by Chris Ryan
‘Don’t be discouraged,’ said Ridley. ‘They’re very . . . educated fish.’
At the next pool, at Ridley’s suggestion, Eve stood behind Slater and guided his casting arm. Eventually, after a number of mishaps and tangles, he got the feel of it. He also got the feel of Eve’s breasts against his back, but decided to file the sensation away for later retrieval. He was determined to catch one of these bloody trout.
‘Why don’t we split up?’ Ridley suggested. ‘Neil, you go upriver a hundred yards, Eve can stay here, and I’ll go down to the bottom field. Oh and Neil, anything over a couple of pounds, knock it on the head and we’ll have it for supper.’
Keeping well back from the bank, Slater walked up through the buttercups with the split-cane rod at his side. It was a hot afternoon, bees hummed, and bullocks regarded him incuriously. Finding the pool he had been directed to, he knelt down beside an alder bush in order not to silhouette himself against the skyline, and started to cast. There were two fish in view, swimming side by side in the centre of the river. With no obstruction nearby Slater managed to float his fly past them a dozen times, but they ignored it. Painstakingly he knotted on another on another fly, but with the same result. For half an hour he tried to cast as Ridley had done, but it was no good. The fish seemed to be laughing at him, hovering in the current and then lazily scattering as soon as he made a move towards them. Sometimes they didn’t even bother to swim away, but merely ignored him. Perhaps, Slater mused irritably, you had to have been an officer for them to take you seriously.
But there had to be a way. He was damned if he was going to return to the house empty-handed. Improvise, he told himself – as you have spent your life improvising. If fair means don’t get you where you want, try foul. On hands and knees now, he rounded a bend in the river and peered over the side of the bank. Below him, finning placidly over the gravel, was the long, ghostly form of a trout. It was the best fish he’d seen all day.
Retreating from the bank, he looked round and made sure that he was out of sight. Then taking the flybox from the bag that Ridley had lent him, he selected the largest fly he could find. Hooking its barbed point into a stick he took his lighter from his pocket and burnt off the feather hackles of the fly until only the bare hook remained. This he attached to his line. Crossing to the bullocks’ field he found a splatter of dried dung. Beneath it, as there had always been in his boyhood, he found a colony of lively red worms. Six of these went on to the hook.
Returning to the bank, which overhung the river by a couple of metres, he pulled two or three yards of line off the reel. If he stuck the end of the rod over the bank, he guessed, the fish would spook. So keeping well back, he took the writhing bundle of hooked worms in his hand, and lobbed it a few feet upstream of where he had seen the fish.
For a second nothing happened, then there was a loud gloop, and the fly-line started snaking through the grass. Seizing the rod, Slater held hard. The split-cane bent double, and then line started zipping through his fingers. The fish was thirty yards upstream before he managed to turn it, and this was only the first of half a dozen such runs.
Finally the trout lay beneath him, beaten, but here the bank was too high – five or six feet above the water – to reach it with the net.
Only one thing for it – and Slater slid feet-first into the river, feeling his Italian trousers rend as he went. He went in up to his waist, and finding his feet, quietly netted the fish. It was a beautiful thing, perhaps three and a half pounds in weight, and Slater watched it for a few moments. Then walking into shallower water he reached for a large stone and struck it sharply on the head. The trout shuddered briefly, and was dead.
Climbing from the river he laid the fish and his tackle among the buttercups. Water streamed from his trousers as one by one he emptied his wellingtons. He was wringing out his socks when a shadow fell across him. It was Eve.
‘What a fantastic fish! I’m impressed!’
‘Well, as you can see, in the end I had to go in after it. Settle it man to man.’
‘I see.’ She picked up the rod. What fly were you using?’
‘Well . . .’ began Slater, ‘I . . .’
‘Improvised,’ Eve nodded, peering at the hook to which a segment or two of worm was still attached. ‘And fell in, obviously.’
‘Will you tell him?’ asked Slater.
‘What? That you fell in? I think that’s going to be obvious!’
‘No, that I bent the rules a bit.’
