Bandit Country

by Andrew Turpin

  Except there won’t be a rifle in it any more. Idiot.

  “Shit, I’m screwed here,” Johnson muttered to himself. He flung the car into gear and executed a rapid three-point turn.

  Duggan and his cronies must have found the GPS trackers, shoved them in the box, and junked it on the pile of gravel. But now he was a sitting duck for an ambush.

  Johnson, his adrenaline now in overdrive, accelerated back down the lane. A few seconds later, he had to slam on his brakes again. In his lights he could see, at the side of the road, what appeared to be a dead fox.

  He was certain it hadn’t been there when he had driven the other way, just minutes earlier. Or had it?

  Oh, shit . . . I’m going for it.

  Johnson let the clutch up and accelerated hard past the fox. He was about fifteen yards past it, the car whining at high revs in second gear, when there was a massive bang and a flash from behind him that lit up the fields and trees on both sides of the road.

  Fragments of glass from the rear windshield sprayed past him into the front of the car, and he felt the back end skew sharply sideways as the force of the blast caught it.

  Johnson lost control of the Ford, which hit a large hole in the pavement and then speared into a ditch at the right side of the road, where it rammed hard into a tree.

  He felt his head bang into the side window and there was a rushing noise in his ears. He wanted to move his hand but couldn’t.

  He blacked out.

  Thursday, January 24, 2013

  South Armagh

  For just a second or two, Jayne thought she was dealing with some thoughtless farmer who had decided to turn his Land Rover around in the road without checking for approaching traffic.

  But she quickly realized it was a classic old IRA countryside roadblock tactic. During her stint in Northern Ireland in the early ’90s she had twice been caught up in almost identical maneuvers.

  Jayne grabbed her Walther from the glove compartment.

  Her thought was confirmed by Johnson, who shouted over the crackly cell phone connection that it was a setup. She then heard him say he was on the move again, moments before the phone connection was completely lost.

  Obviously Johnson’s car was being deliberately separated from hers. And assuming Duggan and his dissident buddies organized the roadblock it didn’t take much imagination to work out what the next step was likely to be.

  Jayne quelled the temptation to bang on her horn.

  Instead, she put the gun on her lap, rammed the white Toyota into reverse, and backed it into the gateway of a field on her right.

  The car wheels spun in the mud as she accelerated back in the direction she had come, away from the roadblock, all the while expecting to hear gunshots and feel the impact of rounds hitting the car’s bodywork.

  But there was nothing.

  Within seconds she had rounded a bend and was away. She had no idea whether Johnson was safe or whether he had managed to get back on the tail of the truck carrying the tracking device and the sniper’s rifle.

  But she knew one thing: she and Johnson were now headed in opposite directions down a dark country lane in south Armagh that appeared to be bristling with dissident terrorists.

  Thursday, January 24, 2013

  South Armagh

  Johnson came around when the car door was yanked open and his head, which had been resting against it, lolled sideways.

  He found it impossible to focus. All he could see was the black, shadowy figure of a man who grabbed him forcibly by the arm and pulled him out of the car onto the muddy shoulder of the road, then lashed his hands together tightly behind his back.

  The man pulled Johnson to his feet, but the ground wobbled as if an earthquake had struck, and he crashed straight back to earth.

  “Shit,” a voice said, in a broad Irish accent. “Here, Liam, help me get this bastard into the van.”

  Johnson blacked out again.

  The next time he came to, his chin hit the wooden plywood floor of a large van. A bandage or some long, thin piece of cloth was wound around his head, holding another piece of cloth in his mouth.

  By the dim glow of an interior light, Johnson saw a man watching him, his back to a partition that separated the driver’s cab from the rear. He was sitting on four huge wooden beams—the ones which had come from Boston.

  Johnson’s first thought was of Jayne. Did she get away or was she somehow trapped too? He hadn’t heard gunshots, but the cell phone connection had terminated abruptly. It was impossible to know what had happened.

