8.30am, Wednesday 30 April 1980. Fifteen months had passed since my return, fifteen months of routine, boredom and lack of action. The rugby-club hangover combined with the noise of the other team members pulling on equipment, filling magazines and cocking weapons made me feel as cheerful as an abattoir-bound pig. I resented that upon my return to the Regiment I’d been unable to get back into my old troop, Eight Troop, the lads I’d fought at Mirbat with. There were no vacancies.
My separation from my old mates in Eight Troop had been made all the more acute when in February of the previous year I’d heard the news of Mike Kealy’s death during a forty-mile endurance training march in the Brecon Beacons. The hero of Mirbat six years before, a major and DSO, he died of exposure during a cruel combination of snow, ice and fog. It was a tragic loss and saddened me deeply.
With an ill-disguised lethargy I pushed open the door to the Killing House. My mind was barely in focus as I threw down my holdall of assault kit and began pulling at the wire seal on the box of 9-milly ammo. I broke a fingernail in the process as it stubbornly refused to open. I cursed. When you’re not in the mood for a job, even inanimate objects conspire against you. They seem to assume a life of their own and to frustrate your efforts at every turn. I tore off the loose piece of fingernail. It came off at a deeper angle than I’d expected, biting into the skin at the side and drawing blood.
Another routine day was in prospect, a day of shooting neat holes in Figure 11 targets. I was beginning to get bored with this place: the oppressive sameness of the range practices, the same six rooms, the target paste-pots always empty. And the Figure 11 targets themselves. In the old Operation Jaguar days, they came properly trimmed with the corners neatly cut off so that they fitted the wooden veneers exactly. Nowadays, the picture of the sinister-looking Russian storm trooper was stamped onto an oblong sheet of brown paper and you had to fuck and fart about fitting the target facing to the trimmed veneer. And then there was the problem of lead in the enclosed atmosphere of the killing rooms. Firing our submachine guns on automatic over long periods of time filled the small rooms with lead fumes. It occurred to me more than once that breathing the thick smoke couldn’t be doing my lungs any good. Only yesterday I had coughed up a large black ball of phlegm at the end of the day’s training.
As I pulled on my assault kit, a pain in my temple throbbed continuously. I looked down at the heavy Bristol body armour lying on the bench-seat next to my holdall. Fuck the high-velocity plates! I thought, I’m not in the mood for training with that ton weight today – and I threw the ceramic plates back in the holdall. With the now much lighter body armour secure in place, I drew on my skin-tight aviator’s leather gloves, cocked the action of my Heckler & Koch MP5, introducing a live round into the chamber, applied the safety-catch, carried out the same operation on my Browning pistol and realized I had begun to sweat. It was going to be a long, tedious day.
9.00am. Six Arab revolutionaries – Makki, Ali, Shai, Faisal, Hassan and Oan, the leader – assembled on the blood-red carpet in the foyer at 105 Lexham Gardens in Kensington, London. They belonged to the Mohieddin al Nasser Martyr Group, fighting for the autonomy of Arabistan, an oil-rich province in the south-west of Iran, annexed by the country in 1926. In their small, lightweight holdalls they had a veritable arsenal. It included two 9mm machine pistols, accurate up to 150 metres and firing 700 rounds per minute; three Browning automatics with thirteen-round magazines loaded with Winchester hollow-point ammunition; one .38 revolver and several Russian hand grenades. They bade farewell to the handful of unwitting residents who had befriended them and headed for their rendezvous with destiny.
11.20am. ‘Split down into three teams of four again.’ Tak’s voice boomed across the small changing room, his beetle-black eyes, the eyes of a deep thinker who weighs up the options carefully before acting, slowly scrutinizing the assembled team members.
My one consolation amid all the monotony of routine training was that Tak, my brother-in-arms since Mirbat days, had also found his way into Six Troop. A powerful bond of friendship had developed between us. In his assault kit he looked large and menacing. With his big hands he took a firm grip on life, with his wide feet and muscular toes he stood his ground unyieldingly, and with his broad forehead he faced the world square-on. In his solidity and steadfastness he was extremely placid. When fooling and rolling around with the Firqat children in Dhofar he had been like a cuddly teddy bear. Nothing appeared to bother him. He would take everything in his stride – or so it seemed. Yet there was a distant point, a point that was rarely reached, but once it was, Tak would explode with an awesome temper. He would then become as ferocious as a grizzly bear.
‘The game plan is the same. Head shots – double taps or single only. Limits of exploitation are your allocated rooms.’ He pointed to the blackboard, circling every individual’s responsibility with the barrel of his 9-milly. ‘Be on your doors in five minutes. I will initiate with a burst of fire into the long gallery. Any questions?’
‘Will there be any distractions this time?’ My voice cut through the tedium.
‘Yeah, I got a thunderflash on ISFE for this one. I’ll detonate after the burst of MP5,’ replied Tak, replacing his 9-milly pistol in the quickdraw holster, snapping closed the securing stud on the thumb-brake with a well-practised ease.
11.25am. The terrorists worked quickly. Shamags were pulled tight across dark Arab features, holdalls were unzipped, weapons produced. Then they were up the steps and bursting in through the slightly ajar main door of 16 Princes Gate. Oan, well-built, square-bodied, the first man in, made straight for PC Lock, who was standing by the door to reception at the bottom of the stairs.
11.25am. The combination of the twenty-round burst from the MP5 and the deafening explosion of the thunderflash on the ISFE rocked the Killing House. My number three on the Remington blasted the lock of the small combat room with a blank cartridge and then kicked the door in. Drag – the range warden – will go mad if he finds that one, I thought, as the door flew open. In I went and headed straight for the cluster of Figure 11 targets propped up in their rickety stands in the far corner. Usual thing, I thought quickly, my eyes doing a radar scan of the room. Four terrorists and three hostages.
‘Ba-bang, Ba-bang, Ba-bang’. Three double taps in less than three seconds, six neat holes in three terrorist heads.
‘Ba-bang’. My number two neutralized a kneeling target behind the chair in a corner.
‘Paste up,’ shouted Tak from the door, adding to the tedium of the moment.
11.26am. ‘Don’t move! Don’t move!’ screamed Oan in Farsi. Then came a deafening burst of submachine-gun fire. All Trevor Lock could see was confusion, disorder, chequered shamags and automatic weapons. A hand came forward and ripped the radio out of his tunic.
‘OK, OK,’ he found himself saying, as he brought up his hand to investigate a sharp stinging pain in his cheek. The Iranian Embassy siege had begun.
11.40am. I applied the safety-catch to my MP5, pushed the S6 respirator onto the top of my head and reached for the paste-pot and patches. As I pasted over the neat holes with a grubby Woolworth’s paste-brush, a thin, gluey, poorly mixed paste wormed down the handle of the brush and slithered over my fine leather gloves. I cursed inwardly and began applying the one-inch square brown patches to the bulletholes.