‘Finn’s a hard case – they’re probably more scared of him than they are of you. Any luck with the weaponry?’
‘One M60 has been traced to a theft from a National Guard arsenal in the States about eight months ago. The rest came up from bunkers in the South. The Gardai are working on it.’
‘The Gardai,’ Early scoffed.
‘Anything else?’
‘Yes. The Lavery woman is active. There is at least one arms cache in the pub itself, but her brother doesn’t know, I think. He seems a decent sort. I think he just wants to be left alone.’
‘I got that impression.’
‘The survivors of the operation came to the pub three – no, four nights ago. We patched them up before they went on their way. They were in two Ford Transits, one blue, one grey. Number-plates are as follows.’ Early handed Cordwain a tiny scrap of paper. The SAS major nodded.
‘Hijacked in Newry a week ago,’ he said. ‘One we’ve found, burnt out along the border near Omagh. That’s what threw us off the scent. We thought they had headed west. So they’re in Belfast! Cheeky buggers. Tell me about the crowd who made it to the pub.’
‘There were fourteen of them. Some I couldn’t place. Three of them were wounded: arm and leg injuries. They were to be admitted to the Royal in Belfast with false ID and passed off as punishment shootings.’
Cordwain smiled. ‘Scratch three more of the bad guys. We’ll leave them alone for the present. We don’t want you coming under any more suspicion. The others?’
Early nodded at the piece of paper he had given Cordwain. ‘Southern Special Branch will be able to confirm the names.’
‘Excellent, John. I believe we have them cold.’
‘What the hell happened the other night? You only bagged half of them, and the other half are thirsting for blood. You’ll never get any Freds down in this part of the world if you keep coming up with operations like that.’
‘It was Boyd. He’s a good man, but a little … impulsive. Call it one of the follies of youth.’
‘Fuck the follies of youth,’ Early said savagely. ‘He could have ruined the whole thing. I hadn’t given you enough information to launch a preemptive strike. I thought you would just step up preventative measures, maybe catch them in the act. That young man is too much of a cowboy.’
‘As I said,’ Cordwain told him, his voice hardening, ‘he’s young, but he’s very good. It was my fault if anybody’s – I gave the go-ahead. Do you think you’ve been compromised by the operation?’
Early pondered the question as the car wound its way along the quiet roads of South Armagh.
‘No,’ he said at last. ‘I patched up one of their wounded and helped them out the night of the fight. They are on their guard, certainly, but I don’t think they suspect me any more than a few other locals that they’ve got their eye on.’
‘And the Lavery woman?’
‘What about her?’
‘Damn it, John. Is she setting you up? We know you’re involved with her, and she’s bloody attractive.’
‘I won’t let my prick rule my head, if that’s what you’re getting at, James.’
‘Good. Now listen, John. Your handlers in the Intelligence Service have found out what we’re up to and they’re mightily pissed off at us intruding on their turf. They want you extracted. They’re trying to portray the Drumboy op in the worst possible light.’
‘They’re full of shit. I’ve just given you the whole South Armagh Brigade on a platter.’
‘Yes, but they want the Border Fox. The whole situation down here is being screwed up tighter every day, despite Drumboy. The resident battalion is causing trouble for itself, and questions are being asked in Parliament.’
Early laughed. ‘How inconvenient for you all!’
‘It could result in the Greenjackets being replaced early in their tour – their casualties alone almost warrant that. That would be a grave blow to us, politically as well as operationally.’
‘What do you want me to do about it?’
‘Find the Fox. He must be taken out before he strikes again. I am able to authorize any and every means to neutralize him once he has been identified. If the worst comes to the worst we’ll drag the fucker over the border and top him ourselves. But he must go down.’
‘The Fox is mine, Major.’
Cordwain sighed.
‘This is not a personal vendetta. I’m sorry about your brother, John, but Christ, you’ve got to remember you’re part of a team. We’re establishing another covert OP in Cross square to keep an eye on you. The first one is being folded up – the risk of compromise is too great with two in the same town.’
