Outside again, looking down, I realized that the cemetery had a huge view over Belfast, lying below us to the north-west. At the back of my mind I felt it was wrong that my thoughts should be turning so swiftly from the past to the future, but that is what they were doing. ‘Whoever he is, he’s down there somewhere,’ I told myself. ‘And wherever he is, I’ll get him.’
FOUR
There was no question of my quitting the course. On the contrary, I couldn’t wait to rejoin it. Early on Friday morning I nipped into camp and left a message for the adjutant saying I was back on side, then got myself straight down to LATA, determined to make up whatever ground I had lost through being away.
For the first couple of days the guys treated me rather strangely. There was none of the usual banter and piss-taking; instead, their attitude was respectful. Were they anxious not to hurt my feelings? Looking back, I can see that they expected me to be in pieces and were trying to handle me gently. But at the time I found it annoying. Outside the course I had one or two close mates — Tony and John Stone — who knew how hard I had been hit, and I was glad of their help; Pat Martin was another bulwark for me. The rest of the course may well have thought I was an unfeeling bastard, and didn’t care much about what had happened. If that was the score, all the better, because I didn’t want anyone to know what I had in mind. What nobody realized was that the agony of losing Kath had transformed itself into a ferocious desire for revenge. Grief had turned into anger, despair into steely determination. Far from being in distress, I came back on fire with new motivation.
I’d read in some newspaper that the own-goal bomber had been given a full-scale military funeral in West Belfast. Never mind that his incompetence had led to the deaths of five innocent civilians, or that a Protestant riot had broken out while he was being buried, with thousands of pounds’ worth of damage caused. In the twisted minds of the IRA he had died in active service, and was a martyr, a hero. Brilliant!
To focus my animosity, I had given my target a name. Because he was obviously a leading player, I had called him Gary, after Gary Player, the golfer. In my mind’s eye Gary had reddish hair and beard, and sly, pig-like eyes. He was of medium height, and sloppily dressed — altogether a scruffy individual, dirty and slovenly — but cunning, and bigoted as hell, a dirty fighter and a dangerous customer. Trying to work out the position he might occupy in the IRA hierarchy, I had done my best to reconstruct events. The bomber had been an unemployed twenty-two-year-old. No doubt he had been a member of some ASU, which also included a shooter and a driver. Probably the bomber had been given orders to pick up from Point A the device which was to kill him, and deposit it at Point B. But who had given the orders? That was the key question. According to our instructor Reg Brown, who’d already done a tour in Northern Ireland, it would almost certainly have been an ops officer or a quartermaster in the Belfast brigade.
Maybe I was deluding myself, but I felt sure that fate was pointing me in the direction of my enemy. Already we were into August. Provided I got through the rest of the course OK, I would be posted to Belfast in October, only two months off; and then, for a year, I would be on the man’s doorstep, trained, armed, and furnished with every pretext for taking terrorists out. When, in the middle of August, Loyalist gunmen killed seven people in eight days, and the IRA responded in kind, I persuaded myself that nobody would notice one more apparently sectarian killing.
On the domestic front, things were under control, if not great. After a family discussion we had agreed that it would be best for me to leave Tim with his Gran. Meg had pulled up again after her operation, and said she could manage. When I came across in the autumn, at least I’d be able to see something of the kid. In England there was no one to look after him.
At Keeper’s Cottage I’d left Kath’s things exactly as they were — clothes, shoes, hats, a few bits of jewellery. I could have given everything to Oxfam but somehow I didn’t want to, so I shut the wardrobe doors, left her dressing table as it was, and deferred action indefinitely.
At the end of August a 1,0001b bomb went off outside the RUC station at Markethill in County Armagh. Miraculously, no one was hurt, but the explosion further sharpened our eagerness to get across the water. Down at LATA we were into the most fascinating part of the course: surveillance, or the art of following a target, either on foot or by car, without being seen. In this, for the first time, we became fully aware of the role that was going to be played in our lives by the shadowy organization known as the ‘Det’. Short for ‘Detachment’, the name referred to the undercover intelligence-gathering unit that worked alongside our guys across the water. Whereas our role was reactive, theirs was passive: watching, spotting faces, gathering information, learning about the enemy.
The Det was made up of guys drawn from all corners of the forces; within the SAS they were known as ‘Walts’. Some had come from the Regiment, but others were from all sections of the British services, and as far as work went, the whole lot kept themselves very much to themselves. In Belfast our guys shared a canteen and bar with them, and we were told that they were friendly enough off-duty; at LATA, whenever I saw some of them, I noticed how totally unremarkable they looked. I’m sure they’d been picked partly for their anonymous appearance, and for the fact that they had no distinguishing features. They were neither too tall nor too short, neither too fat nor spectacularly thin. None of them was particularly good-looking, but no one was all that ugly either. They all seemed to be uniform and neutral, so that they would blend effortlessly into a crowd anywhere in Northern Europe, and if you saw a couple of them in a car you wouldn’t look twice. But we soon realized that they were highly trained, and an indispensable weapon in the fight against terrorism.
Until we tried it, I don’t think any of us had realized what an elaborate business surveillance was — a team of eight or ten men or women tracking a single target, all in immediate touch with each other by covert radio, all speaking a special language. The radios were secure, and scrambling devices made it impossible for outsiders to listen in. The jargon wasn’t designed to baffle anyone; rather, its aim was to achieve economy and precision — to cut down time on the air and eliminate misunderstandings. Thus ‘Bravo’ was any man, ‘Echo’ any woman, ‘Charlie’ any car. ‘Foxtrot’ meant on the move on foot, ‘Mobile’ in a car. ‘Complete’ signified that a person had gone into a house or a car. ‘Getting a trigger’ meant getting your eyes on the target or the place where he was last seen.
To give us an idea, the instructor set up a scenario on the magic board — the big sheet of white-enamelled metal that covered most of the front wall of the classroom. Switching on a projector, he put a blown-up street-plan on the board and placed a few magnetic counters on it. One was black — the target — and the others white. Also on the plan were some coloured spots — red, green and blue, with numbers on them. Each of these, he explained, was used to identify a particular area. It was far easier and quicker to say ‘Green One’ than ‘The crossroads at the intersection of River Street and Upper Richmond Way,’ or give the place’s grid-reference.
‘Now,’ he began, ‘the most important guy in any surveillance operation is the one running it from the ops room. He’s sat there with all his radios on, a couple of helpers, and a blown-up map of the area you’re in. One big plus about this part of your training is that it gets you shit-hot on the radio. You’ve got to be really slick in reporting the target’s movements. If you’re slow, you’re too late — he’s gone round a corner and you’ve lost him.