Remote Control, page 32
I let the backrest down a bit and tried to get my neck into a comfortable position, but I couldn’t relax. My mind was racing. The whole operation in Gibraltar had been a set-up so that PIRA and the Colombians could keep making money. Fair one, but where did Kev and I fit into the scheme of things? I lay there and listened to the beat of rain on the roof.
For Euan and me it had all started on 3 March, less than a week before the shootings. We were both on different jobs over the water and had got lifted off and sent to Lisburn, HQ of the British army in Northern Ireland. From there it was a quick move by Puma to Stirling Lines in Hereford, England, the home of the Special Air Service.
One of the slime was waiting to take us straight to RHQ, and the moment I saw the china cups and biscuits outside the briefing room I knew that something big was in the offing. Last time that had happened, the prime minister had been here.
The room was in semi-darkness and packed. There was a large screen at the back of a stage and tiered seats so that everyone got a good view.
We were looking for somewhere to sit when I heard, ‘Oi, over here, dickspot!’
Kev and Slack Pat were sitting drinking tea. With them were the other two members of their four-man team, Geoff and Steve. All were from A Squadron and were doing their six months on the counter-terrorist team.
Euan turned to Kev and said, ‘Know what this job is about?’
‘We’re off to Gib, mate. PIRA’s planning a bomb.’
The CO got up on the stage and the room fell silent. ‘Two problems,’ he said. ‘Number one, a shortage of time. You leave immediately after this briefing. Number two, shortage of solid intelligence. However, Joint Operations Committee wants the Regiment to deploy. You will get as much intelligence as we know now, and as it comes in during your flight and once on the ground.’
I thought, What the fuck are Euan and I doing here? Surely as Det operators it would be illegal for us to work outside Northern Ireland? I kept my mouth shut; if I started querying the decision, they might send me back and I’d miss out.
I looked around me and saw members of RHQ, the operations officer and the world’s supply of Int Corps. The final member of the team was an ammunitions technical officer, a bomb-disposal expert on attachment to the CT team.
Someone I had never seen before moved towards the stage, a teacup in one hand, biscuits in the other. He stood to the right-hand side of the stage by the lectern. There was an overnight bag by his feet.
‘My name is Simmonds and I run the Northern Ireland desk for the intelligence service from London. The people behind you are a mix of service and military intelligence officers. First, a very brief outline of the events that have brought us all here today.’
Judging by the bag, it looked as if he would be coming with us. The lights were dimmed and a slide projector lit the screen behind him.
‘Last year,’ he said, ‘we learned that a PIRA team had based itself in southern Spain. We intercepted mail going to the homes of known players from Spain and found a postcard from Sean Savage in the Costa del Sol.’
A slide of the player came up on the screen. ‘Our Sean’, Simmonds said with a half-smile, ‘told Mummy and Daddy he was working abroad. It rang a few alarm bells when we read it, because the work young Savage is best at is bomb-making.’
Was he making a funny? No, he didn’t look the sort.
‘Then, in November, two men went through Madrid airport on their way from Malaga to Dublin. They carried Irish passports, and in a routine check the Spanish sent the details to Madrid who, in turn, passed them with photographs to London. It turned out that both passports were false.’
I thought to myself, Stupid timing by them really. Terrorist incidents in Northern Ireland tended to decrease in the summer months, when PIRA took their wives and kids to Torremolinos for a fortnight of sun and sand. The funny thing was that the RUC also took their holidays in the same places, and they’d all bump into each other in the bars. By travelling to Spain out of the tourist season these two characters had drawn attention to themselves; if they’d passed through Malaga airport during the holiday season, they might have got away with it.
It turned out that one of the passport holders was Sean Savage, but it was the identity of the second man that had got everybody flapping.
Simmonds showed his next slide. ‘Daniel Martin McCann. I’m sure you know more about him than I do.’ He gave a no-fucking-way sort of smile.
‘Mad Danny’ had really earned his name. Linked to twenty-six killings, he had been lifted often, but had only been put away for two years.
To the Firm, Simmonds went on, the combination of McCann and Savage on the Costa del Sol could only mean one of two things: either PIRA was going to attack a British target on the Spanish mainland, or there was going to be an attack on Gibraltar. ‘One thing was for sure,’ Simmonds said, ‘they weren’t there to top up their tans.’
At last there was a round of laughter. I could see Simmonds liked that, as if he’d practised his one-liners so the timing was just right. Despite that, I was warming to the man. It wasn’t often that you got people making jokes at a briefing as important as this one.
The slide changed again to a street map of Gibraltar. I was listening to him, but at the same time thinking of my infantry posting there in the 1970s. I’d had a whale of a time.
‘Gibraltar is a soft target,’ Simmonds said. ‘There are several potential locations for a bomb, such as the Governor’s residence or the law courts, but our threat assessment is that the most likely will be the garrison regiment, the Royal Anglians. Every Tuesday morning, the band of the 1st Battalion parade for the changing of the guard ceremony. We think the most likely site for a bomb is the square that the band march into after the parade. A bomb could easily be concealed in a car there.’
