Elephants can't hide forever (7 page)

On that Monday morning, the remaining thirteen men started fourteen intense weeks of Continuation Training. Mike learnt survival, escape, evasion and most significantly, extraction of prisoners
and hostages from hostile environments. They were tasked on one exercise to plan and extract a prisoner from a high security prison on the British mainland, and indeed only when the operation was
in the final stages of a successful conclusion was it stopped and the relevant authorities informed. The Home Office went ballistic, but points were proven. The final six weeks were spent in the
jungles of Brunei, and the hardships were unimaginable- rumours abounded that the week before they arrived a large snake had eaten an Irish Ranger. The truth was that a twenty five foot Anaconda
had taken him from a hide he was occupying, wrapped itself around his body, suffocated him and done just that.

Back at Stirling Lines, seven men had returned from the jungle, being the remaining existing recruits, and were waiting for the Colonel in Charge to deliver the final verdict. They didn’t
have to wait long before he entered the room.

“Welcome to the regiment, gentlemen” he beamed, “before I tell you of what life is going to be like in the regiment, I am going to give you your winged-dagger badges and wings,
well done.”

The cheer that emanated from the seven guys would have drowned a full capacity Wembley crowd and Mike was on his way.

The history of Northern Ireland is as complicated as the mechanics of the universe. Like all Jihads or Holy Wars no one could say when it started and similarly no one could say
when it ended. Although wars based on religion never end, they develop a truce or ceasefire at best, as is the case with Northern Ireland.

When Oliver Cromwell was appointed Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland in the spring of 1649 he was tasked by Parliament to assemble a formidable force of 12,000 veterans to bring the island under
British rule. During the following months, Cromwell’s troops, under his orders, gave no quarter to the Catholic people who were slaughtered in cold blood. It is fair to say that the legacy of
Cromwell’s butchery lives on to this day in Irish folklore, making his name one of the most hated in Irish history.

Following Cromwell’s introduction of the barbaric ways of the English, the most significant battle in Irish history was that which cemented the sectarianism which was already developing.
The battle of the Boyne took place on July 1
^st
1690 and it was fought by two claimants for the English throne: James the Second, who was a Catholic, and William of Orange, a Protestant.
The southern Irish, who were predominantly Catholic, were supported by James the Second, and the Northern Protestants were supported by William. Within a few hours of the battle it became clear
that the forces of William would win and James beat a hasty retreat to Dublin, leaving the throne of England and the control of Ireland under the rule of the now Protestant King William of Orange.
The significance of this battle of the two religious factions divided Europe at the time, and to this day tens of thousands of Orangemen march across Northern Ireland on July 12
^th
to
celebrate the great victory of the battle of the Boyne.

The final straw for the two religious factions of Ireland came on 3
^rd
May 1921 when the British Government of the time, in their wisdom, decided to divide the country into the free
state of Southern Ireland and the British run state of Northern Ireland. This essentially put the Protestants in the South and the Catholics in the North, thus creating a divided society and a
period of civil conflict and disharmony followed, culminating in the Northern Ireland riots of August 1969. What followed was thirty years of bloodshed, known as “the Troubles.”

Mike Tobin knew none of this history, nor if truth were told, did he care. He was stationed in the army barracks of Bessbrook Mill, the hub of counterterrorism operations in South Armagh, bandit
country as it was referred to by the inhabitants of the Mill. It overlooked the rolling hills of the county of Armagh, not far from the border of the Free State and an ideal area for the forces of
the IRA to hide in and operate from. There were thirty-two SAS troopers based in these barracks, along with regular soldiers from units such as the Royal Artillery and Royal Marines. The SAS
troopers kept themselves very much to themselves, not having to wear army uniform or indeed even keep clean and tidy. With their scruffy clothes and long hair they were given a wide berth by the
regular soldiers, albeit the reputation of the SAS was enough for the regulars to show nothing but deference.

