‘ “Command and Signals”,’ says H. ‘Radios, mostly. Who talks to who, when and how. We won’t be calling in much air support. Just checking in with London from time to time.’ He waves a pen over the notes. ‘And we need to think of a cover story for our time in-country. Something short term.’ This is my task. He then explains how I should apply for a second passport, which can be left hidden in a safe place in case we’re parted unexpectedly from our things.
His wife has prepared a dinner for us in advance. We eat and then devote the evening to familiarising ourselves with the weapon that lies behind the whole operation.
‘Might want to study this,’ says H, putting a bulky manual in front of me. It’s the American DoD training documentation for the FIM-92. The pages are marked secret, and there are several hundred of them.
‘The Sovs would’ve killed to get their hands on this a few years back,’ he says, tapping the cover.
‘They were the first to find out the hard way what the Stinger could do,’ I say, thinking of the missile’s deadly effect on Soviet airpower in Afghanistan.
‘Not quite,’ he corrects me. ‘The Yanks gave us some of these when we were down south in the Falklands. There was only one bloke from the Regiment who knew how to use the Stinger, and he was on that Sea King that crashed in the South Atlantic. A trooper in D Squadron managed to shoot down an Argentine fighter, though he was bloody lucky. That was the first combat kill with the Stinger.’
Its portability and reliability make it one of the most desirable weapons in the world. It is strange to think of the most advanced anti-aircraft technology of the time being hauled around Afghanistan on the backs of donkeys and camels. The Stinger’s role in the final humiliation of the Soviet army was never really acknowledged.
The earliest Stinger models didn’t distinguish between enemy or friendly targets: anything in the Afghan skies was fair game. The long thin missile is fitted into a fibreglass launch tube, and then attached to an assembly made up of the trigger and the infrared antennae, which looks vaguely like a toaster. A small battery unit is clipped in place, and when the missile has locked onto its target, a small speaker gives out the signal to fire. In case there is too much noise for it to be heard, a vibrator buzzes in the cheekbone of the firer. There are a number of checks and sensors that indicate whether the weapon is serviceable.
We need to know these things, and we go over them in detail.
Several hours later H gathers up our paperwork and locks it in a small safe. Then, when it’s time to turn in, he waves a hand over his bookshelves and invites me to have a browse.
‘You might like this one.’ He pulls down a book about the Regiment and fans the pages until he reaches the chapter devoted to the campaign in Oman. There’s a selection of photographs taken at the height of the conflict, but the images of the soldiers don’t look like conventional portraits. The men wear beards, ragged-looking uniforms and frayed caps or Arab shemaghs; cigarettes dangle from their lips, and many of them look too old to be soldiers in any case.
H points to a photograph of a fearsome-looking bearded man with a sunburned face under a combat cap. A bulky general purpose machine gun and dangling belt of gleaming ammunition hang from his shoulder.
‘That’s the Ditch,’ says H, looking fondly at the photograph. ‘Gentle as a kitten. And that’s the Monk.’ There’s another photograph of a man wearing what looks like a monk’s hooded cassock. From the shadows of the woollen hood, a faint and enigmatic smile on the lean face does seem to confirm a contemplative temperament. Only the M16 assault rifle cradled protectively in his arms suggests a different calling.
He turns the pages again to show me a photograph of a young man peering over the sights of an 81-millimetre mortar in a dusty-looking sandbagged gun pit. His bare upper body is deeply tanned and he looks very fit. It’s H, twenty-five years earlier, up on the Jebel near Medinat al-Haqq.
‘We used to play with that mortar a lot.’ He smiles. ‘Just to let the Adoo know we could put down a round on a sixpence if we wanted to.’
It’s very strange. As a teenager I owned the same book and pored over its pages, never imagining that one day I might know the names of the anonymous soldiers who looked out from them.
‘Those blokes were the real deal,’ says H, nodding solemnly. ‘They don’t make them like that any more.’
We leave the house in the morning while it’s still dark. The Brownings are hidden in the go bags at our feet, and the AK under the rear seat. We’re heading for an abandoned quarry about half an hour west of Hereford, practising the anti-ambush drill on the way, throwing the car onto the verge and positioning it between us and our imaginary attackers. Then, as the sky is beginning to brighten, we turn from the main road onto an unsurfaced track. At the end of it the ground opens out into a wide flat stretch of chalky subsoil, criss-crossed by waterlogged bulldozer tracks. Beyond it rises a pale amphitheatre of stone about sixty feet high.
I cut the engine and H takes two rolled-up targets from the car. We walk across the open ground and fix the targets to the soft stone with tent pegs. We count a hundred paces and I stand on the spot we mark, while H takes the AK from the back of his car. He clears the mechanism, hands me the weapon and feeds three rounds into the magazine. From his pocket he takes a small box of yellow foam earplugs, which we squeeze into our ears.
‘Let’s zero the sights. Put three rounds on the black circle.’
The black circle, the size of a small plate up close, looks tiny. I line up on the speck of black and squeeze the trigger. The rifle bucks as if knocked by a hammer from below. I’ve forgotten how loud guns are.
‘One,’ says H. I fire again. ‘Two.’ And again. ‘Three. Clear it.’
We jog to the target. One round is a foot off to the left. This is probably the first. The other two are a few inches apart, in line with the centre but six inches too high. We jog back to our firing position, where H makes an adjustment to the foresight and feeds five more rounds into the magazine.
‘Centre of the target. Five rounds rapid.’
The AK rises and falls. I fire at the end of each downward lull and try to keep the rhythm even. My cheekbone, which I’ve been holding too close to the butt, is throbbing as if someone’s punched it, and despite the earplugs my ears are ringing.
‘Not bad,’ says H, grinning as we pull the pegs from the target. ‘Must be the quality of instruction.’ There are three small holes in the centre circle and two others within the second, all vertically aligned within a few inches. He looks at his watch. ‘Let’s see how you do with the other fellow.’
We walk to the car, put the AK back under the rear seat and retrieve the Brownings. H has also brought a plastic bag with a dozen empty beer cans, seven of which we now set on a sloping stone shelf running across the face of the quarry. We take ten paces towards the car and turn around.
‘When you’re ready,’ says H. ‘Double tap on each. Remember not to yank the trigger.’
I cock the Browning and fire at each can in turn. Four of the seven are sent spinning. Three remain stubbornly in place as little fountains of chalk erupt behind them.
‘Needs a bit of work,’ says H. We gather up the empty casings, then the cans, and fix them back on the shelf.
‘Show me how it’s done then,’ I say.
H cocks his pistol and tucks it into his belt above his left hip with the butt facing forward, and lets his coat fall in front of it. Then, in a single movement of astonishing swiftness, he draws his coat away with his left hand, pulls the weapon out with his right and begins firing with his knees slightly flexed. There’s hardly a pause between targets, each of which disappears as he works from left to right. By the time I look back from the targets to see him removing the magazine from his pistol, less than five seconds has passed. H says nothing but throws me a satisfied wink. Then he pockets the Browning and scoops up the empty casings.