That’s exactly what had happened after the first sniper shooting. During their attempt to flush out the assassin, an unwary infantryman from the Unit Search Team had tripped a wire in an upstairs room. The blast from the hidden explosive device had taken off his right arm and left him blinded.
But the soldiers had been swift to learn their lesson. After the next sniper killing in similar circumstances, they had radioed ‘Felix’ — call sign of the bomb-disposal team — for an ATO expert to clear the sniper’s eyrie.
Tasked to the scene, that time Harrison had found by a window some hand-rolled cigarette ends and a tin of Golden Virginia tobacco. Inviting inspection.
Harrison had declined the invitation. Having learned that you could never be overcautious, he had fitted a hook and line to the tin before giving it a tug from a safe distance. The tin had only contained an ounce of plastic explosive fitted to a trembler switch, but it would have been enough to destroy eyesight and remove the careless pair of hands that had touched it.
Now here he was again, faced with almost exactly the same scenario. And that black dog was right behind him.
It didn’t help that there was a name being mentioned. Knowing a bomber’s name just made it that much more personal. Harrison’s friend Don Trenchard had told him of the man’s suspected identity a few days earlier.
Harrison had known Trenchard, who was a few years older than himself but didn’t look it, since his Sandhurst days when his friend was lecturing on the role of intelligence in Northern Ireland. Trenchard’s groomed good looks and boyish charm were not what one associated with the murky world of covert warfare, but as a prankster and dedicated womaniser he was a welcome companion. Always to be relied on to bring more than one pretty girl to a party.
Although a major, Trenchard never introduced himself by rank and was rarely to be seen in uniform. Working as he did with Intelligence Company under the Intelligence and Security Group, he was privy to many of the Province’s secrets.
Hughie Dougan, he had told Harrison. That was the name that 14 Int and ‘Whiz’ thought was behind the latest rash of boobytrapped bombings in Belfast. Dougan was a ‘Sixty-niner’ who had joined the IRA after the August riots of that year. As a former REME technician in the British Army, his professional knowledge was soon put to good use by the fledgling Provisionals. He was finally arrested and imprisoned for nine years on a charge of conspiring to cause explosions.
According to Trenchard, Dougan had been released earlier that year before going ‘on the gallop’, in Provisional IRA slang, disappearing over the border to help plan the bombings and make the devices.
Harrison had gone back over the Dougan files from nine years earlier. There were, he had to admit, distinct similarities. The most glaring was the inevitable use of one or more antihandling devices and deliberate ‘come-ons’ to lure troops or ATOs.
After all, Trenchard pointed out, the Provos were currently paying a thirteen thousand-pound bounty to their members for a dead bomb-disposal operator. Thirteen. It had been unlucky for several of Harrison’s oppos. But did it help having a name?
Not really. You still couldn’t take anything for granted. Or assume you knew how the bomber’s mind worked. Familiarity and contempt were dangerous one-way streets. If anything, having a name just added to the tension. Encouraged the black dog.
He became aware that the subaltern was talking: ‘We’ve cordoned off this whole area down to those derelicts and around the back of them. We appear to have identified the building that the sniper used.’
‘Yes?’
The officer shrugged. ‘Three witnesses, kids who were playing behind the derelicts. Swore they saw a man jumping over the back-yard wall and running away. Said he was carrying what looked like a long canvas case.’
Harrison narrowed his eyes. ‘Don’t tell me, the kids were under fourteen?’
The inexperienced officer looked puzzled.
‘Unsafe evidence, sir,’ the sergeant explained with weary patience.
‘Kids in the Ballymurphy aren’t usually that keen to assist the security forces,’ Harrison said. Probably recruited from the Na Fianna Eireann, the Republican boy scout movement, he thought. ‘They’ve been put up to it. My guess is it’s a come-on and we’ll find your sniper actually fired from someplace else.’ He looked up at the shabby concrete monolith beyond the line of derelicts. ‘Maybe that block of flats.’
The officer looked suitably chastened. He’d learn, and fast too, if he wanted to survive for a second tour.
Harrison made two decisions. The first was to wait for another ninety minutes ‘soak time’, as the delays most commonly used by the Provisional IRA were one-or two-hour — although, of course, nothing was ever certain. Only then would he task in a specialist High-Risk Search Team of Royal Engineers to scour all the other derelicts in the row before he alone approached the suspect house.
His second decision was on the siting of the Incident Control Point. ‘I don’t like it here,’ he said. ‘It’s too exposed and overlooked. There could be a command-controlled device anywhere on this wasteland and it would take a month to find it.’ He consulted his large-scale map. ‘I’ll set up the ICP down nearer the derelicts on the next street intersection. We can’t so easily be watched from there.’
The officer nodded, seeing the sense in that.
‘Just one thing, sir,’ the sergeant said. ‘The stairways in those derelicts are very narrow with a tight bend on the landing. So if you need to go up I don’t think you’ll be able to send a Wheelbarrow in.’
Harrison smiled grimly. ‘Anything else I ought to know?’
The sergeant grinned for the first time since the shooting. ‘And I think it’s about to rain.’
He was right on both counts. The Royal Engineers confirmed the restricted access on the stairways as well as the structural unreliability of the upper floors. And when Harrison was finally ready to be fitted with the armoured khaki bombsuit, the air had been filled with a warm drizzle for over an hour. He stood at the new Incident Control Point with his arms outstretched as though beseeching the gods for good fortune as his Number Two — an earnest and moustacheoed corporal called Marsh — expertly strapped together the back of the jacket and slid the Kevlar armour chest and crotch plates into their respective pouches. Now he resembled a rather dowdy medieval knight, an impression completed by the bomb helmet with its thick Plexiglas visor.
A total weight of some seventy pounds reduced Harrison’s forward movement to a waddling gait and turned the slightest action into a sweaty, exhausting effort. But that was the Army rule. Bombsuits to be worn until the threat was evaluated and neutralised unless it was judged directly prejudicial to the operator’s safety.
‘Let’s at least get the Wheelbarrow up outside the house, Corporal,’ Harrison said. ‘See if we can’t get a look-see inside.’
‘Boss,’ Marsh acknowledged. Harrison wasn’t one for formality, but like many soldiers the corporal felt uneasy with undue familiarity. He liked to know exactly where he stood.
Returning to the back of the Pig, Marsh sat opposite the TV monitor which relayed from the video camera on board the little tracked vehicle that resembled a miniature tank some three feet in height. He picked up the separate control console. Then at the press of a button, the Wheelbarrow robot began its familiar defiant whir, trundling down the deserted street with the command-cable playing out from the coils beside the first Pig.