by Jack Higgins
Binnie grabbed me by the arm and dragged me towards the nearest confessional box. In a moment we were jammed together inside, the curtain drawn.
There was a movement on the other side of the grille and a quiet voice said, 'My son?'
'I have sinned most grievously, Father, and that's a fact,' Binnie told him, 'but even hell fire and damnation would be preferable to what the bastards who're coming in now are likely to dish out if they lay hands on us.'
There was silence, then the main church door opened and steps approached, the boots ringing on the flagstones. There was a movement on the priest's side of the grille and I turned to peer through the curtain, aware that Binnie had drawn his Browning.
The young paratroop officer from the road block was there, a gun in his hand. He paused, and then my view of him was blocked as a priest appeared in alb and black cassock, a violet confessional stole around his shoulders.
'Can I help you, Lieutenant?' he asked quietly.
The young officer murmured something, I couldn't catch what, and the priest laughed. 'No one here except a few backsliders, as you can see, anxious to be confessed in time for early mass.'
'I'm sorry, Father.'
He holstered his gun, turned and walked away. The priest stood watching him go. When the door closed behind him, he said calmly and without turning round, 'You can come out now, Binnie.'
Binnie jerked back the curtain. 'Michael?' he said. 'Is it you?'
The priest turned slowly and I was face to face, at last, with the Small Man.
11
The Small Man
I waited in a small, cold annexe outside the vestry, aware of the murmur of voices inside, but unable to hear a thing through that stout oaken door. Not that it mattered. For the moment, I'd lost interest. Too much had happened in too short a time, so I smoked a cigarette, sacrilege or no, and slumped into a chair in the corner.
After a while the door opened and Cork appeared, Binnie sitting on the edge of a table behind him. I knew he was in his sixties, but when he took off his hornrimmed spectacles and cleaned them with a handkerchief he looked older - much older.
He said, 'I'd like to thank you, Major Vaughan. It seems we owe you a great deal.'
'Binnie's told you, then?' I said.
'About Norah and Frank Barry.' He replaced his spectacles. 'Oh yes, I think you could say he's put me in the picture.'
'So what do you intend to do about it?'
There were the sounds of more vehicles arriving in the street outside, a shouted command.
He smiled gravely. 'From the looks of things I wouldn't say we're in a position to do much about anything at the moment, Major. Wait here.'
He took a shovel hat down from a peg, put it on and went out through the church briskly. The front door clanged. There was silence.
I said, 'Does he do this often? The priest bit, I mean?'
'It gets him around,' Binnie said. 'You know how it is? Nuns and priests - everybody trusts them and the army has to be careful in its dealings with the Church. People take offence easy over things like that.'
'What about the local priest?'
They don't have one here. A young Jesuit comes up from Strabane once a week.'
'So Cork's performance isn't official?'
He laughed harshly. 'The Church has never been exactly a friend of the IRA, Major. If they knew about this there would be hell to pay.'
'What do you think he'll do? About Norah, I mean?'
'He didn't say.'
He lapsed into silence after that, staring moodily into space, reaction, I suppose, and hardly surprising. I went back to my chair and stared blankly at the wall opposite, more tired than I had been in my life before.
After a while, the front door of the church opened again, then closed, the candles by the altar flickering wildly. We flattened ourselves against the wall, Binnie with that damned Browning ready in his hand, but it was only Cork and a small, gnarled old man in cloth cap, tattered raincoat and muddy boots.
'More troops have arrived.' Cork hung up his shovel hat. 'And more to come, I fancy. Paratroops in the main. I've been talking to that young lieutenant. Gifford his name is. Nice lad.'
He frowned in a kind of abstraction and Binnie said, 'And what's happening, for God's sake?'
'They seem to think you're down in the ravine in the wreckage of that car. They're still searching. I think you'd better go up to the farm for the time being till I sort this thing out. Sean here will take you.' He turned to me. 'It's only half a mile up the valley at the back of the church, Major. You'll be safe there. There's a hidey-hole for just this kind of occasion that they've never discovered yet.'
