Once a Pilgrim

by James Deegan

  Geordie shook his hand, looked him in the eye, and promised one more time not to kill the Kosovan.

  And then Carr was in the Audi, down the farm track and away, game face on.

  He was leaving himself plenty of time to get up to Scotland, time in the car which would help him to plan.

  It helped to think of the whole thing in terms of a mission.

  His objective was clear enough: to get to Pat Casey, Freckles, and their inside man in the PSNI, and neutralise them.

  Logical thing was to start with Casey, whose identity he knew and whose movements he could discover, and work his way from there.

  Carr wasn’t sure yet how he was going to hit him, but one thing was for sure – there was no way he was going to walk the streets of Belfast without at least a pistol.

  Geordie Skelton was right: if you believed the newspapers, the Troubles were over, but the papers didn’t know the half of it. True, PIRA was much diminished from its glory days, but there were various offshoots still active, and even those who had jacked it in… There were hundreds of men who would love the chance to take down an SAS man.

  So, yes: he needed a weapon.

  For personal protection, if nothing else.

  He was sure Oleg could have helped him out, but it was just too risky to drive them over to Northern Ireland, what with random searches and sniffer dogs.

  Which was why John Carr’s mind was going back to a night twenty years earlier…

  89.

  CLOWNEY STREET, WEST BELFAST EARLY HOURS, JUNE 27, 1996

  01:00HRS ON A THURSDAY, in a muggy late June.

  The junction of the Falls Road and Beechmount Avenue – known locally as RPG Avenue.

  Coronation Street houses, with a rocket-propelled twist.

  A dangerous, dangerous place in daylight hours – strangers stopped, searched and questioned by the local bhoys, and in serious trouble if they couldn’t give the right answers.

  People had been shot, nailed to floors, and beaten to death just for giving the wrong ones.

  But now the street was quiet, with dawn still a couple of hours away.

  Every man in a half-mile radius snoring in a drunken sleep, after the rare pleasure of watching those English bastards get kicked out of Euro 96 by Andreas Möller and his pals.

  But something was afoot.

  There were two or three unfamiliar vehicles cruising around, and something of an odd pattern in the traffic – not that the casual observer would have realised. In fact, a surveillance expert at the very top of his game wouldn’t have put the pieces together, because the people involved were themselves the very best players around.

  Presently, another car, a dark-coloured Vauxhall Cavalier, pulled over and two men got out.

  Just a couple of mates who’d passed an evening together, and were now finishing the night and sloping off home to bed.

  One, long-haired and slim, black Sisters of Mercy T-shirt, goatee, earring in each ear; the other broad and stocky, a fuller beard, dark jeans – not unlike Gerry Adams in appearance, now you mentioned it.

  Both wearing black trainers and both looking like they needed a good wash.

  One thing neither of them looked like was what they were.

  Because they were both British soldiers, members of the Det.

  Long days and nights spent operating in very close proximity to hardened terrorists, often alone, and with no immediate support.

  Every single man – or woman – having put their hand up for this, well aware of the consequences of capture.

  Not thinking too much about them, mind.

  The front seat passenger leaned back in and spent a moment chatting casually with the driver. There was a chuckle, and a friendly slap of the shoulder, and then the Vauxhall departed back off along the Falls towards the city centre.

  No-one saw the driver say, from the corner of his mouth, ‘That’s drop-off complete.’

  The Gerry Adams lookalike – he was actually a six-year SAS veteran called John Carr, well into a secondment tour with the Det – looked at his mate.

  Grinned, and – quietly, into his hidden mike – said, ‘19 radio check, toward RV1.’

  Rendezvous 1.

  A moment later, he and several others heard the response in hidden earpieces: ‘All calls, this is Zero. 19 is towards RV1.’

  The desk, acknowledging the call from the Operations centre, miles away at a secret location on the south east side of the city – each phase of the operation being monitored there, at the Tasking and Co-ordinating Group at Knock, and by the hidden supporting team on the ground.

  ‘Let’s go, Steve,’ said Carr.

  They strolled down Beechmount like they hadn’t a care in the world – though they kept to the shadows as much as possible, and their outward nonchalance hid minds that were working overtime.

  Their senses only heightened once they’d turned left into Clowney Street, with its low ranks of brick-built terraces.

  A full-ish moon, but a cloudy night, so no issues there.

  The odd window was lit, though, and they were careful both to avoid the splash of illumination and to check for signs of life.

  They walked silently on rubber soles, ears straining to hear any sound.

  This was dangerous ground: enemy ground.

  Truly, their lives were on the line.

  But all was quiet.

  Halfway down, they came to an alleyway which took you through to the next street, or left and right to the back-to-back gardens full of raggedy old sofas, rusty bikes and the occasional veg patch.

  Whispering now, John Carr said, ‘RV1 to FRV.’

  FRV being the final rendezvous, the gate to the back yard of the target house.

  ‘All calls, this is Zero, 19 RV1 to FRV,’ said the desk, in his ear.

  Down the alley.

  Which was empty.

  Left into the rat-run between the gardens.

