Marine A SBS Read online

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  1

  ‘Is it true the Prime Minister’s in the VIP lounge?’ McGee asked, wiping his lips with his hand and glancing idly around the crowded heliport lounge.

  ‘That’s right,’ Tony Masters replied, studying the bottles along the bar. ‘Why do you ask? Want to shake the great man’s hand?’

  McGee laughed sardonically and turned his head to grin at Masters. The Englishman was leaning against the counter, sipping his whisky.

  ‘Ackaye,’ McGee said. ‘I’d like to shake his hand all right. Then I’d push him off the edge of the drilling floor. For that I’d give my right arm.’

  ‘You’re a republican,’ Masters said.

  ‘Sure I am,’ McGee replied. ‘Me and a lot of other right-minded Paddies. Our day will come.’

  Masters glanced at the other waiting men with an air of impatience. The heliport lounge was packed and the men on the chairs were surrounded by luggage. Mostly under thirty, they were wearing jeans and anoraks, and were all now hazed in a fog of cigarette smoke. Outside, the weather was filthy, with the airstrip covered in a silvery, wind-blown drizzle. Grounded, the Wessex Mk 3 transport helicopters were parked in well-spaced rows and the drifting clouds cast shadows on their Perspex windows. Masters was annoyed: he wanted to get moving. All the men in the lounge had been there for hours and were no less impatient.

  ‘Look at them,’ McGee said softly. ‘The scum of the land.’

  ‘Being one of them, you should know,’ Masters replied.

  The Irishman smiled tightly. His eyes were dark and intense. He had a rough, wind-whipped face, a short, wiry body, and the sort of restless energy that betrays unreleased inner tension.

  ‘I come from them, all right. Sure, I haven’t forgotten that. I’m a working-class Paddy and proud of it. But that doesn’t mean I’m one of this rubbish.’

  ‘Rubbish?’ Glancing around the crowded lounge, Masters saw the unshaven faces of the other men through a veil of cigarette smoke, framed by the windows that looked out on the windy, cloud-darkened heliport. There was a storm over the North Sea, raging around the oil rigs, and the men in the lounge were waiting to board the grounded helicopters. They had been here, in the Bristow Heliport in Aberdeen, for almost five hours.

  ‘Sure they’re rubbish,’ McGee insisted. ‘The dregs of the working classes. They only work on the rigs because they can’t find employment elsewhere.’

  ‘You work on the rigs,’ Masters said. ‘And I work on the rigs.’

  ‘Right, Tone. But not because it’s the only work we can find. The rigs attract the worthless, the North Sea attracts the debris. Sure, it’s a job where you’re not asked for your past record or credentials, which is why it appeals to this scum.’

  ‘This is 1982,’ Masters said. ‘There are approximately three million unemployed. The first time since the 1930s. That makes it very easy to be scum.’

  After sipping some more beer McGee put his glass down and lit a cigarette with abrupt, nervous movements. Knowing that Masters didn’t smoke, he didn’t offer him one.

  Tony Masters was a bit of a mystery, being a wizard on the oil rigs, seemingly obsessed with work, and rarely discussing his onshore life. McGee was wary of Masters because most of the rig-workers revered him. The Englishman was a tool-pusher, one of the élite of the North Sea: in charge of the drilling, he was tough, efficient and ruthless when it came to hiring and firing. He demanded hard work and obedience from the roughnecks and roustabouts, but he had an almost puritanical sense of justice, which had gained him respect. Too much respect, McGee thought, for a man who had only been on the Frigg Field for six months, reportedly having spent the previous couple of years on the Beryl Field.

  ‘Just think of it,’ McGee said. ‘Three million unemployed. And that bastard, the Prime Minister, is in the VIP lounge right now, filling his belly.’

  ‘You’re not unemployed,’ Masters reminded him.

  ‘I’m just a roughneck, Tone. I’m not unemployed, but I could be any day now, just like the others.’

  ‘It’s not that bad,’ Masters insisted.

