Now and in the Hour of Our Death

by Patrick Taylor

  The sound of heavy machine-gun fire coming from above shattered the morning, racketing on in harsh bursts of four shots. Lighter automatic weapons chattered a horrid staccato above the barking of the bigger weapon. She glanced past the tractor and saw lights winking from the loopholes in the shutters. A stray round from the barracks hit the bricks above her head and screeched off along the street behind her.

  Erin stared upward, her gaze following a stream of tracer bullets as they hosed from an upstairs window and across the tractor’s cab. The fire from the windows of the barracks seemed heavier. The street and the compound were laced with a stitching of lead.

  “Cal,” she screamed, hauling out her weapon, unfolding it in one deft movement. She slid behind the street corner, slammed the ArmaLite against her shoulder, and started firing up at the window above. Bullets from the barracks ricocheted from the bricks.

  She felt a presence beside her. What the hell was Eamon doing there? He was meant to be providing covering fire, and why wasn’t McGuinness firing?

  The tractor had slewed sideways and stopped outside the wire. A row of circular holes, silver-rimmed against the red paint, ran diagonally across the cab door. She could see Cal, slumped in the cab. He was moving.

  “Cal’s all right,” she yelled. “I’m going for him.”

  “Stay where you are.” Eamon ran bent and doubled over across the few yards between the corner and the tractor.

  Erin wanted to watch but knew her job was to try to suppress the incoming fire. She ripped off four aimed shots at the nearest barracks window, seeing gashes appear in the rusty shutter. She spun and pumped four more shots at the window above, where she could see the snout of a machine gun and hear its incessant chatter.

  She heard a scream ahead and spun to see Eamon, carrying Cal in his arms, fall on the street, spilling Cal’s limp body into the gutter. Bloodstains bloomed on his chest. “Eamon. Eamon.”

  The machine gun clattered on. More shots were coming from God knew where. Erin clapped a hand over one ear and begged the racket to stop. She barely noticed a black station wagon speed past her up the hill road. McGuinness was running. The bastard hadn’t tried to help.

  She sobbed, fumbled for her white hanky, tied it to the muzzle of her rifle, and stepped out into the street, waving her pathetic flag of surrender. She tried to find some shelter in the lee of the tractor. “Stop it. Stop it,” she screamed up at the machine gunners. “For the love of God, stop it.”

  She felt the thump of a bullet strike her thigh. There was no pain, but its force hurled her to the ground. She crawled ahead, dragging the leg behind her. “I’m coming, Cal. Hang on, Eamon.” The firing seemed to have slackened. She forced herself to her knees, made another yard, then collapsed facedown on Eamon’s unmoving chest.

  Her thigh throbbed and burned now, but suddenly there was quiet. The firing had stopped. From where she lay, she could see two uniformed policemen herding a group of civilians and two nuns along the T and away from the barracks. A third nun lay crumpled on the street, limbs awry, black habit and white wimple bloodstained. She looked like a shot magpie.

  Erin struggled to get her back against the wheel of the tractor and stared up at the bucket above her head. The fuse had only minutes to run.

  She tried to crawl away but was too weak. Blood had soaked her trouser leg, and a pool slowly spread on the tarmac. She looked into Eamon’s milky eyes and at Cal’s hands as they clutched empty air. And for Eamon and Cal, and for Ireland, because it wasn’t for herself, she began to whisper, “Hail Mary, full of grace…”

  * * *

  Davy left the van in Lifford where he’d been told to and tucked into a corner of the vacant lot behind a wall, out of sight of the Gardai post on his side of the bridge. He’d ignored Eamon’s instructions to stay with the van and crouched behind the wall to watch the bridge, wishing the black car would get a move on.

  He heard birds bickering behind him and glanced over to where a huge chestnut spread its boughs over a field at the back of the lot. It grew on the banks of a stream he’d crossed on the outskirts of Lifford. The tree’s branches were alive with a flock of jackdaws. Their cawing intensified as the birds exploded into the air. Davy could hear nothing but their strident shrieking. Something had frightened them.

  He had to wait until their racket faded as they flew away before he could hear the distant clatter of automatic weapon fire. He’d heard enough in his time. The deeper note was a GPMG, and he’d never mistake the bark of a Heckler and Koch. It had always been his weapon of choice. Oh, Christ. They were all carrying ArmaLites. They must have run into trouble. Bad trouble, by the way the distant guns yammered and spat.