  Four gates down.

  John Carr paused by the gate.

  Heart rate slightly elevated.

  Overhead, the clouds parted for a few fleeting moments, and he pressed himself against the wall to avoid the shadow cast by the two-thirds moon.

  Whispered, ‘At FRV.’

  The moon vanished again, and both men waited in silence.

  One minute.

  Two minutes.

  In the still night air, a distant car horn sounded and someone shouted something.

  A few gardens away, restless chickens clucked in their coop.

  Carr let his right hand drop to his waistband, and felt the reassuring presence of his Sig 226.

  You never, ever wanted to fire a weapon in a place and time like this, because that meant things had gone to shit and your life was in extreme danger.

  But it was better to have and not need than need and not have.

  He put his hand around the pistol grip, and pulled it from his waistband.

  Held it tight to his thigh.

  Heart rate a little more elevated, now: this was an area of vulnerability.

  This was not like a back alley in any other city in the UK. Here, in the heart of PIRA territory, if they were seen they were compromised.

  And if they were compromised…

  Carr looked at Steve.

  Nodded.

  Whispered, ‘Towards entry point.’

  The desk repeated the call.

  He opened the latch on the gate – fortunately, it was recently greased – and stood to one side to let Steve pass.

  Shut the gate.

  Both men slipped across the courtyard.

  A dozen silent steps and they were at the back door, in the shadow of the house itself.

  Unseen.

  They held their position and waited again.

  Taking in the atmospherics.

  The house was in darkness.

  Two – no, three – doors down, a bedroom light was on.

  But no-one looked out of the window, or any of the windows.

  And why wou
ld they?

  No-one had cause to suspect that this particular house would be of interest to the British Army, after all.

  It was home to a Northern Ireland Electricity fitter and his lollipop lady wife, and – beyond a general dislike of prods and Brits – they had no connection to, or interest in, the ‘armed struggle’.

  And yet.

  The biggest challenge for the Provisional IRA was in obtaining weapons; the second biggest was in hiding them away from prying eyes.

  And by a very painful process of trial and error, they had become very creative.

  Underground tunnels out in the southern wilds.

  Waterproofed barrels in slurry pits.

  Long-term caches laid in the foundations of new-build houses.

  And others secreted in nondescript terraced houses in west Belfast.

  With the knowledge of these locations kept to an extremely small circle, just two or three men, to avoid one arrest leading to the loss of everything.

  The couple presently slumbering in the bedroom above John Carr’s head were not long back from two weeks in Benidorm. Unbeknown to them, while they’d been sucking down sangria and giving themselves sunburn on the Costa Blanca, a brace of terrorists had entered their house and had hidden inside it a pistol and a long weapon, and a decent quantity of ammunition. There it would stay until such time as it was required; if and when that day arrived, the Northern Ireland Electricity fitter and the lollipop lady were in for a very great surprise indeed.

  But if the owners of this house were completely oblivious to the existence of the weapons cache, others were not.

  Army Intelligence had an exceptional source, a well-known Provo who went under the codename ‘Catweazle’.

  A key figure in the IRA infrastructure in the Beechmounts area, and a respected man amongst his peers, ‘the Weasel’ – as his handler liked to call him – was a man who, had he been a soldier of the Crown, would have been decorated for his sizeable contribution to the ongoing war against terrorism.

  The Weasel had started out a true believer, and had never intended to help the Brits, whom he hated as much as the next man.

  But we all have our weak points, and the Weasel’s was in his personal proclivities.

  It had happened late in the 1980s. He’d been driving to the bookie’s with a smile on his face and a song in his heart, when, wouldn’t you fucking know it, he’d been pulled over by the Army. What had at first appeared to be a minor ball-ache – though he’d miss the chance to get on the 3.50 – had quickly turned into something a lot more troubling.

  The uniformed private who leaned in at his window was actually an intelligence officer working undercover – if you could get your head around that, and it had taken the Weasel long enough – and this had, in fact, been a pre-planned stop.

  After a few moments’ chat, the officer had reached inside his camo smock and handed over a slim file.

  The contents of the file had left the Weasel drained of colour and feeling nauseated.

  Four or five photographs of himself in flagrante with a young man in the public toilets at that park out at Mallusk.

  High-resolution photographs, at that.

  He was caught between marvelling at how the bastards had managed to take them, and wondering what would happen to him when the fellas found out. Homosexuality was frowned upon in his circle, to put it very mildly: the minimum he could expect was to be properly fucked up – like, a couple of weeks in hospital, and three months on crutches – and it might be a lot worse than that.

  He was drowning in a sea of shite, and then the man from Army Intelligence had thrown him a rubber ring.

  Working for the Army had not come easy, at first, but the money, and the protection, and the thrill of the risks he was running had all got mixed in together, and he had become extremely good.

  Over the last few years, he’d helped to disrupt multiple operations against the security forces, leading to the recovery of numerous amounts of ammunition and weaponry, and the incarceration or death of several PIRA men.

  Among the latter his own brother-in-law, who’d been shot like a dog by the SAS as he was about to fire an RPG7 into the rear of a police Hotspur on Fruithill Park.

