by Finn Óg
Sam shrugged a little – what the hell? Perhaps he’d been thinking about this all along.
“Do you fancy flying, John, without getting in an aircraft?”
“What?”
“Let’s buy a Black Hornet. It’s expensive, but it might be fun.”
21
“What’s happening?” the opso asked one of his team at the computer bank.
“Just pulling out the observation team on Carlingford Lough,” she said.
“Good hiking up round there,” he muttered.
“Dissident hotbed,” came the reply. “More arms in Omeath than a crate of starfish.”
The opso grunted. It was true. They believed there were weapons dumps all over the Cooley Peninsula courtesy of an old IRA quartermaster who had settled in the area.
“Good views, though. Any pictures?”
She leaned forward into her mic. “Any images available?”
“Standby,” came the reply, the thrum of a diesel engine clear over the net.
A monitor flickered to the right of the bank and the opso watched as it panned and pulled focus. The dim foredeck of a fishing boat was revealed as dawn tried to break through the gloom. Three of his team had been living aboard the vessel for a week. The specialists he had chosen had been delighted at the prospect of some time at sea – their natural habitat. One was a Royal Marine, another a specialist on secondment from the Norwegian Special Forces, while the sergeant leading them had been a member of the opso’s Special Reconnaissance Regiment. The opso was still in the habit of referring to it as “the DET” because it was still the same sort of people doing the same sort of work.
The opso triggered the lever on his deep chair, allowing it to keel back while he put his feet up – wishing he was aboard the boat on the screen. He pulled over the day’s reports and began flicking, glancing up every so often at the feed, enjoying the unusual scenery being fed into his own windowless, dimly lit room.
His operatives got on with their tasks – drawing up manifests for the week ahead, requirements from the techs and spanners, plotting routes and deployments. The opso poured through the intel. None of their watch list appeared to be doing anything out of the ordinary.
He didn’t know what made him look up when he did – two seconds later he would have missed it. The prow of the fishing boat rose a few feet to capture a sailing yacht headed the opposite direction. Even at a glance he knew her; he’d had a drink aboard and stayed the night. He even fancied he recognised the lonely figure at the wheel, and smiled.
“Ok, cut the feed and wipe the cards. We’re not supposed to operate down there, so let’s make sure there’s nothing that could come back to bite us.”
The image went black and the tapping of his team began as all memory of the deployment was erased.
With any single-handed sail comes thinking time.
Ordinarily, if Sam made it through a week without speaking to anyone other than Isla, that suited him just fine. But he had a nagging guilt, and on the long solo run to Carlingford he admitted to himself that he’d have to address the Sinead situation. He knew he was being unfair. He owed her so much. But to unravel his emotions would open up a new front in the battle to clear his mind. To allow Sinead in, was to push Shannon out. Yet he knew make-or-break time was nearing. And until he worked it out, he couldn’t keep asking her to mind Isla – who was, instead, spending the weekend with her grandparents.
He slipped through the entrance to the dilapidated marina before six o’clock – too early for anyone to approach him for a mooring fee. There were several empty berths and he took one that was almost masked by a forgotten catamaran nail deep in limescale and green weed. Sam made up the warps and prepared a bundle of cash in the hope that an attendant might accept the money, pocket it and leave the ledger empty. Then he got his head down – he’d been sailing all night and he had a longer night ahead.
“I often wondered where you went on your downtime.”
The opso looked at Libby as she struggled up to the flat rock. “Clears the head, the fresh air. I like the altitude.”
“I forgot you were in the Parachute Regiment. You must miss the wind whistling through your ears when you’re cooped up in the ops room.” Libby was breathing hard. She’d obviously not spent her own days off wisely.
“That was a lifetime ago. I’ve been in the 14th for twenty-five years.”
The older hands never took it well when people referred to the modern name for their unit – as if it somehow offended the memory of those who had gone before.
“Why did you bring me here?” she asked. “Bit out-of-area for us, isn’t it? This place is full of unfriendlies.”
The opso looked down over the valley below. The Mourne Mountains were tiny compared to where he had trained, and Libby was right – there was no end of hostility to the British military in the villages beneath them, but there was support too in the mixed-up communities and between the unmarked boundaries that separated United Kingdom unionists from Irish nationalists.
“Don’t you ever wonder about your enemy – what motivates them to do the things you try to stop them doing?”
Libby thought for a minute. “Not really, to be honest. I thought it was pretty straightforward. They want a united Ireland with no British in it. The majority of people who live here don’t want to be Irish. So that’s democracy, and democracy needs protected.”
“But did you never wonder why they want it so much? Why they’re prepared to go to jail for a reunified Ireland – to be killed for it, even?” the opso pressed.
“I know the history,” said Libby with determination. “But that’s not the point. The point is to stop them killing each other.”
