‘Toward orange five, roger that,’ Mike replied into the handset as Graham walked back in.
‘Stratton’s on his way,’ Graham said.
Mike nodded as he pored over the map. The entire province was coded at the major junctions and landmarks, all committed to memory by the operatives even though they had secure communications, just in case that system ever went down and they had to revert back to open comms as in the old days. Graham grabbed a bar cloth off its hook, wiped away the previous chinagraph pencil marks and circled orange five.
‘They’re heading for Dungannon,’ Graham said.
‘Probably, but where will they cross the border?’
‘If they do.’
‘We must assume it for now,’ Mike said, scrutinising the thick yellow demarcation line that ran from the top left to the bottom right corner of the map.
‘Where’s Bill Lawton?’ Mike asked referring to the detachment’s liaison officer.
Graham snatched up a phone. ‘He’s at a special branch meeting in Belfast,’ he said as he punched in a number.
‘Get hold of him. We need at least a dozen checkpoints covered.Tell him to call the Garda before he talks to anyone else. He’s to tell them we’re concentrating on an area five miles either side of Aughnacloy.’
‘Bill Lawton?’ Graham asked into the phone.
‘He’s to call them before he talks to anyone in Whitehall. I don’t want to hear from London until this is over . . . How soon can Stratton be at the border?’ Mike asked, well aware Graham could handle half a dozen different tasks at once and give them equal attention.
‘Twenty, twenty-five minutes,’ then into the phone, ‘Tell him it’s urgent, life and death,’ then to Mike, ‘Bill’s gone tramp around in the building somewhere. Someone’s gone off to look for him.’
Mike looked worried, as if trying to see the actual ground on the map beyond the two-dimensional topographical information. ‘If he’s in a bloody pub I’ll have his arse in a sling. The checkpoints will never be set up in time. The army and RUC are too bloody slow.’
Everyone in the room was thinking the same thing. Poor old Spinksy.
The Irishman kneeled heavily on Spinks’s sternum, searching his jacket pockets as the car bumped along at speed. ‘You one of those who don’t carry one because you think it’s a waste of time? Eh?’ He checked the trouser pockets, front and rear. ‘Grubby little bastard, ain’t ya?’ he growled. The man gave up the search and sat back a moment to take a look at Spinks, who lay there like a frightened seal. ‘You stink, Pink, so you do,’ he said, wearing a look of disgust as he wiped his hands on his own jacket.
Brennan was his name. He was from Dundalk in County Louth. His primary livelihood was armed robbery, cash targets mostly, such as banks, post offices and building societies. He preferred to work during business hours for two reasons: he felt it was the safest time of the day to rob a high street business, and he enjoyed seeing the terrified faces of the people when he burst in wearing his balaclava and armed with a pump-action shotgun or sub-machine-gun. Working for the Real IRA was more of a sideline for Brennan, although he would never admit that to anyone. In fact he described his criminal activities as ‘fundraising’ to maintain his war effort. He was a Republican to be sure but ultimately he was a mercenary - unless there was glory to be had; enough glory might well tip the scales in favour of doing a job for very little money, although a freebie would have to be exceptionally glorious. Brennan had not done a job for free for the Republicans since his early sectarian executions where he gained the reputation that allowed him to start charging a nice fee. This kidnapping offered both cash and glory. Brennan had been provided with the weaponry and given three thousand pounds, which included expenses, to carry out the assignment. It was well below his normal rate, but the glory of getting a Brit spy more than made up the difference.
The War Council discouraged him from telling anyone about the money he received for his work. Most soldiers were volunteers and worked for a basic upkeep that usually had to be supplemented by a regular job or crime. Some, especially the new, younger members were not paid a penny. If a soldier was sent on a long-term operation, such as a member of a bomb team in England, then the pay was not too bad. But Brennan was given special pay because he was known to get the job done. It was not always pretty, and often a little too brutal for some tastes, but he had a knack for success.
