Embassy Siege
Embassy Siege
Shaun Clarke
Ultimate soldier. Ultimate mission. But can the SAS assault team rescue the hostages from the terrorist-held Iranian embassy?30 April 1980: six well-armed terrorists seize the Iranian Embassy in London. Nineteen Iranian nationals and four British citizens are captured.Subsequent negotiations see some hostages released, but when, on the fifth day of the siege, one of the hostages is shot dead, his body dumped outside, the time for negotiation is over. It is time to end the siege, and the only men with enough skill and daring for this dangerous task are the legendary SAS! In fact, convinced they will eventually be called in, they have already practiced a high-risk rescue operation in their top secret ‘Killing House’.On the evening of 5 May – and in the full glare of the international media – twelve SAS soldiers, dressed in black and wielding a deadly arsenal, make their courageous assault on the Embassy…
Embassy Siege
SHAUN CLARKE
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by 22 Books/Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1994
Copyright © Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1994
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover photographs © Oleg Zabielin/Alamy (soldier); Shutterstock.com (textures)
Shaun Clarke asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008155124
Ebook Edition © December 2015 ISBN: 9780008155131
Version: 2015-11-02
Contents
Cover (#u604ac074-65aa-5634-bbaa-c2858306e0d8)
Title Page (#u5d83b0f0-dae6-5b29-a0e3-5d35b031f256)
Copyright (#uf89100a0-44dd-588d-9cd4-7539906ab6c5)
Prelude (#u2f186dc4-1125-541b-b026-603d7de5afee)
Chapter 1 (#u8ffc31bd-82be-5dab-a9ce-f8219bc687e0)
Chapter 2 (#uea182437-9633-54fb-bb44-8a78beaa3f14)
Chapter 3 (#uc8406632-6cb1-5947-b855-02fe8cf6bfa2)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
OTHER TITLES IN THE SAS OPERATION SERIES (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prelude (#ub8079cee-b7cd-5aa6-ae32-4a5b05f362d6)
Number 16 Princes Gate formed part of a mid-Victorian terrace overlooking Hyde Park and had been used as the Iranian Embassy in London for more than a decade. Until 1979, it had represented the Iran ruled by Shah Reza Pahlavi and his wife, the Empress Fara Diba.
Noted for its Italianate stucco façade and prominent frieze, it was a very large building spread over three main floors and an attic. The ground floor comprised an imposing entrance hall, a large, beautifully furnished reception room, toilets, an administration office, and an expansive library overlooking the rear terrace. The main stairs led up to the first floor and the rather grand ambassador’s office, the more modest office of the chargé d’affaires, two administration offices and a storage room. The second floor contained two more administration offices, Rooms 9, 9A and 10, another toilet and a telex room. The third floor was the busiest, containing the press counsellor’s office, the press room, the commercial office, the xerox room, the switchboard, Room 19, the kitchen, a toilet, and two more administration rooms, one of which was empty. A well skylight with a glass roof, located between Room 19, the switchboard, the xerox room and the outer wall, overlooked the main stairs connecting the three floors. As the lift terminated on the second floor, the third floor could only be reached by the stairs.
When run by the Shah’s young and eligible Ambassador, Parvis Radji, the Embassy had been noted for its lavish dinner parties and largesse when it came to supplying excellent caviar, French wines, cars, free hotels and first-class travel to British diplomats, journalists and other visitors whose goodwill and assistance were vital to Iran. However, while ostentatiously maintaining this front of gracious, civilized living, the Embassy had also been used as a base for SAVAK, the Shah’s dreaded secret police, whose function was to spy on and intimidate London-based Iranians, mostly students. Many of these secret police were uneducated, unsophisticated and addicted to the Western ‘decadence’ they were supposed to despise: nightclubs, alcohol and bought women.
Such activities had, however, ended with the downfall of the Shah in January 1979. Six months after the revolution, the Ayatollahs replaced Parvis Radji with a new chargé d’affaires, Dr Ali Afrouz, a twenty-nine-year-old graduate in psychology and education. Once installed in the Embassy at Princes Gate, Ali weeded out the corrupt members of SAVAK, banned all alcohol from the premises, got rid of the more ostentatious luxuries of the previous regime, and in general ensured that Embassy business was conducted in a more modest, formal manner.
In the days of the Shah, the Embassy’s front door had been guarded by the British security company Securicor. Unfortunately, when Dr Afrouz took over, he dropped the company and gave the job to an Iranian, Abbas Fallahi, who had been the Embassy’s butler and knew precious little about security.
More knowledgeable in this area was Police Constable Trevor Lock, at that time a member of the Diplomatic Protection Group. This organization, being unable to give individual protection to each of London’s 138 embassies and High Commissions, was based at several strategic points in West London, remained constantly on alert in case of emergency, and also provided individual armed guards as part of the British Government’s token contribution to the embassies’ security.
Though not due to serve at the Iranian Embassy that morning, PC Lock agreed to stand in for a colleague who required the day off for personal matters. So it was that at approximately 1100 on 30 April, the policeman strapped his holstered standard-police issue .38 Smith and Wesson revolver to his thigh, carefully buttoned his tunic over the holster, then set out for the Embassy.
One of the most loyal members of the Embassy staff was not an Iranian, but an Englishman, Ron Morris, who had joined as an office boy twenty-five years before, when he was only fourteen. Ron had graduated to the position of chauffeur, then, when the luxuries of the Shah’s days were swept away, among them the ambassadorial Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, he was made a caretaker and general maintenance man.
Just before nine o’clock on the morning of 30 April, Ron bid a routine farewell to his Italian wife Maria and cat Gingerella, left his basement flat in Chester Street, Belgravia, and drove on his moped to the Embassy, arriving there on the dot of nine. After parking his moped against the railings, he entered the building and began work as usual.
Two hours later, Simeon ‘Sim’ Harris, a thirty-three-year-old sound recordist, and Chris Cramer, a thirty-one-year-old news organizer, both with the BBC and widely experienced in the world’s trouble spots, arrived at the Embassy to try yet again – they had tried and failed before – to obtain visas to visit Iran. They were met by the doorman, Abbas Fallahi, who led them to the reception room, located through the first door on the left in the entrance hall. While waiting there, they were joined by another visitor, Ali Tabatabai, an employee of Iran’s Bank Markazi. In London for a fourteen-week course for international bankers run by the Midland Bank, Ali was visiting the Embassy to collect a film and map of Iran for a talk he was to give as part of his course. He sat beside the two BBC men and, like them, waited patiently.
These three visitors were soon joined by Majtaba Mehrnavard, an elderly, nervous man who bought and sold Persian carpets, but was there because he was worried about his health and wished to consult the Embassy’s medical adviser, Ahmed Dagdar.
Ten minutes after the arrival of the BBC team, Mustafa Karkouti, a Syrian journalist who was the European correspondent for As-Afir, the leading Beirut newspaper, arrived to interview the Embassy’s cultural attaché, Dr Abul Fazi Ezzatti. Shown into Ezzatti’s office, Room 13 on the third floor, he was offered a cup of coffee and proceeded with his interview while drinking it.
Another newsman present was Muhammad Farughi, a fifty-year-old British national born in India. He was the editor of Impact International, a Muslim magazine based in Finsbury Park, north London. Farughi had come to the Embassy for an interview with the chargé d’affaires, Dr Ali Afrouz, for an article about the Islamic revolution in Iran, and was at once escorted to the latter’s office, at the front of the building, on the first floor, overlooking Princes Gate.
On arriving at the Embassy for his day of duty on behalf of the Diplomatic Protection Group, PC Lock took up his usual position outside, by the steps leading up to the front door. On this particular morning, however, which was particularly cold, he was offered a warming cup of tea by the sympathetic doorman, Abbas Fallahi. As it would not have been proper to have been seen drinking outside the building, the frozen policeman decided to take his tea in the small ante-room between the outside door and the heavy security doors leading to the entrance hall. So he was not present outside – and, even worse, the main door was ajar – when the six armed men from Baghdad arrived at the doorstep.
Number 105 Lexham Gardens, Earls Court Road, was rather more modest than the Iranian Embassy. An end-of-terrace Victorian house with five steps leading up to the front door, it had simulated tiles on the steps and yellow awnings above the window to give the façade the appearance of a colourful Continental hotel. Inside, it was less grand. The foyer was papered with gold-flecked wallpaper, the carpet was blood-red, and an office desk served as reception.
Flat 3, on the second floor, contained three bedrooms, two sitting-rooms, two bathrooms and a kitchen. The rooms had the tired, slightly tatty appearance of all bedsits and flats in the city, with unmatching furniture, fading wallpaper, and a combination of bare floorboards and loose, well-worn carpets.
At 9.40 a.m. on Wednesday, 30 April 1980, the six Iranians who had shared the flat with another, Sami Muhammad Ali, left it one by one and gathered in the foyer. They were all wearing anoraks to keep out the cold and to conceal the weapons they would soon collect.
The leader of the group, Oan-Ali, real name Salim Towfigh, had a frizzy Afro hairstyle, a bushy beard and sideburns. Twenty-seven years old, he was the only member of the group to speak English. His second in command was twenty-one-year-old Shakir Abdullah Fadhil, also known as Jasim or Feisal, a so-called Ministry of Industry official who favoured jeans and cowboy boots and claimed to have once been tortured by SAVAK. The others were Fowzi Badavi Nejad, known as Ali, at nineteen the youngest and smallest member of the group; the short, heavily-built Shakir Sultan Said, or Shai, twenty-three and a former mechanic whose almost blond hair fell down over his ears; Makki Hounoun Ali, twenty-five, another Baghdad mechanic who now acted as the group’s humble housekeeper; and a slim young man named Ali Abdullah, known as Nejad.
Though not as obviously dominant as Oan, Ali Abdullah was greatly respected by the others because his older brother Fa’ad was one of the most important leaders of the Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan. Fa’ad Abdullah operated in exile in Iraq and broadcast regularly for the Arabic and Farsi sections of Radio Baghdad, exhorting the Iranians to rise up against the regime of the Ayatollahs.
Ali was a serious young man. More ebullient was Makki, who informed one of the other residents that the group was heading for France. In the foyer, Ali informed the Egyptian caretaker, Ahmed, that their nine bags, weighing a total of 203lb, would be collected by David Arafat, the property agent who had rented them the flat through his Tehar Service Agency in Earls Court Road. It would then be airfreighted back to Baghdad by him. After depositing the bags with Ahmed, the group left the building.
Makki waved goodbye to those watching through the glass doors of the foyer, then blew a handful of kisses and followed the others along the pavement.
For the next hour and a half, in the steel-grey morning light, the group moved from one safe house to another, collecting an arsenal of weapons that included two deadly Skorpion W263 Polish sub-machine-guns, three Browning self-loading pistols, one .38 Astra revolver, five Soviet-made RGD5 hand-grenades, and enough ammunition for a lengthy siege. By eleven-twenty the six men were assembled in Hyde Park, near the Albert Memorial, their weapons hidden under their coats, engaged in a last-minute discussion of their plans. Just before eleven-thirty, they left the park, crossed the road, and arrived outside 16 Princes Gate. The front door of the Embassy was ajar.
After covering their faces with the loose flap of their keffias, the traditional patterned Arab headdress, so that only their eyes and noses were visible, the men removed their weapons and stormed through the open front door of the Embassy, into the entrance hall. Hearing the commotion at the outer door, PC Lock darted out of the small ante-room and was practically bowled over by the terrorists rushing in. The deafening roar of automatic fire close to his ear was followed by the sound of smashing glass. A large slice of flying glass from the inner-door panel slashed PC Lock’s cheek. Before he could remove his pistol, and as he was in the throes of sending an unfinished warning to Scotland Yard, one of the Arabs wrested the portable radio from him and another prodded his head with the barrel of a Maitraillette Vigneron M2 machine pistol. Putting up his hands, the policeman was prodded at gunpoint across the entrance hall, towards the door of reception.
Waiting there were Sim Harris, Chris Cramer, Ali Tabatabai and the highly strung Majtaba Mehrnavard, who all heard the roaring of the machine pistols, the smashing of glass and the thudding of bullets piercing the ceiling of the entrance hall. There followed frantic shouting in Arabic, then a voice bawling in Farsi: ‘Don’t move!’ Understanding the words, Ali Tabatabai wanted to go out and see what was happening, but Cramer, an experienced newsman, stopped him with a curt ‘No!’ When he and the other BBC man, Sim Harris, turned to face the wall with their hands over their heads, Ali did the same.
A few seconds later PC Lock entered the room, his hands clutching his head, his face bloody. Following him were two women who also worked in the Embassy, and following them, prodding them along with semi-automatic weapons, were more terrorists with their faces veiled in keffias.
One of the veiled terrorists, speaking in English, warned the hostages that they would be killed if they moved, then he and the other terrorists led them at gunpoint across the entrance hall and up the stairs to the second floor.
