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To all those who strive for peace in Ireland
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book, which is my first novel, was nurtured by some very special people who helped me bring it to its first publication:
Carolyn Bateman
Janet Irving
Nick Bantock
Salman Nensi
Adrienne Weiss
Since the publication of the Irish Country series some remarkable others have been instrumental in the reissue of Pray for Us Sinners:
Tom Doherty
Natalia Aponte
Paul Stevens
Alexis Saarela
Jamie Broadhurst
Fleur Matthewson
To you all I tender my most sincere thanks.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Author’s Note
Also by Patrick Taylor
About the Author
Copyright
ONE
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 1974
“Bugger it.”
Lieutenant Richardson raised his head above the top of a low wall. Droplets trickling down his Plexiglas visor distorted his view: narrow, red-brick terrace houses, two boarded up; black stains above the sashes where fires had raged after a riot; a green, white, and gold tricolour hanging limply from a distant upper-storey window, proclaiming the Republican sympathies of the neighbourhood. The deserted neighbourhood.
The citizens had been cleared out because, at the far end of the street, to Richardson’s left, an ordinary-looking blue van was parked. Ordinary-looking, and potentially deadly as a grumbling volcano. He could see rust streaks showing through the blue paint. The bomb-disposal robot, known as the wheelbarrow, stood stolidly beside the van.
The voice of the sergeant ammunition technician came over the headphones, tinny, distorted. “It’s the wheelbarrow, sir. Sodding thing’s stuck.”
“Hang on, Sergeant.” Lieutenant Marcus Richardson, ammunition technical officer, 321 Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company, Royal Army Ordnance Corps, started to sweat despite the chill drizzle that misted his helmet’s visor and darkened the fabric of his massive EOD “heavy” suit. His chest armour rose in a hollow arc in front of his mouth and was reinforced by a thicker pad over his lower abdomen and genitals. Behind, a wide tail hung down below the backs of his knees. He crouched, bulky as the Michelin Man.
“What seems to be the trouble, Sergeant?” As Lieutenant Richardson spoke calmly into the built-in microphone, he peered at the wheelbarrow. He could make out its caterpillar tracks and the hydraulic rams that drove its articulated arm. The dark green of the cylinders contrasted sharply with the silver of the pistons. Nothing moved. At the end of the arm, the lock-busting gun dangled over the van’s roof, lifeless as a corpse on a gibbet. The angled arm and pig stick reminded him of a vulture, waiting silently.
“Dunno, sir. The bloody thing won’t respond to command signals. The jack-in-the-box is on the fritz, too. No picture. The transmitter’s at it again.”
Damnation. Without the closed-circuit TV system—“the jack-in-the-box”—he might as well be blind. This was the second time this week that the thing had malfunctioned. If Sergeant Crowley, fifteen years with the unit, couldn’t sort out the problem, no one could—certainly not a twenty-six-year-old lieutenant on his first tour in Northern Ireland. A lieutenant who, as ATO in charge of an inoperative robot, would have to go in, find the bomb, and render it harmless.
“You sure, Sergeant?”
“Sorry, sir. Dead as a bloody dodo.”
Marcus felt the familiar tingle of anticipation. His friends at Sandhurst had thought him crazy choosing the Ordnance Corps. He’d never bothered to explain why. He was an Ulsterman, a Protestant Ulsterman, and if the other officer-cadets wanted to think that by going into bomb disposal he was fighting some kind of holy war against the Provisional IRA, that was fine by him. Marcus Richardson, living proof of the Sandhurst motto “Serve to Lead.” He grinned.
And yet there was some truth in the supposition. As far as he was concerned, no one who had grown up in Ulster and had any feeling for the place could fail to hate what the Republican hard men had done in the last five years. But the truth was—and he knew it—his real interest was unexploded bombs. Like the one in the blue van.
“Right, Sergeant. Pull the men back.” Marcus turned and waited as the other members of the team climbed into the modified Mercedes-Benz they used for transport in urban areas. He caught a glimpse of the unit’s Felix the Cat sticker on the driver’s door. Felix the cartoon cat, impervious to all explosions, was the good-luck charm of the EOD company and so well known in the Security Forces that his name was the team’s radio call sign.
Ammunition technical officers were not as invincible as Felix, Marcus told himself, but he was unconcerned. All his life he’d needed to face danger and had found opportunities racing sailing dinghies, playing rugby football, boxing. Challenging himself, pushing himself.
“Oookay,” he whispered to himself. The Mercedes was gone, safely round the corner. He was on his own. He turned and sat, encumbered by the body armour, back to the wall. So much for the marvels of technology. The inoperative wheelbarrow was as much use as a heap of scrap metal. He was going to have to deal with the device with his bare hands because no armoured gloves allowed the necessary sensitivity of touch.
