Soldier E: Sniper Fire in Belfast

by Shaun Clarke

  Chapter 10

  Life in O’Leary’s loft was not very comfortable. By the end of the first day the men realized just how uncomfortable it was; by the end of the first night they felt tired, dirty and cramped, with nerves already stretched to the limit and humiliation added to their general sense of deprivation. By day three they felt grubby, exhausted, claustrophobic and increasingly tense.

  It was cold, too. Outside, when they looked through the peep-hole, they could see frost on the pavements and an occasional snow shower. The Belfast winds howled bitterly. In the loft, because of the need to be quiet and not let O’Leary’s neighbours suspect their presence, they could not wear their boots and so, though they wore extra layers of socks, their feet were constantly freezing and their bodies, likewise wrapped in extra clothing, nonetheless were cold more often than not.

  The main problems, however, were domestic. No food could be cooked, so they were forced to subsist on dry, high-calorie rations, such as biscuits, cheese, chocolate and sweets. Although they had a couple of vacuum flasks of hot tea and coffee, they had to strictly limit themselves to one hot drink a day and, for the rest of the time, drink tepid water from the plastic water bottles. As there was nowhere to wash, they could only clean themselves with moisturized cloths and clean their teeth, or rather freshen their mouths, with chewing gum. Even worse, as the loft of O’Leary’s house was not divided from the other lofts, the loft space of the adjoining house was designated as a toilet, with the men using plastic bags for this purpose; which they had to seal and store carefully after use. Since they also had to do this in full view of the other men, Taff found it to be particularly humiliating.

  ‘I was prepared for anything when I was badged,’ he whispered, ‘except for shitting into plastic bags in front of the other men. I mean, that’s too much for me.’

  ‘You’ve got an anal complex,’ Gumboot replied. ‘Me? I’ll shit anywhere except in my own pants and I don’t mind who sees me doing it. A shit is a shit, mate.’

  ‘You’re bloody disgusting, Gumboot. I put it down to country living. I’ve heard a lot of stories about life on the farm and none of them were very nice: Carnal knowledge with animals and suchlike. Did you ever do that?’

  ‘A hole is a hole,’ Gumboot said. ‘What do you think, old mate?’

  Taff didn’t know what to think. He was too tired to think. They had to sleep sitting upright, against the brick walls of the loft, a blanket wrapped around them for warmth, a cushion under the arse. They rested two at a time, with one sleeping, one just relaxing, though the second was compelled to keep his eye on the first in case he talked or cried out in his sleep, alerting the neighbours on either side of O’Leary.

  For that reason, no matter how tired they were, they were all too tense to sleep properly.

  ‘That fucking O’Leary sleeps better than we do,’ Lampton said sardonically to Ricketts. ‘I could kill for his bed.’

  They had learnt from their own surveillance that the tout’s name was O’Leary and that he had been released from Castlereagh detention barracks at the same time as Quinn. They knew he had returned to the house because they could hear him moving about below. Of course, he knew they were above him and tried to stay as quiet as possible, but they heard practically everything – his radio and TV, the flushing of his toilet, the opening and shutting of doors, drawers and cupboards, conversations with his unwanted visitors – and this, combined with what they were picking up from the surveillance, rendered what he did below to be entirely superfluous.

  More interesting what was O’Leary had done before for Lieutenant Cranfield.

  The more I hear, the more I fear for him,’ Lampton said. ‘Cranfield’s out on a narrow ledge.’

  The surveillance was a welcome distraction from the oppressive horrors of daily life in the loft, which inhibited movement and forced them to be unnaturally quiet, talking only in whispers. The surveillance, therefore, was a form of work that acted as therapy and also contained its own fascinations, most of which revolved around Lieutenant Cranfield, who was increasingly revealed as a man unlike other SAS officers.

  ‘He thinks he’s playing an exciting game,’ Ricketts said, ‘but he’s going to get into trouble and maybe drag us down with him.’

  Since starting the surveillance, Ricketts and Lampton in particular, perhaps with a clearer picture of what was actually going on, felt that they were being sucked into a whirlpool of Cranfield’s making. The surveillance itself, apart from being a distraction from the rigours of the loft, was a seductive business, drawing them out of themselves and into the world of Michael Quinn and his fellow PIRA members.