  He craned round the corner, but all he could see was the bridge and the houses of Strabane. He strained to hear and was able to pick out the sharper cracks of an ArmaLite. At least one of the attack party was returning fire.

  It took little imagination for him to picture the battle that must be raging round the barracks. His first thought was that McGuinness still held on to the passport, and if he’d been shot or taken, all Davy’d gone through would have been a waste of time.

  He’d tried to tell them it was bloody madness to press ahead with this attack when they were so close to getting away. Damn them all. Damn that Erin, beautiful, spirited, in love with Eamon—and so bloody bound and determined to go ahead. Damn Eamon, even if he had been Davy’s friend, a friend Davy knew he could have tried to forgive for roping him in, but whom he might never see again.

  Davy looked at the bridge. Across the river, he could see Ulster Defence Regiment troops spilling from the customs shed, rifles held at the high port. They formed a cordon lining the approaches to the bridge.

  Three men of the Gardai detachment on the Lifford side stood behind a red-and-white-striped barrier gazing toward the sound of gunfire that yammered to a crescendo, fell, then, after a few single shots, died.

  The sudden silence was broken by the sounds of a black station wagon he could see approaching the bridge. Some of the attack party had got away. Perhaps some of them were in the car, wounded. Davy caught his breath as he waited for it to speed up and smash through the barrier, but it slowed as it neared the customs shed on the Northern side.

  He saw soldiers of the Ulster Defence Regiment surround the station wagon. One stood in the middle of the road, hand held aloft, and the rest knelt, rifles pointed at the vehicle’s windscreen. Shite, whoever was in it couldn’t hope to shoot their way out. It was over. The car’s occupants were fucked—and he’d never get his passport now.

  The soldier in the middle of the road bent and seemed to be speaking in through the driver’s window. Davy waited to see how many would get out, hands raised in surrender, but the soldier stood, stepped out of the way, and must have given an order to the covering troops, who lowered their weapons.

  What the hell was going on?

  The red-and-white-striped barrier swung up, and the wagon was driven slowly across the bridge, only to stop at the Gardai post as if it simply held a carload of tourists on an excursion to the Republic.

  How they could be able to talk their way through was a mystery to Davy, but whatever was happening, his job was to get back to the van. He slipped from the corner and limped to where he had left the vehicle. The faint grating noises of gravel under his shoes were covered by the sounds of tires crunching toward him.

  He spun to see the black wagon lurch into the lot. McGuinness was driving. Someone with blond hair sat in the passenger seat. There was no one else inside. Davy wondered if anyone could possibly have survived back in Strabane.

  He watched the wagon skid to a stop, the driver’s door open, and McGuinness struggle out, dragging a little girl by one of her pigtails. The child was in tears. McGuinness hauled her over to Davy.

  “Get that fucking van started. There’s only me coming. The rest’s shot. It was an ambush.” His voice trembled. “And if they’d known to look out for the tractor, they’d’ve had the number of thi
s car. I’d never’ve got through the border, so I grabbed this wee one for a hostage. They had to let me through.”

  “Are you being followed?”

  “No fuckin’ way. The Brits can’t cross the border, and I told the Gardai to stay put for fifteen minutes, or this one”—he jabbed the gun muzzle under the child’s chin—“gets hers.”

  The girl howled, and McGuinness snarled, “Shut the fuck up.”

  “Let her go,” Davy said quietly. “Let her go.”

  “I will not.” McGuinness tightened his grip on her arm. “She’s old enough to get the number of the van and tell the Gardai. We need the van to get to Sean’s people in Castlefinn. You’d feel fucking stupid if we got picked up between here and there.” He kept glancing over his shoulder as if expecting pursuers to appear at any second.

  Davy tried to keep his voice level. “Christ, Brendan, it’s only ten miles. If we go right now, leave her here, it’ll take her a fair while to walk back to the Gardai post. By the time they…”

  “I’m taking no chances.” McGuinness screamed and pushed the child from him.

  Davy caught his breath as she landed on her knees in the gravel. He started to move to her to pick her up but was halted by McGuinness’s yell of, “Stay where you are.”

