The Exit Club: Book 3: The Professionals Page 3

  Tone’s death had not helped. Discussing the death with Tone’s wife, as Marty had done, hadn’t helped either. Though he knew she had been officially informed of the death, he had felt obliged, as Tone’s best friend, to pay her a visit when he returned to England. He had lied through his teeth, saying that Tone had died quickly, but he sensed by the way she looked at him that she hadn’t believed him.

  ‘Thanks,’ she had said. ‘It was kind of you to come. But you coming here can’t bring him back. Goodbye, Marty. Good luck.’

  Though Marty never talked about the ghastly death of his best friend (the dreadful agony of the punji pit, followed by the Exit Club – suicide), nor about the terrified eyes of the severed head of Trooper ‘Rob Roy’ Burns, those recollections were never far from his thoughts and they had, he knew, changed him for all time.

  ‘Well,’ he said thoughtfully, licking brandy from his lips and studying the smouldering tip of his cigar, ‘at least we learned a lot in those damned swamps. Those lessons will be put to good use in the future, so we have that to thank them for.’

  ‘True enough,’ Paddy said, puffing another cloud of smoke. ‘And that particular kind of conflict – counterinsurgency– will become more commonplace in the future. In fact, the future of the SAS was clearly mapped out in Malaya. We mustn’t forget this.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Marty said. ‘And I won’t forget to weigh my principles against expediency. You have my word on it.’

  Paddy smiled, finished his brandy and placed his empty glass on the low table between them. Then he stubbed his cigar out in the ashtray and stood up to stretch himself.

  ‘Did you have a nice weekend?’ he asked.

  ‘Terrific,’ Marty replied.

  ‘I sensed you were a bit nervous at first, wondering what you’d let yourself in for. That’s due to your workingclass upbringing, but you’ll have to get over that.’

  ‘So Ann Lim told me. I suppose I was also worried about her and your middle-class friends. My personal hang-ups and my foreign wife. Yes, I think I was nervous at first. But it was great. It really was.’

  Paddy grinned, yawned, glanced at his wristwatch, then looked into the middle distance, as if his thoughts were far away. ‘Ann Lim’s separated from the British by race,’ he said. ‘You and I, no matter how deep our friendship, are helplessly separated by class. And I, Marty, with all of my inherited wealth, am separated from the England I love by the fact that although I’m a bit of an aristocrat, I’m also Irish. The world’s a bloody mess, right?’

  ‘It’s all bullshit,’ Marty replied, using that word now so popular with the SAS. ‘Which is why I love the lack of distinction between rank or class in the regiment. There’s no bullshit there.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ Paddy said.

  Chapter Two

  The following year, Marty, promoted to sergeant, attended the opening of Bradbury Lines, Hereford, as the official SAS training and administrative base. Wearing his full uniform, his badged beret, and the decorations he had received for service in North Africa and Malaya, he was proud to take part in the formal opening ceremony, but also felt regret that he would now be spending most of his time, at least for the foreseeable future, training new recruits instead of taking part in active service.

  Later, when the ceremony was over, he joined the others in the informal celebrations in the bar, to which friends and relatives had also been invited and where the officers mixed freely with the NCOs and other ranks.

  As Ann Lim had given birth a week ago to a son, Ian, delighting Marty, she was compelled to remain at home and look after him. Marty was, however, pleased that his parents had come down from London and was amused by the excitement his ageing father, in particular, showed when introduced to some of the SAS men he had heard so much about. Marty’s mother, on the other hand, though not interested in soldiering, could not resist what she clearly viewed as a glamorous occasion and was particularly charmed when Captain Kearney said, ‘Just call me Paddy’ and talked to her for a good part of the evening.

  Even having alternated for years between Malaya and England, Taff Hughes, now also a sergeant, had remained blue-eyed, blond-haired and impossibly youthful for his age, retaining a kind of distracted innocence that belied his ferocious killer’s instincts. However, even Marty, who could never forget just how ruthless Taff was in battle, was surprised at how attentive he was to his parents when introducing them to his superior officers and fellow SAS troopers. He was also surprised to find that Taff’s parents were almost as quiet as their son – rather shy, in fact – and it made him wonder just where Taff, clearly a much-loved only child, had picked up his cold-blooded, deadly nature.

  ‘Meet me mum and dad,’ he said to Marty, offering his beatific smile and flicking the blonde hair out of his distracted blue eyes with an airy wave of his hand. ‘Mum and Dad, this is Marty, who was badged when I was. I think I’ve told you about him.’

  ‘He has that,’ Taff’s dad confirmed to Marty, smiling happily, his jowly cheeks flushed, his almost bald head gleaming with sweat between tufts of greying hair. ‘Nothing but good to say about you. Said you were an excellent soldier and he was proud to work with you.’

  Marty couldn’t help grinning. ‘I think just as highly of your son,’ he said. ‘He’s a damned good soldier, Mr Hughes, and I’m pleased to have him on our side.’

  ‘He always wasa good boy,’ Mrs Hughes chipped in, flushed and proud as she beamed at her darling son, who smiled lovingly back at her. ‘Always quiet as a mouse and so gentle. A real little saint, he was.’