‘What rules? I didn’t hear anyone lay down any rules.’
‘You know what I mean. The rules of sportsmanship. Gentlemanly conduct and all that.’
She smiled. ‘Only the Colonel and his guests fish here.’
It wasn’t until late that evening, when they had eaten the fish with butter and parsley and were ensconced in a corner of the Dunns Ford Inn with a pint glass in front of each of them, that professional matters were raised.
‘Tell me,’ Ridley said with deliberation, ‘about Operation Greenfly. And your part in it.’
‘How much do you know already?’ asked Slater.
‘As regards the planning side of it, quite a lot. As regards what happened on the ground, rather less.’
Slater nodded. ‘Well, you’ll remember that the operation was set up immediately after the murder of a part-time RUC officer called Frayn, who was shot in a drive-by outside a betting shop. Special Branch decided that it was time that three of their top operators were taken out, and handed the job to the Regiment. The targets were Henry O’Day, who shot the officer and was stupid enough to boast about it, a bomber called Frankie Coyle, and a shooter, name unknown. The operations were coded Mayfly, Cranefly and Greenfly.
‘I was put on the Greenfly team that was tasked to take out the shooter. He was known to have killed at least two squaddies – a lance-corporal from the Cheshires, and a young signals guy who was fixing a mast on one of the OPs on the border – and the word that the undercover guys in the FRU were getting from their touts was that he was going to hit a checkpoint near Forkhill.
‘Now I don’t know who the FRU had on the inside – as you know the Regiment are basically just called in to do the chopping – but the data was very good. The weapon had been cached on a border farm about five miles from the checkpoint, and the shooter was due to collect it some time after ten o’clock. It was December, a night with no moon, so it would be black as the ace of spades by that time. The hit on the checkpoint would probably take place within half an hour of the collection – Greenfly wouldn’t want the weapon on him for a second longer than necessary; he’d want it fired, cleaned and back in the ground.
‘We were desperate for Greenfly to be a success. These shooters go off to Texas or Louisiana to do a sniper’s course and when they come back the word gets around. No one says anything, but everyone knows who they are, and they become like these legendary figures in the community. It was a propaganda thing as much as anything else. We wanted to whack him and score the Regiment a hatful of points with the powers that be. I’ll not lie to you – we wanted a killing and we wanted it bloody.
‘Well, everything seemed to bear out the accuracy of the intelligence. PIRA dickers with CB radios had been seen sniffing round the Forkhill checkpoint on the day in question, doing a last-minute target-area recon – there was one called Deathly Mary who always used to do a walk-by on foot; everyone knew her – and we were certain that the shooting would be going down as planned. Sean Delaney, the owner of the farm where the shooter’s weapon was cached, was known to be an IRA sympathiser, if not an actual player. His wife had left him twelve months earlier and moved to Derry, and he was living with his brother Joey, a mentally retarded boy who helped him about the farm, and his unmarried sister Bridget. Like the dickers, we had done our own close-target recce. We knew where all the exits were and we knew to within a few yards where the cache was.
‘The team went in at last light. We were dropped off from an unmarked vehicle a mile away and tabb
ed across country to the farm. In the surrounding lanes, mobile units moved into position. A helicopter waited on stand-by ten miles out at one of the camps, turning and burning. It was a very cold, very dark night . . .’
Slater had reached his firing position, a small rise beneath a stand of firs, within twenty minutes of the drop-off. Carefully, aware that the area might easily be under night-sight observation, he had manoeuvred into place, concealing himself beneath the spreading branches and covering his body with cam-netting and foliage. Soon he was satisfied that, to all intents and purposes, he was invisible. He was in a comfortable firing position, or as comfortable as he could expect to be given the situation, and his weapon – a Heckler and Koch 53 sniper’s rifle loaded with ten 7.62 armour-piercing rounds – was readied for action on its bipod. The HK’s night sight had been zeroed for 120 yards, and the sight’s miniature generator was emitting its faint characteristic whistle. It was a very cold night – by 7pm the ground was already stiffening with frost – but the adrenaline racing around Slater’s system anaesthetised him to the cold, to the icy flint of the ground, to everything except his own intense concentration.
