Bandit Country

by Andrew Turpin

  Nowhere were there any papers, notebooks, or anything remotely interesting in sight that might give a hint or be useful evidence of Duggan’s past or future plans in relation to his Real IRA activities.

  The strange thing was, apart from the messy basement room, the place was spotless. Only a handful of photographs, few trinkets, no fridge stickers, no clutter. Johnson hadn’t expected to see pictures of Moira or even Duggan’s ex-wife. But equally, he hadn’t envisaged the place looking like a show home, either.

  Hanging on the living room wall was a large framed black and white photograph of a devastated Dublin city center during the 1916 Easter Rising, seen as the birthplace of modern violent Irish republicanism.

  He gazed at the photograph for a few moments, then shook his head. He had now been in the house for twenty minutes. He realized it was time to move, so he turned and headed back down the stairs to the basement.

  He reentered the tunnel via the hatch and paused to place another camera in a crack between two cinder blocks near the entrance. That might be useful in the future.

  After crossing the vertical shaft where he had entered, Johnson paused to place the wireless booster unit in another crevice near where the shaft met the two horizontal tunnels. That should ensure that signals from the cameras in the tunnels would reach the transmitter in the barn.

  Johnson continued along the tunnel on the other side of the shaft until he reached another hatch. He pulled it open with his left hand, his right poised to grab the Beretta if needed, and emerged into a room about twenty-five feet long and fifteen feet across, again made of cinder blocks, with a normal-height ceiling. It had two deeply recessed areas the width of a large double bed stretching back at least another twenty feet on both sides of the main room. There was another hatch at ground level at the far end.

  Johnson stood and looked around in astonishment. There was a a desk, a chair, and a computer monitor screen, together with a swivel chair and a desk lamp. He flicked a light switch on the wall and two bare bulbs came on, dangling from wires at either end of the room.

  Five more wooden dining chairs stood against a wall, and there was a low coffee table in the center of the room.

  Next to the desk was a small fridge, which hummed away, and in the far corner was a white sink and a single tap with a small countertop on which stood a kettle and three mugs.

  In one of the recessed areas a dartboard was screwed to the wall. A piece of paper next to it had a series of seemingly random letters written on it in thick felt-tip pen across the page, with some of them crossed out in red ink.

  Opposite the dartboard, on the floor, stood a car battery with a set of jump leads, an electrical extension lead with bare ends, cut back to the copper wire, together with a pair of rusty handcuffs, some rope, and a set of sharp knives. He looked up. Above him, screwed into the ceiling, was a meat hook. There were several deep brown stains, obviously blood, engrained in the concrete floor beneath the hook. Johnson gave an involuntary shiver.

  At the back of the other recess sat a dirty old double mattress. There was also another smaller recess with a rough, thin plywood door that had a squatter toilet built into the concrete floor.

  The whole thing looked like an emergency wartime bunker. It was dark and gloomy but functional.

  There was no time to waste. Johnson quickly found gaps in the mortar that bound the cinder blocks and wedged in two microcameras, one at each end of the main room.

  He began opening the drawers in the desk. The top and middle ones were empty. But the bottom one contained a cardboard box holding three huge .50-caliber cartridges, each of them nearly four inches long.

  Johnson took a deep breath.

  This was doubtless what Duggan used to feed his favorite Barrett M82 rifle.

  He photographed the shells with his phone camera and replaced them in the drawer, then took additional photographs of the underground chamber, the torture equipment, the furniture, and the exit hatches.

  It was time to go. Johnson switched off the lights and, relying on his headlamp again, crawled back along the tunnel toward the shaft where he had entered.

  As he drew near to the shaft he stopped still.

  A loud metallic scraping noise echoed clearly along the tunnel. After about ten seconds it stopped. There was a pause and then another similar noise, which also lasted several seconds.

  Johnson knew immediately what it was. Somebody above him was opening the giant metal doors to the barn.

  Sure enough, several seconds later, there was the sound of a heavy diesel engine revving up and getting louder.

  Shit. Now what?

  The engine stopped.

  Then came the muffled but audible sound of a man’s voice. “Can I leave it there, Dessie?”

  A pause. “Yeah, that’ll do. Come on, let’s get inside. I’m just going to stow these boxes.”

  There was another pause. Then the same voice, clearer this time. “Have you been down in the den? The cover’s off.”

  “No, not for weeks.”

  “Weird. I’d have sworn I left the fecker in place. Has Dennehy been down?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Okay, I’m just going to go down and check.”

  Johnson swore to himself. He was trapped underground. And someone, probably Duggan, was heading down the shaft.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Saturday, January 12, 2013

  Forkhill

  Johnson thanked God that he was slim and still flexible enough to turn in the tunnel and scuttle back the way he had come.

  As he did so he remembered Ronnie’s words about the emergency exit from one of the diesel tank structures out into a field, beneath a cattle drinking trough.

  Johnson pictured the hatch at the far end of the cinder block underground room. That was where he needed to head.

  Johnson crawled as fast as he could, back into the room through the hatch, which he closed behind him.