His hands were chilled. He rubbed them together to restore the circulati
on. What would it be this time? The Provisional IRA, at that time, favoured a homemade mixture of amyl nitrate fertilizer and sump oil for making car bombs. It was fairly stable stuff. Might be dynamite. Not too bad, unless it was poor quality and had sweated nitroglycerine.
He kept on rubbing his hands. Numb fingers would be no help finding and removing the detonator. Mercury tilt switches were tricky. The slightest movement would make the liquid metal run the length of the glass tube and complete the circuit. Then it was stand in line for wings, angels, for the use of. Two. He grimaced. Timers were worse, particularly if you failed to beat the clock. He took comfort from the thought that, if there was a timer, it would probably have been set some time ahead. The van had been stopped by a routine patrol and its three occupants arrested. A piece of good luck for the army. It wasn’t likely that this street had been the target, and Provo bomb-transportation squads had enough sense to give themselves time to deliver their devices and make their getaway.
“How’s it going, sir?” The tinny voice again.
“Bugger off, Sergeant. I need to concentrate.”
“Sorry, sir.”
Marcus checked his equipment. Simple stuff. A couple of screwdrivers, nonconducting pliers, wire cutters, insulating tape. He taped the tools to the cuffs of the EOD suit and hauled himself to his knees, forcing the stiff Kevlar leggings—strapped on behind like wicketkeeper’s pads—to bend. Finally, he pivoted to face the wall.
He raised his head, protected in its futuristic carapace, above the concrete coping stones. He noticed soft moss growing where the mortar between had cracked. He could see the rows of stunted terrace houses, their slate roofs glistening in what was now a steady downpour. Belfast in February—not quite April in Paris.
The rusty blue van and the wheelbarrow waited for him, silent partners in their own danse macabre. He would have to cover fifty yards of empty street, already well inside the four hundred metres that an ATO was meant to stay back. Whatever genius had come up with that recommendation had never been in Belfast’s warren of slums.
Marcus hoped that the security cordon had done a thorough job clearing the surrounding area—the Provos often posted a marksman. Bomb-disposal units were vulnerable to sniper attacks—indeed, Headquarters believed that using car bombs as bait had become a new Provisional IRA tactic. Two-step operation, the CO had called it. Blow up a bunch of civilians and then snipe at the troops when they move in.
Yes, you had to be daft to do this. Utterly bloody daft. Here he was, risking life and limb from gunfire, if not the bomb itself—like poor old Alan Cowan, who had lost both arms and been blinded when trying to neutralize a similar device.
Marcus ran his tongue over dry lips, listened to the faint, rapid hammering of his bloodstream, and held both hands in front of his visor, fingers splayed. Steady as a pair of rocks. Unprotected, very soft rocks.
He pushed himself back from the wall, feeling the bricks rough and damp beneath his palms. The screwdriver taped to his left cuff caught on a piece of masonry and, stripped from its securing band, clattered to the pavement. He froze.
Unexpected noises were always troubling. Very troubling. Craning to see over his chinpiece, he dipped his head beneath the top of the wall.
The blinding intensity of the light was followed immediately by the roar of the explosion. The shock wave shattered the wall and bowled Marcus over onto the pavement, where he lay on his back like a stranded beetle while soft rain and hard bricks fell on his chest. The thumping of masonry against armour gave counterpoint to the chime and tinkle of glass tumbling from shattered windows.
He had just enough time to mutter “shit” before a concrete coping stone slammed into his helmet and turned out the lights.
TWO
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 4
“High explosive. TNT. 1 pound net. Dangerous.” Dangerous, for Christ’s sake. Trust the Brits to state the obvious. Davy McCutcheon stacked the blocks, aligned the two on the top tier with the two beneath, and reached for a roll of insulating tape.
That morning he’d gone with his friend Jimmy Ferguson to collect the trinitrotoluene from the 2nd Battalion, Provisional IRA, explosives dump in a safe house in the Falls Road district of Belfast. The blocks were the right size to conceal in wrapping paper that had originally covered pounds of butter. Davy had snugged his packages in a basket with the rest of his groceries and walked past two British patrols on the way home to his terrace house on Conway Street.
The soldiers hadn’t bothered him. He was used to troops on the streets of Belfast. The buggers had been there since 1969, with their patrols and their Saracens and their sangars—fortified observation posts.
Davy had more to worry about than squaddies clumping about in their great boots, clutching their self-loading rifles. The four pieces of TNT had been the last in the cache, and there’d been no bloody detonators. He’d had to send Jimmy off to find another source. Where the hell was Jimmy, anyway?
Davy wound three turns of tape round the middle of the charges. Damn it, he’d forgotten the scissors. He exhaled through his moustache, set the roll aside, rose, and limped to a dresser.
