The Regiment by Rusty Firmin

Author:Rusty Firmin
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781472823243
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

FIRST BLOOD

The Iranian Embassy

On Wednesday 30 April 1980 I was sitting at home in Hereford waiting for a phone call. B Squadron had recently taken over from D Squadron as the 22 SAS on-call counter-terrorist team and having finished our work-up training, we were due to conduct an exercise in Northumbria at some point over the coming Bank Holiday weekend. I’d been in the SAS for nearly three years by now and had reached the dizzy heights of lance corporal and I was now designated as one of the ‘Blue Team’ assaulters so I should have been feeling fairly pleased with myself, but I wasn’t.

Gripe number one was with the whole idea of an exercise over the Bank Holiday when most sensible people would be celebrating the arrival of spring with barbecues and beer drinking. Gripe number two was more specific. I was due to play for Westfields Football Club in a cup final on Bank Holiday Monday and I had absolutely no idea whether I would be back from the exercise in time to play.

I had made myself a cup of Nescafé and was sipping it as I read the morning paper when the phone rang. Here we go, I thought.

I picked up the receiver to answer it.

‘Rusty?’ It was ‘Wing-Nut’, the squadron clerk.

‘Yes, speaking.’

‘You need to come into camp straight away for briefing.’

‘On my way,’ I told him. As I was talking, the bleeper I wore on my belt went off, signalling a message. This was normal: we were on 30 minutes standby so I was entitled to be at home, which was less than 500 yards from camp, but I might have been in the garden or sitting on the bog when the phone rang so they would bleep the whole team at the same time as they were calling round. It was a routine Standard Operating Procedure (SOP).

I glanced down at the little LCD screen on the bleeper and was surprised to see that it read ‘9999’ which was the code for a live operation, rather than ‘1111’ which signalled the start of an exercise. Someone’s getting over-excited, I thought.

My overnight kit was already packed in a bag by the front door so I picked it up, went out, locking the door behind me, and jogged down to camp. I was in no particular hurry as I assumed that it was just the start of the exercise and that the operational code was a mistake but I was still there within six or seven minutes of the call going out.

I arrived on camp at about the same time as Gerry, Minky and Johnny Mac and we hung around, chatting about this and that, waiting for the rest of the squadron to arrive. By now we’d picked up on the rumour that there was actually a live incident going on in London and it seemed likely that the planned exercise was binned, or at least postponed, until the head shed found out what was happening.

With most of the team assembled, Officer Commanding B Squadron, Major G, gave us a quick briefing.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.