Bandit Country

by Andrew Turpin

  Donovan did likewise but then asked, “What the hell’s this all about, guys? We’re having a quiet day out here.”

  His words were interrupted by the staccato sound of automatic gunfire coming from somewhere farther along the road, through the woodland.

  Johnson jumped and raised his head. Above them was a black-and-yellow-painted helicopter with the word Police emblazoned in yellow along the side.

  The aircraft lurched to the left and dipped a little; and after a few seconds its tail began to spin slowly around.

  “Shit,” Johnson muttered. “What’s going on?”

  There came another burst of gunfire, after which the tone of the helicopter’s engines lowered, then rose again, but now sounded quite different.

  “Bloody hell, it’s coming down, the chopper’s had it,” Donovan said, his voice rising rapidly in pitch.

  “Shut it, both of you,” the man said. He quickly frisked first Johnson, then Donovan.

  “Okay,” he said. “This is an informational roadblock organized by the IRA, the New IRA, fighting for a united Ireland. That’s us. Take this and make sure you read it. You can go in a minute.” He handed both of them a leaflet.

  By now the helicopter was a few hundred yards farther up the road ahead of them and descending rapidly. But the gunfire appeared to have stopped.

  “Get back in the car, then don’t move until I tell you to. Don’t even think about trying anything else, or you’ll be crow’s meat,” the man in the balaclava ordered.

  Johnson and Donovan climbed back into the Audi.

  They sat in silence for a minute or two. The faint sound of a single gunshot from the direction of Crossmaglen could be heard, followed a minute later by another one.

  A car pulled up behind them, and Johnson turned around to see the IRA man in the balaclava repeat the procedure with the driver and a woman passenger in the second car, spread-eagling them over the hood, searching them, then handing them leaflets. The woman screamed but was silenced by one of the men in balaclavas who yelled a stream of obscenities at her.

  Johnson glanced at the leaflet.

  It was a plain typewritten sheet headed “Óglaigh na hÉireann—The New IRA,” and contained two densely written paragraphs.

  The New IRA is a combined republican force under a unified leadership that abides by the constitution of the Irish Republican Army. We are committed to the armed struggle in pursuit of Irish freedom through the removal of British military presence and British political interference. The people of this country have been sold a phony peace by a false political legislature that represents a failure of leadership of Irish nationalism. The ideals and principles set down and enshrined in the Proclamation of 1916 are what drive our unified organization. Nothing will divert us from this path.

  Anyone passing on information about republican activity to the Police Service of Northern Ireland, MI5, the Gardaí, or Sinn Féin will be dealt with severely.

  Donovan glanced at the sheet. “Now you see what we’re up against here.”

  Johnson looked up as the three men in balaclavas ran back past Donovan’s Audi and jumped into the two cars that had been blocking the road ahead.

  Seconds later, they shot off, back in the direction of Newry, away from Crossmaglen.

  “We’d best get out of here, quickly,” Donovan said and started the engine. He accelerated forward.

  As they passed the trees that lined the road, the police helicopter came into view on the left, resting in a field screened from the road by a stone wall. Two men could be seen standing on the other side of the wall.

  Donovan continued to accelerate up a slope in the road and over a ridge. The village of Crossmaglen was now visible ahead of them, with its gray- and white-painted houses, a gas station, and a church spire.

  He braked to a halt behind a line of cars at a junction. To the right was a large Roll of Honor sign with the pictures of twenty-four volunteers from the IRA’s south Armagh brigade. Johnson assumed they had died for the cause.

  Four men dressed in black jeans and sweatshirts ran across the road in front of them and jumped into a car. Johnson noticed Donovan’s white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel.

  Underneath the photographs was a quote attributed to a woman called Máire Drumm. “We must take no steps backward, our steps must be onward, for if we don’t, the martyrs that died for you, for me, for this country will haunt us for eternity,” it read.

