After a wash-up, we got our heads down, but not for long, because the exercise continued in the morning with a full-scale inquiry. Not only did a proper judge preside in court, with real-life barristers holding forth; the Regiment brought down about sixty cooks and bottle-washers from the squadron, to act as audience and sit there heckling. We’d been told how easy it would be to let ourselves down by getting details wrong when we gave our accounts of what had happened, or by giving away more information than necessary; so we briefed ourselves carefully beforehand, and in the event got the whole incident well squared away. The best bit of the morning came when one of the cooks, Jimmy Bell, went way over the top. We didn’t know whether he’d had a couple of pints on the way down or what, but he became so obnoxious with his heckling and his shouts of ‘Order! Order!’ that the judge ordered him removed from the court, and it was all we could do to sit there with straight faces.
Maybe because of my upbringing in the country, I felt more at home operating out on farms and in the woods than in towns. But the next event on our programme was a four-day spell in Lydd and Hythe, the mock village on the Kent coast purpose-built for training. That is an eye-opener, because there are video cameras set up on every corner, and after a house assault you could run the tape and see exactly what everyone had done. If someone had behaved like a prat it was useless for him to deny it, because there he was on the video, pissing about for all to see.
Our final exercise — a joint one with the MI5 — was mostly urban. The scenario was that two major players had just come across the water and gone to ground in Birmingham. MI5 trainees followed them to a house in Solihull, where they were supposed to have secreted some weapons in a garage. It fell to Pat and myself to do a CTR, and exercise our newly acquired skills as lockpickers by breaking into the garage at night to verify the information. Sure enough, we found a cache of two dummy AK 47s and some bomb-making equipment. We reported the find and pulled off, taking care to remove all traces of our entry, and left a couple of guys in an OP that covered both house and garage.
MI5, meanwhile, was continuing its own surveillance, boxing the area to make sure that the villains didn’t slip away unobserved. But it was our guys in the OP who saw the players loading their weapons into a car next morning. By then we were all pretty professional at keeping up a running commentary, and this one came over without hesitation: ‘OK. Bravos One and Two are in garage. They’ve got the weapons. Now they’re loading them into Charlie One. Weapons definitely in boot of car. Stand by, stand by. Bravos One and Two mobile towards Blue Three.’
Seconds later the MI5 boys came up with, ‘OK, I have Charlie One at Blue Three mobile towards Blue Two.’
So it went on. Charlie One, a battered old blue Montego estate, was followed to a deserted farmhouse in the hills outside Kidderminster. This was the base from which they were going to mount their operation. Again our troop went in at night to put an OP on the farm, and when the baddies turned up to collect their weapons we ambushed them, in theory killing the lot. In fact (according to the scenario) one escaped, and moved north to join an ASU in Wolverhampton — so the exercise continued in pursuit of him, and the action moved up there.
When the course ended, we had a couple of beers at the bar in LATA, then went back for a Chinese meal in Hereford. After that we felt we’d taken enough fried rice and crispy noodles on board to soak up a few more beers, so we went on to the Falcon, one of the Regiment’s regular haunts. By then we’d all grown our hair fairly long, as part of our preparation for Northern Ireland, but we were all of much the same age, size and physique, and it wasn’t difficult for outsiders to tell where we came from.
As usual we stood around together, occupying what we regarded as our own territory, at one end of the main bar, and before long we began to get aggro from a gang of town lads in the opposite corner. At first they were just making the odd sarcastic remark, more or less loud enough for us to hear. Then one of them, as he came past on his way to the bar, deliberately barged into me with his shoulder. He was quite a big lad, with straw-coloured hair shaved flat at the top to make an Elvis-type quiff.
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘What’s the matter with you? Bog off, before you get hurt.’
He mouthed some obscenity, then turned to the barman. I could see that he was drunk enough to behave stupidly, but not so drunk that he couldn’t do somebody serious damage. When he came back with two pints of lager, I stood well aside. Apart from anything else, Fred, the landlord, had recently installed closed-circuit TV, so that if anything did start he would have the evidence on tape — and in the event of trouble, he’d be straight up the camp next morning.
Nothing more happened for a while; but when I went for a slash, out of the corner of my eye I saw the fellow get up and start after me. Then, as I stood at the communal urinal, he came and took up position right beside me, not having a piss himself, but peering down at my midriff in the most offensive fashion.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I told you to fuck off.’
‘Not much to bloody write home about, is it?’ he said contemptuously. ‘Can’t think what she sees in it.’
I saw his right hand moving down towards his pocket, so I didn’t wait any longer, but dropped him where he stood. He slid down the enamel face and finished up lying on his left side with his head in the trough. Just the place for him. I made a quick grab into his trouser pocket. Sure enough, he had a flick-knife. In a second I had lifted the lid of the flushing cistern and dropped it in. Maybe in a few years’ time, if rusty water started coming down the system, somebody would have a look and discover its corroded remains.
Back in the bar I muttered, ‘Time to thin out, lads. We could have a problem. I’ll see you.’
‘Where’s your admirer?’ asked Pat.
‘Just having a little nap.’
With that I said good-night to Fred and moved off casually. On the way home I tried to make sense of the yobbo’s aggression. Tracy had said something about recently breaking up with a boyfriend… but no — she would never have been friends with a turd like that. And anyway, how could he possibly associate me with her? She and I had never been seen together in town. I decided that there was no connection; it was just normal jealousy of the Regiment coming out. All the same, the incident made me realize how much the girl was on my mind.
FIVE
A few days before we left, at the start of December, we heard on the grapevine that 500 men of the First Glosters had been sent to Ulster in response to the latest upsurge of violence. It certainly sounded as though we were going to get some action.
Several of the lads went berserk over their packing, insisting that they take almost every single object they possessed. We knew that our accommodation was going to be basic — no more than a series of Portakabins inside a warehouse — yet they seemed hell-bent on having their fridges, TV sets, microwaves and God — knows-what with them. There was no limit on what we were allowed to take — the bulk items went ahead by road and ferry, leaving us with only our ops kit — all the same, I didn’t go in for much heavy stuff; for one thing, I didn’t think I’d need it, and for another, I didn’t want to strip the cottage just as the girls moved in. In the end all I took was my Technics stereo system, minus the speakers, because I reckoned they’d piss off my neighbours in a close-quarter environment, and in any case I’d recently invested in a pair of Stax headphones whose sound quality put the speakers in the shade.