On the third floor, the journalist Mustafa Karkouti was still deeply involved in his interview with Dr Ezzatti when he heard the machine-gun fire from below. Rushing from the office, both men saw other Embassy staff rushing past, heading down the stairs. Assuming that they were heading for a fire exit, Karkouti and Ezzatti followed them, but soon found themselves in another room that had no exit at all. There were about nine people in the room, including three or four women.
To protect all those gathered in the room, the door was locked from inside. Five minutes later, however, it was kicked open and one of the terrorists entered, looking like a bandit with his keffia around his face and a pistol in one hand and a grenade in the other. After firing an intimidating shot into the ceiling, he ordered everyone to place their hands on their head and face the wall. When they had done so, another man masked with a keffia entered the room and, with the help of the first man, guided the hostages at gunpoint down the stairs to the second floor, where other Embassy staff were standing with their hands on their heads, guarded by two other masked, armed terrorists.
Ron Morris, the caretaker, was still in his office on the fourth floor. Hearing the muffled sounds of gunfire, his first thought was that a student demonstration was under way, with the police firing blank cartridges. He ran down to the first floor, where he saw PC Lock and Abbas Fallahi with their hands on their heads, being guarded by an armed Arab. Morris instantly turned around and went back up to the second floor, where he passed an accountant, Mr Moheb. On asking the accountant what was happening, he received only a blank, dazed look. The caretaker hurried up to his office on the fourth floor, planning to phone the police, but just as he was dialling 999, he heard shouting and running feet on the stairs. Not wanting to be caught with the phone in his hand, he put it down and sat behind his desk until an armed terrorist entered. Speaking in English, the terrorist ordered him to leave the room, then prodded him at gunpoint down the stairs to Room 9A on the second floor, normally occupied by the Embassy’s medical adviser, Dr Dadgar, but now filled with many hostages, all with their hands either against the wall or on their heads.
One of the gunmen searched the hostages. After frisking Morris, finding his spectacle case and throwing it to the floor, the gunman searched PC Lock, but in a manner so inept that he failed to find the policeman’s holstered pistol.
While this search was going on, other members of the Embassy staff were managing to flee the building. Zari Afkhami, who was in charge of the medical section, had her office at the rear of the ground floor. Hearing the gunshots and shouting, she opened the door, stepped into the hall, and saw a gunman prodding PC Lock in the chest with a gun. Running back into her office and closing the door behind her, she alerted an elderly clerk who had a weak heart. Afkhami opened the window and climbed out, followed by the clerk. Catching sight of two workmen at the rear of the building, she asked them to call the police.
Another official escaped by boldly climbing out onto the first-floor balcony and making his way across a parapet to the Ethiopian Embassy next door.
One who attempted to escape, but failed, was the chargé d’affaires, Dr Afrouz, who was still being interviewed by the Muslim journalist Muhammad Farughi in his office on the first floor when the attack began. Hearing gunfire and shouting, both men went to the office door, where Farughi was instantly seized by a terrorist. Afrouz managed to make it back across to the rear of his office, where he clambered out through the window. Unfortunately, in his haste he fell, spraining his wrist and bruising his face badly. Hauled back in by the terrorists, he was prodded at gunpoint into a room where there were no other prisoners. There, one of the gunmen fired a shot into the ceiling, possibly to intimidate Afrouz. He then led the limping diplomat out of the room up the stairs to the second floor, where he was placed in Room 9A with the other prisoners.
Shocked by the appearance of the injured diplomat, and assuming that he had been beaten up by one of the terrorists, Ron Morris asked one of the terrorists for some water. He bathed Afrouz’s face, then examined his jaw and confirmed that it was not broken. The chargé d’affaires, still shocked and in pain, fell asleep soon afterwards.
Informed of the attack on the Embassy, the police were already gathering outside. An officer entered the back garden, where he saw an armed Arab looking down at him from an upstairs window. Aiming his pistol at the terrorist, the police officer asked what the group wanted.
‘If you take one more step you’ll be shot,’ the Arab replied in English.
By eleven-forty-five Scotland Yard knew that one of its men, PC Lock, was one of the hostages, that he belonged to the Diplomatic Protection Group, and that he had been armed. This last fact, combined with the information that gunshots had been heard, gave them further cause for concern.
By midday, the Embassy was surrounded by police cars and vans, ambulances, reporters, press photographers, and armed policemen wearing bulletproof vests. Other police officers were on the roof of the building, clearing spectators from the balconies of the adjoining buildings. More police were across the road, opposite the Embassy, clearing people out of the park and sealing off the area.
The siege had commenced.
1 (#ub8079cee-b7cd-5aa6-ae32-4a5b05f362d6)
The wind was howling over the Brecon Beacons as Staff-Sergeant Bill Harrison, huddled behind a rock for protection, surveyed the vast slopes of the Pen-y-Fan to find his four-man CRW (Counter Revolutionary Warfare) team. The men, he knew, would be feeling disgruntled because the tab he was making them undergo they had all endured before, during Initial Selection and Training, with all the horrors of Sickeners One and Two. The four men now climbing the steep, rocky slope were experienced SAS troopers who had fought in Aden, Oman or Belfast, and none required a second dose of the ‘Long Drag’ or ‘Fan Dance’ across this most inhospitable of mountain ranges – or, at least, would not have done so had they been asked to do it while carrying an Ingram 9mm sub-machine-gun and a 55lb bergen rucksack.
This time, however, there was a slight but diabolical turning of the screw: they were making the same arduous tab while wearing heavy CRW body armour, including ceramic plates front and back, and while breathing through a respirator mask fixed to a ballistic helmet. In short, they were being forced to endure hell on earth.
That was only part of it. Staff-Sergeant Harrison had not only ordered them to climb to the summit of the mountain, but had then informed them that he would be giving them a thirty-minute head start, then following them to simulate pursuit by a real enemy. Thus, even as they would be fighting against exhaustion caused by the heavy body armour and murderous climb, as well as possible claustrophobia or disorientation caused by the cumbersome helmet and respirator mask, they would be compelled to concentrate on keeping out of Harrison’s sub-machine-gun sight. This would place an even greater strain on them.
In fact, they had already failed in their task. Even though wearing his own body armour and head gear to ensure that his men would not feel he was asking them to do what he could not, the tough-as-nails staff-sergeant had taken another route up the mountain – to ensure that he was unseen by his men while they were always in his sight – and circled around them to take up this position above them, just below the rocky, wind-blown summit. The men would be broken up when they found him blocking their path, emulating an enemy sniper; but that, also, was part of this lesson in endurance.
Harrison had been a member of the ‘Keeni Meeni’ assassination squads in Aden in 1966, survived the incredible SAS hike up the mighty Jebel Dhofar in Oman in 1971 and, in 1976, spent days on end in freezing observation posts in the ‘bandit country’ of south Armagh, sweating it out, waiting to ambush IRA terrorists. For this reason he knew all about endurance and insisted that his men be prepared for it.
They had already lost this one, but they were still good men. Hiding behind his rock, one hand resting lightly on his PRC 319 radio, the other on his Ingram 9mm sub-machine-gun, which was loaded with live ammunition, Harrison watched the men advancing arduously up the slope and recalled how their work in Northern Ireland and led to their induction into the CRW.
All four men – Lance-Corporal Philip McArthur and Troopers Danny ‘Baby Face’ Porter, Alan Pyle and Ken Passmore – had been shipped in civilian clothing to Belfast immediately after being ‘badged’ in 1976. There they had specialized in intelligence gathering and ambush operations, working both in unmarked ‘Q’ cars in the streets and in OPs on the green hills of Armagh. By the end of their tour of duty in Northern Ireland, they were widely experienced in intelligence operations and therefore ideal material for special training in the ‘killing house’ in Hereford and subsequent transfer from their individual squadrons – B and D – to the Counter Revolutionary Warfare Wing.
Once in the CRW Wing, they were given more Close Quarters Battle (CQB) training in the ‘killing house’, then sent for various periods to train even more intensively with West Germany’s CSG-9 border police and France’s Groupement d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale (GIGN) paramilitary counter-terrorist units, the Bizondere Bystand Eenheid (BBE) counter-terrorist arm of the Royal Netherlands Marine Corps, Italy’s Nucleo Operativo di Sicurezza (NOCS), Spain’s Grupo Especial de Operaciones (GEO), and the US 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment, created specially for CRW operations.
The overseas postings had been designed to place a special emphasis on physical training and marksmanship. These included advanced, highly dangerous practice at indoor firing with live ammunition in other kinds of ‘killing houses’, such as mock-up aircraft, ships and public streets; abseiling and parachuting onto rooftops, parked aircraft and boats; hostage rescue in a variety of circumstances (which had the cross-over element of training in skiing, mountaineering and scuba diving); and the handling of CS gas canisters, and stun, fire and smoke grenades. Finally, they were taught how to deal with the hostages, physically and psychologically, once they had been rescued.
So, Harrison thought, those four hiking up the last yards to the summit of this mountain are going to be bitterly surprised at having lost – but they’re still good men.
By now the four men were only about 20 yards below him, fifty from the summit, and obviously thinking they had managed to make it to the top without being caught. Wearing their all-black CRW overalls, respirator masks and NBC hoods, they looked frightening, but that did not deter Harrison. Smiling grimly, he raised his Ingram 9mm sub-machine-gun with its thirty-two-round magazine, pressed the extended stock into his shoulder, aimed at the marching men through his sight, then fired a short burst.
The noise broke the silence brutally. Harrison moved the gun steadily from left to right, tearing up soil and stones in an arc that curved mere inches in front of the marching men. Knowing that the bullets were real, they scuttled off the track in opposite directions, hurling themselves to the ground behind the shelter of rocks and screaming for Harrison to stop firing. Grinning more broadly, the staff-sergeant lowered his Ingram, put the safety-catch back on, then used the PRC 319 radio to call the leader of the four-man team, Lance-Corporal Philip McArthur.
‘You dumb bastards. You’re all dead meat,’ the message said.
Lying behind the rocks lower down the windswept slope, the four men received the message with incredulity, then, almost instinctively, turned their surprised gaze to the exploded soil that had cut an arc just a short distance in front of where they had been walking, practically up to their feet.
‘I don’t believe it!’ Trooper Alan Pyle exclaimed, removing his respirator mask from his face as the others did the same, all relieved to be breathing pure, freezing air. ‘That daft bastard was using live ammo and nearly shot our fucking toes off.’
‘He’s too good for that,’ Trooper Danny ‘Baby Face’ Porter said. ‘If he’d wanted to shoot your toes off, you can be sure he’d have done it.’
‘Just like you, eh?’ said the third trooper, Ken Passmore, grinning admiringly. ‘A real crack shot.’
‘Yeah,’ Baby Face replied with modest pride. ‘I suppose you could say that.’
‘All right, all right,’ snapped Lance-Corporal Phil McArthur. ‘Stop the backslapping. We’ve nothing to be proud of. After all, we were as good as dead. Now let’s pick up our gear and go and face the great man.’
Breathing more easily without the masks, but crushed by being ‘killed’ by Harrison, the men picked up their weapons and other kit and advanced up the hill until they reached the staff-sergeant. Squatting behind the rock with a big grin on his face, Harrison was strapping the PRC 319 to his shoulders and picking up his Ingram.
‘Nice try, men,’ he said, ‘but if this had been a real operation you’d all be belly up by now. Are you SAS men or not?’
‘Fucking ’ell, Sarge,’ Phil McArthur protested as he glanced back down the mountain at the broad sweep of the Brecon Beacons far below. ‘We could hardly breathe in these bloody masks. And that hike was a killer.’
‘Piece of piss,’ Harrison replied. ‘I got this far without taking a deep breath. I think you need some more exercise.’
The men stared warily at him. All of them were breathing heavily and still bathed in sweat, even though the wind was howling across the mountain, slapping icily at them.
‘No more exercise, please,’ Ken Passmore said, already drained. ‘I can’t move another inch.’
Harrison grinned with sly malice. ‘What were your instructions, Trooper?’
‘To get to the summit of the mountain,’ Ken replied, ‘without being shot or captured by you.’
‘Which you were.’
‘Right.’
‘Which doesn’t mean it’s over, you daft prat. You’ve still got to get to the summit, so get up and go, all of you.’
In disbelief the breathless men glanced up to the summit, which was 50 yards higher up, though the distance seemed far greater and the steepness of the climb was horrendous.
‘Jesus, Sarge,’ Alan complained. ‘After the climb we’ve just made, that last leg is going to be impossible.’
‘Right,’ Ken said. ‘That slope is a killer.’
‘Either you make that climb,’ Harrison told them, ‘or I have you RTU’d and standing by dusk on Platform 4, Hereford Station, outward bound. Get the message?’
‘Yes, Sarge.’
‘Come on,’ Baby Face shouted. ‘Let’s get up and go.’
Though still trying to get their breath back, the weary men covered their heads and faces again with the respirator masks and ballistic helmets, humped their bergens onto their backs, picked up their Ingrams and reluctantly began the steep climb to the summit.
