The next fifteen minutes passed slowly for Alex. The RUF posed no great danger to Stan they were unlikely to be awake, sober and staring into the river at this hour but Alex had felt the massive and wilful power of the Rokel river at first hand and hoped that the outspoken cockney would play it safe. Eventually, thankfully, the two loomed out of the darkness -Stan Clayton once again dripping with river water. The news was that the ITN team were still in the same place and still tied up, but apparently asleep. As was their guard, still wearing the Barbara Windsor wig.
Ricky Sutton unfurled the sat-coin's aerial and called up Freetown. The news that the hostages had not been moved would come as a relief to the "D' Squadron team, who wouldn't have to waste time searching for them while under fire the camp would be a hornet's nest by the time the team de-bussed from the Puma. No one had so far put it into words, but it was possible that the Regiment would take casualties. It was possible that the story would end, as so often before, at the modest graveyard of St. Martin's church outside Hereford.
A few minutes before 3 a.m. Andy Maddocks called Alex on his UHF set to report that he had arrived with Zulu Three Five patrol and was in position at the bottom of the approach slope. On Alex's instructions the six newcomers worked their way into the tree line above and behind Alex's patrol, and silently took up firing positions in pairs. As soon as they were established Alex briefed them by radio as to the location of the hostages.
One hour to go. In Freetown the "D' Squadron assault and rescue team would be boarding the Pumas, loading magazines and checking kit. There would be nerves they would be aware that they were hitting a hot landing zone.
How would it go, Alex wondered? Was there any way he could further ensure his men's safety? Not really, he decided. The thing was risky, but it had to be done. There wasn't a man here or at the squadron base who would rather be somewhere else somewhere where there weren't any bull-leeches, malarial mosquitoes or trigger-happy rebels. Without exception the men under his command subscribed to Don Hammond's philosophy, that life was too short to spend it buying magnolia emulsion and wan king over Gail Porter'.
Which was pretty much how Alex felt himself.
Would this, as he had assumed, be his last taste of active service? As an officer he was bloody lucky to be dug in here with a bandolier of grenades across his chest and ten fully loaded magazines in his pouch rather than sweating it out on others' behalf in the briefing hut.
Not that he hadn't been pleased to be sent to Sandhurst. Only two or three Regiment NCOs received a commission each year and it had been very gratifying to be singled out. In his ten previous years of SAS service he'd seen Ireland a lot of Ireland the Gulf, Columbia, Liberia, Bosnia (where they'd given him the Military Medal), Kosovo and now Sierra Leone. And the list was even longer if you included the deniables and the 'black bag' jobs like Somalia and Sri Lanka.
Why had he been chosen? Alex wondered. Because he'd watched his mouth over the years? Because he'd managed to survive a decade of SAS service without actually decking a superior? Something like that, probably. Whatever it had made it worthwhile staying in the army for a full term of service. With a bit of luck he'd make major before too long. After that, if he played his cards right there was Staff College... But what the hell. All that lay in the future.
It had been weird, though, hanging out at Sandhurst aged thirty-four with all the teenaged officers-to-be with their sports cars and their nightclubs and their weekends in the country. There had been admin classes, report-writing classes and even an etiquette or 'knife and fork' course. Never in his life had Alex felt more like a fish out of water.
The others hadn't all been rich, but plenty of them had been, especially the ones destined for the Brigade of Guards and the other outfits where an expensive social life came with the regimental silver. Alex, whose father ran a small garage and body-repair shop in Clacton-on-Sea, and who had joined the Paras as a private to impress a girlfriend (who had immediately dumped him thanks, Stella!) found it impossible to imagine what it must be like to have money to spend on Savile Row suits and Curzon Street restaurants and Caribbean sailing holidays at that age.
For Alex, at eighteen, it had been rockfish and chips, Kestrel lager and a brown leather jacket ('sixty-five quid mate, fully lined') from the Pakistani guy who had the stall at the Saturday market. There hadn't been any foreign holidays.
"Why pay to go to the Seychelles," his father would ask, nodding towards Marine Parade with its icy spray and mournful winter winds, 'when the sea's right here on our bloody doorstep?"
It wasn't meanness, it was just that Ray Temple didn't hold with what he called 'all that pina co lada bollocks'. What he did hold with was motor sport and lots of it. Formula One at Brands Hatch, drag races at Santa Pod, stock cars at Belle Vue, bangers at King's Lynn, night races at Snetterton any occasion involving cigarette advertising, petrol vapour and deafening noise. The Temple family attended pretty much every event in the Castrol motor sport calendar. And went first class all the way, with enclosure tickets, steak dinners at the motel if it was an overnighter, souvenir T-shirts and the rest.
The old man had been broken-hearted when, inspired by a TV documentary series, Alex had gone for the Parachute Regiment rather than one of the mechanised units.
"Don't be a tosser, son," Ray Temple had begged him.
"If God had meant us to walk, he wouldn't have created fuel injection."
But Alex had been adamant and stuck to his guns throughout the tough Para-selection course known as "P' Company. He wasn't particularly big and he certainly wasn't the archetypal tattooed, scarred knuckled Tom, but when it came to the speciali sed skills of the airborne infantryman he was a natural.
He was a fast learner, excellent with weapons and always switched on in the field. His superiors marked him down as potential NCO material and posted him to his battalion's Patrol Company.
Unexpectedly, like many a town-raised soldier before him, the young paratrooper developed a passion for the wild, remote terrain in which he and his unit trained.
He enjoyed downing pints and trapping WRAC girls with his Patrol Company mates, but found that after only a few days in barracks he missed the freedom and the solitude offered by the mountains and the moors.
Shortly after his twenty-third birthday he was made up to lance-corporal, but by then a part of him had begun to wonder if there might be more to army life than the culture of the Aldershot brotherhood, with its relentless cycles of drinking, brawling, mooning, curry-swilling, shagging and vomiting.
On impulse, he applied for SAS selection. By then, perhaps jealous of his promotion, some of his colleagues were beginning to regard him coolly. No one made any specific accusations but the word got around that he was a bit of a loner. There was an unconfirmed rumour that he had turned down the chance to join in a game of 'freckle' - a ritual in which a fresh turd was hammered between two beer mats on a pub table and the least bespattered paratrooper got to buy the next round.
If he had failed SAS selection, Alex would have had a very hard time living it down. But he didn't fail.
Along with Don Hammond, then a Royal Fusiliers corporal, and a dozen others of the forty or so who applied, he passed. Badged into the Regiment, he discovered a different sort of soldier tough, self sufficient young blokes like himself who knew how to have a good time but didn't need to strike macho attitudes. The best friend he'd made in the Regiment was probably Hammond. As unmarried troopers they'd shared quarters in Hereford, along with a couple of clapped-out cars and for three ill-tempered months a Royal Army Dental Corps nurse named "Floss' Docherty When it was announced that Alex was to be commissioned, no one could have been more pleased than Don Hammond.