  The van bounced as it rattled over a bump in the road, then lurched to the left, moved forward more slowly, and finally came to a halt.

  The driver turned around and looked through the glass window in the center of the dividing panel. It was Duggan.

  “Blindfold him, get him into the house, then get him downstairs. We’ll keep him in the den. And have you got his stuff?” Duggan shouted.

  “Yes, boss,” the man sitting on the beams called. He held up a plastic bag that Johnson could see contained his phone, the Beretta, and his wallet.

  The man picked up a piece of ripped towel and tied it around Johnson’s head, blindfolding him.

  Johnson heard the back doors of the van open; then he was pushed out of the back and told to stand. This time he was able to do so without the earth disappearing from under him, but his head throbbed and felt distinctly wet from where it had bashed into the side window of the car.

  Someone grabbed him by the arm and propelled him forward. He sensed that they had moved indoors, and then a man ordered him to walk down some stairs. He was maneuvered into position, then pushed.

  At the bottom, he took a few more steps. Then came another order. “On your knees, then crawl straight ahead when I tell you, Yank.”

  Johnson did as commanded.

  He knew he was now going into the tunnel at Duggan’s house, through the bookcase door and hatch door, heading from the house to the den.

  He tried to picture where he had left the microcameras, wedged between cinder blocks, and prayed that the batteries were holding up. The instructions had given an estimated battery duration between charges of around seventeen days, but how accurate that was, he had no idea.

  A boot hit Johnson hard in the backside. Without the use of his hands, which were still lashed behind his back, he lost his balance, toppled forward, and hit his chin on the floor.

  “Crawl, come on, lift yourself up, you asshole, and crawl,” That was Duggan’s voice from behind him.

  Johnson complied but found he could move only slowly forward.

  He could hear somebody else crawling ahead of him, presumably another one of Duggan’s gang, and others behind.

  After what seemed like an eternity, he felt his knees move off the carpet squares and onto solid concrete.

  A voice came from in front. “Stand up.”

  Again he did as told.

  Someone untied his blindfold.

  He was in the den, its grim, gray cinder block walls illuminated by the two bare bulbs. It looked exactly as it had on his previous visit.

  The man who stood next to him ran a hand through dark, dank hair and rubbed the blue-black stubble on his chin. He held a Browning 9 mm pistol in his right hand.

  Johnson looked back at the hatch to the tunnel just as Duggan emerged, also holding a Browning.

  Duggan instructed Johnson to sit on one of the wooden chairs that stood against a wall.

  Then Duggan sat on the office chair, put his Browning on the desk next to him, and swiveled to face Johnson. “Okay, you fecker,” he said, pausing to cough. “You’ve given us some hassle. But now you’ve screwed up. You’ll be staying here for a while, where you can’t cause us anymore trouble, until we can decide what to do with you. You want to explain what the hell you’re doing, poking your nose in?”

  He spoke in a flat, quietly menacing tone but with no sign of anger.

  Strange, Johnson thought. There was no reference t
o any suspicion that Johnson had been in the den or tunnels before.

  “Look,” Johnson said. “I’m an outsider here, but it’s obvious even to me that what you’re trying to do isn’t going to work. I know you’ve taken out a few guys, but it seems to me that times have moved on. The ship’s sailed—you’re not going to somehow get the politicians to do a U-turn by plugging a few coppers or prison officers.”

  Duggan ran the back of his hand across his nose.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Duggan said.

  “Probably not, but—”

  “First, you haven’t a clue what I’m trying to do.”

  “Tell me what you’re trying to do, then.”

  “You know shit about life here, how it’s been destroyed by the Brits over the past few decades. The politicians have made us all slaves to a shit peace settlement that ain’t going to last just to get themselves a few years of power, a nice pension. It’s built on sand.”

  “Doesn’t look that way,” Johnson said.