He might have added that, from a bomber’s point of view, it would be a near-perfect location. Because of the confined area, the blast would be tamped and therefore more effective.
‘Following this assessment we stopped the ceremony on 11 December. The local media reported that the Governor’s guard-house needed urgent redecoration. In fact, we needed time while we gathered more intelligence to stop it needing rebuilding.’
Not as good as his last one, but there were still a few subdued laughs.
‘The local police were then reinforced by plain-clothes officers from the UK, and the surveillance paid off. When the ceremony resumed on 23 February, a woman, ostensibly holidaying on the Costa del Sol, made a trip to the Rock and photographed the parade. She was covertly checked and was found to be travelling on a stolen Irish passport.
‘The following week she was there again, only this time she tagged along behind the bandsmen as they marched to the square. Even one of the Rock apes could have worked out that she was recceing for the arrival of an active service unit.’
There was loud laughter. He’d done it again! I wasn’t too sure if we were all laughing at his jokes or just at the fact that he kept on telling them. Who the fuck was this man? This should have been one of the most serious briefings ever. Either he just didn’t give a fuck or he was so powerful no-one was going to say a word against him. Whatever, I could already tell his presence in Gibraltar would be a real bonus.
Simmonds stopped smiling. ‘Our intelligence tells us that the bombing is to take place some time this week. However, there is no sign that either McCann or Savage is getting ready to leave Belfast.’
He wasn’t wrong. I had seen both of them, pissed as farts, outside a bar in the Falls Road just the night before. They didn’t look that ready to me. It should take them quite a while to prepare for this one – or maybe this was part of the preparation, having their last night out before work started.
‘This is where we have a few problems,’ he went on. He was working now without his notes. Did that mean no more one-liners? Certainly there was more of an edge to his voice.
‘What are we to do with these people? If we try to move in on them too early that would only leave other PIRA teams free to go ahead with the bombing. In any case, if the ASU travel through Malaga airport and remain on Spanish territory until the last minute, there is no guarantee that the Spanish will hand them over, not only because of the dispute with the UK on the question of Gibraltar, but also because the case against them could only be based on conspiracy, which is pretty flimsy.
‘So, gentlemen, we must arrest them in Gibraltar.’ The screen went blank and there was only the light from the lectern shining up on his face. ‘And this throws up three options. The first is to arrest them as they cross the border from Spain. Easier said than done; there’s no guarantee we’ll know what kind of vehicle they’re in. There would be only about ten to fifteen seconds in which to make a positive identification and effect an arrest – not an easy thing to do, especially if they’re sitting in a car and probably armed.
‘The second option is to arrest the team once they’re in the area of the square, but again this depends on advance warning and positive identification, and their all being together with the device. At the present time, therefore, we are going for the third option, and that’s why we are all here.’
He took a sip of his tea and asked for the lights to come on.
‘The Security Service will place surveillance teams to trigger the PIRA team into Gibraltar.’ He looked around for each group as he talked. ‘The two soldiers who have just arrived from the province must give positive IDs before the civil authorities will hand over the operation to the military. The four men from your counter-terrorist team will go for an arrest, but only after they have planted the device.’
The two soldiers who have just arrived from the province. Now I understood. That was Euan and me.
‘Once arrested,’ Simmonds went on, ‘they are to be handed over to the civil authorities. Of course the normal protection will be given to the team from any court appearance. The two operators from the province will not, repeat not, conduct any arrest or contact action. You understand the reasons why?’
He managed a smile. ‘I think that’s enough, gentlemen.’ He looked at Frank, the CO. ‘Francis, I understand we fly to RAF Lyneham in ten minutes to link up with the Hercules?’
Just over three hours later I was sitting in a C130 with Euan, who was busy worrying about a black mark on his new trainers. Kev was checking the weapon bundles and ammunition and, more importantly as far as I was concerned, the medical packs. If I got dropped I wanted fluid put into me as soon as possible.
We landed at about eleven thirty p.m. on Thursday, 3 March. The whole Rock was still awake; lights were on everywhere. We moved off to the military area, where trucks were waiting with our advance party to get us away quickly and without fuss.
Our FOB was in HMS Rooke, the Royal Navy shore base. We had requisitioned half a dozen rooms in the accommodation block and turned them into living space, with our own cooking area and ops room. Wires trailed everywhere, telephones were ringing, scaleys ran around in tracksuits or jeans, testing radios and sat comm links.
Over the din Simmonds said, ‘Int suggests there could be a third member of the team, and probably its commander. Her name is Mairead Farrell. Pictures will be here within the hour, but here’s some background for you. She’s a particularly nasty piece of work’ – he paused to time his delivery to perfection – ‘middle class, thirty-one, ex-convent schoolgirl.’
When the laughter died down he told us more about her. She’d served ten years in prison for planting a bomb in the Conway Hotel, Belfast, in 1976, but as soon as she was released she reported straight back to PIRA for duty. There was a slight smile on his face as he explained that her lover, unbelievably named Brendan Burns, had blown himself up recently.
The meeting broke and we mooched around looking for a brew. A scaley came over and handed out street maps. ‘They’ve already been spotted up by the Firm,’ he said.
