England's Janissary

  ‘Brit bastards!’ a falsetto voice screamed as a whistle shrilled and the lorries crunched to a halt, disgorging soldiers who swiftly formed a cordon across either end of the street, bayonets glinting menacingly in the sunlight.

  ‘It’s the Brits! How the hell did they know we were here?’ O’Neill called back to McNamara, who was already swinging his legs over the side, his boots thudding down on the ageing floorboards. As he stood up he pulled a Luger automatic pistol from his pocket, checked that it was loaded and then cocked it with a deft flick of his hands. ‘You have got to be bloody kidding me!’ O’Neill said in disbelief as he watched his companion make ready. ‘There’s half the bloody British army out there and you think that you can shoot your way out with that?’

  ‘Here, take this.’ McNamara shot him a cold glance before pulling a revolver from his other pocket and tossing it to O’Neill, who caught it and instinctively checked the cylinder to make sure that it was loaded. ‘It’s got five rounds in it. I left one empty so you don’t shoot your bloody foot off!’ Too many people had managed to shoot themselves by mistake over the last couple of years and McNamara was referring to the fact that he had only put five bullets in the cylinder, leaving the sixth chamber empty, making it safe so that it could not go off accidentally.

  ‘And what if I need more than five bullets?’ O’Neill asked.

  McNamara rolled his eyes and plucked an unopened box of .38 bullets from his jacket pocket and tossed it over to O’Neill. The box rattled as he caught it and he stuffed it into his pocket, patting it reassuringly. Just like in most trouble spots around the world, ammunition was freely available in Ireland, if you knew where to look, and McNamara couldn’t remember where he got this particular box from. For that matter he couldn’t remember where the pistol had come from either, he just got it from somewhere. Someone had once quipped that if you dug up all the arms caches in Dublin there wouldn’t be a single building left standing and McNamara was sure that it wasn’t too much of an exaggeration.

  Quietly, the two men slipped out onto the tenement landing. It smelt of stale urine and unwashed bodies and a shabbily dressed sallow woman clutched a grubby ring-wormed baby to her flat chest, watched them with empty, disinterested dark eyes. They reminded O’Neill of the blank unintelligent gaze of a dairy cow standing in a meadow waiting for milking. McNamara raised his finger to his lips, gesturing her to be quiet.

  They froze as they heard the noise of a door shatter under the blows of a sledgehammer, drowning the shouts and whistles in the street. O’Neill thumbed back the hammer of his pistol to half-cock. His heart was hammering in his chest and he could feel his hands beginning to tremble as adrenalin flooded his system. He forced himself to steady his breathing and peered down the gap in the middle of the stairwell, expecting to see khaki-clad figures doubling up the stairs.

  Nothing moved, blood pounded in his ears and his vision began to tunnel, making him light-headed. Somewhere, a woman was keening, shrieking abuse as others joined in, and he could hear dustbin lids being slammed into pavements like galvanized jungle drums, sending a warning to the streets around that a British raid was underway. McNamara stole another glance out of the cobwebbed window at the end of the landing.

  ‘They’re raiding the house over the road!’ McNamara said as he watched the soldiers dragging a couple of men out of the house opposite and bundled them into a waiting lorry. A crowd had gathered, jostling the soldiers. A cobble-stone bounced off the bonnet of the lead lorry, ricocheting through the windscreen and narrowly missing the driver.

  O’Neill felt a wave of relief pulse through him and he eased the hammer of his pistol forward with a soft click. They were off the hook. The dull-eyed woman looked at him indifferently. She could have been pretty once, O’Neill thought, as he ran his eyes over her, but life in the slums had put paid to that, condemning her to a subsistence of squalor, disease and death. He hoped to God things would be different after the British had gone. ‘Is there another way out?’ O’Neill asked.

  She stared at him blankly, as if weighing up what to say, rocking the sniffling bundle of rags in her arms. ‘That way,’ she said in an abrasive north Dublin slum accent and gestured, with a slight flick of her head, towards the rear of the building. ‘There’s a back stair.’

