Next Harrison inspected the outer doors themselves. Sure enough a simple contact-breaker had been fitted, a wire also leading… oh, God, no, only leading back to the Claymore — and the sodding thing was still live!
He swallowed hard and again cut the link.
Then he signalled to Monk that he wanted to speak to Zulu Control before going on. The SAS man settled on the steps, MP5 undipped and at the ready, while Harrison pressed the send button. ‘SATO to Zulu Control. I’m meeting with all manner of IEDs on this route. Suggest I investigate next floor before you tackle your end. Over.’
Tall Lloyd Williams came on. ‘Roger to that, SATO. We’ve just lost the Attack Barrow on the front door. The backup Mark 8 is in and starting to climb. Over.’
‘Pull back/ Harrison advised. ‘Tell them to check for a trip and a secondary. If they’ve got one it could well have survived the initial blast.’
‘Roger, SATO. Let us know what you find up there.’
‘Wilco and out.’
He joined Monk at the stairs and led the stealthy climb, using his Allen lamp and feeler-probe to check each step. Still no sound and no light came from above. No doubt the AIDAN team were confident that their defences were impregnable. Harrison had an increasingly uneasy feeling that they could well be right.
Their two heads peered over the top step of the landing, noses level with the floor. He lifted his Allen lamp and played it over the walls. The beam gleamed on the wet brickwork and the green fungal growth. Right-hand wall. Clear. Ahead. Clear. He wriggled forward on his stomach to see around the left wall of the stairwell to the far wall and the next flight.
And there it was.
The slab of plastic explosive, just a few ounces, had been tied with string which was fixed to a nail that had been hammered into the mortar. It was wrapped in parcel tape, three-inch galvanised bolts secured between the layers. Nasty. Enough to disembowel or castrate, maybe worse.
But how was it triggered?
The wire was black and difficult to identify at that distance, but he managed to trace it in the light from the Allen lamp down to the debris that littered the floor. Flattened cardboard boxes, sodden lengths of hardboard and yellowing newspapers. In fact quite a covering of junk.
Then he was back. Back in 1983, in the Ballymurphy derelict after the sniper. Just minutes before Don told him that Hughie Dougan had been caught.
Cars and derelicts.
Oh, shit!
He stared down at his elbows. They still rested on the hard concrete. Half-an-inch in front of him was a flattened cardboard box that had once contained a refrigerator.
Somehow he just knew. What other tricks had Hughie Dougan taught his daughter?
Turning to Monk, he whispered into his mike: ‘Get back down till I’ve cleared this.’
The SAS man nodded and slithered back down the steps to shield behind the wall on the lower stairwell. Confident that he was out of harm’s way, Harrison switched on his standard right angle chest torch, then stretched out his fingers to the edge of the cardboard. He eased one hand under and then the other. Gently, very gently, he began to lift. The light from his torch probed into the shadow. And there it was, the pressure mat.
It was a difficult manoeuvre, raising the large expanse of heavy cardboard clear. At one point an end flap dropped and swung perilously close to the surface of the mat. At last he was able to drop it behind him on the steps. Only then he realised that he’d been holding his breath during the entire operation.
Now he was able to identify the connecting wires and quickly snipped them before casting the mat aside.
He reported back to Zulu Control and told them what he’d found; the information was then passed on to the operators of the Wheelbarrow at the south end.
Monk was back at his side, anxious to get on, his team working up the steps behind him. But Harrison had to resist the temptation to cut too many corners, although the SAS man was clearly impatient for him to neutralise the nail bomb on the wall.
That done, they moved swiftly up the next flight, Harrison hopeful that they had cleared the last of Clodagh Dougan’s defences. But, as they turned the next corner, he was confronted by a barricade. It was formed by an old iron bedstead frame with half its springs missing and held in place by crisscrossing spars of old rotten timber. In the middle of the obstacle sat a one-gallon motor-oil can, a battery taped to the outside and wires leading from the cap, slithering away to somewhere unseen amid the clutter.
‘ShitP Monk’s voice was clear in Harrison’s earpiece.
It didn’t take a genius to work out that buried in the barricade were one or more tilt or pressure switches that would trigger the moment anything was disturbed.
Harrison shone his Allen lamp over the tangle of wood and metal, trying to work out its exact purpose. There had to be some logic in it, he told himself. But what?
‘There’s oneP Monk.said.
The mercury tilt switch had been fitted to the underside, halfway along a length of timber that had been rested on the top edge of the blocking bedstead frame. Harrison shone his lamp along it. In total five wooden spars held the barricade upright, one other also with a switch. Both out of reach.
‘If we can hold those two spars steady…’ Harrison began.
Monk saw his point, beckoned up the next SAS soldier waiting below. The sergeant major pointed to the second spar. ‘If you let it slip, we’ll end up like paint’on the wallsP
The man grimaced in his respirator and set to the job in hand. Harrison crouched down and squinted into the lamp beam for a better view of the switches. The blobs of mercury were obviously at the bottom of the capsules, the contact points nearer to him. If the bedstead was pulled away, which would have been the most likely occurrence during a hasty assault, the spars would lower and allow the mercury to touch the contacts.
If they pushed, the spars might remain safely upright, but the bedstead would land on top of the bomb itself with unknown and probably horrendous consequences.
There was only one thing for it. He waved up more troops from below and told them to hold the bedstead firm. He then proceeded to treat it like a fence, mounting it one foot at a time until he could lift one leg over. His head cracked unexpectedly against the ceiling. Cursing, he looked up. Not the ceiling. It was the narrow conduit piping that had once carried power to the lights at each landing.
It gave him an idea. Feeling in his tool belt, he extracted a length of paracord, cut it and poked it through the small gap between the conduit and the surface of the ceiling. He tied a slipknot in one end and dropped it over the spar that Monk was supporting.
The SAS man nodded, obviously smiling inside his respirator as he saw Harrison pull on the loose end and the timber securely eased upwards and tied into the vertical position, the globule of mercury safely at the bottom of its capsule.
By the time he’d repeated the process with the second spar, the edge of the bedstead which he straddled was cutting painfully into his crotch. Cramp was beginning to set in.
Awkwardly he drew over his other leg and stepped down into the barricade, checking first that he wasn’t placing his boot onto some nasty surprise. Now he could reach the oil can and swiftly cut the battery leads, then the wires to the tilt switches.
‘Don’t touch it or kick it,’ Harrison warned. ‘There could be an antilift device underneath it.’
As quickly as possible, without creating noise, the team carried away the bedstead frame and carefully removed the timber until they had a clear passage.