Within a few yards they were already gasping for breath, their feet slipping on smooth rocks, bodies tensed against the wind, the sweat soon dripping from their foreheads into their eyes. Twenty yards on, where the wind was even more fierce, the slope rose at an angle so steep it was almost vertical. Holding their sub-machine-guns in one hand and clinging to rocks with the other, they laboriously hauled themselves up until, about 20 yards from the summit, all of them except Baby Face decided to give in. Falling behind, they just leaned against high rocks, fighting to regain their breath, about to call it a day.
Harrison’s Ingram roared into life as he fired a short burst in an arc that tore up earth and pieces of splintered rock mere inches from the feet of the men who had given up. Shocked, they lurched away from the spitting soil and scrambled with a strength they had felt had been drained out of them up the last, cruel section of the slope. Each time they fell back, another roar from the Ingram, ripping up the soil and rocks just behind the men, forced them to move hastily higher, finally following Baby Face off the sheer slope and onto the more even summit.
When the last of them had clambered onto the highest point, gasping but still surprised at their hitherto untapped stamina, Harrison followed them up and told them to remove the masks and breathe proper air. When the men had done so, they were able to look down on the fabulous panorama of the Brecon Beacons, spread out all around them, wreathed in mist, streaked with sunshine, thousands of feet below. Lying there, now completely exhausted, they gulped the fresh, freezing air, grateful that they would at last be able to take a good break.
Just as they were about to have a brew-up, a message came through on the radio. Harrison listened intently, then said: ‘Got it, boss. Over and out.’ Replacing the microphone on its hook, he turned to his weary men. ‘Sorry, lads, no brew-up yet. We’ve got to return straightaway. The Iranian Embassy in London has been seized and we’re being put on stand-by. This isn’t a mock exercise. It’s the real thing. So pack your kit and let’s hike back to the RV.’
Recharged by the prospect of real action, the men hurriedly packed up and began the hazardous descent.
2 (#ub8079cee-b7cd-5aa6-ae32-4a5b05f362d6)
By three p.m. on the first day, in a basement office in Whitehall a top-level crisis management team known as COBR, representing the Cabinet Office Briefing Room, was having a tense discussion about the raid on the Iranian Embassy. Presiding over the meeting was a man of some eminence, addressed as the ‘Secretary’, Junior Defence and Foreign Affairs ministers, representatives of MI5 and the Metropolitan Police, including the Police Commissioner, and the overall commander of the SAS CBQ team, addressed as the ‘Controller’, though in fact he was much more than that when it came to issues involving international politics and the defence of the realm.
‘The function of this meeting,’ the surprisingly genial and unruffled Secretary said, ‘is to lay down guidelines for the police and, if necessary, the Army. First, however, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police will fill us in on the general situation.’
The Commissioner cleared his throat and sized up his audience before speaking. ‘The Embassy is being held by a six-man team of Iranians who were trained in Iraq, issued with Iraqi passports, and supplied with weapons brought in by diplomatic bag from Baghdad. We now know that they all visited the British Embassy in Baghdad last February to pick up individual visas to visit the UK. When asked how they would live in the UK, they each produced the same amount of cash: £275. In each case the purpose of the visit was recorded as being for medical treatment. Once in London, they were placed under the command of an Iraqi army officer, Sami Muhammad Ali, who flew home the day the siege began.’
‘Who’s leading them now?’ the Secretary asked.
The Commissioner showed them a picture of a well-built Arab with frizzy hair, a bushy beard and long sideburns. ‘The ringleader, Oan-Ali,’ he said. ‘Real name Salim Towfigh. Twenty-seven years old. Records show that he comes from Al Muhammara in the Khuzistan province of Iran, just across the Shatt-al-Arab river border with Iraq. Studied languages and law at Tehran University, where he became politically active and eventually militant. Fluent in four languages: Farsi, Arabic, German and English. He’s believed to be one of those who took part in the riots that occurred there on 29 May last year, when 220 men and women in the crowd were reported killed and approximately 600 wounded. Certainly he was imprisoned and tortured by SAVAK, which only made him more militant. On 31 March this year he turned up with four other Arabs in Earls Court Road, where they took two flats at 20 Nevern Place. One of the flats was on the second floor, the other in the basement. Only three of the men signed the register: Oan-Ali, Makki Hounoun Ali, and Shakir Abdullah Fadhil. The caretaker was an Iraqi student studying computer engineering. He says he didn’t examine their passports thoroughly, though he noted that they were issued in Iraq. The men told him they had just flown in from Baghdad. Apart from that, the caretaker learnt little about them. They claimed to have met each other by chance on the plane to London. One said he was a farmer, the other a student, the third a mechanic. The group is particularly remembered by the caretaker and other members of the household because, though Muslims, they came in late at night, invariably drunk and often with local prostitutes. Eventually, when they became embroiled in an argument over prices with one of the ladies in the basement flat, the caretaker, a devout Muslim, threw them out of the house.’
‘Sounds like they weren’t particularly sophisticated,’ the Secretary said. ‘Muslims seduced instantly by Western ways: alcohol and sex. Certainly not very disciplined.’
‘That’s worth bearing in mind,’ the Controller said. ‘A lack of discipline in a siege situation could go either way: either helping us to succeed or leading to mayhem and slaughter.’
Deliberately pausing to let the Controller’s words sink in, the Commissioner then continued reading from his notes: ‘After being thrown out of the house in Nevern Place, the terrorists dropped into the Tehar Service Agency, an accommodation agency run by a Jordanian named David Arafat and specializing in Arab clients with plenty of money and often dubious intentions. Arafat rarely asked questions of his clients, but claims that Oan-Ali told him he had left his previous accommodation because his group had been joined by two other friends and they needed larger accommodation. Subsequently, Arafat fixed them up with Flat 3, 105 Lexham Gardens, just a few hundred yards north of his Earls Court Road office.’
‘And were there more men at this point?’ the Controller asked.
‘No,’ the Commissioner replied. ‘It was the same five who had been in Nevern Place who took over the flat in Lexham Gardens. However, the flat has three bedrooms, two sitting-rooms, two bathrooms and a kitchen, and according to the Egyptian caretaker, the five-man group grew to seven over the next few days. After that, there were times when as many as a dozen men would be there at the same time.’
‘Do we know who the others were?’ the Controller asked.
‘No. We do know, however, that some of the others in his group are former members of the Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan and that one of them, Fa’ad, broadcasts for the Arabic and Farsi sections of Radio Baghdad, exhorting the people of Iran to rise up against the regime of the Ayatollahs.’
As the Controller nodded and wrote in his notebook, the Commissioner concentrated once more on the file opened on the table before him. ‘Intelligence has reason to believe that though Oan-Ali led the raid, he didn’t actually plan it himself. One of those who moved into 105 Lexham Gardens was Sami Muhammad Ali, an Iraqi army officer described in his passport as an official of the Iraqi Ministry of Industry. Other meetings which Ali was known to have attended took place at 55 and 24 Queens Gate, the latter only two doors up from the office of the Iraqi military attaché.’
‘How ironic!’ the Secretary purred, smiling like a Cheshire cat.
‘Finally,’ the Commissioner continued reading, ‘on 29 April, the day before the seizure of the Embassy, it was Oan-Ali who visited David Arafat, the property agent, to tell him that his friends were leaving Lexham Gardens – supposedly going to Bristol for a week, then returning to Iraq. He asked Arafat to crate their baggage and air-freight it back to Baghdad. The address he gave was a post-box number. By the following morning, when the rest of the group seized the Embassy, Oan-Ali had disappeared.’
‘How many hostages?’ the Controller asked.
‘Twenty-two in all. Fifteen Iranians, the British caretaker, one Diplomatic Protection Group police constable, and five visitors, four of whom are journalists. The DPG constable, PC Lock, had a pistol concealed on his person and may still possess it.’
‘That could be helpful,’ the Secretary said with a hopeful smile.
‘Or dangerous,’ the Controller reminded him, then turned back to the Commissioner. ‘Do we know more about the hostages?’
‘One is Mustafa Karkouti, the European correspondent for As-Afir, the leading Beirut newspaper. Thirty-seven years old, he’s Syrian by birth, but educated in Damascus and Beirut. He was known to be pursuing the story of the hostages held by Iranian students at the American Embassy in Tehran. We also know that a month ago he attended an Islamic conference in London, to hear a speech by the Iranian Embassy’s cultural attaché, Dr Abul Fazi Ezzatti. He then fixed up a meeting with Dr Ezzatti at the Embassy for Wednesday, 30 April, at eleven a.m. He was there when the terrorists seized the building.’
‘Any use to us?’ the Secretary asked.
‘Could be. He speaks fluent English and Arabic, as well as a fair bit of Farsi.’
‘That could come in handy.’
‘Exactly. Also useful is the fact that Karkouti works out of Fleet Street and lives with his wife and child in Ealing. He therefore knows the English mentality, as well as the Iranian, which could be helpful to my negotiators.’
‘Who else?’
‘Ron Morris, a forty-seven-year-old Englishman, born in Battersea, London. Son of the station-master at Waterloo. Left school at fourteen, spent six months in a factory in Battersea, then obtained a job as an office boy for the Iranian Embassy. That was in 1947 and, apart from his two years’ National Service, he’s worked for the Iranians ever since – first as an office boy, then as a chauffeur, and finally as caretaker and general maintenance man. In 1970, when he’d been with them for twenty-five years, he was given a long-service bonus of a ten-day trip to Iran.’
‘Is he political?’
‘No, Mr Secretary. He’s a regular, down-to-earth type, not easily ruffled. Reportedly, he views himself as being above politics. Lives with an Italian wife and a cat in a basement flat in Chester Street, Belgravia. Collects replica guns. His work for the Iranians is certainly not political.’
‘So he could be useful.’
‘Yes and no. As the maintenance man, he knows every nook and cranny in the building. That knowledge could encourage him to try to escape.’
‘And the others?’
‘The Diplomatic Protection Group’s Police Constable Trevor Lock. Known as a good man. He had a standard police-issue .38 Smith and Wesson revolver holstered on the thigh and so far there’s no report that the terrorists have found it. According to a recent report, however, Lock was slightly hurt and is bleeding from the face.’
‘Have the hostages made contact yet?’
‘Yes, Mr Secretary. Ninety minutes after the seizure of the Embassy, the terrorists asked for a woman doctor to be sent in. At first we assumed this was for PC Lock, but in fact it was for the Embassy Press Officer, Mrs Frieda Mozafarian, who’s had a series of fainting fits combined with muscular spasms. Lock is apparently OK – just a little bruised and bloody.’
‘So how do we handle this?’ the Secretary asked.
The Commissioner coughed into his fist. ‘First, the police will negotiate with the terrorists. Undoubtedly the terrorists will want media coverage of their demands, so we’ll use this as a bargaining chip. As their demands won’t be directed at the British Government, but at the Iranians, we can afford to cede this to them.’
He paused, waiting for their reaction.
‘Go on,’ the Secretary said, clasping his hands under his chin and looking disingenuously benign.
‘Having met them halfway with media exposure for their demands,’ the Commissioner continued, ‘we try to talk them out, letting the affair stretch on for as long as necessary. During that period, we’ll attempt to soften them up with food, medical attention, communications, more access to the media, and the involvement of their own ambassadors and those of other friendly Middle Eastern states. We’ll also ask for the release of certain hostages, particularly those ill or wounded. This will not only reduce the number of hostages to be dealt with, but encourage the terrorists to feel that they’re contributing to a real, on-going dialogue. In fact, what we’ll be doing is buying enough time for the police and MI5 to plant miniature listening devices inside the building and also scan it with parabolic directional microphones and thermal imagers. Between these, they should at least show us just where the hostages are being held.’
‘And what happens when the terrorists’ patience runs out?’
‘Should negotiations fail and, particularly, if the terrorists kill a hostage, or hostages, clearance will be given for the SAS to attack the building.’
The Home Secretary turned his attention to the Controller, who looked handsome in his beret with winged-dagger badge. ‘Are you prepared for this?’
‘Yes, sir. The operation will be codenamed “Pagoda”. We’ll use the entire counter-terrorist squadron: a command group of four officers plus a fully equipped support team consisting of one officer and twenty-five other ranks, ready to move at thirty minutes’ notice. A second team, replicating the first, will remain on a three-hour stand-by until the first team has left the base. A third team, if required, can be composed from experienced SAS soldiers. The close-quarters support teams are backed up by sniper groups who will pick off targets from outside the Embassy and specially trained medical teams to rescue and resuscitate the hostages.’
‘You are, of course, aware of the importance of police primacy in this matter?’
The Controller nodded. ‘Yes, Mr Secretary. Coincidentally, we’ve just been preparing for a joint exercise with the Northumbria Police Force, so the men and equipment are all in place at Hereford. That’s only 150 miles, or less than three hours’ drive, away. We’re ready to roll, sir.’
‘Excellent.’ The Secretary turned to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. ‘Do you have any problems with this scenario?’
