All the doors were missing here, no doubt taken for secondhand resale by the workers who had boarded up the place. He was thankful for that, because every closed door was a potential deathtrap.
He took another step up, then he saw it. From the top of the stairs he had a clear view across the short landing to where a wedge of daylight filtered through a gap in the boarding of the front bedroom window. It glinted on the half-dozen spent brass cartridge cases lying on the bare boards. Very possibly 7mm rounds.
Suddenly the doubts crowded in on him. Had he been wrong? Had this indeed been the sniper’s nest? Had the Catholic kids really seen the assassin legging it away before the Light Infantry closed their net?
There was a discarded chocolate-bar wrapper and a can of Tango orange drink beneath the window where the gap in the boarding would have been sufficient to view the army patrol.
Carefully he placed the Jack-in-a-Box case on the floor and squeezed the carrying handle so that it opened, the pop-up legs lifting the closed-circuit camera automatically into position. Whatever he did now. Corporal Marsh would be able to observe from the monitors in their vehicle.
He moved forward cautiously, looking around for anything out of the usual, probing with his tripwire feeler. Only when he saw it would he know what he was looking for. A near-invisible length of monofilament wire, some exposed firing cable…?
At the doorway of the bedroom he dropped to a crouch and stared across the bare boards to the collection of cartridge cases. Then suddenly a thought occurred. Only one shot had been fired, that was the name of the sniper’s game. One spent case only, normally retrieved by the sniper as a matter of routine. One, not six. He thrust up his visor and sniffed the musty air. Not a hint of cordite, a smell that normally lingered about in a confined space like this.
Was this a come-on”? Should he exit now, take time to think it over? Hell, no, he’d only have to come back again eventually. So keep going and get it over with.
Once more he played his lamp across the floorboards, the ceiling and along the walls. At the light switch by the door, an edge of floral wallpaper had come adrift from the wall. Damp seeping in from missing roof tiles? Probably, yet there were no telltale watermarks and elsewhere the wallpaper appeared sound., It was nothing, yet somehow it niggled him. A growing sense of edginess prevented him from putting a foot inside the bedroom. Something purely instinctive persuaded him to use the tripwire feeler.
He extended the end of it forward towards the light switch and pulled a length of wallpaper free. As it flapped down he saw the slightly darker patch amid the white friable plaster of the wall.
His heart began to pound; his hand trembled. Another hour or so and the patch would have dried and become virtually indistinguishable. Had something been wired to the light switch? Surely the electricity was cut off to these derelicts? Dammit, he really should have checked that. Stupid! His eyes travelled down to the floorboards. He shone the Allen lamp. It was then he saw that the nails were loose, that there were scratch marks on the old dry timber. Frayed, fibrous scars where something like a screwdriver had been used as a lever.
Extracting a light chisel from his tool pouch, he tackled the board closest to the wall skirting, easing the thin blade into the gap and gently prising it free.
Although he’d been half expecting it, the sight of the white twinflex wire still came as a shock. His mouth was suddenly dry, his heart beginning to palpitate.
Now he knew. He thumbed up his visor to see clearer, the effect of the air on his face helping to clear his brain.
Sitting back on his haunches, he went to work again with his chisel, easing out the two adjoining floorboards.
And there it was, a simple pressure mat. It was old and scuffed and had probably been taken from the front door of a grocer’s shop. But instead of ringing a bell to warn that a customer had entered, it had been connected by a wire channelled into the wall to a home-made directional mine at chest level. The wall had then been thinly replastered and the wallpaper restuck with Copydex adhesive.
Now certain that he wouldn’t be cutting into a collapsing circuit — a favourite Provo trick — he turned back to the wire leading to the mat. Flat twinflex, with positive and negative currents running side by side, could be lethal if carelessly cut. It was so easy for bare strands of copper to touch each other and complete the circuit accidentally. That’s why he always used a small pair of needlepointed garden secateurs, first snipping one line of the double stranded flex with absolute accuracy, then moving an inch farther along before snipping the second half so that there was no possibility of the two arcing together.
That done, he cautiously scraped away the hardening plaster in the wall and removed the detonator from the explosive. It had been placed in a lidless rectangular biscuit tin set on its side, the open top facing into the room with four ounces of Gelamex kept in place by two layers of insulation tape between which was held a row of four-inch galvanised nails.
He felt his stomach turn to liquid and the nauseous bile rise up into his throat causing his eyes to smart.
It had been meant for him. Just like the last two come-ons after a snipe. The PIRA bomber, whoever he was, would be perfectly aware that an ATO would be tasked to clear a suspect house. It would be an ATO who took the first tentative step into the bedroom, momentarily overcome by the sight of the spent cartridges and the opportunity to seize crucial forensic evidence.
Harrison would not be the first bomb-disposal operator to become paranoid. To believe that a bomber was after him and him alone. That he had become a personal target. It had happened to several brave, rational men. They rarely returned for another tour.
Looking down at the pressure mat, he could understand how it could happen, how imagination could start to take over from logical thought.
The feeling of unease was still with him when he emerged from the gloom of the derelict ten minutes later and squinted at the watery sunlight squeezing out from behind the rain clouds.
As he retraced his footsteps towards the ICP, he saw that a few additional and familiar figures had gathered by the ‘bomb wagons’. One was his immediate commander, the Senior Ammunition Technical Officer.
‘Well done, Tom. Heard you had an interesting box of tricks down here. Mind if we have a look over it together when you’re ready?’
‘My pleasure, boss.’
The second onlooker was a fellow EOD operator out of Gird wood Park, Al Pritchard.
A warrant officer first class, Pritchard was a tall man with thinning black hair and a cultivated expression of gloom. Although the two men maintained a professional tolerance of each other, theirs had always been an instinctive mismatch of chemistry. This wasn’t helped by the fact that, as ten years Harrison’s senior, Pritchard had vastly more experience, although in the past Harrison had been required to discipline the older man on two occasions when he had been a senior NCO under his command. And Pritchard’s was not a naturally forgiving nature.
Harrison couldn’t resist a good-natured jibe. ‘Come to see how it’s done, Al?’
For once Pritchard responded with one of his severely rationed sardonic smiles. ‘We were called out on a rubber duck. Thought this shout might be entertaining.’ He indicated the TV monitor at the rear of the Pig. ‘Better than an episode of Coronation Street.’
Harrison knew this was as near to a compliment as he was likely to receive from his rival. ‘That exciting, eh, Al?’
‘Good enough for me, sir.’ Another smile. Was this a record? ‘Another happy little memory for when I’ve got my feet up in London.’
The SATO overheard. ‘What Mr Pritchard means, Tom, is that we’re going to be losing him. Landed himself a cosy little number with the Met’s Explosives Section at twice his army salary.’