Murder was Brennan’s main choice of work. He discovered his penchant for it after he started working for the Provos in his late teens. He liked to do it up close and personal, and the slower the better. If he had the time to get acquainted with his victim, even better. He had no idea if he was to eventually kill Spinks. If it looked like they weren’t going to get him across the border then his orders were to execute him. That was his call to make. Ultimately Spinks was to be interrogated. Brennan hoped he would be the one selected to finish him.
‘If all your mates smelled as bad as you we’d have no trouble finding them,’ Brennan said to Spinks. He reached over into the boot and pulled out the MPK5 and pistol and threw them into the passenger foot-well.As he leaned further in to check for anything else the car went over a bump and he bashed the back of his head hard on the lid. He steamed a look at his young driver Sean as he rubbed the bump, snarled and finished his search. He found nothing else but the empty water bottle. The car then took a corner hard, sending Brennan crashing into the side window.
‘You roll this focken car and I’ll focken shoot you!’ Brennan shouted.
Sean was a cool character and didn’t flinch, but he had been warned not to fuck with Brennan. They had never met before the previous evening, when the team was called in for orders and, for security reasons, they had remained in the same house for the rest of the night. All Sean knew about Brennan was what the others had told him before Brennan arrived. One rumour had it that he had once killed one of his own people on a job for incompetence. Sean had long since decided that if they did crash, and if he was able to, he would keep running until he was all the way to America, which was about the only place he could think of where Brennan would not find him.
Whatever the truth about Brennan Sean couldn’t give a shite. He had his own job to do and he’d do it how he saw fit. He checked his rear-view mirror. No worries about the car behind; whoever was at the wheel was never going to catch him. Sean slipped down a gear as they approached another tight corner. He decided to be a bit flash and take the tight inside line rather than simply cut the corner. He hooked his front nearside tyre into the small ditch on the inside bend to hold the car tight in the turn and let the back end slip out a little, allowing a faster entry and exit. The trick was to jerk the steering wheel and flick the tyre out of the ditch after the apex. If the tyre didn’t eject the car would spin out of the turn and then Brennan would likely shoot him if they crashed.
Sean went through the turn easily and bombed on down the road. He had been selected for this task because he had a reputation for out-driving police cars. In fact his record was one hundred per cent. He often did it just for fun, bombing past a stationary police car in a small town or village and then leading a chase through the countryside until he lost it.
The road straightened out like a rail for at least a mile, with a small humped bridge halfway along it. Sean smiled to himself as he red lined it. His plan this time was to go airborne.
Chapter 3
Paul Healy sat with a pair of headphones around his neck in the back of an old Ford Transit van opposite an array of jerry-rigged electronics equipment bolted into a basic framework.The gobbledygook sound of the secure communications emitted from a pair of small speakers. Healy was in his early fifties, balding and looked old and tired, like someone who was nearing the end of a long, exhausting journey having discovered halfway through how pointless it all was. Tommy sat watching him from the driver’s seat, smoking a cigarette, dog-ends all around his feet. Tommy had been given two specific responsibilities: drive the van, and protect Healy, wit
h his own life if need be. He watched Healy with contempt. There was no way he was going to give his life for that man.
Tommy was suspicious of Healy for no other reason than he was not a member. Tommy didn’t have a friend in the world who was not a militant pro-Republican, a member of the Irish Republican Army. Although Healy was Irish Catholic, he was just a hired hand and that made him untrustworthy. If he cared about the cause he would not be taking money. Healy could have been forced to do the job, but experience had taught the organisation that it was far more effective to steal the money to pay for the professional than to steal the professional and threaten him to work for his life. They needed Healy, reputed to be the best in the whole of Ireland at what he did, to be on best form for this job.