‘No,’ the Commissioner replied. ‘My views today are those of Sir Robert Mark regarding the Spaghetti House siege of 1975. Those terrorists will either come out to enter a prison cell or end up in a mortuary. They’ll have no other option.’
Some of the men smiled. The Home Secretary, looking satisfied, spread his hands out on the table. ‘To summarize, gentlemen…There will be no surrender to the terrorists. No safe conduct for the terrorists out of the country. Either this affair ends peacefully, with the surrender of the terrorists, or the SAS go in and bring them out, dead or alive. Agreed?’
The men of COBR were in total agreement.
3 (#ub8079cee-b7cd-5aa6-ae32-4a5b05f362d6)
As the team on the Pen-y-Fan were contending with the arduous return hike to the four-ton Bedford lorry that would take them back to Bradbury Lines, the SAS base in Hereford, another team, consisting of Staff-Sergeant ‘Jock’ Thompson, Corporal George ‘GG’ Gerrard, Lance-Corporal Dan ‘Danny Boy’ Reynolds and Trooper Robert ‘Bobs-boy’ Quayle were dressing up in heavy CRW Bristol body armour with high-velocity ceramic plates, S6 respirator masks to protect them from CS gas, black ballistic helmets and skin-tight aviator’s gloves in the ‘spider’, their eight-legged dormitory area, in the same base in Hereford. They did not take too much pleasure in doing so.
‘I hate this fucking gear,’ Corporal ‘GG’ Gerrard complained, slipping on his black flying gloves. ‘I feel like a bloody deep-sea diver, but I’m walking on dry land.’
‘I agree,’ Lance-Corporal ‘Danny Boy’ Reynolds said, adjusting the ballistic helmet on his head and reluctantly picking up his respirator. ‘This shit makes me feel seasick.’
‘I hate the sea,’ the relatively new man, Trooper ‘Bobs-boy’ Quayle, said grimly, ‘so these suits give me nightmares.’
‘Excuse me?’ Staff-Sergeant ‘Jock’ Thompson asked.
‘What, Sarge?’ Bobs-boy replied.
‘Did I hear you say that suit gives you nightmares?’
‘That’s right, Sarge, you heard me right.’
‘So what the fuck are you doing in this CT team?’ Thompson asked.
Bobs-boy shrugged. ‘I’m pretty good with the Ingram,’ he explained, ‘close quarters battle.’
‘But you suffer from nightmares.’
The trooper started to look uncomfortable. ‘Well…I didn’t mean it literally. I just meant…’
Danny Boy laughed. ‘Literally? What kind of word is that? Is that some kind of new SAS jargon?’
‘He’s an intellectual,’ GG explained.
‘Who gets nightmares,’ Danny Boy added.
‘A nightmare-sufferer and an intellectual prat to boot,’ Jock clarified. ‘And we’ve got him on our team!’
‘I didn’t mean…’ Bobs-boy began.
‘Then you shouldn’t have said it,’ the staff-sergeant interjected. ‘If you get nightmares over CRW gear, we don’t want you around here, kid.’
‘Dreams,’ Bobs-boy said quickly. ‘I meant dreams. Really nice ones as well, Sarge. Not nightmares at all. I dream a lot about scuba diving and things like that, so this gear suits me nicely, thanks.’
‘You can see how he got badged,’ GG told the others with a wink. ‘It’s his talent for knowing which way the winds blows and always saying the right thing.’
‘The only sound that pleases me is his silence,’ Jock said, ‘and I’d like that right now. Put those respirators on your ugly mugs and let’s get to the killing house.’
‘Yes, boss,’ they all chimed, then covered their faces with the respirator masks. Though this kept them from talking casually, they could still communicate, albeit with eerie distortion, through their Davies Communications CT100E headset and microphone. However, once the respirators were attached to the black ballistic helmets, they looked like goggle-eyed deep-sea monsters with enormously bulky, black-and-brown, heavily armoured bodies – inhuman and frightening.
‘Can you all hear me?’ Jock asked, checking his communications system.
‘Check, Corporal Gerrard.’
‘Check, Lance-Corporal Reynolds.’
‘Check, Trooper Quayle.’
All the men gave the thumbs-up sign as they responded. When the last of them – Bobs-boy – stuck his thumb up, Jock did the same, then used a hand signal to indicate that they should follow him out of the spider.
After cocking the action of their weapons, they introduced live rounds to the chamber, applied the safety-catch, then proceeded to the first of six different ‘killing rooms’ in the CQB House for a long day’s practice. Here they fired ‘double taps’ from the Browning 9mm High Power handgun, known as the ‘9-milly’, and short bursts from their Ingram 9mm sub-machine-guns, at various pop-up ‘figure eleven’ targets. They were also armed with real Brocks Pyrotechnics MX5 stun grenades.
The ‘killing house’ had been constructed to train SAS troopers in the skills required to shoot assassins or kidnappers in the close confines of a building without hitting the hostage. As he led his men into the building, Jock felt a definite underlying resentment about what he was doing.
The Regiment’s first real experience in urban terrorism had been in Palestine, where SAS veteran Major Roy Farran had conceived the idea of having men infiltrate the urban population by dressing up as natives and then assassinating known enemies at close quarters, usually with a couple of shots from a handgun. Though Jock had never worked with Farran, he had been a very young man in Aden in 1964 when Farran’s basic theories had been used as the basis for the highly dangerous work of the Keeni Meeni squads operating in the souks and bazaars. There, teams of men, including Jock, all specially trained in CQB and disguised as Arabs, had mingled with the locals to gun down known Yemeni guerrillas.
Loving his work, dangerous though it had been, Jock had been shocked by the extent of his boredom when, back in Britain, he had been RTU’d to his original unit, the 2nd Battalion, Scots Guards, for a long bout of post-Suez inactivity. Though he subsequently married and had children – Tom, Susan, then Ralph, now all in their teens – he had never managed completely to settle down into the routine of peacetime army life.
For that reason he had applied for a transfer to the SAS, endured the horrors of Initial Selection and Training, followed by Continuation Training and parachute jumping in Borneo. Badged, he had fought with the Regiment in Oman in the early 1970s. Unfortunately, he returned from Oman to more years of relative boredom until 1976, when he was posted to Northern Ireland, where, in Belfast and south Armagh, he learnt just about all there was to know about close-quarters counter-terrorist warfare.
Posted back from Northern Ireland, Jock was again suffering the blues of boredom when, luckily for him, the Commanding Officer of 22 SAS decided to keep his CQB specialists busy by having them train bodyguards for overseas heads of state supportive of British interests. One of those chosen for this dangerous, though oddly glamorous, task was Jock, who, bored with his perfectly good marriage, was delighted to be able to travel the world with diplomatic immunity and a Browning 9mm High Power handgun hidden in the cross-draw position under his well-cut grey suit.
During those years, when most routine close protection of UK diplomats in political hotspots was handled by the Royal Military Police, the SAS were still being called in when the situation was particularly dangerous. For this reason, the need for men specially trained in close-quarters work led to the formation of the Counter Revolutionary Warfare Wing.
In Munich in September 1972, the Palestinian terrorist group Black September took over an Olympic Games village dormitory and held Israeli athletes hostage, leading to a bloody battle with West German security forces in which all the hostages, five terrorists and one police officer were killed. The shocked West German and French governments responded by forming their own anti-terrorist squads. In Britain, this led to the formation of a special SAS Counter-Terrorist (CT) team that would always be available at short notice to deal with hijacks and sieges anywhere in the United Kingdom. Those men, like their predecessors in Aden and in the CRW, had been trained in the ‘killing house’. Jock Thompson was one of them.
The CQB House is dubbed the ‘killing house’ for two good reasons. The first is that its purpose is to train men to kill at close quarters. The second is that real ammunition is used and that at least one SAS man has been killed accidentally while training with it.
Jock was mindful of this chilling fact as he led his four-man CT team into the building and along the first corridor, toward rooms specially constructed to simulate most of the situations an SAS man would encounter during a real hostage-rescue operation. The men had already been trained to enter captured buildings by a variety of means, including abseiling with ropes from the roof, sometimes firing a Browning 9mm High Power handgun with one hand as they clung to the rope with the other. This particular exercise, however, was to make them particularly skilled at distinguishing instantly between terrorist and hostage. It was done with the aid of pictures on the walls and dummies that were moved from place to place, or that popped out suddenly from behind artificial walls or up from the lower frame of windows.
This began happening as Jock and his men moved along the first corridor. Dummy figures bearing painted weapons popped out from behind opening doors or window frames to be peppered by a fusillade of bullets from the real weapons of the training team. Once the targets had looked like Russians; now they were men in anoraks and balaclava helmets.
The major accomplishment lay not in hitting the ‘terrorists’ but in not hitting a ‘hostage’ instead. This proved particularly difficult when they had less than a second to distinguish between a dummy that was armed and one that was not. To hit the latter too many times was to invite a humiliating rejection by the SAS and the ignominy of being RTU’d.
The exercise could have been mistaken for a childish game, except for one thing – like the weapons, the bullets were real.
Completing a successful advance along the first couple of corridors, Jock’s team then had to burst into various rooms, selected from drawings of the reconstructed killing house, shown to them during their briefing.
The CT team is divided into two specialist groups: the assault group, who enter the building, and the ‘perimeter containment’ group, consisting of snipers who provide a cordon sanitaire around the scene. In this instance, Jock and his men were acting as an assault group. This meant that they had to burst into a room in pairs and instantly fire two pistol rounds or short, controlled bursts of automatic fire – the famed SAS ‘double tap’ – into each terrorist, aiming for the head, without causing injury to either fellow team members or the hostages.
Reaching their selected rooms, the four-man team divided into two pairs, each with its own room to clear. Leading Red Team, with Danny Boy as his back-up, Jock blasted the metal lock off with a burst from his Remington 870 pump-action shotgun, dropped to one knee as the lock blew apart, with pieces of wood and metal flying out in all directions, then cocked the Browning pistol in his free hand and bawled for Danny Boy to go in.
The lance-corporal burst in ahead of Thompson, hurling an instantaneous safety electric fuse before him as he went. The thunderous flash of the ISFE exploded around both men as they rushed in and made their choice between a number of targets – the terrorists standing, the hostages sitting in chairs. They took out the former without hitting the latter, delivering accurate double taps to the head in each case.
Each man had his own preselected arc of fire, which prevented him hitting one of his own men. In this instance, the two men could easily have done this when they burst from a ‘rescued’ room back into the corridor to come face to face with either another dummy or with the other team, Corporal ‘GG’ Gerrard and Trooper Robert Quayle. Likewise, when Blue Team burst out of their own ‘rescued’ room, they often did so just as a dummy popped out from behind a swinging door, or up from behind a window frame, very close to them. The chilling possibility of an ‘own goal’ was always present.
Even so, while the men had found this form of training exciting, or frightening, in the early days, by now it had become too familiar to present any novelty. To make their frustration more acute, once the figures had been ‘stitched’ with bullets, or the room ‘cleared’ of terrorists, the men then had to paste paper patches over the holes in the figures, using a paste-brush and brown paper, in order that the targets could be used again by those following them. Because they had to do this mundane task themselves – even though they were firing real weapons, exploding ISFE, and hurling stun grenades – they became increasingly bored as they made their way through the various rooms of the killing house.
Their irritation was made all the worse by the fact that a day of such training led not only to sweaty exhaustion, but to raging headaches from the acrid pall of smoke and lead fumes which filled the killing house. So, when finally they had completed their ‘rescue’ and could stumble out into the fresh air, they were immensely relieved.
‘I’ll tell you something,’ Danny Boy said later, as they were showering in the ablutions of the spider. ‘If I don’t get killed accidentally by one of you bastards during those exercises, I’ll be killed by the fucking boredom of doing them over and over again.’
‘They don’t bore me,’ Bobs-boy said. ‘I just hate the CRW suits and body armour and helmet and mask. I feel buried alive in them.’
‘You feel buried alive because you’re like the walking dead,’ GG taunted him. ‘You’re as limp as your dick, kid.’
‘Nightmares!’ Danny Boy exclaimed.
‘Dreams,’ Bobs-boy corrected him.
‘All I know,’ GG said, ‘is that we haven’t done a real job since Northern Ireland and we’ve now had four years of bullshit. One more run through that bloody killing house and I’m all set for the knacker’s yard.’
‘Or Ward 11 of the British Army Psychiatric Unit,’ Danny Boy said, ‘like Sergeant “Ten Pints and a Knuckle Sandwich” Inman.’
‘Sergeant Inman was in a psychiatric ward?’ the relatively new Bobs-boy asked incredulously.