Through the night sight all that he saw was an undersea green. The farmhouse, a low, discoloured building with a slate roof, was about 120 metres in front of him. Amplified green light bled through the curtains; their edges blazed with it, as did the gap beneath the back door, which gave on to a flight of steps and a stone-flagged farmyard. As Slater watched, a fox slunk into the yard, nosed cautiously at the dustbins, climbed the frozen dung-heap to the wall and looked around him.
A hunter, thought Slater. A killer like myself. Good luck to you, brother. May you be spared the shotgun and the flick of the boot on to that same dung-heap.
Through a throat-mike and earpiece, Slater was in communication with the three other members of the SAS sniper team, now silently readying themselves, and with the outlying mobile units. As team leader he had the position covering the most probable killing-ground; the other snipers were invisibly disposed around the farm as back-up. Like him they were taut-wired with adrenaline. Like him they felt no cold, saw the night as green day. There will be a death tonight, thought Slater, and I have never felt more fully alive.
On the wall the fox stiffened, leapt to the ground and raced for cover. Soon Slater could hear the car too. And see it. A muddy Toyota hatchback, showing sidelights only, swinging carefully up the track.
‘Vehicle approaching,’ murmured Slater into his throat-mike.
It disappeared for a moment behind a rough coppice and was suddenly there in the farmyard, its sidelights two blinding swirls in the ghost-green landscape. In the yard, the car came to a greasy, shuddering stop. The driver stayed at the wheel, and a second figure wearing a heavy trenchcoat – looked like military surplus, thought Slater – ducked from the Toyota.
‘Target exiting vehicle.’
It was the shooter.
He would identify himself to the occupants of the farmhouse, collect the weapon from the cache, and change into ‘sterile’ overalls, headgear, footwear and gloves. IRA shooters, Slater knew, favoured yellow Marigold gloves as the least likely to leave any trace of forensic. Afterwards these would be burnt at the farmhouse.
The greatcoated figure hurried to the door. As he got there he pulled a mobile telephone from his pocket, thumbed it briefly, and seemed to mouth a single word. The door opened – a blare of green-white light, swiftly extinguished – and he was inside. Get ready to die, motherfucker, thought Slater, his heart thumping hard at his ribs. Get ready to die.
‘Target entering house. Back door.’
For ten minutes nothing happened. The driver lit a cigarette, smoked it, flipped the smoking butt from the car, waited. Then the door of the house opened, and the greatcoated figure exited, his breath smoking, his shoulders hunched against the cold. OK, thought Slater grimly. OK.
‘Target in view.’
Through the night sight he saw the shooter cross the yard. He was carrying a gardening fork, and with this he carefully cleared an area of dung and straw at the base of the heap. Then, crouching, he lifted one of the heavy flag-stones.
‘Target retrieving weapon.’
I’ll take him when he straightens, Slater told himself. As soon as I can see that he is holding the weapon. Gently exhaling, he placed the inverted black V of the sight above the shoulders of the crouching man. Took up the play in the trigger. Inhaled.
The target rose, weapon in hand. Rose in profile into the clear line of Slater’s zeroed sights, the inverted V meeting the perpendicular crossbar just forward of the target’s ear.
Exhale to stillness. Squeeze. Muzzle-flash.
The lower half of the pale green face vaporised into black spray. The report splitting the night, punching the compound plastic stock of the HK against Slater’s shoulder and cheek, dropping the target like rubbish to the dung-heap.
‘Contact. Target down.’
Slater, dragging his ski-mask over his eyes with his free hand, all but gagging with the release of tension, was already half-way to the fallen man. Reaching him he whipped the HK to his shoulder to deliver the killing shot but at the last moment held his fire. The target was alive, although he no longer had a jaw, or a mouth, or indeed a lower half to his face. He still had his eyes, however, and the eyes were the terrified, incomprehending eyes of a child. They held Slater’s for a moment, and it seemed as if – in a last desperate plea – they were trying to smile.
