Reaper

by Hurley, Graham

She nodded, not looking up. “Yes.”

  He hesitated a moment, then folded the map, checked the envelope, and slid both into his pocket. He leaned towards her, meaning to kiss her, then changed his mind and stood up. The wind had stiffened from the north. It was colder. He gazed down at her for a moment.

  “Bye,” he said, turning on his heel, and walking away.

  An unmarked civilian car, a dark red Maxi with Northern Irish plates, picked up Miller from RAF Aldergrove, Belfast’s principal airport. He arrived after dark, stepping off the evening BA shuttle, carrying the single holdall as cabin luggage, walking straight past the queue at the reclaim carousel, out onto the concourse. The waiting driver also wore civvies. Miller, who knew him by name, greeted him with a smile and a nod of the head.

  They drove south, skirting the shores of Lough Neagh, down past Lurgan, avoiding Belfast. At Newry, they turned right, the driver checking and rechecking his mirror, watching the pattern of cars behind, looking for the tell-tale signs of a shadow. At the barracks at Bessbrook, he slowed, turning in past the sandbagged entrance, showing his pass at the gate. The younger of the two sentries, a newcomer to Northern Ireland, squinted after the departing Maxi. Normally, every civvie had to submit to a search. On this occasion, a quick visual and a nod had seemed enough.

  “What’s that all about then?” he queried.

  The other man, a corporal, didn’t take his eyes off the road outside.

  “Nineteenth,” he said simply.

  The Maxi drove to a remote corner of the barracks and stopped outside a two-storey block. Lights were on in the rooms downstairs, curtains tightly drawn against the darkness outside. There were TV surveillance cameras mounted high on the brickwork. The brackets looked new. Miller retrieved his holdall, thanked the driver, and walked the twenty yards across the grass to the building’s main entrance.

  Inside, past the armed guard at the door, it looked like a school: green walls, red fire extinguishers, a single long corridor, and a musty, slightly sour, institutional smell. Miller walked down the corridor, pausing at a door near the end. He glanced briefly at his watch, then went in. The room was small, and warm, and fuggy. There was a grey filing cabinet in one corner, and a battered old sofa, and a couple of chairs, and a single desk. Standing over the desk was a youth in his early twenties. He wore jeans and a heavy, knitted sweater. His hair was long, tied in a neat pony tail, and there was half a roll-up smouldering in the ashtray beside an open map. The map was spread the length of the desk. Miller looked at it, recognizing the familiar contours of South Armagh, the browns shading into yellows across the border, the tiny villages dotted black. The youth behind the desk glanced up, and stiffened.

  “Sir.”

  Miller smiled, dropping the holdall onto the sofa. “Charlie,” he said briefly.

  “Good trip?”

  “Excellent.”

  “Tea, sir?”

  “Please.”

  Charlie stepped across to the window, checked an electric kettle on the floor, and plugged it in. He had a soft, Irish accent, but a military training had settled perceptibly upon him. He reacted quickly. He showed respect. The two men obviously knew each other well. The kettle began to hum. Charlie glanced back over his shoulder. Miller had sat down on the sofa, and was loosening his shoes. He kicked one off after the other, stretching the length of the sofa.

  “I liberated some Scotch,” he said, “compliments of Curzon Street. Here.”

  He unzipped the holdall and took out a bottle of Johnny Walker. He tossed it across the room. Charlie caught it deftly, surprised. He’d never put Miller down as a drinker.

  “Now?” he said.

  “Please.”

  “Tea as well?”

  “Why not?”

  Charlie shrugged, unscrewing the Scotch and decanting two glassfuls.

  “Dunno,” he said, “just thought I’d ask.” He paused and looked up. “Not celebrating, are we?”

  There was a brief silence, then a chuckle as Miller’s head went back, and his eyes closed.

  “You tell me,” he said, “you bloody found the man.”

  Two hours later, in one of the briefing rooms upstairs, Miller addressed the small squad of men he’d already hand-picked for the operation. Including Charlie, there were four of them, a tight, flexible unit, ASU-size, ideal for what he had in mind. They sat in a loose semi-circle, jeans and T-shirts, and curls of smoke from another of Charlie’s roll-ups. They listened intently, occasionally making notes on the Army-issue tear-pads, following his careful exposition, step by step.