‘Fair enough. I’ll tell you this though: we may be on to a loser with the Fox, precisely because he prefers to work alone. Not even the regular players in Cross know who he is – only Finn and the quartermaster, McLaughlin, one of whom is now dead and the other up in Belfast. Whoever he is, he’s not in our files – he’s an unknown, with no previous convictions. And he’s a cool-headed bastard too, hitting that VCP the day after the Drumboy op.’
‘We’ve figured out the weapon he uses,’ Cordwain said. ‘It’s a Barratt-Browning .50-calibre rifle. Uses armour-piercing rounds. The fucker can punch through four inches of steel; it even pierces the trauma plates on body armour.’
Early whistled softly. ‘Where the fuck did the Provisionals get a weapon like that?’
‘The States, where else? It’s American-made. But it’s a fuck of a big weapon, John. A man wouldn’t be able to run far with it, so this Fox depends on vehicular transport for every hit, if he uses no back-up. That means he operates near roads, tracks, lanes. He’s not a cross-country man, unless he’s in the Republic, where he can probably saunter around with his hands in his fucking pockets if he likes. Anyway, back to business.’
Cordwain handed Early one of the ubiquitous pieces of paper.
‘Three times, dates and places for three LLBs. It’s up to you whether or not you turn up at them; there will be a contact waiting for you at them but he will wait precisely five minutes and then bugger off. They’re roughly every week for the next three weeks.’
‘What if I get info that has to be delivered right away?’
The number at the bottom. Use a public phone box and let us know. If you’re really in the shit, then hopefully the OP being established tonight will notice and call in the cavalry. That’s the best we can do. Fibre optics and phone taps, they’re all out at the moment, I’m afraid; things are too tense. We’ll wait a while, and then see what we can do. I don’t have to tell you to destroy that note, do I?’
Early shot him a withering look.
‘Good. Here we are then, John – back where we started. What did you tell the girl?’
‘That I was going for a walk.’
‘On an evening like this? You’ll have to think up better excuses than that.’
Early said nothing. The car stopped briefly and he got out.
‘Good luck,’ Cordwain said, and sped off. Looking in his rear-view mirror he saw the hooded figure hunched against the rain, walking back into Cross.
Maggie Lavery or no, he was glad he was not John Early.
Chapter 13
The army foot patrol was a large one; twelve men in staggered file moving down both sides of the darkened street. It was three o’clock in the morning and the street-lights of Crossmaglen were an amber glow in the early hours. The village was silent and sleeping, but the soldiers checked every window and doorway as though they expected a face to appear at it, a rifle barrel to flash. They were tense, jumpy, and they eyed the death tally that graffiti artists had painted on one gable wall with hatred. Ten-nil, it said, seemingly forgetting the seven PIRA members killed at Drumboy Hill. The thought sweetened the mood of the patrol a little, though they were still burning with a desire for revenge, like all the members of their battalion. Scarcely three days had passed since the murder of rifleman Kenny Philips at the vehicle checkpoint outside the town.
Gorbals McFee and the three other members of his team were at the rear of the patrol. Haymaker was there, the stitches removed from his face only that morning, Raymond Chandler, and Jimmy Wilkins: Wilkie. They were dressed and equipped identically to the Greenjacket soldiers that preceded them, except for the large bergens on their backs. The patrol was to cover their approach to the site of the OP.
On the northern side of Cross square was a line of three derelict houses, their windows boarded up and slates missing from their roofs. The local council had been promising for months to renovate them, but never seemed to get round to it. The patrol turned east on its approach to the square and moved down the narrow alley at the back of the houses. A head-high crumbling brick wall enclosed the tiny, overgrown back gardens. The doors in the wall were of wood, rotting and sagging on their hinges.
A cat darted across the alleyway, causing the point man to whip up his rifle, then breathe out softly and let the muzzle sink again. It was army policy to have weapons loaded but not cocked while patrolling in urban areas, so that there was no round ‘up the spout’ to cause a possible negligent discharge. But this moral nicety had gone to the wall a long time ago down in South Armagh. All the section’s weapons had been cocked as soon as the patrol had left the base, and the trigger finger of each man rested on the little stud that was the SA-80’s safety-catch, ready to flick it off and open up at the slightest hint of danger. The Greenjackets had lost too many men to worry much about infringements of Standard Operating Procedure now.