Tommy was right to think Healy didn’t give a damn about the cause, but Healy had no love for the Brits either, not after what they had done to him. He had only one true lifelong love - solving puzzles. The more complicated they were the greater the challenge and the purer the high if he succeeded in cracking them. He should have been born fifty years earlier. He would have given anything to be a code breaker in the Second World War. He knew everything there was to know about Ultra and the breaking of the German, Japanese and Italian codes. Mathematics and psychology had been the primary skills then; now it was as much about knowing computers and electronics. But Healy had made sure he had kept up to date in that field too. If he had not screwed up all those years ago he could have ended up working for MI6 or possibly even the CIA. But now those ambitions were dead and buried for ever.The irony was that his childhood dream could now be fulfilled only by working for the other side, thugs and morons like these.Terrorists. He had worked for several organisations over the years: Libyans, Palestinians and Iranians. They were pretty much all the same as far as he was concerned. Some were just a bit more insane than others. The jobs were nothing to brag about but at least he made a living doing what he enjoyed and that, surely, was the important thing.
Tommy listened to the unidentifiable sounds coming over the speakers and watched Healy as he concentrated on every transmission and scribbled notes into a large notebook.‘Why do you listen to that if you can’t understand a word?’ he asked.
‘I may not be able to understand a single word, but there’s a lot of information to be gained,’ Healy replied as if talking to a child.
‘Like what?’ Tommy asked, lighting a new cigarette with his old one.
Healy would normally prefer not to get into a conversation with any person who had a single digit IQ, as this one obviously had, but when it came to his work he could talk about it to anyone who would listen. ‘Well, there’s tone for one,’ he said. ‘You can hear urgency, or lack of it. You can sometimes tell if it’s just casual communication or if it’s important, such as an operation. And you can tell, more or less, how many people are on the network. That’s quite a lot of useful information in the right hands.’
Tommy stared at Healy unconvinced. ‘Sounds like a load of bollocks to me.’
‘Which is why you only get to operate that nice big wheel in the front of the van and I get to play with all these little ones in the back,’ Healy said with a genuine enough smile. Healy had long since got used to spending his time with thickoes; wherever he worked he always had a driver or bodyguard and it was too much to expect anyone from that stratum to have any intelligence.
Healy first arrived on the scene in the seventies, a cocky, arrogant genius, bragging he could crack any code if he was given the time and equipment and volunteering his services to the IRA. That was in the days before secure scrambled communications. The IRA was willing to take a chance on him and gave him the money, the time and the place in which to prove himself: Belfast. He was as good as his word and within a year had successfully cracked the codes used by Britain’s most elite Northern Ireland undercover group, compiling lists of vehicles, number plates, photographs of operatives and the codes for every important location in the province. In the back of Healy’s mind he knew there was a good chance he would get caught eventually. In fact, as the prison psychologist said, from the start he really wanted to be caught because he craved the acknowledgement of his genius. After he was arrested he was all too ready to crow to the British, offering to show them how to prevent against any such future technical invasions. Didn’t the Americans employ German geniuses after the Second World War? How naïve he was to think they would forgive him, let alone ask him to join them. He never got over the shock of the public trial and the ten-year jail sentence. He was released after six years, a marked man and with any hope of a career in Western intelligence in tatters. If there was any solace he might gain from his circumstances, it was that it was due to his success in breaking the British military codes that the new secure communication system he was listening to at that moment had been introduced.
Another garbled transmission came from the speakers. Healy frowned as he concentrated on it. Then he smiled, nodding in recognition and self-satisfaction as he jotted something down on a piece of paper. Tommy leaned over to read what Healy had written.
‘Mary? Who’s Mary?’
‘It’s a voice,’ Healy replied. ‘Listen to the transmissions long enough and you start to recognise different voices.That was Mary. I’m certain it was. She’s been with the detachment almost a year now.’
‘How do you know her name is Mary?’ asked Tommy, looking confused.
‘I don’t.That’s just the name I’ve given her.’ Healy adjusted some controls on his panel. ‘And by the signal strength I’d say she was getting closer.’ He then checked his watch, curious about something. ‘There’s one element missing,’ he said, more to himself.
‘What’s that?’ asked Tommy.
