Shaun Clarke - Embassy Siege

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 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.