Braver Men Walk Away Read online

  I had come back from Northern Ireland in December and said goodbye to the army. After twenty-three years I needed a change. During my time at Hounslow I’d heard about the Met’s Explosives Office: with only a desk job looming if I stayed in the army, it offered job satisfaction and an opportunity to display ingenuity, logic and independence unconstrained by army regulations. The Black September and Angry Brigade campaigns had shown London that the Improvised Explosive Device had arrived; the bomb-disposal man could now pit himself against bombs far more complex and challenging than those unearthed in Conventional Munitions Disposal work.

  Geoffrey hadn’t changed much over the years; he was still tall and ramrod straight with white hair, patrician features and clerical manner. He had been one of the founding members of the Met’s Explosives Office, back in the days when safe-breaking had been all the rage. He had joined with Don Henderson, another ex-officer I’d known from my time in the army. Since then Ronnie Wilson and Andy Clarke had joined, so now there were five of us.

  We were not policemen but civil servants, part of the Met’s C7 support service. We were accommodated within the top floor of Cannon Row Police Station because it was close enough to the river crossing to facilitate south and north London operations and also because of its proximity to the seat of government.

  In 1974 the powers that be decided we would be better placed in a home of our own – after all, being stuck on the fifth floor of a building without a lift wasn’t ideal. We’d taken to waiting outside in the patrol cars during major alert periods: charging up and down five flights of stairs was not only tiring and time-consuming, it posed an unacceptable injury risk.

  We were allocated an adjacent single-storey building which, imaginatively, became known as the Bungalow. It had originally been built as an Army Recruitment Office during the First World War. It took several months to get the accommodation into shape, during which time the Explosives Office was relocated on the ground floor of the police station.

  By the time we moved into the Bungalow our numbers had swelled to eleven Expos. Amongst the new arrivals were two old friends: Ken Howorth, who joined in 1974 while we were still based in the police station, and Roger Goad, who was appointed early in 1975. Memories of our times together at Feltham flooded back; we even found ourselves playing the same jokes we’d pulled years ago, such as lightly filling in Roger’s crossword puzzle when he wasn’t looking.

  The Bungalow made for a comfortable home: it had two large open-plan offices, a couple of largish workshops, a training area, restroom with television, showers, a duty officer’s bunk, a communications and administration office, and a secure library. The library was stacked high with shelves and filing cabinets. Apart from housing the usual textbooks on explosives, munitions and IEDs, it was also a data centre because we were now part of the worldwide network of bomb information resources.

  I was never sure who started the network but it certainly works well. Virtually every country now has its own Bomb Data Centre, interlinked by fax, telephone and computer to all the others around the world, which focuses principally on the IED: who is making it, where it is being used, how it is changing in design, construction and application. With only one or two exceptions, information is freely and readily shared (of the major Western countries only France is still reluctant to provide information about its bombs). International contact amongst explosives officers has also increased, to the extent that operators now ring each other within a short time of an unusual incident occurring on their territory.

  This willingness to share vital information sometimes has its humorous side: when the Israelis heard of the IRA mortar attack on Downing Street the head of their Bomb Squad immediately rang me to see if it would help us to know the precautions they had worked out to thwart Scud attacks. Distorted news reports of the Downing Street incident had given the Israelis the impression that we’d encountered bombs the size of missiles rather than shells, hence the reference to Scuds. As a result of this conversation, IRA mortars became known as ‘Spuds’.

  Every day, by telephone, telex and international mail, we received news of incidents large and small, information about the few that made the headlines and the many that did not. Week by week, month by month, international co-operation slowly broadened and strengthened in the face of a threat which knew no borders.

  Information exchange and compilation was an integral part of the day’s routine. We had three shifts – one operating from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., another from 4 p.m. to 1 a.m., and the third from midnight to 8 a.m. (The one-hour extension of the middle shift and its overlap with the third shift was deliberate: experience showed that the IRA was very active between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m.) The shifts worked on a ten-day fortnight; we were fully operational for seven days (working at least fifty-six hours, Monday through Sunday), and then non-operational for three days of the following week. The four days off in the second week arose because explosives officers have to be on duty at weekends, do not have any prescribed meal breaks, and under civil service regulations are therefore entitled to time in lieu.

  Non-operational days were not a time to put your feet up; Expos would be away from the Bungalow giving lectures to groups such as airport and Government department staff or out on visits to research establishments, forensic laboratories, or attending conferences. Paperwork could be inordinately time-consuming. As more and more countries came together in the exchange of bomb data, it was not unusual to receive eighty pages of information a day. You couldn’t afford to miss it – who was to say that the next device you had to deal with would not be modelled on one previously encountered by another operator overseas?

  As an Expo, you are required to fill in a report form in respect of every job, no matter how small. Normally, your report form is also the tasking form, a document intended to record the time of the incoming job, name of operator allocated, time of arrival at scene, nature of location, nature of incident, details of actual or suspected device. Only if a crime is suspected is a statement requested, and that may often be months later, or even years.

