скачать книгу бесплатно
Both Reardon and his wife understood.
‘Get on your working coat and boots. Don’t want you driving through Belfast with your best clothes on, do we?’
Rorke followed Reardon upstairs. When they came down again Marie and the children were on the sofa, one of the gunmen in the armchair opposite them and the other by the door.
‘Behave yourself and he comes back.’ Rorke looked at the woman, then at Reardon. ‘You do as we want and we don’t touch her or the kids.’
The children were too frightened to cry.
‘Nice and quiet, Tommy boy. Walk to the car and get in the back.’
He looked again at the woman. ‘Don’t worry, missus. You’ll have him back by eleven.’ If the bastard police and army could find enough of him to even fill a paper bag. No point in not giving them hope, though. Tell them the truth and one of them might try something; pretend to give them a chance and they’d do exactly as you said, even though they both knew what was going to happen. He pulled off the balaclava and the two of them walked down the path. Behind them one of the gunmen closed and locked the door. The driver of the Sierra glanced up at them and a second man opened the rear door. Reardon and Rorke climbed in and the car pulled away.
Seven o’clock, Rorke checked his watch. In five minutes the RUC would receive its third genuine bomb warning of the day, at eight its fourth. Everything on time and going to plan. The police and army already over-extended, the evening’s bombs creating fresh diversions, the timing and location of each incident apparently random but carefully plotted to draw the security forces away from the route to the prison. And the lads waiting on the inside of the Crum for Tommy Reardon to drive his digger filled with high explosive into the front gate and blow it to kingdom come. Everything on schedule. Everything as McKendrick had foreseen.
‘Now, Tommy boy. Where’s that digger of yours?’
The gap in the curtains was less than two inches wide, and the curtains themselves had not moved. Perhaps it was because she was still in mourning that she kept them that way, she sometimes told herself. Perhaps because it prevented the sunlight from damaging the furniture. Perhaps because it enabled her to see what was happening without being seen herself. There were others in the street who kept a similar watch, she knew, but they reported to the Provisionals. Beechwood Street, after all, was in Ballymurphy, part of the Catholic heartland.
Moira Sheehan was 66 years old and widowed for the last two. She was thin, with white hair, and walked with a slight stoop. Her fingers were bent and slightly arthritic. Moira Sheehan was also a Republican. In 1980 she had voted for the hunger striker Eamon McCann, officer commanding the Provisionals in Long Kesh, when – midway through his fast and in an attempt to gain publicity for it – he had stood for the British parliament. And six weeks later she had been one of the hundred thousand who had marched behind his coffin when his pitiful remains had been laid to rest in the Republican plot at Milltown cemetery. Even now she supported the Cause, gave money to it: even now she voted for Sinn Fein. But sometimes she wondered. About the men of violence and how they sometimes went about their business.
That morning Marie Reardon had told her the news about the baby, made her promise to keep it a secret until Marie had told her husband.
The Reardons had lived next door for the past nine years. During that time Moira Sheehan had grown close to them, had effectively become the grandmother to their children. Had shared both their dreams and their fears. Had sat with Marie one winter night when Tommy was working outside Belfast and the Transit had broken down, the night he had not returned home till midnight and they had feared the worst.
Now she watched as the Sierra drove out of Beechwood Street and turned left at the end. It was too soon for Tommy to be going out, she thought, there had barely been time for him to have his tea. And there had been something wrong. With the way the first man had gone in to the house, the way the others followed as soon as he stepped inside, the way Tommy had left with one of them.
Perhaps, in her heart of hearts, she already knew. Perhaps, in the deepest recesses of her soul, she knew what was going to happen to Tommy Reardon. She went to the kitchen, made herself a cup of tea, then resumed her position at the curtains and waited for Marie to come out with the children, waited to talk with them as she did every evening.
The bomb warning was exactly on time, giving a recognized codeword and location, and allowing thirty minutes for the area to be cleared. The next genuine warning came fifty-five minutes later. Between the two there had been a constant stream of hoax calls via newspaper offices and radio and television stations, plus the normal emergency calls received every hour of every day.
It was sheer, bloody unadulterated luck, Halloran would reflect later, that he had offered to work overtime that evening, that for the first time in his life he was in the right place at the right time. That, above all, it was he who happened to be standing next to the constable when the call came in and was almost discarded in the cold and calculated chaos between the reports of bomb warnings from the journalists and switchboards receiving them.
‘What is it?’
