The Exit Club: Book 4: Conspirators

by Shaun Clarke

  In fact, Belfast didn’t look like a British city at all, but like some Third World country during a coup d’état. Though situated in rolling green countryside and surrounded by the Divis Mountain, also known as the Black Mountain, the city was filled with bombed-out, bricked-up houses, police and army barricades, barbedwire fences and stretches of waste ground strewn with rubble where terraced homes had once stood. Invariably, Wallace drove them along Grosvenor Road, past the Royal Victoria Hospital, where, so he informed them, most of those kneecapped or otherwise wounded were treated. Nearing the hospital, they had to pass a police station and British Army checkpoint, surrounded by high sandbagged walls and manned by heavily armed soldiers, all wearing DPM clothing, helmets with chin straps, and standard-issue boots. Apart from the army private manning a light machine gun, the soldiers were armed with M16 rifles and had stun-and-smoke grenades on their webbing.

  Frequently Marty saw soldiers with assault rifles keeping a sapper covered while he carefully checked the contents of a rubbish bin. This, Wallace explained, was because of the Provos’ Russian anti-tank weapons with their 500-metre range. The Provos used them mainly against police stations, army barracks and Saracen armoured cars, known to the locals as ‘pigs’. They also command-detonated dustbins filled with explosives, which is why the sappers had to check all the bins near police stations and checkpoints.

  The hospital itself was an enormous Victorian building guarded by RUC police wearing flak jackets and armed with the ubiquitous Ruger assault rifle. After being checked by security and parking the Q car, Wallace took Marty, Taff and TT into the building where they found the victims of kneecappings, mostly scruffy teenagers, either sitting in chairs or still lying on stretchers, depending upon how bad their punishment had been. The kneecapping, Wallace explained, was a punishment administered not only to touts, or informers, but also to car thieves, burglars, sex offenders and so-called traitors to the cause. Reportedly, the people in the Catholic ghettoes were so terrified of the Provisional IRA, the PIRA, that when they received a visit from them, saying they had to report for punishment, they actually went to the place selected for punishment of their own accord. Knowing what was going to happen to them, they sometimes tried to anaesthetize themselves beforehand by getting drunk or stoned on Valium.

  According to Wallace, you could tell what kind of Catholic, or Fenian, you were dealing with by checking just how he had been kneecapped. Pointing to the various kinds of ugly wounds on the knees, ankles and even elbows of those sitting forlornly on chairs or groaning on stretchers in the grim hospital corridors, Wallace informed them that if the wound was from a small calibre weapon, such as a .22 pistol, which does not shatter bone, and if it was either in a fleshy part of the thigh or in the ankle, then the victim was only a minor thief or police informer. For something more serious he would be shot in the back of the knee with a high-velocity rifle or pistol, which would sever the artery and blow the kneecap right off. Worst of all was the dreaded ‘six pack’, which meant a bullet in each elbow, knee and ankle, thus putting the victim on crutches for a long time and letting everyone see that the paramilitaries had been particularly displeased with him.

  Indeed, the kneecappings had become so commonplace that the victims were even allowed to remove their pants or other clothing to save them from being damaged by the bullets or ruined by the blood. Turning the punishment into another form of illegal commerce, the paramilitaries would call for an ambulance to take the victim to hospital. If subsequently the victim was awarded compensation from the British government, the very men who had kneecapped him would then pay him another visit, demanding part of his compensation. It was a lucrative business.

  ‘So if that’s what they can do to their own,’ Taff asked, studying the shattered bone and bloody bullet holes of the wounded youths in the corridor they were visiting, ‘what are they likely to do to us if they capture us?’

  ‘Don’t ask,’ Wallace said grimly. They visited the hospital every day to enable Wallace to check the details of the wounded and ascertain whether any of them were his touts or, even better, active IRA or PIRA members who could be interrogated. Leaving the hospital, they would drive along the Falls Road to check out the activity on the pavements. The rules for this kind of reconnaissance were simple and undeviating. All journeys had to be planned carefully to avoid enemy territory whenever possible. The Q car was never to be left unattended in the streets. If it was, it would be vandalized by the kids, stolen for joyriding, sold to be used by one of the paramilitary groups, or blown up by the British Army on the grounds that it might be booby-trapped with a bomb.