  A copy of all tasking/report forms is left with our central office; the first thing every Expo does when arriving on duty is flick through those copies to see what has happened since he was last on duty. If anything of special note does occur, a further message is written on our wipe-off noticeboard, saying, for instance, ‘All Expos to see message so-and-so.’ If the content of this message is unclassified, then it will be available at central office; if it is classified, it will be held within the secure library.

  Having checked the messages, the Expo then checks his equipment. Range Rovers are shared between two Expos, one who is operational and one who is not. On board the Range Rover is a variety of equipment, some sophisticated, some fairly rudimentary, particularly the hook and line – a long piece of light nylon rope with various attachments. It can be used from a safe distance to move a suspect bomb or things lying around it.

  Also aboard the Range Rover is the disrupter, about 18 inches long, it is a steel tube which fires a quantity of water by means of an explosive cartridge. The velocity of the jet of water is so great that when it hits a bomb it actually penetrates the interior and disrupts the circuitry before the circuits can close. Disrupters are used by EOD organizations throughout the world. They are highly effective, but also lethal: the plastic plug which holds the water in place will kill you if you are in the way and the recoil kickback is about 40 yards. Expos will usually restrain it from flying back that far by using a special stand or wedging it.

  In addition there is a small explosives kit, a shotgun, and complete bomb suit. The suit is of limited value: its tremendous weight makes walking difficult and, with bombs often tucked away in awkward corners, its bulk inhibits effective operation. (A bomb suit will only provide protection in certain kinds of incident anyway; if you happen to be on top of more than a kilogram of high explosive when it goes off, it will mean only that slightly bigger pieces of your body will remain to be picked up.) For
that reason, Expos tend to wear flak jackets and bomb helmets; they may not afford quite the protection of a full bomb suit but they are infinitely more practical and provide good protection from fragments if a device goes off while you are walking towards it.

  Expos also wear fire-resistant clothing – because explosions are invariably followed by a fire-ball – and boots. These would have been useful some years earlier when, following an explosion at Gieves & Hawkes in Savile Row, I went in to rescue an injured person, discovered it was a tailor’s dummy, and then realized I was standing on a nail which had driven upwards through the sole of my heavy shoe, through my foot, and out through the leather upper.

  Personal kit is down to each individual Expo: Stanley knife, screwdrivers, wire-cutters, even rose-pruners. The Expo also has his own small X-ray machine which now weighs less than 10 pounds. Used in conjunction with a Polaroid X-Ray plate, this enables an operator to see a positive image (as opposed to the hospital-style negative image) in less than thirty seconds. Finally there’s the Wheelbarrow; though not carried on the Range Rover, it is available on demand.

  Our new well-equipped premises with increased staffing was much needed: we were having to cover an area that extended from north of Oxford down to the south coast and the Isle of Wight, taking in the whole of Kent, Sussex, Essex and the rest of the Home Counties. The army was still tasked with handling CMD, and little if anything was happening outside the London metropolitan area, but there was nothing to suggest that terrorism wouldn’t spread to the south-east.

  Improvements in communications were well-nigh constant, and occasionally a boon to practical jokers. One night Ken Howorth and I were on the late-turn duty and the Hotline rang – the direct connection between the explosives officers and the Bomb Squad (now the Anti-Terrorist Branch of the Metropolitan Police). You could always tell which was the Hotline: it had a distinctive ring as well as a red flashing light on the top of the telephone. A call on the Hotline was always imperative; whatever you were doing at the time you had to get to that phone and answer as quickly as possible.

  That night we were well prepared. I had my small portable tape unit with a standard recorded message:

  ‘I’m sorry but there’s no one here to take your call at the moment. Please leave your message and we’ll get back to you when we can. Please speak clearly and slowly after the tone.’

  I picked up the Hotline and Ken held the recorder to the mouthpiece. He punched the start button and the message played. There was a brief silence and then we heard someone from the Bomb Squad: ‘Christ Almighty! It’s an Ansaphone. I’ve got a fucking Ansaphone. What the hell am I supposed to do now?’

  Ken collapsed in hysterics. With some difficulty I told the Bomb Squad I was now answering for real. It took them a while to appreciate the joke.

  In operational situations, too, humour frequently came into play – as in the case of Queen Victoria’s statue, an impressive edifice sited directly outside Buckingham Palace. In response to a bomb warning, I found myself undertaking a nerve-wracking examination of the monument’s hollow interior. It was dark, and uncomfortable, and so constricted that I had to remove my bomb helmet – at which point my unprotected skull came into sharp contact with a hidden inner protrusion.

  I radioed through to my driver: ‘Guess what: you’re talking to the only living Englishman to have banged his head on Queen Victoria’s clitoris.’

  Back came the reply: ‘Yes, well, I’ve got news for you: I’m looking at her face, and she most definitely is not amused.’

  Unorthodox additions to standard-issue uniform were sometimes called for. On one occasion we took some lead plate which we’d been using to shield emissions from the X-ray unit and cut it up into small pieces. We then inserted a couple of them into the pockets of a protective tabard-style garment worn by one of our colleagues.

