We seemed to need a mountain of kit. For our personal weapons we took MP 5 Kurtzes — the short-barrelled version of the sub-machine-gun — as well as Beretta pistols, a couple of 53s and a couple of 203s — combination weapons with an automatic rifle in the top barrel and 40mm grenade launcher below. We also loaded up a terrific amount of ammunition, because we’d heard there was a shortage out there. Also, we’d heard that the Colombian jundis — the ordinary soldiers — couldn’t shoot for pussy, and needed a lot of training purely in weapon skills. So I signed for pallets full of ammunition boxes — 7.62 rounds for their Galil rifles, and 9mm for the MP 5s and Berettas — as well as a load of PE4 plastic explosive, and saw it all packed into steel Lacon boxes along with hundreds of targets and our personal heavy gear. If we’d known what was going to happen we’d have taken jungle kit — but as far as we could tell at that point, we were merely going to spend six or seven weeks in a reasonably civilized camp. I don’t know what it was that made me pack my Magellan GPS — the hand-held global positioning system that communicates with satellites and tells you your location on the face of the earth to within a few feet. Maybe I thought I would show off the miracles of western technology to our students in the jungle.
The best feature of our preparation was that each of us got an extra payment of £3,000 in travellers’ cheques. Described as an overseas allowance, it was an addition to our normal pay — a kind of bonus for going abroad. For me it came just in time, as the loss of a month’s pay had left me struggling, and I put all but £500 straight into the bank. The money also consolidated the feeling that I was back in the fold.
Several of the other guys also stashed their unexpected loot, but a couple kept all the money on them, determined to blow it in the night-spots of Bogotá and buy emeralds, which were rumoured to be incredibly cheap. They were the financially incurables. As somebody remarked, ‘Giving that amount of money to fucking Johnny’s like giving whisky to an Indian.’ When Johnny announced that in Bogotá night clubs the girls danced on the tables and didn’t wear knickers, the place was in an uproar. What with the money, the promise of a hot climate, and the language, the lads were getting a bit above themselves. As they went about the camp I could hear the most outrageous greetings: ‘Buenas tardes, Shitface. ¿Como esta?’ and ‘On your bicicleta, cabron.’
On the day we were due to fly, Tracy took the morning off so that we could spend some time together, and we had a scene uncomfortably like the one with Kath before I went to the Gulf.
‘It’s only for two months,’ I said, ‘and there’s nothing dangerous about it. All the same, we’d better know were we stand. Don’t get upset, but I’ve changed my will.’
‘So?’
‘If I’m run over by a bus in Bogotá, you get everything, including the house. Except for Tim’s trust fund. That stays the same.’
‘That’s fantastic. But, Geordie?’
‘What?’ I saw Tracy looking at me in a peculiar way.
‘Don’t do anything stupid this time. It’s not fair on me and Tim.’
‘Of course I won’t.’
Still she was looking at me with a strange expression. ‘Geordie,’ she said, ‘I want you to have this.’ She reached into the pocket of her jeans and brought out a blue velvet box.
I took it and opened it. Inside was a little silver figure on a chain, small, but heavy and solid for its size.
‘Wear it round your neck,’ she said.
‘Who is it?’
‘St Christopher. The patron saint of travellers. He’ll bring you luck. He’ll bring you back safe.’
‘But where did you get it?’
‘I bought it, stupid!’
‘You shouldn’t have bothered.’
‘I wanted to. Put it on.’
I slipped it over my head and gave her a kiss.
‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ she said.
‘What’s that, love?’
‘It’s just that I seem to be pregnant.’
ELEVEN
It’s an old joke in the RAF that Lockheed, manufacturers of the Hercules C 130 transport, solved the aircraft’s noise problem by putting it all inside. When you hear a Herc fly over it doesn’t sound too bad, and even at close quarters the scream of the four turbo-props is tolerable. Inside the back, though, it’s a different matter. The high, penetrating whine bores into your head, and after seven or eight hours even earplugs and defenders can’t keep it out of your brain.
That was what we had to contend with — three consecutive marathon flights of eight, eight and five hours respectively. The pull-down seats along the sides of the fuselage are impossible to sit on for more than a few minutes, so the guys slung their parachute-silk hammocks and crashed out in them, swinging along to the rhythm of the aircraft. Most RAF crews would have gone ballistic at people taking such liberties with their aircraft, but our particular crew was dedicated to special forces missions, and we knew several of them personally, so more or less anything went. It was also possible to make the odd comfortable nest among our Lacon boxes. Looking at the steel trunks, all padlocked and labelled and held down by heavy-duty netting, I reflected on the weight of the kit we were taking. The boxes of ammunition were four-man carries, and many of the others weren’t much lighter.
From Brize Norton the plane lumbered across the Atlantic to Gander, in Newfoundland, where it went tits-up on the runway, so that we had to kill time while its load was transferred to another. The next hop took us to Belize, north of Panama, where it was stinking hot. Finally we flew down to a military airfield somewhere in the west of Colombia, the flight being timed so that we came in at the dead of night, when nobody would see us.
After so many hours cooped up, the lads were pissed off to find that they weren’t allowed to leave the aircraft. Instead, some immigration official came on board to stamp our passports. When we heard that we had to fly on for another couple of hours to a little-used military airfield way out in the country, the pilots were even more pissed off, as they’d never seen the place before, and it had no proper runway lights. But in the end there was no problem, and we finally staggered out into the warm tropical darkness at about 0400, just in time for a shower and a nap before breakfast.
Daylight revealed that the camp was built on level ground, and that the perimeter fence enclosed a large area of maybe fifty acres. Beyond the wire, scrub had been cleared back for another hundred yards or so, and then dense secondary jungle took over. In the far distance, above the trees, we could see bare rocky mountains. The buildings were all new, made of concrete, and reasonably well finished, with mosquito screens over the windows, doors that fitted, and showers that worked. The only trouble was, the place was alive with flies, big spiders and geckos; instead of rats, as in Belfast, it was lizards, going like smoke up and down the walls, racing across the walkways and disappearing into holes among the rocks.
We spent most of day one sorting ourselves out. We went for a run round the perimeter and did a bit of phys to get the flight out of our systems. The dry season, known as the verrano, was coming to an end, but the weather seemed to be holding up. Early morning was relatively cool, but by eleven or so the heat had built into the high eighties, even though we were 3,000 feet above sea-level, and for us, not yet acclimatized, the temperature was quite oppressive. That didn’t stop the guys lying out after lunch and sunbathing in their shreddies. They’d immediately spotted the possibility of acquiring a serious tan; I also saw the possibility of getting seriously burnt, and I let it be known that if anyone was careless enough to roast himself, he’d be seriously fined. Because we didn’t want to make ourselves conspicuous by wearing any kind of uniform, we’d decided to go for shorts and T-shirts, and that in itself presented a problem, as our necks and knees were glaringly white.