  The traffic began to move again, and the Audi passed through the village square. Donovan turned down Cullaville Road. “You’ll see the police barracks in a moment,” he said. “Ugly place; it’ll be like an ant colony that’s been set on fire right now.”

  In front of them on the left lay a tall corrugated steel structure topped with several strands of electric fencing, with a communications tower rising inside. As they approached, two double vehicle gates opened, and a trio of police cars poured out, tires squealing, sirens blaring. Donovan braked hard to a standstill.

  The three cars screamed past them toward the village square, their blue and red lights strobing the white-painted house walls at the junction. Two more cars followed a few seconds later.

  Johnson was tempted to contrast the action playing out in front of them with Donovan’s earlier comment about police being reluctant to police but held back.

  Donovan flicked on the car radio, which was set to BBC Radio Ulster, then accelerated away again. A business news program was underway, with a slot about the economic problems plaguing Northern Ireland.

  After several minutes, the program was interrupted by a newscaster. “Apologies for interrupting the business news, but word has just reached us of a major incident in south Armagh. A police helicopter carrying the chief constable of Northern Ireland, Eric Simonson, was shot down just outside Crossmaglen. Police sources have told us that the helicopter managed to make an emergency landing, but Mr. Simonson was shot dead, seemingly by a sniper, as he escaped from the aircraft. The secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Bryan Long, was on the same helicopter but is understood to have been unhurt. We’re expecting to get official confirmation and more details of this incident very soon, and of course we’ll bring those to you as soon as they come in.”

  “Unbelievable,” Johnson said.

  Donovan glanced at him and pushed his head back into the headrest. “Bloody hell. I might as well flush my business down the toilet.”

  Chapter Three

  Thursday, January 3, 2013

  Belfast

  The mug of tea was sweet and hot. Brendan O’Neill sipped it slowly and looked around the snooker club bar.

  He glanced at his watch again and removed his scuffed brown leather bomber jacket. It was almost noon and GRANITE was three-quarters of an hour late. True, the man wasn’t the most punctual individual on earth. But normally he could be relied on to turn up when he said he was going to.

  Still, it gave O’Neill time to think things through, a rare commodity.

  O’Toole’s Snooker and Pool Club, just off Falls Road in West Belfast, near the huge Milltown Cemetery, had been a fertile recruiting ground for O’Neill and his team of agent handlers at MI5 as they had tried to keep themselves up to speed with the sometimes random activities of dissident republican terrorists in Northern Ireland.

  He had found three decent informants at the club, right in the middle of a Catholic republican stronghold, during the nine years he had been at MI5, to which he’d transferred from army intelligence. That was good going, he thought. So much so that he’d had to stop recruiting there for fear that if one agent was blown, it could bring down the others.

  Of the three, GRANITE had been the toughest to recruit; it had taken three years of effort, off and on, and he had only come on the payroll a year or so ago. But he had established himself as a trusted lieutenant of the OC—the officer commanding—in the Real IRA’s south Armagh brigade, the group O’Neill was particularly focused on. MI5 was tasked with gathering intelligence to combat the growin
g threat from dissident Republicans who were happy to use violence to further their objectives.

  Snooker was one of many plausible covers, a viable excuse for a meeting, although the serious business of passing over information was normally done at either Black Lake or Grey Dog, the code names for two safe houses in the area.

  Only two months earlier, over a hurried sandwich lunch at Grey Dog, O’Neill had received a tip from GRANITE that a number of pipe bombs were due to be transported two days later in a certain car from Derry and were to be used to attack a police station south of Portadown, in County Armagh.

  Police, operating on the pretext of a routine check for uninsured drivers, had checked the vehicle, discovered four large bombs in the trunk, and arrested the driver. Almost certainly, that information had saved lives.

  O’Neill’s hope was that information from GRANITE would enable him to nail one of the big fish, namely the OC, the quartermaster, or the IO—the intelligence officer—of the brigade.

  But he had found GRANITE difficult to handle. He was inscrutable and to O’Neill’s annoyance was often selective with the information he passed over. So far, the leads had led to the arrests of only minor RIRA volunteers.

