Eye of the Storm (30 page)

We were a little weak from having had no proper food for at least five days and the cold saps your energy like nothing else. At 1400 hours, with still neither sight nor sound of the helicopter, I told Dash to get on the radio and ask where the helicopter was. Back came the reply, ‘To you shortly.’ Apparently the pilot had been given the grid reference for the landing site, but no one had told him it was on West Falkland. Since almost all the British land forces were on East Falkland, he’d been searching for us there.

The helicopter finally arrived at 1600 hours, by which time we had been waiting for four and a quarter hours and were almost frozen stiff. We saw the Sea King flying in at low level when it was still about ten kilometres away, and I told the lads to stow their sleeping bags in their bergens and Dash to put away the radio. The chopper landed, but because of the extreme cold we were stiff-limbed and movement was very difficult. After a real struggle, we managed to throw our kit on board and climbed in after it.

I asked the RAF load master, who sits at the rear of the helicopter during flights, if he had any food, and without a word he threw me a tin of corned beef. To open it, we had to break a metal key off the lid and use it to unwind a strip of metal running round the tin. Sounds easy – after all, thousands of people do it every day – but not with frozen fingers. After a struggle we eventually managed it and wolfed the cold, fatty meat down. You’d have thought the load master would have offered to help, but he just sat there with his headset on, looking at us. Mind you, after nearly two weeks in the open without washing, we must have stunk like nothing on God’s earth.

We landed not on
Intrepid
, which we’d left twelve days earlier, but on
Sir Lancelot
, an LSL (landing ship logistic) manned by an RFA crew. She had been struck by two Argentinian bombs on 24 May, and though they had not exploded, she had been abandoned until they had been made safe and removed. Even then, the damage to her was such that she was now being used solely for military accommodation. In the last week of the war SAS troops had been stationed aboard her as a rapid-reaction force, to be deployed at a moment’s notice when and where they might be required.

I dragged my kit out of the Sea King and trudged below. The circulation was coming back into my numb fingers, a feeling like having pins-and-needles, and I sat at a table and cleaned my M16 before handing it in to the armoury. What I really wanted, though, was to stand under a hot shower for hours. I had been thinking about that shower for days and days, so I stripped off my filthy clothes, wrapped a towel around my middle, pulled on a pair of flip-flops, and found the shower room.

There was no hot water. There was no lukewarm water, either. In fact, if the water had been any colder, it would have come out of the showerhead as snowflakes. They must have pumped it straight out of the South Atlantic, and you would have needed a survival suit to stand it for any length of time. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a choice, for I needed more than a few minutes to wash away the grime and fifth I’d accumulated on West Falkland. That done, it took me hours to get warm afterwards, but eventually we managed to get some food inside ourselves, which helped. By now some of the other members of the squadron were trickling back from whatever operations they’d been tasked with. One team had a hilarious story to tell of what had happened to them while patrolling a few miles from Mount Kent before the Argentinian surrender.

While on patrol they had come across a hut that they thought might be occupied by the enemy. The squadron commander decided that this was a mission for Mobility Troop and, never one to miss a bit of action, he went with them. After lying low and watching the target for some time, they decided to go in fast and grab whoever was inside. So they silently surrounded the place and then smashed the door in with a sledgehammer and threw themselves through it. The door burst inwards with such violence that it flew off its hinges. But the only living thing in the room was a single Argentinian soldier, and he was in bed. It was so cold in the hut that, under the bedclothes, he was wearing a quilted duvet jacket, denim trousers and a pair of thick woollen socks.

When the guys charged into the room with their weapons ready to blast anyone who offered the slightest resistance, the terrified enemy soldier sat bolt upright in the bed. They dragged him out, and at once a terrible smell filled the hut. The poor sod was crying and was so scared that he’d fouled himself.

