Anything to Declare? (32 page)

The aircraft finally appeared, the distinctive buzz getting louder as it dropped and approached. Finally, it touched down and taxied over to a hardstanding area. Waiting for it were two escort vans, small but fast, probably tuned up for a quick getaway if needed. We had discussed when was the best time to knock this job and it had been decided that we would do it midway through unloading. That way we could try to nab everybody in one place, with no chases or getaways. King was merrily telling his gang what to do over his mobile phone.

At a given signal, we went in: the knock was on! All our vans and police cars screamed out of cover and shot at high speed on to the small landing strip, before screeching to a halt in a wall of tyre smoke to form a blockade; every vehicle spat out its officers and they hit the ground running, batons out, shouting and charging down the gang members. It was all going like clockwork until Andrew King, in shock and panic, decided that he didn’t really want to be nicked today and so made a blind dash for it. His getaway lasted all of ten feet as his dash took him running straight into the airplane’s still spinning propeller. Nearby officers and gang members all groaned and covered their faces – both in horror and to block the blood spray. Shiny, wet bits of Mr King span all around the vicinity.

How he did it, I will never know, but with some good paramedic first aid and a fast ambulance, King survived and made it to hospital, where the immense bleeding was stopped and he was sedated into a controlled coma.

As the rest of us dealt with the gang and their interviews, Paul, our senior officer, headed up north to talk to King’s wife and break the bad news. Paul was very diplomatic and explained to her that Andrew had been in a severe accident but he was still alive. What he needed from Mrs King, he said, were details about her husband for identification purposes.

‘Sorry to have to ask these questions at a time like this, but does Mr King have any tattoos?’

‘Yes, he has a pair of lovebirds tattooed on his left arm.’

Paul phoned one of our officers who was keeping an eye on King at the hospital and passed on this information. There was a slight pause while checks were done at the other end. But the answer came back: ‘No.’ No lovebirds.

Paul shook his head at Mrs King, and tried again. ‘Does Andrew have any more tattoos?’

‘Yes, he had a small tattoo of “The Saint” on his right hand,’ she said, now getting more upset.

Once again, Paul passed the information to the hospital officer. There was another pause, some more whispering and then: ‘No.’ Nope, no Saint tattoo.

Paul shook his head at Mrs King and she started crying all over again. Like Paul, she was now thinking that, if all King’s tattoos had disappeared, just how many of his body parts had been chopped off by the propeller blades?

It all came to a horrible climax when she told Paul that her husband had a long scar above his knee on his left leg. Surely that must be there. Once again, Paul passed on the info and once again the answer came back: ‘No.’

At this, Mrs King howled and collapsed on the floor in tears and Paul nearly collapsed too when, just at that moment, Mr King walked in through the front door.

There was no doubting it, they did look very much alike: the real Andrew King, who had just got home, and the fake Mr King who was laid out in the hospital. The real Mr King had had his passport stolen while on a business trip to the Netherlands and this was no doubt where the fake Mr King – our drugs boss – got his hands on it and adopted his identity. Chances were that the passport had been stolen to order because of the resemblance.

And no wonder our ‘Mr King’ had never travelled north to see his wife: it wasn’t his wife at all. The only ID we had ever seen was the passport after we had the fake Mr King stopped at Customs during the early days of the operation.

The real Mrs King was overjoyed to get back the real Mr King, and all in one piece rather than several separate ones.

And it’s fair to say that, for their services during the raid, all Customs officers were fully decorated. Especially those stood near the propeller.

There was one thing that shocked people more than anything else about the work I did as a Customs officer. And that was the investigations where I worked as a CROPs officer. That meant Covert Rural Observation Positions. It was about as far away from the image of a black and gold uniformed officer standing in an airport as you could get – and most members of the public don’t even know that Customs officers do this kind of work. And those who do know think they are a little bit crazy for doing it. Even for those in the trade, CROPs officers are thought of as nutters who risk their lives every time they are deployed. Sometimes, I was one of the nutters. I was still working for the Investigation Division but would be called to go on a CROPs ‘adventure’ as and when required.

