2005 Volume 2
In The Line Of Fire
The Adventures of Fred
by Jaco Terblanche
Fred is a normal, run of the mill man, a husband and father of two children, who has a garage and spares sales business in Blackheath, Cape Town. Blackheath is not the best of areas after dark, so Fred carried a pistol tucked in his belt.
Fred did not buy his pistol on a whim, he did research on the subject as he did with all his subsequent sidearms. He contacted the police and enquired what they carried and why. So at the time of his first encounter, he carried a Single Action Star 9mm pistol, the same as the Police and Military issue. He also kept it loaded with one up the spout and the normal FMJ ammunition. But the pistol never performed as expected, with frequent jams and gunsmith sessions, and in the end the problem was identified as a magazine problem, so magazines were replaced.
Fred was always at his garage late Sunday evenings, to take home the weekend’s takings to be checked. At 22:00 on a Sunday evening in 1988, Fred put all the lights out of the front plain, parked his car in front of the show room he has to enter to collect the money from the drop-in safe, and checked that the area was clear. He entered and locked the door behind him. As he entered he put his pistol on top of a vending machine under a newspaper, and went to the safe to collect the money, and put it in an inconspicuous kitbag.
Star 9mmTo make sure he had the correct fan belt, Fred checked in the manual again, and he heard the door open, assuming the old man had returned. When he looked up, he looked into the muzzle of a Makarov. In front of him were four men, armed with a pistol, a carpentry hammer and a hunting knife. They shouted for money.
When Fred saw that they had no masks on, and the man with the Makarov cocked it and told him in no uncertain terms that they were going to reward non-compliance with execution, he decided to fight as he was going to be executed anyway. He looked around for a weapon, but there was nothing suitable near him. When the four men realised that Fred wasn’t going to comply, they started hitting and stabbing him, and dragged him through the storeroom. The storeroom is approximately forty metres long. When they got Fred to the back, the Makarov Man thumbed the hammer back again, and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. He heard the man starting to fire the pistol double action, but always just the click, click, click… The man ejected the round, and started pulling the trigger again, with the resulting clicks. Then Fred started to fight them with his bare fists, feeling numerous stabs and hits of the hammer on his head. Fred fought the four men the forty meters back through the storeroom, around the counter, and then made a dash for the vending machine.
He made it to the vending machine, got to the pistol, thumbed off the safety, and fired a shot at point blank range at his attackers. He missed; and the pistol failed to feed the next round.
With the sound of the shot all the attackers ran for the door of the show room, but fumbled with the lock, and couldn’t get out. When the attackers saw Fred struggling to clear the misfeed, they turned around and attacked again. Fred threw the pistol down, barged through them to the door, got it open, and ran out through the front plain into the street, where luckily a motorist stopped. The attackers ran away, and Fred’s ordeal was over.
The Makarov pistol was found on the showroom floor where it was dropped when Fred fired his shot, and instead of being loaded with 9x18mm Makarov rounds, it was loaded with 9x19mm Parabellum rounds, and it could not fire the wrong round. The would-be robbers however, made off with Fred’s pistol, and this was later found in another attempted robbery of a garage, in which the Police and owner were tipped off by an attendant, and the four attackers were apprehended.
This last attack clarified the modus operandi of the robbers: They cornered a gas station employee, got his details, and threatened him with his and his family’s lives if he did not provide them with all the details and times of the owner’s collection of the business takings. In the last case the employee had a long and good relationship with his employer, and so tipped him off.
What were the mistakes Fred made, and what can we learn from them?
1. Fred got himself a pistol that was not 100% reliable, and with repeated attempts he could not get it to function 100%. But he kept it because the Police and the Military would know better, and they would choose only the best.
2. Fred did not look after his weapon properly; he gave it a superficial cleaning every few weeks, and a thorough cleaning every few months.
3. Because of the weight and size of the pistol, Fred put it down when indoors, near the door where he expected the trouble to come from, and where he expected to go when there would be trouble.
4. Fred was very security conscious, but failing only once to lock the door nearly cost him his life.
5. The attack in which the robbers were caught showed us the importance of having a good and open relationship with your employees.
6. When Fred was caught flat-footed without his sidearm, he only had his bare fists to defend himself. Even a small canister of pepper spray could have spared him a lot of wounds.
Fred lost his pistol in the attack, and he asked the investigating officer (who was killed a few months later on an investigation) what he would advise him to carry, and the response was an Astra Police .357 six-shooter with the additional 9mm cylinder. Fred promptly got himself one, and within a few weeks (the good old days when your safety was still an issue) he got his licence and collected it. This he then carried tucked in his belt with his shirt over it.
Jaco is a Professional Town & Regional Planner. He has a masters degree in Anthropology.