  As Davy turned, he heard the “snick” as McGuinness released the rifle’s safety catch and saw him tuck its butt into his shoulder. Mother of God, he was going to shoot her. “Brendan, for fuck’s sake, there’s no need for that.” Davy positioned himself between the child and McGuinness. He could see death staring at him from the ArmaLite’s muzzle. “Put the fucking gun down.”

  “Get out of my way. “McGuinness moved sideways to clear his line of fire.

  The wee girl screamed, “Pleeeease.” Just like the one in a burning car in 1974.

  Davy snatched the .25 from his pocket and shot McGuinness. Once. Through his forehead.

  Davy heard the ArmaLite clatter to the gravel, ignored McGuinness where he lay, and pulled the little girl to her feet. “It’s all right,” he said, knowing it wasn’t. “It’s all right.” He hugged her, then held her at arm’s length. He looked into her tear-stained face, saw her grazed knees, then put a hand under her chin and said, “Now run you away on to the nice Garda man at the bridge. He’ll get you back to your mammy.”

  “Yes, Mister,” she sobbed, and started to run.

  Davy bent over McGuinness, fished a Canadian passport out of the man’s inside pocket, flipped it open, confirmed that it was his own photo inside, and stuffed it in his jacket pocket.

  He grabbed a handful of mud from the lot’s verge and smeared it over the van’s rear number plate, climbed in, and drove to the corner of the lot. A quick glance reassured him that the Gardai had obeyed McGuinness’s instructions and were still standing on the bridge.

  Moving deliberately, he eased the van onto the street and drove slowly to the corner, glancing twice in the rearview mirror to make sure he wasn’t being followed. Once out of sight of the bridge, he accelerated along the road to Castlefinn, hoping to God Sean’s people would be there, that they’d get him to Dublin by tonight, and that Sean would help him telephone Vancouver.

  He stopped the van as he crossed the bridge over the stream at the outskirts of Lifford. Davy hefted the .25, the one Erin had smuggled into the Kesh, the one Davy had refused to use on Mr. Smiley in the corridor of H-7 or on the guards in the car park on the day of the jailbreak, the one that had snuffed McGuinness out like a guttering candle. It was McGuinness or the wee girl, Davy tried to reassure himself.

  He stepped out, stood on the parapet, and hurled the revolver as far downstream as he could manage.

  Davy didn’t hear the splash. The morning was riven by the roar of five hundred pounds of exploding ammonal. He turned and saw a smoke cloud rising above Strabane, staining the sky and uniting in its stinking, all-embracing pall the steeples of the Catholic chapel and the Presbyterian church.

  Davy climbed into the driver’s seat, released the brake, and started on his solitary journey to Castlefinn, to Dublin, to Vancouver, and to Fiona.

  EPILOGUE

  IRELAND

  In the twenty-five years of internecine strife (1969–94) in Northern Ireland, 3,268 people were killed and more than thirty thousand wounded. In late August of ’94, Sinn Féin, the political wing of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, announced a ceasefire and called for talks with the British government. At the time of writing for initial publication in 2005, those talks still struggled on but were derailed by a December 2004, $43 million robbery of the Northern Bank in Belfast, which was blamed on a still-active Provisional IRA, and by the Republicans’ refusal to decommission their secret arsenals.

  Some weapons will never be found. A .25 revolver lies rusting on the gravel bed of a stream on the outskirts of Lifford, County Donegal. Six ArmaLites and two Lee-Enfield .303s are gradually corroding in County Tyrone in a neolithic passage grave, where spiders spin their webs over four camp beds and a chemical toilet.

  Sammy McCandless managed to contact Inspector Alfie Ingram, who sent constables to sit by Sammy’s bedside until he was discharged. The Provos were known to have walked into the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast and assassinate informers who were patients. Sammy read in The Belfast Telegraph about the outcome of the Strabane attack and the deaths of Eamon, Cal, and Erin. The story was accompanied by graphic photographs. When he threw up, the pain in his broken ribs was intense.

  He was taken to England and housed alone in disused army married quarters at Catterick Camp on the dismal Yorkshire moors. Six days after he arrived, Sammy whispered “Erin” once, before he hanged himself with the belt of his nice, new, provided-by-the-British-taxpayer trousers. His discarded old clothes were found strewn over the army-issue furniture. Three days’ worth of unwashed plates cluttered the sink. His name is reviled in County Tyrone, and along with Mollie MacDacker and Art O’Hanlon, he will never be forgotten.