Halloran had been in the RUC for eighteen years, twelve of them as a sergeant, and – according to those close to him – would have made inspector, probably higher, if he had not voiced his opposition to certain aspects of Northern Ireland policing in the eighties quite so forcefully.
‘Woman reports something funny with her next-door neighbours. No reply but she knows they’re at home.’
‘How?’
‘Telly’s on, she can hear it, and the curtains are drawn.’ A burglary or a domestic, his shrug and the tone of his voice suggested, something CID could deal with in the morning.
‘What else?’
‘The kids aren’t playing in the street as normal.’
‘Who’s at home?’ It was instinct.
‘The wife and kids. The husband left with someone else twenty minutes ago.’
Something the other man had missed, Halloran began to think, something the other man’s lack of years had not picked up.
‘Give me the name and number. I’ll speak to her.’
The Transit had dropped Tommy from work as usual, Moira Sheehan told him. Half an hour later he had left with the other man. Marie hadn’t brought the children out to play as she normally did. When she had knocked on the front door there was no reply and the back door was locked.
‘But you’re certain they’re in?’
‘Like I said, I can hear the television.’
‘And the curtains are drawn?’ The evening was still light – no need to draw the curtains.
‘Yes.’
‘What about at the back?’
‘No, but the kitchen’s empty.’
Halloran knew when not to ask a question.
‘Funny though. The dinner’s still on the table.’
‘You said Tommy left with another man. Did he come home with Tommy?’
‘No, he and the others came just after.’
The alarm bells began to ring.
‘How many others?’
‘Three of them altogether. Then there were the men in the car.’
Three in, one out with Tommy. Two still inside with Tommy’s wife and children. ‘What’s Tommy do for a living?’
There was a commotion around him, another series of bomb calls being reported.
‘He drives a digger.’
‘Who for?’
‘Ellis and Knight.’
Oh, Christ. Halloran knew what was happening. Oh Jesus bloody Christ.
The building site was deserted, the gate secured by a padlock. Rorke snapped through the chain with a set of bolt-cutters, pulled back the gate, and the Sierra drove through and parked behind the huts and Portacabins. Two minutes later a Transit, sprayed the same colour as those used by Ellis and Knight, drove in, a Cavalier close behind it.
There were three men in the Sierra, Reardon counted automatically, plus two in the Transit and four in the Cavalier, all armed with pistols or submachine guns.
‘Keys?’
Behind them a gunman closed the gates and hung the padlock and chain in place.
‘In the agent’s office.’
Access was easy: a crowbar against the door, the lock holding but the wood around it splintering, then giving way. The office was neat and organized, a filing cabinet in one corner and a desk against the far wall, the site plans and charts stacked neatly on it. Beside the cabinet was a line of hooks with keys hanging from them.
‘Which one?’ Rorke was always behind him.
If he did what they said, Reardon thought, then at least Marie and the kids might live. His stomach churned with fear and he fought to stop his hands shaking. He took the keys and stepped outside. The digger was parked forty yards away, in the open. Rorke followed him across the site. Instinctively Reardon bent down to examine the underside of the vehicle for bombs.
‘I don’t think we need bother about that tonight, Tommy.’
He unlocked the cab, started the motor, and drove the digger to the side of the Transit.
‘How’s the fuel tank?’ Rorke’s attention to detail was as meticulous as McKendrick’s planning.
‘Half-full.’
‘Check it,’ Rorke ordered.
The back doors of the Transit were open. Two of the gunmen placed a plank against the rim of the floor, rolled out a forty-gallon drum, two hundred pounds of Semtex packed inside, then manhandled it into the bucket at the front of the digger. It was almost dusk.
‘Time to go, Tommy boy.’ Rorke pulled a canvas sheet over the barrel. ‘The Crum and no stopping. Remember Marie and the kids.’ He saw the look on Reardon’s face. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of time to jump dear.’ No point telling him the truth, no point telling Reardon that the IRA man in the first of the two escort vehicles would detonate the explosives the moment the digger rammed the gate.
The surveillance helicopter hovered in the sky and the army patrols swung into Beechwood Street and the terraces on either side, the Green Jackets piling out and knocking on the doors, beginning the census checks – the patrols leapfrogging house to house, the RUC policemen accompanying them.
‘Dermot Wilson is registered here.’ It was the second lieutenant’s first Northern Ireland tour. ‘Is he in? Where is he? What’s he doing tonight?’
The woman slammed the door in his face.
