A Puma came into camp on the Monday afternoon, and lifted the twelve of us away over the Welsh mountains. Looking across the cabin, I was glad to see the grizzled, close-cropped head of Tom Dawson, the sergeant major, who was coming as our second-in-command on the final posting of his career. I suppose that in a way he was a father figure to us all, and, maybe because I had no parents of my own, I’d benefited more than most of the guys from his wisdom and long experience.
We put down to refuel in a shit-hole of a depot on the coast, and then did a flit across the sea. The crossing gave me time to reflect on the set-up at home. Tracy and Susan had moved their things in the day before, and we’d piled Kath’s clothes into the small spare bedroom. The three of us had spent that night in separate rooms, as proper as could be. In the morning I’d shown the girls how to work the central heating system and how to manage the wood-burning stove. I’d amassed a big store of logs, so they had plenty of fuel. ‘For God’s sake don’t burn the place down,’ I told Tracy. ‘That’s the only rule.’
At that stage I don’t think she’d said anything to Susan about her long-term plans; all Susan knew was that they had somewhere to live for the next few months. But when we were alone for a moment Tracy said again, ‘When you come back, I’ll be waiting for you.’ That gave me a big kick, of course, but I was still disturbed by the speed at which everything had happened. Kath had been killed on 28 July, and we were now only just into December. Four months. I kept telling myself that it wasn’t me who had written Kath off. I hadn’t done anything to get rid of her. Fate, or whatever, had snatched her.
My soul-searching didn’t last long. Soon we were over the coast and landing in the camp on the outskirts of Belfast. Inside the warehouse, the first thing we saw was a man with pink hair. ‘For fuck’s sake!’ cried Pat. ‘What’s this? A poofters’ convention?’ But an old SAS hand, who’d been there for a couple of months already, assured us that it was only one of the Det guys who’d tried to dye his fair hair brown but had got the mixture wrong. The senior wrangler explained that it was perfectly legitimate for members of the Det to change their appearance for cover purposes. This fellow, however, was going to have to stay out of sight for a few days, until he got himself sorted.
Apart from the pink head, our immediate surroundings weren’t that cheerful, but Pat and I got cabins next to each other and soon settled ourselves in. Some previous occupant of mine must have been a freak for Pirelli calendars, because it was tits and bums on every wall. Rather than rip them down and have bare cream-coloured panels all round, I left them where they were, gradually persuading myself that in some respects the June bird looked remarkably like Tracy.
The best that could be said for our set-up was that everything was under one roof: not only our cabins, but also the briefing room, armoury, MT depot, canteen, bar, showers and bogs were situated within the warehouse. To me it had a claustrophobic air, but the guys who handed over to us assured us that you soon got used to it. One feature nobody had warned us about was the rats. That first evening a sudden yell of outrage went up, and we ran out of our cabins to see a guy called Ginger Norris pointing up into the roof.
‘Look at that!’ he roared. ‘The biggest fucking rat you’ve ever seen!’
Sure enough, there on one of the girders perched a vast rat, a real monster, and, when a volley of trainers went up at it, all it did was move a tier higher and sit there polishing its whiskers, cool as a pint of Stella. ‘Jesus Christ!’ cried Ginger. ‘Never mind the PIRA or anybody else, the next thing’ll be we’ll all go down with lepto-fucking-spirosis.’ He was all for taking out the rat with his Sig, until somebody pointed out that we’d be even worse off if he shot the roof full of holes and let the rain through.
‘It’s those wankers of cooks,’ explained one of the old hands. ‘They sling all the leftover food in open bins out the back of the cookhouse, and the rats eat themselves stupid. It’s like giving them a free run of the menu at the Dorchester.’
‘Why don’t we get some cats?’ I suggested.
‘Cats?’ said Ginger derisively. ‘Cats? Rats this size would have them for breakfast.’
Our first couple of days were spent on orientation, getting to know Belfast itself. Even though I’d made several visits to my in-laws in Helen’s Bay, and had come into the city centre from the east, I’d never been in West Belfast, and now I was appalled by the sheer squalor of the place. I’d seen endless pictures of it on television, of course, and I was familiar with the crude murals of black-hooded figures painted on the sides of buildings; but nothing had quite prepared me for the pure grot — the scruffiness, the meanness, the ugliness, the filth.
Our own senior guys drove us around the softer areas of the city in unmarked cars; but the hard areas were out of bounds to such vehicles, and the only way we could get a look at them was by courtesy of the RUC, who gave us tours, two at a time, in the back of their armoured Land Rovers.
That meant, first of all, getting infiltrated into one of the fortified police stations — an experience in itself. The one Pat and I went to was defended like Fort Knox with high, anti-rocket wire-mesh screens, mortar-proof walls of reinforced concrete, and closed-circuit television cameras bristling from every rooftop. Driving in, we passed through three separate manned gateways; then, to enter the building, we went round a couple of corners — thick walls set at right-angles to each other to cut down the chance of blast penetration.
Inside, a sergeant gave us a quick tour, mainly of the ops room, where radios crackled and the walls were covered with large-scale maps dotted with coloured pins. This station, said our guide, had been attacked more than a hundred times, with rockets, mortars, sniper fire and coffee-jar devices, or petrol bombs. ‘They fired an RPG7 from the distilleries into the canteen, so they did,’ he told us. ‘There were no fatalities, but quite a few people were injured. Then they tried to float a bomb down the stream which passes under the station in a tunnel. We have a cage on either end, and cameras, but still they were going to try it. Luckily the Special Branch got wind of what was happening, and they aborted the attempt.’
From one of the sangars — high, fortified towers — we had a great view over the city. Everything looked peaceful enough, yet still our guide could speak of nothing but attacks. One great merit of the station’s position, he explained, was that it had a school and a housing estate right behind it. These made the PIRA reluctant to fire mortars in that direction, because the weapons were notoriously unreliable, and an overshoot that caused civilian casualties would create very bad publicity.
We ventured out on patrol in a police Land Rover. A constable drove, and a sergeant called Martin kept up a running commentary from the passenger seat. We crouched in the back, craning forward to peer out through the armoured glass of the windscreen, with a third RUC man scanning through the small aperture in one of the rear doors.
Here, on this corner, a rocket attack on a police Land Rover had cut an RUC sergeant nearly in half. Here a lad had tried to throw a bomb over the wall into a police station, but he’d dropped it, and it blew off his arm. Here, on the Falls Road, was the infamous Rock Bar, where members of the PIRA would meet for a pint. Here they had staged a burglary on a library, and as a policeman approached to investigate they’d opened up on him with an M 60 machine-gun. Here was Rose Cottage, inhabited by a harmless old pensioner. Under the pretence of befriending him, IRA men had offered to decorate a room for him, and in the course of doing so they had built a false wall, shortening the room by about five feet and creating a major weapons hide, later discovered by the Royal Marines.