The other thing that chuffed them was unarmed combat. At first they were laughing at Murdo because of the dark-red colour of his hair and moustache, and the tattoos which covered him from the neck down. (When he showed them the pair of eyes on his arse, they fell down laughing.) Soon they were calling him ‘El Mono’ — the ape. But when he invited them to attack him, one after another, he decked the lot, or tied them in such knots that they were very soon crying for mercy. Then he started to divulge a few secrets of holds and so on, and their respect for him became enormous.
What they didn’t realize was that Murdo was one of the few Jocks never known to take a drink; to him, fitness was a creed, and his obsession with it gave him a strong practical interest in medicine. On this trip he acted as our medic, treating several of the Colombians for minor injuries — most of which he’d inflicted himself. All this made him very popular with the locals.
Another cause of amazement to the Colombians was Marky Springer, generally known as Sparky because he was our principal signaller. Over six foot tall, thin as a piece of wire, and covered in dense black hair, Sparky looked like a bloody great spider. He didn’t drink either, and, unlike Murdo, he was fanatically mean about money. Tight as a gnat’s arsehole, he hoarded every penny, and never went out to celebrate. Yet he, too, was a first-class operator, able to turn his hand to many skills.
Driving techniques and range-work were taught by Stew McQuarrie, one of the ugliest members of D Squadron, and a renowned piss-artist, given to drowning his sorrows in case he should catch sight of himself in the mirror. With his wiry bleached hair and permanently wrinkled forehead, he looked a picture of misery. The great thing about Stew, though, was that even if he got smashed out of his mind one evening, he’d be there on the dot in the morning, ready to give his all. In spite of the beer he put away, he had the steadiest of hands, and was one of our best marksmen.
As I walked round watching the lads at work, and listening to them teaching, I felt pleased with the way things were going. But the experience also made me realize that, competent as they all were, there is no such thing as a typical SAS guy: they are all individuals, all very different.
As for the Colombians, they liked it best when we started showing them close-protection formations, such as the closed box (in which they formed tightly round the main man) or the open V (with two guys watching for any threat from the front, ready to stop anyone coming inside, and another guy always on the main man’s shoulder).
By the end of the first week our guys had settled in well. Everyone was walking around saying ‘¡Carajo!’ instead of ‘Shit!’ and ‘Jodido’ in place of ‘It’s fucked‘. At the start of a lesson they’d crack off with ‘OK, para bolas!’ rather than ‘Pay attention‘, and they’d learnt that ‘mamar gallo’ meant to take the piss out of somebody.
After work, the trainees talked endlessly about drugs. The fact that Escobar was in the nick had them well wound up, and they kept telling stories about him: how in his prime he’d been earning a million dollars a day; how he’d established a full-scale zoo, with rhinos and elephants, at his estancia; and how he’d mounted one of his early cocaine-running aircraft on top of an arch over the road leading to his house, as a kind of trophy.
The drug war was on everybody’s mind, and one evening we had another brief, this time from an officer of the Colombian anti-narcotics unit. A lot of what he said was already familiar to us, but when he got down to the nitty-gritty he became much more interesting. Talking of Escobar, for instance, he described a telephone conversation in which the drug baron had been speaking to his wife. When she protested about screams she could hear in the background, Escobar shouted, ‘Just keep that fellow quiet until I’ve finished my conversation.’ It transpired that the man yelling was losing his fingers, one by one, to a pair of bolt-croppers, because he was suspected of having lifted a few thousand dollars from one of the bulk payments. If that fellow erred again, the narcotics officer told us, not only he, but his whole family, would be executed — children, wife, parents, the lot.
‘Yes,’ said the officer, in his fractured English, ‘I am sorry, but life is a little cheap in Colombia. You know, last year the narcos want to kill one sapo — an informer, literally a toad. They hear he is in the police station. Next to it is some apartments. So what do they do? They bring a truck full of explosive. Park it outside. Big bang. End of police station. End of apartments. One informer dead. Also two hundred other persons dead. ¡Maravilloso!’
He also said they’d recently caught a notorious torturer called Gonzales whose speciality was sawing off his victims’ heads in front of their families. It wasn’t that he wanted to conceal anybody’s identity, just that he enjoyed dismemberment.
We didn’t have much in the way of entertainment, but while everything was relatively new that hardly mattered. One advantage was that there seemed to be no threat from guerrillas or other nasties, so that security was totally relaxed. In the evenings we could stroll down the road to the nearest village, where there was a bar cum restaurant which served incredibly cheap meals. For the equivalent of about fifty pence we could eat to bursting point, and the local beer was about fifteen pence a bottle. We could tell from the label that the stuff was brewed just down the road, and it cleared your gut like paint-stripper; but you could get nicely wrecked on it just the same.
For our first few days we reckoned the national sport must be cycling. Every time we went out of camp we saw streams of fanaticos flying down the road like the clappers on racing bikes. Then one evening we went to the pub and found that a big soccer match was on. A huge television screen had gone up in one corner of the bar; the picture was diabolical, and so was the sound, which was turned up to about 2,000 decibels, but the place was packed with fans, roaring like lunatics. By the time the right team won, they were dancing on the tables. This led to our discovery that the nation was soccer-mad, and that Captain Jaime was a keen supporter of the team he called ‘Espurs’. Unfortunately none of our lads could match his knowledge or answer his questions about the club’s latest exploits, but soccer always made a good subject for casual conversation. At least we’d heard of Captain Jaime’s hero ‘Gary Leeneker’, Spurs’ skipper, and when the local radio station reported that his team had been defeated by Nottingham Forest in the semi-final of the Rumbelows’ League Cup, we were able to sympathize.
It was at the end of our second week that we went up to Bogotá. When work finished on Thursday night, we declared a long weekend and prepared to head for the bright lights. Many of our trainees came from the capital, and they couldn’t wait to get back there, so they set off ahead of us in their own cars, promising to meet us at our hotel and show us the best places to buy emeralds and leather goods.
Peter Black had been down to see us once, but he’d called off a second visit on the pretext that the international situation was difficult, and that he needed to be in the embassy. He’d booked us into the Hostal Bonavento for the nights of Friday and Saturday.