The patrol paused, the men seeking fire-positions. Gorbals nodded to Haymaker and the big man leaned against one of the doors in the alley, testing it. Letting his weapon hang from its sling, he produced a short crowbar from his thigh pocket and levered the door open. The hinges squeaked in protest, and then he had disappeared.
In a twinkling the other SAS men followed him, and the door was swung shut. The Greenjackets continued down the alley and then turned left to enter Cross’s main square, on their way back to the base, which was off its southern end.
Gorbals, Raymond and Wilkie crouched in the tangled undergrowth that was the back garden of the deserted house. They were almost invisible in the darkness. Haymaker was working on the garden door, disguising the scar the crowbar had made.
The procedure was repeated for a window at the back of the house. Soon the team was inside, breathing dust and damp in the pitch-blackness.
They went up the stairs, Wilkie erasing their footsteps behind them as they went. No one spoke. When they had reached the top floor they paused, listening. Then they slipped off their bergens and placed them in a pile, and swapped their boots for trainers.
The house had already been checked out by an Explosives Ordnance Disposal team, and the SAS men had clocked both the building and the surroundings on a previous patrol. The place was clean, in an operational sense, though as the SAS soldiers dug out their equipment they could feel rats scampering around their feet.
Each of the men had differing tasks to perform before the OP could begin to function. Haymaker went downstairs again and planted a series of trip-wires linked to stun grenades and flash initiators on the lower floor, so that if any of the locals came nosing around the team would have warning that they were compromised. Wilkie engineered a tiny hole in the brickwork under the eaves that would be their sole window on the world, and began setting up the surveillance equipment. Raymond got out two sleeping bags and unrolled them, and then set aside two sets of plastic bags, one pair for human waste and the other for empty food cans. The team would be in the OP for ten days, and in all that time they would not eat hot food, but only cold, tinned rations. They would not have hot drinks, except at first light, when there was the least chance of the little gas stove being heard. And they would drink tea, not coffee, which gives off an aroma.
Gorbals set up the radio, which would be used as little as possible, both to conserve batteries and cut down on noise. The procedure would be for two men to sleep while one monitored the radio and the fourth carried out the surveillance, logging everything he saw. Radio transmissions from the OP would be made at night only, since the VHF set had a habit of interfering with television transmissions. Every third night, an RGJ patrol would pass close to the OP and pick up a bergen full of waste and used camera films, and would leave behind a bergen full of food, film and radio batteries.
By first light that morning, the OP was up and running. Gorbals was sitting with his eye glued to the optic of the camera, while Raymond sat listening to the radio. Wilkie and Haymaker were asleep, wrapped in sleeping bags on the dust and filth of the floor.
As Maggie Lavery got out of bed and stretched her white arms towards the ceiling, Gorbals smiled and pressed the shutter on the camera. What a great pair of tits, he thought. Surveillance work has its perks, after all.
* * *
Eugene Finn lit another cigarette and stared down the rain-shiny roofs of the city. From this height he could even see the two huge yellow Harland and Wolff cranes, Samson and Goliath, over by the docks, as well as the green copper dome of the City Hall. A helicopter hovered, motionless, over Belfast city centre, keeping an eye on things.
He was in a high-rise in Divis, in west Belfast. The IRA safe house had turned out to be a grimy tenth-floor flat in the Republican heartland, the ghetto of the city. Belfast was a grim town, divided up into tribal territorities, split by the Peace Line, patrolled by troops and controlled by paramilitaries. He had never liked the place. He was a countryman.
The door was knocked in a peculiar rhythm and the other man in the room, a big Falls Road native, got up to answer it. He was Seamus Toomigh, Finn’s ‘minder’. Or jailer, or executioner, Finn told himself. It all depends on how things go.
Six men came into the room, the last looking round the corridor before shutting the door behind him. Finn stubbed out his cigarette. The men sat down and Toomigh wandered off to the tiny kitchen to get drinks. Finn knew the names of two of the men. The other four he did not even recognize.
