Braver Men Walk Away Read online

  ‘On the top.’

  ‘The only things on the hallstand are some phone books. Have you shoved the thing underneath them?’

  ‘No. I didn’t move it.’ The stare had also gone now; he clearly thought I was blind or incompetent. ‘It’s on top of those telephone directories.’

  I felt my pulse beginning to race. It had nothing to do with fear. ‘The only thing on top of the directories is a postcard. A postcard.’

  ‘Yes, sir. That’s exactly it.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The postcard, sir.’ He nodded. ‘It’s suspect.’

  ‘The postcard?’ I could hear my own disbelief echoing back to me. ‘What the hell can be suspect about a postcard?’

  ‘It was mailed in Dorking.’

  The conversation came to an abrupt halt as I mentally replayed the reply. I took a deep breath. ‘Sergeant, it is a postcard. A postcard. Never mind where it came from, never mind bloody Dorking, how can you get a bomb into a fucking postcard?’

  The sergeant remained remarkably unfazed. ‘It meets all the requirements, sir: it’s unexpected, it has an oily stain on it, and it comes from someone unknown to the recipients. From Dorking, sir.’

  I told him that (a) a letter bomb needs to be in a letter and (b) the letter needs to be at least one-eighth of an inch thick. He seemed unable to understand, although this may have been due to a certain lack of clarity on my part on account of the difficulty in speaking through gritted teeth.

  Today the incident has a bizarre humour, but then it did not – we were working flat out to answer calls yet here I was diverted from my work by an utter buffoon. Even now, our conversation remains vivid; I have dealt with many stupid people in my time and many stupid situations but nothing has ever come close to the police sergeant and his damned postcard. It was for that reason that I broke my own cardinal rule: for the only time on any job I actually lost my temper.

  Another instance of keenness defeating logic came when someone somewhere believed that a solution had been found to all our problems: the Portable Concrete Garage.

  In great secrecy, and at great expense, a trial was organized by several Government departments to test the effectiveness of a proposal that a six-inch-thick concrete box should be lowered on to a suspect car to contain the effects of an explosion. Unfortunately, the organizers of the trial didn’t bother to contact us. We’d have told them that concrete garages are not particularly portable and that in the middle of an IRA car bomb campaign the last thing time or London’s crowded streets allow is the slow passage of a giant crane.

  They headed for a quiet rural location, packed a car with 100 pounds of HE and manoeuvred a crane alongside to winch down upon the car one extremely heavy and well-made concrete garage. As soon as the garage covered the car they detonated the bomb. The garage was completely destroyed, so much so that the roof was never found. They had, in effect, created a giant hand-grenade.

  We toasted the venture with happy irony in one of our wind-down sessions, when the Teacher’s came out and the glasses were passed around. Sometimes our drivers joined us, sometimes we had business to discuss. It was different from military life and yet the old army camaraderie lived on, the sense of belonging to a small and specialist group of people. We had learned our craft and the army had served us well – in fact, Roger had so enjoyed it he’d taken a Commission as a captain, which explained why, whenever he made a particularly forceful remark during one of our off-duty sessions, Ken would raise his arm in mock salute.

  Those brief, infrequent evening sessions at the Bungalow were only feasible when the pressure was off. When the quiet times were over, the hours on the duty roster meant nothing: as long as you had a job to complete, you stayed out on the street.

  7

  The IRA in London

  On my first day at the Met I had sat wondering what kind of challenges the job would bring, anticipating that London would be quite different to Northern Ireland. Less than four weeks later I had to think again.

  An Intelligence report arrived warning of a major car bomb attack or attacks by the IRA in London on 8 March. All five explosives officers were alerted for round-the-clock operation from 7 March. The metropolitan area was systematically scoured – hundreds of square miles of roads and streets and alleyways. The task was huge, the time short. To add to the problem there were strikes on British Rail and the London Underground. Never could industrial action have been so mistimed: at the very moment when we needed as few vehicles as possible in central London, parking restrictions had to be relaxed to cope with the massive influx of cars.