  GRANITE occasionally passed on information but first insisted on O’Neill committing to not using it or giving it to anyone else in MI5 or the police, usually because there was a threat that he might be compromised, given the small number of people with that particular knowledge.

  There had been a few of those situations recently. GRANITE seemingly wanted to put O’Neill to the test, check him out, make sure he could trust him. That was how it felt, anyway.

  That wasn’t good, O’Neill felt, given that he was supposed to be the one controlling the relationship.

  In most cases O’Neill discussed the situations that arose with his boss, Phil Beattie, who headed the team of agent handlers in Belfast, but not always.

  Three days earlier GRANITE had briefly mentioned a plan for some guns to be shifted north over the border from the Irish Republic into south Armagh. GRANITE was one of the drivers responsible for the transfer. Again he’d requested no action on O’Neill’s side and had claimed that the circle of knowledge was too small and that the OC, Dessie Duggan, would finger him immediately. He had claimed he didn’t know what the weapons were intended for anyway.

  O’Neill had agreed. He reasoned to himself at the time that he couldn’t risk putting one of his agents at risk of a kneecapping, torture or even death. That was the first law of agent handling.

  Now as always, the violent Republicans showed no mercy to a tout, or informer. So-called six packs were still relatively common—bullets in the ankles, kneecaps, and elbows—as were broken fingers and toes, sometimes arms and legs. The abuse was a warning to others.

  The threat to handlers was almost as great. O’Neill had worked in Northern Ireland for well over three decades in different army and security roles. When he had started, O’Neill had followed the advice of an army colleague and took to sleeping with a fire extinguisher in his bedroom and a pistol under his pillow. Even now he followed the same routine.

  Given all that, O’Neill often wondered at the motivation of some touts. Sometimes it was the money; he was paying GRANITE more than one thousand pounds a month. Sometimes it was a desire to take revenge on a superior inside the organization. Occasionally it was because touts did not agree with what was being done but were too scared to get out or object.

  In the case of GRANITE, O’Neill guessed it was money.

  O’Neill rubbed his chin, which was covered with a day and a half’s worth of stubble, and looked at his watch again. Ten past twelve. One more cup of tea, then he would have to leave. Something had clearly gone wrong.

  He walked to the bar and asked the young blond girl behind it for another mug. On the other side of the bar the rolling satellite TV news was on, so O’Neill moved around and sat near the flat screen on the wall.

  That was when he noticed the moving ticker across the bottom of the screen: “Breaking news: Ulster chief constable shot dead in south Armagh after helicopter comes under fire.”

  O’Neill felt his chest tighten and his forehead start to sweat.

  The girl behind the bar was looking at the screen and saw the ticker. “Shit, those guys are going one step too far.” She turned toward O’Neill. “Did you see that?” she asked.

  He nodded distractedly, but his mind was already focused elsewhere.

  Then O’Neill’s phone rang. He knew who it would be before he even pulled it out of his pocket.

  Thursday, January 3, 2013

  Forkhill, south Armagh

  Duggan carefully placed all his clothing into a large black plastic bag.

  One of the brigade’s volunteers was waiting in the hallway of his farmhouse south of Forkhill to take it away to be incinerated. Duggan didn’t want to risk leaving behind any traces of the gases and minute particles of propellant and other gun matter thrown off when he fired the Barrett.

  Then he eased his angular, slightly stooped frame into the shower in his en suite bathroom and began to systematically soap himself down, cleaning his skin thoroughly. Then he shampooed himself three times, running his fingers carefully through his close-cropped dark hair, now flecked with gray.

  The Barrett and the unused ammunition had been offloaded to another volunteer whose job it was to return the gun to the cache, located south of the border in some woodland down near Dundalk.

  Downstairs, drinking coffee and waiting in his living room, were the guys with whom he had worked and operated for the past fifteen years, since the catastrophic Good Friday agreement.