  Hidden in the loft, seeing Quinn’s world through the peep-hole, concentrated and magnified, as it were, by the use of the Thorn EMI hand-held thermal imager, weighing only five kilograms, which he carried on a string around his neck, Ricketts soon began to feel that he was more familiar with Quinn’s world than he was with his own. This sense of extraordinary intimacy, of dissolving into someone else’s existence, was only increased by his frequent recourse to the camera, which was a 35mm Nikon F3HP with a heavy-duty titanium body, telescopic lens, and a Davis Minimodulux image intensifier also used as a night-vision scope. Ricketts had taken so many photos, and studied Quinn so many times through the viewfinder of the camera, seeing him magnified, his every blemish exposed, his every expression exaggerated, that he sometimes felt that he was actually becoming the Irishman himself.

  Perhaps, Ricketts reasoned, Lieutenant Cranfield hadn’t considered just how detailed the surveillance of Quinn could be and, therefore, just how much about himself it would reveal.

  ‘He killed O’Halloran all right,’ Ricketts said to Lampton when they had listened to yet another conversation picked up by the tiny fibre-optic probe camera which had been inserted near the ceiling of the wall in the adjoining house when the soldiers were pretending to search it. With its advanced laser system, the tiny probe picked up the minute vibrations created by conversations in Quinn’s place and transmitted them to a tape-recorder in O’Leary’s loft, thus giving Ricketts and Lampton an invaluable but increasingly hair-raising glimpse into the world of the terrorists and their hunters.

  Released from Castlereagh, Quinn had returned to his home and called an immediate meeting with the other three members of his PIRA murder squad. During that meeting, every word of which was picked up by the probe, Quinn confirmed that Captain Dubois and Lieutenant Cranfield together had made numerous illegal trips across the border in Eire to snatch wanted IRA men and bring them back to Northern Ireland to be ‘captured’ by the RUC and imprisoned. Because of this, it was widely believed that the two men, and certainly Lieutenant Cranfield, had killed O’Halloran as an act of vengeance for the deaths of ten invaluable 14 Intelligence Company ‘Freds’, or turncoats, and the subsequent suicide of Corporal Phillips. As retaliation for this, as well as for Cranfield’s illegal cross-border ‘snatches’, Quinn was going to assassinate Cranfield and seriously damage British morale into the bargain.

  ‘It’s clear from what Quinn says,’ Lampton told Ricketts, ‘that he doesn’t know that O’Leary, his PIRA bookkeeper, is Cranfield’s tout.’

  ‘Which means he can’t possibly know that O’Leary is setting him up to be taken out by Cranfield, instead of vice versa, and that Cranfield has deliberately used O’Halloran’s murder, as well as the death of that boy in the Divis, to make Quinn go for him and give him a legal reason for ambushing him. Cranfield wants a very public hit and propaganda victory, as well as some glory for himself. He wants to be the top man.’

  ‘Which he’ll be if he succeeds.’

  ‘Yes, if he succeeds. But if he fails, that failure will also be public and do us serious damage.’

  ‘Shit!’ Lampton exclaimed, though in a whisper. ‘It goes against the grain of every SAS tenet. It’s self-aggrandizement on a monumental scale. What the hell can we do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Ricketts said. ‘We can’t even get out of this loft on our own.
We can only get out when the Army comes back on another phoney cordon-and-search, and neither Dubois nor Cranfield will ask for that until they’re good and ready.’

  ‘Are you saying we’re trapped here?’ Lampton asked.

  ‘I reckon so,’ Ricketts said.

  Temporary escape from the claustrophobia of the loft came through communication via the Pace Communications Landmaster III hand-held transceiver, operating in the VHF/UHF frequency range, or through the UHG band on their portable radio. Ricketts and Lampton were able to do this even when manning the surveillance equipment, as they were both equipped with Davis M135b covert microphones with standard safety-pin attachment and ear-worn receivers, positioned on the collars of their jackets, with the on/off switches taped to their wrists. One of these was tuned in to the military command network at Lisburn; the other to the surveillance network, including the two OPs in Armagh.