  The Ford saloon was spotted by two alert officers from the Special Patrol Group. It was parked outside the Post Office in Broadway opposite New Scotland Yard. Unless you knew what to look for, nothing about the car suggested the nature of the threat. But it was mistagged: the number plates did not tie in with the model year. The SPG officers carefully examined the plates and saw evidence of tampering: screwdriver scratches, slight mispositioning, some slackness. They also saw an air freshener.

  Geoffrey and I arrived in an area police car. He had been up all night whereas my day was only just beginning. We examined the Ford and looked particularly at the boot.

  ‘What d’you think?’ Geoffrey said. ‘There’s something wrong with the lock.’ He pointed to the dented key-slot.

  I didn’t like the look of it either: it could be accidental damage or it could be evidence of some kind of booby-trap. We backed off. The luggage compartment would have to be checked but lifting the boot-lid was out of the question; we’d need to get access via the Ford’s interior.

  I jiggled the lock on the nearside rear door, released the catch and eased the door open. The smell of nitrobenzene was overpowering: you’d have needed a dozen air fresheners to defeat it; the Ford had only one. Either it had been in the vehicle when it was acquired by the bombers or they’d been too mean and too stupid to realize that nitrobenzene isn’t masked by a single whiff of Forest Glade or Alpine Mountain.

  With each moment that passed, the time was drawing nearer to detonation. It could be in a minute or it could be an hour – only the bombers knew.

  In the days before cars had fireproof internal rear bulkheads, the easiest way to get into a locked boot was by lifting out the rear seat squab and clambering in. Today it isn’t possible; in 1973, it was. I made to lift up the squab and almost sustained a hernia: it was so heavy I wondered if it was somehow bolted into place. It didn’t make sense for a section of seating to be as immovable as this. Carefully, cautiously, I lifted it up, looked underneath, and saw a gleaming mass of polythene bags packed with explosive. Not only that, they’d removed the springs from the squab and packed its interior with explosive as well.

  One pound of high explosive is sufficient to blow a car to pieces; the dozens of bags crammed into the back of this vehicle looked as though they weighed 5 pounds each. If this thing blew it would make Broadway look like a battle zone.

  We decided to shift some of the bags. If the bomb went off while we were standing next to it, one bag or one hundred wouldn’t make much difference to us: we’d both be dead. But less explosive meant less likelihood of death or injury to the people still being evacuated from nearby buildings. It would also give Geoffrey and me a chance to find the bomb’s initiating system.

  I glanced around the incident scene; there seemed to be a lot of people near by. Familiarity would soon bring a greater understanding of danger, but London had had little experience of car bombs before 1973; the police at the scene had no idea of what happens when a vehicle containing over 180 pounds of HE blows up.

  Geoffrey and I began removing the bags one by one. I tested their weight; each was around 5 pounds and each contained Co-op. The mixture had not been used in London before but I’d seen enough of it in Northern Ireland to know that this home-made concoction was as powerful as it was sensitive – shock and friction could set this stuff off. We ran with them and set them down on the other side of th
e road, far enough away not to be set off by the detonation of the main charge.

  I wasn’t sure if Geoffrey was fully cognizant of the properties of Co-op. I’d once taken a sample of the stuff to a Home Office laboratory specializing in explosives analysis and been met by a very superior scientist. Oh no, said the scientist, there must be some mistake. A mixture of nitrobenzene and sodium chlorate would be far too sensitive to handle. The very idea was unworkable. I felt like asking him to put it in a memo to the IRA. They’d blown up half of Belfast with Co-op mix but perhaps if the Home Office told them it was too dangerous to use they’d pack it in.

  The Ford’s cargo was gradually diminishing: twelve bags … fifteen … twenty. I suddenly looked up at the façade of New Scotland Yard, the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police itself, and saw that all the windows were filled with faces looking down at us.

