Soldier E: Sniper Fire in Belfast

by Shaun Clarke

  Using a hand signal, Cranfield indicated that the men should slip around the gate posts rather than open the chained gate, then cross the ground in front of the farmhouse. This they did, moving as quietly as possible, spreading out as they advanced with their handguns at the ready, merely glancing in a cursory manner at the Alsatians now lying in pools of blood.

  When they reached the farmhouse, Cranfield nodded at Sergeant Blake, who returned the nod, then slipped quietly around the side of the house to cover the back door. When he had disappeared around the back, Cranfield and Dubois took up positions on either side of the door, holding their pistols firmly, applying equal pressure between the thumb and fingers of the firing hand.

  Cranfield was standing upright, his back pressed to the wall. Dubois was on one knee, already aiming his pistol at the door. When the latter nodded, Cranfield spun around, kicked the door open and rushed in, covered by Dubois.

  O’Halloran was sitting in his pyjamas at the kitchen table, about ten feet away, as the door was torn from its hinges and crashed to the floor. Shocked, he looked up from his plate, the fork still to his mouth, as Cranfield rushed in, stopped, spread his legs wide, and prepared to fire the gun two-handed.

  ‘This is for Phillips,’ Cranfield said, then fired the first shot.

  O’Halloran jerked convulsively and slapped his free hand on the table, his blood already spurting over the bacon and eggs as his fork fell, clattering noisily on the tiles. He jerked again with the second bullet. Trying to stand, he twisted backwards, his chair buckling and breaking beneath him as he crashed to the floor.

  Dubois came in after Cranfield, crouched low, aiming left and right, covering the room as Cranfield emptied his magazine, one shot after another in the classic ‘double tap’, though using all thirteen bullets instead of two.

  O’Halloran, already dead, was jerking spasmodically from each bullet as Sergeant Blake, hearing the shots, kicked the back door in and rushed through the house, checking each room as he went, prepared to cut down anything that moved, but finding nothing at all. By the time he reached the kitchen at the front, the double tap was completed.

  Sergeant Blake glanced at the dead man on the floor. ‘Good job, boss,’ he commented quietly.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Dubois said.

  Cranfield knelt beside O’Halloran, placed his fingers on his neck, checked that he was dead, then stood up again.

  ‘Day’s work done,’ he said.

  Unable to return Cranfield’s satisfied grin, though feeling relieved, Captain Dubois just nodded and led the three men out of the house. They returned to the Q car, not glancing back once, and let Sergeant Harris drive them away, back to Northern Ireland.

  Chapter 2

  Martin was leaning on the rusty railing when the ship that had brought him and the others from Liverpool inched into Belfast harbour in the early hours of the morning. His hair was longer than it should have been, windswept, dishevelled. He was wearing a roll-necked sweater, a bomber jacket, blue jeans and a pair of old suede boots, and carrying a small shoulder bag. The others, he knew, looked the same, though they were now in the bar, warming up with mugs of tea.

  Looking at the lights beaming over the dark, dismal harbour, he was reminded of the brilliant light that had temporarily blinded him when the Directing Staff conducting the brutal Resistance to Interrogation (RTI) exercises had whipped the hood off his head. Later they had congratulated him on having passed that final hurdle even before his eyes had readjusted to the light in the bare, cell-like room in the Joint Services Interrogation Unit of 22 SAS Training Wing, Hereford. Even as he was being led from the room, knowing he would soon be bound for the last stages of his Continuation Training in Borneo, he had seen another young man, Corporal Wigan of the Light Infantry, being escorted out of the building with tears in his eyes.

  ‘He was the one you shared the truck with,’ his Director of Training had told him, ‘but he finally cracked, forgot where he was, and told us everything we wanted to know. Now he’s being RTU’d.’

  Being returned to your unit of origin was doubly humiliating, first through the failure to get into the SAS, then through having to face your old mates, who would know you had failed. Even now, thinking of how easily it could have happened to him, Martin, formerly of the Royal Engineers, practically shuddered at the thought of it.

  Feeling cold and dispirited by the sight of the bleak docks of Belfast, he hurried back into the bar where the other men, some recently badged like him, others old hands who had last fought in Oman, all of them in civilian clothing, were sipping hot tea and pretending to be normal passengers.

