6 While PC Lock and the terrorist leader, Oan, are locked in mortal combat in a room on the first floor, an SAS trooper from the front assault team bursts in, warns the constable off and shoots Oan with a burst from his MP5.
7 One of the rear assault teams, shooting dead one terrorist as he flees towards the front of the embassy, reaches the telex room, where three terrorists have managed to kill one hostage and injure two others only moments before. The SAS men dispatch two terrorists with automatic fire but fail to recognise the presence of the third, who masquerades as a hostage and retains possession of a hand grenade.
8 The female hostages, discovered unguarded in a room on the second floor, are hurriedly joined with their now liberated male counterparts and manhandled downstairs for evacuation out of the rear of the embassy.
9 Clutching a hand grenade and still concealed amongst the hostages as they are hustled downstairs, the undetected terrorist from the telex room is recognized by Staff Sergeant PeteWinner who, unable to open fire for fear of inflicting casualties on the hostages or his colleagues, strikes the terrorist on the back of the head with the butt of his weapon, causing his victim to tumble to the base of the stairway where other SAS men riddle him with machine-gun fire.
10 (Not visible) Frightened and confused, the rescued hostages emerge into the garden at the rear of the embassy, where their SAS escort place them face down on the ground, secure their wrists, and identify them, thus discovering and arresting the only surviving terrorist of the original six.
14
The Falklands
‘She was squirming in her seat, giggling with excitement, wide-eyed and eager. I fixed her very deliberately with my best macho stare as I related the unsavoury details of Faisal’s demise. She wasn’t put off. Far from it. She was hanging on every word, raring to go. One thing is for certain: if I hadn’t been married I could have got her number and I would have had a guaranteed jump that night – and I’m not talking about parachuting.’ I took another gulp of beer. ‘But the funniest part was when I’d just finished giving evidence and was stepping from the witness box. Ron Morris came charging across the courtroom, his arm outstretched. He gripped me by the hand and said to the coroner, “Excuse me, sir, but I must shake hands with this man. I want to thank him and his mates for all they did for us.” I was quite taken aback, embarrassed, almost.’
The alcohol was flowing freely. I was sitting reminiscing about the Embassy inquest in the Volcano Club, an American airmen’s gin palace that clung like a limpet to the edge of Wideawake airfield on Ascension Island. If you draw a cross whose horizontal axis links Brazil in South America to Angola in West Africa, and whose vertical axis bisects the island of Ireland from north to south, in the centre of the cross you will find Ascension Island, a scab of volcanic rock and dust in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, a British telecommunications centre, US airbase and US space-research station. It was 1982. We’d not long since flown out from Hereford; the Falklands War was in full swing.
‘Take No Prisoners!’ The name of the newly christened cocktail was shouted to the rafters as several half-pint glasses of a milky-coloured liquid appeared on the plastic-topped table in front of the troop hierarchy. The lethal-looking concoction had just been invented by an ex-Para called Paul. Before joining the Army, Paul had worked as a croupier in a South Coast casino, until he got fed up with the well-heeled punters, who would blow clouds of smoke from expensive cigars in his face as a distraction. Young, hard but amiable, a rebel from the maroon machine, he was the troop new boy. ‘A warmer in the bank before the Last Supper,’ he would announce invitingly as he raised his glass.
Disorientated by the octane rating of this Molotov-strength cocktail, the troop would then await with mouth-watering relish the arrival of the Volcano’s special grill. The steak was a joy to behold. It was so vast it overlapped the plate at both ends. It must have been at least one inch thick and came generously garnished with garlic butter. With the passing of each evening, and our departure for the Falklands becoming more and more imminent, this gastronomic delight really did become known as the Last Supper. It helped clear the mind of gremlins after a day of green-slime briefings.
As this particular day’s Last Supper entered its closing stages the lads in the troop, actively encouraged by Big Fred the Fijian and aided and abetted by Tak – once again setting off on a great adventure alongside me – were required to take part in an initiation test steeped in ritual. Each member of the mission had to finish off the evening by drinking a flaming Drambuie. Big Fred would half fill a standard spirit glass with the liqueur, and Tak would step forward and ignite it. A nine-inch Bunsen flame would then shoot upwards from the surface of the liquid. The initiation test required the drinker to place the flaming spirit glass to his lips, drain the Drambuie, then put the empty glass back on the table with the blue flame still leaping off its rim. (This ritual was an SAS refinement of the ‘dance of the flaming arseholes’ – a custom peculiar to the crap-hats – in which pieces of newspaper were rolled up tightly and inserted into the anal orifices of two rookie squad members. Both were then set alight. The first man to pull out the flaming roll bought the drinks.) The last time the SAS attempted this before abandoning it as childish was back in 1972, when Del, the guy who was later to help me stitch up Malcolm the clerk during the Embassy siege, decided to liven up the proceedings by throwing a glass of Drambuie over the back of a Nine Troop man called Frenchie. It burst into flames and badly burned Frenchie’s back.
Big Fred, solemn and dignified, had the bearing of an MC at a Fijian kava ceremony. Kava is a narcotic drink prepared from the root of the Yagona tree and is drunk from coconut shells. It numbs the lips, gums and tongue and acts like dental cocaine, rendering the drinker high as a kite. An evening in the Volcano Club had a similar effect. Fred handed the first flaming Drambuie to Tommy, a tough Scot from the Highlands. Tommy was no stranger to the dangers of fire and flame. At the Embassy siege in 1980, during a desperate attempt to get access via a window into an already burning room, his gas-mask and gas-hood had got so badly burned they had to be discarded. In spite of having no protection whatsoever from the thick fumes, he continued to carry out his duties in the smoke- and CS gas-filled rooms. His bravery was later recognized by the award of the Queen’s Gallantry Medal.
With a knowing wink, Tommy gripped the stem of the glass, tipped his head back at just the right angle, and with practised ease quickly drained the contents before the glass became too hot to handle. A group of REMFs in the far corner of the bar began chanting ‘Napalm sticks to spics’ as we each took our turn with the fiery liquid. Most of us were past masters in the art, and not an eyebrow had been singed, not a nosetip burned by the time the REMFs launched into the latest chant.
Then it was Paul’s turn. He accepted the offered glass from a stillsolemn Fred, then glanced briefly at the flickering blue flame before raising the glass warily to his lips. The flame was now gathering momentum and Paul hesitated slightly before tilting his head forward to meet the glass. A dangerous mistake. As he gulped at the burning liquid, the flame licked around his upper lip and nose and singed his eyebrows. He spluttered and attempted a recovery, but to no avail; he was forced to spit the fiery Drambuie from his mouth, spraying a two-foot sheet of flame across the table, hitting Nish down his left-hand side.