Embassy Siege. Shaun Clarke

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.

      The CQB House is dubbed the ‘killing house’ for two good reasons. The first is that its purpose is to train men to kill at close quarters. The second is that real ammunition is used and that at least one SAS man has been killed accidentally while training with it.

      Jock was mindful of this chilling fact as he led his four-man CT team into the building and along the first corridor, toward rooms specially constructed to simulate most of the situations an SAS man would encounter during a real hostage-rescue operation. The men had already been trained to enter captured buildings by a variety of means, including abseiling with ropes from the roof, sometimes firing a Browning 9mm High Power handgun with one hand as they clung to the rope with the other. This particular exercise, however, was to make them particularly skilled at distinguishing instantly between terrorist and hostage. It was done with the aid of pictures on the walls and dummies that were moved from place to place, or that popped out suddenly from behind artificial walls or up from the lower frame of windows.

      This began happening as Jock and his men moved along the first corridor. Dummy figures bearing painted weapons popped out from behind opening doors or window frames to be peppered by a fusillade of bullets from the real weapons of the training team. Once the targets had looked like Russians; now they were men in anoraks and balaclava helmets.

      The major accomplishment lay not in hitting the ‘terrorists’ but in not hitting a ‘hostage’ instead. This proved particularly difficult when they had less than a second to distinguish between a dummy that was armed and one that was not. To hit the latter too many times was to invite a humiliating rejection by the SAS and the ignominy of being RTU’d.

      The exercise could have been mistaken for