The Sixteen (28 page)

Gee, we’re gonna miss you everybody sends their love.’

Suddenly, the earth vibrated beneath us as the air was filled with a tremendous explosion, and I was flung forward onto my face, sandbags landing on top and all around me, as a huge blast inflated then collapsed the tent. Bodies, limbs, broken furniture and glass flew out, showering down everywhere. For a few seconds there wasn’t a sound, everything was still and quiet, then all hell broke loose and the air was filled with the sound of moans and groans and screaming.

I tried to get up but the heavy sandbags pinned me down. My whole body felt numb and I thought I must be injured, but I couldn’t feel any pain. My mouth and eyes were full of dust and I was finding it hard to breathe. Gradually, I managed to move my head and took a full breath. I could just make out people running around, their voices seeming to come from a long way off, I couldn’t hear properly; my ears were still ringing from the noise of the explosion. One at a time, I tentatively began to move each limb and quickly realised that I wasn’t seriously hurt. With difficulty, I managed to push my way out from under the sandbags and struggled to my feet. I looked around me in total disbelief at
the devastation; there was blood everywhere, like splattered red paint.

Nearby my mates were also struggling to get out from under the heavy sandbags, and, worried that some of them might be seriously injured, I immediately helped to pull the bags off them and checked that they were all OK. Like me, they were all shocked and anxious to find out if I was all right but, luckily, none of them was hurt.

‘Jeeesus, Geordie, what the hell was that? Are you OK?’

‘Yeah, don’t worry I’m all right, I’ve just got a gob full of dust,’ I reassured them.

‘God, what a bleedin’ racket, what happened?’

‘Oh Christ, I’m deaf, I can’t hear properly!’

‘Bloody hell, it’s a good job we came out when we did. Shit, look at that, what a f***ing mess!’

Nearby under the heavy canvas of the demolished marquee, people who could move were trying to find a way out and those who did emerge staggered about, dazed and bleeding. By now my ears were beginning to clear and the air was filled with noise. Everywhere people were running around shouting – Red Cross, MPs, NCOs – everyone trying to get to the injured people under the canvas. All that remained of the tent were the two end poles where it had once stood; the rest of it lay around in tattered shreds.

I went to help but was ordered away by an MP, he dragged me from the area and told me to go to the guardhouse along with others who were uninjured. There we were all searched and briefly questioned.

‘Are you going to hold us here?’ I asked one of the MPs.

‘Why?’

‘Well, we’ve been here all week on detachment and we’re due back at our camp by 2300 hours tonight,’ I explained.

‘Right. Show us your ID, then you can go, if we need you we’ll send for you. Make sure you return immediately to your own units,’ he ordered, brusquely.

Rumours were rife about the incident and that two British servicemen had been killed. It was widely believed that Greek terrorists had planted a large bomb in the jukebox and rigged it to go off when the banned record was played. By ensuring that several other records were played first, they’d given themselves time to get well away. I had no way of knowing if this was the truth, but it sounded fairly plausible. As usual, to ensure that there were no repercussions and to maintain morale, the whole thing was hushed up by the military, and no official explanation was ever given. But after that security around the camps was considerably tightened up, and a large number of Greeks working at camps were dismissed.

Another incident when I almost blew my cover had taken place some months earlier, shortly after we first arrived at the camp and I’d begun my training with ‘The Sixteen’. It was to have a profound effect on one young soldier. I was on guard duty with several other lads and it was my turn for a sleep break. On this particular night, I was woken by the sound of a woman’s blood-curdling scream and immediately rushed outside to join the others.

‘What the hell was that?’

‘I dunno. It came from over there somewhere,’ a young soldier named Curran told me, white as a sheet and obviously very scared.

He pointed to an area some seven hundred yards from the camp where there was a small brick building which housed an old generator. At that time, there was no barbed wire perimeter fence, nothing to separate the camp from the surrounding area. I wanted to investigate there and then but the officer in charge insisted that we waited until first light in case it was a terrorist trap to lure us out of camp in the dark.

As soon as it was daybreak, he assigned a patrol to go out and investigate, which included both Curran and me. Checking carefully for a possible ambush or booby traps, we reached the hut and as we rounded the corner of the small brick building one of the lads in front of me opened the door. He took a step inside then instantly came flying back out.