  He began by sketching in background, the recent mainland bombing campaign, the casualties they’d taken in Chelsea and Oxford Street, the car bomb that had so nearly robbed the Royal Marines of their commanding officer, all of it evidence of careful planning, and decent fieldwork. Over December, he told them, there’d been a lull. Scotland Yard had talked cautiously of a withdrawal, or some kind of home goal. Then, only days ago, the Qualitech bomb, a straightforward assassination attempt, the clearest possible warning that the boys from Belfast were back in business. The mood in Downing Street was, he remarked drily, a little tense. The Anti-Terrorist mob were pursuing certain leads, and with luck they might come up with something before the end of the decade, but now – in the real world – there were calls for a counter-stroke. It was no longer enough to wait. It was time to seize the initiative.

  He paused and looked round. All of these men had been part of Nineteenth Intelligence for at least a year. They’d come from the regular SAS battalions at Hereford, and they had no illusions about the glamour of the job. They knew it was nasty, and they knew it was dangerous, but they knew as well that they had a real insulation from the normal chains of command. They had unprecedented freedom of action, and access to whatever firepower they required. They roamed selected areas of the Province, sometimes Belfast, sometimes the smaller towns, sometimes the wild border country down in Fermanagh and South Armagh. Occasionally, they strayed a mile or so into the Republic. Always working undercover, they developed contacts, acquired information, analysed it, and – when the time was right – drew the appropriate operational conclusions. Executing the latter – a burst of gunfire in the hills, a stake-out in Belfast – had rapidly become the Nineteenth’s speciality. They fought a war without uniforms, a war without rules, and more often than not, they won.

  Miller reached for his mustard-yellow file and took out a sheaf of photocopied maps. Charlie distributed them, one to each man. Miller began to outline the operation, carefully rationing the information, telling these men no more than they needed to know. It was to be a snatch, he said. A man of forty-eight. A top Provo staff officer believed to be in charge of the current England Department. He was to be taken on Saturday afternoon, at a known address, and transported in the boot of a car. He was to be handed over to a special interrogation unit, flown over from London. They would empty him of every particle of information, and afterwards – if there was an afterwards – he’d be put away. If what he heard was true, he said, then yer man was the real thing. The once-in-a-decade breakthrough. The mother lode.

  He paused, then directed their attention to the maps. Heads bent. One man, quicker than the rest, whistled softly.

  “Dublin?” He sounded incredulous. “Do the locals know?”

  Miller grinned at him. “Good question.”

  Another man looked up, his finger on the black china-graphed cross on the Dublin street map. “Well?” he said. “Do they?”

  Miller shook his head. “No,” he said. “The locals know nothing. We’re in and out. The money’s on not getting caught.”

  “But what if …” he shrugged, “we do?”

  “We won’t. We can’t. The Garda won’t wear a joint operation. Not in the middle of Dublin. And higher up it’s politically impossible to even ask. So we’re on our own. As ever.”

  There was a long silence while the men absorbed the implications of Miller’s cheerful optimism. A couple of hours staking
out a farmhouse three or four miles the other side of the border was one thing. A run into Dublin was quite another. They were hardly Bomber Command.

  Charlie plugged in a small projector, and loaded it with two slides, while Miller filled in more details. They’d be working in three teams, three separate cars. They’d be leaving Bessbrook at first light, Saturday morning for the two-hour run to Dublin. The cars would have Republican number plates. They’d rendezvous north of the airport in a car-park in Swords. Unit One would drive into Dublin and establish surveillance on the property in question. In all likelihood, the target would already be inside the house. Unit Two would go to the airport and await an inbound London flight. A second target would arrive on the flight and travel to the house under surveillance. Unit Two would follow him. Unit Three, meanwhile, would be in reserve. Miller himself would be part of Unit One. He’d make the decision to snatch the target. The target would be taken in, or near, the house at gunpoint. He’d be drugged, taped, and driven north in the boot of the Unit One car. They’d cross the border on an unadopted road between Castleblayney and Cullyhanna. With luck, they’d be back in Bessbrook in time for supper. He detailed the radio frequencies they’d be using, both primary and secondary, and then he closed the file.