‘Michael Sullivan.’ It was the officer with the second patrol. ‘Does he still live here? Is he in Belfast? When did you last see him?’
It was no more nor less than the families in the street expected: the Brits putting on the pressure on Orange Day, the bastards letting them know who was boss. Piss off, Sullivan’s wife began to say. The patrol pushed past her and into the hallway, searching the rooms, downstairs, upstairs. Sullivan was different, Sullivan was on the security computer as a known Provo. His wife was shouting and his children screaming. The patrol hurried past them and out of the house.
The men in the patrol knew each other, had trained with each other, become accustomed to patrolling the streets together. Except for the two men who had joined them half an hour before and who had sat silently with them as the armoured personnel carrier swung into Beechwood Street.
The first patrol was already pushing its way in to the next doorway, the second lieutenant still questioning the family in the hallway and the rest of the patrol searching the rooms upstairs and downstairs, running down the stairs and pushing past, out into the street and to the next address on the list. The soldiers moving quickly and confusingly.
Six soldiers into number 47, only four out. Two – the two who had joined them thirty minutes before – through the trapdoor on the upstairs landing and into the roof space.
The patrols were still ten houses away from Tommy Reardon’s. Abruptly the soldiers climbed back into the vehicles and the convoy screamed away as quickly and apparently as predictably as it had arrived.
The woman who left the slightly battered Opel by the shops three corners from Beechwood Street was in her late twenties, five feet six inches tall, with brown hair – Irish hair her mother called it – and thin attractive features. She spent the next fifteen minutes observing both the alleyway which ran behind Reardon’s house, and the street itself. By the time she returned to the car it was positioned at the top of Beechwood Street.
Cathy Nolan had been born in Northern Ireland. Her family religion was Protestant, though she herself had slipped into something bordering atheism. For four years she had served in the Women’s Royal Army Corps, the last two of them in Germany, where she had volunteered for what was described – officially, at least – as an adventure training course, but which was a front set up by the talent-spotters and run by an SAS officer from the NATO Long Range School near Lake Constance. At the end of the course she had been taken aside and the suggestion made that she might like to consider Special Duties. Three months later she had been given a new name and sent on the ten-week SAS course at Pontrilas for women undercover agents. At the end of that period, and with yet another identity, she had begun work with the 14th Intelligence Corps in Northern Ireland, based in Lisburn. For the past month she had been seconded to E4A, the RUC undercover surveillance department. The coat she wore was from Next, green but slightly faded, all the pockets with zips which she herself had added so that nothing would fall from them, and the 9mm automatic pistol she wore in the waist holster beneath the jacket was a Browning Hi-Power.
‘All quiet?’ Brady sat in the driver’s seat. He was slightly older, fair hair and lean face.
The microphone in the car was voice-activated, the aerial concealed, and the two of them wore earpieces. Brady also wore a Browning Hi-Power in a waist holster on his left side, a Heckler and Koch MP5K lay on the floor between the driver’s seat and the door, covered by a folded newspaper, and the two-man back-up car was three streets away.
‘So far.’
Someone was being greedy – she had first felt the unease midway through the briefing, felt it again now. The SAS were dealing with the gunmen inside the house, plus the Provo team escorting Tommy Reardon and his digger. Assuming they found him in time. E4A were assigned to tailing any IRA men who might show during the operation. The two operations fine and logical, except they were being run together. And that was the problem. Either the SAS should be inside the house, or E4A should be waiting outside. Not both. Bloody typical, she thought. Different bosses playing out the same game. Herself and Brady in the middle.
Noel Ellis had been notified thirty minutes before and had telephoned RUC headquarters to confirm. The Special Branch man showed his identification and came straight to the point.
‘An employee of yours, Tommy Reardon. We need to know where he’s working.’
Ellis and a schoolfriend, Billy Knight, had formed the building firm twenty years before. Ellis was a Catholic and Knight a Protestant. When the other man had died two years ago Ellis had deemed it fit not to change the name of the firm.
‘Why?’ He poured himself a Black Bush and offered the policeman one. ‘He’s a good worker, took him on myself. Not the sort to get mixed up with the wrong people. Not in trouble, is he?’
The SB man declined the drink. ‘What site’s he working on?’
‘Short Street, by the docks. I wouldn’t normally know, but I was there this afternoon.’
‘And he’d leave his digger there?’
Ellis began to understand. ‘Yes.’
‘Can I use the phone?’
