Braver Men Walk Away Read online

  The bombs had been placed in parcels for international Air Mail. The targeting was entirely indiscriminate: there was no way the bomber could have known which aircraft would be operating the route because all scheduled carriers convey Air Mail.

  As a device it had been simple enough: batteries and explosive wired to a detonator via an altitude-sensitive barometric switch. The higher an aircraft flies, the lower the pressure falls. A barometric switch detects the decrease in pressure and, when it declines to a point predetermined by the bomber, allows current to flow between battery and detonator to initiate detonation and explosion of the main charge. Obviously, the key to the bomb’s operation was the functioning of the barometric switch. If conditions similar to those of a high-flying aircraft could be replicated, then international package post could be screened before going into an aircraft’s hold. The only problem was, how do you duplicate the conditions of a jet at 30,000 feet?

  At Hounslow we were asked if we could devise a method of simulating the depressurization effect; Air Mail packages carried by BEA and BOAC could then be handled very much more quickly. In the wake of the 21 February explosions, all such mail was being manually checked before loading.

  We had worked out a theoretical solution to the depressurization problem; now it was time to test it out on the edges of Heathrow Airport. We transported a large galvanized iron watertank to our little patch of noisy desolation; the structure (around 7’ × 3’ × 3’) was big enough to house three or four mailbags at a time. Next we wrapped the tank in a preposterously voluminous ‘Driclad’ heavy-duty plastic bag. It looked bizarre but, when closed, the bag ensured a completely airtight covering. We then installed a valve which ran through from the bag’s outer skin and into the tank. When coupled up to a vacuum pump, the valve allowed us to evacuate air from the tank’s reinforced interior, reducing internal pressure to that in the cargo hold of an aircraft flying at cruising height.

  Soon fed up with our windswept test site, we commandeered a Post Office workmen’s hut, tapped a power source from a nearby aircraft landing light to provide electricity and heat, came to an amicable arrangement with airline catering firms who thereafter regularly stopped by to drop off free meals, and finally set two large pots of geraniums outside our front door.

  Teething problems with the chamber were to be expected: sometimes the valve didn’t operate as smoothly as it should have; on other occasions the airtight seal didn’t hold. Nevertheless, in a very short time we got the depressurization chamber up and running. Its performance quickly became dependably consistent. For a cost of less than £200 we had built a depressurization chamber that worked first time, every time.

  Today airports throughout the world have depressurization chambers which embody the same principle we applied at Heathrow, They can cost up to £500,000.

  Aircraft were not the only form of transport threatened. The nation’s favourite ship, the QE2, had been the subject of an unusual extortion attempt: someone had rung Cunard to say they’d placed a bomb on board and unless a very large sum of money was paid then Cunard’s prized possession would very soon find itself at rest alongside the Titanic.

  Cunard alerted the police. The police alerted the army. The army went through its records of bomb disposal officers to discover how many had parachute experience. Only one could be found. He was duly flown out across the Atlantic to parachute into the sea near the QE2. No bomb was found and no bomb went off. The extortion attempt had been a hoax; when the deadline passed, nothing was heard from the caller again.

  When word subsequently came through that the army needed experienced explosives officers to volunteer for parachute-training, I responded immediately. It would be marvellous: everyone knew it took at least a month to train a parachutist and in our case it might even be longer. I could get into shape again after too much sitting around inside offices and Land Rovers.

  I reported to RAF Abingdon, Oxfordshire. The base was extensive and swathed in vast expanses of green grass. There had to be a running track somewhere around; I felt the springy turf underfoot and breathed in the fresh country air.

  Six EOD officers had reported for parachute-training, including two from Hounslow: myself and Alan Brahmer, an athletically built staff sergeant with a sharp sense of humour. We made our way to the classroom for the induction session.

  My only slight worry was that I couldn’t swim. It was, if you thought about it, a disadvantage, but no more so than my fear of heights. Surely within the time available it would be perfectly possible for the RAF to take a non-swimmer who suffered from vertigo and turn him into an expert parachutist ready at a moment’s notice to drop into the ocean anywhere in the world.