  A figure was moving about behind one of the pillars near the main entrance. ‘You!’ I shouted. ‘That man lurking behind the pillar!’ Twenty-three years of army life endowed it with all the force of a barrack-square command. ‘You get inside and get those stupid bastards away from the windows! If this thing goes off they’ll be wearing glass for the rest of their lives.’

  The figure hesitated briefly, then vanished inside. He turned out to be a very senior officer indeed, which probably explained why the faces at the window disappeared so rapidly.

  With half the bags removed we at last found the core of the car bomb: 40 pounds of commercial explosive – Gelamex or Frangex. The bombers had obviously intended for this to go off first: though not strictly necessary, it would provide so powerful an explosive boost that the home-made stuff – which might otherwise perform erratically – would all go up in one enormous bang.

  The commercial charge was laced with Cordtex detonating cord; it ran down and underneath the rear carpet to the well beneath the front passenger seat. Geoffrey slowly eased out a box that had been hidden there, its external detonators connected up to the Cordtex. The box contained a modified alarm clock, terminal and battery. The bomb had been designed to explode between two and three o’clock that afternoon; though we hadn’t known it when we’d started our work, we’d had a minimum of four hours in hand.

  It would have been comforting to be more exact, but that wasn’t possible because of the modification to the clock: if the hour hand alone is used, a bomber can have almost twelve hours’ grace; with only the minute hand, about sixty minutes. As I knew from experience, there were even clocks which had both hands removed, evidence of what came to be known amongst bomb men as ‘the Paddy Factor’; a clock with no hands is about as much use as a bomb with no explosive. In this instance the bombers had removed the minute hand and worked with the hour hand alone.

  Geoffrey neutralized the timer and removed the detonators from the box; I removed the Cordtex from the charge. We stepped back and contemplated our handiwork. But even as we gathered our things together, all hell was breaking loose around London: more suspect car sightings, more alerts, more urgent messages over the communications net. I suspected that someone somewhere in authority knew how many bombs there were but had decided not to tell us. Not that it mattered; throughout that morning we were perpetually on the move. Geoffrey went home after a very long night and an exhausting morning; I continued with Andy Clarke.

  At this time explosives officers always worked in pairs. It was – and still is – army practice but in civil operations had ceased to make much sense. The army’s theory was that two heads are better than one. But in the army only one man went forward to deal with the bomb; in the Met, both men dealt with it. It seemed a particularly stupid way of doing things; if anything went wrong with an army operation, only one man might be killed; with a Met operation, both explosives officers would die.

  Early that afternoon we were tasked to a car in Dean Stanley Street outside the headquarters of the British Forces’ Broadcasting Service. By now the day had become a kind of blur. Like us, Don Henderson and Ronnie Wilson and an army team from Hounslow were criss-crossing central London. Many of the jobs were never logged because there simply wasn’t time: you reached a car, popped the window, searched it, and raced off to the next job. London had never seen urban terrorism on this scale before.

  The car was a Vauxhall Viva. We looked through the window, saw an Irish 2p piece on one of the seats and an air freshener. I checked my watch; this vehicle bore all the hallmarks of the New Scotland Yard car bomb – which meant that its timer could be running to an identical schedule. It was now 2.35 p.m. Whether we lived or died would depend on the accuracy with which the clock had been set and the speed with which we could deal with the device.

  I broke the Vauxhall’s rear offside window, reached in, killed the interior light and unlocked the door. As before, the smell of nitrobenzene almost swamped me. I unlocked the other door for Andy and then carefully lifted up the rear carpet. Twin leads of detonating cord bound together with adhesive tape ran from the rear to a small box in the recess under the front seat: so far same design, same bomb and, very likely, the same timetable.

  Ideally, I wanted to disconnect the detonator, but it was under the front seat and couldn’t be reached without moving the clock box. To touch a timer mechanism which is close to running out is to invite disaster: the slightest movement can cause the contacts to close, which would complete the bomber’s work for him.

  The only option we were left with was to cut the detonating cords. This would have to be done with exceptional care, but if I pressed down on the leads to keep them steady while Andy did the cutting, we should be OK.