The roof space was dark and dusty. Haslam and Phillips moved carefully, picking out the rafters in the beams of the streamlight torches and transferring their weight slowly and exactly, making no noise and counting the number of houses over which they passed. Each carried a Browning Hi-Power, with spare magazines in pouches on their belts. Each wore a remote earpiece, the microphones of their Mitre radios concealed and an induction loop passing through their clothing to the hand pressure switch by their wrists. Any messages they sent would be via the car parked three streets away, the car on remote and the message relayed to control, the net they were using dedicated to the operation and verbal signals kept to a minimum in case the IRA intercepted them or the people in the houses heard them. After eighteen minutes they came to the trapdoor above the upstairs landing of Tommy Reardon’s house. Haslam clicked the switch three times – the signal to the man on listening watch that they were in position – and waited.
In ten minutes he would die, Reardon knew. His palms were wet with sweat, and the fear drummed through his head and churned in his stomach. He followed the Sierra out of the docks area, under the motorway flyover and up Brougham Street. The route was as carefully planned as the pick-up: the building site was less than a mile and a quarter from the Crum, and where possible the route wound its way through back streets – all Catholic – with the houses on either side protecting the convoy from the eye in the sky. Only at three points would the digger be exposed, and the last of those was on the hundred-yard run-up to the prison itself.
The convoy filtered left along North Queen Street, the sound of the digger engine drowning the whine of the surveillance helicopter hovering high in the sky half a mile away above the Falls, then turned third right into Spamount Street. The terraced houses on each side were red brick and spotlessly clean, yet in the streets to the right many of the houses were boarded up and painted with INLA slogans.
McKendrick’s Granada was waiting on the corner of Lepper Street. As the convoy approached he slid into the passenger seat. Rorke left the Sierra, joined him, and the convoy slipped past, along Lepper Street, the Republican slogans daubed on the walls and the sides of the tower blocks to Reardon’s left. Five minutes to go, he knew, perhaps six or seven if he managed to slow down. He turned right into Churchill Street and tried to control the trembling.
‘Any problems?’ McKendrick sat back as Rorke spun the Granada round and headed for Beechwood Street. One last check before they cleared the area, he decided.
‘Should there be?’
The Gazelle was half a mile from the convoy, the surveillance at an oblique angle to avoid detection. ‘Red Nine, Yellow.’ Communication from the helicopter was kept to a minimum, call signs omitted and codenames for locations pre-set.
The message was relayed to the two Macrolan Land-Rovers: Red Nine the code for the location where the digger had been spotted – and from this the suggestion that the Crum was the probable target – and Yellow the code for the fact that vehicles were following the digger. And that was the problem, the SAS commander in charge of the ambush knew. Because the explosives which Tommy Reardon was carrying were probably on a remote firing system – possibly others, but certainly a remote device as insurance in case the others failed or Reardon decided to make a run for it. So to save Reardon they would have to take out the command vehicle. But there was no guarantee that the vehicles in front of or behind Tommy Reardon’s digger were part of the IRA operation.
McKendrick and Rorke saw it even before they passed the car. Two people sitting doing nothing at this time of night. Either the front car for an undercover operation, in which case it wasn’t connected with Tommy Reardon and there would be a back-up three hundred yards away, or itself the back-up car, in which case the operation might concern Reardon.
Rorke drove past, ignoring the next turning left which led to Beechwood Street. Only when he was a hundred yards on did he turn left, then left again, and accelerate up the road which crossed Beechwood Street twenty yards from the top and which ran parallel to the one on which the back-up vehicle was parked. Fifteen yards from the junction with Beechwood Street he stopped, then he and McKendrick left the vehicle and strolled casually round the corner.
The car was parked twenty yards away, the man and woman in the front seat and facing away from them. So what the hell was going on? McKendrick tried to work it out. Was the stake-out on Reardon’s house, or was it just coincidence that the undercover car happened to be parked seventy yards from where Reardon’s wife and children were being held? If the subject was Reardon, then what did the bastards know about the operation? But the fact that there was a car meant that even if the security forces suspected that something was up with Reardon, they didn’t know what. Because if they did know they wouldn’t have revealed that knowledge by putting an undercover car so close to the house.
He nodded at Rorke and thumbed the safety off the Walther.
They’d been in position too long, both Brady and Nolan knew, shouldn’t be sitting in the vehicle like this. Should have left it and be standing on the street, lost in a doorway. Shouldn’t be here in the first place. Except orders were orders.