‘I’d have thought it would be up by now. A bit slow. Which is good, I suppose.’
‘What’s slow?’ Tommy asked, a little annoyed at being ignored.
Healy looked at him as if just remembering Tommy was in the van with him. ‘The helicopter,’ he said.
Stratton drove at speed along the airbase access road and arrived at a collection of long, narrow single-storey buildings on the edge of an airfield. He screeched to a halt, drawing the attention of the handful of mechanics and service engineers lounging outside on a smoke break. He climbed out with his bag and rifle, passed the servicemen, who watched him curiously, and headed towards a Gazelle jet helicopter parked alone on the grass fifty yards away. There was no sign of the pilot or ground crew.
He opened the passenger door of the sleek four-seater, dumped his bag on the floor in front of the passenger seat, and looked toward the Air Corps buildings. The pilot casually stepped out, wearing the standard green one-piece flying suit, a helmet and pulling on his tight leather gloves. Stratton took off his jacket, removed a shoulder holster from his bag and pulled it on, clipping the tail to his trouser belt. The pilot did not acknowledge Stratton as he walked around the other side of the cab and climbed in with the urgency of someone preparing for a Sunday drive. Stratton had a problem with him already.
‘Do you know what an op Kuttuc is?’ Stratton asked.
The pilot was a young, cocky lieutenant fly-boy with a condescending smile he reserved specifically for those he considered to be of an inferior class. He had placed Stratton in that category the moment he laid eyes on him.
‘Yes,’ he replied. It was one of those long, irritating ‘yeses’ that went up at the end, suggesting the question was childishly obvious. ‘One of your chaps has been kidnapped,’ he said as if he had been watching too many old Brit war movies. Stratton watched him climb in.The man was digging his own grave, completely ignorant of it.
Stratton checked his pistol and slid it into his holster. ‘This kite should’ve been turning over by the time I got here.’
‘I was here as soon as I got the word,’ the pilot replied tiredly.
‘You’re the standby pilot, right?’ Stratton asked.
‘Obviously,’ the pilot said as he flicked switches and pushed buttons
in the order on his checklist.
‘That means you standby in your kit, helmet at your side, and when the bell goes you sprint like the Battle of Britain.’
The pilot continued checking his instruments, ignoring Stratton. Stratton reached over and took his arm in a vice grip. ‘Do you understand?’
The pilot stopped and looked at him, quite horrified by the physical contact.
‘Now get this fucking thing airborne,’ Stratton continued, releasing the pilot’s arm to pull on his heavy jacket.
The pilot continued to check off instruments, glancing at Stratton, unbalanced by his attitude. He was certain Stratton was not an officer and no matter what the urgency he had no right to talk to him in that manner, let alone physically grab him. He decided not to make an immediate issue of it as there obviously was some urgency, but he would certainly bring it up with his CO when they got back. He couldn’t give a fig if this ruffian was from Special Forces. Long hair and dirty clothes did not give him the authority to be insolent.
The pilot started the engines while Stratton climbed inside and pulled his door closed. Stratton fastened his seatbelt web, pulled on his headset and plugged the giro-steady device attached to the rifle into the power source on the instrument panel. He placed a full magazine into the magazine breach, rested the end of the barrel on top of the instrument panel and pulled back the cocking leaver, loading the weapon loudly. The pilot glanced at him and the rifle, aware the rifle should have been loaded outside the helicopter and in the sandbagged loading bay as standing orders demanded. He wondered why these people acted as if they could break any rule that suited them.
Aggy flew down the lane in more doubt of her driving skills than ever.The speedometer was hovering around eighty mph. She leaned into a smooth left hand-bend and barely kept her nearside wheels on the road. If another vehicle had been coming the other way the chase would have been over. Ed had squeezed permanent indentations in the base of the seat with his fingers and was fast reaching his breaking point. He pulled on his seatbelt, a defining act since operatives always declined to use seatbelts because it slowed their escape from vehicles if they came under fire.
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