  ‘We’ll have to cut,’ I told him. I manoeuvred awkwardly, half-in and half-out of the car; I wished Vauxhall hadn’t made the thing so small. ‘I’ll hold the leads firm, you cut.’

  Andy hesitated and patted his pockets. ‘I haven’t a knife.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Use a pair of wire-cutters.’

  More futile checking of pockets. ‘I haven’t any tools with me.’

  Marvellous. I had my tools in my pockets but couldn’t reach them because of the way I was positioned; having already pressed down on the detonating cords it would be unwise to disturb them again.

  Andy disappeared to fetch a cutting tool. I remained stuck in a car holding the detonating leads of a bomb with a very short fuze indeed. I waited, and waited. The seconds seemed like hours. Finally I let go of the cords.

  Getting out of the car was as slow-motion as everything else: my body weight had exerted pressure on the Vauxhall’s suspension; removing that weight meant an easing of the pressure and this could cause the car to rock – highly undesirable in these circumstances.

  I stood upright and breathed slowly, steadily. I reached in my pockets for my own cutting tools, bent down again, held the leads – hoping to God that the steadying effect of just one hand would be sufficient to prevent any vibration from travelling to the detonating mechanism – and then severed them.

  The Vauxhall was packed with about 120 pounds of high explosive. I removed the rear seat complete with its explosive, went back in and dealt with the clock box and the electric detonator. I checked the clock; once again the bomber had used the hour hand alone to set the time. It was now almost 2.40 p.m.; although pinpoint accuracy is never possible with a one-hand clock, it seemed likely I’d completed the job with less than ten minutes to spare.

  Andy returned. I told him what I’d done and left him to get on with the job of unpacking the main charge from within the rear seat. I was concerned about the timing on other car bombs. I ran into the British Forces’ Broadcasting building, grabbed a telephone and rang our Control Office. ‘If there are any more bombs, my advice is that the team should stay laid back. We’re running out of time.’

  As I cradled the telephone, a distinctive rumbling noise reached my ears: a car bomb in Great Scotland Yard, only a short distance from Whitehall and the Ministry of Defence, had just gone off. A few moments later, although I didn’t hear it because of the traffic no
ise and the Belfast-style overlay of sirens and alarms, another car bomb exploded outside the Old Bailey.

  Both bombs were similar to those at Broadway and Dean Stanley Street. Both went off with enormous force and caused enormous damage. Thankfully, the Great Scotland Yard explosion neither killed nor injured anyone; the army team which had been dealing with it were well away from the vehicle at the time of detonation, in the process of removing the detonating cords with a very long hook and line arrangement.

  Though the Old Bailey car had been spotted, the area was still in the process of being cleared and the other Met team was still en route to the scene. The explosion injured over a hundred people.

  The next day Andy and I were again teamed together and tasked to another suspect car. The experience proved one too many: being ex-Northern Ireland, I never opened a car door without making certain checks beforehand. In any event I always pulled out the interior light after popping one of the windows. Bombers had been known to link their devices to a car’s interior light circuit.

  Andy was alongside as I popped one of the windows. ‘Peter,’ he said, ‘there’s no need to do that. The car’s not locked.’ And with that he opened the door.

  When we’d finished the job I went back to Cannon Row and sought out the Chief Superintendent. From now on, I said, I would only work on my own. I did not wish to work with anyone else. He didn’t argue.

  After the car bombs came the incendiaries – dozens of them. They were as simple as they were effective: a cigarette packet containing a small quantity of incendiary material, a battery and a modified wrist watch. The igniter was based on the kind of hot-wire device used to light domestic gas stoves.

  The IRA targeted London’s major department stores: Harrods, Austin Reed, Liberty, Swan & Edgar, and Harvey Nichols. The damage was caused not so much by the fires as by the in-store sprinkler systems. The campaign reached its peak in the summer of ’73 when I found myself in more department stores in a week than the average shopper might visit in a year.