interviewer has a chance.
When a second interrogator took over and asked him to confirm his name, he instantly said, âHell of a price.â Only after a few seconds of blank silence did he come up with the second half: âSolomon Grice.â In the next minute he said, âGive âem a chanceâ for âSouth of Franceâ, then, when asked where his father lived, he replied, âAsk some boffin.â Again he waited before completing the equation: âIn his coffin.â
âYou mean heâs dead?â
âCourse heâs fucking dead. Been dead for twenty years, ennie?â
I looked at the nearest controller, who was trying to suppress a laugh, and said, âYouâll not get anywhere with him. Not a chance. Heâs done this too often.â
âYou could be right.â
âLetâs pack it in, then. The guys are all doing OK. The rest are at the R.V. We might as well join them there.â
So it was that we piled into the Feathers for big plates of lasagne and a few pints of Shepherd Neameâs Spitfire ale, while we shot the shit about how weâd reached the Channel.
TWO
The moment weâd got wind of a team job in Moscow, word had spread through SAW like a charge of electricity. Russia! The very notion had put the wing on an immediate high. The Regiment had never worked there before. In the Communist era, of course, the idea would have been unthinkable. For as long as anyone could remember, Russia had been the arch-enemy, the big, ugly bear on the eastern horizon, threatening the rest of the world with nuclear destruction.
My only personal involvement in the Cold War had been during the early eighties, on stay-behind exercises in which members of the Regiment had literally gone to ground on the West German border, opposite the Soviet and East German troops on the other side of the line. Weâd dug ourselves in, camouflaged the shelters, and spent three weeks at a stretch underground. Buried on top of each other, breathing the foul air, shitting into plastic bags . . . It had been a filthy experience which had almost driven several of the lads round the bend. The plan was that, if the Russians launched World War Three, their front units would roll over us, and we could come up behind them, to report troop movements, direct Western air strikes and suchlike. Everyone had known that, if it happened for real, weâd be on a one-way ticket. So, what with that and the discomfort, the whole experience hadnât been very cheerful.
Now things were entirely different. As part of the programme of co-operation between our Prime Minister and their President, the Subversive Action Wing had been tasked to go out and train Tiger Force, a special unit newly formed to fight the ever-increasing menace of the Russian Mafia. With the rupert who normally commanded the SAW away in the Far East on another assignment, it had fallen to me to lead the training team and take it out.
Iâd never say it to any of them, but the seven guys under my command were a first-class lot â seasoned all-rounders whoâd each done at least five or six years with the Regiment.
The oldest and best known to me was Whinger Watson, whose laid-back attitude concealed his high abilities. Weâd worked together in Ulster, Colombia and other hairy places, and understood each other perfectly. His nickname was slightly misleading, in that it referred to his habit of making deliberately stupid remarks, rather than complaining about things. That was one of his best features, in fact: he never complained, but always got on with the job in hand.
The others were all in their late twenties, although Rick Ellis, our best linguist, looked younger, being fresh faced, with curly light-brown hair already receding from his forehead. He had a very good brain, and had worked closely with the Det â the intelligence-gathering unit â in Northern Ireland. Maybe it was his