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 comman
d had been running a covert snatch-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 spetsnaz course, so he’ll be good, fast, and probably armed.”
“Lovely. Spetsnaz, eh? We’ll see how good they really are.”
All three present knew of the spetsnaz troops, the crack Russian elite saboteurs who comprised the Soviet equivalent of the SAS.
“Sorry to break up the party, but let’s get the briefing under way,” said Lyndhurst.
He and Preston mounted the stairs to the upper office, where they met Brigadier Cripps, the major in charge of operations, Chief Superintendent Low, and the SAS intelligence collators. Preston spent an hour giving as thorough a briefing as he could, and the atmosphere grew extremely grave.
“Have you any proof there’s a nuclear device in there?” asked Low at length.
“No, sir. We intercepted a component in Glasgow destined for delivery to someone working under cover in this country. The backroom boys say it could have no other use in this world. We know the man in that house is a Soviet illegal—he was made on the streets of Damascus by the Mossad. His associations with the secret transmitter in Chesterfield confirms what he is. So I am left with deductions.
“If the component taken in Glasgow was not for the construction of a small nuclear device inside Britain, then what the hell was it for? On that, I come up with no other feasible explanation. As to Ross, unless there are two major covert operations being mounted in Britain by the KGB, that component was destined for him. Q.E.D.”
“Yes,” said Brigadier Cripps, “I think we have to go with it. We have to assume it’s there. If it’s not, we’ll have to talk to friend Ross rather earnestly.”
Chief Superintendent Low was having a private nightmare. He had to accept the fact that there was no other way but storming the house. What he was trying to envisage was the condition of Ipswich if the device went off. “Couldn’t we evacuate?” he asked, with little hope.
“He’d notice,” said Preston flatly. “I think if he knows he’s ruined, he’ll take us all with him.”
The soldiers nodded. They knew that, deep inside Soviet Russia, they would have done the same.
The lunch hour was gone and no one had noticed. Food would have been superfluous. The afternoon was spent in reconnaissance and preparation.
Steve Bilbow went back to the airport with the photographer and a policeman. The three took the Scout in one single run down the estuary of the Orwell, well away from The Hayes but on a course from which they could keep it in view. The policeman pointed out the house; the photographer ran off fifty stills while Steve took a long pan-shot on video for screening in the holding area.
The entire assault team, still in civilian clothes, went with the police to see the empty house that had been built by the same architects to the same plans as the one on Cherryhayes Close. By the time they got back to the holding area, they could see the stronghold on video and in close-up still pictures.
They spent the rest of the afternoon inside the holding area, practicing with the mock-up that the policemen had helped build, under SAS supervision, on the warehouse floor. It was a hurried construction, with canvas “walls” dividing the “rooms,” but its dimensions were perfect, and it showed up one overriding factor: space inside the house was very limited. It had a narrow front door, a narrow hall, a cramped stairway, and small rooms.