clackers and det cord to do the business, and I could see Trev’s eyes brighten at the prospect. He moved towards me on his elbows and toecaps and leaned in close to my ear. ‘Why hang about?’ He hated surprises, all right, but he didn’t mind dishing them out.
I nodded. Why indeed?
We surrounded the site, deployed cut-off teams to stop any runners reaching their boats or vanishing into the foliage, and blew it apart. The best news of all was that we didn’t take a single casualty. The Josés and the Miguels were all going to make it back home for tea and sticky buns. The bad guys weren’t so lucky. One boy legging it off the premises with his finger locked onto the trigger of an AK-47 got on the wrong end of a cut-off team, and a white-eye took a round in the chest.
I hauled the boffin out of the dirt, dressed the wound and threw him into the first Huey on the pad. I was rewarded with a blast of hard-core Marseille abuse. Trev chuckled. ‘Mate, looks like we’ve wrapped up the French Connection.’
I blamed myself for what happened next. I sat on my Bergen in the middle of what was left of the DMP, still enjoying the joke, as another wave of anti-narcotic police helis screamed in. The ANP lads were quartering the place, seeking out and destroying the stocks of precursor chemicals before burning the whole installation to the ground.
I’d got a brew on, but not quickly enough for Trev. He was stomping around behind me as I waited for the water to boil. ‘I’m gagging for some Tetley’s, Stoner. Pull your finger out.’
He was still having a moan when I heard a commotion off to my right. The ANP had unearthed two guys who must have hidden themselves during the attack.
They legged it towards the canopy, desperate to get back into cover before they got shot, and I was directly in their way. All mad hair and staring eyes, the one with a gollock headed straight for me. As he raised the weapon I dropped the mugs, and, still on my arse, pushed back on my Bergen to dodge the blow.
I knew I hadn’t moved fast enough. His blade was so close I could see my face in it. Then blood blossomed from two neat holes, one in his forehead, the other in his neck, and he dropped like liquid. A nanosecond later another couple of 9mm rounds were pumped into his mate. The whole thing was over almost before I heard the Browning’s report.
As I straightened, I heard an animal snarl beside my ear. ‘You going to finish making that brew, or what?’
7
I exited the bothy and tabbed south-west, well past the point where the Grwyne Fawr stopped behaving like a stream and started being a full-on river, then flanked the northern edge of the reservoir. An hour or so later I scrambled up through the gorse onto the path that curved across the top of the huge stone dam.
It towered above the next stretch of the valley, and the sight of it never failed to stop me dead. The times we’d been here since our first Waun Fach adventure, Trev and I used to go straight into Guy Gibson mode at this point. It was impossible not to. Mostly we’d whistle ‘The Dam Busters March’, just like every other tripper. Before we’d deployed for the Gulf, we’d taken it a stage further and danced around on the parapet, pretending to be the German sentry in the Carling Black Label ad, keeping a never-ending succession of bouncing bombs out of our imaginary goalmouth.
We weren’t the only ones to behave like idiots here. Prince William and Prince Harry got a serious bollocking for abseiling down the front of it without the right kit when they were teenagers. The Royal Protection Squad had been given a king-size slapping as well.
But there was no one around now.
The first new flakes of snow began to fall as I passed the strange chunks of overgrown concrete that flanked the dam’s eastern approach. It made the spooky metal gates that creaked open beneath the overhanging fir trees seem even more like something out of a Dracula movie.
I stepped out onto
I nodded. Why indeed?
We surrounded the site, deployed cut-off teams to stop any runners reaching their boats or vanishing into the foliage, and blew it apart. The best news of all was that we didn’t take a single casualty. The Josés and the Miguels were all going to make it back home for tea and sticky buns. The bad guys weren’t so lucky. One boy legging it off the premises with his finger locked onto the trigger of an AK-47 got on the wrong end of a cut-off team, and a white-eye took a round in the chest.
I hauled the boffin out of the dirt, dressed the wound and threw him into the first Huey on the pad. I was rewarded with a blast of hard-core Marseille abuse. Trev chuckled. ‘Mate, looks like we’ve wrapped up the French Connection.’
I blamed myself for what happened next. I sat on my Bergen in the middle of what was left of the DMP, still enjoying the joke, as another wave of anti-narcotic police helis screamed in. The ANP lads were quartering the place, seeking out and destroying the stocks of precursor chemicals before burning the whole installation to the ground.
I’d got a brew on, but not quickly enough for Trev. He was stomping around behind me as I waited for the water to boil. ‘I’m gagging for some Tetley’s, Stoner. Pull your finger out.’
He was still having a moan when I heard a commotion off to my right. The ANP had unearthed two guys who must have hidden themselves during the attack.
They legged it towards the canopy, desperate to get back into cover before they got shot, and I was directly in their way. All mad hair and staring eyes, the one with a gollock headed straight for me. As he raised the weapon I dropped the mugs, and, still on my arse, pushed back on my Bergen to dodge the blow.
I knew I hadn’t moved fast enough. His blade was so close I could see my face in it. Then blood blossomed from two neat holes, one in his forehead, the other in his neck, and he dropped like liquid. A nanosecond later another couple of 9mm rounds were pumped into his mate. The whole thing was over almost before I heard the Browning’s report.
As I straightened, I heard an animal snarl beside my ear. ‘You going to finish making that brew, or what?’
7
I exited the bothy and tabbed south-west, well past the point where the Grwyne Fawr stopped behaving like a stream and started being a full-on river, then flanked the northern edge of the reservoir. An hour or so later I scrambled up through the gorse onto the path that curved across the top of the huge stone dam.
It towered above the next stretch of the valley, and the sight of it never failed to stop me dead. The times we’d been here since our first Waun Fach adventure, Trev and I used to go straight into Guy Gibson mode at this point. It was impossible not to. Mostly we’d whistle ‘The Dam Busters March’, just like every other tripper. Before we’d deployed for the Gulf, we’d taken it a stage further and danced around on the parapet, pretending to be the German sentry in the Carling Black Label ad, keeping a never-ending succession of bouncing bombs out of our imaginary goalmouth.
We weren’t the only ones to behave like idiots here. Prince William and Prince Harry got a serious bollocking for abseiling down the front of it without the right kit when they were teenagers. The Royal Protection Squad had been given a king-size slapping as well.
But there was no one around now.
The first new flakes of snow began to fall as I passed the strange chunks of overgrown concrete that flanked the dam’s eastern approach. It made the spooky metal gates that creaked open beneath the overhanging fir trees seem even more like something out of a Dracula movie.
I stepped out onto
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