  Trouble was, the Weasel had been too successful.

  Too many coincidences, too many times.

  Too many botched operations where he’d been involved somewhere along the line.

  He didn’t know it, but the IRA’s internal security team had been watching him closely, and – as John Carr and his oppo crouched by that back door at the rear of the house in Clowney Street – the Weasel had only a few days to live.

  Not that that made any difference to the two Det men.

  Steve was the entry man – trained to unlock locks and defeat alarms, he could have got you inside John Major’s bog if required – and now he knelt down by the door, a set of picks in hand.

  ‘At entry point, about to make entry.’

  Repeated by the desk.

  Steve made quick work of the mortice lock.

  Behind them, a sudden noise – high-pitched, then a crash.

  John Carr’s heart skipped a beat.

  A fucking cat, yowling, and then a bin lid.

  ‘Entry complete.’

  It had taken but a few seconds, and now they were inside the kitchen.

  It smelled of fried food and air freshener.

  Steve locked the kitchen door behind them, and both men stood there, pistols in hand.

  Not moving.

  Not even breathing.

  Hearts thumping, listening for anything out of the ordinary.

  If they had been set up – and it wasn’t unknown – then this was when it would happen.

  A minute went by.

  Slowly, they exhaled and breathed.

  Their eyes grew accustomed to the dark.

  Two minutes.

  Five minutes.

  ‘About to conduct search,’ whispered Carr, into his mike.

  They moved quietly from the kitchen into the pitch-dark hallway.

  The Weasel’s intelligence was that the hide was under the floorboards in the cupboard under the stairs, but before they started looking they needed to clear the place, room-by-room.

  So the next few minutes saw the two men creep through or into every room, until they found themselves back downstairs, having established that the only occupants were the fitter and his missus, and that both were deep in the land of nod.

  There being no immediate threat, both pistols were put away and they got to work.

  Steve took up a position with a view up the stairs, ready to whisper a warning if they stirred.

  Carr opened the door to the cupboard and switched on a dim head torch.

  ‘Thank fuck for that,’ he said, under his breath. The small space was all but empty: a Hoover, an empty washing basket, a brush, and a stack of Railway magazines… Evidently, the man of the house was a trainspotter.

  Carr took out a piece of paper and a pen and drew a quick orientation sketch, to show where everything was, and then began to remove the items.

  Once everything was out, he felt along the top of the skirting board inside the cupboard.

  Something gave on the section immediately to the right of the small door.

  He pushed downwards, and the board popped up with a quiet crack which sounded to him like a rifle shot.

  He waited a few moments.

  No reaction from upstairs, so he prised out a two-foot section of skirting. That allowed him to remove the other two pieces and revealed that a new trapdoor had been created in the floor, with the hinges hidden by the skirting.

  Clever fuckers, he thought. Tidy work, too.

  He lifted the trap door and propped it back against the angle of the stairs.

  In the low light from his head torch, he saw a black bag.

  He reached down and…

  A strangled Psst.

  A noise from upstairs.

  He clicked off the torch and
then froze.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Steve pressed into the wall, Sig half-levelled, eyes up the stairs.

  The sound of feet padding across the landing.

  A bathroom door opening.

  Silence for a few moments.

  Liquid flowing.

  Forever.

  Christ, he must have had a skinful.

  The bog flushing, muffled padding, a creak of bedsprings.

  Silence.

  Carr waited five minutes, maybe longer.

  Then he clicked the torch back on, reached down and – very carefully, and slowly, to minimise the noise – retrieved the bag.

  Opened it on the carpet.

  There was a folded-up AKSU-74, and four magazines for the weapon, wrapped in a towel. Two pillowcases - one containing six twenty-round boxes of 7.62mm short rounds, the other a Browning 9mm Hi-Power automatic with three magazines and a hundred-odd loose rounds.

  He confirmed the contents with the desk, and then began carefully photographing them, working methodically in the knowledge that the summer sun was on its way.

  Eventually, job done, he replaced the weapons in the bag, and the bag in the hole, and put back the floor and the skirting.

  Then – using his sketch – he replaced the contents of the under-stairs cupboard on top of the hide, and carefully shut the door.

  Confirming his progress over the radio as he did so – ‘Leaving target towards pick-up’ – he crept back out to the kitchen, Steve following.

  In a matter of moments they were through the door and out into the cool pre-dawn, and a minute later they had crossed the courtyard, and walked down the alleyway, and away.

  The whole thing had taken almost exactly 180 minutes.

  A few streets later, having conducted counter-surveillance, they were collected by a man driving a black work van.

  Just two blokes heading off to start their day on a site somewhere, as the first pink blush of dawn splashed across the sky.

  90.

  HE WAS NORTH of Stoke on the M6 by the time he had finished walking himself mentally through that night.

  And, as he drove, Carr realised that the hairs on the back of his neck were on end.

  The power of old memories.

  For a moment there, he’d been back in that house, lifting those boards.

  The reason he’d been revisiting that particular place in his mind was simple enough.