  Sergeant Frank Lampton, who had been Martin’s Director of Training during the horrors of Continuation Training, was leaning back in his chair, wearing a thick overcoat, corduroy trousers, a tatty shirt buttoned at the neck, a V-necked sweater and badly scuffed suede shoes. With his blond hair dishevelled and his clothing all different sizes, as if picked up in charity shops, he did not look remotely like the slim, fit, slightly glamorous figure who had been Martin’s DT.

  Sitting beside Sergeant Lampton was Corporal Phil Ricketts. Their strong friendship had been forged in the fierce fighting of the ‘secret’ war in Dhofar, Oman, in 1972. Ricketts was a pleasant, essentially serious man with a wife and child in Wood Green, North London. He didn’t talk about them much, but when he did it was with real pride and love. Unlike the sharp-tongued, ferret-faced Trooper ‘Gumboot’ Gillis, sitting opposite.

  Badged with Ricketts just before going to Dhofar, Gumboot hailed from Barnstaple, Devon, where he had a wife, Linda, whom he seemed to hold in less than high esteem. ‘I was in Belfast before,’ he’d explained to Martin a few nights earlier, ‘but with 3 Para. When I returned home, that bitch had packed up and left with the kids. That’s why, when I was badged and sent back here, I was pleased as piss. I’ll take a Falls Road hag any day. At least you know where you stand with them.’

  ‘Up against an alley wall,’ Jock McGregor said.

  Corporal McGregor had been shot through the hand in Oman and looked like the tough nut he was. Others who had fought with Lampton, Ricketts and Gumboot in Oman had gone their separate ways, with the big black poet, Trooper Andrew Winston, being returned there in 1975. A lot of the men had joked that the reason Andrew had been transferred to another squadron and sent back to Oman was that his black face couldn’t possibly pass for a Paddy’s. Whatever the true cause, he had been awarded for bravery during the SAS strikes against rebel strongholds in Defa and Shershitti.

  Sitting beside Jock was Trooper Danny ‘Baby Face’ Porter, from Kingswinford, in the West Midlands. He was as quiet as a mouse and, though nicknamed ‘Baby Face’ because of his innocent, wide-eyed, choirboy appearance, was said to have been one of the most impressive of all the troopers who had recently been badged – a natural soldier who appeared to fear nothing and was ferociously competent with weapons. His speciality was the ‘double tap’ – thirteen rounds discharged from a Browning High Power handgun in under three seconds, at close range – which some had whispered might turn out useful in the mean streets of Belfast.

  Not as quiet as Danny, but also just badged and clearly self-conscious with the more experienced troopers, Hugh ‘Taff’ Burgess was a broad-chested Welshman with a dark, distant gaze, a sweet, almost childlike nature and, reportedly, a violent temper when aroused or drunk. Throughout the whole SAS Selection and Training course Taff had been slightly slow in learning, very thorough at everything, helpful and encouraging to others, and always even-tempered. True, he had wrecked a few pubs in Hereford, but while in the SAS barracks in the town he had been a dream of good humour and generosity. Not ambitious, and not one to shine too brightly, he was, nevertheless, a good soldier, popular with everyone.

  Last but not least was Sergeant ‘Dead-eye Dick’ Parker, who didn’t talk much. Rumour had it that he had been turned into a withdrawn, ruthless fighting machine by his terrible experience in the Telok Anson swamp in Malaya in 1958. Accordi
ng to the eye-witness accounts of other Omani veterans such as Sergeant Ricketts and Gumboot, Parker, when in Oman with them, had worn Arab clothing and fraternized mostly with the unpredictable, violent firqats, Dhofaris who had renounced their communist comrades and lent their support to the Sultan. Now, lounging lazily on a chair in blue denims and a tatty old ski jacket, he looked like any other middle-aged man running slightly to seed. Only his grey gaze, cold and ever shifting, revealed that he was alert and still potentially lethal.

  The men were scattered all around the lounge, not speaking, pretending not to know one another. When the boat docked and the passengers started disembarking, they shuffled out of the lounge with them, but remained well back or took up positions on the open deck, waiting for the last of the passengers to disembark.