  When driving, they had to keep the windows locked at all times. If parked at a red light and approached by anyone, they were to go through the red light and keep going until out of sight. If approached by someone before they could move off, they were (as SergeantMajor Wallace had told them at their initial briefing) to snap ‘Fuck off!’ and, if the stranger didn’t do so immediately, drive away as quickly as possible. Finally, if they accidentally knocked someone down when in paramilitary territory, they were not to stop to attend to the victim. If they did, Sergeant-Major Wallace explained grimly, they would almost certainly be killed.

  Following these rules, they drove all over the city, familiarizing themselves with it, adopting to its grim, always threatening, nature. Invariably, they would drive around Turf Lodge and Andersonstown, two Republican strongholds. Looking like parts of London after the Blitz, those two areas contained rows of terraced houses with their doors and windows bricked up, the gardens piled high with rubble. The pavements outside the pubs and certain shops were barricaded with large concrete blocks and sandbags. The windows were caged in heavy-duty wire netting as protection against car bombs and petrol bombers. Men and youths loitered on street corners, heavy housewives trudged wearily in and out of shops, and grubby children swarmed over burnt-out cars like flies over turds, smashing the remaining windows with sticks and screaming like banshees.

  Even worse was the Falls Road, the Provo heartland and one of the deadliest killing grounds in the province. In ‘the Falls’ everyone looked poor and suspicious, particularly the gangs of aggressively menacing, scruffy young men, the socalled ‘dickers’, who stood in gangs on street corners keeping their eyes out for the SF patrols or suspicious strangers. Invariably, with the gangs, there were young people on crutches or with arms in slings, having been kneecapped or shot in the elbows for some infraction or other.

  The ‘war zone’, as the Falls was known to the SF, was always clogged with armoured Land Rovers. British Army barricades topped with barbed wire and protected by machine-gun crews on Saracen armoured cars, or ‘pigs’, blocked off the entrances to many streets, with the foot soldiers heavily armed and looking like extraterrestrials in the DPM uniforms, boots, webbing, camouflaged helmets and chin-protectors. It was their job to check everyone entering the barricaded areas and, in many instances, take them aside to be searched. This they did with brisk, ruthless efficiency, making no friends with anyone.

  The traffic in the Falls headed up towards the distant Cave Hill, the black taxis packed with passengers too frightened to use public transport or walk. When the grey-painted RUC mobiles or British Army Saracens passed by, Marty noticed that the officers were carefully scanning the upper windows and roofs on either side of the road, looking for possible sniper positions.

  Even after five days of relentless driving around the city, Marty still found it hard to believe that what he was seeing was taking place on British soil. His feeling of disbelief was in no way eased by the many glimpses he had of static OPs with high-powered cameras on the roofs of tall buildings, recording every movement in the streets. The OPs were manned by soldiers of the 14th Intelligence Company armed with GPMGs and M16 rifles, the barrels always resting lightly on the sandbagged walls. They were equipped with a highpower telescope, state-of-the-art surveillance cameras and computers linked to vehicle registration and suspect-information centres. Each OP was
backed up with another consisting of two to four soldiers and located near enough to offer immediate firearms support. Both OPs were in turn backed up by a QRF, or quick reaction force, of soldiers and police, sometimes both, located at the nearest convenient SF base, which would respond immediately to a radio call for help.

  Rather than being hidden from the people they were spying on, the OPs were deliberately given high visibility to remind the locals of their presence. This placed certain constraints on those being watched and, at the same time, allowed those doing the watching to check the movements of suspected terrorists and their friends. This in turn allowed the collators of intelligence at Lisburn and brigade headquarters – including SAS green slime – to investigate links between meetings of particular individuals and subsequent terrorist activities.

