Roll call
“.. and last and
definitely least, here’s B-B. So glad you could disturb your slumbers and make
it in for duty this month.”
Good-natured laughter filled the Squad Room
as the late-arrival sat down on a squeaking, complaining plastic chair several
sizes to small for him.
“Pipe down. Alright,” went on the sergeant,
“We’ll be patrolling by squads today as usual from noon. Yes. I said ‘noon’.
This morning after roll call we’re going to muster for a Combined Services
Operation. We’ve got a live one in Old
Town
Briefing
“The Intel is that the bad guy’s holed up at
this house,” the Lieutenant pointed to a projection of a dwelling in the middle
of a maze of interconnected terraces with small, cluttered back yards and high,
uneven roofs. “It’s right in the middle of a densely populated area full of
folk we don’t want to wake, let alone frighten, so it’s softly-softly today.”
The new Lieutenant’s name was a byword for
inexperience and naïveté and a few veterans broke their professional
glassy-eyed stares to gaze briefly at the ceiling in silent prayer.
“Insertion will be by the back door here,”
he highlighted the entry point with a laser. “Tiny’s up first for that, being
our resident housebreaking and general trespassing expert.” Satisfied grunts
came from around the room for this. Tiny was no longer tiny at all but he had
grown up in a world where strangers just strolled into private homes and stole
whatever they wanted. The Service was a great practitioner of ‘set a thief to
catch a thief’ and Command never, ever wasted experience. It seemed that the
Lieutenant had been reading their service files: not too stupid. “Once inside,
Corporal Brown’s section will sweep the ground floor and I want that to be done
lickety-split. Got that?” The immigrant NCO nodded crisply at the Lieutenant.
“The ground floor being secured, I’ll lead the sweep team upstairs and once
Elvis’s Team Two has secured the front room, here, and the bathroom here,
Elvis, Tiny and Brown will do the kick-down and I’ll be first through the door
to sweep the rear bedroom here.” Murmurs of approval at this: the quickest way
for an officer to earn respect is to lead from the front and there’s nowhere
more forward than the sharp end itself. Perhaps the new boss would work out
before someone got seriously hurt after all...
Insertion
“Too thick.” Tiny discarded the lock-pick
and pulled out another. He wiggled it around for a moment. “Too thin,” he
muttered. I could be safe and sound
working in my parent’s non-destructive testing business, he thought. Ah, here we go. This one’s optimal.
The third pick slid sweetly into the lock and in a moment there was a
satisfying click and the door swung open silently on well-oiled hinges; much to
Ed’s relief as Tiny jumped off his shoulders and waved Brown’s team inside.
Tiny paused for a moment before going in and
looked up to where the glamour boys were flying C.A.P. Pete and T.B. were the
best in the sector and if Pete was a little too keen on the juice he didn’t let
it show at all when flying top cover. T.B.’s sweet soprano called down: “All’s
well up top. No-one’s looking our way. You’d better believe it.”
The War was almost wholly clandestine and
the Service rarely let civilians in on the details. The world was full of
children: hurt, frightened children who didn’t need reminding of what they have
to fear and if that means hiding their protectors and what they had to do away
from sight, then so be it.
Go-no go
“Front room, clear!”
“Bath
It was time.
The Lieutenant was whistling to himself
nervously through hidden teeth. A classic…wood
city limits. You go to the fields on weekdays and have a picnic on…
“Okay, it’s time. Brown. Elvis. Tiny. The door, if
you please.”
“Si, senor,” Brown said; his South American childhood
burning through the newfound clarity of his Service English. His childhood and
the fear.
And then the door whooshed open from the combined
thrust of Elvis, Brown and Tiny’s shoulders and the Lieutenant dashed
in…sliding across toy-strewn carpeting to lift the edge of the duvet up with
his Service-issue weapon…scanning under the bed but it was clear of everything
but dust bunnies and a solitary sock…and then a dash for a low cupboard under
the window… he wrenched it open and jumped back to avoid an avalanche of
hastily-tidied away books…and last the breathless sprint towards the huge
wardrobe in what felt like slow-motion and his mouth felt like cotton wool as
he took hours to reach the half-open
door that could swing open to reveal the target at any moment; alert and
enraged and coming at him… and Elvis,
Brown and Tiny’s almost-silent footfalls padding behind him sounded miles away and what am I going to do if the bad guy leaps out and opens up on me at
point-blank range and kicks the stuffing out if me and all I have to fight back
with is this stupid under-powered Service issue popgun piece of junk and it’s just all too much to bear…and
here’s the door and here’s the handle and
here’s…an empty space where the bad guy should be…and next the relief and
the shock and ordering the sweep teams to double check everywhere in the target
house again and calling for extraction and ordering the whole lot of them back
to base…
Debriefing
“…must have exfiltrated scant minutes before
we deployed,” the Lieutenant concluded. His troops stared blankly at him;
professionally glassy-eyed and expressionless again after the tension and fear
of the operation.
“But, Santa
Lucia, sir,” growled Corporal Brown, his English almost returned to the
middle-class accent he had acquired recently, “How can the Air Force have
missed that one?
“Look, I don’t want to go all around garden
for the rest of the day about this one, but it does seem probable that while
the spotters briefed T.B. and Pete when they arrived to set up for Combat Air
Patrol the bogie sneaked out under cover of that very thorough briefing. We
think he went out of the rear window and across the rooves. However,” added the
Lieutenant with a grim smile “our beloved brothers-in-arms of the Air Force
have redeemed themselves by reacquiring the bogie in this lightly forested area
here.” The laser illuminated a patch of mixed woodlands and rough pasture to
the north and west of town. “Command confirms that the Intel’s sound and the
order to deploy came down from the very top. Yes, ladies and gentlemen: this is
from W himself.”
Breathless murmurs for this. The Commander-in-Chief
rarely interfered with the war at the operational level but when he did it was
a sure-fire indication that the op concerned was going to be no picnic.
“So here’s the deal. The area’s mostly
scrubland; full of wild shrubs and tall grasses and herbs with plenty of shadow
and cover below waist level; ideal for the bogie to bivvy up in - and to ambush
from. We’re in full Covert Ops order this afternoon so you’d better get those
disguises right. It’s a popular area for recreation that families visit and I
do not, I repeat not, want anyone
scaring the children today. Not a single
one. We go in, do the job and bring the bogie back dead or alive and
without getting the sawdust knocked out of us, okay?” The Lieutenant looked at
each of his troops in turn; making eye contact to rub the message home. He went
on. “I will remind you that, as the terrain is woodland I don’t want any mess
so once you’re inside the tree-line you will
follow strict hygiene procedures at
all times -…” catcalls and whistles at the instruction that was a byword
for redundancy “- and finally that this bogie’s regarded by Command as the
hardest of the hard-core. In fact our target is believed to be responsible for
most of the nightmares in our sector. So be alert: he’s tricky, resourceful, smarter
than the average one of us…and utterly dedicated to prosecuting the War for his
side. So expect the unexpected.”
“Just want to be …,” growled Elvis to the
noisy amusement of his comrades.
“Stow
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