  We listened to a briefing by the Senior Parachute Instructor. ‘You are being trained for waterborne landing. You are being trained for this because the army does not want you disappearing down a ship’s funnel, never to be seen again.

  ‘The procedure is very simple …’ And he gave us a long, complicated demonstration of how to deal with a parachute. At the end he paused and smiled understandingly. ‘I know. It seems a lot to take in. But I assure you, by tomorrow afternoon all this will be second nature.’

  Tomorrow afternoon? I would probably have swallowed hard if my mouth hadn’t suddenly turned so dry. Far from having a couple of months before making our first parachute jump, we were not even going to have a couple of days.

  We went to the training area and stared up at a replica rear hull that had been created to simulate the aircraft jump-off point. Another instructor began checking off our personal details as we arrived.

  ‘I think you should know something,’ I told him. ‘I can’t swim.’

  ‘That’s all right.’ He smiled. ‘If your chute doesn’t open we’ll be able to put it down to death by drowning.’

  Long hours of practice now followed: how to fall, how to go through the mechanics of the process, left hand here and right hand there, and this strap and that strap, and arms across, arms up, legs bent, legs straight and, finally, ‘The moment you exit the aircraft you open your mouth and shout “Geronimo!” as loud as you can. Altogether now: Geronimo!’

  ‘Geronimo!’

  The echoes dinned around the replica hull. The instructor seemed pleased. ‘That’s right, “Geronimo”. Never forget it.’

  One by one we stepped into the wide maw of the hull and dropped down on to the surface below. From the interior, the last sight we had of our colleagues was their fingertips gripping the lip and the last sound their ringing war-cry: ‘Geronimo!’

  Alan Brahmer preceded me, vanishing from sight yet somehow contriving to leave his fingertips behind. Eventually his head slowly reappeared as he hauled himself back up, ‘Excuse me, Sergeant,’ he said in his usual well-modulated tones. ‘What was the name of that fucking Indian again?’

  With less than a day’s practical training behind us, we were thundering over the Channel in the company of a squad of Special Boat Service personnel. The white face of the one sitting next to me prompted me to ask him if he was training too. He told me he’d done around 300 jumps. Just think of Geronimo, I told myself. Everything will be all right.

  I fell like a stone, then like a bird, and finally like a butterfly. The red haze cleared from my eyes soon after the racketing and battering of the aircraft had faded; when I looked around, it was already nearly a mile away. The sea, the coastline, spread out far below; after the pre-jump tension, the utter serenity was blissful. I’d never felt so free before.

  ‘Geronimo,’ I said. But this time it was only an awed whisper.

  I landed in the English Channel and came up to find my canopy still floating on top of me. I struggled free of the thing and the spare chute that had somehow become tangled around my legs and then bobbed up and down in my Mae West, gasping for breath.

  The Gemini rescue craft soon reached me. The Marines told me I’d come out of the water like some strange sort of penguin, actually walking the last twenty feet to the Gemini. I didn’t ca
re. The excitement, the elation and the overwhelming sense of satisfaction meant that all I wanted to do was to get back up there and do it all over again.

  It was not to be. I never made another jump. I returned to Hounslow and subsequently went on an EOD update course at Bramley, where I encountered Lieutenant Colonel Alan Yardley, then Chief Ammunition Technical Officer, UK Ammunition Inspectorate. We had met in the past; now we talked about the way the bombers were bringing terror to Northern Ireland. I said I couldn’t understand why the army wasn’t sending out WO Is; after all, we were the most experienced in the RAOC. I would be more than happy to go.

  I didn’t get to finish the update course. Two days later I was in Belfast. It was August 1972 and Northern Ireland was in flames.

