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.
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
