But we agreed to let the idea of a hunting trip ride, meanwhile, and we resorted to the age-old SAS formula for sorting out personal troubles: we drove out to Talybont, parked in the lay-by, and tabbed it as hard as we could to the summit of Pen-y-Fan. No matter that it was a miserable day, with rainstorms sweeping across the bare mountains; the physical challenge and the grandeur of the hills wrought their usual magic, and I came home with my confidence at least partially restored. Of course I would carry on with the Regiment.
On the Monday morning when I went back to work, things took a turn for the better. At Morning Prayers in the Squadron Interest Room the sergeant major asked me to see him in his office immediately afterwards, and when I went in there he said, ‘Geordie, I’m glad to say you’re in luck. You don’t fucking deserve it, but there’s a slot come up for you. Geoff Hunt, who’s been on the SP team, fell off a pissy little wall on Friday and broke his ankle. That means we need a guy to take his place. You’re a trained assaulter, so in you go.’
‘Fine,’ I replied. ‘How long will it be for?’
‘There’s six weeks of the squadron’s tour left. After that, we’ll find you something else.’
‘Great!’
My enthusiasm wasn’t just for show. I’d been dreading the possibility that they were going to make me ops sergeant — the worst job around, as it amounted to sitting on your backside in the ops room and being little more than tea-boy for the head-shed, with endless paperwork. I was genuinely glad to go back into the Special Projects (or Counter-Terrorist) Team for a spell. I’d already done one tour with them and enjoyed it, so it was no trouble to slip back into harness.
The task of the unit was to respond instantaneously to any terrorist attack, such as the hijack of an aircraft or seizure of a building. Of the two teams, Red and Blue, one was always at thirty minutes’ readiness, with vehicles loaded, ready to roll, and the other at three hours. In fact the first team was often capable of taking off within ten minutes of an alert.
Life on the SP team could be quite exciting. If a callout came, you could never be sure whether it was an exercise or a genuine emergency. One of the Regiment’s greatest ever hits — the siege at the Iranian Embassy in London in 1980 — began with just such uncertainty. On the morning of 30 May, a former member of the Regiment, Dusty Gray, phoned the head-shed from Heathrow Airport and tipped them off that all the Metropolitan Police’s terrorist dogs had suddenly been whipped away to London.
It so happened that at that moment a major exercise was getting under way. According to the scenario, there’d been a hijack attempt at an airfield in the northeast, and the SP team was about to deploy in response. Then in came this call from Dusty Gray. At first the CO thought it was someone trying to take the piss and screw up the start of the exercise by feeding him duff information, but then he decided it was for real. Before any official notification came in, he said, ‘Bugger the exercise,’ and deployed the SP team to a holding location on the way to London. The result was that when the media later came and camped outside the gates to watch for warriors departing, they saw fuck-all — until six days later, when every television screen in the country showed our guys abseiling down from the Embassy roof in their black kit and taking the villains out. Twelve years on from that historic event, the terrorist threat remained much the same, and the head-shed often sprang an exercise without any warning to keep the guys on their toes.
In between, we were ceaselessly training. The thirty-minute team had to stay within easy range of camp and train locally, but the rest were free to go up country and do things like practise aircraft-entry and visit prominent buildings that might become targets for terrorist take-over.
Being on the team meant that I could carry on living at home, because my address was easily within the thirty-minute limit. At night, when the roads were clear, I could be inside the warehouse within eleven minutes. Like everyone else, I carried a bleeper wherever I went. If all the numbers appearing on its screen were one, I knew it was a practice call-out; what we wanted was all the nines — the real thing.
There were sixteen of us assaulters on the Blue Team, and for me it was a bit of a comedown to be merely one of the pack. On my earlier tour I’d been Sniper Team Commander — in effect the third in command of the whole outfit, under the boss (a captain) and a staff sergeant. But any active employment was better than being stuck behind the desk in the ops room.
We usually began our day at 0830 with an hour’s fitness training. Then we’d practise abseiling, fast-roping out of helicopters, climbing glass walls with suckers, entry into rooms — all pretty physical stuff. I enjoyed the challenge of getting really fit again, and put in extra hours at the gym; in that role you need all the strength you can muster — you’re forever lifting people, pulling them about or restraining them. You’re also carrying a lot of extra weight — apart from the MP 5 sub-machine-gun and pistol, there’s the body armour, kevlar helmet and ops waistcoat (loaded with axe, stun grenades and ammunition). For all these reasons, upper-body strength is a real asset.
The other thing we did was fire pistols. We fired pistols until we were almost out of our minds. Hundreds of rounds a day. Sometimes at Hun’s Head targets on the camp’s own range, sometimes in the Killing House, sometimes in the Garaback down at LATA. It would have been easy to go stale, get bored of it, but I concentrated by imagining (still) that my target was Farrell, and telling myself that somewhere, sometime, all these practice rounds would pay off.
Inevitably, our training was repetitive. We fast-roped until we could do it in our sleep. We practised entry into rooms until it was second nature. I had an advantage, coming in towards the end of the tour — I hadn’t been doing these things for such a long time. I could see that some of the guys were already bored witless. They’d begun to take outrageous risks, like urging the chopper pilot to go in at a higher speed when we were about to fast-rope down to the top of the building, or even dispensing with the rope altogether, jumping instead. This, apparently, was where my predecessor had come unstuck: the head-shed had been led to believe he’d hurt himself jumping off a wall, but in fact he’d been attempting an unscheduled, ropeless descent from a helicopter.
With a month of the SP tour to go, a new buzz-word suddenly started circulating: Colombia. A fastball job had come up — the squadron had been tasked to send out a team at short notice to train the president’s bodyguard.
‘Colombia?’ said Murdo McFarlane, the redheaded Jock, in the canteen one lunchtime. ‘Is that in Canada?’
‘Is it bollocks,’ big Johnny Ellis said. ‘That’s Columbia with a U, twat. This one’s in South America. It’s a hotbed of drugs and fucking corruption. Cocaine pours out of it like water out of the Amazon. That’s why El Presidente needs so much guarding: the drug barons spend their lives trying to top the bastard.’
‘How d’you know so much about it?’ I asked. ‘Have you been out there?’
‘No, I just saw a video.’
‘Spanish-speaking, I suppose?’
‘Absolutamente.’
The gossip set me thinking. Maybe, with my good result in the Spanish course, I would be in with a chance of getting on board.