CROPs is regarded as such a danger because the main role is to set up observation positions as close as possible to a target address, whether that is a house, a farm, a landing stag or so on. These are the rural locations used by criminal organizations and drugs gangs as hideaways, meeting places and drop-off points for their gear. But, because of the rural positions, normal urban surveillance is impossible. So, as CROPs officers on surveillance, we had to dress and act as you would imagine SAS soldiers would on a field deployment: camouflaged, silent, dug in, totally independent and self-sufficient.

The golden rule was that we should be able to remain concealed to a trained soldier at twenty paces and concealed to a civilian at ten paces. The major difference between Customs CROPs and the police force’s version was that our rural surveillance ops were much more hardcore – we would remain dug in for days on end, if needs be, whereas the police would do short-term deployments for hours. Due to this extended exposure to the weather and to the risk of discovery, we trained and exercised with the special forces. We would also try out new techniques in the UK that the special forces were mailing, and then pass on our findings back to them so they could put them to better use in Northern Ireland, Afghanistan or Iraq or wherever they happened to be deployed. Whenever an ex-special forces soldier came over to the dark side and joined the Customs CROPs teams, we’d make sure we’d test ourselves and our skills against them – we always came out on top. Customs CROPs officers had such a good reputation that we were sometimes in demand from various bodies such as the secret services. But our primary employer was, of course, Customs.

CROPs officers were predominantly from a military background that wanted to continue using their expertise. I’d started off in the Army so I already had the initial training required; and I also had the desire. I’d travelled through the ranks and services of HMCE, so CROPs work was a natural development and a needed challenge for me.

Every deployment required different skills and intricate planning, the briefings of which could go on for hours. For example, if myself and a colleague were to stake out an area in the middle of the countryside that we suspected was being used as a drugs drop, we would carefully map out the surrounding area, choose the best spot for observation that was also the best spot from which not to be seen, calculate our required time there and then, from all that, choose our kit. This would be a Bergen (military rucksack) filled with high-energy food supplies (all cold as heat and smell is a giveaway), drinks, surveillance kit (binoculars, sights and scopes), cameras and zoom lenses, camouflage gear, spare clothing items (thermals), weapons of choice (kukri knife and an SOE dagger for me) and odd sundries such as clingfilm (which, if we had to, we shat into in order to hide the smell: the crap-and-wrap).

You can see now why most Customs officers didn’t want to become an Investigative CROPs officer and thought we were a little crazy to volunteer. Sleeping rough in mud and water while dug in a ditch in the middle of nowhere, day and night, in the freezing cold and suffering wind, rain and snow, while eating cold rations, crapping into clingfilm and observing at close quarters hardcore criminal gangs who if they found you would want to kill you is, I can see, not everyone’s idea of a good time at the office.

I absolutely loved it.

The adrenaline surge was incredible, as was the sense of satisfaction when you withdrew from a job with surveillance photographs of a consignment drop that you knew would be used as evidence to crack open a smuggling organization.

As difficult as CROPs missions could be, it was always a relief when one came around if the current investigation caseload was low. On this occasion, I was having a slow week: no surveillance going on, half the team on holiday and I had a pile of papers to get ready for court. My phone rang about midday.

‘Hi, Mad Dog, fancy a dirty weekend away?’ It was Peter Holland, a great CROPs officer from one of our northern offices and someone who’d known me long enough to use the ‘Mad Dog’ nickname I’d picked up in uniform.

‘Peter, I’m just too busy to play at the moment,’ I said.

There was a bark of disbelieving laughter at the other end of the line. ‘If that’s true, then I must be talking to an impostor and not the Jon I know who loves a bit of CROPs work. So, get your arse in gear and you and Nick put your kit together and get up here for 20:00 hours.’