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Shaun Clarke
Ultimate soldier. Ultimate mission. But can the SAS assault team rescue the hostages from the terrorist-held Iranian embassy?30 April 1980: six well-armed terrorists seize the Iranian Embassy in London. Nineteen Iranian nationals and four British citizens are captured.Subsequent negotiations see some hostages released, but when, on the fifth day of the siege, one of the hostages is shot dead, his body dumped outside, the time for negotiation is over. It is time to end the siege, and the only men with enough skill and daring for this dangerous task are the legendary SAS! In fact, convinced they will eventually be called in, they have already practiced a high-risk rescue operation in their top secret ‘Killing House’.On the evening of 5 May – and in the full glare of the international media – twelve SAS soldiers, dressed in black and wielding a deadly arsenal, make their courageous assault on the Embassy…
Embassy Siege
SHAUN CLARKE
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by 22 Books/Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1994
Copyright © Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1994
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover photographs © Oleg Zabielin/Alamy (soldier); Shutterstock.com (textures)
Shaun Clarke asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008155124
Ebook Edition © December 2015 ISBN: 9780008155131
Version: 2015-11-02
Contents
Cover (#u604ac074-65aa-5634-bbaa-c2858306e0d8)
Title Page (#u5d83b0f0-dae6-5b29-a0e3-5d35b031f256)
Copyright (#uf89100a0-44dd-588d-9cd4-7539906ab6c5)
Prelude (#u2f186dc4-1125-541b-b026-603d7de5afee)
Chapter 1 (#u8ffc31bd-82be-5dab-a9ce-f8219bc687e0)
Chapter 2 (#uea182437-9633-54fb-bb44-8a78beaa3f14)
Chapter 3 (#uc8406632-6cb1-5947-b855-02fe8cf6bfa2)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
OTHER TITLES IN THE SAS OPERATION SERIES (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prelude (#ub8079cee-b7cd-5aa6-ae32-4a5b05f362d6)
Number 16 Princes Gate formed part of a mid-Victorian terrace overlooking Hyde Park and had been used as the Iranian Embassy in London for more than a decade. Until 1979, it had represented the Iran ruled by Shah Reza Pahlavi and his wife, the Empress Fara Diba.
Noted for its Italianate stucco façade and prominent frieze, it was a very large building spread over three main floors and an attic. The ground floor comprised an imposing entrance hall, a large, beautifully furnished reception room, toilets, an administration office, and an expansive library overlooking the rear terrace. The main stairs led up to the first floor and the rather grand ambassador’s office, the more modest office of the chargé d’affaires, two administration offices and a storage room. The second floor contained two more administration offices, Rooms 9, 9A and 10, another toilet and a telex room. The third floor was the busiest, containing the press counsellor’s office, the press room, the commercial office, the xerox room, the switchboard, Room 19, the kitchen, a toilet, and two more administration rooms, one of which was empty. A well skylight with a glass roof, located between Room 19, the switchboard, the xerox room and the outer wall, overlooked the main stairs connecting the three floors. As the lift terminated on the second floor, the third floor could only be reached by the stairs.
When run by the Shah’s young and eligible Ambassador, Parvis Radji, the Embassy had been noted for its lavish dinner parties and largesse when it came to supplying excellent caviar, French wines, cars, free hotels and first-class travel to British diplomats, journalists and other visitors whose goodwill and assistance were vital to Iran. However, while ostentatiously maintaining this front of gracious, civilized living, the Embassy had also been used as a base for SAVAK, the Shah’s dreaded secret police, whose function was to spy on and intimidate London-based Iranians, mostly students. Many of these secret police were uneducated, unsophisticated and addicted to the Western ‘decadence’ they were supposed to despise: nightclubs, alcohol and bought women.
Such activities had, however, ended with the downfall of the Shah in January 1979. Six months after the revolution, the Ayatollahs replaced Parvis Radji with a new chargé d’affaires, Dr Ali Afrouz, a twenty-nine-year-old graduate in psychology and education. Once installed in the Embassy at Princes Gate, Ali weeded out the corrupt members of SAVAK, banned all alcohol from the premises, got rid of the more ostentatious luxuries of the previous regime, and in general ensured that Embassy business was conducted in a more modest, formal manner.
In the days of the Shah, the Embassy’s front door had been guarded by the British security company Securicor. Unfortunately, when Dr Afrouz took over, he dropped the company and gave the job to an Iranian, Abbas Fallahi, who had been the Embassy’s butler and knew precious little about security.
More knowledgeable in this area was Police Constable Trevor Lock, at that time a member of the Diplomatic Protection Group. This organization, being unable to give individual protection to each of London’s 138 embassies and High Commissions, was based at several strategic points in West London, remained constantly on alert in case of emergency, and also provided individual armed guards as part of the British Government’s token contribution to the embassies’ security.
Though not due to serve at the Iranian Embassy that morning, PC Lock agreed to stand in for a colleague who required the day off for personal matters. So it was that at approximately 1100 on 30 April, the policeman strapped his holstered standard-police issue .38 Smith and Wesson revolver to his thigh, carefully buttoned his tunic over the holster, then set out for the Embassy.
One of the most loyal members of the Embassy staff was not an Iranian, but an Englishman, Ron Morris, who had joined as an office boy twenty-five years before, when he was only fourteen. Ron had graduated to the position of chauffeur, then, when the luxuries of the Shah’s days were swept away, among them the ambassadorial Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, he was made a caretaker and general maintenance man.
Just before nine o’clock on the morning of 30 April, Ron bid a routine farewell to his Italian wife Maria and cat Gingerella, left his basement flat in Chester Street, Belgravia, and drove on his moped to the Embassy, arriving there on the dot of nine. After parking his moped against the railings, he entered the building and began work as usual.
Two hours later, Simeon ‘Sim’ Harris, a thirty-three-year-old sound recordist, and Chris Cramer, a thirty-one-year-old news organizer, both with the BBC and widely experienced in the world’s trouble spots, arrived at the Embassy to try yet again – they had tried and failed before – to obtain visas to visit Iran. They were met by the doorman, Abbas Fallahi, who led them to the reception room, located through the first door on the left in the entrance hall. While waiting there, they were joined by another visitor, Ali Tabatabai, an employee of Iran’s Bank Markazi. In London for a fourteen-week course for international bankers run by the Midland Bank, Ali was visiting the Embassy to collect a film and map of Iran for a talk he was to give as part of his course. He sat beside the two BBC men and, like them, waited patiently.
These three visitors were soon joined by Majtaba Mehrnavard, an elderly, nervous man who bought and sold Persian carpets, but was there because he was worried about his health and wished to consult the Embassy’s medical adviser, Ahmed Dagdar.
Ten minutes after the arrival of the BBC team, Mustafa Karkouti, a Syrian journalist who was the European correspondent for As-Afir, the leading Beirut newspaper, arrived to interview the Embassy’s cultural attaché, Dr Abul Fazi Ezzatti. Shown into Ezzatti’s office, Room 13 on the third floor, he was offered a cup of coffee and proceeded with his interview while drinking it.
Another newsman present was Muhammad Farughi, a fifty-year-old British national born in India. He was the editor of Impact International, a Muslim magazine based in Finsbury Park, north London. Farughi had come to the Embassy for an interview with the chargé d’affaires, Dr Ali Afrouz, for an article about the Islamic revolution in Iran, and was at once escorted to the latter’s office, at the front of the building, on the first floor, overlooking Princes Gate.
On arriving at the Embassy for his day of duty on behalf of the Diplomatic Protection Group, PC Lock took up his usual position outside, by the steps leading up to the front door. On this particular morning, however, which was particularly cold, he was offered a warming cup of tea by the sympathetic doorman, Abbas Fallahi. As it would not have been proper to have been seen drinking outside the building, the frozen policeman decided to take his tea in the small ante-room between the outside door and the heavy security doors leading to the entrance hall. So he was not present outside – and, even worse, the main door was ajar – when the six armed men from Baghdad arrived at the doorstep.
Number 105 Lexham Gardens, Earls Court Road, was rather more modest than the Iranian Embassy. An end-of-terrace Victorian house with five steps leading up to the front door, it had simulated tiles on the steps and yellow awnings above the window to give the façade the appearance of a colourful Continental hotel. Inside, it was less grand. The foyer was papered with gold-flecked wallpaper, the carpet was blood-red, and an office desk served as reception.
Flat 3, on the second floor, contained three bedrooms, two sitting-rooms, two bathrooms and a kitchen. The rooms had the tired, slightly tatty appearance of all bedsits and flats in the city, with unmatching furniture, fading wallpaper, and a combination of bare floorboards and loose, well-worn carpets.
At 9.40 a.m. on Wednesday, 30 April 1980, the six Iranians who had shared the flat with another, Sami Muhammad Ali, left it one by one and gathered in the foyer. They were all wearing anoraks to keep out the cold and to conceal the weapons they would soon collect.
The leader of the group, Oan-Ali, real name Salim Towfigh, had a frizzy Afro hairstyle, a bushy beard and sideburns. Twenty-seven years old, he was the only member of the group to speak English. His second in command was twenty-one-year-old Shakir Abdullah Fadhil, also known as Jasim or Feisal, a so-called Ministry of Industry official who favoured jeans and cowboy boots and claimed to have once been tortured by SAVAK. The others were Fowzi Badavi Nejad, known as Ali, at nineteen the youngest and smallest member of the group; the short, heavily-built Shakir Sultan Said, or Shai, twenty-three and a former mechanic whose almost blond hair fell down over his ears; Makki Hounoun Ali, twenty-five, another Baghdad mechanic who now acted as the group’s humble housekeeper; and a slim young man named Ali Abdullah, known as Nejad.
Though not as obviously dominant as Oan, Ali Abdullah was greatly respected by the others because his older brother Fa’ad was one of the most important leaders of the Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan. Fa’ad Abdullah operated in exile in Iraq and broadcast regularly for the Arabic and Farsi sections of Radio Baghdad, exhorting the Iranians to rise up against the regime of the Ayatollahs.
Ali was a serious young man. More ebullient was Makki, who informed one of the other residents that the group was heading for France. In the foyer, Ali informed the Egyptian caretaker, Ahmed, that their nine bags, weighing a total of 203lb, would be collected by David Arafat, the property agent who had rented them the flat through his Tehar Service Agency in Earls Court Road. It would then be airfreighted back to Baghdad by him. After depositing the bags with Ahmed, the group left the building.
Makki waved goodbye to those watching through the glass doors of the foyer, then blew a handful of kisses and followed the others along the pavement.
For the next hour and a half, in the steel-grey morning light, the group moved from one safe house to another, collecting an arsenal of weapons that included two deadly Skorpion W263 Polish sub-machine-guns, three Browning self-loading pistols, one .38 Astra revolver, five Soviet-made RGD5 hand-grenades, and enough ammunition for a lengthy siege. By eleven-twenty the six men were assembled in Hyde Park, near the Albert Memorial, their weapons hidden under their coats, engaged in a last-minute discussion of their plans. Just before eleven-thirty, they left the park, crossed the road, and arrived outside 16 Princes Gate. The front door of the Embassy was ajar.
After covering their faces with the loose flap of their keffias, the traditional patterned Arab headdress, so that only their eyes and noses were visible, the men removed their weapons and stormed through the open front door of the Embassy, into the entrance hall. Hearing the commotion at the outer door, PC Lock darted out of the small ante-room and was practically bowled over by the terrorists rushing in. The deafening roar of automatic fire close to his ear was followed by the sound of smashing glass. A large slice of flying glass from the inner-door panel slashed PC Lock’s cheek. Before he could remove his pistol, and as he was in the throes of sending an unfinished warning to Scotland Yard, one of the Arabs wrested the portable radio from him and another prodded his head with the barrel of a Maitraillette Vigneron M2 machine pistol. Putting up his hands, the policeman was prodded at gunpoint across the entrance hall, towards the door of reception.
Waiting there were Sim Harris, Chris Cramer, Ali Tabatabai and the highly strung Majtaba Mehrnavard, who all heard the roaring of the machine pistols, the smashing of glass and the thudding of bullets piercing the ceiling of the entrance hall. There followed frantic shouting in Arabic, then a voice bawling in Farsi: ‘Don’t move!’ Understanding the words, Ali Tabatabai wanted to go out and see what was happening, but Cramer, an experienced newsman, stopped him with a curt ‘No!’ When he and the other BBC man, Sim Harris, turned to face the wall with their hands over their heads, Ali did the same.
A few seconds later PC Lock entered the room, his hands clutching his head, his face bloody. Following him were two women who also worked in the Embassy, and following them, prodding them along with semi-automatic weapons, were more terrorists with their faces veiled in keffias.
One of the veiled terrorists, speaking in English, warned the hostages that they would be killed if they moved, then he and the other terrorists led them at gunpoint across the entrance hall and up the stairs to the second floor.
On the third floor, the journalist Mustafa Karkouti was still deeply involved in his interview with Dr Ezzatti when he heard the machine-gun fire from below. Rushing from the office, both men saw other Embassy staff rushing past, heading down the stairs. Assuming that they were heading for a fire exit, Karkouti and Ezzatti followed them, but soon found themselves in another room that had no exit at all. There were about nine people in the room, including three or four women.
