Stand By, Stand By

by Ryan, Chris

  Lying in my cabin one night, unable to sleep, I started thinking about Tracy (as usual). I’d been phoning her most evenings, and had sent an expensive silver bracelet as a Christmas present. Our relationship was going great guns – as far as it could while we were a few hundred miles apart. I had no doubt we were going to stick together when I got home, and I was pretty sure she’d take Tim over, as if he were her own. She had only ever seen him as a baby, when he’d been brought into the Med Centre in Hereford, but that didn’t seem to worry her.

  Now I had a brainwave. Partly because I’d volunteered to work over Christmas, I had a week’s leave coming up, and I’d been planning to go home. But if I did the opposite, bringing Tracy over, I could take local leave, and have a chance to pursue my own devious plans in the Province. At the same time, she could start getting to know Tim. Furthermore – my mind ran on – we could have a kind of premature honeymoon at my in-laws’ holiday cottage on the north coast. The place was standing empty, and it was in a safe enough area. We’d take Tim with us, and at the very least give Meg a break. Afterwards, if all had gone well, Tracy might take him back with her to Keeper’s Cottage and start getting our family settled there – maybe not after this first visit, but some time later.

  For once the tide seemed to be running in my favour. Three phone calls fixed everything: one to Tracy, one to Meg, one to the airline. The great thing about Tracy – or one of the great things about her – was the positive way she reacted to new ideas. I can’t stand people with negative attitudes, who reject suggestions on principle before they’ve even thought about them. Tracy’s outlook was the opposite of that: everything new was fun, or likely to be – and so it turned out when I suggested that she might come over. ‘Great!’ was her reaction. Susan could hold the fort at KC. She herself could take a week off work any time, she said. Her only question was, ‘When?’

  Meg was almost equally enthusiastic. I put over the idea that Tracy was a trained nurse, and fully capable of looking after a young child. I said, truthfully enough, that her elder sister had two young boys of her own, and that Tracy had helped look after them. I’m sure my in-laws must have seen the way things were going. They’d known that I’d left Tracy in possession of the house in England, and when I said she was coming over, no doubt they put two and two together; but they were too sensible to criticize my arrangements. As for the troop – instead of having to creep out on surreptitious expeditions, I merely said that I was proposing to spend my leave in a holiday cottage on the north coast.

  After its last little dust-up the Sierra had been smartly retired from our stable of cars, and in its place I had a Cavalier. This time I drove with one eye permanently on the rear mirror, and once I’d come off the M2 at Junction Four, I made a couple of unnecessary stops – one at a garage to buy some peppermints, one in a layby to check under the bonnet for some imaginary engine fault. Satisfied that I had no tail, I headed up round the edge of the hills towards the village of Ballyconvil.

  The place was so small that when I saw it my heart sank. Four, five, six little houses straggling along the road – and that was it. One, with ‘LIAM’S’ painted white-on-green above the door, was a bar cum general store, and the others were ordinary dwellings, so poor and mean I couldn’t imagine Farrell setting foot inside any of them, let alone living there. If the village had been anywhere at home, I’d have gone into the pub for a pint and made casual inquiries about the neighbourhood; but here, I knew, the appearance of a stranger speaking with an English accent would immediately raise an alert. Word would go round in a flash; everybody would be talking and on the lookout.

  All I could do was drive straight through the place and on up the hill. But as I glanced back to my left, I realized that there was one more house, set apart from the rest of the hamlet on higher ground. It was hidden from the road directly below it by the fact that it stood back on a ledge, and remained out of view until anybody passing was clear of the other houses. The place looked like a farm, with a couple of barns set round a yard, but even a fleeting glimpse gave the impression that it wasn’t a run-of-the-mill ramshackle farmhouse. The old buildings had been renovated in the past year or two: the roofs were tidy and straight, the windows in the house new. The set-up looked too smart to be a working farm. Right, I thought, that can only be him.