  5

  Belfast

  They had left the car in a narrow alleyway off the Crumlin Road – three youths in jeans and windcheaters with a handgun apiece. The car had stopped in the mouth of the alley, hemmed in by buildings on either side. The driver and front passenger got out and waited with guns poised while the third youth manoeuvred around in the back. It took him barely half a minute to finish whatever he was doing, and then he also clambered out of the car. One of the escorts then shouted at the bystanders: ‘There’s a booby-trap bomb in this car. Youse got five minutes to get the fuck out.’

  The call came through to the Ops Room at Girdwood Park where I was based: suspected car bomb, Crumlin Road west, emergency services and ground troops attending. I was on day one of a seventy-two-hour roster: operational for the first twenty-four hours, on standby for overflow work in the next twenty-four, on stand down for the third.

  This latest outbreak of ‘the Troubles’ had first erupted in 1969 and 1970. In that two-year period only 167 explosions occurred in the province; 1971 had witnessed 1,022 explosions involving 9,600 pounds, and 274 finds totalling 1,040 pounds of explosive, with 508 bombs containing 2,700 pounds being defuzed. By the end of 1972 1,339 explosions would have occurred, involving 48,500 pounds of explosive, with 561 hoax calls, 1,259 false alarms and 621 finds of explosives totalling 26,900 pounds. The number of bombs defuzed stayed roughly the same as 1971 (515), but the bombs were on average nearly eight times larger and involved a total of 20,500 pounds of explosive.

  Faced with such a fast deteriorating situation it was obvious to the army that Northern Ireland could no longer be a standard three-year RAOC posting. As a result they devised a system whereby suitably qualified ammunition officers would be selected to carry out four-month-long emergency tours. They were initially drawn from UK postings and, as I’d noted, hadn’t included anyone of Warrant Officer Class 1 rank.

  The senior Explosives Ordnance Disposal officer in Northern Ireland was a colonel with a major as second-in-command and support staff all based at HQ, Lisburn. Operational duties were assigned to three RAOC detachments – one in Londonderry, one in Crossmaglen, and the third in Belfast. Each consisted of a captain and four ammunition technical officers (in Northern Ireland both commissioned and non-commissioned ammunition technicians are known as Ammunition Technical Officers – ATOs) plus signalmen and drivers. Also attached to each section were four infantry soldiers to serve as the duty Ammunition Technical Officer’s bodyguard.

  I had been in Belfast just over six weeks when the Crumlin Road call came in. There was now an average of twelve incidents a day, some of them hoaxes, most of them not. The IRA had split between the old-guard ‘Official’ wing and the new-style ‘Provisionals’.

  Bombs which had been crude to begin with were now as ambitious as anything fashioned by terrorists elsewhere. The bomb-makers now knew how to create home-made explosive, how to install timers and how to arm them with relative safety. In their early endeavours devices had been carried to the scene in a dangerously unstable state, but they’d rapidly learned to make bombs which could be safely transported, armed at the target, then triggered by electric circuitry linked to variable-delay timers. IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) they may have been, but they were complex and sophisticated, improvised only in the sense that they had not come from licensed munitions manufacturers.

  Now it looked as though I had yet another IED to deal with. I left Ops and headed outside to where the Saracen was waiting in the yard. It roared along, pitching on corners, bucketing over the road surface, every vibration travelling from its six wheels through the huge armoured frame.

  The police had set up a cordon 200 yards from the alley in each direction; ground troops and other RUC officers were at each end and appliances from Belfast City Fire Brigade waited, engines ticking over. Flagged by the waiting ground troops, the Saracen double-parked near the railings and I clambered out.

  A breeze funnelled between the buildings – an angular row of two-storey terraces, a warehouse, and petrol station on the right, a twenties or thirties apartment block on the left. Leaves and scraps of paper stirred in the gutters. Other than that, stillness; and yet beyond the cordons, beyond the army Land Rovers and police vehicles, everything was normal: distant figures thronged the urban landscape, cars and trucks and buses wove in and out of the traffic flow. At the cordons bystanders pressed forwards, clusters forming and regrouping, voices beginning to carry on the air. The clearest voices were the highest voices. They belonged to the smallest onlookers, girls and boys aged eight or nine, ragtag kids with pale faces and hands thrust deep into the pockets of their jeans.

