Thunder in the Blood Page 8

  Before I flew to Belfast, I attended a two-week course at an MOD facility in Hereford. For the first three days I commuted from a small boarding house near by and sat through a series of lectures on self-defence. The lectures included the use of small arms and afterwards we practised with various weapons, sometimes on a range with targets, sometimes in a specially built complex ringed with razor wire. The building included a number of rooms we were required to ‘sanitize’. The latter meant kicking open the door and responding to whatever you found on the other side. The guys who ran the place would have made a fortune in Disneyland. They had a real talent for mixing high explosive with a certain black humour. The ear defenders we had to wear were wired to a Walkman. The Walkman had been programmed to play rock music at critical moments in the exercise. The theory had something to do with disorientation, but to this day I can’t listen to the Pogues without seeing the room plunged into darkness and smelling the hot sweet chemical smell of freshly expended cordite.

  After the ranges and the killing rooms, we took to the hills. So far, life outdoors had never offered me anything but immense pleasure. I’d always been physically fit and in London I’d been running three or four times a week, sometimes more, but here the routines were brutal – deliberately so – and until you worked out exactly what they were trying to do, it was extremely hard to take.

  As a climax to the course, they sent you out on your own for two long days, completing a huge fifty-mile circuit of the Brecon Beacons, and you carried everything you needed to survive except water. That was hidden in special caches every ten miles or so and if you didn’t find it you went thirsty. That put a premium on keeping your wits, which was doubtless the point of the exercise, but the instructors spiced our days with a series of sick jokes designed to make you lose faith – first in them and latterly in yourself.

  A favourite happened at the end of the course. A Land Rover would be sent to pick you up. It would be waiting for you at the last R/V (rendezvous), normally the end of a long, straight track. Exhausted, but aware of the watching NCOs, you’d put everything into that last quarter of a mile, only to watch the Land Rover drive slowly away, leaving you totally spent, close to tears, sick at heart. That, of course, was the intention, and once you’d recognized them for the bastards they really were, then it became infinitely simpler and more personal. One of you would prevail. And, you told yourself, it wouldn’t be them.

  After Hereford, I had a week’s leave. I went home, to Devon. I was fitter than I’d ever been in my life, an astonishing combination of appetite, self-confidence and sheer physical zest that my father must have recognized at first glance. He sat me down in front of the fire and fussed around me in a way that he’d never done before. At first, I put all this down to senility, or the cloudy, farm-bottled cider that he used to drink. Only later did it occur to me that it was simple pride. His girl. Young Sarah. Out in the mountains with a Bergen on her back for a taste of the real thing.

  We went to the pub one night, just the two of us. I demolished a huge plate of pasty and chips while my father sat in the snug beside me, one leg crossed over the other, plugging and replugging his pipe. We talked about life in London and about his recent return to a Brigade HQ desk in Plymouth. He told me how glad he’d been, and how lucky, to have made it to the Falklands in 1982. Wars, real wars, were getting hard to come by, especially if you were as strapped for cash as the Brits appeared to be. I humoured him and called him an old war horse, Budleigh’s answer to Genghis Khan, and he smiled and patted me on the knee, and quietly recommended the rhubarb crumble, a shyer, nicer, gentler man than I’d ever, somehow, been led to expect.

  Towards the end of the evening, in passing, he mentioned Rory. ‘Seen anything of him?’

  ‘A bit. A while ago. To begin with.’ I paused. ‘Why?’

  ‘Just wondered. He was asking after you. Last week, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Oh?’

  I glanced up. It must have been something in my voice that made him look at me rather harder than usual. He nodded.

  ‘He was back for the weekend. Collecting some bits and pieces.’

  ‘Back?’

  ‘Yes. He and Ruth have rented a flat in London. I thought you knew.’

  I shook my head, remembering the riverside pub at Putney and the lone sculler in the half-darkness and the lurch inside me when Rory told me he thought he was in love. I’d done the right thing. I knew I had. I’d told him to think about his wife, his family. Since then, though, I hadn’t heard a word. Until now. I was still gazing at my father.

