asked.
‘I’m looking into Lismore. There’s a little cul-de-sac down there where they’re scheduled to do a house search.’
I scanned forward, letting the Gazelle’s powerful thermal-imaging camera do its thing. Lismore was just forward of the area the multiple was patrolling. The ability of the camera to stare into people’s living rooms, from this height and far higher, never ceased to amaze me. I let the camera rove through the streets and alleyways. It was a warm, late spring day. Wild flowers bloomed in the neighbouring fields. I could see it all. It was strange, then, that apart from the three kids playing football, no one was around.
A movement at the edge of the screen caught my eye, a curtain billowing in the breeze. The window on the first floor was wide open.
I scanned to the next house and noticed that its windows were open too. It was the same all along the street…
Fuck.
‘One Zero Alpha, this is Gazelle Five. Go firm, go firm now! I have large combat indicators in Lismore, wait out.’
‘What is it, Ed?’
I pointed at the screen. ‘The bins are out in this cul-de-sac, but not in any of the others. They don’t do bin collections in just one street. And take a look at the windows. What do you see?’
‘It is almost summer, Ed.’
‘Do you leave all your windows wide open when you go out to work? Look at the other houses in the area. Only a couple have theirs open.’
‘I know a bin can have an IED in it, but what’s the significance of the windows?’
‘The IRA won’t piss off the locals. They’ll tell them there’s a bomb in a bin. That’s why the place is deserted. The windows are open so the pressure from the blast doesn’t blow them in. I may be wrong, but this stinks of a set-up.
‘It couldn’t be a booby-trap bomb because our guys won’t even touch a twenty-pound note on the floor in Crossmaglen and the IRA know that. The bomb would have to be set off by a command wire or remote control. I couldn’t see any wires, but I didn’t see a living soul down there either, except for the lads and their football. Stand by, Scottie, I’m about to transmit again.’
I told One Zero Alpha the form. There was a pause, then he came back to me; he didn’t want to go near the place, but did want to question the three lads.
I told him how to corner them by moving a brick out onto the Dundalk Road first and another down the alleyway.
Scottie watched One Zero Charlie by the Dundalk Road and I surveyed the three lads as the men of One Zero Alpha moved towards them.
‘One Zero Charlie, this is Gazelle Five. The lads are headed your way.’ I could see them break into a run towards the Dundalk Road.
‘This is One Zero Charlie cutting them off.’ I could hear his breathing quicken as he ran.
I turned to Scottie. ‘And that’s why you need to know where everyone is and what their callsigns are.’
The lads ran back into the cul-de-sac and were promptly confronted by the men of One Zero Alpha.
Zero One Bravo was covering the alleyway and Zero One Charlie the entrance to the Dundalk Road. The three lads were cornered.
‘It’s making sense to me now,’ he said.
‘You don’t need to gawk at our boys,’ I told Scottie, ‘because they’re not going to shoot themselves. You need to be looking ahead of them and on their flanks. That’s where trouble’s going to come from if it’s out there. Take a look, for instance, across the Dundalk Road and across that first field there. There’s an inverted T-shaped tree line. Do you see it?’
‘Got it,’ Scottie said.
‘Keep an eye on that place, buddy, because that’s an awesome sniping position.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s got a good clear shot, cover from above and a great escape route, making it hard for us to follow anyone who bugs out of there.’
‘How do you know this shit, Ed?’
‘Because I’ve been a foot soldier. I see things from up here. But I also see them from down there.’
The radio crackled. ‘Gazelle Five, this is One Zero Alpha. The three lads are local teenagers and the way they’re behaving makes our copper suspect there is an IED in the area. He knows these guys. They’re usually pretty gobby, but today butter wouldn’t fucking melt…Our job’s done, Gazelle Five. We’re heading back out onto the Dundalk Road and back to the station, over.’
‘Wait out.’ I explained to Scottie that we now had to go through the routine all over again, covering them on the journey back.
‘One Zero Alpha, Bravo and Charlie, this is Gazelle Five. Your only threat is from a wood line to the east of One Zero Charlie. It’s across the field on the other side of the Dundalk Road. We’ll keep an eye out for any snipers, over.’
‘Thanks, mate, over.’
‘No worries, buddy, out.’
We turned and headed back the way we’d come.
It was my second tour of Northern Ireland. My first had been in 1993-not counting the time I had deployed there on the ground as a Para in 1987-and this time it was a very different ball of wax. In 1993, when I’d been in Belfast as part of City Flight, covering foot patrols in and around Belfast, I’d flown with ex-infanteers, AAC guys who like me had previously been soldiers. They’d all had a natural feel for the tactical picture on the ground and it showed in the way they flew. Somehow or other, this skill had been lost in the four years I’d been away.
My first unit after graduating from Middle Wallop, 664 Squadron, 9 Regiment Army Air Corps, was located at Dishforth in Yorkshire. With it, I’d been on exercises in Belize, Kenya and the United States.
In the five years I’d been an operational pilot I was having the best fun it was possible to have with my clothes on.
As a newly qualified AAC helicopter pilot, there were two platforms I could aspire to: the Gazelle or the Lynx. Most elected for the Lynx because it was armed and as aggressive a flying machine as the army possessed at the time, though that wasn’t saying much. I went for the Gazelle because it formed the heart of the AAC’s covert ‘Special Forces Flight’.
I loved the Gazelle. It was the sports car of the skies while the Lynx was the family saloon. The Gazelle, being a two-seater, could sneak in almost anywhere, which is why the Special Forces liked it. And it had excellent performance; it could get up to 13,000 feet-quite a height for a helicopter-no problem.
Because it was small and made of ‘plastic and Araldite’ it was extremely hard to detect on radar when it was down in the weeds. It was also an extremely useful surveillance platform, because you could hang things off it-Nightsun searchlights and thermal-imaging cameras for starters-and at stand-off ranges, because of its size, it was pretty difficult to detect from the ground.
I’d been doing everything I could to tick the boxes that would get me selected for the Special Forces Flight. I’d done my Aircraft Commander’s Course, which allowed me to fly in the left-hand seat, and I’d racked up as many flying hours as I could. A couple of tours in Northern Ireland couldn’t hurt either, I figured.
The second time I got out there, in December 1996, I’d found the place in a mess.
Someone who’s new in-theatre, who doesn’t know the callsigns or the flying regulations, is usually put through a routine known as ‘supervised duties’ until he or she is proficient with the set-up. Although I didn’t need to sign up to supervised duties because I’d previously been in-theatre, I did so nonetheless, because the place we were flying out of, Bessbrook Mill, was extremely tight-it was the busiest base in the province-and had very strict flying procedures. I wanted to be