'And Norah,' Binnie demanded urgently. 'What about her?'
'All in good time, Binnie lad.' Cork patted him on the shoulder. 'Now be off with you.'
He took down his hat and went out again. The door clanged, the candles flickered, only this time most of them went out. I hoped it wasn't an omen.
The old man, Sean, took us out through the graveyard and plunged into the trees at the back of the church, walking strongly in spite of his obvious age. What with the rain and the mist, visibility was reduced to a few yards, certainly excellent weather to turn and run in. Not that it was necessary for we didn't see a soul and within fifteen minutes came out of the trees above a small farm in a quiet valley.
It was a poor sort of place and badly in need of a coat of whitewash. Broken fences everywhere and a yard that looked more like a ploughed field after heavy rain than anything else.
There didn't seem to be anyone about and old Sean crossed to a large two-storeyed barn built of crumbling grey stone, opened one half of the double door and led the way in. There was the general air of decay I might have expected, a rusting threshing machine, a broken-down tractor, several holes in the roof where slates were missing.
There was also a hayloft, a ladder leading up to it. At first I thought the old man intended climbing it, but instead he moved it to the other side of the barn and leaned it against the wall which was constructed of wooden planking. Then he stood back.
Binnie said, 'Follow me, Major. The Black Hole of Calcutta we call it.'
He went up the ladder nimbly, paused half way, reached to one side, got a finger into a knot hole and pulled. The door which opened was about three feet square. He ducked inside and I followed him.
The old man was already moving the ladder back to its original position by the loft as Binnie closed the door. Light streamed in through various nooks and crannies, enough for me to see that we were in a small, narrow room barely large enough to stand up in.
He said, 'Follow me and watch it. It's thirty feet down and no place to find yourself with a broken leg.'
I could see the top of a ladder protruding through some sort of trapdoor, waited until he was well on his way and went after him, dropping into the kind of darkness that was absolute.
Binnie said softly, 'Easy does it, Major, you're nearly there.'
My feet touched solid earth again a moment later. I turned cautiously, there was the scrape of a match, and as it flared I saw him reaching to an oil lamp that hung from a hook in the wall.
'All the comforts of home,' he said.
Which was a fair enough description, for there was a rough wooden table, chairs, two old army cots and plenty of blankets, a shelf stocked with enough tinned food to feed half a dozen men for a week or more.
'Where are we exactly?' I demanded, unbuttoning my trenchcoat.
'Underneath the barn. This place has been used by our people since the nineteen-twenties and never discovered once.'
The far end of the room was like a quarter-master's store. There were at least two dozen British Army issue automatic rifles, a few old Lee Enfields, several Sterlings and six or seven boxes of ammunition, all stamped War Department. There were camouflage uniforms, flak jackets, several tin hats, a few paratroop berets.
'What in the hell is all this lot for?' I demanded. 'The great day?'
&
nbsp; 'Mostly stuff we've knocked off at one time or another, and some of the lads wore the uniforms when we raided an arms dump a few months back.' He draped his wet overcoat carefully across a chair and sprawled out on one of the beds. 'Christ, but I'm bushed, Major. I could sleep for a week and that's a fact.'
I think he was asleep before he knew it, to judge by the regularity of his breathing, but in the circumstances it seemed the sensible thing to do. I tried the other bed. Nothing had ever felt so comfortable. I closed my eyes. I don't know what brought me awake, some slight noise perhaps, but when I opened my eyes, Cork was sitting on the other side of the table from me reading a book.
As I stirred, he peered over the top of his spectacles. 'Ah, you're awake.'
My watch had stopped. 'What time is it?'
'Ten o'clock. You've been asleep maybe three hours.'
'And Binnie?'
He turned and glanced towards the other bed. 'Still with his head down. A good thing, too, while he has the chance. In our line of work a man should always snatch forty winks at every opportunity, but there's no need to tell an old soldier like you that, Major.'