  It was also to military HQ in Lisburn, where Captain Dubois and Lieutenant Cranfield were based for the duration of this surveillance, and to the two OPs in south Armagh that details of Quinn’s plans and movements, as picked up by the surveillance equipment, were relayed by Lampton or Ricketts in short-burst transmissions. As Quinn had suddenly taken to commuting almost daily between Belfast and his cottage in south Armagh, for meetings with other PIRA members, when such plans and movements were discussed, the two OPS in south Armagh were sending similar information back to Lisburn. Based on the information received, Cranfield was going to pick his time for taking out Quinn’s PIRA ASU.

  ‘What he wants,’ Lampton said, ‘is to ambush Quinn when he and his mates are embarked on some illegal PIRA activity. That’s what all this surveillance is for. Also, you can bet that when the sum total of our intelligence gathering is regurgitated in edited form by 14 Intelligence Company, under the supervision of Cranfield’s nervous friend, Captain Dubois, what you’ll have is a report indicating that Quinn was plotting to assassinate Cranfield, but not saying exactly why. More likely it’ll imply that it’s because Cranfield is a supremely efficient SAS officer, deemed as a threat to the IRA in general and PIRA in particular. This will only enhance Cranfield’s reputation and give him an excuse to go for Quinn. I bet Cranfield is good at chess.’

  ‘Diabolical,’ Ricketts said. ‘But if he fails, he’s going to do the SAS enormous harm.’ He squinted through the viewfinder of the Minimodulux image intensifier on the Nikon and saw only the drawn curtains and closed front door of Michael Quinn’s house, ‘Let’s face it, the SAS haven’t exactly done themselves proud here so far. First, two troopers try to rob a bank in Londonderry and get six months for their troubles. Then we get a reputation as a bunch of killers as bad as the Black and Tans. Now we’re arriving in force with a lot of men experienced in jungle or desert warfare, but with no Combat Training experience and no knowledge of the law when it comes to fighting a war on British territory. Given all this, it won’t take too much to damage our reputation further – and what Cranfield’s doing could do just that.’

  ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,’ Lampton said. ‘So if we can’t stop Cranfield – and we can’t – then let’s make sure he doesn’t fail and leave Hereford with egg on its face.’

  ‘Mmmmm,’ Ricketts murmured.

  For the next couple of days he tried to concentrate on the job in hand, studying the street in general and Quinn’s house in particular, by day and by night, with the aid of his hand-held thermal imager, the Minimodulux image intensifier and, most importantly, the fibre-optic probe camera inserted in the wall of the adjoining house and transmitting back to the laser system in the loft. Thus able to see and hear Quinn and his friends at all times, Ricketts and the others were given a comprehensive picture of exactly what they were doing and how they lived.

  It was always difficult to know if an IRA or PIRA member truly believed in the cause or was in it for some other motive. While many had suffered either personally or indirectly at the hands of the British in the past and therefore had genuine motives for fighting them, it was an unfortunate truth that many others simply thrived on the Troubles and had good reason to ensure that they continued. Given the nature of the conflict, it was also an unfortunate truth that dedication and exploitation often tended to become muddled until even the sincere individual had forgotten his original motives and surrendered to the corruption inherent in the situation.

  Though the Troubles had sprung out of genuine grievances, the hard fact of the matter was that much of Belfast was now ruled by graft, blackmail and purely mercenary violence, with protection rackets in abundance and gangs competing to rule their own patch, rewarding those who pleased them, punishing those who did not, and in general using the Troubles as a route to personal power. In this unsavoury stew, therefore, it was difficult to tell if a man was a genuine ‘freedom fighter’ or just another crook.

  That difficulty presented itself when Ricketts and the others observed Quinn. Certainly, it was evident that he ruled his own street, was given due respect from his neighbours, and received a constant stream of visitors to his modest terraced house. Most of the visitors were men, either seasoned PIRA co-workers or adolescent dickers who came to Quinn for discussion or instruction. It was clear from the conversations that weapons were being handed over and taken back, usually accompanied by murmurs about ‘single shot’, ‘both knees’, ‘six-pack’, ‘house call’, ‘post office’ or ‘bookie’s’, suggesting a combination of PIRA punishments, door-stop assassinations and armed robberies of local establishments. It also appeared, from the conversations, that Quinn doled out the weapons and that they had to be returned when the job was done.