  Erin and Cal O’Byrne and Eamon Maguire, more “martyrs for old Ireland,” have been mostly forgotten by the people of Tyrone. Erin got her wish, and her remains were buried under an Irish sky beside Fiach, Cal, and Da in Ballydornan churchyard, close to the old Celtic cross. Eamon Maguire lies in the Maguire family plot. A black-framed photograph of each adorns their gravestones with the lines, only changing where the name of the victim is inserted:

  I Gcuimne, Óglach

  Erin Ó’Broin, Óglaight na hÉireann

  A fuair bás ar saoirse na hÉireann.

  Here lies Erin O’Byrne, volunteer of the Irish Army. She died in the cause of Irish freedom.

  Turloch O’Byrne, Erin’s brother, came back from Australia and still farms the family place. Tessie and Margaret are long dead.

  The Gardai, as required by law, turned Brendan McGuinness’s body over to the Lifford coroner. The cause of death was obvious, and it was a weekend after all, so the coroner decided to forgo the formality of a postmortem and signed the death certificate. As no one claimed the remains, they were sent to the medical school at University College, Galway. A student in the dissecting room remarked on McGuinness’s glass eye and also asked the anatomy teacher if the heart of this particular cadaver wasn’t abnormally shrunken.

  Inspector Alfie Ingram’s contribution to the success of the ambush at Strabane was recognized. He was promoted to chief inspector and continued his undercover work. On June 2, 1994, he was one of twenty-eight people accompanying RUC Detective Inspector Ian Phoenix on RAF Chinook helicopter HC2 ZD576. It flew into the Hill of Stone in the Mull of Kintyre, Scotland, at approximately 6:00 P.M. All twenty-nine people on board died.

  CANADA

  Fiona Kavanagh and Davy McCutcheon live on Whyte Avenue. McCusker is long gone, as is his successor, a ginger tabby also named McCusker. Davy answers to the name Davy McConnan and, when he remembers, wears a pair of plain-glass granny glasses. Davy and Fiona are old now, and their lovemaking, though tender, is infrequent. Davy is less prone to flatulence
but still insists on making tea, even though he grumbles about the water and says Canadian tea is not a patch on the Northern Irish brands.

  Fiona’s nightmare has never returned, but Davy sometimes wakes up trembling and sweating. Like most veterans of a war, he never speaks of his memories, but Fiona understands and comforts him.

  Fiona retired in 1999 as principal of Charles Dickens Elementary School. Davy, after a rapid start in Expo ’86 construction, managed to secure a loan from the Royal Bank of Canada and branched out in partnership with Jimmy Ferguson. They sold their construction company in 1997.

  Davy and Fiona had an anxious few weeks in 1987, when Davy applied to renew his Canadian passport, but the new one arrived without any questions having been asked. The document withstood the scrutiny of the social worker when they adopted two Vietnamese girls in 1988.

  Erin and Siobhan McConnan attend Simon Fraser University. Their da, usually accompanied by his friend Jimmy Ferguson, comes every Saturday in the season to watch them play varsity soccer. The two men can often be heard arguing about the relative merits of women’s soccer and the Celtic matches they remember watching back in Belfast. After the games, they take their pints in Sean and Erin Heather’s pub, the Irish Heather, in Gastown.

  After the death of her father, Becky Johnston left teaching to move to Abbotsford and care for her mother. When her mother died in 1989, Becky surprised her friends in Vancouver by selling up and moving back to Henley-on-Thames. Every year, she and Fiona exchange Christmas cards. Fiona has noticed how spidery Becky’s handwriting has become in the last few years.

  Doctor Tim Andersen devoted himself to his patients and his research for two years. In June 1985, he entered Windshadow in the annual Round Bowen yacht race. His crew for the day failed to show up at Burrard Civic Marina. He sailed single-handedly to Bowen Island’s Union Steamship Company Marina. At the prerace skippers’ meeting, he was approached by a stranger of Danish extraction, Pernille Olafsen, who was willing to crew. He grudgingly agreed to take her aboard. During the race, when Squamish winds blew up to forty knots, it became apparent that she was a first-class foredeck hand, a fine helmsman, and fearless in a stiff blow.