On the floor by the bed was a well-thumbed pile of dog-eared porn magazines. One of the patrol sat on the floor, leafing through the magazines, while another took off the captured soldier’s socks and put them on his own feet. Then someone else took the prisoner’s quilted jacket. Just then the OC walked in. He looked at the Argentinian, who was still sobbing – by now he only had his shitty trousers left on, because nobody wanted those – and shook his head in amazement.

‘Give the poor lad his kit back,’ he said. So the guys handed the terrified soldier his gear and sat him down on a chair. The OC then told Jock, one of the patrol members who spoke Spanish, ‘Ask him where the barracks are.’

Jock looked down at the Argentinian and demanded, ‘Donde esta la estación?’ At this the soldier, who turned out to be a cook, cried and sniffled even more, and said, ‘No se, no se.’

‘Donde esta la estación, you lying dago fuckwit,’ said Jock. The question was repeated again and again, with Jock getting increasingly irate, shaking the cook and shouting at him. And still the Argentinian, by now almost gibbering with terror, said that he did not know.

Things might have got completely out of hand if somebody hadn’t suddenly realized that Jock’s Spanish wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. He had been demanding to be told where the railway station was – not the barracks. It was little wonder that their prisoner didn’t know the answer, because there wasn’t a station anywhere between there and South America.

Since he clearly had no information, and was equally clearly no threat to anyone, the cook was taken away to a helipad. When the chopper arrived, however, he had to be physically dragged on board. Later we learned that he thought he was going to be taken up a few thousand feet and then thrown out. Nevertheless, he was delivered safe and sound, although still smelling strongly of shit, to the JSIW – Joint Services Intelligence Wing – where he was debriefed.

Having willingly given up what little information he possessed, he was given a job behind the hotplate in the galley aboard
Intrepid
until he could be repatriated to Argentina. When he wasn’t serving food he washed pans, and whenever anyone walked in whom he recognized from the raid, he would wave and smile. He was good at his job and worked hard; what was more, he was living in better conditions than he had been in that hut near Mount Kent. All things considered, he seemed a good deal happier as a PoW than he had been as a soldier.

It was a further twenty-four hours before all the squadron was back together again. Then, during lengthy debriefing sessions aboard
Sir Lancelot
, we stood up and spoke of what had happened during our various missions exactly as it had happened, warts and all. If there had been a cock-up, then we said so, with the result that we all learned from the experience, and with a very good chance that our mistakes would not be repeated. The same went for a successful mission, in that everyone learned something from it that might be of help in future operations.

That June also saw the start of the 1982 World Cup with England’s first game against France. We listened to the match on a big radio with the commentary relayed from Spain on the BBC World Service. I remember Bryan Robson scoring the first goal in the opening forty seconds of the match, which cheered us all greatly. England won 3:1, which was poetic justice on a country that had supplied Argentina with Exocet missiles.

Although it was some days since the formal surrender of all Argentinian forces in the islands, we didn’t go ashore. We had seen enough of the Falklands to last us a lifetime. I had made friends with the Chinese cooks aboard
Sir Lancelot
, and every night, myself and a pal called Geordie would eat Chinese food with them, instead of the lousy navy slop. They were a good lot, those cooks, especially considering that they were civilians who had sailed into a war zone and been put in considerable danger.

On 25 June, nine days after we returned from Fox Bay and eleven after the enemy surrender, Rex Hunt, the Governor of the Falkland Islands, returned to Port Stanley from London, to which he had been repatriated by the Argentinians after their invasion, just eighty-four days earlier. Our CO, Mike Rose, was adamant that D and G Squadrons were not going to have their time wasted on a long sea voyage back to the UK. Instead we would wait for RAF C-130s to airlift us back. The aircraft that had brought in the Governor took the first wave of thirty men.