  Marty also learned from Wallace that there were miniature spy cameras in the ceilings of suspected IRA buildings and bugs on the telephones.

  Most times, when Wallace stopped the Q car, he would ask Marty to hand him the Nikon camera, then he would take photographs of specific individuals or locations. Sometimes, just to show Marty and the others how dangerous the place was, he would deliberately let those he was photographing see him doing it. Invariably his subjects were groups of youths standing outside bookies’, shops or pubs, some with long hair, others with heads closely shaven, all wearing an assortment of casual jackets with trousers rolled up high enough to reveal big, unpolished boots. Usually, when seeing Wallace’s camera, the youths would start across the road towards the car, looking aggressive and threatening. At such times, Wallace always handed the camera back to Marty and raced the car away just before the youths managed to reach it and do some damage.

  ‘They’d kick the shite out of us,’ Wallace said, ‘if they got their grubby paws on us. They might even kill us. Those dickers are on their own killing ground and damned well they know it. They’d have good protection.’

  In many ways, however, the Protestant heartlands of Sandy Row and the Shankhill were just as bad as the Falls. Both busy roads, they were lined with shops and pubs, the pavements bustling with shabby-looking pedestrians and the same kind of loiterers who had been so common in the Catholic ghettoes. Wallace often stopped the Q car in those areas, to take pictures of the men entering and leaving certain pubs, which were, he explained, UDR watering holes serving hardline Loyalists who did as much damage as the IRA and had to be watched.

  One of those groups, Wallace explained, had a ‘collection day’ twice a week, when they demanded so- called ‘protection money’ for a Loyalist splinter group. Indeed, the whole city, according to Wallace, thrived on protection rackets not much different from those of Al Capone or the present-day Mafia. Anyone in business in the ghettoes had to contribute, whether or not they liked it. Falls Road cabbies made weekly payments to the IRA. Protestants in Sandy Row or the Shankhill – the owners of pubs, shops, betting shops, and those in the building trade– paid similar to the UDR or the UFF.

  Though during that first week Marty did not have to defend himself with his 9-Milly, he and the others were given a good example of the violence of the city and how it was dealt with when, during the evening of the fifth day, they learned that some Catholic youths, approaching a Morris Marina parked near the notorious Divis Flats, had been shot by men wearing civilian clothes and armed with handguns. Though the identity of the men had not yet been ascertained, it was widely believed in the Catholic community that they were British Army soldiers. Subsequently, violent riots had broken out in the area.

  ‘I think you better see this,’ Wallace told Marty and the others.

  Driving out of Sandy Row, he took the Donegall Road, then cut through the Broadway until they were back in the Falls. In a darkness illuminated by streetlamps, it looked even more dangerous than it had during the day, with gangs of youths and older men standing on street corners, many drinking from cans or bottles, all clearly aggressive. The bricked-up doorways and boarded-over windows were only rendered more ominous by the smashing parked frightened passers-by seemed like scavenging animals. The flak-jacketed RUC police and heavily-armed soldiers at the sandbagged barracks and barricaded streets, all watchful, never smiling, seemed like faceless men in a bad dream.

  Even before the Divis Flats tower block came into view, the crimson glow of flames was illuminating the dark, cloudy sky and sporadic gunfire could be heard. When Wallace finally turned off the Falls Road and reached the wasteground where the Catholic youths had been shot, they saw mobiles and foot patrols trawling flats that were being swept eerily by floodlights. The crimson glow in the sky came from a series of bonfires deliberately set ablaze to block the paths of the mobiles and Saracens, as well as frustrate the charges of the soldiers in flak jackets, Perspex-visored riot helmets and reinforced leg-and-arm shields. Other fires were caused by the Molotov cocktails being thrown by gangs of teenage dickers. People were screaming when struck by rubber bullets. Others were racing out of clouds of CS gas with eyes streaming. Housewives were drumming bin lids on the concrete floors and balconies, children and youths were throwing stones and dropping bricks on the mobiles stopped by the bonfires, and unseen gunmen were sniping on the soldiers keeping watch while their mates smashed in doors with sledgehammers and dragged out kicking, punching men, young and old, for transportation in RUC paddy wagons to the detention centre at Castlereagh. Before being thrown into the paddy wagons, the arrested mens’ ankles were chained together to prevent them from light-streaked darkness. Children cars without reprimand from kicking out or running away, but they still managed to bawl a lot of obscene abuse.

