Once A Pilgrim: a breathtaking, pulse-pounding SAS thriller

JAMES DEEGAN MC spent five years in the Parachute Regiment, and seventeen years in the SAS.

He served for most of that time in a Sabre Squadron, from Trooper to Squadron Sergeant Major, and saw almost continuous service on operations in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. He fought in both Gulf Wars, and was on both occasions amongst the first Coalition soldiers to cross the border into Iraq. He was twice decorated for gallantry and, on his retirement from the Special Air Service, as a Regimental Sergeant Major, he was described by his commanding officer as ‘one of the most operationally-experienced SAS men of his era’.

He now works in the security industry, in some of the world’s most hostile and challenging environments.

COPYRIGHT

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018

Copyright © James Deegan 2018

James Deegan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © January 2018 ISBN: 9780008229498

TO ALL THE BRAVE MEN I HAVE KNOWN WHO WILL NOT SEE OLD AGE. THEY ACCEPTED THE RISKS, STEPPED INTO THE BREACH, AND PAID THE ULTIMATE PRICE.

UTRINQUE PARATUSWHO DARES WINS

John Carr – CV

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION.

NONE OF THE EVENTS DESCRIBED HAPPENED, AND NONE OF THE CHARACTERS CONTAINED IN THE NARRATIVE ARE BASED ON ANY PERSONS, LIVING OR DEAD, UNLESS EXPRESSLY STATED.

We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go

Always a little further; it may be

Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow

Across that angry or that glimmering sea

From The Story of Hassan of Baghdad and How He Came to

Make the Golden Journey to Samarkand (1913)

JAMES ELROY FLECKER (1884-1915)

These words are inscribed on the clock tower at Stirling Lines,

Hereford, along with the names of those members of the

Special Air Service who have fallen whilst serving.

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Author’s Note

Part One: Baghdad, Iraq

Chapter 1.

Chapter 2.

Part Two: Belfast, Northern Ireland Twenty Years Earlier

Chapter 3.

Chapter 4.

Chapter 5.

Chapter 6.

Chapter 7.

Chapter 8.

Chapter 9.

Chapter 10.

Chapter 11.

Chapter 12.

Chapter 13.

Chapter 14.

Chapter 15.

Chapter 16.

Chapter 17.

Chapter 18.

Chapter 19.

Chapter 20.

Part Three: London Modern Day

Chapter 21.

Chapter 22.

Chapter 23.

Chapter 24.

Chapter 25.

Chapter 26.

Chapter 27.

Chapter 28.

Chapter 29.

Chapter 30.

Chapter 31.

Chapter 32.

Chapter 33.

Chapter 34.

Chapter 35.

Chapter 36.

Chapter 37.

Chapter 38.

Chapter 39.

Chapter 40.

Chapter 41.

Chapter 42.

Chapter 43.

Chapter 44.

Chapter 45.

Chapter 46.

Chapter 47.

Chapter 48.

Chapter 49.

Chapter 50.

Chapter 51.

Chapter 52.

Chapter 53.

Chapter 54.

Chapter 55.

Chapter 56.

Chapter 57.

Chapter 58.

Chapter 59.

Chapter 60.

Chapter 61.

Chapter 62.

Chapter 63.

Chapter 64.

Chapter 65.

Chapter 66.

Chapter 67.

Chapter 68.

Chapter 69.

Chapter 70.

Chapter 71.

Chapter 72.

Chapter 73.

Chapter 74.

Chapter 75.

Chapter 76.

Chapter 77.

Chapter 78.

Chapter 79.

Chapter 80.

Chapter 81.

Chapter 82.

Chapter 83.

Chapter 84.

Chapter 85.

Chapter 86.

Chapter 87.

Chapter 88.

Chapter 89.

Chapter 90.

Chapter 91.

Chapter 92.

Chapter 93.

Chapter 94.

Chapter 95.

Chapter 96.

Chapter 97.

Chapter 98.

Chapter 99.

Chapter 100.

Chapter 101.

Chapter 102.

Chapter 103.

Chapter 104.

Chapter 105.

Chapter 106.

Chapter 107.

Chapter 108.

Chapter 109.

Chapter 110.

Chapter 111.

Chapter 112.

Chapter 113.

Chapter 114.

Chapter 115.

Chapter 116.

Chapter 117.

Chapter 118.

Chapter 119.

Chapter 120.

Chapter 121.

Chapter 122.

Chapter 123.

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

PART ONE

BAGHDAD, IRAQ

1.

SERGEANT MAJOR John Carr stood in the low light, fighting unfamiliar emotions and watching his blokes go through their final equipment checks.

Even at this hour, the air was brutally hot and humid, and it stank of open sewers, old garbage fires, and diesel fumes from the idling vehicles.