If the British Army had failed to learn one lesson throughout its long and chequered history, it was to never underestimate its opponents. Whenever it had engaged local indigenous people on
their own soil, it had always treated them as semi- literate heathens and the IRA were considered no different. As far as the Brits were concerned, these so called freedom fighters were a bunch of
potato eating paddies without a brain cell between them. Nothing could be farther from the truth; the IRA were in fact a highly sophisticated and well organised army, who had studied guerrilla
warfare, both in books and on the ground, with their foot soldiers slipping on and off mainland Britain to cause havoc, and higher command training in sophisticated terrorist activities in
sympathetic countries such as Libya.

The British had been in Northern Ireland long enough to know that the area of South Armagh was an ideal area for the Provo’s to hide and plot in the safety of the numerous farmhouses that
straddled the border between North and South. It was no coincidence that the crack troops of the SAS were stationed in Bessbrook barracks, where they could slip over the border to spy on the farms
that housed the terrorists. These farms, remote and unassuming, hid various factions of the IRA; some contained specialised sniper units, a couple more were bomb factories, and another was home for
a particularly notorious IRA chief of staff. It was from one of these farmhouses that one of the most spectacular achievements the IRA accomplished on the British mainland was masterminded, that
being the assembly and subsequent detonation of a massive bomb which nearly brought down Canary Wharf on 9
^th
February 1996.

The particular farm that had recently come to the attention of the British Intelligence Service sat no more than 3 miles from the border; it was occupied by three brothers and one cousin.
Typical of the family connection that ran right through the borders, these four men were all killers. Trained in Syria in the art of subterfuge and stealth, they were marksmen who could assemble a
deadly incendiary device from the innocent purchase of ingredients from Sainsbury’s; and they were infiltrators, whose role was to cause mayhem and destruction on the British mainland. They
were in the final process of planning their third sortie across the water, and were due to leave in a few days. The security measures that were in place at the farm were state of the art, a few
fences and a roll of barbed wire made the farm look innocuous enough, any thing else might draw suspicion. However, strategically placed and impossible to see, were four Infra Red Heat Seeking
Cameras, capable of 360 degree surveillance. These thermal imaging beams were capable of detecting any suspects which gave off body heat up to a mile away. These static cameras would pick up
anything that moved, or more importantly anything that didn’t move, within a one mile radius of the farm. Backing up this technology, each member of the cell carried a hand held Thermal
camera. These cameras were cutting edge performance capable of allowing the user to detect any imagery in total darkness, and all supplied by the good people of Boston USA. This is where the
Provo’s had massive American support; most Bostonians had blood ties with Ireland somewhere down their lineage. although this support was about to take a downturn.

So it was on this cold winter’s evening that the four plotters had put down the equipment they were readying for the forthcoming trip, and for the second night in succession placed the
camera in the crow’s nest, high up in the chestnut tree adjacent to the Dutch barn. It then picked up an object high up on the ridge that ran the length of the farm’s boundary and
beyond. The previous night the camera had bleeped, alerting the four protagonists to the fact something or someone was breathing on the ridge; not the first time that week, the cameras would sound
off at anything from a passing fox to a low flying plane. What was now concerning the four men was the fact that in twenty four hours the living thing that the camera had been trained on since it
detected life had not moved, neither had the intensity of the image, which might have suggested that an animal such as a badger was dying. If that had been the case the image would have dulled, no,
something was out there, very much alive and very, very still.

“We got ourselves some company,” said Dermott Donnelly, the youngest brother.

“Right,” replied his older brother “let’s get up there and find who or what’s come to see us.”

It was on this particular stormy night when it all went wrong for Mike Tobin. He was up in the hills observing the remote farmhouse just over the border, from which it was thought an IRA cell
was operating, and he had been in this hide for three days and nights. Known as an OP observation point, the SAS were trained to live in these holes in the ground for days on end; you
couldn’t smoke, eat, or even check the magazine on the Heckler and Koch sub-machine gun you were issued with.