  Apart from Duggan himself, who had the OC title, there was Danny McCormick, the quartermaster, Liam McGarahan, who was the intelligence officer, Dennehy, and Kieran O’Driscoll, the finance director and brains behind the operation.

  They all saw the political settlement as a sellout by Sinn Féin politicians Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, not least because it removed the historic claim of the Irish Republic on the six counties of Ulster and instead gave the people of Northern Ireland the right to decide whether they should be part of the UK or Ireland.

  Not long after the peace agreement went into effect, Duggan’s group disentangled themselves from the Provisionals. They saw themselves as a separate entity altogether—a splinter group that was part of the Real IRA. More recently, there had been more cooperation with others, particularly the coalition of other republican entities under the name Óglaigh na hÉireann, following a merger agreement to form the New IRA.

  Duggan knew that Óglaigh na hÉireann members had been handing out republican leaflets at a roadblock outside Crossmaglen while the operation to bring down the PSNI helicopter had been going on.

  All the groups in the New IRA were firmly committed to a united Ireland—and to the armed struggle as a means of achieving it. They believed that sooner or later the peace agreement would fall apart, leaving them in the driver’s seat of a new armed, violent republican movement.

  This often left them at odds with the Provisionals, the old guard, at national and local levels. In south Armagh, the Provisionals had been a highly organized group that operated with almost military discipline, so Duggan trod with care and with as much secrecy as possible.

  Duggan toweled himself off, dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and sweatshirt, and headed downstairs carrying the clothes destined for the incinerator. He handed them to a young man who sat on a chair in his hallway and then watched as the man went out and climbed into a waiting car.

  Then he walked to the living room door. He knew what was coming.

  “All cleaned up?” O'Driscoll asked. He watched Duggan as he walked to an armchair and sat down.

  “Yeah, spotless. Good job I was there to mop up Pete’s mess,” Duggan said, referring to the machine gunner Pete Field, whose job it had been to down the helicopter. “Went to plan, though. That was the obvious spot they’d land it. We chose well.”

 
Duggan looked at McGarahan. “Your man Fergus came up with good info there. Spot on. Timing was just as he told you.”

  McGarahan nodded but didn’t smile. The information the IO had received in advance—of the chief constable’s visit to Crossmaglen and the fact that the secretary of state would be accompanying him—wasn’t the first valuable tip from his mole in the chief constable’s office, a public affairs officer named Fergus Kane.

  “We spent a long time cultivating that guy,” McGarahan said. “Paid off now, hasn’t it?”

  There was a short, awkward silence.

  “So, Dessie. You did well with the cop. But what about the Brit?” asked McCormick.

  There was a distinctly hostile note in the quartermaster’s voice.

  “What do you mean, Danny?”

  “You took down the right man first, did you?”

  Here we go, it’s started. “Took down the one I could get best sight of. I was three-quarters of a mile away. I knew it was the chief constable. I was after the Brit next, but he’d hit the deck immediately, and the angle was too tight. We had to get out of there quick as possible.”

  There was silence in the room.

  “Anyway,” Duggan said, “None of you knows how to handle a Barrett, do you? What other OC is out getting his hands dirty, lying in the mud waiting for hours, looking through the crosshairs. None of ’em, I tell you. They’re all tucked up inside giving orders over their cocoa. I do it because none of you lot know how.”

  He knew he was right. None of them could handle a sniper rifle. There was another silence.

  Dennehy broke the silence eventually. “He’s right. He did well to hit the cop from that distance. Then the Brit was on the ground straightaway. Saw him through the scope.” He glanced at Duggan.

  O'Driscoll butted in. “It makes little difference. The chief constable was a good hit. I mean, the shit’s hit the fan, it’s already causing chaos. The Brit would’ve been better, we’re agreed on that. But I’ve heard the radio news. They’ve no idea where the bullet came from. And there’s already been some rent-a-quote on the radio saying that at this rate the Brits’ll have to put the army back on the streets if the police can’t protect their own chief constable. Beautiful, if you ask me.”