated-iron set-up that held all the Figure-11 targets we used when zeroing weapons, and all the plywood backings and little squares of paper and paste to glue over the holes so we could use them again.

  I thought it must have been range stuff we'd been buying, but as soon as Frank opened the door I saw we were going into what was obviously his workshop. A large kitchen table was under construction, bright white, sprucy wood; all sanded down, ready to be stained. Four chunky kitchen chairs had already had the treatment. The hut stank of paint and freshly sawn timber.

  Frank beamed with pride. 'I've made it so the legs can come off. I'll be able to drive it back to H.' I looked down at the lumps of 4 × 2 under my arm. 'Fucking hell, Frank – you're going for the whole New Testament package, aren't you?'

  He groaned. It obviously wasn't the first time he'd heard that one, but at least I got a smile out of him.

  Frank dropped the wood. 'Tell you what, Andy. I'll make you a table and chairs if you read the Bible.'

  I dropped my pile of wood next to his and laughed. 'You're not giving in, are you?'

  'Don't you believe in God?'

  'No. But I'll find out if I'm wrong when I'm dead, won't I? For now, I don't really think about it, mate.'

  'Aha – that means you're an agnostic. You can't make a decision because you're afraid. You know that, don't you? That means the door is still open.'

  I turned to go as Frank got out his tools and continued the good work of God's family business.

  'Mate, the only door that interests me is the one out of here. Do you want me to close it behind me?'

  As the new boy, I guessed I was only a natural target for Frank's recruitment drive. I just hoped Nish wasn't planning to ask me to join his band.

  40

  1 December 1984

  We'd heard that an active service unit was targeting a member of the security forces. The informant wasn't sure exactly who the target was, so we were working on a list of possibles in the ASU's area of operations. They'd been keeping themselves busy. A lot of close-quarter shoots had been going down. The players would go up to a front door, knock, then barge in, guns firing, as soon as somebody answered. The targets were mostly RUC or UDR people and the players had always melted away to safety before the police or army arrived.

  There weren't enough of us to cover all the potential targets, so we called in a platoon from 2 Para, the resident battalion in the area. Ken's plan was to put one of the troop with a couple of 2 Para lads on each possible, apart from the prime one. This particular guy lived way out in the cuds, just metres from the border, and had been threatened a couple of times before. No wonder he kept a Stirling submachine-gun on the kitchen table while he got the kettle on.

  Frank's four-man patrol, including me, would cover him. We would get on target before the rest of the troop took their 2 Para patrols in on theirs.

  Boss S was also in Frank's patrol. He'd just recently passed Selection and had been sent over to get some experience. Frank didn't want him on the ground, but how else was an officer going to get to know the ropes unless he was hands-on? Besides, he knew how to shoot. Ken had another heart-to-heart with Frank. Boss S would be on the ground with us and Frank would make sure he stayed with him at all times. He was here to learn.

  The fourth member was Eno. He was from the Queen's Regiment, and came up to about neck height on me. He said less even than Chris or Al, and smoked more than Nish.

  I listened through the wall as Frank prayed before we went out, even though I couldn't make out exactly what he said. From my side it was never more than a mumble.

  The players might already have eyes on target, so to avoid suspicion – and to stop Frank walking across to the house to see if they were going to shoot him – we were dropped off at the target's home at about 11 p.m. We tumbled out of the van like we were old mates as our good friend came to the door and welcomed us inside.

  The target, who was in his mid-fifties, had seen it all before. 'I'll get the kettle on, boys. It's a cold night – I can't see them coming out in this.' Even so, he had sent his family away for a few days. His Stirling 9mm rattled about on the washing-machine as it went into spin.

  If the players had done their recces, they wouldn't attack through the front of the house. It was one of those places where the front door had never been used. Vehicles and people came to the rear kitchen door via the farmyard. It was unlikely they'd drive in because it was a pain opening the gate. In any case, the border was spitting distance from the kitchen door.

  From our armchairs in the warm, dry kitchen, Eno and I had a grandstand view of the courtyard, the cowshed the other side of the hard standing, the dip where a stream ran, and the high ground of the Republic beyond.

  The major, Frank and Boss S went into the front room to watch TV. It was important the major kept to his routines. One of the downsides of being a patrol commander on a job like this is that you have to stay with the target. Eno and I would have the first contact.

  We turned off the lights and opened the curtains. Feet up on pouffes, weapons across our laps, we watched through the double-glazed french windows. The target was right about one thing. It was cold out there. Ice had formed in the courtyard, and the freezing fog, an Irish speciality, was thickening by the minute.

  Our plan was simple. As they came to the back door to the left of us, Eno would give them the good news with his LMG (light machine gun), a Second World War Bren gun, converted from .303-inch to 7.62mm. It was a great bit of kit. I had a G3, along with a couple of high-explosive hand grenades that would do the business with anyone on the hard standing. We would have shot out the double-glazing by then anyway so it would be easy to throw them out and duck behind the wall each side of the french windows.