It was one of the beauties of the ASU system. The IRA Active Service Unit was a self-contained entity, and the foot-soldiers within it knew no one in the organization outside their own little cell. Only the commanders of the ASUs, and the brigade officers knew who the various quartermasters and staff officers of their district were. And only a man who had been in the ‘Ra’ as long as Finn would know who the men on the Army Council were. This was the bulk of it: these six men. They dictated and co-ordinated the actions of all the IRA members on the island. It was rare to see them all together, especially up here in the North, for the Brits knew who at least a few of them were. Finn knew he would be moved again, to another place, as soon as the meeting was over. The Brits or the RUC would have these men under constant surveillance.
‘Well, Eugene,’ said one of them, a middle-aged, hard-faced character. He was Francis McIlroy, operations officer for the Belfast district.
‘You’ve been having an exciting wee time to yourself down south, haven’t you?’
‘Have we now?’
‘Seven Volunteers dead, three more in the Royal, some valuable weapons lost. I’d say you’d been busy enough,’ another man said harshly. Finn did not know him.
‘And for what? Four wounded SAS. You didn’t even manage to top any of them. The biggest operation we’d authorized in fifteen years and what have we to see for it? Fuck all. Now the South Armagh Brigade is out of action for the foreseeable future. You know what I think, Eugene? I think you just handed the Brits a victory on a platter, with nothing gained on our side but corpses.’
‘What is this?’ Finn asked heatedly. ‘A trial?’
‘Call it a court martial – we prefer that term. You lot in the South have always been a bunch of big-timers. Before you it was Kelly and the East Tyrone Brigade: and look where it got them – that disaster at Loughgall. Who the fuck do you think you are, Clint Eastwood?’
Finn leaned forward, his face white with anger. ‘You authorized it
. The Army Council backed the idea behind the operation.’
‘We backed it before we knew there was a leak in your parish. Someone down there is singing, Eugene. Why else should the SAS be waiting for you?’
Finn was silent. The same thought had occurred to him.
‘You Armagh boys have always been the tightest-knit bunch of us all, I’ll make no bones about it. But now there’s a screw loose, Eugene. Somebody in Cross is a tout.’
Finn shook his head. ‘Even the other ASU commanders only knew the details of the operation the night before. I can’t see how it could happen.’
‘Where are they now? Here?’
Finn smiled icily. ‘They’re six feet under, most of them. Lynagh is the only one that survived besides me. He’s up here in the city. I don’t know where you have him – you know that.’
‘We’ll talk to him too, then. But I don’t think it was him or you, Eugene. Don’t get us wrong – we don’t suspect you yourself.’
Finn felt a cold wave of relief wash over him, but his face betrayed none of his feelings.
‘No, it’s someone in Cross, and they’re good, whoever they are. My guess is they put together a whole lot of little pictures and came up with one big one.’
Finn nodded. ‘I think the SAS were as surprised as us. There weren’t more than a dozen of them. If they had known how many of us there were, they’d have brought in more. At Loughgall they had over thirty men. The East Tyrone bunch had nine.’
The senior IRA figures digested this for a few minutes while Toomigh came back in with glasses of beer and whiskey.
‘Just how bad is the damage?’ McIlroy asked at last.
‘Bad enough. Two of the dead were mine, the rest were Monaghan men under Lynagh. It was his platoon they hit first …’
‘Platoon!’ one of the older men guffawed in a mixture of wonder and admiration.
‘Aye. They wiped out half of his men in the first minute, but they didn’t seem to know my lot were there. We hit them in the rear, RPG and everything, and we were fucking winning, too, until that arsehole McLaughlin charged forward with a few of the hot-heads, and tripped a booby-trap. A claymore, I think it was. Well, he went down along with a few others, and after that I gave the order to pull out. Three of the wounded we managed to get on the vans, the others were picked up by the Brits. But the point is, we had them surrounded. I really think we could have beaten the cunts if only we’d had a little more time.’
Soldier U: Bandit Country Page 10