  As the tabard was quite a weight to begin with, the lead ballast wasn’t immediately noticeable. In fact, our ‘victim’ didn’t even remark upon it – which encouraged the furtive addition of even more pieces of plate. Finally, the operator said: ‘I must be growing old: every day this week my bomb jacket seems to have got heavier and heavier. It was so bad today I almost couldn’t stand upright …’

  The reconstitution of the old Feltham group had made life at the Bungalow even more pleasant and served as a release from the pressures of the hour; for Ken, Roger and me, wind-down time became almost a ritual. It wasn’t something we could always manage because we weren’t always on the same roster, but on those days when we came off duty together we’d sit in our office and open a bottle of Teacher’s whisky and discuss everything from Roger’s golf handicap to the state of the world. We would review the problems each of us had encountered during the day and the solutions we’d devised. Sometimes we would discuss the host of ideas put forward both by officials and the public.

  In some ways the public showed more imagination. One suggestion in particular showed ambition as well as originality: a gentleman wrote to us suggesting that, as the government must still hold ‘large stocks’ of barrage balloons from the Second World War, we should use these to beat the bombers. Instead of risking life and limb every time we dealt with a suspect car, why not couple it up to two or three barrage balloons? If it did explode, it would already be high in the air and so only minimal damage would occur; if it didn’t, we could all happily wait until the wind had blown it out over the Channel, where ‘our gallant lads in the RAF could then shoot it down’.

  I had great difficulty in composing a reply, not least because a vision kept dancing before my eyes of cars popping skywards like champagne corks above London. I explained that the capital’s narrow streets made life awkward if you were trying to tie down barrage balloons: apart from anything else, the small army of technicians involved would also be at risk. There were other considerations, too: always assuming that the cars didn’t smash into the nearest building on their way up, God alone knew what Air Traffic Control would say at Heathrow and Gatwick. As for the work of our gallant lads in the RAF, I had every faith in their expertise, but the consequences of failure would be horrendous: Anglo-French relations were unlikely to be improved if the French looked out of their windows one morning and saw their skies filled with IRA car bombs dangling from English barrage balloons. Still, as Roger pointed out, it might encourage them to start sharing their IED data with the rest of the world.

  I thanked our correspondent for his idea. His good intentions had offered us the kind of moral support we valued.

  Unlike in Northern Ireland, where all too often an ATO is reviled, intimidated and even attacked by the very people whose lives and property he is trying to save, in mainland Britain people are very appreciative of the Expo’s role.

  In the wake of one particularly horrifying incident in London, a group of old-age pensioners wrote to me as head of the Met’s Explosives Office. These pensioners had decided that the price some of us were having to pay was too high: we had wives, families, small children. They, however, had had their lives.

  Some of them, said the letter-writer, had a basic knowledge of explosives from their own days in the army. They would be more than delighted to undertake a crash course on bomb disposal. If they were killed, they would die knowing that they had already had the best years of their lives, and that in dying for their Queen and their country they were also saving the life of a younger man.

  I have never read a more extraordinary letter than this. And I have rarely had such difficulty in composing a reply. Even now, it is difficult to put into words what I feel about the spirit of people such as this.

  Unfortunately one occasionally has to deal with people who are less helpful. I was once called to Hammersmith Broadway; a suspect bomb was reported on platform four of the Underground Station. The station had been cleared, the staff and public kept outside, behind a cordon. In the empty foyer a Met police officer and a London Transport official briefed me and confirmed that no trains were running past that platform.
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br />   Wearing my bomb helmet and flak jacket, and carrying my disrupter, portable X-ray and personal tool kit, I staggered across the foyer, looking less like a human being than a creature from a sci-fi film. At the ticket barrier I struggled to squeeze through. And then a voice said: ‘Excuse me, sir. Can I see your ticket?’

  I stared into the polite, impassive face of an elderly West Indian ticket collector. ‘I haven’t got a ticket.’

  ‘Well, you can’t come through without one.’

  ‘But I’m here to defuze a bomb!’

  ‘Oh no, sir. Not without a ticket.’

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I am a bomb disposal officer. I have been summoned here because there’s supposed to be a bomb on platform four. Now then; either you let me through or you can take my equipment down there yourself and you can defuze the thing.’

  He considered this for a moment or two. Finally: ‘All right, sir. You can go through … just this once.’

  During the IRA’s letter-bomb campaign I again came across this kind of blinkered, unthinking officialdom. I was called to a house belonging to a public figure, a likely target for a letter bomb. I clambered out of the patrol car, walked up the steps and met a police sergeant who was guarding the front door. ‘It’s still in there,’ he said. ‘On a stand, in the hall.’

  I thanked him and went in. I checked the hallway and glanced at the telephone directories and a postcard that had been left on the hallstand. There was no sign of any letter bomb. Someone must have taken the suspect mail away. I spun on my heel and wrenched open the front door. ‘Sergeant, quick – is there another hall in this house?’

  ‘No, sir … ?’ He stared blankly, bewildered by my question.

  ‘There’s no sign of a letter bomb in there.’

  ‘There is, sir.’ Bewilderment was replaced by certainty. ‘It’s on the hallstand.’

  ‘Where?’