The Network - Jason Elliot [110]
At the foot of the hill the road loops around and we pull up at the entrance to what at first looks like a small open-air stadium.
It’s a hundred and fifty feet square, with steep grassy banks on three sides, which rise to about thirty feet. The whole area is fenced off and guarded with a barrier on its open side, which faces south so that no one has to shoot into the sun. Vehicle drills of the kind we’ve earlier practised are carried out within the central enclosure, but H doesn’t want me to risk aggravating my leg, so we work on grouping and then snap shooting with the Brownings. Then, because H can’t resist the opportunity, we practise shooting from a moving vehicle, which is as noisy as it is exhilarating. And as he rightly suggests, good for morale.
We drive back in the afternoon. As we reach the village near his home I offer him a drink at his local. But he seldom goes there any more, he says. He used to when he first moved to the area years ago, he says, but that was before the SAS became such a big deal. He stopped going to the pub not long after the Prince’s Gate hostage rescue, when people who heard he was in the Regiment would treat him disturbingly, like a kind of god.
The thing I like about H is that he prefers to be invisible. I can’t really picture him, after all this is over, going public and giving lectures to the local British Legion in pubs around Hereford and Leominster. Nothing makes him stand out in either habit or appearance, unless you count the small knife that always hangs from the back of his belt or the length of opaque plastic that he carries in his wallet, which can be put to so many different uses.
The few Regiment men I’ve met all share this quality. They are the last ones you would identify as members of the most feared military unit in the world. They are all exceptionally fit, and exertion comes easily to them. They enjoy order and precision in physical tasks, and prefer action to theory, which makes them wary of pretence or self-importance and suspicious of men who wear moleskin trousers. They take solace in beauty of the kind not found in art galleries but in the mist that hovers over a bend in a river at dawn. They rarely smoke, but tend to drink more than most. Much more, in fact. They love the quiet life of the English country village until the next operation in a country that most of us have never heard of. It’s true they keep strange things in their garages, but they get points on their driving licences like anyone else.
So H cooks us an early dinner instead, and afterwards produces a bottle of whisky, which we broach in front of the fire that he lights in his living room. We get on to stories about people H has met who claim to be members of the Regiment. His favourite is the time he gets into conversation with a former soldier who’s just delivered a lecture to a gathering of security experts and claims to have been in the SAS for years. H invites him for a friendly drink, over which the man reveals, confidentially of course, that he’s a former member of the Regiment’s F Squadron. There’s no need, on this occasion, to make a call to the security cell at the Regimental HQ to check on him, because the SAS has never had an F Squadron.
Stories about the more stubborn