  “Listen, find out how people feel, don’t believe the politicians. Our country is our country. We’re Irish Catholics, not British Protestants. Nothing’s changed since 1916—nothing. My grandfather, Sean, died in the cause, in ’57, and so did my father, Alfie, in ’84.”

  “If you carry on, you’ll be next. That what you want?” Johnson asked.

  “I want to smash the idea of British rule as the normal thing around here. If we just lie down and accept it, it’ll become a reality, eventually. We’re not having that. Like my old math teacher at school used to say, what’s twenty-six plus six? Answer: one.”

  It took Johnson a second to realize that Duggan was referring to the twenty-six counties of the Irish Republic and the six of Ulster: a united Ireland.

  “Forgive me,” Johnson said. “I’m trying to figure out how shooting a prison officer and a policeman and an investment company guy and a security company boss is going to help. And I’m not going to mention your stepdaughter.”

  “Who says I shot them?”

  Johnson didn’t respond.

  The light cast by the bare electric bulbs cast stark shadows, making Duggan’s eyes appear like large black bullet holes in his head.

  Duggan picked up his pistol, then stood and turned to his colleague. “That’s enough talk. Liam, let’s get the American tied up on that mattress. He can stew down here for a bit.”

  “Okay, boss.”

  “Then I need to call the quartermaster, let him know what’s going on, and speak to Patrick. We need a meeting to decide what to do with this guy. Or rather, when to do it.”

  Duggan looked at Johnson. “It’ll be slow. But we’re underground here, so you’ll be able to scream as much as you like.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Friday, January 25, 2013

  Newtownards

  Jayne knocked at the door, then rang the bell. There was no response, so she tried again, and again.

  She checked her watch. It was almost one o’clock in the morning. Brown Bear, O’Neill’s safe house in Newtownards, remained silent and in darkness, just as his main home in Belfast had been when she had stopped there half an hour earlier. All the street lights, apart from one, had gone out.

  A car approached at speed from the other end of the street, slowing markedly as it passed the house. From the driver’s window, a white face peered at her, illuminated by a pale green glow, presumably from a dashboard instrument panel, and the car crawled slowly on toward the nearby school.

  Jayne felt deeply uncomfortable hanging around on the doorstep. She swore and took her phone from her pocket.

  After escaping the roadblock, she had spent nearly an hour in the dark driving a circuitous route around Forkhill, Drumintee, and on the main N1 road that ran from Dublin to Belfast. She had absolutely no idea where Johnson was, although her immediate fear, given the roadblock, was that the dissident Republicans might have trapped and executed him.

  She tried several times to call Johnson, but each time his phone went straight to voice mail. The person you are calling is not available. Please leave a message.

  Eventually she conceded defeat and headed back to Belfast, trying several times en route to contact O’Neill, also without success. His phone too went straight to voice mail, so she decided to drive to his house.

  Jayne had memorized the log-on details for the video monitoring website Johnson had been using to view the feeds from Duggan’s underground bunker. Johnson had also given the details to O’Neill when they had visited him at the safe house. It was now critical to check the video feeds as quickly as possible.

  Standing on the doorstep, she tried calling O’Neill one more time. But yet again, there was no reply.

  She left another message asking O’Neill to call her back urgently as Joe had run into serious problems.

  Where the hell is the guy?

  She walked back to her car and tried to tee up the video monitoring website on her phone. But the 3G cell phone connection was just too slow, and eventually the site crashed.

  After two more tries, she gave up, started the car, and drove back toward Belfast. Clearly, if she were going to mount a search for Johnson, she couldn’t do it single-handed.

  Yet she felt unable to call the local police. Even now, the idea of bringing in local coppers whose heavy-handed approach would likely torpedo any chance they had of trapping Duggan seemed like a nonstarter to her.

  Jayne turned on the car radio, only to find syrupy late-night love songs. It wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She reached over and firmly pressed the off button.