  The senior army officer at the scene briefed me: suspect vehicle – Riley Elf, colour blue; IED believed to be in rear interior; location – the alleyway between the petrol filling station and the paint store.

  Some thought had obviously gone into setting up this incident: a paint store, a petrol station, an IED in between – this was typical Provo planning. Women carriers often hid between their legs incendiaries housed in small audio cassette boxes. They would take the device into a store and set it down out of sight, hidden away amongst paper, paint, plastics or upholstery. When the thing went off, fire would consume everything. If it was timed to ignite late at night, then a £2 incendiary could do £2 million worth of damage.

  This particular bomb could be an elaborate hoax designed to disrupt rather than destroy. Given the eye-witness statements, though, it sounded more like the genuine article, a bomb hidden in a cardboard box on the back seat of the car. I hoped it was the only one. It took only one pound of high explosive to blow a car to pieces, but the IRA had been known to use up to 500 times that amount: a small bomb was placed in plain sight and the bulk of the explosive hidden away inside luggage and inside compartments. The explosive could be commercial or home-made: this bomb could well feature the widely used Co-op recipe (a filling of nitrobenzine and sodium chlorate, so called because the bombers first tested out the efficacy of the mix on a Belfast Co-op store). As for the timer, the IRA had given a five-minute warning, but that didn’t mean anything and ten minutes had elapsed anyway. Whatever was in the car could go up now or at any time.

  Thoughts flickered through my mind in the space of a few seconds – no more than that, because if you are an EOD operator you don’t go to a scene to stand and muse. All you know is what you see and what you have been told – and you don’t necessarily trust that.

  You do not entertain any preconceptions because what is happening to you now has never happened before. What you are going to do now you may very well never have done before. Every kind of possibility exists as you move out from safety and begin the long walk.

  The car was obviously going to have to come out. The stubby boot and thin gleam of chromed bumper almost filled the alleyway. Depending upon the size and nature of the device, an explosion here could at best smash a lot of glass, at worst bring down the wall of the paint store and spark a conflagration. The petrol station was actually less volatile; its storage tanks were under ground.

  I moved in closer, constantly shifting my approach. As usual, the problem was how best to get to the IED location. Walk along the pavement, close in to the walls, and if a device
goes off the suction effect of the blast will whip out the windows and create a lacerating blizzard from myriad shards of glass. Walk along the gutter, away from walls and windows, and the blast wave will lift roof tiles like straws in the wind and send them arrowing down. Alternatively, move out into the road and the risk of death is even higher: not only is there a probability of being struck by the bomb’s fragmenting casing and anything else hurtled outwards by the blast; there’s also a chance that someone near by may have you in his sights and –

  ‘SNIPER!’

  Even as the sound fully registered – a distant thwack! of something striking stone or brick – the warning shout cut through the air. I hit the ground, rolled, heard it again, thwack! – another bullet, not close though, perhaps not even intended for me.

  I scrambled away from the junction. The troops had obviously sourced the fire to the flats. Whether they would lift the sniper was another matter: by the time a soldier had raced up God knows how many flights of steps the shootist would have either escaped along a backstairs route or simply slipped into his own apartment.

  I got back to the Saracen, pulse calming, steadying. There would be 10,628 shooting incidents in Northern Ireland that year and in at least four of them I was a primary or secondary target. It wasn’t something I shrugged off or forgot but equally it wasn’t something that left me quaking with shock, unable to continue. After all, everybody got shot at in Belfast: policemen, ambulancemen, firemen, soldiers, children. (Soon after I arrived in Belfast, a corporal whose section was attending my IED incident advised: ‘If you hear me shout, “Take cover”, sir, please don’t ask where. You’ll be talking to yourself.’)