To protect all those gathered in the room, the door was locked from inside. Five minutes later, however, it was kicked open and one of the terrorists entered, looking like a bandit with his keffia around his face and a pistol in one hand and a grenade in the other. After firing an intimidating shot into the ceiling, he ordered everyone to place their hands on their head and face the wall. When they had done so, another man masked with a keffia entered the room and, with the help of the first man, guided the hostages at gunpoint down the stairs to the second floor, where other Embassy staff were standing with their hands on their heads, guarded by two other masked, armed terrorists.
Ron Morris, the caretaker, was still in his office on the fourth floor. Hearing the muffled sounds of gunfire, his first thought was that a student demonstration was under way, with the police firing blank cartridges. He ran down to the first floor, where he saw PC Lock and Abbas Fallahi with their hands on their heads, being guarded by an armed Arab. Morris instantly turned around and went back up to the second floor, where he passed an accountant, Mr Moheb. On asking the accountant what was happening, he received only a blank, dazed look. The caretaker hurried up to his office on the fourth floor, planning to phone the police, but just as he was dialling 999, he heard shouting and running feet on the stairs. Not wanting to be caught with the phone in his hand, he put it down and sat behind his desk until an armed terrorist entered. Speaking in English, the terrorist ordered him to leave the room, then prodded him at gunpoint down the stairs to Room 9A on the second floor, normally occupied by the Embassy’s medical adviser, Dr Dadgar, but now filled with many hostages, all with their hands either against the wall or on their heads.
One of the gunmen searched the hostages. After frisking Morris, finding his spectacle case and throwing it to the floor, the gunman searched PC Lock, but in a manner so inept that he failed to find the policeman’s holstered pistol.
While this search was going on, other members of the Embassy staff were managing to flee the building. Zari Afkhami, who was in charge of the medical section, had her office at the rear of the ground floor. Hearing the gunshots and shouting, she opened the door, stepped into the hall, and saw a gunman prodding PC Lock in the chest with a gun. Running back into her office and closing the door behind her, she alerted an elderly clerk who had a weak heart. Afkhami opened the window and climbed out, followed by the clerk. Catching sight of two workmen at the rear of the building, she asked them to call the police.
Another official escaped by boldly climbing out onto the first-floor balcony and making his way across a parapet to the Ethiopian Embassy next door.
One who attempted to escape, but failed, was the chargé d’affaires, Dr Afrouz, who was still being interviewed by the Muslim journalist Muhammad Farughi in his office on the first floor when the attack began. Hearing gunfire and shouting, both men went to the office door, where Farughi was instantly seized by a terrorist. Afrouz managed to make it back across to the rear of his office, where he clambered out through the window. Unfortunately, in his haste he fell, spraining his wrist and bruising his face badly. Hauled back in by the terrorists, he was prodded at gunpoint into a room where there were no other prisoners. There, one of the gunmen fired a shot into the ceiling, possibly to intimidate Afrouz. He then led the limping diplomat out of the room up the stairs to the second floor, where he was placed in Room 9A with the other prisoners.
Shocked by the appearance of the injured diplomat, and assuming that he had been beaten up by one of the terrorists, Ron Morris asked one of the terrorists for some water. He bathed Afrouz’s face, then examined his jaw and confirmed that it was not broken. The chargé d’affaires, still shocked and in pain, fell asleep soon afterwards.
Informed of the attack on the Embassy, the police were already gathering outside. An officer entered the back garden, where he saw an armed Arab looking down at him from an upstairs window. Aiming his pistol at the terrorist, the police officer asked what the group wanted.
‘If you take one more step you’ll be shot,’ the Arab replied in English.
By eleven-forty-five Scotland Yard knew that one of its men, PC Lock, was one of the hostages, that he belonged to the Diplomatic Protection Group, and that he had been armed. This last fact, combined with the information that gunshots had been heard, gave them further cause for concern.
By midday, the Embassy was surrounded by police cars and vans, ambulances, reporters, press photographers, and armed policemen wearing bulletproof vests. Other police officers were on the roof of the building, clearing spectators from the balconies of the adjoining buildings. More police were across the road, opposite the Embassy, clearing people out of the park and sealing off the area.
The siege had commenced.
1 (#ub8079cee-b7cd-5aa6-ae32-4a5b05f362d6)
The wind was howling over the Brecon Beacons as Staff-Sergeant Bill Harrison, huddled behind a rock for protection, surveyed the vast slopes of the Pen-y-Fan to find his four-man CRW (Counter Revolutionary Warfare) team. The men, he knew, would be feeling disgruntled because the tab he was making them undergo they had all endured before, during Initial Selection and Training, with all the horrors of Sickeners One and Two. The four men now climbing the steep, rocky slope were experienced SAS troopers who had fought in Aden, Oman or Belfast, and none required a second dose of the ‘Long Drag’ or ‘Fan Dance’ across this most inhospitable of mountain ranges – or, at least, would not have done so had they been asked to do it while carrying an Ingram 9mm sub-machine-gun and a 55lb bergen rucksack.
This time, however, there was a slight but diabolical turning of the screw: they were making the same arduous tab while wearing heavy CRW body armour, including ceramic plates front and back, and while breathing through a respirator mask fixed to a ballistic helmet. In short, they were being forced to endure hell on earth.
That was only part of it. Staff-Sergeant Harrison had not only ordered them to climb to the summit of the mountain, but had then informed them that he would be giving them a thirty-minute head start, then following them to simulate pursuit by a real enemy. Thus, even as they would be fighting against exhaustion caused by the heavy body armour and murderous climb, as well as possible claustrophobia or disorientation caused by the cumbersome helmet and respirator mask, they would be compelled to concentrate on keeping out of Harrison’s sub-machine-gun sight. This would place an even greater strain on them.
In fact, they had already failed in their task. Even though wearing his own body armour and head gear to ensure that his men would not feel he was asking them to do what he could not, the tough-as-nails staff-sergeant had taken another route up the mountain – to ensure that he was unseen by his men while they were always in his sight – and circled around them to take up this position above them, just below the rocky, wind-blown summit. The men would be broken up when they found him blocking their path, emulating an enemy sniper; but that, also, was part of this lesson in endurance.
Harrison had been a member of the ‘Keeni Meeni’ assassination squads in Aden in 1966, survived the incredible SAS hike up the mighty Jebel Dhofar in Oman in 1971 and, in 1976, spent days on end in freezing observation posts in the ‘bandit country’ of south Armagh, sweating it out, waiting to ambush IRA terrorists. For this reason he knew all about endurance and insisted that his men be prepared for it.
They had already lost this one, but they were still good men. Hiding behind his rock, one hand resting lightly on his PRC 319 radio, the other on his Ingram 9mm sub-machine-gun, which was loaded with live ammunition, Harrison watched the men advancing arduously up the slope and recalled how their work in Northern Ireland and led to their induction into the CRW.
All four men – Lance-Corporal Philip McArthur and Troopers Danny ‘Baby Face’ Porter, Alan Pyle and Ken Passmore – had been shipped in civilian clothing to Belfast immediately after being ‘badged’ in 1976. There they had specialized in intelligence gathering and ambush operations, working both in unmarked ‘Q’ cars in the streets and in OPs on the green hills of Armagh. By the end of their tour of duty in Northern Ireland, they were widely experienced in intelligence operations and therefore ideal material for special training in the ‘killing house’ in Hereford and subsequent transfer from their individual squadrons – B and D – to the Counter Revolutionary Warfare Wing.
Once in the CRW Wing, they were given more Close Quarters Battle (CQB) training in the ‘killing house’, then sent for various periods to train even more intensively with West Germany’s CSG-9 border police and France’s Groupement d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale (GIGN) paramilitary counter-terrorist units, the Bizondere Bystand Eenheid (BBE) counter-terrorist arm of the Royal Netherlands Marine Corps, Italy’s Nucleo Operativo di Sicurezza (NOCS), Spain’s Grupo Especial de Operaciones (GEO), and the US 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment, created specially for CRW operations.
The overseas postings had been designed to place a special emphasis on physical training and marksmanship. These included advanced, highly dangerous practice at indoor firing with live ammunition in other kinds of ‘killing houses’, such as mock-up aircraft, ships and public streets; abseiling and parachuting onto rooftops, parked aircraft and boats; hostage rescue in a variety of circumstances (which had the cross-over element of training in skiing, mountaineering and scuba diving); and the handling of CS gas canisters, and stun, fire and smoke grenades. Finally, they were taught how to deal with the hostages, physically and psychologically, once they had been rescued.
So, Harrison thought, those four hiking up the last yards to the summit of this mountain are going to be bitterly surprised at having lost – but they’re still good men.
By now the four men were only about 20 yards below him, fifty from the summit, and obviously thinking they had managed to make it to the top without being caught. Wearing their all-black CRW overalls, respirator masks and NBC hoods, they looked frightening, but that did not deter Harrison. Smiling grimly, he raised his Ingram 9mm sub-machine-gun with its thirty-two-round magazine, pressed the extended stock into his shoulder, aimed at the marching men through his sight, then fired a short burst.
The noise broke the silence brutally. Harrison moved the gun steadily from left to right, tearing up soil and stones in an arc that curved mere inches in front of the marching men. Knowing that the bullets were real, they scuttled off the track in opposite directions, hurling themselves to the ground behind the shelter of rocks and screaming for Harrison to stop firing. Grinning more broadly, the staff-sergeant lowered his Ingram, put the safety-catch back on, then used the PRC 319 radio to call the leader of the four-man team, Lance-Corporal Philip McArthur.
‘You dumb bastards. You’re all dead meat,’ the message said.
Lying behind the rocks lower down the windswept slope, the four men received the message with incredulity, then, almost instinctively, turned their surprised gaze to the exploded soil that had cut an arc just a short distance in front of where they had been walking, practically up to their feet.
‘I don’t believe it!’ Trooper Alan Pyle exclaimed, removing his respirator mask from his face as the others did the same, all relieved to be breathing pure, freezing air. ‘That daft bastard was using live ammo and nearly shot our fucking toes off.’
‘He’s too good for that,’ Trooper Danny ‘Baby Face’ Porter said. ‘If he’d wanted to shoot your toes off, you can be sure he’d have done it.’
‘Just like you, eh?’ said the third trooper, Ken Passmore, grinning admiringly. ‘A real crack shot.’
‘Yeah,’ Baby Face replied with modest pride. ‘I suppose you could say that.’
‘All right, all right,’ snapped Lance-Corporal Phil McArthur. ‘Stop the backslapping. We’ve nothing to be proud of. After all, we were as good as dead. Now let’s pick up our gear and go and face the great man.’
Breathing more easily without the masks, but crushed by being ‘killed’ by Harrison, the men picked up their weapons and other kit and advanced up the hill until they reached the staff-sergeant. Squatting behind the rock with a big grin on his face, Harrison was strapping the PRC 319 to his shoulders and picking up his Ingram.
‘Nice try, men,’ he said, ‘but if this had been a real operation you’d all be belly up by now. Are you SAS men or not?’
‘Fucking ’ell, Sarge,’ Phil McArthur protested as he glanced back down the mountain at the broad sweep of the Brecon Beacons far below. ‘We could hardly breathe in these bloody masks. And that hike was a killer.’
‘Piece of piss,’ Harrison replied. ‘I got this far without taking a deep breath. I think you need some more exercise.’
The men stared warily at him. All of them were breathing heavily and still bathed in sweat, even though the wind was howling across the mountain, slapping icily at them.
‘No more exercise, please,’ Ken Passmore said, already drained. ‘I can’t move another inch.’
Harrison grinned with sly malice. ‘What were your instructions, Trooper?’
‘To get to the summit of the mountain,’ Ken replied, ‘without being shot or captured by you.’
‘Which you were.’
‘Right.’
‘Which doesn’t mean it’s over, you daft prat. You’ve still got to get to the summit, so get up and go, all of you.’
In disbelief the breathless men glanced up to the summit, which was 50 yards higher up, though the distance seemed far greater and the steepness of the climb was horrendous.
‘Jesus, Sarge,’ Alan complained. ‘After the climb we’ve just made, that last leg is going to be impossible.’
‘Right,’ Ken said. ‘That slope is a killer.’
‘Either you make that climb,’ Harrison told them, ‘or I have you RTU’d and standing by dusk on Platform 4, Hereford Station, outward bound. Get the message?’
‘Yes, Sarge.’
‘Come on,’ Baby Face shouted. ‘Let’s get up and go.’
Though still trying to get their breath back, the weary men covered their heads and faces again with the respirator masks and ballistic helmets, humped their bergens onto their backs, picked up their Ingrams and reluctantly began the steep climb to the summit.
Within a few yards they were already gasping for breath, their feet slipping on smooth rocks, bodies tensed against the wind, the sweat soon dripping from their foreheads into their eyes. Twenty yards on, where the wind was even more fierce, the slope rose at an angle so steep it was almost vertical. Holding their sub-machine-guns in one hand and clinging to rocks with the other, they laboriously hauled themselves up until, about 20 yards from the summit, all of them except Baby Face decided to give in. Falling behind, they just leaned against high rocks, fighting to regain their breath, about to call it a day.
