Recovering Commando Box Set

by Finn Óg

  She was surprised to find a file for a young recruit seconded from the Parachute Regiment. He’d been quite good-looking in a gnarly sort of way. Detailed in it was a breakdown of his past: son of a soldier killed at Warrenpoint, mother with mental health issues. He’d had two spells in prison for group-related violence, one at a football match. Libby read how he’d witnessed a hooligan attack on a fan who had become isolated from his own crowd. The opso had apparently stepped in and viciously wounded three of the attackers. She wouldn’t hold that against him.

  She scrolled knowing she didn’t have time to pry, and, there, at the bottom, his stats were listed: height, weight, blood group, medical conditions – he was allergic to penicillin as a child. She hadn’t been looking for it, but, interestingly, his DNA record and fingerprints were logged and on file too. She imagined the ops had all been fingerprinted to exclude them from any crime scene investigation. Libby was fearful that the opso might match the print on the memory card in her pocket. If he was somehow involved in taking out the dissidents, frankly she’d prefer not to know.

  Which made her wonder how she really felt about him. Why was her instinct to protect him if he did, in fact, prove to be a killer?

  She inserted the card into the computer, convinced that the systems were so far removed by date that they wouldn’t be compatible enough to read one another. Yet up popped her file branches and she opened what the tech had given her. As she did so, an application was offered – some form of matching software. Even back then the systems had been advanced, she realised. She opened the software. It was before drag and drop days, so she uploaded the prints from the oar discovered in the man’s throat in Venice. Then she opened the file with the opso’s prints.

  A bar appeared, darkening from left to right at a painful pace. Libby watched it, increasingly convinced that the opso couldn’t be involved because he was in jail when the dissident was burned at sea – wasn’t he? Her trepidation rose as the bar neared the end of its slow journey: 3% match.

  She exhaled with relief. The violent attack in Liverpool would put many a person off, yet somehow to her it was a brave act, worthy of admiration.

  The screen opened a new window. In the box was an offer – did she want to run the prints against other files?

  Yeah, like there was time.

  She looked at the pile of computers she’d dumped and thought it best to put them back the way they were so nobody knew what she’d done. She turned to the screen and was about to click ‘no’ when she thought – what the hell? This stacking is going to take me fifteen minutes, why not let it run?

  Her back was to the monitor when the results finished churning. She stretched her spine at the lugging of weight and moseyed round to switch off the last of the machines. She raised her eyes to the screen and there, in black and white, was the results: ninety-eight per cent match, and an image of a man she’d never seen before: Sam.

  26

  There were three prongs to the little anchor Sam found under the thwart, along with an old extendable fishing rod. The prongs folded out but he had serious doubts as to whether it would hold him and the boat in place. Still, he rowed until he was about a mile from the copse of trees where Gillen and his wife had last met. Too far for the human eye to identify him – but also too far for him to identify anyone ashore. But then Sam had his own means of seeing things up close.

  The boat yanked to a stop as the anchor bit the bottom. Sam smiled at its unexpected ability to grip. He unpacked the spinnaker – knowing that the light sail material when bunched up would give all the heat of a sleeping bag. He threw the tarp over it to conceal the bright colours and lay across the seat. The boat lay perpendicular to the shore, giving him a near perfect view of the copse. The green tarpaulin all but concealed him as he dozed. Just another fisherman at anchor, wasting the day, waiting for a nibble.

  Libby stared at the man who might have done so much damage to her team, to the opso’s operation – and, arguably, to security in the north-west. But, then again, she thought, looking at his photo, maybe he’d tidied it up.

  Sam Ireland, she read. He’d been in his early twenties when the file was downloaded onto the computer she’d found. Seconded to 14th Intelligence from the Royal Marines. There had been some debate about whether to deploy him to Northern Ireland given that he was from the place, but they had settled on the notion that his local accent and knowledge could prove useful at a crucial time in the fledgling peace process.

  Then came the personal stuff – the psych analysis: Apolitical. A keen understanding of the politics of the region, but a lack of unionist sentiment should not be read as a risk. This recruit is equally ambivalent to nationalist politics and is motivated by a curious moral code, unusual in a solider of his age. The most worrying aspect of his personality is his liberal attitude.

  Libby snorted. Nobody in the military liked a liberal. The navy wouldn’t have liked her hippy upbringing, for sure. Yet Sam Ireland’s commanding officer had offered a positive reference of sorts: From unstable beginnings this man has all the makings of an officer, but having been identified as such, he declined the opportunity to take up a place in YO batch. So far, despite promotion and encouragement, he has declined to enrol for AIB. Ireland was promoted rapidly and is particularly adept when waterborne. I nonetheless have reservations about his internal processing; unclear as to whether he would, in the heat of things, follow orders that conflict with his sensibilities. Regardless, a natural leader by example and strength of character. Almost silent at times, occasionally unnervingly so. A conundrum. Perhaps time and further action will iron out the questions, but his ability is among the finest I have ever seen.