‘Urrgh! Jeesus Christ! Bloody hell!’ He groaned, and then abruptly pushed us out of his way as he began to retch noisily.

We cautiously peered inside. Sprawled across the top of the old generator was the body of a young Greek woman of about eighteen to nineteen years old. Her throat had been slit to such an extent that her head was all but severed from her body, which was saturated in blood. Her dark olive skin had turned a sallow almost yellow colour.

The officer in charge immediately yanked us all out and closed the door.

‘Get back to camp, you lot,’ he ordered. ‘This mess’ll have to be dealt with by the officers’. Subdued, we returned to the camp. None of us spoke – it had been a pretty horrific sight. Shortly after, the CO, several senior officers and the MO arrived to take charge and later that day I heard that people from the nearby village, probably relatives, had arrived to take her body away.

Naturally, the camp was soon buzzing with the news and all of the gory details. The rumour was that she had been killed because she fraternised with British soldiers, who to the Greeks were the enemy. Apparently, she had been seen by some of the locals in the company of British troops and they had meted out their own form of punishment. That was almost certainly the reason for her execution by the terrorists. Whether they brought her there specifically to kill her as a warning to the soldiers I don’t know, but it seemed to me a terrible waste of a young life and an awful thing for her own people to have done.

Even so, the sight of a young woman so brutally murdered did not physically or mentally upset me as it did many of the others who witnessed it. I returned to my tent and went back to sleep without any trouble.

A few weeks later, I was on guard duty with Curran again. He was a small, quiet guy of about nineteen, who looked as though he should have been working in a tailor’s shop. I think that the incident must have been preying on his mind over the couple of weeks since it had happened, although at the time he’d said he was OK.

He’d seemed a bit quieter than usual but that was all. However, later that night while I was on a rest break, he suffered a form of breakdown, whether as a direct result of witnessing the incident with the Greek girl or not, I’ll never know.

I’d just done two hours on first watch and was lying sound asleep on the top bunk in the guardhouse, when suddenly I heard the loud crack of gunfire and all of the guardhouse lights went out. Immediately I dived from the top bunk onto the floor and found two other guys lying beside me. There was a lot of shouting going on outside and we feared that it might be a terrorist attack. The two guys had their torches and switched them on as the door burst open with a crash and one of the other lads on duty rushed in.

‘Where’s the officer? Curran’s gone crazy!’ he yelled. ‘It’s him that’s doing all the firing. There’s bullets going all over the place, we can’t get near the stupid bastard!’

‘The officer’s not here yet,’ one of the lads replied.

‘Well, something’s got to be done, before somebody gets killed. He’s spraying bullets all over the bloody camp!’

‘Are you sure it’s him?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, it’s him alright, he’s gone bleedin’ barmy.’

Just then, the gunfire stopped and we all dashed outside, the two with the torches just slightly ahead of me.

We got to within a couple of yards of the sandbags, but I couldn’t make Curran out properly. Suddenly he turned around towards us and the torches lit up his face. His eyes were wide and staring and he looked completely dazed. Immediately the bullets began to fly again in our direction, towards the torchlight, whistling over our heads as we dived to the ground and the torches were quickly put out.

‘Where the hell did he get all the bullets from?’ I asked, unable to understand how he’d managed to get so many, as the amount issued to us was strictly controlled.

It was dark and there were no lights where Curran was, but I could clearly see the bright flashes of gunfire from inside the round sandbagged bunker where he was firing his gun. I could also make out the dark shapes of several other men lying on the ground nearby.

As I watched him, I realised that he was moving around and around in a circle, firing at the sandbags surrounding his post. It seemed as though he was oblivious to everything around him and no one was able to get near to him for fear of being hit by a stray bullet.

Just then, I saw the flashes moving away from us, and leapt to my feet. I vaulted over the sandbags and disarmed him swiftly and without fuss before he or anyone else realised what was happening. As I took the gun from him, he just stood there, slack-jawed with his mouth open, his eyes glazed, not really aware of anything, then he collapsed onto the ground. I picked him up and dragged him to the entrance of the bunker and stood there holding him for a moment.

