I glanced at my watch. Eleven o’clock already. The pubs would be open soon. Time for a shave. At least I still bothered to take some kind of basic care of my personal appearance. Which was more than I could say for the appearance of the bathroom. The bath and loo mats were grimy. The plugholes in the bath and hand basin were matted over with enough hair to weave a rug. A tiny scrap of soap, no mirror, one torn towel, one toothbrush in a holder, toothpaste dribbling down like bird droppings under a perch, a loo seat that had a mind of its own and would come crashing down in mid-piss, and a weird, pervasive smell of decay. Was it the drains, the mould on the shower curtain, a dead mouse beneath the bath panels? I didn’t know, and I didn’t really care. I’d get round to sorting it one day. My wife had left me and taken my son with her. I didn’t need to bother any more on the domestic front.
The downstairs was no better. You could say it was lacking a woman’s touch. Curtains always drawn, the television blaring out constantly, half-drunk cups of tea lying around the place like in an under-staffed café, rooms not vaccuumed in months, the garden looking like the Borneo jungle. There were even exotic mushrooms growing under the fridge and getting bigger by the day. I thought of preserving them under glass and taking them down to the survival course briefing room at the camp as an exhibit in the dangerous fungi section. But what can you expect? The SAS is not a school for aspiring ballet dancers. You can’t expect us to go in for civilised niceties like cleaning the house. I was even toying with the idea of moving out of my bedroom and getting my head down at nights in the back garden under a poncho to see if that would make me feel more at home.
It was all getting too much. I wasn’t sure I could hack it. I was still functioning in this society, but only just. Our mortar man at the battle of Mirbat, Fuzz, had already cracked up in Civvy Street. More would go the same way, I was sure of that. Would I join them? Would I end up burnt out, just another statistic, another skeleton in the nation’s cupboard? ‘Tragic End for Shell Shocked Hero’, would they write that about me too in the Hereford Times?
Enough! Enough! This morbid navel-gazing had gone on far too long. I couldn’t spend the rest of my life like this. I shook my head and came to my senses. I was disgusted with myself for feeling so edgy and discontented. People should be able to handle their own feelings. I wasn’t a civilian under some kind of imminent threat: I wasn’t living through some kind of civil war or trying to survive a conflict-induced famine or vicious ethnic cleansing. I was a proud soldier. I’d come through the battle of Mirbat, the Embassy siege, the Falklands War, Northern Ireland. Why should I feel dissatisfied now? I was a pampered Westerner with everything on a plate.
No more self-pity. It was time to pick up the phone.
19
On the Circuit
‘Tak. I need a job. I need some anti-boredom pills.’ In the Army that was the slang for getting in some money, and I could always rely on my Fijian brother-in-arms to get me out of a fix. He’d done it often enough in the past. He’d left the SAS a bit before me and in typical Tak fashion had quickly risen through the ranks of his new profession to become a director of Kilo Alpha Services (KAS) – a private security firm. KAS were part of ‘the Circuit’ – a network of companies run mainly by ex-SAS members specializing in close protection, risk assessment, UK and international security and hostile-environment survival training. It’s a sphere of operations that demands the same degree of stealth, silence and anonymity that became second nature to me in the Army. As with the world of espionage and secret intelligence, the general public gets only the faintest glimpse of what really goes on behind the scenes. This was familiar territory.
‘Get yourself down to London tomorrow. I might have something for you.’ The phone clicked and Tak was gone. In all the years I’d known him, Tak had never, ever discussed operational matters over the telephone.
The offices of KAS were at 22 South Audley Street right in the middle of London’s Mayfair. I smiled as I clocked the abbreviation of this address – 22 SAS. Familiar territory indeed! As I pushed open the front door I was confronted by an imposing six-foot-six figure. Slightly stooped as if apologizing for his unusual height, his clothes were immaculate, his manners perfect. Softly spoken and of modest demeanour, with an obvious aristocratic background, in the Regiment he had been nicknamed ‘the Scarlet Pimpernel’ for his actions behind enemy lines in the Second World War. It was none other than Sir Archibald David Stirling DSO OBE, the legendary founder of the SAS and now chairman of KAS.
It was only a couple of years ago that I’d been his bodyguard in the Regiment. He recognized me straight away and shot out his hand to greet me. ‘Nice to see you again.’ I felt at home already.
I felt even more so when I met the managing director of the outfit, Major Ian Crooke. When I knew him in the Regiment he had been OC of A Squadron, then Ops Officer. He was part of the outside team collating intel and information during the Embassy siege in 1980. When you’ve been through something like that together, you’ve bonded forever. Stunning though that episode was, his most daring exploit took place a year later. He and two senior NCOs from B Squadron were sent to ‘observe and advise’ on a Marxist coup in the Commonwealth nation of the Gambia. It was when he got to the capital, Banjul, that he took the expression ‘going beyond the call of duty’ to a spectacular new level. Being the loose cannon he was, Crookie proceeded to do a little bit more than observe and advise. He decided to end the coup single-handed.
The rebels had taken control of the key infrastructure in and around Banjul whilst the president, Sir Dawda Jawara, was in the UK as an honoured guest at the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. While the happy couple were sunning themselves on honeymoon on board Britannia, Crookie and his team flew in to neighbouring Senegal. They casually strolled across the border into the Gambia dressed in jeans and T-shirts and carrying rucksacks crammed with Heckler & Koch MP5s, Browning pistols and an ample supply of ammunition.
Arriving in the capital, they quickly assessed the situation and found the rebels in control of key positions. In particular, members of the president’s family and other high-placed dignitaries were being held hostage at the main hospital. Totally undaunted, Crookie and his NCOs acquired white coats and stethoscopes and arrived at the hospital in nothing more threatening than a taxi. With the element of surprise on their side they quickly disarmed the rebels and freed the hostages. Next, they established contact with an elite force of French-trained Senegalese paratroopers who’d also arrived at the request of the president. Crookie introduced himself to their senior officer and promptly took command of the unit. Leading the counter-attack from the turret of an armoured car and with his two sergeants running the assault groups, he routed the rebels and dislodged them from their strongholds in the army barracks, the radio station and the police armoury. Without further ado, he and his team hopped on a plane and headed back to Hereford. Freeing a small African state from Communist rebels – all in a day’s work for the SAS! Back home the top brass were spitting blood at how he’d gone beyond his brief. They were on the verge of court-martialling him. In the end they changed their minds and gave him a DSO for outstanding bravery instead.