Deadly States (Seaforth Files by Nicholas P Clark Book 2)

by Clark, Nicholas P

  As usual Barry and the the nature of their mission. summer clothing Jack assumed that the mission was not going to be anything too dangerous—camouflage clothing and combat boots were the dress code for missions where the bullets would fly. This was obviously a re-con mission of some kind; or perhaps the other terrorists in the cell wanted Jack out of the way for a few hours for some reason; and if that was the case then those few hours under the Irish sun could have been his last. When the group got together to discuss one of their members in the absence of that member, it was never good and without exception it led to a one-way drive into the mountains. This was always a real concern to Jack. It wasn’t only Barry who mistrusted Jack. Since he first met with a contact from the terror movement in a bar back in Belfast, there had always been a certain amount of mistrust and uncertainty nailed to Jack as he worked his way up through the ranks. He was, to put it mildly, too good to be true. He was supposedly the son of a dead Belfast woman who had been killed in an accidental shooting by the British army. Jack, or Sean, as he was known to the IRA, had been brought up in England and Scotland as his mother had lived most of her adult life in London. She died during a short visit back to Belfast a few years before Jack turned up in the city. That much was true. It was just the part about Jack being her son that was the lie. As part of that lie Jack let it be known that he wanted to get revenge for the death of his mother, and that he was prepared to go to any lengths to attain that goal. After waiting patiently for several months the IRA finally made contact with Jack.

  Jack’s first mission was the assignation of a young British soldier who was being set up with the help of the girl he was seeing. Jack didn’t kill the soldier but he made it look as if he had. The media, under the direction of the government, carried news of the soldier’s death and from that point on Jack was a fully fledged member of the

  108

  others had kept Jack in the dark about As both Barry and Jack were dressed in

  terror group—or as fully fledged as the terrorists would allow. With his Scottish accent he could easily get close to sensitive targets both in Northern Ireland and back on the UK Mainland. An Irish accent always generated suspicion. It was this one asset that made Jack a very useful member of the organisation, but that same very useful asset made other members of the group, such as Barry, see him as someone who was simply too good to be true. Too good to be true never happened in their world. Too good to be true lead to teams of dead IRA men littering the streets of Britain as the SAS moved in and took them out. There was no surrendering once an operation was set in motion as the unofficial shoot to kill always found the reaction shoot to kill policy slightly amusing—they didn’t have a problem with planting a bomb under the car of a young soldier or police officer, or spraying a van filled with unarmed workmen as they set out for an honest day’s work. But when similar tactics were used on them then their political representatives screamed blue bloody murder. It was a mentality that Jack’s own sense of right and wrong simply could not fathom.

  Jack sighed deeply. He was very good at controlling his emotions, even when he was under the most intense pressure, but the heat and the silly power game being played by Barry was really testing him on that particular day. During the interview process before he was allowed to join the terror group, the IRA took him to an isolated farmhouse in the South of Ireland. It was a tense meeting and at several points during the meeting Jack believed that he was going to die. He never once flinched. He never once lost his cool. But in the heat of that car, on that day, on a mission that he knew very little about and which would probably turn out to be something completely inane, his patience was beginning to wear thin. There was a real danger that the heat would do what a gun pressed to the back of his head could not. He sighed again. Barry did not respond. Barry liked playing this game. Jack may have been a very useful asset. He had the accent and he had a lifetime of paperwork behind him to prove to any nosey official that he was really from Scotland, but out there, in the wilds of South Armagh, Barry was very much the top dog, and he would take every opportunity to piss all over Jack.

  “Is there something that I can help you with soldier?” Barry asked,

  109

  policy was always on their minds. Jack of his colleagues in the movement to the with mild aggression in his tone. The aggression was only tempered by snarling self-satisfaction, and that self-satisfaction reminded Jack that Barry was little more than a self-important asshole—the kind of asshole that could be found in any place of work, and the kind of asshole who didn’t even realise how ridiculous they were and how much his co-workers hated him. Nazi Germany had turned such creatures into a deadly cult, but the rest of the world had too much of a sense of humour to ever allow them to gain that much power. TheIRAwas not the rest of the world and so Barry had found the only workplace in the modern world that would actually put up with him and his nonsense. “Well you could help me with a lot of things Barry, but as you have been acting like a complete arsehole towards me for months now, I would doubt very much that you will help me. I know that you are never going to trust me. Though I think that you don’t trust me because I make you look bad. You talk a big game and you huff and puff and do very little. I have been out there. I have killed. I have put my life on the line for our cause, again and again. You don’t like me because I expose you as the bull shitter that you really are. So, save this cloak and dagger bullshit for someone who might be impressed by it and tell me why the hell we are out here.”

  Barry grinned but he didn’t turn to face Jack. It was an uneasy grin. It was the grin of a man who was just about to strike out. Jack rebuked himself. He had let the situation get the better of him and he had placed his entire cover at risk.

  “You know that everything that we do is on a need to know basis,” Barry said. “If we get pulled over by the army and taken away for interrogation then you will not be able to tell them anything as you will not know anything. It is as simple as that.”