  ‘What happens when they get taken in?’ Marty asked.

  ‘Let’s go see,’ Wallace replied.

  He turned the car around and drove away from the hellish scene, out of the Falls, back through the city centre, across the Albert Bridge, then along the A2 to Castlereagh. Arriving at the detention barracks just before 2000 hours, they were directed to the rear of the building by an armed RUC guard. Wallace parked the Q car in what looked like an enormous yard, like an empty car park, with a high brick wall running along one end. He turned off the ignition and headlights, leaving them in darkness.

  ‘Any minute now,’ he said, checking his luminous wristwatch. ‘This happens every single night, riots or no riots. It happens to all those picked up.’

  Suddenly, a series of floodlights flared into life along the top of the wall the car was facing, bathing the wall and the ground in front of it in a dazzling fluorescence. Less than a minute later, a couple of armed RUC officers emerged from a doorway at one end of the wall to take up positions at both sides of it, about ten metres away from it, covering it with their Rugers submachine guns. When they were in position, first one, then two, then finally a whole group of dishevelled youths were coaxed out through the doorway and along the base of the wall by another RUC officer. When some of the youths, either blinded by the floodlights or frightened, instinctively took a step back, the RUC officer prodded them forward with his baton. If this failed, he gave them a light blow with it, and this always worked. Eventually, the youths, nearly a dozen, were forming a line along the whole length of the wall, equidistant apart, in an eerily dreamlike chiaroscuro.

  As the youths were standing there, squinting into the floodlights, a sky-blue Morris Marina inched forward out of the darkness beside Wallace’s Q car, its headlights off, its motor ticking over quietly, and stopped just out of range of the floodlights. At barked commands from one of the RUC officers, the youths were made to step forward one by one, stand there for about a minute, then step back against the wall again. Occasionally, the horn of the blue Morris Marina would toot when a particular youth stepped forward, and he would be marched away from the line-up and taken inside the detention centre.

  ‘The men in that blue Morris Marina,’ Wallace explained quietly, ‘will be the ones who shot those Catholic kids earlier on. They probably did it when their parked car was surrounded and the kids were becoming aggressive or ma
ybe even attacked them. Each time that horn’s tooted, it means that one of the men in the car has recognized one of those kids as being present at the scene of the incident. Those particular ones will be interrogated and then possibly put on trial. The others will be set free later tonight.’

  The process continued until the last youth in the line-up had stepped forward and been ordered back against the wall. Then the remaining youths were marched back in through the doorway for release and return to Belfast. When the last of the RUC officers had followed the young men through the doorway, the steel door was slammed shut, the floodlights blinked out, and the wall disappeared back into darkness.

  A sudden gust of wind swept the yard. The rain started falling.

  Staring at the vanished wall, trying to adjust to that total darkness, Marty had the unsettling feeling that he was in a foreign country where the laws of civilized society no longer applied, where the normal rules of war had changed, and where honourable men had to do dishonourable things in order to win. He was one of those men and he didn’t like the thought, but he believed that the end justified the means and that belief would sustain him. He was here to fight an exceptionally dirty war and that was what he would do. This was just the beginning.

  ‘So that’s it,’ Wallace said, turning on the ignition of the Q car as the increasingly heavy rain fell on it. ‘Your breaking-in week is over. From tomorrow,’ he added, addressing Taff and TT, ‘you two in the back will be on your own.’ He turned on the car’s headlights, illuminating that grim wall, and then grinned at Marty. ‘As for you, Staff-Sergeant Butler, tomorrow morning you’ll report to the HQ at Bessbrook to commence your work with the green slime. Nomore street life for you.’