  O’Neill nodded and called to McNamara. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here!’ The gunman spared one last glance into the street in time to see the wet lumpy brown contents of a chamber pot plunge from an upstairs window onto an unfortunate squaddie below, to a ripple of jeering laughter. McNamara could see the officers and NCOs trying to restrain their men. ‘You think this is funny!’ the effluent-coated soldier barked at the crowd. ‘You think this is bloody funny!’ He jerked up his rifle, smashing the butt into the nearest face. ‘Now that’s funny, you Mick shit!’ the soldier shouted as he slammed the weapon down on the prone figure writhing at his feet, clutching its face. A moan of horror, like a wave, rippled through the crowd and more cobble-stones thudded into the knot of soldiers, bouncing indiscriminately off lorries and tin hats.

  ‘C’mon!’ O’Neill called again.

  ‘Bastard!’ McNamara hissed through gritted teeth, as he raised his Luger into a firing position, took a brief aim and squeezed the trigger. The window exploded in a shower of glass and the effluent-soaked soldier was thrown to his knees as the 9mm round tore into his dorsal muscle before lodging in his shoulder blade. For a fraction of a second it was as if time stood still. You could have heard a pin drop in the stunned silence and then all hell broke loose.

  ‘Shit!’ O’Neill cried. ‘Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! What the hell have you done?’ McNamara snapped off another couple of rounds into the rapidly dispersing tangle of soldiers. The crowd had already taken to its heels. Officers and NCOs tried to restore order, barking orders, punctuated by harsh, rasping whistle blasts as their men dove for cover. A bullet thudded into the ceiling above McNamara’s head, peppering him with fragments of a dilapidated plaster motif and the floodgates of adrenalin reopened as O’Neill realized that it hadn’t taken them long to work out where the shot had come from.

  ‘Mick, you eejit, let’s go!’ O’Neill shouted again as he began to edge his way towards the back stairs. He noticed that the woman had gone, her woodwormed door wedged firmly shut. ‘We’ve got to get out, now!’ He could hear the battering on the front door below and knew that they only had seconds left to get out. With an ominous crash, the door splintered inwards and through the banister O’Neill could see great-coated soldiers tumble inwards, brandishing bayonets that seemed huge in the confines of the tenement’s foyer.

  ‘Damn!’ The word flashed in his head like one of those enormous neon signs he had once seen in Paris during the war. ‘Damn! Damn! Damn!’ The sign seemed to expand its vocabulary and flash on and off as he watched and then the shadow of the gallows began to loom large as blood roared in a raging torrent inside his head. McNamara pulled a Mills bomb from his pocket, jerked the pin free with his index finger and then, letting the spring-loaded lever fly across the landing, dropped the grenade into the hall below.

  BANG! Razor-sharp slivers of cast iron slashed through the foyer, turning it into an abattoir, and O’Neill staggered as the floor shook under his feet, his ears searing with pain. The shockwave of the blast tore through him as it was vented up the stairway, showering plaster dust, and a high-pitched ringing pulsed through his head. He ran his tongue over his top lip, feeling the bitter coppery taste of blood dripping from his nose, and he felt off-balance. McNamara grabbed O’Neill’s arm and, mouthing something, dragged him towards the stairwell and the floor above.

  Slowly, the ringing and nausea began to recede. ‘Quick! Up! The roof, now! MOVE!’ O’Neill began to make out McNamara’s words as he dragged him by the arm up to the next floor. Down in the foyer the dust began to settle on the writhing, gore-bespattered carnage just as the second wave of soldiers cautiously probed their way into the building. O’Neill heard one of the soldiers curse as
his boot skidded in a pool of bloody slime. Even in his confused state, O’Neill knew that it would only be a matter of moments before they would be up and after them. As his head began to clear, O’Neill could hear children crying behind flimsy, flaking, Georgian plasterboard walls of the decaying tenement. They were taking the stairs two at a time now in their haste to get away.

  ‘Where the bloody hell did you get that from?’ O’Neill gasped. Ignoring his questions, McNamara lengthened his stride. O’Neill could hear the heavy thud of boots on the stairs behind him and through gritted teeth forced himself to keep pace with his fleeing companion. Below, doors crashed open to the cry of women and children as soldiers began clearing the first floor and, for a brief moment, O’Neill felt a glimmer of hope that the soldiers’ caution could maybe give them just enough time to get away.