If you needed a crap it had to be into cling-film and then discreetly buried where you lay, to stop the unwelcome attention of rats and foxes drawing attention to your position. It was most
unusual that a soldier was by himself in these circumstances, but the Commanding Officer known as the Head Shed at the barracks had felt the importance of the mission so great that secrecy was of
greater importance than the increased risk of a lone soldier in hostile territory

It was just past 2am and Mike was dozing, but not enough to fail to hear the faintest sound of a twig breaking, Mike could tell the difference between an animal’s nocturnal movements and a
man’s, and this was definitely the footfall of a man. Very slowly, Mike reached for his 9-millimeter Browning hand pistol, praying it would work if needed. He hadn’t checked or oiled it
for three days, and that was against the grain. Just as his hand clasped the butt of his gun he felt the cold metal of a rifle barrel pushed harshly into the nape of his neck.

“Don’t move a fucking inch, you English proddy bastard” were the last words he heard before he was battered by a reign of blows that rendered him unconscious.

Several hours later Mike, who had come round, found himself in a dark dank room he could only suppose was the cellar of the farmhouse he had been watching earlier. Unfortunately, this was not
the case. The gunmen that had taken him were aware that they were now under surveillance and their position had now been compromised, so they had fled with their prize twenty kilometres to the
south, to a safe house that was another remote farm, heavily guarded by another IRA cell.

Mike began to assess the damage to himself, and it wasn’t good. He was chained to a beam suspended from the ceiling; at least half his teeth were gone or broken, as was his nose and
several of his ribs. His head was covered with a hood and his toes had been broken to stop him running (not that there was much likelihood of that at this precise moment). To make matters worse,
Mike had no idea if his capture would have been noticed, as he wasn’t due to make contact with his handler for another five days. What he would have dearly liked to know, was whether a
miniature tracking device had been slipped into the last meal he ate back at the barracks; it was considered by the hierarchy that if a trooper was captured and knew he was carrying a tracker, and
admitted such a thing under extreme torture, he would probably be eliminated immediately. Mike hoped his tracker had not yet passed through him. The only positive angle Mike could find was that he
was still alive, but even that gave him cold comfort as he was only too aware what the IRA did to special forces personnel if they were unlucky enough to get captured.

Several hours later, Mike heard the bolts of the door being drawn and steeled himself for what was inevitably going to be a slow and extremely painful execution. The hood was ripped off his
head, not a good sign as the people that held him were not afraid of showing their faces, meaning there would be no future for him and no identification parades.

“Well, well, just look what we caught ourselves here,” said the man now nose to nose with Mike. Mike was looking into the eyes of a psychopathic maniac grinning like a Cheshire cat.
The IRA chief of staff for Armagh stood six and a half feet tall, with a great swath of red hair and a spider’s web tattoo covering his face. He could put the fear of Christ up any man on
earth.

“Now Mr. SAS man, I’m not going to fuck about,” he said in a deep Irish accent, “I’m not going to tell you can make it easy for yourself, you can’t, but if
you want to tell us all about yourself you can, but over the next few days we are going to cut you into small pieces, but ever so slowly so you don’t bleed to death on us, and then
we’re going to post them to your mates back at Bessbrook, and just for good measure we’ll send some nice photos to Hereford, you fucking English pig.”

With that the Irish giant spat into Mike’s face, head butted him with the force of an express train on his broken nose, replaced the hood and left the room. For a few seconds back on the
Fan, Mike had briefly glimpsed the feeling of failure, this time all the resolve in the world couldn’t allay the sinking feeling in his stomach; he thought about his life and passing the
training regime back at Hereford, all to end in a shithole in the arse end of a bog in Ireland. What he was about to go through was unthinkable a few days earlier. Three days later, semi-conscious
and lying in his own excrement, they came for him, the red-haired giant and two disciples.