  I drove on for twenty minutes, stopped in a lay-by and watched the mirror for ten minutes between intervals of studying my 1:50,000 map. Very few cars passed, and none gave me any cause to worry. Obviously I wouldn’t be able to park in the village when I did my CTRs; I needed somewhere secure to leave the car. My eye fastened on some blocks of forestry, green on the map. The one nearest to Ballyconvil was round the back of the hill from the farm, but only one kilometre or so away across country. It was worth a look, anyway.

  A short drive brought me into sight of it. As I expected, it was a dense conifer plantation which climbed the hillside and swept round into a big bowl. The public road followed the contour-line below it, and a barbed-wire fence bounded its lower edge. After a few hundred metres I came to the entrance, a gravelled drive leading up into the trees and turning left. Following the road, I came to a barrier in the form of a heavy wooden pole, hinged on a pivot at one end and padlocked with a chain to a post at the other. No supersonic knickers here – only a sign saying: ‘FORESTRY COMMISSION, NO ADMISSION TO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONS.’

  I got out and had a look round. The gates were nicely out of sight of the main road. The gravel was clean and hard, so that tyres left no mark on it. A careful check of the chain, the padlock and the ground showed that the entrance had not been opened for some time. Evidently there was no work going on in the wood, no thinning or felling. The set-up seemed ideal for my purposes. After my lock-picking course at LATA, the barrier would present no problem. Once inside, I could drive up to a convenient point in the forest, hide the car, and go in round the shoulder of the hill on foot. If, by ill chance, someone came across the vehicle while I was away and reported it, I’d say that it had been nicked, and must have been dumped up there by the villains.

  With that settled, I turned round and drove back along the same road. My second pass through Ballyconvil confirmed earlier impressions. The farmhouse came into view as I approached the village, and I saw that its walls had been freshly painted white. The window frames were new and made of dark wood. The roof was as it should be – traditional slate. At the back, a stretch of high-wire fence was showing. Somebody had spent a lot of money on the place. But there was no car outside the door, and no sign of any activity.

  That second pass also gave me a chance to look at the background. Behind the house, rough grass fields sloped away up the flank of the hill, with much the same texture as the one in which Mike and I made our OP; but after only one field’s width the farmland gave out and the mountain proper began. The cut-off was a fence running horizontally round the contour; above it, thickets of gorse grew among the bracken, and higher still the bracken gave way to heather. It looked as though the gorse would be perfect for an OP – prickly, but brilliant cover, within less than two hundred yards of the target.

  On the morning Tracy was due in, I got Pat to lift me out to the City Airport, and I was there in time to pick up a hire-car before the flight from Birmingham landed. When the car-hire girl told me all she had left was a red Datsun I nearly flipped. Red! That was the last colour I wanted. Especially in the forest – it would show for miles. But then I told myself, ‘Come on, you’re a civvy tourist for the week. Behave like one.’ So I paid with my Visa card, gave my in-laws’ address, and signed for the Datsun.

  When Tracy appeared in the scruffy arrival area, we ran straight to each other and held on tight without speaking. I think other people could feel the high current of emotion flowing between us, because they kept away and didn’t even look in our direction. Through her shiny blue shell-suit she felt slim and fit.

  ‘You’ve lost weight,’ she said.

  ‘I know. Things are pretty tense o
ver here.’

  ‘It suits you, though.’

  ‘Good!’

  This was her first visit to Belfast, and as we headed out for Helen’s Bay I explained that we were already on the north-eastern edge of the city, well away from all the nasties in the West. The holiday cottage, I said, was even farther from the centre of the troubles, so that there was no need to worry.

  Tracy went over big with both my in-laws – she said all the right things, and made an immediate hit. Den told her she was too thin, and said she should eat more; in particular, he insisted she should have another piece of the lemon cake which Meg had made and put out with the coffee. As for Tim – Tracy started straight in, playing with his train set and talking to him as if he was an adult. I couldn’t believe it. After about thirty seconds they were having a serious discussion about why the signals went green for go and red for stop.