“And that’s why you’re here?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Not because a stint in Northern Ireland is good for the CV?”
“That too,” she said unabashed. “What I don’t understand is why you’ve spent so long here. It’s pretty irregular.”
The opso went quiet for a moment and looked down into the scenery. “See that stretch of the lough?” He nodded beneath them.
“Yeah?”
“That’s Narrow Water.”
The name rang a bell but Libby hadn’t even been born when the place name had morphed into a byword for an atrocity. Like Omagh. Or Loughinisland. Or Greysteel. Or Kingsmill.
She stared and waited.
“That’s where my dad was killed.”
Libby closed her eyes for a moment, the significance dawning. “He was a para too,” she said softly, the detail still hazy in her mind.
“That’s why I joined. I was nine years old when he died. They triggered the bomb from over there.” The opso pointed to the mountain range opposite their own, across a narrow sea, in a different country.
“How many were killed that day?”
“Depends how you count them. But eighteen.”
“How often do you come here?”
“Not often.”
“That’s why you’re so committed to the place?”
“It was – before, initially.”
“How do you mean?”
“When I first came here I was a para on patrol – I wanted to kill everyone, but then I got older, and as the peace process settled and we were able to get out of the camps more I started walking in the hills. Then I began to understand more about what we were doing here.”
“You’re not going to tell me you went native, are you?”
“You can understand another point of view, Libby, without agreeing with it. You’ll understand that as you get older.”
The condescension grated on Libby, but she allowed him his seasoning. “So what did you understand?” Libby couldn’t completely conceal her scepticism.
“See this stone we’re standing on?”
Libby looked down. It was broad and flat, like it had been placed there by an army of Egyptian slaves. “Yeah?”
“It’s a Mass rock.”
“A what?�
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“During Penal times – when Catholicism was banned, the faithful used to sneak up here and a priest would appear, say Mass, then sneak away again before he got strung up.”
“That was like, what, four hundred years ago?” she said dismissively.
“Something like that.”
“So it’s a bit of a stretch – no disrespect – to say that that’s why the IRA does what it does.”
“Maybe,” said the opso, staring across at the mountains from where his father’s fate was decided. “But they still talk about it in Mass now. They remember the sacrifices they made to practice their faith. The priests tell their congregations about their forebears and how they risked Cromwell’s wrath to preach.”
“Priests were banned then?”
“Funny enough, so were some Presbyterians.”
“Protestants?”
“Yeah, there was a time when the Prods wanted shot of us as well.”
“So this lot have more in common than they think.”
“I’d say so. But that is one thing they have forgotten.”
“Long memories here,” Libby mused. “Selective.”
“There was a reason for what happened here. No matter how wrong it all was, it didn’t come from nothing.”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“I’m saying that then – back then – they could rationalise what they were doing just the same as we could justify what we did. It was a war. We were never able to call it that, but that’s what it was. A grubby, indecent war. And with every person that died there was more bitterness. And with the families of the folks killed in Ballycastle, there will be more of that. More kids like me who will grow up without their parents, who will want to kill dead things. More parents who will die long after their kids. It’s just so wrong.”
“Well, that’s what we’re here for, isn’t it? To stop that,” Libby said with certainty.
“Except we could have and we didn’t.”
She stiffened. “It went off prematurely. You know that.”
“You and I both know we weren’t going to disarm that device. We were going to let it get to its destination and explode.”
“I do not know that!” Libby rounded.
The opso held her stare and lowered his voice. “You know that,” he said. “I’m not saying you had the information or understood what the game was at the time – for the record, and for what it’s worth, I think you’re a good person – but you know now that we were going to let that bomb detonate.”
“I don’t know, and how you can be so sure?” Libby attempted, but she knew he was right.
“We had Deirdre Rushe, we had the manager, we had the kid. That was all we was ever gonna get, Libby. There was no grand plan to catch anyone else cos there was nobody else to get. No senior IRA man was going to approach an armed device – especially when it got to its destination.”
“So what’s your grand theory, then?” she asked. “Why would we be asked to let the bomb vehicle proceed?”
The opso noted the tacit admission but chose not to seize upon it. “Maybe to quash the remnants of support for the dissidents? Bomb goes off, kills a few innocent people, the public’s disgusted. You tell me, Libby. That’s your end of the business.”
“We wouldn’t allow that.”
“No?”
“No,” Libby said firmly.
“I’ve been around your organisation longer than you’ve been in it, Libby. I’m not so sure.”
“Olden days,” she said, and it was the opso’s turn to bristle.
“We had a chance to analyse the device and maybe let the plods get the DNA of the bomb maker. Instead we were babysitting the fucking thing so it could travel. There was no advantage in letting it get to its destination and then deciding to dismantle it. None that I can see anyway. There was no advantage in taking the risk of letting it drive through traffic and towns either. That thing was gonna go off no matter what. And we allowed that. It just means probably less people died in Ballycastle than where it was supposed to go.”