  Looking in both directions along the quayside, Martin saw nothing moving among the gangplanks tilted on end, scattered railway sleepers and coils of thick mooring cables. The harbour walls rose out of the filthy black water, stained a dirty brown by years of salt water and the elements, supporting an ugly collection of warehouses, huts, tanks and prefabricated administration buildings. Unmanned cranes loomed over the water, their hooks swinging slightly in the wind blowing in from the sea. Out in the harbour, green and red pilot lights floated on a gentle sea. Seagulls circled overhead, crying keenly, in the grey light of morning.

  Having previously been told to wait on the deck until their driver beckoned to them, the men did so. The last of the other passengers had disembarked when Martin, glancing beyond the quayside, saw a green minibus leaving its position in the car park. It moved between rows of empty cars and the trailers of articulated lorries, eventually leaving the car park through gates guarded by RUC guards wearing flak jackets and armed with 5.56mm Ruger Mini-14 assault rifles. When the minibus reached the quayside and stopped by the empty gangplank, Martin knew that it had to be their transport.

  As the driver, also wearing civilian clothing, got out of his car, Sergeant Lampton made his way down the gangplank and spoke to him. The man nodded affirmatively. A group of armed RUC guards emerged from one of the prefabricated huts along the quayside to stand guard while the men’s bergen rucksacks were unloaded and heaped up on the quayside. There were no weapons; these would be obtained from the armoury in the camp they were going to. All of the men were, however, already armed with 9mm Browning High Power handguns, which they were wearing in cross-draw holsters under their jackets.

  When the last of the bergens had been unloaded, Lampton turned back and waved the men down to the quayside. Martin went down between Ricketts and Gumboot, following the first into the back of the minibus, where a lot of the men were already seated. Gumboot was the last to get in. When he did so, one of the RUC guards slid the door shut and the driver took off, heading out into the mean streets of Belfast.

  ‘Can we talk at last?’ Gumboot asked. ‘I can’t stand this silence.’

  ‘Gumboot wants to talk,’ Jock McGregor said. ‘God help us all.’

  ‘He’s talking already,’ Ricketts said. ‘I distinctly heard him. Like a little mouse squeaking.’

  ‘Ha, ha. Merely attempting to break the silence, boss,’ retorted Gumboot, ‘and keep us awake until we basha down. That boat journey seemed endless.’

  ‘You won’t get to basha down until tonight, so you better keep talking.’

  ‘Don’t encourage him,’ Jock said. ‘It’s too early to have to listen to his bullshit. I’ve got a headache already.’

  ‘It’s the strain of trying to think,’ Gumboot informed him. ‘You’re not used to it, Jock.’

  His gaze moved to the window and the dismal streets beyond, where signs saying NO SURRENDER! and SMASH SINN FEIN! fought for attention with enormous, angry paintings on the walls of buildings, showing the customary propaganda of civil war: clenched fists, hooded men clasping weapons, the various insignia of the paramilitary groups on both sides of the divide, those in Shankill, the Falls Road, and the grim, ghettoized housing estates of West Belfast.

  ‘How anyone can imagine this place worth all the slaughter,’ Taff Burgess said, studying the grim, wet, barricaded streets, ‘I just can’t imagine.’

  ‘They don’t think it’s worth it.’ Jock said. ‘They’re just a bunch of thick Paddies and murderous bastards using any excuse.’

  ‘Not quite true,’ Martin said. Brought up by strictly methodist parents in Swindon, not religious himself, but highly conscious of right and wrong, he had carefully read up on Ireland before coming here and was shocked by what he had learnt. ‘These people have hatreds that go back to 1601,’ he explained, ‘when the Catholic barons were defeated and Protestants from England arrived by boat to begin colonization and genocide.’

  ‘1601!’ Gumboot said in disgust. ‘The Paddies sure have fucking long memories.’

  The Catholics were thrown out of their own land,’ Martin continued, feeling a little self-conscious. ‘When they returned to attack the Protestants with pitchforks and stones, the British hanged and beheaded thousands of them. Some were tarred with pitch and dynamite, then set on fire.’

  ‘Ouch!’ Taff exclaimed.

  ‘When the Catholics were broken completely,’ Martin continued in a trance of historical recollection, ‘their religion was outlawed, their language was forbidden, and they became untouchables who lived in the bogs below the Protestant towns. They endured that for a couple of hundred years.’