  It didn’t seem the right moment for a talk about long-term plans, so we packed up and got going, on the basis that all three of us would be away for the week. Den had bought Tim a new car-seat because he’d outgrown his old one, and we fixed that in the back of the Datsun. As we drove off I realized what great cover it was to look like a regular family on holiday in a hire-car, innocent and harmless as could be. Only I knew that the Luger was in the boot. We stopped once to stock up from a little supermarket in a village, and the entire journey took not much more than an hour.

  The cottage wasn’t quite what I’d been expecting. I’d been imagining something tucked away on its own – but I hadn’t known the address: No. 1 Coastguard Row. It was one of four, built for the local coastguards, and stood at the end of a little terrace overlooking the sea, perched above the road so that you had to leave the car down below and walk up a flight of stone steps to the front garden. I immediately thought, Ah, this is handy, because the houses were out of sight of the road, and nobody would spot a car coming or going at odd hours of the night or early morning.

  Inside everything was fine. Meg had phoned a friendly neighbour, who kept a spare key, and got her to switch on the underfloor heating, so that the place was warm and welcoming. Tim had been there before, so of course he considered himself an expert on the house’s layout, and showed us which rooms were which.

  It was a good job we had him with us, otherwise we’d have spent all day in bed, as well as all night.

  With a fire going in the front room the house became a cocoon, cradling our little family, and there wasn’t much temptation to go outside. All the same, that first afternoon we walked along the shingly beach. The tide was coming in, and the sea was flat and calm, with only the tiniest waves turning over as they hit the shore. I showed Tim how to choose flat stones and give them an underarm flick so that they did ducks-and-drakes across the water. At that stage he wasn’t much good at throwing, and he spun himself round in circles with his efforts to get more leverage on to his arm. I noticed that there was plenty of driftwood on the high-tide line, so on the way back I collected an armful for the store in the shed behind the cottage.

  All the time I was thinking of the white farmhouse at Ballyconvil and the dark forest on the hill. How was I going to account for my need to be absent for hours at a time? Why should I want to disappear in the middle of what was, in effect, our honeymoon?

  I’d already tried to explain to Tracy that guys in the Regiment habitually told their wives and girlfriends as little as possible about what they were doing. It was plain good sense and good security, I said, to restrict knowledge to a minimum. With her knack of going straight to the point, she’d come back with, ‘Well, that doesn’t sound great. If you’re not coming clean about your work, how am I to know what else you may be covering up?’ She was right, of course. Secrecy breeds distrust – and now, with our relationship hardly started, I was going to have to start deceiving her.

  I said nothing that day. While she was getting supper on the go I walked down to the pub at the other end of the village. Den had told me that out there, in tourist country, it was safe enough, especially as he and Meg were well known locally. The place was called the Spanish Galleon, and the walls were covered with mementoes of the Armada, mostly pictures of fantastic gold jewellery recovered from the Girona, which was wrecked off the coast in the autumn of 1588. I bought myself a pint of stout and explained to the landlord that we’d come to the cottage for the week. I couldn’t tell whether or not he knew about Kath, so we just had a general chat, mostly about fishing. A fellow about my age, who was already at the bar, said he had a friend who owned a fishing boat at some place nearby. After a while I bought a bottle of plonk for supper and set off home.

  In the morning, before it was fully light, Tim came bursting into our room in his pyjamas. ‘Why are the beds pushed together?’ he demanded.

  ‘So we can have a cuddle,’ said Tracy.

  ‘Gran and Grandad don’t have them like that.’

  ‘Well – come on in and have a cuddle anyway.’

  Next thing, he was in between us, wriggling like a ferret.

  ‘Why are you bare?’ he asked accusingly.

  Jesus! I couldn’t help laughing.

  ‘This duvet’s nice and warm,’ said Tracy. ‘We don’t need pyjamas.’

  So it went on. She was brilliant with him, especially when he started on about God.

  ‘Who’s God?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘He’s like a big father, up there in heaven.’

  ‘Why can’t I see him, then?’

