there’d be the interior stud wall, which would have a finishing coat of either paint or paper, or both. None of which should be a problem for the sophisticated gear we were carrying.
As planned, we’d crawled to a point between two ground-floor windows. A utility box the size of a coal bunker was set against the wall. It was an ideal location for the stuff we were going to leave behind.
Fingers shielding the lens of his mini-Maglite, Charlie opened the utility box with a square lug key and had a quick look inside.
Half Arse had his pistol out; he kept his eyes on the windows and his ears everywhere else. He’d had a buttock shot away during an op a few years back, and right now I wondered if it meant his arse was only half as cold as mine. His wife wanted him to have an implant so he didn’t scare the kids when he took them swimming, but they weren’t available on the NHS, and he refused to go private. ‘I’m too tight-arsed’ was his standard joke. ‘Or rather, tight half-arsed…’ Nobody ever laughed. It wasn’t very funny, and nor was he.
We knew that everyone in the various Pods [tactical operations] would be watching the thermal and IR imagery of us at work, beamed down to them by the P3. We wanted to make sure it was a job well done; don’t mess with the best was the message we wanted to transmit — though right now it was the last thing any of us was worried about; personally, I just wanted to do the business and get away alive. This was my last job before I left the Regiment. It would be the mother of all ironies if I got dropped or injured now.
I eased my day sack off my back. A distant voice inside the building shouted out something but we ignored him. We’d only react if someone was actually shouting that they’d spotted us; otherwise, we’d be stopping and starting every five minutes. You just have to get on with it until you know there is a definite drama. That was what Half Arse was here for.
Charlie had worked out where he wanted to fix the device. He pressed a thumbnail into the wood at almost ground level and gave me a nod. I brought out a pyramid from my day sack, seven inches high and made of alloy. Instead of a peak, it had a hole, and at each of the four corners was a fixing lug.
Guided by the beam from Charlie’s Maglite, I positioned the pyramid so the hole was directly over his nail mark, and held it there while he put a battery-powered screwdriver to the first lug. Very slowly, very deliberately, the shaft of the screwdriver rotated. It took the best part of two minutes to screw it in tight. By the time the first three were in, my hands were almost numb.
A different voice shouted from inside. It was closer, but it wasn’t talking about us. He was complaining about the rabbit noise, and I couldn’t blame him.
The sweat on my back was starting to cool and I could feel fingers of wind fighting their way down my neck. At last, Charlie fixed the last lug and I gave the structure a wiggle left and right to test it was stable. He was the mechanic; I was the oily rag. The rest was up to him now.
He retrieved a drill bit half a metre long and seven millimetres in diameter from his day sack and threaded it carefully into the pyramid hole, oblivious to everything else that was going on.
He blew on his fingers to warm them, then eased the drill in further until it just touched the wood of the exterior wall. This kit couldn’t be worked by any old knuckle-dragger, which ruled me out. It called for a delicate touch and a steady hand. Charlie was the best of the best; he always said that if he hadn’t gone into this line of work, he’d have taken up brain surgery. Maybe he wasn’t joking; I saw him settle a bet once by turning one five- pound note into two with a razor blade. Back in Hereford, they called him the CEO of MOE [method of entry]. There wasn’t a security system in existence that he couldn’t defeat. And if there was, he wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. He’d get me to blow it up instead.
Next out was the power cable, connected to a lithium battery inside his day sack. Charlie plugged it into the pyramid. There was a moment’s delay as jaws inside the pyramid clamped round the bit, and then it began to turn, so slowly it almost seemed not to be moving. The only sound was a barely audible, low-frequency hum.
There was nothing we could do now but wait as it started to work its way quietly, slowly, methodically through an inch of wood, a sheet of tarpaper, and about half a centimetre of plasterboard. I moved against the wall to make myself as small a target as possible if anyone looked out of a window. My right hand lifted my fleece and rested on the grip of the pistol pancake-holstered on my jean belt. My left pulled the zipped-up front over my nose for warmth.
This kit worked on the same technology they used in neurosurgery; if you’re drilling through a skull it helps to be doing so with something that stops when it senses it’s about to hit the cranial membrane. Our one behaved the same way when it was just about to break through the final layer of paint or paper. And — so it left no sign — it automatically collected the debris and dust as it went.
Charlie disconnected the power and pulled out the bit, then took out a fibre-optic rod with a light on the end. He moved it down through the pyramid, just to make sure he wasn’t about to break through the stud wall. Everything seemed to be fine. He removed the fibre optic, reinserted the drill, and reconnected the power. The gentle hum resumed.
It moved quicker as it hit the tarpaper, then slowed again as it encountered the plasterboard. Charlie stopped it again and repeated the operation with the fibre optic.
I looked over at Half Arse. He was lying on his back with his feet nearest the wall, his pistol resting on his chest, pointing up at the first-floor windows. He must have been freezing his arse off — or what was left of it. I thought about the Americans in the Pods, drinking coffee and smoking cigars while they watched our progress. Most of them were probably wondering why the fuck we didn’t get a move on.
It took nearly an hour before the drill stopped turning for the third and final time. Charlie did his trick with the fibre optic again and gave us a thumbs-up. He removed the drill bit, put the screwdriver to the first lug, and began to turn it anticlockwise.
When he’d removed the pyramid, Charlie dug out the microphone. It too was attached to a fibre-optic cable, so it could be put into position correctly.
I stowed the gear carefully, bit by bit, in my day sack. No point rushing it and making noise.
With a flourish, Charlie connected the microphone to the lithium battery and laid a metre-long wire antenna on the ground.
As soon as the power was switched on, there was squelch in my earpiece. The signal was beamed to the Pods and then bounced back to us. We didn’t want to have to get on the net to check that we’d done the business.
I heard the microphone rustle as Charlie fed it gently into the freshly drilled hole. He stopped now and again, eased it back a fraction, then pushed it through a bit more. As it got closer to the membrane, I could hear a woman murmuring to her children, and a man moaning in agony. It must have been the one who’d taken a round in the stomach during the first attack.
It was almost time to leave. Charlie closed and relocked the utilities box as I dug the wire into the earth and smoothed it over. He did a quick final sweep of the area with his shielded Maglite, and we got rid of a couple of footprints. Then we started to crawl back to RV [rendezvous] with the Bradley.
Voices echoed in my earpiece as we went; a man mumbled passages from the Bible; a child whimpered and pleaded for a drink of water.
We had done our bit.
Now it was time to hand our toys over to the Americans.
3
The baby rabbits screamed all night long. It was close to impossible for us to sleep — and we were six hundred metres from the action. Fuck knows what it must have been like for the hundred-odd men, women and children on the receiving end of their relentless squeals, taped on a loop and amplified a thousand times through the AFVs’ loudspeakers.
It was still dark. I unzipped my sleeping bag just enough to slide my arm out into the cold. I tilted my wrist close to my face and pressed the illumination button on Baby-G. It was 5.38 a.m.
‘Day fifty-one of the siege of Mount Carmel.’ I kicked the bag next to me. ‘Welcome to another day in paradise.’