  By 1:40 a.m. she was back at the apartment on Falls Road, her head buzzing despite her tiredness.

  Jayne again tried logging on to the monitoring site, but even though she was now on a broadband connection, the feeds still refused to load. Exasperated, Jayne tried calling both Johnson and O’Neill one final time, but both calls went to voice mail.

  She immediately sent an encrypted email to Alice Hocking, one of her oldest and best friends at the UK Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham, asking if she could put a trace on Johnson’s phone as soon as she got into work in the morning. In theory, Alice shouldn’t carry out such a check, given that Jayne was no longer employed by the SIS and didn’t have official access to GCHQ’s expertise. But she knew that Alice would be able to slip the query through at some point. It was a long shot: if Johnson had been trapped by the dissidents, it was almost certain they would have removed the SIM card and battery from his phone. If he was still free, then by morning he would have called or messaged her anyway—she was certain of that. But it was worth a try.

  Once the email had been sent, there seemed to be no other option but to try and get some sleep and then regroup in the morning.

  All Jayne could hope for was that perhaps by then, O’Neill would have surfaced, and they could jointly come up with a plan.

  If not . . . then what? Jayne had no answer to that question.

  Friday, January 25, 2013

  Forkhill

  Two miles from where Johnson was lying incarcerated in the underground den, Duggan was standing in a corner of the drafty barn owned by his brigade machine gunner, Pete Field.

  Field, who still had a swagger about him after forcing the emergency landing of the chief constable’s helicopter three weeks earlier, was the only other real gun enthusiast in the south Armagh brigade. He looked after his DShK heavy machine gun just as meticulously as Duggan did his Barrett M82.

  And like Duggan, Field was still, remarkably, a cleanskin who had never been convicted of a crime north or south of the border.

  That was one reason why the four huge oak beams with their valuable contents had been taken to Field’s property for safekeeping after their long journey from Panama via Boston.

  Now came the task of checking the weapons, test-firing them, and removing them as quickly as practicable to a safe cache, whose location was to be determined by the brigade’s quarterm
aster, Danny McCormick.

  Duggan and Field walked to a decorator’s trestle table, on which a five-foot-long, one-foot-wide soft black carrying case lay.

  Duggan had a momentary flashback to Christmases of long ago: the surge of anticipation and the excitement at unwrapping a new toy. He unzipped the case, flipped open the top, and took out the unassembled components of an almost-new Barrett M82A1 .50-caliber rifle.

  His friend McKinney had done a good job in sourcing the weapon at such short notice, even if it had cost him seven and a half thousand bucks. The rifle looked as though it had hardly been used, its matte gray paint free of scratches or marks.

  Duggan ran his hand lightly, almost sensuously, across the upper receiver and placed it on the table, then did the same with the lower receiver. Then he slid the long, slim barrel from the transport position to the firing position, clipped the upper and lower receivers together, put the lock pins in place, and pulled the bolt back. He wasn’t expecting to find ammunition in the chamber but checked anyway, out of habit. Then he flipped off the safety and pulled the trigger. He gave a thin-lipped smile of satisfaction at the loud click when the firing pin came forward.

  It had taken just a couple of minutes to transform the rifle from being in pieces to fully assembled.

  Duggan picked up the weapon. It weighed more than thirty pounds, and that was without the Schmidt & Bender scope and ten rounds of ammunition. Probably forty with all that attached, he estimated.

  Quite apart from the weapon’s power, its flexibility, transportability, ruggedness, and—ashamed as Duggan sometimes was to think it—the looks of the Light Fifty were what he loved about it. Even the recoil after firing was minimal for such a large, powerful gun.

  Duggan felt relieved to have it, given the job he had in mind: the margins for error would be minute, and there would likely be no second chance. It would probably be a one-shot opportunity, he knew. But with this baby, he wouldn’t have to worry about the bolt not chambering the next round properly, unlike with his old M82.