Harrison’s Ingram roared into life as he fired a short burst in an arc that tore up earth and pieces of splintered rock mere inches from the feet of the men who had given up. Shocked, they lurched away from the spitting soil and scrambled with a strength they had felt had been drained out of them up the last, cruel section of the slope. Each time they fell back, another roar from the Ingram, ripping up the soil and rocks just behind the men, forced them to move hastily higher, finally following Baby Face off the sheer slope and onto the more even summit.
When the last of them had clambered onto the highest point, gasping but still surprised at their hitherto untapped stamina, Harrison followed them up and told them to remove the masks and breathe proper air. When the men had done so, they were able to look down on the fabulous panorama of the Brecon Beacons, spread out all around them, wreathed in mist, streaked with sunshine, thousands of feet below. Lying there, now completely exhausted, they gulped the fresh, freezing air, grateful that they would at last be able to take a good break.
Just as they were about to have a brew-up, a message came through on the radio. Harrison listened intently, then said: ‘Got it, boss. Over and out.’ Replacing the microphone on its hook, he turned to his weary men. ‘Sorry, lads, no brew-up yet. We’ve got to return straightaway. The Iranian Embassy in London has been seized and we’re being put on stand-by. This isn’t a mock exercise. It’s the real thing. So pack your kit and let’s hike back to the RV.’
Recharged by the prospect of real action, the men hurriedly packed up and began the hazardous descent.
2 (#ub8079cee-b7cd-5aa6-ae32-4a5b05f362d6)
By three p.m. on the first day, in a basement office in Whitehall a top-level crisis management team known as COBR, representing the Cabinet Office Briefing Room, was having a tense discussion about the raid on the Iranian Embassy. Presiding over the meeting was a man of some eminence, addressed as the ‘Secretary’, Junior Defence and Foreign Affairs ministers, representatives of MI5 and the Metropolitan Police, including the Police Commissioner, and the overall commander of the SAS CBQ team, addressed as the ‘Controller’, though in fact he was much more than that when it came to issues involving international politics and the defence of the realm.
‘The function of this meeting,’ the surprisingly genial and unruffled Secretary said, ‘is to lay down guidelines for the police and, if necessary, the Army. First, however, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police will fill us in on the general situation.’
The Commissioner cleared his throat and sized up his audience before speaking. ‘The Embassy is being held by a six-man team of Iranians who were trained in Iraq, issued with Iraqi passports, and supplied with weapons brought in by diplomatic bag from Baghdad. We now know that they all visited the British Embassy in Baghdad last February to pick up individual visas to visit the UK. When asked how they would live in the UK, they each produced the same amount of cash: £275. In each case the purpose of the visit was recorded as being for medical treatment. Once in London, they were placed under the command of an Iraqi army officer, Sami Muhammad Ali, who flew home the day the siege began.’
‘Who’s leading them now?’ the Secretary asked.
The Commissioner showed them a picture of a well-built Arab with frizzy hair, a bushy beard and long sideburns. ‘The ringleader, Oan-Ali,’ he said. ‘Real name Salim Towfigh. Twenty-seven years old. Records show that he comes from Al Muhammara in the Khuzistan province of Iran, just across the Shatt-al-Arab river border with Iraq. Studied languages and law at Tehran University, where he became politically active and eventually militant. Fluent in four languages: Farsi, Arabic, German and English. He’s believed to be one of those who took part in the riots that occurred there on 29 May last year, when 220 men and women in the crowd were reported killed and approximately 600 wounded. Certainly he was imprisoned and tortured by SAVAK, which only made him more militant. On 31 March this year he turned up with four other Arabs in Earls Court Road, where they took two flats at 20 Nevern Place. One of the flats was on the second floor, the other in the basement. Only three of the men signed the register: Oan-Ali, Makki Hounoun Ali, and Shakir Abdullah Fadhil. The caretaker was an Iraqi student studying computer engineering. He says he didn’t examine their passports thoroughly, though he noted that they were issued in Iraq. The men told him they had just flown in from Baghdad. Apart from that, the caretaker learnt little about them. They claimed to have met each other by chance on the plane to London. One said he was a farmer, the other a student, the third a mechanic. The group is particularly remembered by the caretaker and other members of the household because, though Muslims, they came in late at night, invariably drunk and often with local prostitutes. Eventually, when they became embroiled in an argument over prices with one of the ladies in the basement flat, the caretaker, a devout Muslim, threw them out of the house.’
‘Sounds like they weren’t particularly sophisticated,’ the Secretary said. ‘Muslims seduced instantly by Western ways: alcohol and sex. Certainly not very disciplined.’
‘That’s worth bearing in mind,’ the Controller said. ‘A lack of discipline in a siege situation could go either way: either helping us to succeed or leading to mayhem and slaughter.’
Deliberately pausing to let the Controller’s words sink in, the Commissioner then continued reading from his notes: ‘After being thrown out of the house in Nevern Place, the terrorists dropped into the Tehar Service Agency, an accommodation agency run by a Jordanian named David Arafat and specializing in Arab clients with plenty of money and often dubious intentions. Arafat rarely asked questions of his clients, but claims that Oan-Ali told him he had left his previous accommodation because his group had been joined by two other friends and they needed larger accommodation. Subsequently, Arafat fixed them up with Flat 3, 105 Lexham Gardens, just a few hundred yards north of his Earls Court Road office.’
‘And were there more men at this point?’ the Controller asked.
‘No,’ the Commissioner replied. ‘It was the same five who had been in Nevern Place who took over the flat in Lexham Gardens. However, the flat has three bedrooms, two sitting-rooms, two bathrooms and a kitchen, and according to the Egyptian caretaker, the five-man group grew to seven over the next few days. After that, there were times when as many as a dozen men would be there at the same time.’
‘Do we know who the others were?’ the Controller asked.
‘No. We do know, however, that some of the others in his group are former members of the Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan and that one of them, Fa’ad, broadcasts for the Arabic and Farsi sections of Radio Baghdad, exhorting the people of Iran to rise up against the regime of the Ayatollahs.’
As the Controller nodded and wrote in his notebook, the Commissioner concentrated once more on the file opened on the table before him. ‘Intelligence has reason to believe that though Oan-Ali led the raid, he didn’t actually plan it himself. One of those who moved into 105 Lexham Gardens was Sami Muhammad Ali, an Iraqi army officer described in his passport as an official of the Iraqi Ministry of Industry. Other meetings which Ali was known to have attended took place at 55 and 24 Queens Gate, the latter only two doors up from the office of the Iraqi military attaché.’
‘How ironic!’ the Secretary purred, smiling like a Cheshire cat.
‘Finally,’ the Commissioner continued reading, ‘on 29 April, the day before the seizure of the Embassy, it was Oan-Ali who visited David Arafat, the property agent, to tell him that his friends were leaving Lexham Gardens – supposedly going to Bristol for a week, then returning to Iraq. He asked Arafat to crate their baggage and air-freight it back to Baghdad. The address he gave was a post-box number. By the following morning, when the rest of the group seized the Embassy, Oan-Ali had disappeared.’
‘How many hostages?’ the Controller asked.
‘Twenty-two in all. Fifteen Iranians, the British caretaker, one Diplomatic Protection Group police constable, and five visitors, four of whom are journalists. The DPG constable, PC Lock, had a pistol concealed on his person and may still possess it.’
‘That could be helpful,’ the Secretary said with a hopeful smile.
‘Or dangerous,’ the Controller reminded him, then turned back to the Commissioner. ‘Do we know more about the hostages?’
‘One is Mustafa Karkouti, the European correspondent for As-Afir, the leading Beirut newspaper. Thirty-seven years old, he’s Syrian by birth, but educated in Damascus and Beirut. He was known to be pursuing the story of the hostages held by Iranian students at the American Embassy in Tehran. We also know that a month ago he attended an Islamic conference in London, to hear a speech by the Iranian Embassy’s cultural attaché, Dr Abul Fazi Ezzatti. He then fixed up a meeting with Dr Ezzatti at the Embassy for Wednesday, 30 April, at eleven a.m. He was there when the terrorists seized the building.’
‘Any use to us?’ the Secretary asked.
‘Could be. He speaks fluent English and Arabic, as well as a fair bit of Farsi.’
‘That could come in handy.’
‘Exactly. Also useful is the fact that Karkouti works out of Fleet Street and lives with his wife and child in Ealing. He therefore knows the English mentality, as well as the Iranian, which could be helpful to my negotiators.’
‘Who else?’
‘Ron Morris, a forty-seven-year-old Englishman, born in Battersea, London. Son of the station-master at Waterloo. Left school at fourteen, spent six months in a factory in Battersea, then obtained a job as an office boy for the Iranian Embassy. That was in 1947 and, apart from his two years’ National Service, he’s worked for the Iranians ever since – first as an office boy, then as a chauffeur, and finally as caretaker and general maintenance man. In 1970, when he’d been with them for twenty-five years, he was given a long-service bonus of a ten-day trip to Iran.’
‘Is he political?’
‘No, Mr Secretary. He’s a regular, down-to-earth type, not easily ruffled. Reportedly, he views himself as being above politics. Lives with an Italian wife and a cat in a basement flat in Chester Street, Belgravia. Collects replica guns. His work for the Iranians is certainly not political.’
‘So he could be useful.’
‘Yes and no. As the maintenance man, he knows every nook and cranny in the building. That knowledge could encourage him to try to escape.’
‘And the others?’
‘The Diplomatic Protection Group’s Police Constable Trevor Lock. Known as a good man. He had a standard police-issue .38 Smith and Wesson revolver holstered on the thigh and so far there’s no report that the terrorists have found it. According to a recent report, however, Lock was slightly hurt and is bleeding from the face.’
‘Have the hostages made contact yet?’
‘Yes, Mr Secretary. Ninety minutes after the seizure of the Embassy, the terrorists asked for a woman doctor to be sent in. At first we assumed this was for PC Lock, but in fact it was for the Embassy Press Officer, Mrs Frieda Mozafarian, who’s had a series of fainting fits combined with muscular spasms. Lock is apparently OK – just a little bruised and bloody.’
‘So how do we handle this?’ the Secretary asked.
The Commissioner coughed into his fist. ‘First, the police will negotiate with the terrorists. Undoubtedly the terrorists will want media coverage of their demands, so we’ll use this as a bargaining chip. As their demands won’t be directed at the British Government, but at the Iranians, we can afford to cede this to them.’
He paused, waiting for their reaction.
‘Go on,’ the Secretary said, clasping his hands under his chin and looking disingenuously benign.
‘Having met them halfway with media exposure for their demands,’ the Commissioner continued, ‘we try to talk them out, letting the affair stretch on for as long as necessary. During that period, we’ll attempt to soften them up with food, medical attention, communications, more access to the media, and the involvement of their own ambassadors and those of other friendly Middle Eastern states. We’ll also ask for the release of certain hostages, particularly those ill or wounded. This will not only reduce the number of hostages to be dealt with, but encourage the terrorists to feel that they’re contributing to a real, on-going dialogue. In fact, what we’ll be doing is buying enough time for the police and MI5 to plant miniature listening devices inside the building and also scan it with parabolic directional microphones and thermal imagers. Between these, they should at least show us just where the hostages are being held.’
‘And what happens when the terrorists’ patience runs out?’
‘Should negotiations fail and, particularly, if the terrorists kill a hostage, or hostages, clearance will be given for the SAS to attack the building.’
The Home Secretary turned his attention to the Controller, who looked handsome in his beret with winged-dagger badge. ‘Are you prepared for this?’
‘Yes, sir. The operation will be codenamed “Pagoda”. We’ll use the entire counter-terrorist squadron: a command group of four officers plus a fully equipped support team consisting of one officer and twenty-five other ranks, ready to move at thirty minutes’ notice. A second team, replicating the first, will remain on a three-hour stand-by until the first team has left the base. A third team, if required, can be composed from experienced SAS soldiers. The close-quarters support teams are backed up by sniper groups who will pick off targets from outside the Embassy and specially trained medical teams to rescue and resuscitate the hostages.’
‘You are, of course, aware of the importance of police primacy in this matter?’
The Controller nodded. ‘Yes, Mr Secretary. Coincidentally, we’ve just been preparing for a joint exercise with the Northumbria Police Force, so the men and equipment are all in place at Hereford. That’s only 150 miles, or less than three hours’ drive, away. We’re ready to roll, sir.’
‘Excellent.’ The Secretary turned to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. ‘Do you have any problems with this scenario?’
‘No,’ the Commissioner replied. ‘My views today are those of Sir Robert Mark regarding the Spaghetti House siege of 1975. Those terrorists will either come out to enter a prison cell or end up in a mortuary. They’ll have no other option.’
Some of the men smiled. The Home Secretary, looking satisfied, spread his hands out on the table. ‘To summarize, gentlemen…There will be no surrender to the terrorists. No safe conduct for the terrorists out of the country. Either this affair ends peacefully, with the surrender of the terrorists, or the SAS go in and bring them out, dead or alive. Agreed?’