  Libby looked at the image. Sam Ireland appeared average in every way, yet there was something about his stare that suggested a layer of intelligence, perhaps danger. She wondered whether he was capable of smiling.

  His history was equally vague. There was reference to an incident prior to his arrival at the commando training centre in Devon, but it was listed simply under motivation: following an incident in Belfast, Northern Ireland, he was offered and accepted a place at Lympstone. Excelled in the recruitment test and throughout but was given to periods of introspection that worried training staff. Had the air of combustibility without ever having lost control.

  Weird, thought Libby. His academic scoring was through the roof for a rating, but she couldn’t see from the file whether he’d done A levels or been to college. The last entry was perhaps the most telling: Assume nothing with this soldier. He will protect his team and work until he drops, but he is much too freethinking on occasion.

  Which said everything and nothing.

  “Did you kill all these people?” Libby asked aloud to the screen.

  All she knew for sure was that he’d touched an oar that had ended up down a throat, and that a similar method of murder had been discovered one thousand miles west on a boat. Particularly adept when waterborne, she read again. It worried her that he’d served with the opso. She was certain that if anyone else came to know what she knew, the opso was finished. Any investigator would conclude that this Sam Ireland had been fed information about dissident republicans. Specifically, dissidents who were connected in some way to the Ballycastle bomb. The detachment that had been following that bomb was under the opso’s command. The opso and this man Ireland were, at the very least, acquaintances. He could easily have been passing the intel. Everything rang of collusion, the filthiest word in Northern Ireland. It looked like setting people up to die. The opso would never see the sky again unless she …

  Libby ran it around her mind quickly. The details would come, but if she could sever the link between the opso and this man Sam, that should have a favourable impact. If they couldn’t get the opso for collusion, she certainly wouldn’t let them get him for her own agency’s security failures. She needed to see him.

  The clerk knew that to park outside the gate of the base was to hoist a flag with “Arrest me” written on it; thou
gh she felt no less comfortable sitting at the edge of the civilian road, about half a mile from the entrance to the barracks, for seven hours. If it even was a barracks. It certainly had a big enough gate.

  Night came and she considered giving up. There was no way she could spot anyone in a car at night. Several groups of vehicles had passed her, vans and cars – all of them seemed to be travelling together – and she had struggled to see into any of them. The whole thing was probably pointless, but she had no alternative, so she pulled her coat round her, reclined the car seat and tried to sleep.

  Sam had been sure that the Gillens would return for a regroup, a chat away from the house. He wondered why he’d allowed himself to be so certain. And if they returned in the dark, how would he know?

  He admonished himself for a few minutes, staring at his kit and becoming increasingly forlorn. And then a thought occurred. He switched on the helicopter command console and began to scroll through the menu. At “heat signature” he clicked into the options.

  Attaching the belt to his waist, he began the launch sequence and sent the small heli into the air as he stared down into the bilge to conceal the light from the screen that relayed the helicopter’s vision. The heli covered the mile in less than two minutes. As gently as he could, Sam brought the device down to rest among the foliage – facing the area where Gillen and his wife had last stood.

  Then he rearranged his little boat, bunching the sail into the V shape of the hull, and pulling the tarp clean over the top. He needed to be able to watch the screen all night, and he needed to remain unseen from the shore or above.

  Libby unscrewed the casing of the computer and used a screwdriver to lever out the hard drive. She put the outer shell back on and stacked the unit exactly as it had been before she’d found it. Then she went upstairs, grabbed her bags and walked out in search of a staff car. The storeroom was empty – it was 3 a.m. after all. Then she realised that the staff had all been taken back to Belfast. Stupid. How was she supposed to get off base?

  She wanted to get away before anyone came looking for her. She desperately wanted to destroy and dispose of the hard drive so that nobody could map the prints against a friend of the opso’s, whom she needed to talk to, so she did the only thing she had the power to do – she shouldered her bags, signed out at the gate and started walking.

  Sam was dozing when the screen lit up, but his eyes pulled focus immediately and he stared intently at what the heli onshore was relaying.

  It took him a moment to understand what was happening. At first he thought it was two men getting on it in the bushes – the heat signatures showed two bodies moving in unison. Then he realised they weren’t quite touching but were definitely working hard – the glow from the human shapes was red, so there was a lot of heat in what they were doing.

  Gillen and his wife? Sam wondered. No. Both appeared to be male – or at least large.

  Then the penny dropped. DET. Ops. They’re digging in.

  Fuck.

  It was hard for Sam to estimate distances. How far from where the Gillens had stood had the operatives chosen to make their hide? It did tell him one thing for sure – the DET expected the Gillens back. And that, at least, was something.

  The clerk was freezing. Too cold to sleep and too afraid of attracting attention to start the car engine. She lay as far back as the passenger seat allowed and waited for sunrise – as much for the heat it might bring as for the light to watch faces.

  She was debating whether to turn on the radio for company, wary of the glow it would emit, when an odd apparition appeared at the edge of her focal length. From the gloom ahead the clerk could make out some sort of bulbous shape meandering towards her. She tried to suppress her panic – the dark figure had rounded edges like misshapen wings.