  ‘What about the kids?’ I said carefully. ‘What’s happened to them?’

  ‘Emma’s started at Norton Grange. Giles went to Fernside. Been there two years now.’

  ‘Both away then?’

  ‘Yes.’ My father nodded. ‘That’s why Ruth’s up in town.’ He smiled. ‘Keeping the boy on the straight and narrow.’

  ‘Good for her,’ I said automatically, wondering where they lived, what the place looked like inside and whether or not – after all – it was what Rory really wanted. Ruth, to be honest, I’d never been really sure about. I knew her socially, a thin, slightly gaunt woman with a long, fine-boned face and an interest in bereavement counselling. They’d been married for more than eight years, but for someone with Rory’s appetites, she’d always struck me as a bit of a surprise: too serious, too intense, too introvert. My father was still looking at me. Behind the bar, the landlord’s wife was hosing my crumble with whipped cream.

  ‘He told me you’d saved him from the funny farm,’ my father said, ‘those first few months in town. He said he was going barmy until you turned up.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Apparently you cheered him up no end. Turned the lights back on was the phrase he used.’ He smiled again. ‘That sound like the Rory you know?’

  I nodded, watching the steaming plate of crumble, glad of the interruption. ‘Yes,’ I said, reaching for my spoon, ‘it does.’

  In Belfast, after a brief spell in barracks, I moved into a rented flat off the Ormeau Road. No one ever bothered me with anything as formal as a job description and after a couple of months I realized why. At some exalted level, my bosses had decided to push for something called ‘primacy’ in UK mainland dealings with the Provisional IRA. Primacy meant MI5 taking a lead in the war against the terrorists. If the plan worked, then the police would be the losers, and my bosses – never ones to underestimate a challenge – had accordingly dug themselves in for a long struggle.

  To make a credible case in Whitehall, they had to argue from a position of strength. They had to know a great deal about the Provos. They had to fatten their intelligence files, improve their strike rate and demonstrate to the Home Office that their knowledge of the enemy was second to none. That meant extra assets on the ground, agents who would bed down in Belfast, touching base occasionally with the RUC, with Army Intelligence and with MI6. Most of all, it meant building a stable of informants, men and women from deep within the Republican command structures, people whom, for one reason or another, you’d turn and nourish and put to good account. The latter job, amongst one or two others, was mine.

  The logic wasn’t difficult to follow. I had youth on my side. I had the right academic background. And some judicious arm-twisting gave me credible cover as a research student at Queen’s University. The fact that I was single entitled me to a half-decent social life, and from my bosses’ point of view I thus acquired the most precious asset of all: I could plausibly mix in most company.

  It was a strange life, me and my other self, and if I felt anything at all it was a kind of lingering guilt at enjoying it so much. Raw intelligence is a commodity unlike any other. It doesn’t respond to fixed hours and a five-day week. You can’t manufacture it on an assembly line, behind a set of factory gates. On the contrary, the best bits are often wholly unpredictable, big juicy windfalls that drop off the tree without the faintest stir of breeze, a phone call or a meeting or a note
through the door that seems, at the time, pure chance. In reality, of course, that’s not the case at all. Nothing happens without months of careful preparation, of friendships carefully nurtured, of pressures oh-so-subtly applied, of dance steps so intricate and so deft that it’s hard, often, to even be aware of the music. But the music is there, and as time goes by it becomes slowly but unmistakably addictive.

  ‘Off-duty’ isn’t a meaningful word in this context because it never happens, but there were times when the sheer beauty of the place very nearly got the better of me. I used to go to the Republic a lot, trips south over the border. Most of these excursions took me no further than Dundalk or Donegal, places of considerable interest to people like us, but occasionally I could justify going way down, past Dublin, across the Midlands, to the wild, empty coasts of Kerry and Galway. These were landscapes I’d never seen in my life, the mountains shouldering down to the sea, the weather ever-changing, the fine soft drizzle drifting in from the Atlantic, the abrupt squalls of wind, the heaving ocean puddled a sudden, brilliant blue. I loved it, the taste of it, the smell of the peat fires, the curls of smoke around the tiny cottages, the dogs chained to the milk urns, the way the hill farmers worked their stony fields, their jackets buttoned tight against the wind, one finger raised, a passing salute. Sometimes alone, sometimes not, I marvelled at it all, brief interludes, simple pleasures, buried in an otherwise complicated life.