The men of COBR were in total agreement.
3 (#ub8079cee-b7cd-5aa6-ae32-4a5b05f362d6)
As the team on the Pen-y-Fan were contending with the arduous return hike to the four-ton Bedford lorry that would take them back to Bradbury Lines, the SAS base in Hereford, another team, consisting of Staff-Sergeant ‘Jock’ Thompson, Corporal George ‘GG’ Gerrard, Lance-Corporal Dan ‘Danny Boy’ Reynolds and Trooper Robert ‘Bobs-boy’ Quayle were dressing up in heavy CRW Bristol body armour with high-velocity ceramic plates, S6 respirator masks to protect them from CS gas, black ballistic helmets and skin-tight aviator’s gloves in the ‘spider’, their eight-legged dormitory area, in the same base in Hereford. They did not take too much pleasure in doing so.
‘I hate this fucking gear,’ Corporal ‘GG’ Gerrard complained, slipping on his black flying gloves. ‘I feel like a bloody deep-sea diver, but I’m walking on dry land.’
‘I agree,’ Lance-Corporal ‘Danny Boy’ Reynolds said, adjusting the ballistic helmet on his head and reluctantly picking up his respirator. ‘This shit makes me feel seasick.’
‘I hate the sea,’ the relatively new man, Trooper ‘Bobs-boy’ Quayle, said grimly, ‘so these suits give me nightmares.’
‘Excuse me?’ Staff-Sergeant ‘Jock’ Thompson asked.
‘What, Sarge?’ Bobs-boy replied.
‘Did I hear you say that suit gives you nightmares?’
‘That’s right, Sarge, you heard me right.’
‘So what the fuck are you doing in this CT team?’ Thompson asked.
Bobs-boy shrugged. ‘I’m pretty good with the Ingram,’ he explained, ‘close quarters battle.’
‘But you suffer from nightmares.’
The trooper started to look uncomfortable. ‘Well…I didn’t mean it literally. I just meant…’
Danny Boy laughed. ‘Literally? What kind of word is that? Is that some kind of new SAS jargon?’
‘He’s an intellectual,’ GG explained.
‘Who gets nightmares,’ Danny Boy added.
‘A nightmare-sufferer and an intellectual prat to boot,’ Jock clarified. ‘And we’ve got him on our team!’
‘I didn’t mean…’ Bobs-boy began.
‘Then you shouldn’t have said it,’ the staff-sergeant interjected. ‘If you get nightmares over CRW gear, we don’t want you around here, kid.’
‘Dreams,’ Bobs-boy said quickly. ‘I meant dreams. Really nice ones as well, Sarge. Not nightmares at all. I dream a lot about scuba diving and things like that, so this gear suits me nicely, thanks.’
‘You can see how he got badged,’ GG told the others with a wink. ‘It’s his talent for knowing which way the winds blows and always saying the right thing.’
‘The only sound that pleases me is his silence,’ Jock said, ‘and I’d like that right now. Put those respirators on your ugly mugs and let’s get to the killing house.’
‘Yes, boss,’ they all chimed, then covered their faces with the respirator masks. Though this kept them from talking casually, they could still communicate, albeit with eerie distortion, through their Davies Communications CT100E headset and microphone. However, once the respirators were attached to the black ballistic helmets, they looked like goggle-eyed deep-sea monsters with enormously bulky, black-and-brown, heavily armoured bodies – inhuman and frightening.
‘Can you all hear me?’ Jock asked, checking his communications system.
‘Check, Corporal Gerrard.’
‘Check, Lance-Corporal Reynolds.’
‘Check, Trooper Quayle.’
All the men gave the thumbs-up sign as they responded. When the last of them – Bobs-boy – stuck his thumb up, Jock did the same, then used a hand signal to indicate that they should follow him out of the spider.
After cocking the action of their weapons, they introduced live rounds to the chamber, applied the safety-catch, then proceeded to the first of six different ‘killing rooms’ in the CQB House for a long day’s practice. Here they fired ‘double taps’ from the Browning 9mm High Power handgun, known as the ‘9-milly’, and short bursts from their Ingram 9mm sub-machine-guns, at various pop-up ‘figure eleven’ targets. They were also armed with real Brocks Pyrotechnics MX5 stun grenades.
The ‘killing house’ had been constructed to train SAS troopers in the skills required to shoot assassins or kidnappers in the close confines of a building without hitting the hostage. As he led his men into the building, Jock felt a definite underlying resentment about what he was doing.
The Regiment’s first real experience in urban terrorism had been in Palestine, where SAS veteran Major Roy Farran had conceived the idea of having men infiltrate the urban population by dressing up as natives and then assassinating known enemies at close quarters, usually with a couple of shots from a handgun. Though Jock had never worked with Farran, he had been a very young man in Aden in 1964 when Farran’s basic theories had been used as the basis for the highly dangerous work of the Keeni Meeni squads operating in the souks and bazaars. There, teams of men, including Jock, all specially trained in CQB and disguised as Arabs, had mingled with the locals to gun down known Yemeni guerrillas.
Loving his work, dangerous though it had been, Jock had been shocked by the extent of his boredom when, back in Britain, he had been RTU’d to his original unit, the 2nd Battalion, Scots Guards, for a long bout of post-Suez inactivity. Though he subsequently married and had children – Tom, Susan, then Ralph, now all in their teens – he had never managed completely to settle down into the routine of peacetime army life.
For that reason he had applied for a transfer to the SAS, endured the horrors of Initial Selection and Training, followed by Continuation Training and parachute jumping in Borneo. Badged, he had fought with the Regiment in Oman in the early 1970s. Unfortunately, he returned from Oman to more years of relative boredom until 1976, when he was posted to Northern Ireland, where, in Belfast and south Armagh, he learnt just about all there was to know about close-quarters counter-terrorist warfare.
Posted back from Northern Ireland, Jock was again suffering the blues of boredom when, luckily for him, the Commanding Officer of 22 SAS decided to keep his CQB specialists busy by having them train bodyguards for overseas heads of state supportive of British interests. One of those chosen for this dangerous, though oddly glamorous, task was Jock, who, bored with his perfectly good marriage, was delighted to be able to travel the world with diplomatic immunity and a Browning 9mm High Power handgun hidden in the cross-draw position under his well-cut grey suit.
During those years, when most routine close protection of UK diplomats in political hotspots was handled by the Royal Military Police, the SAS were still being called in when the situation was particularly dangerous. For this reason, the need for men specially trained in close-quarters work led to the formation of the Counter Revolutionary Warfare Wing.
In Munich in September 1972, the Palestinian terrorist group Black September took over an Olympic Games village dormitory and held Israeli athletes hostage, leading to a bloody battle with West German security forces in which all the hostages, five terrorists and one police officer were killed. The shocked West German and French governments responded by forming their own anti-terrorist squads. In Britain, this led to the formation of a special SAS Counter-Terrorist (CT) team that would always be available at short notice to deal with hijacks and sieges anywhere in the United Kingdom. Those men, like their predecessors in Aden and in the CRW, had been trained in the ‘killing house’. Jock Thompson was one of them.
The CQB House is dubbed the ‘killing house’ for two good reasons. The first is that its purpose is to train men to kill at close quarters. The second is that real ammunition is used and that at least one SAS man has been killed accidentally while training with it.
Jock was mindful of this chilling fact as he led his four-man CT team into the building and along the first corridor, toward rooms specially constructed to simulate most of the situations an SAS man would encounter during a real hostage-rescue operation. The men had already been trained to enter captured buildings by a variety of means, including abseiling with ropes from the roof, sometimes firing a Browning 9mm High Power handgun with one hand as they clung to the rope with the other. This particular exercise, however, was to make them particularly skilled at distinguishing instantly between terrorist and hostage. It was done with the aid of pictures on the walls and dummies that were moved from place to place, or that popped out suddenly from behind artificial walls or up from the lower frame of windows.
This began happening as Jock and his men moved along the first corridor. Dummy figures bearing painted weapons popped out from behind opening doors or window frames to be peppered by a fusillade of bullets from the real weapons of the training team. Once the targets had looked like Russians; now they were men in anoraks and balaclava helmets.
The major accomplishment lay not in hitting the ‘terrorists’ but in not hitting a ‘hostage’ instead. This proved particularly difficult when they had less than a second to distinguish between a dummy that was armed and one that was not. To hit the latter too many times was to invite a humiliating rejection by the SAS and the ignominy of being RTU’d.
The exercise could have been mistaken for a childish game, except for one thing – like the weapons, the bullets were real.
Completing a successful advance along the first couple of corridors, Jock’s team then had to burst into various rooms, selected from drawings of the reconstructed killing house, shown to them during their briefing.
The CT team is divided into two specialist groups: the assault group, who enter the building, and the ‘perimeter containment’ group, consisting of snipers who provide a cordon sanitaire around the scene. In this instance, Jock and his men were acting as an assault group. This meant that they had to burst into a room in pairs and instantly fire two pistol rounds or short, controlled bursts of automatic fire – the famed SAS ‘double tap’ – into each terrorist, aiming for the head, without causing injury to either fellow team members or the hostages.
Reaching their selected rooms, the four-man team divided into two pairs, each with its own room to clear. Leading Red Team, with Danny Boy as his back-up, Jock blasted the metal lock off with a burst from his Remington 870 pump-action shotgun, dropped to one knee as the lock blew apart, with pieces of wood and metal flying out in all directions, then cocked the Browning pistol in his free hand and bawled for Danny Boy to go in.
The lance-corporal burst in ahead of Thompson, hurling an instantaneous safety electric fuse before him as he went. The thunderous flash of the ISFE exploded around both men as they rushed in and made their choice between a number of targets – the terrorists standing, the hostages sitting in chairs. They took out the former without hitting the latter, delivering accurate double taps to the head in each case.
Each man had his own preselected arc of fire, which prevented him hitting one of his own men. In this instance, the two men could easily have done this when they burst from a ‘rescued’ room back into the corridor to come face to face with either another dummy or with the other team, Corporal ‘GG’ Gerrard and Trooper Robert Quayle. Likewise, when Blue Team burst out of their own ‘rescued’ room, they often did so just as a dummy popped out from behind a swinging door, or up from behind a window frame, very close to them. The chilling possibility of an ‘own goal’ was always present.
Even so, while the men had found this form of training exciting, or frightening, in the early days, by now it had become too familiar to present any novelty. To make their frustration more acute, once the figures had been ‘stitched’ with bullets, or the room ‘cleared’ of terrorists, the men then had to paste paper patches over the holes in the figures, using a paste-brush and brown paper, in order that the targets could be used again by those following them. Because they had to do this mundane task themselves – even though they were firing real weapons, exploding ISFE, and hurling stun grenades – they became increasingly bored as they made their way through the various rooms of the killing house.
Their irritation was made all the worse by the fact that a day of such training led not only to sweaty exhaustion, but to raging headaches from the acrid pall of smoke and lead fumes which filled the killing house. So, when finally they had completed their ‘rescue’ and could stumble out into the fresh air, they were immensely relieved.
‘I’ll tell you something,’ Danny Boy said later, as they were showering in the ablutions of the spider. ‘If I don’t get killed accidentally by one of you bastards during those exercises, I’ll be killed by the fucking boredom of doing them over and over again.’
‘They don’t bore me,’ Bobs-boy said. ‘I just hate the CRW suits and body armour and helmet and mask. I feel buried alive in them.’
‘You feel buried alive because you’re like the walking dead,’ GG taunted him. ‘You’re as limp as your dick, kid.’
‘Nightmares!’ Danny Boy exclaimed.
‘Dreams,’ Bobs-boy corrected him.
‘All I know,’ GG said, ‘is that we haven’t done a real job since Northern Ireland and we’ve now had four years of bullshit. One more run through that bloody killing house and I’m all set for the knacker’s yard.’
‘Or Ward 11 of the British Army Psychiatric Unit,’ Danny Boy said, ‘like Sergeant “Ten Pints and a Knuckle Sandwich” Inman.’
‘Sergeant Inman was in a psychiatric ward?’ the relatively new Bobs-boy asked incredulously.
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Shaun Clarke
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Шпионские детективы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 25.04.2024
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О книге: Ultimate soldier. Ultimate mission. But can the SAS assault team rescue the hostages from the terrorist-held Iranian embassy?30 April 1980: six well-armed terrorists seize the Iranian Embassy in London. Nineteen Iranian nationals and four British citizens are captured.Subsequent negotiations see some hostages released, but when, on the fifth day of the siege, one of the hostages is shot dead, his body dumped outside, the time for negotiation is over. It is time to end the siege, and the only men with enough skill and daring for this dangerous task are the legendary SAS! In fact, convinced they will eventually be called in, they have already practiced a high-risk rescue operation in their top secret ‘Killing House’.On the evening of 5 May – and in the full glare of the international media – twelve SAS soldiers, dressed in black and wielding a deadly arsenal, make their courageous assault on the Embassy…