  One man looked up. “This address,” he said. “How do we know it’s kosher?”

  Miller looked at him. “Can’t say.”

  “But is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re sure?”

  Miller hesitated a moment, knowing where a truthful answer might lead. No other Intelligence agencies were yet involved, not even MI5, so there were no cross-checks, no correlation. He simply had to trust his source. He glanced across at Charlie. Charlie was studying his fingernails.

  “Yes,” Miller said, “we’re sure.”

  There was another silence, the men still looking at him, the most obvious question of all still unanswered. Miller nodded at Charlie. Charlie switched on the projector, focusing the image on the fading yellow paint of the wall opposite. Heads turned. Eyes narrowed. The first slide showed a man in his thirties, head and shoulders, collar and tie, a large, bony face with a hint of amusement in the eyes behind the thick rimless glasses. The shot was well-lit, and looked official. Miller stood between the men and the wall, inspecting it.

  “Name’s Leeson,” he said briefly, “he’s the one on the plane.”

  He nodded again at Charlie. Charlie changed the slide. Another head swam into focus, quarter profile, a man in his forties, long solemn face, carefully parted hair, possibly in a car, obviously a snatched shot, the detail grainy, the subject – or the camera – moving at speed. Miller let the image register for a full ten seconds. Then he eased into the pool of reflected light, gazing up at the face on the wall.

  “This one’s the target,” he said. “He’s the star prize. His name’s Scullen …” He turned back into the room. “He has a nickname, too. We’ll use it to code the operation.”

  Miller glanced up at the wall again. For a moment, there was silence. Then a voice from the back, the obvious question.

  “Well, boss? What is it? What do they call him?”

  Miller looked back at them, his eyes narrowed against the beam of light from the projector, his head casting a harsh black shadow against the image on the wall. He began to smile.

  “Reaper,” he said softly.

  BOOK TWO

  EIGHT

  The big four-engined C–130, grey, fat-bellied, Argentinian roundels stencilling the bulge of the fuselage, lifted off from the air base at Comodoro Rivadavia. Wheeling left over the Gulf of San Jorge, it began to climb towards the thin layer of high, wispy cloud feathering the sky above. The Met. Officer at the pre-breakfast briefing had waxed lyrical about the forecast weather. En route, he’d said, they could expect light beam winds from the south, and negligible turbulence. Over the target, for once, he could guarantee no cloud cover, and near-perfect visibility. They could run in low, or select a higher altitude, as they wished. As luck would have it, a perfect summer’s day.

  The C–130 thundered south-east. The engineer served hot, sweet coffee from a Thermos, and distributed small, iced tea-cakes his wife had made specially. Up in the cockpit, the captain donned Air Force issue wraparounds against the glare of the sun, while the co-pilot plotted satellite coordinates against the chinagraphed line on the map on his lap. Thirty thousand feet beneath them, the South Atlantic shimmered, deep blue, for once undisturbed by the long swells that normally rolled in from the Southern Ocean.

  Two and a half hours later, at a prompt from the co-pilot, the captain eased back the throttles. The black nose of the C–130 began to dip. He eased the aircraft into a gentle left-hand turn. Already, ahead on the horizon, he could make out the low blur of the islands, West Falkland and East Falkland, with a ribbon of silvery water between them.

  The engine note changed again, as he began to arrest the descent. At two thousand feet he levelled out, cutting the airspeed to 220 knots, a compromise he’d already agreed with the boys from Buenos Aires, busy adjusting their equipment, way back in the belly of the plane. At 220 knots, they’d have the steadiest of platforms with wide fields of view; while if he had trouble, there was at least seventy knots in hand before the big aircraft was in any danger of stalling. Not that trouble was expected. He’d been tasked for this same operation on four previous occasions. Each time, even at low level, the reconnaissance runs had been child’s play. Of the two thousand islanders, campesinos ingleses, there’d been very little sign, and the few figures he’d spotted – the odd sheep farmer out on the hills, a handful of shoppers in Port Stanley – had offered nothing more menacing than simple curiosity, their faces tilted up, their hands shading their eyes, arms and fingers stretched upwards, pointing. If it ever came to bullets, the most they could manage would be twelve-bore shot-guns and high-velocity hunting rifles. And that, in a sense, said it all. The Malvinas belonged to Argentina. Restoration, when it happened, would be the merest formality.