  He strode to the other end of the room, yanked open the other hatch, and scrambled through into another similar tunnel. He pulled the hatch closed behind him. As he shut it, he was certain he heard the sound of the hatch at the far end of the room scrape on the floor as it began to open.

  Johnson began to crawl again at speed. Within fifteen seconds he reached another hatch, from which he emerged into another underground room, this time filled almost entirely with a massive green polypropylene tank. The entire room stank of diesel.

  Now he needed to find the way out.

  Johnson walked around the side of the tank. There was no sign of an exit. But on the left side of the tank at the northern end of the room there was another hatch door. This one was raised up off the ground to allow two thick plastic pipes that came from the base of the diesel tank to pass underneath.

  He opened the hatch: another straight tunnel. Johnson crawled again, this time with more difficulty and major discomfort because there was no carpet cushioning and he had to place a knee on either side of the twin pipes that ran along the tunnel.

  Soon he emerged into yet another room, identical to the previous one, with another large green tank. This must be the tank located on the Northern Ireland side of the border.

  Some fuel smuggling operation. There was clearly fraud on a large scale going on here. And it must pay handsome dividends, to make this kind of investment worth it. But again, he couldn’t afford to waste time thinking about that now; it was a secondary issue for local police to deal with—or not, as seemed to be the case.

  Johnson didn’t need to take out the map of the underground complex from his bag. He had memorized it. Drawing also on Ronnie’s description, he knew that in theory there should be another tunnel heading to the right, going east, which should then pop up in the field underneath the cattle water trough.

  He walked around the side, and there, sure enough, was another hatch.

  This time the door wouldn’t budge. It took all his strength to shift it, and even then it opened barely a foot. The hinges were ru
sted and the plywood swollen with damp, which prevented it from moving any farther. There was just enough space to squeeze through.

  Johnson quickly realized the floor of this tunnel was covered in water and mud. Or was it something other than mud? It had the distinctive smell of cow muck.

  Once he started crawling, the wet mud came almost over his knees, plastering his trousers, boots, hands, and arms. But there was no going back.

  The tunnel stretched for at least forty yards, Johnson guessed, before he came to a shaft similar to the one in the barn. This time the bottom of the shaft was filled with a stagnant, foul-smelling mix of animal urine, dung, and water. Water dripped down the sides of the shaft, which was covered in green slime, and the rusty rungs of the ladder were similarly coated.

  There was no alternative.

  Johnson crawled out of the tunnel, managed to grab the second bottom rung of the ladder, and hauled himself across without falling down into the foul mixture below.

  He clambered up. He could see by the light of his headlamp that above him was a circular metal manhole cover—which he now needed to shift in order to escape.

  Johnson began by trying to push the cover up with one hand while hanging onto the ladder with the other.

  It wouldn’t move.

  He paused for a few seconds, then lowered his head down into his chest, raised his shoulders, and, adrenaline pumping, used them to lever the heavy metal cover upward, pulling with his hands and arms on the metal ladder to gain leverage.

  The cover lifted an inch. But it wouldn’t move farther. Maybe Ronnie was right. This cover probably hadn’t been moved in a quarter of a century—and it felt like it.

  He tried again, a third attempt. This time Johnson somehow summoned up the strength to lever the cover upward and sideways.

  The cold outside air on his face felt good. Johnson turned off the headlamp and eased his way out of the shaft. He realized as he banged his head hard on the base of the metal water trough above that there wasn’t much headroom.

  A second later he realized something else. All he could see, in both directions, was a forest of cattle legs. The trough was surrounded by a stinking, steaming herd of cows busy drinking.

  Johnson had on several occasions heard of people being trampled to death by stampeding cows.

  But there was no option. He knew Duggan must be after him down the tunnel. He wriggled sideways then pulled the metal cover back over the entrance to the shaft.

  He was going to have to crawl out, through the thick sludge of urine and cow shit, get to his feet fast before the cattle went for him, and just hope for the best.

  Saturday, January 12, 2013

  Belfast

  The car stank from the cow shit covering Johnson’s clothing, and Jayne drove all the way back to Belfast with the windows open, despite the temperature being only a few degrees above freezing. Her attempts to protect the car seats with a few sheets from the Belfast Telegraph failed miserably.

  “Do you think he realized someone was down there?” Jayne asked.

  “He knew someone had been down there because the manhole cover in the barn had been moved, and I heard him talking about it. I’m hoping he thought one of his sidekicks had done it. He certainly didn’t see me, but he might have heard me moving ahead of him, especially when I was opening and closing those hatch doors. And if he went into that last tunnel, he’d see my trail in the mud, for sure,” Johnson said.

  When they got back to the apartment in Belfast, Johnson went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. His hair, face, and most of his body were plastered in brown slime.

  But he felt satisfied with his evening’s work.

  As soon as Johnson had showered and changed, he opened his laptop. He needed to check that the eleven microcameras he had put in place were operating properly. This was the moment of truth. The thought that they might not work after all that effort was just too much.