  Money also changed hands. It was usually brought in by the older men, who would hand it over while mentioning the names of various pubs, fish-and-chip shops, general stores or betting shops, occasionally saying things like: ‘We fire-bombed some sense into the stupid git and now he’s only too willin’.’

  O’Leary, the tout below, had visited Quinn’s house once since getting out of Castlereagh, attending a PIRA meeting. During a conversation about ‘funds’ and ‘more money for weapons’, the ‘books’ were mentioned by Quinn and O’Leary said he would have them ready soon. When Lampton observed that O’Leary sounded nervous, Taff Burgess responded: ‘I can understand that – what with us being up in his loft and all. How would you feel?’

  ‘I guess you’re right,’ Lampton said.

  At least once each day, Quinn drove with some of the others to his house in Armagh. From information picked up by the OPs overlooking the house, it appeared that he was there to receive daily supplies of weapons being brought in from across the border, probably in hidden compartments in the vehicles.

  ‘He can’t be using his country place as an ammunition dump,’ Lampton said to Ricketts. ‘That would be too dangerous.’

  ‘No,’ Ricketts replied. ‘Not an ammunition dump. Obviously he’s preparing for some forthcoming outrage – something pretty big. Let’s just pray that we find out about it in time to prevent it.’

  ‘He keeps mentioning Cranfield,’ Lampton recalled.

  ‘That’s what worries me,’ Ricketts said.

  Resting in the corner beside the sleeping Taff Burgess, Gumboot suddenly perked up to say: ‘This tout down below us. The one letting us use his loft. Being a tout is one thing – you run the risk of kneecapping – but letting Brits into your loft is something else again. In fact, it’s practically suicidal. What would make O’Leary do it for Cranfield?’

  Lampton shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It must be something pretty heavy,’ Gumboot said, ‘for O’Leary to risk that.’

  ‘Right,’ Ricketts said.

  ‘Why do men become touts?’

  ‘Disillusionment,’ Lampton suggested. ‘Moral revulsion. Money, of course.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Gumboot said. ‘Money. Isn’t O’Leary a PIRA bookkeeper?’

  ‘We picked that up from Quinn,’ Ricketts said.

  ‘So maybe he needed m
oney really bad.’

  ‘He was fiddling the books?’

  ‘Right. So he somehow gets involved with 14 Intelligence Company and ends up with Cranfield. I say the man’s being paid.’

  ‘So, what’s your point?’

  ‘If this guy’s fiddled PIRA books and is getting Cranfield to bail him out, I’d say that Cranfield’s treading tricky water and risking O’Leary’s life. Those bastards across the road, if they ever find out we’ve been here, they’re gonna bury O’Leary. That’s not the SAS Way, folks.’

  ‘It’s Lieutenant Cranfield’s way,’ Lampton said.

  ‘He’s certainly let O’Leary go out on a limb,’ Ricketts said. ‘Out just about as far as you can go without falling off.’

  ‘He must’ve had something on him,’ Gumboot said.

  ‘Blackmail?’ Lampton asked.

  ‘What else?’ Gumboot replied.

  As one day passed into the next and the surveillance intelligence built up, it became clear from what Quinn said, both in Belfast and in Armagh, that he thought of Cranfield as the prime threat to PIRA and was intending to take him out. Equally clear to Ricketts was that Cranfield was virtually using himself as bait to bring Quinn’s gang out into the open, where he could legally, and more publicly, put an end to them. Even more disturbing was the fact that he appeared to be using dubious means of accomplishing his mission and was doing so without consulting his superiors in the intelligence community, let alone those in Hereford. It was this that made him dangerous.

  Nevertheless, regardless of their personal feelings, Ricketts and Lampton, with the able assistance of Gumboot and Taff, continued to keep watch on the house across the road and transmit what they found to Lisburn and the OPs in Armagh. Which is how they discovered that something had gone wrong with the OP covering the road to Dublin.

  They knew that something had happened because communications to that OP were suddenly cut. Before they could make enquiries, they received a communication from Cranfield in Lisburn, informing them that the OP had been dismantled, for reasons which would be explained later. They were, however, to keep in touch with the OP overlooking the Al running between Belfast and Quinn’s cottage.