  The big aircraft dipped a wing, and banked to the right, the four turboprops whining, the compass steadying onto a new heading. The first pass, at two thousand feet, was perfect. The photographers bent to their viewfinders, the greens and the browns of the endless tussocks unspooling beneath them, then the rocky outcrops around Mount Kent and Two Sisters, the long swell of Tumbledown, then the red-roofed bungalows dotting the outskirts of Port Stanley, and the ribbon of tarmac that served as the main street, the ancient Land-Rovers parked untidily outside the West Store, the supply boat from the mainland moored out in the bay. Wheeling left, the Captain took the C–130 north, leaving Port Stanley behind, covering the six miles to the airport in a fraction over two minutes. The airport’s single runway was empty. An Aerolineas Fokker Friendship stood on the tarmac in front of the cluster of prefabs that served as the terminal buildings. There was a fuel bowser near by, and further away, a ragged line of single-engined, private aircraft parked beside the airport’s only hangar.

  Out beyond the airport, the Captain began to climb. He fingered the button on the control column that accessed the aircraft’s intercom. They’d want, he knew, a second run, higher, offering a wider view. The planners in the Ministry of National Defence off the Plaza de Mayo liked to work off a single photographic image, high resolution, Port Stanley and the surrounding area, two hundred square miles at least.

  He peered down at the islands below. His own taste was for Buenos Aires: people, and restaurants, and the constant buzz of big-city life. There was a potent symbolism about the Malvinas, a catch in the national throat, and he shared it, but he’d need a great deal of persuading to actually set foot on the islands. They were bare, and windswept, and entirely without charm. The weather was awful, and the food worse, and even the sheep were rumoured to be half-crazy. Quite why people lived there at all was beyond him. You had to be British to be that anti-social.

  There was a crackle of static in his headphones. Then one of the photographers beg
an to come through. He sounded pleased with himself.

  “Perfecto,” he said. “Perfecto. Give us one more run, then we’re through. Ten thousand, if you can manage it.”

  The captain murmured an acknowledgement on the intercom, pushing the throttles forward, easing the control column back, watching the altimeter wind ever upwards. The sun was on his face again. There was, to his certain knowledge, at least another cupful of coffee in the Thermos.

  “Ten thousand feet,” he confirmed with a smile. “Perfecto.”

  Jude Little was out of traction by the time Buddy returned to the hospital.

  He’d come straight from Heathrow on the overnight flight from Boston. He’d slept for an hour or so on the plane, but had spent the rest of the time reading and rereading the articles Pascale had given him. They were difficult going, sure, but the hours he’d put in at the public library had given him the basics, and he could more or less guess the rest.

  The theory seemed simple enough. Central nervous tissue from unborn rats had a certain growth capacity that researchers were investigating. It could conduct tiny – but measurable – quantities of electricity. Grafted across dead human tissue in the spinal cord, there was – in theory – no reason why it shouldn’t reopen a pathway for messages from the brain. The academic debate had been raging in the States for more than a year. Would it work for human tetraplegics? Or would the body simply reject the grafts? The scientific establishment said it was dangerous nonsense. A handful of researchers said they were wrong. Pascale’s contribution was to take the shortest cut of all, and try it out. For real.

  The articles Buddy had read were convincing enough. They spoke of real sensory gains, and functioning neural pathways. His tour of the Clinic, too, had impressed him: half a dozen airy, spacious bedrooms, beautifully appointed, for patients under treatment, full physiotherapy facilities, a small heated indoor pool, and an operating suite that looked – to Buddy – the equal of any facility he’d ever seen. The tour over, Pascale had accompanied him to the waiting cab. He’d been scrupulously even-handed throughout, careful not to overstate the prospects, but far from defensive. The three patients currently awaiting treatment, he’d pointed out, had all had similar injuries to Jude’s. Their prognosis was awful. They faced the certainty of the rest of their lives in a wheelchair. All Pascale was doing was offering them a second chance. It might work. They might regain a little feeling, a little movement. It was a risk, he considered, worth taking.