  Throughout my time in Belfast, I kept one eye on the newspapers, thinking more often than not about Beth Alloway. The Iran-Iraq War had finally come to an end and there was a flurry of press speculation about arms and related sales in its aftermath. As far as I knew, the embargo still applied, but the reports about sanctions-busting UK firms never made the front page, and if I thought anything at all, it was strictly in connection with Beth.

  Once, and once only, I tried to talk to her on the phone. She answered almost at once, a flat, worn voice, a child crying in the background, and after a brief series of awkward pleasantries, I knew that the conversation was going nowhere. She wasn’t pleased to hear from me. Her husband was ‘away’. Life, to no one’s surprise, was going on much as before. After a minute or so, I apologized for interrupting her from whatever she’d been doing, knowing that the gap between our separate worlds was probably unbridgeable. Sympathy, alas, wasn’t enough. All Beth Alloway wanted was her privacy. That, and some vestige of the life that we, and the Iraqis, had taken away from her.

  My life in Northern Ireland came to an abrupt halt one December night in 1989. A complicated set of events had taken me west, across the province, to a modern hotel on the banks of the River Foyle a couple of miles downstream from Londonderry. There I was to meet a young Catholic businessman called Padraig MacElwaine. He ran a local chain of builder’s merchants. Like everyone else in the construction business, he paid a sizeable monthly sum to the local IRA godfathers, but his eldest son had recently been beaten up in a carefully laid ambush in the city centre, and gruff Provo regrets about mistaken identity had done nothing to temper his rage. Evidently, the man was incandescent. He had debts to settle. He had names to impart, information to pass on and – most important of all – he said he was in a position to make an informed guess or two about what we in Five always referred to as ‘forthcoming attractions’.

  This kind of intelligence was exactly the collateral that my bosses needed to make their case in Whitehall. I was therefore ordered to Londonderry post-haste for a rendezvous at the riverside hotel. I was to pose as a visiting businesswoman from the UK, order a drink in the bar and await developments. The hotel was way off the local Provo circuit – too classy, too expensive – and I was assured that the usual cover arrangements, unspecified, would be in place.

  I drove to Londonderry. By the time I found the hotel, it had been dark for nearly three hours. I parked outside reception in a well-lit bay and left a spare key on top of the front wheel. The meet in the bar went according to plan. Padraig turned out to be a beefy, thick-set man with tight curly black hair and a shirt collar one size too small for his neck. He was attentive and courteous and made a beautiful job of picking me up.

  After the meal, we were to adjourn to Padraig’s room. There he’d give me chapter and verse: names, addresses, dates, forthcoming attractions, the kind of priceless operational data that I’d haul back to Belfast for onward transmission to London. That’s what the plan said. That’s what I expected. Instead, Padraig leaned forward over the table, slightly comical, the corner of his mouth blobbed with cream from the second helping of cheesecake.

  ‘I haven’t got a room,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They’re full.’

  I laughed, offering him a napkin. He wiped his mouth with it, reddening with embarrassment. I was still laughing.

  ‘Good job you’re not for real,’ I said. ‘What kind of pick-up would this be?’

  He shrugged, scarlet now. We’d already established he had a wife and four kids. He clearly adored them all. I looked at my watch. It was nine-fifteen.

  ‘Would you have a car?’ he said. ‘Only the wife dropped me off.’

  ‘A car?’ I gazed at him in mock alarm. ‘What did you have in mind?’

  ‘I … we….’ He shrugged again, tapping his wallet, the closest reference he’d yet made to the evening’s real business. ‘I can give it you all. I’ve written it out.’