  ‘I’m sure he was,’ Marty responded, glancing at Taff, seeing his dreamy smile and recalling his calm, brutal despatch of the female terrorist with a familiar feeling of disbelief.

  ‘Excuse me, Marty,’ Taff said, glancing distractedly around the crowded room, ‘but I want to introduce m’folks to some of the others before they drive home.’

  ‘You do that,’ Marty said. Later, when the visitors had all departed and the new base was settling into darkness, Marty sat down with Bulldog Bellamy, now a staff sergeant, and the darkeyed, volatile Pat O’Connor, who had made it to sergeant but then been demoted back to corporal after one of his many drunken brawls. Though O’Connor could be a dangerous man to know, Marty would never forget his outrage when forced to leave the mortally wounded Tone behind as the patrol advanced deeper into the Selangor swamp. He had respected O’Connor ever since.

  ‘You didn’t invite any guests,’ he said to O’Connor as the Irishman drank his latest pint of beer. ‘Why was that, mate?’

  ‘Who the fuck should I have brought?’ O’Connor replied, wiping his thin, mean lips with the back of his hand.

  ‘Your mum and dad?’

  ‘Both dead.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that.’

  ‘No, you’re not. How the fuck could you be sorry to

  hear that when you never even knew ’em?’

  ‘It was a rhetorical statement,’ Bulldog explained. ‘What the fuck does “rhetorical” mean?’ O’Connor

  asked. ‘Is he tryin’ to be funny?’

  ‘It means he was trying to be polite,’ Bulldog told

  him.

  ‘That’s right,’ Marty said. ‘Don’t take offence, mate.

  I mean, when someone tells you their parents are dead,

  you automatically say these things. Just being polite.’ ‘A word you probably can’t even spell,’ Bulldog

  said to O’Connor.

  ‘Dead and buried,’ O’Connor said, ignoring

  Bulldog’s jibe. ‘A fuckin’ good thing, too. They both

  drank like fish and fought cats and dogs and beat me up

  when they weren’t beatin’ each other. Good riddance, I

  say.’

  ‘Where was that, then?’

  ‘In Bandon, West Cork. I remember that it had this

  one long main street and not too much else. Lots of

  pubs, nat’rally. My fuckin’ parents knew them all. They

/>   used to take me shoppin’, hand me the shoppin’ bags,

  then make me wait outside some fuckin’ pub while they

  went in for a socalled quick one. ‘Course they’d be in

  there for hours and come out pissed as newts. They’d

  argue all the way home, sometimes hittin’ each other,

  ‘an’ when they got inside the house, they’d hit me

  instead and then uncork some more bottles.

  Unemployed, the pair of ’em. Too much time on their

  hands. When they beat me once too often, I left home

  an’ never went back. I was seventeen then. Raided my

  dad’s wallet before I left and caught the first boat to

  England. Spent the first months in Liverpool, sweepin’

  the fuckin’ streets, then moved on to London and lived

  in Shepherd’s Bush and got into the buildin’ trade.

  Labourin’, of course. That’s all we Paddies were worth.

  But at least it was honest employment an’ I was paid

  and kept m’self to m’self. A few bints here and there.

  Mostly picked up in pubs. I started drinkin’ with one

  and she drank me under the table and we were pissed as

  two newts when we got married in a registry office. The

  marriage lasted a month. We were pissed the whole

  time. When she started fuckin’ around with a mate, I

  beat up the pair of ‘em. She left me soon after. Took all my savin’s. I took my anger out on another mate on the buildin’ site an’ they sacked me on the spot an’ I was broke and didn’t know what to do. So I joined the regular army. Just waltzed in an’ signed up. The psychologist told me I was borderline mad, a proper head case, but the army was pretty desp’rate at the time, so they let me in anyway. How the fuck I got accepted

  by the SAS I’ll just never know.’

  ‘You have to be borderline mad to want to join the

  SAS,’ Bulldog told him. ‘We’re allborderline mad.’ ‘No, we’re not,’ Marty said. ‘We’re just different,

  that’s all. We’re men who can’t settle for a normal life,

  but we’re nowhere near mad. If we were, we wouldn’t

  get into the regiment. We got in ‘cause we’re special.’ ‘And modest,’ Bulldog said.

  ‘I’m just stating a fact,’ Marty told him. ‘I’m not

  boasting, but I’m saying we’re special – and, damn it,

  we’ve proved it. In North Africa. Certainly in Malaya.

  What we did in those swamps was something special.

  Come on, Bulldog, admit it.’

  Bulldog nodded affirmatively. ‘Okay, I admit it. But

  I still don’t think we’re special enough yet. We have to

  go farther.’

  ‘Exactly my sentiments,’ Captain Kearney said,

  having come up to stand at their table and listen

  attentively. ‘May I join you, gentlemen?’

  ‘Sure, boss,’ Bulldog said.