  Moments later the two fleeing men burst onto the top landing and McNamara began looking frantically around. Then he stopped dead before making a rapid beeline for an inauspiciously shabby cupboard door tucked away in the corner. ‘We’re stuffed!’ O’Neill wheezed despondently and re-cocked his revolver, resigning himself to being gunned down at the top of the stairs of some squalid Dublin fleapit. Behind him he heard McNamara wrench open the door. Below him the sound of boots was getting louder.

  ‘Over here!’ McNamara panted and O’Neill looked around in time to see McNamara vanishing up an even smaller flight of stairs. Gasping for breath, O’Neill followed, pausing briefly to shut the door behind him before bounding up into the attic. Although it was dark, dusty and full of cobwebs, it was occupied by a family that was huddled in the corner, watching the two gunmen with large, fearful eyes. ‘You haven’t seen anything!’ McNamara said to them as he prised open a skylight window. ‘C’mon!’ he barked at O’Neill as he climbed out onto the roof.

  O’Neill hated heights. His palms begin to sweat uncontrollably as he stepped out onto the narrow ledge that ran along the bottom of the roof and he felt unsteady on his feet. He glanced down and saw the back yards below, criss-crossed with grubby washing and filth. Shots were still ringing out and he could hear shouting in the street below and his head began to spin. He tore his eyes away from the squalor below in time to see McNamara vanishing into a skylight several doors further down the street. Moving as quickly as he dare, he shuffled along the ledge until he reached the window and climbed in. McNamara was leaning against the wall, panting, a broad grin slashed across his face. ‘Now let’s get out of here!’ he panted.

  They kept to the back alleyways and O’Neill didn’t feel safe until they were several blocks away from their hideout. He didn’t know Dublin at all and didn’t have a clue where they were. ‘So who informed on us?’ he asked McNamara. The gunman gave him a characteristic sidelong glance without breaking his stride.

  ‘No one, we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. They weren’t after us.’

  ‘So why the hell did you shoot at them?’ O’Neill demanded.

  ‘Because they are the bloody enemy and we are at war, that’s why!’

  Shit! He really is as barking mad as they say, O’Neill thought as he slipped into silence and began to question the wisdom of accompanying McNamara to Dublin. ‘So, what now?’ he asked after a while but McNamara seemed reluctant to answer.

  ‘Shush, I’m thinking!’ he eventually muttered before resuming his sullen silence.

  ‘Shouldn’t we make contact with someone?’ O’Neill persisted.

  ‘We will,’ McNamara replied as they emerged from a side street into Sackville Street and O’Neill realized that they had been hiding in the bowels of Dublin’s infamous red-light district, known as the Monto, after its main thoroughfare Montgomery Street. The Monto was reputably the largest red-light district in the British Isles, if not Europe, and its alleyways and backstreets had provided many a rebel on the run with a place to hide, where no one asked questions or, indeed, wanted to know in the first place.

  Sackville Street seemed like another world to O’Neill. Once the widest street in Europe, it teemed with life, bustling with pedestrians, shoppers and businessmen going about their affairs. In front of the shattered cadaver of the GPO building, the epicentre of the 1916 Easter Rising, the street was dominated by the towering edifice of Nelson’s Pillar and much to McNamara’s obvious disgust, a British flag fluttered defiantly over the post office’s bullet-scarred portico. All around, O’Neill could see the tell-tale signs of battle.

  They walked in silence past the statue of Daniel O’Connell, ‘The Liberator’ who had campaigned fiercely for Catholic emancipation during the first years of the previous century, and onto the O’Connell Bridge beyond. The stink of the River Liffey assaulted O’Neill’s nostrils and mixed with the saline tang of sea air wafting up the estuary, reminding him of his long-past childhood bank holiday sojourns to Portrush or Benone Strand.

  O’Neill almost bumped into McNamara’s back as he drew up suddenly and looked back the way they’d just come through the bustling crowds towards the shell of the GPO. ‘Bastards!’ McNamara muttered, more to himself than to O’Neill, his face taut with barely suppressed rage. The Ulsterman gazed momentarily at McNamara’s face, trying to discern what was going on behind the man’s empty eyes.