“Fewer,” Libby muttered.
“What?”
“Fewer people.”
“So you’re better educated than me, Libby.
“This country is full of horrible brutality.”
“Can’t argue with that. But it’s no different to any other place – except here it’s done in the name of a cause that sticks all that hatred into one big spittoon. In England it’s just the same but it looks like something else – gang murders or modern slavery.”
Libby sighed. They were alone in the hills, and as a fog rolled in from the sea they could both feel the creep of history, the importance of the distant past and the uselessness of what they had done.
“You’re right,” said Libby softly.
“Which bit?”
“All of it,” she conceded. “I don’t know what we were doing. Those people shouldn’t have died. I can’t …” She stared away from him.
“It’s not your fault, Libby.”
“It’s certainly not your fault.”
The opso said nothing but placed his hand on her shoulder and patted it.
“Why did you bring me here?” she asked again as she turned, her eyes pooling with tears.
“If you’re going to work here, it’s useful to get a feel for the place outside the barracks. Turned out for me that the people here are actually quite nice. They deserve not to have to deal with shit like what happened in Ballycastle. They’d give you the everything they have, some of them. It’s like home, really – in Liverpool. Them that has nothing will give you everything.”
“That’s nice and all, but what are you trying to tell me?”
“It’s time this war – or what’s left of it – was finished. Over. Done. No more dead children splattered over walls. That’s all.”
Isla’s playlist made Sam smile. He could always rely on it to get the blood pumping when he woke. Dolly reminded him that the tide was going to turn, so he reached for his wetsuit.
No heavy food – he wouldn’t have the luxury of turning back if he got cramp. He ate a protein and energy bar and drank some water instead. His neoprene balaclava sealed off almost all noise and his goggles were heavy-duty – designed to protect from tear gas as well as water. He rolled down, clicking each vertebra, then lay on his front arching his back loosening up for the cold, hard job ahead. Shoulders warmed and stretched, he quickly climbed the stairs, paced across the cockpit and slid immediately and almost silently over the side. He resurfaced, calming his breathing as his wetsuit did its job and turned the icy water into warmth. He checked his goggles for steam or ingress, then swam a conventional breaststroke in case anyone noticed him. When safely outside the harbour, he reverted to an energy-saving sidestroke that he had been taught many years before and settled into the two-kilometre crawl.
When his wife wrapped a scarf around her face, the boss knew it was time to take a walk. She was just home from work, so it was unlikely she was volunteering to go out of her own volition. Something was up.
He climbed the stairs and swapped his slippers for shoes, pulled on a jacket and got his face buff from the drawer. Then they slipped without a word through the back door and made for the lough-shore walk.
“Ye get a call?” he asked from behind the fleece on his face.
“Early on. Lucky there was nobody in the office.”
“What did they say?”
His wife fidgeted for a moment and then thought better of it. “There’s an increase, so there is, cos of some incidents.”
The boss turned and fixed her with a cold stare. “What did I tell you?”
“To remember every word.”
He raised an eyebrow, waiting for more, like a brutal teacher with a cane in hand.
“Word for word,” she stammered.
“So. Word for word. What did they say?”
“I … I …” she choked, now deeply afraid.
“You only have one job to do. What d
id they say? Be careful – be very careful.”
“That’s what they said.”
The boss lowered his voice further. “No, it’s not. You know it’s not. Think, woman, what did they say?”
She was close to tears knowing what was coming. She had a choice to make: get the message right and get a beating when they got home, or get it wrong and get a bigger beating when they got home. Her fidgeting morphed into action and she drew a piece of paper from her pocket and read: “Surveillance is increased. There have been a number of unfortunate incidents. Do not deviate from routine. Do not become concerned about headlines.”
The boss looked at his wife holding the scrap of paper torn from some civil servant’s notebook. He pitied her. “What have you done?” he asked softly with utter menace.
“I … I took the message.”
“You wrote it down.”
“I was going to memorise it and burn the paper.”
“What about the pad you wrote it on?”
“What?”
“You tore that piece of paper from a notepad.”
She looked forlornly at the scrap in her hand but said nothing.
“Wouldn’t take much for someone to see what you had written, would it?” The boss placed his hand gently on her shoulder. “You know what’s next.”
His wife nodded her head, tears now soaking into her scarf.
“Give me the page.”
She handed over the piece of paper.
The boss placed it in his pocket and looked up to the sky in a display of frustrated disappointment. He could hear the gentle buzz of insects, out of season – but the seasons were all over the place these days. And then he took his wife’s hand and led her home for her punishment.
The manager laid down his gnarled paperback. The pages were the colour of unmilked tea. He hadn’t taken in a word for almost a full chapter; he had read but was unable to remember what the story was about. Nor was he able to admit to himself what was wrong.