As we started to look at their handiwork, he carried on. ‘The main routes from the border to the square are marked in detail, the rest of the town fairly well, and, of the outlying areas, just major points.’
I looked at it. Fucking hell! There were about one hundred co-ordinates to learn before the ASU came over the border. I didn’t know which was tougher, the PIRA team or the homework.
‘Any questions, lads?’
Kev said, ‘Yeah, three. Where do we sleep, where’s the bog and is there a brew on?’
In the morning, we picked up our weapons and ammunition and went onto the range. The four on the CT team had their own pistols. The ones we had were borrowed – our own were still in Derry. Not that it mattered that much; people think that blokes in the Regiment are very particular about their weapons, but they aren’t. So long as you know that, when you pull the trigger, it fires first time and the rounds will hit the target you’re aiming at, you’re happy.
Once at the range, people did their own thing. The other four just wanted to know that their mags were working OK and that the pistols had no defects after being bundled up. Euan and I wanted to do the same, but also to find out the behaviour of our new weapons at different ranges. After firing off all the mags in quick succession to make sure everything worked, we then fired at 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25 metres. Good, slow, aimed shots, always aiming at the same point and checking where the rounds fell at each range. That way we found out where to aim at 15 metres, for example, and that was at the top of the target’s torso. Because of the distance, quite a lot for a pistol, the rounds would fall lower into the bottom of his chest and take him down. Every weapon is different, so it took an hour to be confident.
Once finished we didn’t strip the weapons to clean them. Why do that when we knew they worked perfectly? We just got a brush into the area that feeds the round into the barrel and got the carbon off.
Next job was getting on the ground to learn the spots system, at the same time checking our radios and finding out if there were any dead areas. We were still running around doing that when, at 2 p.m., Alpha came up on the net. ‘Hello, all stations, return to this location immediately.’
Simmonds was already in the briefing area, looking like a man under pressure. Like the rest of us he’d probably had very little sleep. There was two days’ growth on his chin and he was having a bad hair day. Something was definitely on; there was a lot more noise and bustle from the machines and men in the background. He had about twenty bits of paper in his hands. The slime were giving him more as he talked, as well as distributing copies of the rules of engagement to us. The operation, I saw, was now called Flavius.
‘Just about an hour and a half ago,’ he said, ‘Savage and McCann passed through Immigration at Malaga airport. They were on a flight from Paris. Farrell met them. We have no idea how she got there. The team is complete. There is just one little problem – the Spaniards lost them as they got into a taxi. Triggers are now being placed on the border crossing as a precaution. I have no reason to believe that the attack will not take place as planned.’
He paused and looked at each of us in turn. ‘I’ve just become aware of two very critical pieces of information. First, the players will not be using a blocking car to reserve a parking space in the target area. A blocking car would mean making two trips across the border, and the int is that they’re not prepared to take the risk. The PIRA vehicle, when it arrives, should therefore be perceived as the real thing.
‘Second, the detonation of the bomb will be by a hand-held, remote-control initiation device: they want to be sure that the bomb goes off at exactly the right moment. Remember, gentlemen, any one of the team, or all of them, could be in possession of that device. That bomb must not detonate. There could be hundreds of lives at risk.’
I was woken by the noise of engines in reverse and wheels on tarmac. It was just after six a.m. I had been asleep for three hours. It was still dark and the rain had eased quite a bit. I leaned over to the back. ‘Kelly, Kelly, time to wake up.’ As I shook her there was a gentle moan. ‘Oh, OK. I’m coming.’ She sat up, rubbing her eyes.
With the cuff of my coat I started to tidy her up. I didn’t want her walking into the airport looking wrecked. I wanted us looking as spruce and happy as Marie and Donny Osmond on Prozac.
We got out of the car with the bag, and I locked up, after checking inside to make sure there wasn’t anything attractive on view. The last thing I needed now was a car park attendant taking an interest in my lock-picking kit. We walked over to the stop and didn’t have long to wait before the bus arrived to take us to Departures.
The terminal looked just like any airport at that time of the morning. The check-in desks were already quite busy with business fliers. Some people, mostly student types, looked as though they were waiting for flights that they’d got there much too early for, and had got their heads down in sleeping bags spread across three or four seats, with a massive backpack alongside. Cleaners with polishing machines trudged across the tiled floors like zombies.
I picked up a free airport magazine from the rack at the top of the escalator. Looking at the flight guide at the back I saw that the first possible departure to the UK was at just after five p.m. that evening. It was going to be a long wait.
I looked at Kelly; we both could do with a decent wash. We went down the escalator to the International Arrivals area on the lower level. I put some money in a machine and bought a couple of travel kits to supplement our washing gear, and went into one of the disabled toilets.
I shaved as Kelly washed her face. I scraped the dirt off her boots with toilet paper and generally cleaned her up, combed her hair and put it in an elastic band at the back so it didn’t look so greasy. By the end of half an hour we were looking fairly respectable. The scabs on my face were healing. I tried to grin, but they hurt too much. No Prozac, but we’d pass muster.
I picked up the bag. ‘You ready?’