He glanced at a framed photograph hanging beside the hutch. A woman, midthirties, smiling in the sun, dark hair tossed by the wind. He smiled. Aye, Fiona girl, he thought, you’re as lovely now as when that snap was taken on Tyrella Strand. She’d not be home until tonight, and he’d have the job finished by then, which was just as well. Fiona did not approve of his involvement with the Provos. She hadn’t said so for a while, but he knew.
He opened a drawer. Where the hell were the bloody scissors? He grunted as he found them, picked them out, slammed the drawer, and stood, frowning at another faded snap on the wall. A man and woman posing stiffly in their Sunday suits.
He’d inherited Ma’s eyes, though he couldn’t see the blue of them in the old black-and-white. He wished he could remember her better. Remember more than her eyes. Remember more than the day Da had come home grim-faced to tell a six-year-old Davy that Ma had run off with a bus conductor and she’d never be coming home anymore.
He’d kept that picture because it was the only one of Da. Davy had been able to see how lost Da had been without her. He’d tried to be both mother and father, and he’d given Davy more than the sharp McCutcheon nose, heavy-boned height, broad shoulders, and powerful hands. He’d given Davy “the Cause” to believe in. “The Cause.” The reunification of Northern Ireland with the other twenty-six counties and the banishment of the British after eight hundred years of occupation.
Davy rubbed the web of his hand over his moustache. It was grey now, like his thinning hair. He’d had dark hair in 1952, when Da had enrolled him in the IRA as a lad of sixteen. No mucking about in the Fianna Éireann, the boys’ unit. He and his friend Jimmy Ferguson had gone straight in to join the men. Men who had fought with Michael Collins against the English in the Tan War of 1920. Men who had assassinated Collins in August 1922, at Béal na Bláth in County Cork, after he had signed the bloody treaty that let England keep the six counties of Ulster. Men whom young Davy had worshipped as heroes.
A brave while ago, Davy thought, as he moved to the table, sat, and sliced through the tape. He bent to the work he’d done many times before. How many? He’d lost count. He snipped the last piece of tape and admired his handiwork. Four pounds of TNT neatly prepared. It was his job. His job for the Cause.
The Cause in the early days had been all he’d lived for. It was like having the family he had never known. The lads met clandestinely to train at night in the remote Antrim Hills. The senior men indoctrinated the recruits with tales of heroes and rebels, the litany of Ireland’s glorious failures as her sons had tried to throw off the invaders’ yoke.
Faith in their forefathers was all very well—he’d believed Da, believed that one day Ireland would be free, drunk it all in as a novitiate priest takes his Communion wine, swallowing with it his faith in the life everlasting—but back then the IRA had known it would take more than
faith to remove the British. So Davy learned to drill, to use the old Lee-Enfield .303 bolt-action rifles, Webley revolvers, and Thompson guns. Like cowboys and Indians for grown-ups. And he’d learned to make bombs. For the Cause.
When his training was over there had been an induction ceremony. The new recruits had been called to attention: “Paraid, aire!” Davy, the tallest, stood on the right of the front rank. They raised their hands and repeated the IRA declaration—the organization had abandoned oaths in the twenties because the Catholic Church objected to oath-bound secret societies. “I, David O’Flahertie McCutcheon, promise that I will promote the objects of the Óglaigh na hÉirann to the best of my knowledge and ability and that I will obey all orders and regulations issued to me by the army authorities and by my superior officers.”
Davy was still “obeying all orders.” He rubbed his left thigh, the ache there, the reminder.
“Damn your pride, Da,” he said to the photograph. Davy thought of the months he’d spent in 1957, lying cold and lousy in a dugout in the Sperrin Mountains. One of his own bombs had detonated prematurely. Its blast had done for Davy’s left thigh, killed four other men—and Da. Davy’d lain there helpless, nursed by Jimmy Ferguson until his shattered leg had healed.
Davy mumbled as he stared at his dead father’s photograph. “It wasn’t cowboys and Indians after that. Not for me.”
He turned back to his work. The TNT would be no bloody use until he’d built the timer. He lifted a piece of insulated wire and stripped four inches of the plastic covering away. The copper shone where the scissors’ blade had scratched. He bound the metal filaments around one jaw of a wooden clothes peg and repeated the operation with a second piece of wire, wrapping it round the other jaw. The two bare pieces of metal would touch when the peg closed. He produced a packet of cigarettes and took one out. He’d have liked to have one, but—he looked at the TNT and smiled.
Davy bored a hole below the filter, threaded a piece of fine string through the hole, and bound the cigarette to the legs of the clothes peg. The tension forced the jaws apart. When lit, the cigarette would smoulder at a speed of one inch every seven minutes. It would take fifteen minutes for the string to be burnt through and the jaws to snap shut, completing the circuit. Simple but effective. At least it would be when Jimmy Ferguson arrived.
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