Foul in his nostrils as it was, he inhaled deeply: to Carr, it smelled like nothing on earth. He was going to miss it.

Tonight would see yet another operation against yet another high value target – this one a man codenamed ‘Joker’.

Joker: Sufyan bin Ahmed, a former colonel in Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard and now the leader of The Obedient Servants, a vicious Al Qaeda-in-Iraq cell responsible for multiple atrocities and deaths.

Another night, another nasty bastard.

The men of 22 SAS and Task Force Dagger had been at this for a long time now, year after year spent hunting and killing the murderous jihadists who had turned Iraq into a charnel house, slick with blood. Most of the action took place close enough to smell the other man’s breath, and sweat, and fear, in dark, dank rooms in backstreet houses and compounds, where the enemy holed up to make his stand.

With this tour drawing to its end, Carr’s Squadron had been lucky, with only a couple of soldiers wounded and none killed. They were facing a foe who prayed for his own, glorious death, and that presented a very particular challenge. But it was one which the men from Hereford were more than equipped to meet: their phenomenal skill at close-quarter battle, and their proficiency in the art of room combat, had changed the course of the campaign, and the flow of volunteers was drying up. The streets of the Iraqi capital might be teeming with those who loudly proclaimed their desire for martyrdom; few actually stepped up.

Squadron Quarter Master Sergeant Geordie Skelton wandered over, one giant fist wrapped around a hot brew, despite the thirty-five degree heat.

He and John Carr had passed Selection together, and had gone on to serve in every theatre to which the SAS had been committed during the nineteen years they had spent at the tip of the spear. Carr would have stepped through the gates of hell with Geordie by his side, and the feeling was mutual.

‘What’s on your mind, buddy?’ said Skelton, slurping tea.

‘Getting out,’ said Carr, quietly. Absent-mindedly, he rubbed his chin, rough with stubble, and felt the livid, crescent moon scar under his lower lip. A few yards away, a couple of young troopers cracked up at something a third had said. He envied them: they had years of service ahead of them. ‘Knowing I’ll never do this again,’ he said. ‘Knowing it’s all over.’

‘Fuck me,’ said Skelton, with a laugh. ‘That’s another day. Let’s get this one done first, eh?’

‘Yeah, you’re right,’ said Carr. ‘Feeling sorry for myself. Give us a swig of that brew.’

Skelton handed over the mug, and Carr took a big mouthful of the strong, sweet tea before handing it back.

‘Knowing my luck I’ll get clipped tonight,’ he said, with a rueful half-grin.

‘Howay, man,’ said Skelton. ‘What the fuck’s up with you? Twenty years of dickheads shooting at you, and you’ve never had a scratch, bar that fucking Action Man scar on your chin. And even that’s just made yous a fanny magnet. Your luck, you’d jump into a barrel of shite and come out clean.’

‘Aye,’ said Carr. ‘I’m only kidding. If either of us get clipped it’s all went south, that’s for sure.’

That was true: at their level of seniority, John Carr and Geordie Skelton would not even be entering the target building. Grizzled old men like them would hang around at the back with the Squadron HQ element, directing the whole thing, while the young guys did the business.

The building in question was a pale grey, two-storey villa to the south of Masafi Street, in the hard-core Sunni suburb of Dora, on the southern bank of the meandering Tigris. Two hours ago, Carr had delivered the briefing – the last he would ever give – and had watched the blokes poring over the aerial photographs of the area, until every man-jack of them knew the place intimately. Each of the multiple assault teams had gone over its individual tasks, step-by-step, ensuring that they knew exactly which rooms each of them would clear, who would go through which door, what their limit of exploitation would be…

Nothing was left to chance: that was the only way to make sure – or as sure as possible – that you walked back out of the room you’d breached.

As ever, the intelligence picture was imperfect. The informant – who had been promised a lot of US dollars, a new ID and six seats on a US Air Force Globemaster out of Baghdad for himself and his family – was confident that Joker would be at the premises this evening, preparing a giant improvised explosive device for an attack on civilians in the central Shia district of Sadr City. What he could not say for sure was how many of Joker’s lieutenants and underlings would be there.

Carr thought back to the conversation he’d had with the spook who had provided the intelligence for tonight’s target.

‘We want them alive,’ the spook had said, looking down his nose at the thickset Scot – a difficult thing to do, given that Carr was a good six inches taller than he. ‘Especially Joker.’

Carr had shrugged. ‘Is that so?’ he’d said, with a smile. ‘You cannae even tell me what we’re up against.’

‘It’s very important,’ the intelligence officer had said.

‘Really?’ Carr had said. ‘Well, you’ll get him in whatever state he comes out of that building.’

And he’d stared directly into the eyes of the spook, until the man had been forced to look away. ‘But we need…’ he’d said, almost plaintively.