  ‘You’re still talking about centuries ago,’ Gumboot said. ‘That’s a long time to hold those old grudges. Might as well go back to the garden of Eden and complain that you weren’t given a bite of the fucking apple.’

  ‘It’s not the same thing,’ Martin insisted, feeling embarrassed that he was talking so much, but determined to get his point across. ‘We’re not talking about something that happened just once, centuries ago, but about something that’s never really stopped.’

  ‘So the poor buggers were thrown out of their homes and into the bogs,’ Taff Burgess said with genuine sympathy, his brown gaze focused inward. ‘So what happened next, then?’

  ‘Over the centuries, Belfast became a wealthy industrial centre, dominated entirely by Protestants. But the Catholics started returning to the city about 1800, and naturally, as they were still being treated like scum, they were resentful and struck back.’

  ‘Nothing like a bit of the old “ultra-violence” to get out your frustrations,’ said Gumboot, grinning wickedly. ‘Remember that film, A Clockwork Orange? Fucking good, that was.’

  ‘Race riots and pogroms became commonplace,’ Martin continued, now getting into his stride. ‘It burst out every five or six years, eventually leading to the formation of Catholic and Protestant militia. Civil war erupted in 1920. In 1921 the country was partitioned, with the six provinces of the North becoming a British statelet, ruled by its Protestant majority.’

  ‘Big fucking deal,’ Gumboot said as the minibus passed through a street of small terraced houses, many with their windows and doorways bricked up. Here the signs said: PROVOS RULE! and BRITS OUT! Even at this early hour of the morning there were gangs of scruffy youths on the street corners, looking for trouble. ‘What was so bad about that?’

  ‘Well, Catholics couldn’t get jobs and their slums became worse,’ Martin explained. ‘The electoral laws were manipulated to favour owners of property, who were mostly Protestants. Even after more riots in the thirties and forties, nothing changed. Finally, in 1969, the Catholics took to the streets again, where they were attacked by Protestant police and vigilantes. This time they refused to lie down and the whole city went up in flames.’

  ‘I remember that well,’ Jock said. ‘I saw it on TV. Mobs all over the place, thousands fleeing from their homes, and Army tanks in the streets. I could hardly believe what I was seeing. A civil war on British soil!’

  ‘Right,’ Ricketts chipped in. ‘And by the time they were done, you had Catholics on one side, Protestants on the other, and the British equivalent of the Berlin Wal
l between.’

  He pointed out of the window of the van, where they could see the actual ‘Peace Line’: a fifteen-foot-high wall topped with iron spikes, cutting across roads, through rows of houses, and, as they had all been informed, right across the city.

  ‘Which led,’ Sergeant Lampton added laconically, ‘to the birth of the masked IRA terrorist and his opposite number, the loyalist terrorist in balaclava.’

  ‘And here we are, caught in the middle,’ Ricketts said, ‘trying to keep the peace.’

  ‘Trying to stay alive,’ Gumboot corrected him, ‘which is all it comes down to. I’ve only got one aim in this piss-hole – to make sure that none of the bastards on either side puts one in my back. Fuck all the rest of it.’

  The minibus was now leaving the city to travel along the M1, through rolling hills which, Martin noticed, were dotted with British Army observation posts. Even as he saw the distant OPs, an AH-7 Lynx helicopter was hovering over one of them to insert replacements and take off the men already there. The OPs, Martin knew, were resupplied with men and equipment only by air – never by road.

  ‘Hard to believe that’s a killing ground out there,’ Sergeant Lampton said. ‘If it wasn’t for the OPs on the hills, it would all seem so peaceful.’

  ‘It looked peaceful in Oman as well,’ Ricketts said, ‘until the Adoo appeared. It’s the same with those hills – except instead of Adoo snipers, you have the terrorists. They look pretty serene from down here, but you’re right – those are killing fields.’

  Martin felt an odd disbelief as he looked at the lush, serene hills and thought of how many times they had been used to hide torture and murder. That feeling remained with him when the minibus turned off the motorway and made its way along a winding narrow lane to the picturesque village of Bessbrook, where the British army had taken over the old mill. Located only four miles from the border, it was a village with a strongly Protestant, God-fearing community – there was not a single pub – and it was presently living through a grim spate of sectarian killings.