  Barry took the higher ground and made Jack look like the irrational one. It was the IRA’s infamous code of silence and Jack did not have a legitimate argument to make against it. There was silence for a short time. Then, if only to alleviate the boredom, Jack started to play with Barry.

  “It isn’t a shooting mission,” Jack said.

  “And what makes you think that?” Barry asked.

  Barry was willing to play, if only for a little while, as he knew that

  110

  in the end he was right and Jack could not reason his way to making Barry see things in a different way. “Well we aren’t exactly dressed for the occasion. And this is your car. It wouldn’t be very clever to mount any kind of attack in your own car. Even you aren’t that stupid. I hope to Christ that you aren’t that stupid.”

  There was an awkward pause, during which Jack felt that he may have gone too far with Barry—after all, there was only so far that he could push Barry before something snapped. Or at least, that’s how Jack felt at the time; he was later to learn that by pushing Barry’s buttons he actually helped to win his trust—IRA men were suspicious, on edge and paranoid by nature, and if someone was being too helpful then there was something they were hiding. Someone who pushed Barry’s buttons could never be a spy; or so Barry believed. A real spy would have been trained to not lose their cool, and not to ask too many questions.

  “So Sean,” Barry said. “If you know so bloody much then you tell me what we are doing out here on a day like today? Why are we not sitting outside the pub with a pint of the black stuff and a pipe full of baccy?”

  There was another tense pause. Barry was always working an angle but Jack did not know what that angle was.

  “Re-con?” Jack said, simply.

  “After a fashion,” Barry replied.

  “After a fashion? What the hell does that even mean?” Jack said, mockingly. “We are either on a re-con mission or we are not. Why the hell do you insist with this childish double talk? We are on the same side and the
organisation will not fall apart if you answer some noncommittal questions.”

  Without answering Jack’s question Barry pulled the car off the road onto a heather covered verge. Barry got out followed him. Jack was never going to put where Barry was behind him somewhere at the back of the car, while he sat in the front, defenceless. He may not have been armed at that moment but he still had his hand to hand combat training to fall back on, which would at least give him a fighting chance, if it came to that. of the car. Jack quickly himself in the position Barry went to the back of the car and he opened the boot. In seconds Jack was standing beside him. Jack cautiously peered over Barry’s shoulder into the boot. He half expected to see at least one gun in the boot. There were no weapons. In place of the expected guns lay a pair of pretty basic looking binoculars.

  “Didn’t have you pegged as a bird watcher,” Jack said. “Well, maybe looking through a bedroom window as the girl next door got changed. Though I’m sure you will pass that off as being in the interests of the IRA and on a need to know basis.”

  Barry handed Jack the binoculars.

  “The bird that we are going to look for today is a bit more deadly than some birds of prey, or lesser spotted tits. Or tits next door. In fact Sean, the bird that you are going to spot today will kill you if you don’t find him before he finds you. You want to know why we are out here? OK. We are out here to play a little game. If you win the game then we drive back into town and have that pint of Guinness. If you lose the game... If you lose the game then I will roll your body down into the valley below. So Sean, now that I have answered your questions, shall we play? ”

  “Really,” Jack said with a smile. “We are out here to play some stupid game? You brought me here to try to frighten me? You really are a tiny, unimportant little man and I have had enough of your bullshit for one day. Take me back into town now or I will take your car and leave you to walk back.”

  Barry grinned widely and he raised his hand. Almost instantly part of the road next to the car disappeared with a tiny, silent explosion.

  “What the hell,” Jack said. “Are you kidding me?”

  Jack moved to the side of the car, away from where the bullet hit the road.

  “Like I said Sean, if you don’t spot this guy he will kill you. It is a new training regime that we are introducing. Too many of our volunteers have been taken out by SAS sharp shooters in the last year and it is embarrassing. It makes the Brits think that they can win this war. This game will weed out those who are not skilled enough to spot their enemy before he spots them. If they die during training then no one will ever know. We certainly won’t be reading all about it in The Sun or TheTimes.”

  “And how am I supposed to stop him? I don’t have a gun. I certainly don’t have anything like the weapon this guy is using.”

  Barry shook his head and he smiled wickedly once again.

  “Jesus Sean, you really have a problem listening to what other people have to say. I didn’t say that you have to kill him. He is much too valuable to us. A hell of a lot more valuable to us than you, by the way. What I said was that you had to spot him. If you spot him you will live. If you don’t spot him you will die. That is why we are out here today.”

  As Barry finished speaking another bullet tore into the road. This time it impacted less than a foot from Jack; but Jack didn’t flinch. He didn’t like feeling so exposed and vulnerable, but at the same time he genuinely believed that the entire exercise was nothing more than some childish game that had been dreamed up by Barry and one of his sick friends. The IRA had never cared that much about how they were portrayed in the English press, and the simple truth was that the press would spin whatever story the government, and by extension the security services, wanted them to tell.