On the following morning, Saturday 26 June, another RAF C-130 flew in to Port Stanley airport. Long-range fuel tanks had been fitted in the rear and a few hours later it took off again, carrying thirty SAS men on the fourteen-hour flight to Ascension Island. This was the second SAS flight out to Ascension, and I was on it. A party of logistic support personnel from Hereford met us on arrival and gave us a proper English breakfast. There was time for a mug of tea and a shower before we boarded another C-130 homeward bound for RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire. The aircraft touched down for refuelling only once, in West Africa, and then it was non-stop all the way home. We landed at Lyneham at around 0500 hours on 28 June, and three hours later I was back in Hereford.

The first thing I did was go to the squash club and book a court for that afternoon, so that I could have a game with a friend of mine who, like me, was a member of the county squash team. Quite apart from other, more serious, considerations the Argentinian occupation of South Georgia and the Falkland Islands had rudely interrupted my playing. I was determined to become the Herefordshire County Champion. And I had a fair bit of catching up to do.

The Falklands campaign caught up with me again later that year when, one Sunday evening in September, the 2IC telephoned me at home. He told me that the following morning the
Sun
was publishing the names of all the recipients of honours and decorations awarded to those who took part in the campaign. I was not to be alarmed, he said, when I discovered that ‘Sergeant Peter Ratcliffe, Special Air Service’ was among the names, awarded a Mention in Despatches for leading the patrol on West Falkland.

Chapter Fourteen

T
HE
self-styled ‘hard men’ of Scotland’s toughest maximum-security gaol turned out to be about as tough as newborn kittens when faced with really hard men from the SAS.

In October 1987, long-term prisoners in Peterhead’s D Wing rioted, all but destroying the building and taking a warder hostage. Although many prisoners gave themselves up to the prison authorities, a group led by three of Scotland’s most notorious prisoners held out defiantly, threatening to kill their hostage, a fifty-six-year-old warder, Jackie Stuart, who had only one kidney and urgently needed medical care and drugs to stabilize his condition. The three ringleaders were all men with nothing left to lose, for each of them was looking at the wrong end of a massive sentence for violent crimes. Twenty-four-year-old Malcolm Leggat was serving life for murder, as was Douglas Matthewson, thirty, who had murdered a former beauty queen, while twenty-five-year-old Sammy Ralston was a convicted armed robber.

They and the remaining rioters had barricaded themselves into the area beneath the roof of D Wing. Pushing the captive warder through a hole they had made in the slates, the convicts placed a noose round his neck and threatened to set him on fire, yelling their threats to the prison authorities and police who stood below watching helplessly in the unwinking gaze of the media who had been drawn to the drama. Exhausted, ill and terrified, Mr Stuart, who had six grandchildren, stretched out his arms towards the watching television and press cameras and pleaded for help. The hard men of Peterhead simply laughed at him. One of them threatened him with a hammer, and others warned that if anybody tried to rescue the hostage, they would hurl him from the roof into the yard 70 feet below.

Angered and sickened, the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, watched the poor man’s ordeal on the television in her flat at No. 10 Downing Street. Seeing that the police and prison officials were powerless, she telephoned Malcolm Rifkind, the Secretary of State for Scotland. Mrs Thatcher had been triumphantly re-elected in 1983, her reputation, and that of her Tory government, greatly enhanced by the victory in the Falklands. That campaign had also increased the Prime Minister’s respect for the SAS, a process that had begun in May 1980 when men of the Regiment stormed the Iranian Embassy in Princes Gate, London, and freed the hostages being held there by a terrorist group.

Trouble had been brewing in Scottish gaols for weeks, and there had been sporadic outbreaks of violence in some of them. At least fifty prisoners had gone on the rampage at the grim maximum-security gaol at Peterhead, a seaport which lies some thirty miles north of Aberdeen, protesting against what they claimed was a harsh regime. Most surrendered after a couple of days, but before doing so they had taken over three floors of D Wing and smashed the place to pieces. Meanwhile several of the most violent men had grabbed Warder Stuart and refused to give either him or themselves up. Both the Scottish Secretary and the Chief Constable of Grampian Police warned the Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, that the position was extremely serious and that neither the prison staff nor the police were able adequately to cope with the situation.