I rouse to a sharp alarm at the anointed hour – 0800 Rutland time – an obnoxious dawn for a jobbing journo, but just another day at the pergola for the Rutland Coast Patrol.
I’m here today to accompany Rutland’s crack immigration posse on their daily morning patrol, led by veteran veteran Deagle Lancaster.
He gazes wistfully over the haze of Rutland Water and takes a wistful sip of his Irish coffee, which he prefers to call “English Coffee”.
“On especially foggy days,” he tells me, “you can barely see to the other side. Any number of migrants could be out there.”
They don’t make them like Lancaster any more. He’s ‘Dirty’ Harry Callaghan crossed with Charles Bronson from Death Wish crossed with Charles Bronson from prison. A maquette of chiselled quartz with a voice like shingle and quads of prime brisket.
“Do I have problem with migrants?” He muses. “I wouldn’t say so. Smiffy was born on the Isle of Man and we work with him despite that.”
We march as the chough flies for the crown jewel of his fleet – an HMC Nimrod modified for maximum lethality; nickname: Big Biggie.
“They say a camel is a horse designed by committee,” Lancaster jokes, “but I would have designed something with more firepower, and which didn’t freak out about mildly loud noises.”
Big Biggie is a horse designed by a warrior. The hull is padded with seventeen kinds of barbed wire and plate armour that could body block a ballista. On the roof is a swivel-mounted G-Unit Minigun, packing enough ammo to fire for several hundreths of a second. And Biggie boasts the highest number of flags per square inch of any chartered vessel in the UK – a floating fortress of patriotic firepower. Biggie isn’t quite waterborne yet – “the boffins say we need to lose some weight”, Lancaster complains, “but I think the water needs to be more buoyant.”
For now we board a more modestly armed vessel, an HMC Active with a gentle smattering of mounted light machine guns and a humble armoire of KRS-1 grenade launchers.
We blast the outboard motors and head off into the great big blue – and it’s not long before we encounter a suspicious pedalo. Pulses quicken and Lancaster’s squadron leap aboard – three perps are rounded up with lightning precision – one of them gets bashed about a bit for giving some frankly unnecessary backchat and the squad load them onto a tender for processing back at an onshore black site. The pedalo is scuppered in a controlled explosion – “you can never be too careful,” Lancaster explains.
The day charges on with a flurry of similarly racy naval clashes – dinghies and paddleboards are safely destroyed along with a handful of unnapproved migrant fowl.
The criminals are treated with a firm but fair hand. “Morally”, Lancaster muses, “we’re in international waters. We have no responsibility for keeping these miscreants alive, but if we chucked them overboard, we’d be no better than them.” The squad might look like battle-hardened crusaders to the casual observer – and they are – but they’re also disciplined and highly-trained.
“Each of these men has undergone several hours of firearms training – combat trained by real Israeli commandos with real PTSD. And I look at most of their Truth Social feeds before I hire them as well. As long as we’re preventing more crimes than we commit, we’re making a net positive impact. Are we there today? No. But I’m optimistic that one day we can be”.
We return to base and I’m quietly glad to step back onto dry land. As I enjoy a cup of Typhoo and tolerate a Morrisons’ own pink wafer, I gratefully ponder how the woke effete milquetoasts back in London sleep peacefully in their silk pyjamas – all because of these rough, rowdy and often angry men, standing ready to do continuous violence on our behalf.