– the crump! I’d heard in my office. It was Brighton all over again; the terrorists were out to get the government itself, but this time it was a meeting of the War Cabinet, called into session to review the latest developments in the Gulf War.
The front door was open, a policeman standing just inside. I told him to warn everyone to stay inside and keep in the middle of the building. The officer then guided me through Number Ten’s maze of corridors, down stairs and around corners and finally out into the rear garden. At the far end, the smoking remains of a cherry tree testified to how near the bombers had come to attaining their objective.
(There are many things which an explosives officer cannot know at the moment an incident is unfolding, and in this case I had no idea what sort of tree it was until much later – when I met Mrs Thatcher in a lift at New Scotland Yard. She had been visiting the Met’s headquarters and I had been lunching with the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, when I was introduced to her as the Expo who had dealt with the Downing Street mortar attack she said: ‘Oh, yes: that was when the poor cherry tree was destroyed.’)
I walked across the wide expanse of lawn to the shallow crater near the tree. Judging by the crater’s depth and the number of windows which had been smashed in the building it seemed that the mortar bomb had actually detonated above ground rather than on impact. It may, indeed, have actually hit the upper branches of the tree.
Just then another police officer materialized at my side and said something which both relieved and alarmed me: there were two more bombs, but they were lying outside on Treasury Green, a small grassed area next to Horse Guards Parade. According to the officer, it didn’t look as though they had gone off … yet. He unlocked the gate for me and showed me the bombs. One was embedded tail first and had obviously malfunctioned; the explosive charge appeared to have ignited rather than detonated, vented out by a low-pressure explosion, and was now spread out all over the place. The other, however, lay on the ground, apparently intact.
I moved in close. They were big, these mortar bombs, 6½ inches in diameter and 4 feet long, with the fuze secured to the nose of the bomb by four large bolts. This type of fuze is very sensitive and, as the whole area had been cleared, I decided that now was the moment to remove it. Unfortunately I couldn’t raise my driver on the radio because the buildings were blocking the signal, so the policeman raced to Number Ten’s boiler room and collected an adjustable spanner which I needed to undo the bolts.
The fuze used in these bombs was quite a simple affair. In essence, it featured a heavy weight (the slider) which would be locked into place by a special safety pin. This pin would be ejected on firing the bomb and leave the weight free to move about inside the fuze body. On impact, the weight would strike the internal percussion cap and fire the bomb. It was therefore essential that the slider should not move now, otherwise there would be one Expo in the same state as the poor cherry tree.
Without moving the bomb, I examined as best I could the state of the fuze. Through the ¼-inch-diameter hole for the safety pin I could see the empty hole in the slider into which the pin had originally been set. To prevent the slider from moving, I needed some kind of safety pin of my own. I found a twig lying near by and wedged it into the hole. It wasn’t ideal but I hoped it would hold long enough for me to deal with the fuze.
This was not going to be easy: I didn’t dare risk any movement of the mortar because the twig might snap or fall out, leaving the weight free to slide about, yet I couldn’t simply hold the mortar steady – it was far too big and heavy to manhandle. And thus it was that I came to be sitting astride a mortar bomb outside the garden at Number Ten, working away with the Prime Minister’s spanner and trusting in the strength of a solitary twig.
It was cold out there on the bomb; I was thankful my fire-resistant trousers provided some degree of insulation against what I imagined to be the incisive chill of the mortar’s casing. Snow was falling now, the flurries borne on a sharp-edged wind; all around, a frosting of white began to spread.
I concentrated on the bolts, bringing the spanner into position and ignoring the stabbing needles of cold upon my face. I was, after all, used to working in every kind of weather condition; being stuck out here with an unexploded bomb in a snowstorm was nothing to complain about. Indeed, in a disconnected kind of way I was thinking that the morning was quite pleasant, for despite the wind and the snow flurries a comfortable warmth was seeping through, a warmth that was getting hotter and hotter and –
They must have heard my anguished yell halfway across London. God Almighty! My balls were on fire.
Somehow I managed to get off the mortar without moving it and fell sideways. Finally I stood upright, or almost upright, wracked by the terrible burning pain and the realization that if I didn’t do something about it soon I would never finish defuzing the damn bomb or sing anything other than soprano ever again.
I stared frantically around, looking for water – ice – anything to cool the blistering heat, and finally saw a small drift of snow against one of the trees. I opened my flies, scooped up the snow and thrust a handful into my trousers. If it meant frostbite, then so be it.
Bow-legged and sodden, I confronted the bomb again, thinking it was a bloody good job John Major and his Cabinet Ministers had been told to get into the centre of Number Ten, away from all the windows, otherwise they might have been looking out and wondering what the hell was going on. The bomb still lay there peacefully, giving no indication of its temperature. It couldn’t possibly be that hot simply through firing; there had to be something else going on that I couldn’t see. But second-guessing a bomb is something you never do; for all I cared it could start singing ‘Rule Britannia!’. What mattered was that it was still there, still intact, and if I didn’t get the fuze out soon …
There was no alternative: I sat down on it, clamped the spanner tight, wrenched it around a half-turn, then jumped up, waited for my backside to cool, sat down again, did another half-turn, jumped up again and waited again; sit down, half-turn, jump up, sit down, half-turn, jump up. I didn’t dare look up at Number Ten to see if anyone was watching or if men in white coats were coming to take me away.
One bolt out, then another; sit down, half-turn, jump up. I had rarely met a more exhausting bomb in my life. Finally the work was finished. I eased the fuze out, stared inside the bomb and discovered that all the explosive had been burnt out. I could see a gap between the fuze housing and the bomb body, a gap caused either by internal pressure or structural distortion on impact. The burn-out had sent the casing almost incandescent, and I, all unwittingly, had chosen to sit astride it when it was almost at its hottest.
The area was now safe as well as secure and the clear-up could begin. I walked away with a preciseness of tread more appropriate to a ballet dancer than an explosives officer, I hoped no one would ask why.
The snow was falling much faster now, coming down from a low opaque sky to settle on the ground and gradually cover the gravel of Horse Guards Parade. It was the kind of surface you couldn’t brush clear; if we were going to collect all the various bits of forensic evidence lying around – pieces of fuze, casing, explosive – then the search team would have to move fast.
They didn’t. When I asked why, I was told the evidence could not be collected until it had been photographed in position.
‘But by the time the photographer gets here,’ I said, ‘there won’t be any evidence to see.’
‘Sorry. It’s procedure. We have to wait.’
And so we waited until the photographer eventually came and took a very expensive and highly scenic set of pictures which showed Horse Guards in winter, covered completely by a smooth, unbroken blanket of pure white snow.
I gave up on the Horse Guards situation and headed back to Whitehall. Here the search team was collecting the evidence, sweeping the road and pavement clear. I contemplated the burnt-out Transit and thought how thoroughly well-prepared this particular terrorist operation had been. Most weapons are fired by line of sight; when using a mortar, however, it is not necessary to see or be seen by a target. The bomb is lobbed high over any intervening obstacle and falls from the sky.
In order to target the Prime Minister