  “And that’s the other thing Sean. He will fire a shot every sixty seconds. He will get two inches closer to you each time until he hits you. That final bullet will be through your head. So by my calculations I would say you have about five minutes to find him before he ends this wee game. Good luck, mate. And don’t stand too close to my car. I am on a promise later and I wouldn’t want to turn up at her house driving a car like a sieve.”

  Jack knew deep down that there was not really any chance that Barry and his friend were out to kill him, but that kind of dangerous game could end up with an accident taking place that he would not walk away from. When it was over and he was safely back at their base then he would show Barry in no uncertain terms just what he thought of the silly demonstration; but until that time he was going to play along.

  When the third silent shot gorged another piece of the road out like it was made of jelly, Jack raised the binoculars to his eyes and he began to scout the hillside in front of them, where he assumed the sniper was hiding—he wasn’t in the woods behind them, and the angle made a shot from the valley quite impossible, so the hillside was the only logical option. The hill was easily a mile away, possibly more, and it stretched out for a mile and a half. It was quite bare with fewer than a dozen obvious places for a sniper to make himself comfortable. But if this guy was as good as Barry suggested, then he could find cover just about anywhere in the mass of purple heather. The rolling South Armagh countryside made it hard to judge distance with any real degree of accuracy—well it did for Jack, though the gunman did not appear to suffer from that same affliction—the shots were perfectly ranged and bang on target.

  “I must warn you Sean, this guy is the best. And he has something in common with you. He is also a blow-in. Only he came a wee bit further than you did. He’s from the good old U, S of A. Second or third generation Irish who is suffering from the same delusion that many of his countrymen suffer from—that this war is some epic battle of good against evil; right verses wrong. He’s here to rescue his poor Irish cousins from the clutches of the big, bad, British Empire. Normally I would be happy for them to fundraise for us State side, and leave the fighting to us. But this guy is special. He has brought something new to our team, and that doesn’t happen often.”

  Another bullet impacted the ground. The sniper was closing in on him and Jack was beginning to feel the pressure.

  “He is a former Navy Seal. A sniper by trade. The gun he’s using is as long as a man and as light as a feather. The bullets look like they wouldn’t be out of place on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral. Huge bastards they are. Armour piercing. He said that they will pass through the engine block of my car and into your head if you try to hide. It would be worth giving up this piece of shit just to see that. But like I said, I am on a promise later and my curiosity will just have to wait. The old girl will live to see another day.”

  Barry slapped his hand down on the roof of the car as he said those last few words in an effort to make Jack jump. It worked. Jack flashed him a look of anger before returning to the search through the binoculars.

  “This yank has taken out three soldiers so far and he even forced

  114

  a helicopter into an emergency landing last week. We have really big plans for him. He can take his targets out from up to three miles away, or so he says. And from that distance, escaping is never a problem. He’s a real lone wolf. We released him into the mountains last month. For three weeks we heard nothing. We even thought that he might have been captured. Or maybe he got bored and decided it was time to head back home. Then the killings started. He showed up in the Darkly Arms last night. As cool as you like. Just like some dumb American tourist. This one is a cold-hearted killer and I intend to stay on the right side of him. When he was in the pub last night he was laughing and joking like he hadn’t a care in the world. That’s when I set up this little game.”

  “Well it was nice of you to ask me to play with you guys, but I have much more important grown up things to be getting on with,” Jack said.

  “There is nothing more important that this game right now Sean. Some of my comrades think you are nothing short of the second coming. I think that you are full of shit. There is something about you th
at has never sat quite right with me. I don’t think that you are working for the British. Even those ruthless bastards wouldn’t let you kill one of their own soldiers just to put your cover in place. But there is definitely something. This whole mission that you are on, to seek revenge for the death of your mother. I just don’t buy it. You may want to see those who killed her held to account,

  pen through the random killing of soldiers

  but that will never hapor policemen. I kill them

  because they stand in the way of a united Ireland. You expect me to believe that you kill them because you are angry with one unnamed soldier who accidentally killed your mam? That is bullshit.”

  Jack briefly lowered the binoculars and he glared at Barry. “You can believe whatever you want to believe. Frankly Barry I couldn’t give a shit about what you think. I have done everything that has been asked of me and I have done it well. If I do have some ulterior motive then what does it matter? As long as the job is done do you really give that much of a shit?”

  Another bullet. Barry grinned.

  “Just a couple more to go, Sean. And yes it bloody well does mat

  115

  ter to me why you are here. If it isn’t for a united Ireland and it isn’t because of your mother, then that doesn’t leave room for any other explanation,” Barry said, earnestly. He paused, before spitting out the accusation quickly. “You are a cold blooded psychopath. This war is just an excuse to kill. And that my friend makes you even more dangerous to me than the thirty thousand soldiers out there.”

  Jack continued to look through the binoculars. “You are quiet. You are determined. You are intelligent,” Barry said. “But you are not sincere.”

  “If you are right Barry, then I ask you once again; why does it matter? As long as I get the job done then my motivations should not worry you. If you think that I am out here to merely feed some blood lust, then I would be stupid to turn on the people who are helping me feed that desire. Again, and one last time for the hard of understanding; why does it matter? Why should it worry you?”