  ‘I was here, back in sixteen,’ McNamara sniffed, referring to the Easter Rising. ‘There in the GPO. I was with the O’Rahilly on Moore Street when he died. We ran straight into a bloody ambush, mown down like ripened corn by a bloody machine gun somewhere on the edge of Great Britain Street. He bled out, you know, the O’Rahilly, in a godforsaken bloody doorway in Sackville Lane. Now there was a patriot, God bless him. What a waste, what a bloody waste.’ McNamara looked genuinely moved, uncharacteristically so, and as suddenly as he had begun he lapsed back into silence.

  ‘So where to now?’ O’Neill asked.

  McNamara shot him a grin – cold and humourless – and a flinty glint flared for a moment in his fathomless eyes. ‘How do you fancy a trip to the seaside?’ McNamara finally answered. ‘We’ve got a wee bit of business to attend to, down in Kingstown.’

  CHAPTER 36

  Dublin Castle

  DUBLIN CASTLE WAS under siege. There were no trenches dug around its walls cutting it off from the outside world, no soldiers encircling it preparing for a final bloody assault across a ragged, rubble-strewn breech, yet the Castle, the arrhythmic heart of His Majesty’s government, the seat of royal power in Ireland for almost 800 years, was under siege nonetheless.

  Fear hung oppressively in the air, like humidity on a hot day, and Flynn could almost taste it as he strolled through the Castle precinct. He had seen it etched on almost all the civil servants’ pinched faces since he had arrived. Every crevice, every nook, every cranny had become home to some pale, drawn clerk or typist who was too afraid to go home at night. The government was in meltdown.

  And yet life in the Castle was surreal, a seemingly endless round of parties to boost the inmates’ morale, but the more they tried to obscure the shadow that hung over the place the larger it loomed, like an insatiable monster. There had been a dance on the night they arrived but neither Flynn nor Maguire could face it. ‘Jesus, I really can’t wait to get out of this place,’ Flynn said to Maguire as he watched sundry clerks and typists dancing around the main ballroom. ‘You know in the trenches we used to go out of our way to pretend everything was normal but it never was, not really.’ Maguire had shaken his head and said, ‘Fools are fiddling whilst Rome burns,’ and then added, ‘I’m off to bed,’ before striding impatiently towards their billet. Flynn had only hung around for a few moments longer before following him.

  The next morning began with a rushed greasy breakfast in the crowded refectory before Maguire looked at his pocket watch and announced, ‘C’mon then, we’ve got to report in,’ and shoving back his plate, rose from the table.

  ‘Where to now?’ Flynn asked Maguire as he picked up his plate and headed to the drop-off point for dirty dishes.

  ‘You’ll see,’ Magui
re replied and led Flynn out into the Castle’s Lower Yard with its old grey tower, one of the last vestiges of its medieval past and just about the only indication that the place had actually been, once upon a time, a castle. Across the yard an engine spluttered into life, rupturing the quiet, and Flynn turned to see a touring car full of heavily armed Auxiliaries pull off towards the gate and the city beyond. Maguire nodded towards the tower. ‘There. That’s where we’re off to, Kevin, my boy!’

  Outside the tower door a bullet-headed man stood puffing furiously on a cigarette. His clothes were immaculate, obviously bespoke, and even through the haze of rich nicotine smoke, the man exuded the relaxed confidence that came with power. He had to be someone of consequence, Flynn surmised. The man looked at Flynn and Maguire and broke into a broad smile, briefly interrupting his incessant shifting from one foot to the other. He was one of those men who bristled with energy, the ‘action this day’ sort Flynn’d come across far too often in the army.

  The man took one last frantic drag on his cigarette, like a man about to go over the top any moment, and then with a cheery wave bounded enthusiastically towards them, the sun glinting off his monocle. As he drew closer Flynn could see that the man was in his mid forties. His eyes were dark and quick, drinking in his surroundings, and they reminded Flynn of a snake – dark, fathomless, deadly, poised to strike. ‘Good morning! Good morning!’ he called in the sort of crisp, self-confident, self-important public school accent that made Flynn suspect that the man was an army officer of some description, a man used to having his own way.