From 150 yards away, as Slater froze in horror, the sniper team’s number two delivered the double tap. It was a flawless display of shooting, the twin reports sounding as one, and the fallen man — now almost headless – jerked spasmodically as his nervous system arrested. At his side lay a Match M16 rifle with a telescopic sight.
His hands slippery with brain-spray, Slater swung the HK towards the car, where the driver was sitting with his hands raised in terrified surrender, and the back door of the house.
The yard flooded with the noise of running soldiers as the rest of the team closed in. Over the radio Slater heard rapid-fire instructions as an outer cordon was set up.
A long stain of blood on the ground around the fallen figure, and beyond him a sprayed and scattered mess of tissue, bone-fragments and teeth.
And then a man in a muddy windcheater running from the house, and a wild-eyed woman in a leather jacket screaming behind him: ‘You shot my little brother, you cunt! You SAS pigfucker! He was just a . . .’
And the pair of them seized – the man speechless with shock, the woman still dementedly screaming – and plasticuffed.
And the words and the events finally making some sort of sense, and the icy cold kicking in, and Slater knowing for certain that he had shot the wrong man . . .
‘Joey Delaney was twenty-four years old,’ said Slater, lowering his glass, ‘but his mental age was nine. The shooter had sent him out to retrieve the weapon and deliberately lent him the coat. Sent him out as a decoy in case there was an SAS hit team waiting out there. His brother Sean, who wasn’t all that switched on, didn’t realise what was going down – he just wanted to be a good volunteer, doing his bit – and he let the lad go out for the weapon.’
There was a long silence. Eve glanced at Slater but his face was blank.
‘So what happened next?’ asked Ridley.
‘We plasticuffed Sean and Bridget Delaney and hit the farmhouse. And there was your man, cucumber-cool, in the kitchen, unzipping his overalls. He was a tallish guy, perhaps thirty, with receding hair. Distinguished looking, you might say. Certainly not your run-of-the-mill PIRA trigger-man.’
‘And you arrested him?’ asked Eve.
‘We held him. I was for doing him there and then – I got as far as thumbing down the safety catch – and I know the lads would have backed me up if I’d said he’d reached for a weapon. But it would have got very complicated very quickly. I could hear the chopper landing outside – the police were on their way. And in truth no one would
believe that he would have been carrying at that moment anyway. He wouldn’t have been so stupid.’
‘You knew that you were going to have to let him walk away?’ asked Eve.
‘I knew it, and he knew it. But the truth is that there was something else going on between me and this guy. Something personal. He knew what he’d made me do by sending that boy out in his place, and he knew just from looking at me in that kitchen that it was going to do me real damage. And that pleased him. I could see it in his eyes. “Shooting me won’t bring him back,” he said when I brought the HK up to my shoulder. “Shooting me would only make the whole thing worse. Don’t you think?”
‘His accent was – how can I describe it – a kind of Irish American. Something about it said money. Something said this was the sort of guy you’d normally see in a smart suit in an expensive restaurant, and I wondered who the hell he was. He certainly wasn’t on the regular list of known players – he’d probably come over specially from the States. And he’d probably get straight on to a plane when the police released him, go back there, and disappear until the next hit.
‘And then I thought: If I can’t actually kill him, I can at least put him out of action as a shooter. Break a few fingers, perhaps, smash his hand up a bit. I was just wondering about the best way to do that, given that I still had the night sight attached and couldn’t use the butt of the HK, when about five RUC guys came steaming in and took charge. A couple of minutes later we were pulled off the position and choppered back to the barracks.’
‘And that was the beginning of the end as far as you and the Regiment were concerned,’ said Ridley.
Slater nodded. ‘It was. I went off my head, basically. Call it post-traumatic stress or whatever you like, but I hit the Darkland big-time. I became super-aggressive – always picking fights – I gave the Regiment guys under me a really bad time, I started drinking a lot, which I’d never done before . . . and became like a totally aggressive, violent loner.