  ‘It’s that bad and you know it. Sure, with all that unemployment a man can’t risk losing his job and the oil companies exploit it to the hilt. We used to have strong unions on the rigs. We still have unions, but they’re no longer strong. With unemployment going up by forty thousand a month, the bosses have the whip hand and the unions can’t afford to take chances. You’re an English tool-pusher. That’s a double advantage. You’ll have a job as long as there’s drilling, but we’re not all so lucky.’

  If only you knew, Masters thought, resisting the urge to smile.

  ‘As for the oil,’ McGee continued, ‘it’s really in Scottish waters, but the Scots don’t get a penny out of it. They’re being bled by the fucking Brits, just like the Irish.’

  ‘So what’s that got to do with your precious job?’ Masters growled. ‘You’re in charge of every roustabout on your rig. You should be laughing, my friend.’

  ‘Tell us another,’ McGee retorted. He took a swig of beer, inhaled on his cigarette and nervously drummed his fingers on the bar. ‘The oil beneath the North Sea is estimated at about £2000 million a year. If that revenue went to Scotland, it could meet their national budget and give them a healthy balance of payments surplus. I’m amazed the Scottish National Party, who’re getting close to a majority, haven’t formed their own band of paramilitaries to get that money back from the thieving Brits by taking over the oil rigs. That’s what we would do.’

  ‘You back the IRA, then?’ Masters asked distractedly, as if making idle conversation.

  ‘No,’ McGee said promptly. ‘Sure, I’m sympathetic to the cause, but I don’t hold with the way they go about it. I’m not into violence.’

  ‘It’s comforting to know that,’ Masters said sardonically.

  ‘Ackaye, sure it is. They don’t trust Irishmen on these rigs. They think all of us back the terrorists, murdering Englishmen in their sleep, so if they need to get rid of the odd worker they always drop the Irish or Scottish first.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s true,’ Masters replied.

  ‘It’s true enough,’ McGee said.

  Masters knew what McGee meant. The oil boom of the late 1970s had given a lot of men employment, but not all that many had been Scots, let alone Irish. Although the oil was in Scottish waters, ironically the Scots had been forced to take second place to an enormous influx of American, French, Spanish, Norwegian and English workers, with the odd Scot and Irishman thrown in for the sake of appearances. Recently, however, after the Scottish National Party had created a political scandal out of the issue, the oil companies had been bending over backwards to take on more Scottish and Irish workers. In that sense, then, McGee was wrong – or at least out of date.

  ‘Maybe things will change,’ Masters said. ‘Rumour has it that the real reason the Prime Minister is visiting Bravo 1, in the Forties Field, is for a discussion on the possibility of reducing taxes to encourage the big oil companies to do more drilling. Everyone knows they’re deliberately building up huge tax losses in the Middle East and setting the revenue against liability for tax in the UK. They’ll carry on like that until the British government reduces tax, and the Prime Minister is obviously aware of the fact.’

  ‘Fuck dealing with them,’ McGee retorted. ‘The government should nationalize the oilfields and force the bastards to drill.’

 
; ‘They can’t do that, McGee. It was the British government that originally granted exploration licences to the oil companies, selling them off by means of an auction with sealed bids. The British sector of the North Sea now belongs legally to them, so if the government stepped in and nationalized, it would lead to an international scandal.’

  ‘Ackaye,’ McGee said, glancing around the smoky lounge. ‘They’re desperate for money, so they sell off the North Sea. Now they’re even more desperate and they can’t get their hands on the oil. There’ll be no sense in this country until Parliament’s dismantled and a whole new system introduced. British governments, be they Labour or Conservative, are just capitalist lackeys.’

  ‘You keep talking like that,’ Masters said, ‘and you will lose your job.’

  McGee finished his beer. ‘Sure, you’re not wrong there. A man on the rigs should be tight-lipped. He’ll last longer that way.’

  Glancing about him, Masters saw the tables piled high with beer cans and crumpled newspapers, the ashtrays overflowing, the cigarette smoke drifting above the heads of the men, whose conversation was a constant, edgy murmuring. Those men worked a fortnight on and a fortnight off. Once on the rigs they would work twelve hours a day, seven days a week, in wet, freezing weather and filth. Since smoking was allowed only when they were off duty, and since the only permissible alcohol was their allowance of two cans of beer a day, they were now doing as much smoking and drinking as possible before going back.