I joined him at the table and offered him a cigarette but he produced a pipe and an old pouch. 'No thanks, I prefer this.'
The book was St Augustine's City of God. 'Heavy stuff,' I commented.
He chuckled. 'When I was a lad, my father sent me to Maynooth to study for the priest-hood. A mistake, as I realized after a year or two and got out, but old habits die hard.'
'Was that before you were in prison or after?'
'Oh, after, a desperate attempt by the family to rehabilitate me. They were a terrible middle-class lot, Major. Looked upon the IRA as a kind of Mafia.'
'And none of it did any good?'
'Not a bit of it.' He puffed at his pipe until it was going. 'Mind you, a couple of years in the Crumlin Road gaol was enough. I've managed to stay out of those places since then, thank God.'
'I know what you mean.'
He nodded. 'As I remember, the Chinese had you for a spell in Korea.'
There was a slight pause. He sat there puffing away at his pipe, staring into the distance in that rather abstracted way that seemed characteristic of him.
I said, 'What are you going to do?'
'About Norah, you mean?' He sighed. 'Well, now, it seems to me I'd better go to Stramore myself and see exactly what's in Frank's mind.'
'Just like that?'
'With a little luck, of course, and God willing.'
I said, 'He's a bad bastard. I think he means what he says. He'll kill her if you don't tell him where the bullion is.'
'Oh, I'm sure he will, Major Vaughan. In fact, I'm certain of it. There isn't much you can tell me about Frank Barry. We worked together far too long.'
'What caused the split?'
'As the times change, all men change with them, or nearly all.' He sighed and scratched his head. 'I suppose I'm what you'd call an old-fashioned kind of revolutionary. Oh, I'll use force if I have to, but I'd rather sit round a table and talk.'
'And Barry?'
'A different story altogether. Frank has this idea about the purity of violence. He believes anything is justified to gain his end.'
There was another of those silences. I said, 'Will you tell him what he wants to know?'
'I'd rather not.'
'No answer.'
His smile had great natural charm and I suddenly realized what an enormously likeable man he was.
I said, 'How could you ever have worked with a man like Barry, or the others that are like him for that matter. The kind who think it helps the cause to slaughter indiscriminately. Women, kids, anyone who happens to be around.'
He sighed and scratched his head again, another characteristic gesture. 'Revolutionaries, Major, like the rest of humanity, are good, bad and indifferent. I think you'll find that's held true in every similar situation since the war. We have our anarchists, the bomb-happy variety who simply want to destroy, and one or two who enjoy having a sort of legal excuse for criminal behaviour.'
'Like Barry?'
'Perhaps. We also have a considerable number of brave and honest men who've dedicated their lives to an ideal of freedom.'
I didn't have any real answer to that except the most obvious one. 'I suppose it all depends on your point of view.'
He chuckled. 'You know, I knew your uncle, Michael Fitzgerald of Stradballa. Now there was a man.'
'Who just didn't know when to stop fighting.'
'Ah, but you've got quite a look of him about you.' He put another match to his pipe, then glanced at me quizzically over the tops of his glasses. 'You're a funny kind of gun-runner, boy, and that's a fact. Now what exactly would your game be, I wonder?'
Dangerous ground indeed, but I was saved from an unexpected quarter. There were three distinct blows against the floor above our heads. Binnie came awake on the instant and Cork jumped up and climbed the ladder in the corner.
Binnie swung his legs to the floor and ran a hand through his hair. 'What's going on?'
'I'm not sure,' I said.
Cork came back down the ladder and returned to the table. 'Right,' he said. 'It's time to be off.'
Binnie stared at him blankly. 'What's all this?'
'You're going back to Stramore, Binnie,' Cork told him patiently. 'And I'm going with you.'
Binnie turned to me. 'Is he going crazy or am I? Isn't half the British Army scouring the hills for us out there?'
'True enough,' Cork said. 'And with paratroopers by the dozen in every country lane, who'll notice two more?'