  ‘He’s like the wind. You can feel the wind, but you can’t see it. You know? God’s like that.’

  ‘What does he feel like?’

  ‘Sort of warm. Like if someone’s kind to you. He feels good.’

  ‘Is Mummy in heaven?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sure she is.’

  ‘Why did she have to go there?’

  ‘I expect God wanted her.’

  ‘What did he want her for?’

  ‘Because she was a very good person.’

  ‘Can I go and see her?’

  ‘Not really. . .’

  The inquisition was relentless, but Tracy was equal to it; she never lost her cool or cut Tim short with an unsympathetic answer. By the end of breakfast there was a terrific bond between the two of them. Altogether we were a happy family that morning.

  It was all the harder, then, to break the news that I had to go off in the afternoon to do a job of work. Tracy looked really pissed off. ‘But I thought you were on leave,’ she said. ‘That’s the whole point of my being here.’

  ‘I know,’ I prevaricated, ‘But there were a couple of things outstanding. I promised the lads I’d get them done.’

  She knew I was being deliberately evasive, but because of the earlier conversations we’d had about security she didn’t press for more information. When I said I’d be back after dark, she just said, ‘Take care. You’ll find supper waiting.’

  It was less than an hour’s drive to Ballyconvil. But I didn’t go to the village at all. Navigating with the help of the big-scale map, I took a swing out right-handed, to the west, and came up to the forestry plantation from the opposite direction. Once again the entrance was deserted. A quick check confirmed that nobody had moved it since my last visit. Pulling on a pair of thin silk gloves, I brought out my little collection of bent levers and spikes, and in a minute I had the padlock open. The barrier-pole swung up easily, with the lump of concrete on its end acting as a counterweight. With the car through, I closed the gates and put the padlock back in position.

  Inside the plantation, the road climbed to the left in a wide curve. The spruces on either side were quite large – maybe thirty years old and fifty feet tall – and they’d never been thinned, so that they were growing in a solid mass. Nobody could look into the forest from a distance and see a car moving. Half a kilometre up, I reached a fork and took the left, along the contour, in the direction I wanted. Round a corner the road suddenly came to an end in an apron of gravel, a spread big enough for timber-trucks to turn. Uphill
, above it, was a small patch of bare ground under the first rows of trees; I got out and checked that it was firm, then backed the car as far under the branches as it would go, out of sight of any passing helicopter. I’d thought about cutting branches and covering it completely, but decided that, if I did, it would be too obvious that somebody had tried to hide it. Instead, I relied on an element of bluff. On the front passenger seat I left a book that I’d sent away for: Field Guide to the Birds of the British Isles. (I’d taken some stick when that arrived in the warehouse and was opened by Security in case it was a bomb – ‘Fucking hell, there’s only one kind of bird that Geordie’s interested in,’ and so on. Very witty.) Now, I hoped, it might come into its own.

  I locked up, settled my day-sack on my back and set off along a fire-break that continued the line of the hard road. It felt odd to be moving operationally in the open without a G3 or a covert radio. It felt even odder to be on my own, without at least one partner in immediate contact. All I had in the way of equipment, apart from the Luger and the kite-sight, was my knife, wirecutters, secateurs, a torch and a pair of binoculars. While planning the sortie I’d thought hard about borrowing one of the troop cameras, so that I could take pictures of Farrell, develop them myself, and make certain I had the right man. After a while, though, I’d abandoned the idea. One problem was that I couldn’t take a camera away for a whole week without its absence being noticed – and in any case, I knew well enough what Farrell looked like. What with Pink Mike’s photos and our live sighting at the transit hide, there was no chance I could mistake him.

  Heather and rough grass had grown across the ride, but along the middle a narrow path had remained open, and the going was easy. About two hundred metres from the turning-place it bent to the right. As soon as I was out of sight of the car I dropped down and crawled into the wood, coming round in a half-circle under the trees and putting in a few minutes’ covert observation to make sure nobody had followed me up.