Heathcote came bounding up the stairs, his face perspiring with exertion; Corporal Clarke, ruddy-cheeked and wheezing, was just a few feet behind.
‘Boss?’ the captain asked, too breathless to put a sentence together.
‘AH set,’ Harrison replied. ‘We’ll see if this is a threat or if I’m just being an old woman. Want to push the tit?’
Heathcote gave an exhausted, lop-sided grin. ‘Your honour, I think, boss.’ Clearly he meant all the egg was going to be on the SATO’s face when this turned out to be a rubber duck.
Harrison thumbed the circuit button and the light showed green to confirm that the firing circuit was complete. His thumb shifted to the prime button, holding it down for the two or three seconds it took for the internal capacitor to charge. Yet it seemed like for ever before the red confirmation light began to flash. His thumb released its pressure and moved to the fire button.
‘FIRING!’
The thumb of each hand came down simultaneously on the circuit and fire buttons.
There was an instant whipcrack of sound as the MiniFlatsword’s explosive baseplate blew and unsheathed the blade. Immediately it was swallowed by a second, muffled blast that shook the floor and walls. But instead of a deafening roar, the noise was uncertain, the containment spoiled, a furious grumbling that spluttered to nothing.
Heathcote blinked. ‘Shit!’ Slowly he added: ‘I think I owe you an apology, boss. And a beer.’
The SATO stood up. ‘Two at least.’
Corporal Clarke was clearly impressed by their chiefs near clairvoyant power for sniffing out a bomb; it would be the talk of the mess that night.
He followed Harrison and Heathcote into the corridor to see how well the MiniFlatsword had done its job. The dense and stinking smoke parted to reveal that the unleashed blade had been propelled straight through the aluminium case until it embedded in the corridor wall. Although the bomb had ignited under impact, it had done little damage as the explosive mix was already tumbling out of the case as it blew, burning and fizzling onto the carpet. With the essential compression gone, the bomb’s force had been spent uselessly along the scorched corridor walls.
‘Let’s see what we’ve got,’ Harrison said.
As they approached, he found the detonator on the carpet. Closer to, the three men expertly ran their eyes over the array of burnt-out components. It looked like an ounce of Semtex as a booster charge and maybe twenty pounds of ANS mix now spilled and smouldering on the carpet. The plywood timer-and-power unit lay shattered. Harrison examined the baseplate to which the Memo Park timer was fitted. He swallowed hard and felt the small hairs crawl on the back of his neck. There had been just two minutes left to run. Two bloody minutes.
He said: ‘Somehow I doubt you’ll find Mrs Maher is still hanging around to collect her case. Better give her details to SOCO.’
‘The brazen cow,’ Heathcote muttered.
‘What’s that, sir?’ Clarke asked, hunkering down beside them, his pebble glasses steaming up with his body heat after all the excitement.
It took a moment for Harrison to distinguish the buckled tin box at the bottom of the case. There was little remaining to show what it had contained, but logic dictated that it had been a separate antihandling charge. Either a trembler or a mercury tilt switch, only forensics at Carrickfergus would be able to say for certain now.
What was without doubt was that it had been designed to kill any unfortunate member of a search party. Probably a soldier or a policeman, but it could have been one of the hotel staff. Assuming it to have been abandoned during the evacuation, it would have been the simplest mistake in the world for someone to have picked it up with the idea of reuniting it with the owner.
In fact he could have so very nearly kicked it over himself or knocked it as he opened the corridor fire door earlier.
Suddenly he felt weary, tiredness dragging at his eyelids. He straightened up and thrust his hands deep into his trouser pockets.
He really didn’t want either Peter Heathcote or Corporal Clarke to realise that they were trembling.
The day shift at the Explosives Section headquarters in Lambeth Road started at eight o’clock. And thirty minkutes later Jock Murray’s desk had been cleared.
There was not much to show for a lifetime’s work in the bomb-disposal business. A small pile of paperwork: two draft reports on likely future trends in the technology of illegal explosive devices and some notes for a lecture that would never now be given. And on top, a tasking form for the Tower Street callout that would never be completed.
Les Appleyard tried to busy himself with work, but it was hopeless. Just when he succeeded in taking his mind off the previous day’s events, he would find himself about to speak to the man with whom he had shared an office for so many years.
Again he stared across at the empty desk. At the pile of papers and the pathetic collection of personal possessions in a polythene bag. And still he could not accept it. There was more of Jock Murray here than they’d been able to scrape off the London streets…
He shoved back his seat and stood up. For over three hours now he’d kept up the pretence of normality. Well, to hell with it! Angrily he snatched the pack of cigarettes from his desk. ‘ Empty. Sod it, he’d smoked forty already since Jock’s death the previous afternoon. The Scotsman would have seen the funny side of that. Not much point in giving up smoking when you dismantle bombs for a living. And if a device doesn’t get you, then the ciggies will.
Appleyard grinned at the memory of his friend’s sardonic wit. It was a sense of black humour they’d shared since they’d first met as two nineteen-year-old volunteers during their basic army training at Blackdown. Two naive and happy-go-lucky lads from similar backgrounds in deprived inner-city areas. Appleyard from Manchester and Murray from Glasgow. Both with bleak prospects of employment and both with a thirst for excitement and adventure. This was noted by the army recruitment officer who duly offered them the then Royal Army Ordnance Corps.
Being sent for technical ammunition training was not exactly what either had in mind at the time. But then such was their youthful bravado that neither friend was going to admit to the other that he didn’t have the taste for handling lethal high explosives for a living.
Yet by one of the strange paradoxes of life, both Murray and Appleyard found they had stumbled into an occupation that was more demanding and fulfilling than they could ever have dared hope. It was quickly to become a vocation rather than a job. And their reward for doing what the newspapers were fond of calling ‘the most dangerous job in the world’ was to enjoy an immensely strong and unique camaraderie within a small elite who were held in something resembling awe by fellow soldiers and public alike.
To be a bomb-disposal man was to exude an air of mystery and danger — that meant that there was never any shortage of female admirers. And the two young soldiers were never slow to exploit the amorous perks of the job in their various postings around the world — postings that were to take them to Germany, Hong Kong and Cyprus as well as secondments to several African and Middle Eastern countries.
At the age of twenty-five both friends were promoted to sergeant, having completed their advanced training, and both settled down to married life after a double wedding. Later, as warrant officers, they were to serve as operators in Northern Ireland where their paths first crossed with Tom Harrison, now the Senior ATO in the Province. The three of them had become the closest of friends. *
Then, five years earlier, Appleyard and Murray had left the army and were recruited to join the Explosives Section of the AntiTerrorist Branch within three months of each other.
Now all that was at an end and Appleyard felt an aching emptiness in the pit of his stomach. Losing Jock was like losing a brother. Worse. It was as though he had lost part of himself. And that was now, when he still hadn’t fully accepted the fact that Murray was dead. The grief, he knew, would become deeper before it got better.