I shivered violently and turned up my collar against the incessant rain. Where was the contact? The only sign of life was a pair of cats quietly growling at each other from either end of a piece of bacon rind. I glanced at my watch. Five minutes had ticked by. I looked out to sea. A series of red and green pilot lights glowed in the distance beyond the harbour entrance. Within the harbour itself, long thin concertinas of light shimmered on the surface of the water opposite the lamps on the far side of the docks. The harbour walls, dirty brown smudges on the black of the night, loomed up out of the water. They were topped by a rambling collection of offices, warehouses, huts and tanks. As I gazed at the buildings, the desolate cry of an unseen seagull pierced the night air, reinforcing the stillness and quietness.
I felt another wave of unease. Where was the transport? I blew into my hands and shuffled my feet, getting increasingly alarmed by our impossible attempts at inconspicuousness. I walked over to the exit door and squinted through the glass. All I could see was row upon row of empty cars lined up in the floodlit car park. Another five minutes had passed. My gaze returned nervously to the shabby figure still leaning impressively on the sign as he exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke and flicked the dog-end into the water.
At last, Arthur, the team leader, realizing it was too dangerous to wait any longer, seized the initiative and made a decision. It was a risk, but there appeared to be no alternative. Looking incongruously smart in a houndstooth jacket and cavalry twills, the rain dripping from his check tweed cap, he walked over to the donkey jacket still leaning on the sign. In the dull, dingy surroundings he looked like a member of the aristocracy approaching a purveyor of pornography. We all tensed, ready for immediate action. A brief exchange of veiled speech followed, and then suddenly it was all over and we were being hurriedly ushered through the exit door into the back of a blue minibus. Contact had been made.
The rain hit the windscreen like a jet from a high-pressure hose as we sped through the grey, depressing streets of Belfast. It felt strange to be driving on the left. Whenever I had caught a boat or flown across a stretch of water in the past, I had always ended up driving on the righthand side of the road. Now I was in limbo, neither at home nor abroad. The road signs were not in an exotic foreign language as my mind half expected – but the place-names were almost culturally strong enough to qualify as foreign: Larne, Ballymena and Ballymoney going north; Lisburn, Lurgan and Craigavon going west. I rubbed the sleeve of my jacket over the condensation on the side-window and peered out. The night rain had oiled the glistening streets and slicked the pavements with dark puddles. Rows of derelict buildings dripped with angry graffiti: ‘Touts will be shot’… ‘Provos rule’… ‘Smash the H Blocks’… ‘No surrender’… ‘Brit bastards out’. Whitewashed gableends flashed past publicity hoardings in the battle for hearts and minds – raw, powerful murals, created by tragically skilled hands, depicting clenched fists, sectarian insignia and sinister hooded figures clasping lethal weapons.
What a far cry from the deep wadis, the open rolling plains and the blue skies of Dhofar. As the minibus turned onto the M1 taking us south I reflected on the events of the last few years. Since the battle of Mirbat in 1972 my troop had been decimated. Laba and Tommy lost, Tak was still convalescing, Bob was an instructor on training wing, Fuzz and Roger had left the Regiment, and Mike Kealy, his three-year tour of duty as a troop officer completed, had been posted back to a desk job at Group Headquarters. You have to be good at pushing paper to be promoted to field marshal.
I looked around the faces in the bus. Our composite team had been drawn from all four troops in the squadron; misfits who just happened to fit together. But there was not a Fijian in sight. After long and hard deliberation, the best brains in the Kremlin had finally decided in their wisdom that the Fijians, with their swarthy features, short black curly hair and heavy accents, wouldn’t quite blend in with the local population, especially on the Falls Road and the sprawling estates of West Belfast. Valdez in Andy’s Town – no way! It was perhaps just as well. I recollected that when we’d been at Otterburn taking part in a fire-and-movement exercise just before going to Dhofar, Valdez had joked about how his team had occupied their spare time by improvising a Ouija board. Whether they’d meddled with something they shouldn’t have is a matter for speculation. What is certain is that during Operation Jaguar all four of Valdez’s team were wounded. Stranger still, there had been a fifth man in the room there, Sam, who had refused to take part. He came through Operation Jaguar completely unscathed. We had a difficult enough job in Northern Ireland as it was, without having to contend with the supernatural as well!
As the memories drifted and eddied I must have dozed off. My next sensation was one of confusion as I was abruptly awoken when the minibus suddenly jerked to a halt. In an instant I was alert, rubbing at tired eyes, a stiff muscle in my neck making me wince with pain. The side-door slid noisily open and I was given my first view of the SF base that was to be our home for the next few months. In the bitter January dawn, the base looked squalid and claustrophobic. We were surrounded by high corrugated-tin walls topped by wire netting to thwart attack from RPG-7s, the Russian-manufactured rocket-propelled grenades. Concrete sentry boxes at regular intervals and camouflage nets stretched across sandbagged roofs gave added protection. The interior of the base was an untidy clutter of Portakabins serving as both accommodation and admin offices. Soldiers dressed in combat gear and a few uniformed police were milling around amongst a line of Saracen armoured cars. I felt strangely disorientated in this cold grey world. At this time of morning in Dhofar the sun would be growing more powerful by the minute; waves of heat would be spreading across the terrain. The quivering shapes of the hills would be melting into the blue of the sky generating an upsurge of morale. Here there was only damp, gloom and depression.
Over the next few days, I became more and more convinced that I had to get out of this place. We thought we’d come here to take out the opposition; in reality we were armed with the latest Japanese camera technology and told to photograph them. The green slime, the ink boys, were building an empire and using a mountain of photographs to justify it. I could feel the beginning of a new and dangerous frustration: the frustration of not being able to get to grips with the enemy. After Dhofar you could call it post-operation depression.
‘Alpha from Zero. Radio check.’
It was the duty operator. I gripped the volume control on the radio and turned the sound down, then pressed the speak button with my index finger. ‘Zero from Alpha. Read you. Fives.’
‘Alpha from Zero. Roger. Out.’
As we finished the radio check I nodded to Taff and the car lurched forward with a squeal of rubber. The high corrugated-tin gates swung open with an electronic whine, the CCTV camera relaying our exit to the duty operator in the operations room. We were sitting in a fouryear-old Vauxhall Viva that must have had a dozen number-plate changes in its short existence. The green bodywork was battered and there was rust everywhere – along the crumbling sills, on the jagged door bottoms, disfiguring one corner of the boot and eating into the dented towing hitch. A casualty of the constantly damp, saline air, it looked like a typical working vehicle: thoroughly neglected through lack of interest, lack of ambition and lack of money. The car would blend in nicely with the traffic. The last thing we wanted to do was draw attention to ourselves around the streets of West Belfast. I glanced at Taff, the driver. He looked as battered as the transport. A lean man with long, dirty-blond hair, he was wearing a scruffy overcoat and a face as sour as last week’s wine. To the casual observer he could have been anyone – a farm labourer, a navvy – but he was as watchful as a hunting heron. Taff had been kicking around Ireland a long time and had served in the mobile reconnaissance force. Experienced, dependable, he had the nerve of a New York steeplejack. He was to be my guide for today’s familiarization exercise. He knew Belfast like his own backyard.