‘What you need is to know what it’s like to step into a room where there’s an armed man trying to kill you. When you know that, then you’ll understand why that’s not an order I’ll be giving my men.’

Truth was, Carr didn’t have a whole lot of respect for the intelligence community: a first in Politics from Cambridge and a nice, soft pair of hands were not much use out here in the nightmarish killing zones of Baghdad, and this particular miscreant was even worse than most of them. Carr had taken an instant dislike to the superior little fucker – not that the answer would have been any different with a spook he did like.

‘One chance,’ he’d said, finally. ‘He’ll get one fucking chance, and that’s if he’s lying face down on the floor when my guys go in. If not, you get him in whatever state he comes out.’

Geordie Skelton threw away the dregs of his tea.

‘Look on the bright side,’ he said, to Carr. ‘The Squadron’ll run a damned sight better once I’m in charge.’

Carr chuckled: Skelton was due to replace him as Sergeant Major at the end of the tour.

‘I might come back and see how you’re getting on,’ he said. ‘If I fancy a laugh.’

He looked at his watch.

01:15 hrs.

Fifteen minutes until they rolled out of the gate of the FOB on the southern outskirts of Baghdad, which was home to TF Dagger.

‘Time to go, Geordie,’ he said. ‘Mount up.’

Geordie Skelton grinned and stepped up into his vehicle, which would bring up the rear of the mobile column. Carr walked down the line, telling each vehicle commander in turn to mount up, until he reached the front. The plan called for Carr to lead the blokes to the lay-up position, from where the Squadron would move the final couple of hundred metres onto the target on foot. He would remain at the rear with Geordie and his driver, the OC, a signaller and his own driver, a young Brummie trooper called ‘Wayne’ Rooney.

Rooney had joined the Squadron from The Rifles six months earlier, and he was already a promising blade. He’d looked momentarily downcast when Carr had told him he was missing out on the assault.

‘Everyone has to step out to work with the HQ now and then, Wayne,’ Carr had said. ‘Your turn tonight.’

Rooney was already in his seat, and Carr winked at him as he climbed aboard.

‘Alright, son,’ he said. ‘Ready to roll?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Rooney, not yet comfortable with calling his Sergeant Major by his first name. The informality of the SAS, when compared with the line infantry, could be disconcerting at first.

Carr thought about correcting him but decided against, on the basis that it might worsen the young trooper’s discomfort. Instead, he smiled, strapped on his Kevlar helmet, and grabbed his Diemaco C7 – a Special Forces M4 variant fitted with a heavy duty barrel, night-sight, and a flash suppressor.

The vehicle moved forward, and each vehicle behind followed on.

The time to target was twenty minutes.

They picked their way north, past shuttered shops, burned-out cars, and fire-gutted houses. Before the war, Dora had been a predominantly Assyrian Christian neighbourhood, but in the chaos of the early occupation the lunatic fringe had moved in and begun a programme of religious cleansing. It seemed like every third house was daubed with symbols which had been used to identify their occupants as Shia, or Christian, or Mandaeists – whatever they were.

The streets were deserted – you had to be crazy to be out and about at this time of night. But that meant that anyone on the streets was crazy, so the men manned their vehicle-mounted weapons and scanned the route for enemy activity as they progressed to the target area.

As they passed the bloated corpse of a donkey, Carr looked at his map with the route marked on it.

‘Next left, Wayne,’ he said, glancing at the young Brummie.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Rooney.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Carr, under his breath. He shook his head and grinned: it was too far back to remember, but he’d probably been just as bad himself as a new trooper.

Twenty minutes after leaving the FOB, the vehicles pulled over and went static at the LUP.

The teams all dismounted and shook out into the order of march, ready to move towards the target, each man going down on one knee and scanning the immediate area for any threat, the pitch black turning green in their night vision.

Carr walked over to Geordie and the Squadron Commander for a final brief.

Everything was good, no issues.

Carr keyed his radio mike, and sent one transmission. ‘All teams, move to final assault positions.’

The men started to go forwards slowly towards the target. It was only two hundred metres, but it took a full ten minutes, moving quietly, carefully: they’d been in Dora enough times to know that the locals would react aggressively as soon as they worked out what was going on. Every man in the area owned a gun, and most would relish the chance to have a pop. They’d all wake up as soon as the explosive charges effected the breaches, but there was no sense in giving them a head start.

Eventually, the assault teams were at their final positions, and awaiting the radio transmission for the show to commence.

Carr carried out a check on the comms to confirm that everyone was ready to go.

All team commanders confirmed.

Carr gave the OC – Evan Forrest – a thumbs-up.

Forrest keyed the pressel on his radio and uttered the words which had launched a thousand assaults.