  The website hub, through which the video and sound links from the cameras were channeled, took a while to load the different feeds. But gradually they filled the screen in a grid pattern, three across, until there was a black and white image, a little grainy but clear enough, from each of the cameras Johnson had placed.

  He leaned forward and studied them closely. As he clicked on each one, a new inset window opened on his laptop to give him a larger picture, and the sound feed also went live.

  There was nothing happening in any of the images until he got to the one in the study. In that one, a man with short dark hair, heavily flecked with gray, was sitting at the desk, his back to the camera, working on a laptop.

  Duggan.

  All Johnson could hear was the faint sound of fingers tapping on the keyboard, interspersed with a few crackles and momentary interruptions as the sound feed came and went.

  After a few minutes, Duggan’s cell phone rang.

  Johnson jumped. Then he reached for his keyboard and flicked on the screen sound recorder.

  Hearing the action, Jayne came from the kitchen area and looked over Johnson’s shoulder at the computer screen.

  “Hey, Patrick, what’s the craic over there?” Duggan said to the unseen caller.

  That must be Patrick McKinney, Johnson thought.

  A few seconds later, Duggan told his caller to ring back using Skype. Johnson guessed that was because, being encrypted, it was more secure than an open cell phone connection. Johnson was hoping they would now use a Skype video connection on the laptop, so he could see and hear the caller as well as Duggan, but the conversation resumed via a voice-only link on Duggan’s smartphone.

  Duggan sounded tinny and distant over the link from the remote camera, and the picture froze at regular intervals. However, to Johnson’s relief, the sound quality improved and remained consistent. His transmitter unit was functioning as it should.

  There was a pause while Duggan listened to his caller for a few minutes. He swung his chair around a little so that Johnson could see his face, serious and focused.

  Then Duggan said, “Are you still putting it in the timber as we discussed?”

  He listened again for a few moments, then said, “Sounds good. So what’s the timetable? It’ll be into your place from Colón on Tuesday, yes?”

  Definitely McKinney on the line.

  A quick pause. Then Duggan spoke again. “Okay, a two-day turnaround, fine. But then how long?”

  Again Duggan listened. “That’d work fine, but you can’t let it go any later, else it’ll be too late.”

  Any later than when, and too late for what? Johnson wondered. Is he talking about the G8 and Obama?

  A further lengthy pause and then a chuckle. “The Green Dragon, eh? Okay, well I’ll raise a glass to you Tuesday night then. Wish I was joining you—I went there last time I was in Boston. Long time ago, but a lovely old pub.”

  The call continued for a few minutes—inconsequential chat about the social side of a trip that McKinney had recently made to Colón. After ending the call, Duggan resumed tapping away on his computer keyboard.

  Johnson felt he had made a breakthrough of sorts, although annoyingly, several key pieces of information had been missing from the conversation.

  He turned back to Jayne with the hint of a smile on his lips. “Useful,” he said. “Just about made it worth rolling around in the cow shit. So whatever they’re shipping in is coming in a timber cargo via Boston from Colón. Pity they didn’t say which Irish port it’ll come to or when—not sure how we find that out. I’m going to fly out there and check it out. I might even get there in time for a drink at the Green Dragon on Tuesday night. I know it well. I wonder who our friend McKinney’s meeting there. And why.”

  The Green Dragon, a small but historic downtown watering hole, had been one of his favorite haunts as a student at Boston University, where he had majored in history thirty years earlier, prior to moving to Germany to study for his doctorate on the economics of Hitler’s Third Reich at the Freie Universität Berlin.

 
The idea of revisiting his old stomping ground now, for the first time in many years, was appealing. And he suddenly had a good excuse.

  “It’s a good starting point,” Jayne said. “I agree. Get over there and tail McKinney from the Green Dragon—that’s the best option.”

  Johnson took out his phone and called Fiona Heppenstall. She was in a coffee shop on Capitol Hill talking with one of her political contacts but broke off and stepped outside the café to take Johnson’s call.

  As he had anticipated, she was intrigued by his briefing.

  “I’ve been trying to do a little digging on McKinney since we spoke last Monday,” she said, “but he’s not been around. His PA said he was out of town.”

  “Yes, he’s been down in Colón, arranging the shipment,” Johnson said. “We need to know what he meant when he said they were putting it in the timber like before. Putting what in the timber—are we talking guns, bombs, grenades? And what does he mean by timber? Logs? Furniture?”

  “No idea,” Fiona said. “But I do know that Colón is a transit point for all kinds of shady goods.”

  Johnson told her his plan was to fly to Boston before Tuesday and suggested that she persuade her editor to let her join him.

  “Yes, great idea. I’ll talk him into it; leave it to me,” she said.

  Jayne looked up sharply from scribbling in her notebook.

  When Johnson hung up, Jayne folded her arms. “Sounded like the old flame was heating up when you mentioned you were heading over there.”

  Johnson gave her a glare. “I’m not rising to that bait.”

  He felt in his pocket and took out the red and black USB flash drive he had removed from Duggan’s kitchen and slotted it into his laptop. A few seconds later, he was looking at what appeared to be the only file on the tiny device: a document entitled “Visit,” with just five lines of text.