‘This is loaded. You’re to follow that car. The white Escort in front and follow it close. For your own safety don’t bugger about. I’m army, but that won’t help you if you mess me.’
Donal McKeogh, aged twenty-seven, a plastics salesman living outside Dungannon, forty miles down the motorway, gave a mechanical, numbed response. The car trickled forward, its driver’s mind still blank. Harry saw the Escort drawing away.
‘Don’t mess me, you clever bugger,’ he screamed at the face a few inches away, and to reinforce the effect of his intentions fired a single shot through the roof of the car. McKeogh surged forward towards the Springfield Road lights. The message was understood now, and would not need repeating. He might have seen me coming out into the traffic, reckoned Harry, but he’s unlikely to have seen which car is following him. Little chance of that. McKeogh swerving through on the inside, crossing the double lines in the centre and drawing angry shouts from other drivers, had closed the gap to five cars by the time they reached the lights.
Two bullets remained in the Smith & Wesson.
It had taken Billy Downs little time to work out where he was going. The failure to kill the Englishman dictated the decision. He was going home. Blown, finished, out.
He was tired. Needing a corner to sleep away the stabbing pains and biting disappointments of the last few hours, he needed quiet, and silence. Away from the guns, and the firing, and the blood. Above all he wanted to get away from the noise of the weapons that blasted out close to his ears, screwing up his guts with tension, then releasing them like an unplugged bladder, flat and winded.
Away from it all, and the only place he could go was home. To his wife. To his children. To his house. To Ypres Avenue. The logic and will power and control that had caused him to be chosen for London were drained from him. No emotion, no sensitivity left. Even the slight bubbling coughs of Frank in the back seat could not disturb him.
Failure. Failure from the man considered so valuable that only the most important work was earmarked for him. Failure from the élitist. More important, failure against the enemy who was working to kill, eliminate, exterminate, execute him. The words kept tempo with the throbbing of the arm wound. Christ, how it hurt. A bad, dangerous pain that dug at him, then went, but came again with renewed force, chewing at his strength and resolve.
The Armalite was still in the car, untouched under his seat, but useless now. It had no further part to play. The Armalite days were over, they didn’t settle things. It was over. Concluded, done with, half a lifetime ago.
Driving was hard. He had to stretch his left arm to the gear handle every few seconds, and even the movement from the second to third aggravated the injury. He mapped out a route for himself. Down to Divis, then across the top fringe of town to Unity flats, and then on to Carlyle Circus. Could park there, on the roundabout. It was a walk to the Ardoyne then, and the car and Frank would be close to the Mater, their own people’s hospital. Frank would be found quickly there, and would get the treatment he needed. There were no roadblocks and he moved with the traffic, Frank too low down to be seen and the bullet holes failing to draw people into involvement.
It was nine minutes to the Circus where the Crumlin and the Antrim Road came together, and where cars could be left unattended. He drove on to the space and stopped the car. To get out he had to lever himself up with his right hand, then he looked behind and into the back. Frank was very white, with much of his blood pooled beside his face on the plastic seating. In his eyes was just enough light to signal recognition.
‘Don’t worry, Frank boy. You’re close to the Mater. You’ll be there in five minutes. I’m going to call them. I’m going now, and don’t worry. God bless. It’s all OK, you’ll be safe. A few minutes, that’s all.’
Frank could say nothing.
Downs left the engine running and the driver’s door open as he ran away from the car. It was enough to ensure that someone would look inside. The broken window would clinch it. The Armalite was still under the driver’s seat, and the Luger lay beneath Frank’s body. He ran up the Crumlin, Mater hospital on his right, huge and red and cleansed, giving way to the prison. High walls, coils of barbed wire, reinforced stone sentry towers and, dominating it all, the great gatehouse. Downs went on by them, and past the soldiers on guard duty, and the policemen guarding the courthouse opposite with their flak jackets and Stirlings. None spared him a glance as he ran.
The sprint gave way to a jog, then to little more than a stumble as he neared the safety of the Ardoyne at the top of the long hill. The weight of his legs seemed to pin him back as he forced his feet forward, separating himself from the chaos and disaster behind him. His breath came in great sobs and gulps as he struggled to keep up momentum. The only demand he made of himself now was to get to his home, to his wife, and bury himself in her warmth. The Circus and the hospital and the prison were far behind down the road when he reached the iron sheeting that divided Shankill from the Ardoyne, where he had stood the previous afternoon waiting for the lift that took him to Rennie’s home. God rot that bastard copper and his bloody children. That was where it had all collapsed. The child in the way, smack in the way, never a clear sight at the copper, only the kid’s head. Panting and wrenching for air, he slowed up to walk the last few yards.
They were right. He’d lost his nerve. Billy Downs, the one selected by the Chief of Staff, had slipped it because of a child’s head.
And then, this morning… Frank with his voice shot out, and the young bugger they’d sent him, down on the pavement, shredded. And you, you clever sod, you told him to run to make room for yourself, and he did, and he bloody bought it.
In the race across the city McKeogh had several times fallen back in the traffic stream, losing completely the sight of the white Escort before spotting it again far to the front manœuvring among the lorries and vans and cars. Then Harry screamed and threatened McKeogh, and the salesman would speed up. He doubted his hijacker was a member of the British army but was undecided whether he was IRA or UVF. That he would be killed if he didn’t follow the bellowed instructions, he was certain. As they came out of the town and reached the Circus the Escort was gone. Four major routes come together there, including the Crumlin leading up to the Ardoyne and the Antrim Road running up to the nearer, equally hard-line, New Lodge. New Lodge offered the quicker refuge, and Harry aimed his arm that way, as McKeogh swung round the Circus and then up the wide road. They drove a mile and fast up beyond the scorched entrance to the ghetto before Harry indicated they should turn back.
‘Try the Crumlin, it has to be that way.’
‘He could have got away from us and still be in this road. If he went up the Crumlin he’ll be out of the city by now, up in Ligoniel, halfway to the airport,’ said McKeogh.
‘I know where he can be. Just drive and close your attention on that,’ Harry snapped back. He would be lucky now to find him again. He knew that, but didn’t need any bloody driver telling him. Neither saw the Escort still parked among the other cars on the Circus, and they turned up the long haul of the Crumlin. Harry was forward in his seat now, peering right and left as McKeogh swept up the road. At the top he shouted. The exultation of a master of hounds throwing off the frustration of a lost quarry.