  Paddy pulled up a chair and sat between Bulldog

  and O’Connor. He sniffed delicately at his fresh glass of

  whisky, had a sip, then put the glass back on the table

  and lit a cigar. ‘I agree with your sentiments,’ he said to

  Bulldog, ‘but what, precisely, are your proposals?’ ‘Well, boss,’ Bulldog said, ‘I’ve been thinking about

  what you said – about how the war in Malaya was a

  counterinsurgency job and that’s the direction most

  will take in the future.’

  ‘I stick by that,’ Paddy said.

  Bulldog inhaled on his cigarette, let the smoke out

  in a leisurely sigh, then cleared his throat with a cough.

  ‘Well, boss, it seems to me that until another real war

  comes along, we’re all going to be stuck here in

  Hereford, just playing war games.’

  ‘We must keep in practice, Staff Sergeant. That’s

  what we doin peacetime.’

  ‘Exactly. We keep in practice. But we learned an

  awful lot in those swamps in Malaya and it’s changed

  our whole perception of how to do things. So what I’m

  saying is that we’ve not only got to keep in practice –

  keeping going over the old ways– we’ve also got to

  build on what we learned in Malaya and create a whole

  new method of training to meet future requirements.’ ‘With special regard to counter-insurgency

  operations.’

  ‘Right,’ Bulldog said. ‘In hostile environments.’ ‘Pardon?’ Marty asked.

  Bulldog staredsteadily at him. ‘We work best in

  hostile environments, do we not? We started in the

  North African desert with the LRDG, then we worked

  with the Sakai in the jungle, another hostile

  environment. We already insert by parachute. We’ve

  learned the art of treejumping. We’ve poled down

  rivers on makeshift rafts. We’ve learned to live off the

  land, to sleep waist-deep in leech-filled water, to win

  the hearts and minds of the natives and then train them

  to fight for us. What I’m saying, then, is that we have to

  include all that, and even expand on it, in the future.

  We’ve got to be prepared to go anywhere at short notice

  and tackle any task required. It’s the only way we’ll

  survive as a regiment.’

  ‘You’re talking politics,’ Paddy said.

  ‘That’s right, boss, politics. We all know what

  happened after World War Two – the SAS was

  disbanded. They didn’t need us anymore. At least, they

  thought they didn’t need us. And the minute they

  thought they didn’t need us, they ruthlessly axed us. If

  they did it once, they’ll do it again. They’ll say we’re

  surplus to requirements. And the only way we’ll stop

  them from doing that is to make ourselves

  indispensable.’

  ‘So we turn ourselves into a regiment that can do

  what other regiments can’t do.’

  ‘Right, boss. Exactly.’

  Paddy blew another cloud of cigarette smoke,

  watched it spiralling in the air directly in front of him,

  then squinted through the purple haze at Bulldog. ‘What kind of training programme are you thinking

  about?’

  ‘Something a damned sight more extensive than

  standard military training. I’ve dubbed it “cross-

  training”. As I see it, what we need are men who’re

  particularly good at most kinds of military activity–

  weapons, battle strategy, teamwork, endurance– but

  who also have specialist training in other areas that

  ensure they’re prepared for just about any kind of

  environment: heat, cold, jungle, mountain, rivers, the

  sea, the air.’

  ‘But we already do that,’ Marty said. ‘I mean,

  basically we work on a system of four-man teams, with

  each man in each team being trained – cross-trained, as

  you put it – in signals, demolitions, medicine and

  essential languages.’

  ‘Correct. But that only evolved gradually out of our

  needs in Malaya and it still isn’t a regular part of our

  training. What I’m saying is that we have to make such

  training the modus operandi of the regiment and, more importantly, extend it to include specialist techniques relating to survival not only in jungles and deserts and in the air, which we’ve already done, but also at sea and on snow-covered mountains. In other words, in the future we should be prepared for all contingencies even before we leave base– not lear
n as we go along, which is what we did in Malaya. I also believe there should be

  an even more rigorous selection course.’

  ‘That’s a fuckin’ joke, excuse my language,’ Pat

  O’Connor said. ‘An even more rigorous selection

  course than the one we already have could break even

  me.’

  ‘Like breaking a bleeding matchstick,’ Marty joked.

  ‘I’d ignore thatcomplaint.’

  ‘Very funny!’ O’Connor retorted.

  ‘You have some specific ideas?’ Paddy Kearney

  asked, treating the matter more seriously.

  ‘Yes, boss.’ Bulldog stubbed his cigarette out in the

  ashtray, then immediately lit another one and exhaled a

  cloud of smoke into the cloud already created by

  Paddy’s cigar. ‘I think we should break it down into a

  three-part selection-and-training course. First is

  selection. We only consider men with at least two years’

  service in another regiment, and who, while being selfsufficient, will have no record of troublemaking and can

  still work well in a team.’

  ‘That gets rid of O’Connor here,’ Marty said. ‘Up yours!’ came the instant retort.

  ‘The selection,’ Bulldog continued, ignoring the pair

  of them, ‘will be based on a three-week training period

  tougher than any so far devised, concentrating on

  physical stamina and endurance, determination, mapreading skills, which would have to be exceptional, and,

  of course, crosscountry navigation.’

  ‘All already on the agenda,’ Paddy reminded him. ‘The initial three-week training period,’ Bulldog