  Gazing beyond their heads, out through the plate-glass windows of the lounge, Masters saw the Wessex helicopters parked on the landing pads along the runway, which was also used for light aircraft. Black clouds hung low above them, the rain continued to pour down, and a fierce wind was howling across the airstrip. Out in the North Sea there were Force Nine winds – fifty miles an hour – hurling huge waves against the rigs. The weather ruled the North Sea. It made work costly and dangerous. The men were used to long delays, but that didn’t prevent annoyance; and Masters, like the rest of them, was growing edgy.

  ‘I’m going for a piss,’ McGee said. ‘That should help pass a minute or two. Christ, this business is desperate!’

  He slung his rucksack over his shoulder and lumbered off through the milling men, towards the toilet. Masters watched him go, a small smile on his lips, then he surveyed the noisy lounge once more.

  Most of the men were quite young. They were a rough-looking bunch. They had come from building sites, from the armed forces or merchant navy, and they were generally the kind of men who, even if married, spent too much time away from home. Work on the rigs, though tough and dangerous, wasn’t too highly paid; it appealed to men who could not get work elsewhere or who simply disliked the routine of onshore life. It wasn’t a nine-to-five job, you had to serve no apprenticeship, there was no attention paid to previous history or qualifications, and a man with something to hide had to answer few questions.

  In a sense they were the last of the brigands. They weren’t colourful, but they were distinctive. They were returning, now, after two weeks on shore, where they would have visited families and girlfriends, bought sex in sleazy bedsits, or got drunk in the pubs of Peterhead or Aberdeen. An insular breed, they lived in a small world, working like navvies on the rigs, seldom seeing their relatives, and developing an underplayed camaraderie that gave them moral support.

  This mutual support was something that Masters understood, given what he really was and where he came from. He was, in fact, a sergeant with the Royal Marines Special Boat Squadron (SBS), working for the intelligence branch and assigned secretly to the rigs to check out the very real threat of terrorist infiltration, either by Scottish nationalists or by the IRA.

  However, his skill as an oil worker was genuine enough. Masters had been a tool-pusher for the oil companies until 1975, when a bad marriage and acrimonious separation had driven him to making his escape by enlisting in the Army, after which he eventually ended up in the Royal Marine Commandos. Soon bored even with that, and wanting to use the knowledge he had picked up on the North Sea rigs, he had applied for the notoriously difficult SBS Potential Recruits’ Course (PRC).

  After the usual physical and psychological tortures at the Commando Training Centre, Royal Marines, at Lympstone in Devon, he had passed the even more demanding three-week selection test, then undergone a fifteen-week training course in seamanship, navigation, demolition, diving and advanced weapons handling. Among the craft he trained in were paddle-boards, specially-made Klepper Mark 13 collapsibles, Geminis powered by 40bhp outboard motors, and glass-fibre Rigid Raiders powered by 140bhp outboard motors, as used by the specialists of the Royal Marines Rigid Raider Squadron. The main weapons employed by the SBS, he had learned during training, were the US 5.56mm M16 Armalite rifle with M203 grenade-launchers, the 9mm L34A1 Sterling sub-machine-gun, the standard-issue 9mm Browning High Power handgun, and a variety of plastic explosives. He had also learned to use laser designators, burst-transmission radios, and his extensive survival kit, similar to that used by the SAS.

  Having survived the PRC, he had taken an arduous four-week parachute course in Borneo, then been posted to an operational Boat Section, before completing his specialist training at Royal Marines (RM), Poole, Dorset. Accepted by the SBS, he had been allowed to wear the standard uniform of the Royal Marines and the Royal Marine Commando green beret, but with parachuting wings on the right shoulder and the Swimmer Canoeist badge on the right forearm. He had felt proud to do so.

  As a member of 41 Commando SBS, he had taken part in exercises in Hong Kong and Borneo, carried out a tour of duty in the Mediterranean with NATO, and endured special Arctic training at Elvergaardsmoen in northern Norway. Promoted to corporal, he had gone undercover for internal security duties in Northern Ireland, sometimes working hand in glove with the SAS and Army Intelligence. Finally, just a few months ago, he had fought in the brief but bloody Falklands war.