‘Medics! Where’s the medics?’ someone shouted, as the guys
with the torches switched them back on and I saw that I was completely surrounded by men lying on the ground pointing their .303 rifles at me!

When the medics arrived, they put Curran onto a stretcher and carted him off. I was still holding the gun, it was covered with blood and so was I, which I later discovered was from a wound on his left hand. He’d trapped the end of his little finger in the slide mechanism of the Sten gun about four to five inches from the end of the barrel, which moves back and forth at high speed when the gun is fired, ejecting the used cartridges. He’d been in such a state, he hadn’t even noticed that the action had removed the first half-inch of his little finger! He’d just kept on going round in a circle firing into the sandbags.

As soon as they took Curran away, I had to report to the guardhouse to give an account on the incident.

‘What’s all this, Urwin, I haven’t been away two minutes and I come back to find you’ve been jumping about like bleedin’ Audie Murphy. What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’ the sergeant demanded.

‘I haven’t been playing at anything, Sarge, he’d stopped firing and I just climbed over the sandbags and got the jump on him, that’s all!’

‘That’s not the way I heard it, it was a crazy thing to do! Just who do you think you are bloody Errol Flynn or something? Don’t try that sort of thing again, you’re not trained for anything like that!’

It was hard not to smile. ‘Yeah, that’s right, Sarge, I’m not really trained for it, am I?’

A few days after the incident, I saw Sergeant Lupton crossing the parade ground, with that funny walk of his.

‘Hi, Sarge, any news on Curran?’ I shouted to him.

‘Well, well, if it isn’t Geordie, the hero. Taking a gun off a madman eh! Bit of a crazy thing to do, wasn’t it son?’

‘It wasn’t like that, Sarge, it was empty. Anyway, how is he?’

‘They took him to hospital at Nicosia,’ he told me. ‘It looks as though they’ll probably discharge him in a couple of weeks and send him back to Blighty.’

He was right, we later discovered that Curran had in fact been discharged and sent back to England for further treatment.

As I said, although I’d felt very sorry for her, seeing the body of the young Greek woman like that hadn’t really bothered me as much as it had others, who talked about it for quite a while after. One or two of the guys made the odd remark about what they thought I’d done to disarm Curran but, after a few days, they lost interest. Nevertheless, I realised just how careful I needed to be so as not to draw attention to myself and during my next training session, I mentioned what had happened to Dynamo, Spot and Chalky.

‘Oh, you mean the guy with the Sten gun,’ Chalky said. ‘Been doing a bit of practice on the sly, have you?’

‘How the hell do you know about that?’ I said, startled.

Dynamo leaned towards me and said quietly. ‘We know when your toothpaste is running out, Geordie. We even know how many times you go to the bog!’

‘What!’

‘Only joking,’ he laughed.

‘Oh God, I wish you hadn’t said that,’ I groaned. ‘I’ll be watching everyone back at camp again now!’ I’d only just managed to stop thinking about who could be the ‘inside man’ at my platoon and now he’d set me off again.

‘I try to avoid getting into situations like that with Curran but the harder I try the more it just seems happen!’ I explained. ‘Besides, it’s difficult not to tell my mates the truth when they’re
all talking about where they’ve been and what they’ve been doing during the week. Then they’ll ask me what I’ve been up to and catch me off-guard and I almost slip up and blurt out the truth!’

‘Well, don’t worry about it,’ Dynamo said. ‘They can’t have any idea what is going on, as far as they’re concerned you’ve just been digging another hole somewhere!’

‘Anyway, if it bothers you so much, why don’t you just tell them?’ Spot said casually. ‘But be careful!’

I was stunned! ‘What do you mean, tell them? That doesn’t make sense, Spot!’

‘Well, Geordie, look at it this way,’ he went on. ‘Who’s going to believe you, eh? It’s so implausible. Just imagine you tell them that instead of delivering supplies around the island or digging roads, you were actually on a mission with a top secret unit, killing terrorists. They’ll either think that you’re kidding them or that you’ve gone barking mad like that bloke, Curran! Just try it and see what their reactions are.’