  What the fuck is that? she thought, staring at it all the while pushing her neck lower into her shoulders. The figure lumbered on, gradually becoming larger. Then it paused, turned to the side and seemed to peer down, losing one of its wings in the process. Then the other wing fell off and the clerk could make out a person rummaging in one of the spherical wing things.

  Bags, the clerk thought. Someone carrying bags.

  The figure stood upright, still at right angles to her car, and began a stamping motion. There followed a curious ritual in which the figure crouched down and began swinging something at the ground as if hammering a nail into the floor. The clerk could just make out a quiet crunching at the end of each swing. She became convinced that this was preparation for an approach to her car and made up her mind to swing her leg over the handbrake and manoeuvre awkwardly onto the driver’s side, scrabble for her keys and start the engine. With the turn of the key came the lights, which gave the clerk and the apparition the shock of their lives.

  There, in the beam, was Meadow with a baton in her hand.

  The clerk automatically started to pull out, forgetting her purpose entirely. Meadow returned to her previous endeavours and kicked something down what appeared to be a grating. The clerk flashed by, headlights on full beam and drove at speed down the road, breathing hard and stunned at what she had just seen. Only when she was two miles away did she realise that fate had presented her with an opportunity she couldn’t have manufactured if she’d tried.

  Why had she not flattened the bloody spook?

  She turned the car and stuck her boot to the board, hunting the hedges for the woman who had threatened her, slowing a little as the glow of red lights came into view. That was the spot, or close to it. She had no choice but to indicate out, and as she rounded a saloon vehicle she saw Meadow throwing her bags into the back seat. In the nearside rear-view mirror she watched her opportunity vanish into the passenger seat.

  Sam watched the glow of red turn to amber and then blue as the ops in the dugout cooled from their exertions.

  Why did they need to get so close?

  Perhaps they’d lost audio on Gillen, he reasoned. Maybe he’d changed his clothes to flee. Maybe the DET had a device in a jacket he’d discarded? He couldn’t quite work out what was wrong with the scenario but it wasn’t right.

  Then it came with a jolt: they think he’s next. They think Gillen’s the outstanding link to the Ballycastle bomb. They know he’s about to be killed.

  Sam suddenly understood what the DET were thinking. He cast his mind back to operations in the late nineties, when he was a young op being briefed on movements and tasked to do certain things in certain scenarios. Where there was an Article Two, right to life consideration, they identified the target, carried out appreciations and modelled likely scenarios the attackers could adopt. The DET would then build counter-insurgency tactics around those, sometimes deploying multiple teams well in advance. Some might dig in, just as the two men had done this evening.

  That meant they were anticipating an attack on foot. Placing two ops so close suggested they had no air support, otherwise they would simply watch for anyone approaching and take them out at a distance from the Gillens. There was a distinct advantage to that – the Gillens would be unaware of the imminent threat.

  If there had been air support available, Sam would already have been arrested. His heat signature would have shown up on any helicopter, Gazelle or drone flying over the area. Which told him they hadn’t anticipated an attack from the sea. Which was good.

  But Sam had no intention of taking out two operatives to get Gillen. The two men dug in by the copse of trees were younger versions of him – skilled and seasoned probably and working to protect life. Even the lives of terrorists. Which made him wonder about the effort the DET was going to to protect Gillen.

  Perhaps they couldn’t take the heat in the press about the other killings – dissident groups shouting about a return of the British government’s shoot-to-kill policy; state forces complicit in murder, they were saying; collusion, collusion, collusion. Maybe that’s why the DET couldn’t afford one final assassination – the highest profile of them all: Gillen, the leader. Maybe that’s why the
y wanted to keep him alive.

  Sam’s jaw tightened as he stumbled upon the alternative. Maybe they needed Gillen. Maybe his endurance was central to some policy. Maybe, maybe, he was a brussel – a sprout. How the locals and the press described a tout – an informer – an agent of the state.

  That would make sense too – that they actually had the boss in their pockets. Which made Sam think that someone much higher than the opso had known about the Ballycastle bomb and had done nothing to prevent it.

  Sam descended into a state of deep calm. His mind landed softly on an area of extreme focus. He shut all else out and mapped his next steps meticulously.

  Libby’s hitch-hiking got her dropped off right outside Belfast City Airport, where she hired a car for the short journey to Palace Barracks on the edge of Holywood. MI5’s local headquarters rested by Belfast’s lough shore, not far inside the perimeter of the base. Her pass was examined, her car checked and she was waved through the gate. Instead of rolling down the hill towards her own service’s building, she turned right towards the military police offices.

  She swept into a visitor’s space and marched straight through the doors, past reception and towards the custody sergeant’s desk. She held up her pass, noting the lance corporal’s stripes, and was mildly pleased there was no three stripe present.

  “You’ve got north DET operations officer in custody.” A statement, not a question.

  “Ma’am,” the Scarlet clipped.