  ‘Why not give it to me now?’

  He hesitated a moment, frowning. Then he tossed the napkin to one side and began to get up. ‘There are things we ought to talk about. It’s not a lot of your time I’m after. You’ll be away in ten minutes. Unless …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve got a room of your own.’

  I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ve booked somewhere else.’

  I paid the bill and we left the restaurant. Outside, in the car park, it was still raining. I stepped out of the shelter of the hotel porch, Padraig at my elbow, his coat already on. He’d get a taxi afterwards, he was saying. I paused by the hired Escort, bending quickly to the front wheel, looking for the spare key. The key, for some reason, wasn’t there. I glanced up, feeling foolish, the rain dripping off the end of my nose. The last thing I expected to see was the gun in Padraig’s left hand. It wasn’t small, a Browning Parabellum, eight-shot magazine, accurate to thirty yards. I’d used one at Hereford. At point-blank range, like now, they could leave an exit hole the size of a ten-pence piece. Padraig was already walking me round the car.

  ‘Get in,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Get in.’

  The passenger door swung open. There was someone else in the back. I could see the shape of a head, silhouetted against the lights of the hotel. I hesitated, knowing that now was the moment to run, to make a move, knowing that in a second or two it would be infinitely more complicated, but Padraig was already pushing me into the car, forcing the door shut behind me. A gloved hand had appeared from the back, clamping hard across my face.

  ‘You feel this?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You know what it is?’

  I nodded again, recognizing the pressure at the base of my skull, something cold and metallic, another gun. The hand unclamped its grip, but the pressure of the gun never wavered. Watching Padraig circling the front of the car, I could feel the man’s warm breath on my ear. I could smell him, too, a sour mix of spearmint and wet clothing. Padraig got in, not looking at me, adjusting the mirror, closing the door.

  We drove out of the car park and on to the main road. We turned north, skirting Lough Foyle, headlights coming at us out of the rain.

  ‘You’ll have a short,’ Padraig said to me after a while.

  I didn’t answer. ‘Short’ is Provo slang for a handgun. We were going faster now, the car rocking from time to time in the buffeting sidewind from the lough, and I wondered whether it was sensible to risk a bullet in the head by waiting for a corner, grabbing the wheel and trying to force the car off the
road. Unlike Padraig, though, I wasn’t wearing a seat belt. If anyone was going through the windscreen, it would probably be me.

  ‘You’ll have a gun?’ Padraig asked again.

  I looked at him.

  ‘Nice meal,’ I said drily.

  I saw his eyes flick up to the mirror, the merest tilt of the head, then the hand was back, plunging inside my coat, searching left and right, finding the little Beretta at once, clipped neatly inside the shoulder holster they’d given me at Hereford. Best on the market, the instructor had told me. Unlike its new owner.

  We drove on in silence. I heard the scrape of a match behind me and the car was suddenly filled with the bitter tang of cheap tobacco. For the first time it occurred to me that there might be more than one person in the back. I looked at Padraig again. He was concentrating hard, peering ahead through the rain, then up at the mirror.

  ‘Nice odds, too,’ I said, ‘three against one.’

  Padraig appeared not to hear me. The car was slowing now, his eyes fixed on the mirror. Something was wrong. I knew it. It was there in his face. I began to turn round, wanting to look behind, but the moment I moved the gun at my head cracked sharply against my temple and I reacted against the blow, pulling away, the other side of my head hitting the door pillar, my hands coming up, involuntarily, the blood warm to the touch.

  We were going faster now, Padraig dropping through the gearbox, oblivious to the rain, and I felt the rear wheels beginning to slide as he lurched sharply into the next bend, fighting for control. We stayed upright, just, the road straight again, the Cat’s-eyes receding into the darkness, the speedo nudging eighty. I didn’t need to turn around any more. Whoever Padraig had seen, whatever had made him so nervous, was close now, only yards behind, the headlights on full beam, the interior of the car bathed in a hard, white glare.