The grenade exploded, cracking the walls and ceiling, but when its flash had faded away an empty room was revealed. Cursing, Ricketts and the others explored the whole flat, tearing down the curtains, kicking over tables and chairs, ensuring that no one was hiding anywhere, then covering each other as they backed out again, swearing in frustration.
‘Let’s try the flats next door!’ ‘Gumboot’ Gillis bawled, his voice distorted eerily by the gas mask. ‘The fuckers on either side!’
But before they could do so other doors opened and housewives stepped out, still wearing their nightdresses, curlers in their hair, swearing just like the SAS men and bending over to drum metal bin lids on the brick walls and concrete floor of the walkway. The noise was deafening, growing louder every second, as more women emerged to do the same, followed by children. Their shrieked obscenities added dramatically to the bedlam until, as Ricketts knew would eventually happen, the first bottle was thrown.
‘Whores!’ Gumboot exclaimed when the bottle shattered near his feet. ‘And mind those little cunts with ’em!’
‘Damn!’ Lampton said, glancing up and down the walkway, then over the concrete wall, the shotgun in one hand, the Browning in the other, but briefly forgetting all he had been taught and failing to watch his own back. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’
That was his first and last mistake.
A ragged, gaunt-faced adolescent had followed them up the stairs and now emerged from the stairwell with his pistol aimed right at Lampton. He fired three times, in rapid succession, and Lampton was thrown back, bouncing against the concrete wall, as the kid disappeared again. Lampton dropped both his weapons and quivered epileptically, blood bursting from his gas mask, and was falling as Ricketts raced to the stairs, bawling, ‘Christ! Pick him up and let’s go!’ He chased after the assassin, bottles bursting around him, the drumming bin lids and shrieked obscenities resounding insanely in his head as he plunged into the dangerous darkness of the stairwell without thinking. Then…
Ricketts, as he often did these days, was groaning and punching at thin air as he awoke from his nightmare. He soon realized that in fact he had been woken up by a mate, SAS Corporal Paddy Clarke, who was excitedly jabbing his finger at the TV in the barracks, saying, ‘Sit up, Ricketts!’ Everyone called him by his surname, or ‘Sarge’. ‘Look! A bunch of Royal Marines have been forced to surrender in…’
Gumboot started his weekend leave with a quick fuck with some bint he’d picked up in King’s Cross. As he sweated on her passive body, propping himself up on his outspread hands, he was thinking about how the break-up of his marriage had reduced him to this.
Of course, he knew what had caused it – the good old SAS. His wife, Linda, had been torn between fear of what could befall him and anger at his going away so often. What she had hated, Gumboot loved – both the danger and the travelling – so what happened had to happen eventually – and finally did. Linda turned to another man, shacked up with him, and when Gumboot returned from Belfast, where Lampton had bought it, his wife and kids were missing from his home in Barnstaple, Devon, though a note had been left on the kitchen table, kindly telling him why.
Linda had been having an affair with a local farmer, James Brody, and had decided to move in with him ‘for the sake of the children’. She wanted a husband at home, Linda had written in her neat hand, preferably one not slated to be killed or, worse, crippled for life. Sorry, Gumboot, goodbye.
Bloody slag, Gumboot thought with satisfying vindictiveness, as he laboured on the whore stretched out below him. They’re all the same, if you ask me. He knew that wasn’t true, but it made him feel good saying it – just as it had made him feel good when, in a drunken stupor, he had gone to Brody’s imposing farmhouse, called him to the door, beat the shit out of him while Linda howled in protest, and then returned for another bout in the local pub. He had drunk a lot after that, mooning about his empty home, and was delighted to be called back to the Regiment and posted to Belfast.
Most of the men hated Belfast, but Gumboot had found his salvation there. Even the banshee wails of contemptuous Falls Road hags had helped to distract him from his sorrows. He had loved being in bandit country, away from Devon and Linda’s betrayal – loved it even after Lampton bought it with three shots to the head. Blood all over the fucking place. Lampton dragged out by his ankles, down the stairs of the housing estate as Ricketts, his best friend, released a howl of grief and rage, then raced on ahead to find the killer.
No such luck. That estate was a labyrinth. The kid with the gun was protected by the housewives and ‘dickers’ – the gangs of kids who monitored the movements of the security forces and passed on the word. Ricketts had been distraught. Lots of nightmares after that. But Gumboot, though angry at Lampton’s death, still liked it in Belfast.
Fighting was better than sex or booze, though few would admit it. In fact, this whore was pretty good and Gumboot was almost there, which prompted him to think of other things and delay his climax.
Sex was fine, but not enough. He needed to be back with the Regiment. Even when not engaged in a specific operation, he preferred it at the SAS ‘basha’ in Hereford, cut off from the normal world. A basha is the place where an SAS man is based at any given time – whether it be his barracks or a makeshift shelter erected in action.
Gumboot lived for the SAS. Life with so-called ‘normal’ people was boring and offered no satisfaction. Gumboot liked his bit of action, the danger and excitement, the thunder of the guns and the reek of cordite, and so he constantly yearned to be overseas, risking life and limb.
Even right now, as he climaxed, Gumboot was yearning for that. He groaned, convulsed and then relaxed. The tart patted his spine in a friendly manner, then glanced at her watch.
‘You’ve still got twenty minutes,’ she informed him.
‘I’m amazed,’ Gumboot said.
Rolling off her, he lit a cigarette and thoughtfully blew a couple of smoke rings. Then, realizing that he had nothing more to say to the woman, he switched on the radio beside the bed.
‘…islands,’ a BBC newsreader was announcing grimly, ‘were invaded earlier today by…’
‘Fucking great,’ Gumboot muttered.
Corporal ‘Jock’ McGregor and troopers ‘Taff’ Burgess and Andrew Winston were having their regular Friday-night piss-up in their favourite pub in Redhill, Hereford, not far from the ‘Kremlin’ – the Intelligence Section – and their barracks. Jock was short, lean and red-faced, Taff was of medium height, broad-chested and pale-faced, and Andrew, who towered over his two mates, was as black as pitch.
Well into his third pint, Jock was staring up at Andrew, thinking what a big bastard he was, and recalling that if anyone called him ‘Andy’ they were asking for trouble. Born in Brixton, to a white man from the area and a black mother from Barbados, Andrew felt at home in England, but even more so with the Regiment. After transferring to the SAS from the Royal Engineers, he had soon become renowned for his pride and fierce temper. He was also widely respected for the bravery and skill he had shown during the SAS strikes against rebel strongholds on Defa and Shershitti, in Oman, in the mid-1970s.
Taff was a big man too, though not as tall as Andrew, and his smile, when he wasn’t annoyed, was as sweet as a child’s. On the other hand, when he was riled, he’d take the whole room apart without thinking twice. A good trooper, though, always reliable in a tight spot, and like Andrew one with plenty of experience of the kind that mattered most. Not bad for a Welshman.
‘Now me,’ Jock was saying, although it was not what he was thinking, ‘I say that while it’s nice to have a wee break, a long break is misery. Men like us, we’re not cut out for all this peace. What we need is some action.’
‘Oman,’ Andrew said, nodding vigorously, deep in thought. ‘Damn it, man, I loved it there. That desert was livin’ poetry, boys, and that’s what I’m into.’
‘He even writes it,’ Taff said, wiping his