  After being promoted to sergeant for his leading role in a daring SBS raid designed to set fire to the oil storage tanks in Port Stanley’s harbour installations, he had been posted to the intelligence unit of the Portsmouth Group RM, where the work was interesting enough but not very exciting. Luckily, the SBS was then, in strict secrecy, given important responsibilities in the security of Britain’s offshore oil and gas rigs. Using his past experience on the rigs as the trump card in his application for a position in North Sea security, he had been accepted and sent to work under cover on Eagle 3, in the Frigg Field, with false papers stating that he had spent the previous two years working on Charlie 2, in the Beryl Field.

  His brief was simple: to ensure that no terrorists infiltrated the rig for the purposes of espionage or sabotage. In order to do this, he went back to work as a tool-pusher and was very good at it.

  ‘A man deep in thought,’ someone said. ‘I do like to see that.’

  Turning his head, Masters found himself face to face with Robert Barker, who was leaning on the bar at his left shoulder. Blue-eyed and blond, he was wearing a fur-collared pigskin jacket and scruffy blue jeans. Though he looked much younger than his thirty-eight years, he was in charge of security for British United Oil, the conglomerate for which all these men worked. He was also one of the only two men in the North Sea who knew that Masters was SBS.

  ‘Gin and tonic,’ he said to the barman. ‘And one for my friend here. The best tool-pusher in the business needs his breakfast.’

  ‘Mine was whisky,’ Masters informed him.

  ‘I know that,’ Barker said. ‘And the barman obviously knows your tastes: he’s just poured you a large one.’

  Masters grinned as the barman set the drinks on the counter. Barker gave him two pounds, waited for his change, then put the coins in his pocket and tried his gin.

  ‘Nice,’ he said. ‘Very nice. Day like this, a man needs it.’

  ‘I thought you’d be in with the PM,’ Masters said.

  ‘I was,’ Barker told him. ‘He’s having brandy and crisps. The brandy’s a
sign that he’s an ambitious Prime Minister; the crisps mean he’s still one of the lads. It’s what’s known as good politics.’

  Masters grinned again. ‘I’m surprised you’re not still in there. You’re supposed to be our top security man.’

  ‘How can I protect him? He’s already surrounded by bodyguards and military police. If they can’t do the job, no one can. Anyway, my real job is to protect the Forties Field. Our esteemed PM is spending two days and one night on Bravo 1 and I’ve had that platform checked from top to bottom. I also have men all over the place.’ He sipped his drink. ‘I believe you won’t be joining us this time.’

  ‘No,’ said Masters. ‘I’m flying out to Eagle 3 in the Frigg Field to start closing it down. We’ll soon be towing it away to another site.’

  ‘Frigg’s dried out?’

  ‘Yeah. It was the most used field during the boom years and now the oil’s all gone.’

  ‘I would have come across sooner,’ Barker said, abruptly changing the subject, ‘but I didn’t want to interrupt your conversation with that nice man, McGee.’

  ‘He’s a real pain in the arse. But he happens to be a good worker.’

  ‘He’s a troublemaker. He backs the unions to the hilt. Two years ago, when we were having all those strikes, McGee was up to his neck in it.’

  ‘So he’s a union man. A lot of our men are in the union. I don’t give a toss as long as they get on with their work. McGee’s all right. He’s just a bit obsessed. If he catches you at the bar, he’s a pain, but he does do his work.’

  Barker sighed. ‘I suppose you’re right. I just can’t stand the bastard.’

  Masters smiled consolingly. ‘You don’t have to work with the bastard – and neither do I.’

  ‘I guess that’s right,’ Barker said.

  They touched glasses and drank, then glanced around the crowded lounge bar. To the casual observer the men would have looked like a single group, but the more experienced eye saw segregation. The rig workers, who felt divorced from the outer world, were also divorced from one another by the singular hierarchy of the oilfields. Packed together in the smoky lounge, they had instinctively moved into their own, very separate groups.