After a little unconvincing resistance, I agreed. I gave Nick, one of my fellow CROPs officers, a shout and asked if he’d like to go out on a rural surveillance op. Two minutes later, Nick was at the end of his desk with his giant Bergen rucksack.

‘I’ll take that as a definite yes, then,’ I said.

As CROPs work was deemed a job more for the mad than the sane, as soon as we started getting our kit together people would tend to move away from us to give us room. Nobody ever asked where we were going or what we were investigating because they knew we couldn’t say. We would automatically switch into a military mode of behaviour with its accompanying language and sense of humour. During the packing of our kit, we morphed from Customs investigators to CROPs officers. The difference between us and most other forms of law enforcement officer was that when we hit the ground there was a possibility – depending on the risk of the job – that we wouldn’t come home.

It took us a couple of hours to get all our kit together. We never really knew what we might need so we’d just take everything that we could pack into a Land Rover. We arrived at our northern office in the early evening, just in time for the briefing. There were eight other officers in the room as well as the head of office and the case officer. CROPs briefings were always held in secret, away from officers not involved in the operation, so there was no risk that they could give evidence about our actions in court.

The briefing took just over two hours, which wasn’t too bad by our standards: sometimes the briefings could be more than double that. This operation was to be the culminating action of a six-month surveillance job. The targets were importing large amounts of cannabis resin from the near continent. They had previously used lorries and cars via the passenger ferry into Dover, but for some reason they had been spooked and decided to change their MO. Information gained from phone calls and informants led the operational team to believe that the next importation was the following morning at a remote airstrip, about forty miles away. Most of us had been involved in light-aircraft jobs before and we knew how dangerous they could be.

For this one, myself, Pete and a new CROPs officer, Den, were the ones on the ground – or as Pete put it: the ones in the shit. Nick would be what we termed the silver commander at our remote HQ, with the other five officers covering such jobs as medic, communications and transport. As far as the operational team went, our contact would be with Nick only. We used a different radio channel to the back-up officers as we couldn’t afford to have their chatter blocking up the airways if things started to get hot.

I spent the next hour with Pete and Den getting our operational kit ready and going over the routes in and out of the area as well as the emergency pick-up points should they be needed in case of injury.

We hit the ground at one in the morning when we were dropped off by Land Rover by our back-up team as near to the target zone as we dared take a vehicle. We jumped out and then disappeared into the darkness. And there’s no darkness like countryside darkness; it’s not like an urban environment at night where there is still quite a lot of light pollution from towns and cities. Out in the rural wilds, it was what you might call
dark
dark.

The three-mile route towards our target – the small aircraft landing strip – was over fields and ditches, through hedges and trees, and even through a couple of small but freezing cold rivers; the rivers were the only thing that slowed us down as water isn’t the quickest medium to wade through at night, especially when carrying heavy kit bags that you can’t afford to get wet. Pete and Den had already checked out all the routes a couple of days before to try to ensure there would be no nasty surprises. By sunrise, the three of us were nicely settled in a thick hedgerow with deep channelled ditches both front and rear. It had been decided that, on the aeroplane’s arrival, Pete would take the video camera and move down the ditch to a point twenty metres to our left, and I would crawl into a forward position with the stills camera. Den’s job was as a permanent lookout to scope for any signs that we might have been spotted. The role of lookout is very important in that we were putting our lives in their hands. Having said that, it was now in the early morning and we needed to recharge for the following day, so, content that we were well dug in, we were asleep in a matter of minutes.

The next day was really crappy. There was a steady drizzle that penetrated everything and a light fog had rolled in. Within a few hours, most of our kit was soaking wet and, to make matters worse, whenever we’d take it in turns to catch up on a bit of sleep, we’d each get kicked by the others for snoring. Nick came on the radio every half-hour to check on our condition and to give us an update on the smugglers. We couldn’t afford to miss a single radio check because, if we did, our back-up team, who were camped a few miles away, would take it to mean that we were compromised and in trouble, so they would scramble to rescue us.