prying eyes, a floor area ample enough to accommodate a mock-up of the house in The Hayes, and a small glass-sided office to use as an operations room.
Just before noon an Army Scout helicopter swished into the far side of Ipswich municipal airport and disgorged three men. One was the commanding officer of the SAS
Regiment, Brigadier Cripps; one was the operations officer, a staff major with the Regiment; and the third was the team commander, Captain Julian Lyndhurst. They were all in plainclothes, carried suitcases with their uniforms inside, and were met by an unmarked police car that took them straight to the holding area, where the police were establishing their operational center.
Chief Superintendent Low briefed the three officers to the best of his ability, which was to the limit of what he had been told by London. He had spoken to Preston on the telephone but had not yet met him.
“There’s a John Preston, I understand,” said Brigadier Cripps, “who is the field controller from MI5. Is he about?”
“I believe he’s still up at the observation post,” said Low, “the house he has taken over opposite the target dwelling. I can call him and ask him to leave by the back and come here to join us.”
“I wonder, sir,” said Captain Lyndhurst to his CO, “whether I might not go up there right away. Give me a chance to have a first look at the ‘stronghold,’ and then I could come back with this Preston chap.”
“All right, since a car has to go up, anyway,” said the CO.
Fifteen minutes later, the police stationed on the hillside across the estuary from Eagle Wharf pointed out the rear door of No. 9 to Lyndhurst. Still in civilian clothes, the twenty-nine-year-old captain walked across the rough ground, hopped over the garden fence, and went in through the back door. He met Barney in the kitchen, where the watcher was brewing a cup of tea on Mrs. Adrian’s stove.
“Lyndhurst,” said the officer, “from the Regiment. Is Mr. Preston here?”
“John,” Barney called up the stairs in a hoarse whisper, as the house was supposed to be empty, “brown job here to see you.”
Lyndhurst mounted to the upstairs bedroom, where he found John Preston and introduced himself. Harry Burkinshaw muttered something about a cup of tea and left.
The captain stared across the road at No. 12.
“There still seem to be some gaps in our information,” drawled Lyndhurst. “Who exactly do you think is in there?”
“I believe it’s a Soviet agent,” said Preston, “an illegal, living here under the cover of James Duncan Ross. Mid-thirties, medium height and build, probably very fit, a top pro.”
He handed Lyndhurst the photograph taken on the Damascus street. The captain studied it with interest.
“Anyone else in there?”
“Possibly. We don’t know. Ross himself, certainly. He might have a helper. We can’t talk to the neighbors. In this kind of area we could never stop them gawping. Before they left, the people who live here said they were sure he was living alone. But we can’t prove that.”
“And according to our briefing, you think he’s armed, maybe dangerous. But too much for the local lads, even with handguns, mmmm?”
“Yes, we believe he has a bomb in there with him. He would have to be stopped before he could get to it.”
“Bomb, eh?” said Lyndhurst with apparent lack of interest. (He had done two tours in Northern Ireland.) “Big enough to make a mess of the house, or the entire street?”
“A bit bigger than that,” said Preston. “If we’re right, it’s a small nuke.”
The tall officer turned his entire gaze from the house across the street, and his pale blue eyes held Preston’s. “Bloody hell,” he said. “I’m impressed.”
“Well, that’s a plus,” said Preston. “By the way, I want him, and I want him alive.”
“Let’s go back to the docks and talk to the CO,” said Lyndhurst.
While Preston and Lyndhurst were getting acquainted at Cherryhayes Close, two more helicopters, a Puma and a Chinook, had arrived at the airport from Hereford. The first bore the assault team, the second their numerous and arcane pieces of equipment.
The team was under the temporary leadership of the deputy team commander, a veteran 240
staff sergeant named Steve Bilbow. He was short, dark, and wiry, tough as old boot leather, with bright, black-button eyes and a ready grin. Like all the senior NCOs in the Regiment, he had been with them a long time— in his case, fifteen years.
The SAS is unusual in this sense also: the officers are almost all on temporary assignment from their “parent” regiments and usually stay two to three years before returning to their own units. Only the Other Ranks stay with the SAS—and not all of them, just the best. Even the commanding officer, though he will probably have served with the Regiment before in his career, serves a short term as CO. Very few officers are long-stay men, and they are all in logistics/supply/technical posts in SAS Group Headquarters.
Steve Bilbow had entered as a trooper from the Parachute Regiment, done his tour, been selected on merit for extension of assignment, and had risen to staff sergeant. He had done two fighting tours in Dhofar, sweated through the jungles of Belize, frozen through the countless nights in ambush in south Armagh, and relaxed in the Cameron Highlands of Malaya. He had helped train the West German GSG-9 teams and worked with Charlie Beckwith’s Delta group in America.
In his time he had known the boredom of the endlessly repeated training that brought the men of the SAS to the ultimate peak of fitness and preparation, and the excitement of the high-adrenaline operations: racing under rebel fire for the shelter of a sangar in the hills of Oman, running a covert snatch-squad against Republican gunmen in east Belfast, and doing five hundred parachute jumps, most of them HALO jobs—high altitude, low opening. To his chagrin he had been one of the standby team when colleagues stormed the Iranian Embassy in London in 1981, and he had not been called on.
The rest of the team comprised one photographer, three intelligence collators, eight snipers, and nine assaulters. Steve hoped and prayed he would lead the assault team.
Several unmarked police vans had met them at the airport and brought them to the holding area. When Preston and Lyndhurst arrived back at the warehouse, the team had assembled and were spreading their gear on the floor before the bemused gaze of several Ipswich policemen.
“Hello, Steve,” said Captain Lyndhurst, “everything okay?”
“Hello, boss. Yes, fine. Just getting sorted.”
“I’ve seen the stronghold. It’s a small private house. One occupant known, maybe two.
And a bomb. It’ll be a small assault, no room for more. I’d like you to be first in.”
“Try and stop me, boss,” Bilbow answered, grinning.
The accent in the SAS is on self-discipline rather than the externally applied kind. Any man who cannot produce the self-discipline needed to go through what the SAS men must will not be there for long, anyway. Those who can do not need rigid formality in personal relationships, such as are proper in a line regiment.
Thus, officers habitually address those they command, apart from each other, by first names. Other Ranks tend to address their commissioned officers as “boss,” although the CO gets a “sir.” Among themselves, SAS troopers refer to an officer as “a Rupert.”
Staff Sergeant Bilbow caught sight of Preston, and his face lit up in a delighted grin.
“Major Preston ... Good heavens, it’s been a long time.”
Preston stuck out a hand and smiled back. The last time he had seen Steve Bilbow was when, in the aftermath of the shoot-out in the Bogside, he had taken refuge in a safe house where four SAS men under Bilbow’s command had been running a covert snatch-241 squad. Apart from that, they were both ex-Paras, which always forms a bond.
“I’m with Five now,” said Preston, “field controller for this operation, at least from Five’s end.”
“What have you got for us?” asked Steve.
“Russian. KBG agent. Top pro. Probably done the