He walked to the other end of the room, picked up one of the camouflaged uniforms and tossed it on to the table, then he rummaged in one of the boxes for a moment. When he returned, he was holding a couple of major's crowns in his open palm.
'Stick those in your epaulettes and you've got your old rank back again, Major. You'll have to make do with corporal, Binnie. You don't have the right kind of face for a British officer.'
Binnie gave a kind of helpless shrug. I said to Cork, 'All right, what's the plan?'
'Simplicity itself. You and Binnie get into uniform and go back down to the village. Keep to the woods and if anyone sees you, they'll think you're simply searching the area like everyone else. I'll pick you up at the roadside on the other side of the village in my car. You can't miss it. It's an old Morris Ten. Rather slow, I'm afraid, but I find that an asset in my line of work. No one ever seems to think a car that will only do forty miles an hour worth chasing.'
'Will you still be playing the priest?'
'Oh yes, that's all part of the plan. Once we reach the bottom road, the story, if we're stopped, is that you're escorting me to Plumbridge to make an identification. If we get through there in one piece, we'll change direction. From there on you'll be escorting me to Dungiven. After that, Coleraine. Sure and we'll be at Stramore before you know it. The military have a terrible respect for rank, Major. With a modicum of luck we won't get stopped for more than a minute at anyone time.'
It had a beautiful simplicity that made every kind of sense. 'God help me,' I said, 'but it's just daft enough to work.'
He glanced at his watch. 'Good, I'll pick you up as arranged in exactly half an hour.'
He climbed the ladder and disappeared. Binnie stared at me wildly. 'He's mad, Major. He must be.'
'Maybe he is,' I said. 'But unless you can think of another way out of this mess, you'd better get into uniform and fast. We haven't got much time.'
I was dressed in one of the camouflaged uniforms and a flak jacket inside five minutes and that included fixing the Major's crowns to the epaulettes. Binnie, once he started moving, wasn't far behind. When he was ready, I moved close to check that everything was in order and adjusted the angle of his red beret.
'Christ Jesus, Major, but you're the sight for sore eyes.' There was a small broken mirror on the wall and he tried to peer into it. 'My old Da would spin in his grave if he could see this.'
&
nbsp; I found a webbing belt and holster to hold my Browning. Binnie stowed his out of sight inside his flak jacket and we each took a Sterling from Cork's armoury. When I followed Binnie out through the trapdoor to the barn, old Sean was waiting at the bottom of the ladder. He showed not the slightest surprise at our appearance, simply picked up the ladder when I reached the ground and carried it across to the hayloft again. It was only as we went out into the rain and started across the farmyard that I realized he hadn't spoken a single word to us since that first meeting in the church.
Binnie led the way at a brisk pace, cutting up into the trees on the opposite side of the valley from the way we had come. It was quiet enough up there, the only sound the rain swishing down through the branches or the occasional noise of an engine from the road. Once, through a clear patch in the mist, I saw a red beret or two in the trees on the other side of the valley, but there was no one on our side.
We bypassed the village altogether, keeping high in the trees, only moving down towards the road when we were well clear of the last houses.
We crouched in the bushes and waited. A Land-Rover swished past, moving towards the village, the old Morris Ten appeared perhaps three minutes later, and we stood up and showed ourselves instantly. Binnie scrambled into the rear seat, I got in beside Cork, and he drove away.
In his shovel hat, clerical collar and shabby black raincoat he was as authentic-looking a figure as one could have wished for, a thought which, for some reason, I found rather comforting.
I said, 'So far so good.'
'Just what I was after telling myself.' He glanced in the driving mirror and smiled. 'Binnie, you look lovely. If they could see you in Stradballa now.'
'Get to hell outa that,' Binnie told him.
'Come on now, Binnie,' I said. 'I thought any sacrifice was worth making for the cause.'
Which made Cork laugh so much he almost put us into the ditch. He recovered just in time and the Morris proceeded sedately down the hill at a good twenty-five miles an hour.
