Taking the Tunnel

by James Adams

  Since that day when The Archer had destroyed his family, Jonny had followed Dai Choi’s career with the focus of the obsessive. As he had watched the killer prosper, his need for revenge was matched only by his inability to find any way of exacting it. There were always alibis; other, lesser, hoods offered up as sacrifice; always that superior smart-ass look of the man who is aware that in Hong Kong knowledge of guilt means nothing without the power to act. And Jonny had come to understand that he had no real power. But the struggle had become a part of his life and his determination to succeed was the single reason why he remained in the colony.

  Now, as Dai Choi twirled his thumb ring, all the frustrations of the wasted years spent hunting this man returned. Turnbull extended a hand in front of Dai Choi’s face and began ticking off the fingers.

  “One, you don’t execute people and dump them on my patch. Two, I expect to charge somebody with murder within the next twenty-four hours and I don’t just want one of your penny-ante street thugs. Three, you deliver for me and I may — just may — not go and see Stanley to complain about you. And four, you’re a cheap little hood despite the fancy clothes.” He contemptuously flicked the collar of Dai’s dark green linen suit.

  Dai Choi leaned forward, eyes narrowed, The Archer supplanting the artificial cosmopolitan. Turnbull could smell the chocolate on his breath. “Don’t you presume to tell me what I can or can’t do in this town, Mr Turnbull. You’re just a visitor here. This is my town and these are my people. What I do for, with and to my people is my business and my people’s business. Not yours.

  “And don’t threaten me. You work here because we allow you to. You get your little victories because we give them to you. Because it suits us to do so. When you fail, you fail because we have decided that you should. We own you as much as we own this town. So go peddle your sanctimonious bullshit to your own kind on the Peak. You’ll find people there who actually believe in that ridiculous uniform you wear.”

  Turnbull looked at the clever, polished gangster. He knew that what he said was true. He would do anything to make it not so.

  CHAPTER III

  The unseasonal English summer fog lay close to the ground, masking the sound of their footsteps. The damp, grey morning would soon give way to a glorious August day but for now even the birds were silent. The quiet suited the two men, who, despite the darkness and the embrace of the fog, shuffled along close to the verge, toes pointing, seeking the twig or leaf that might betray them.

  Young Marty didn’t like it. Inexperience heightened his natural nervousness and the silence compounded his fear, making the absence of sound rather than noise itself appear a threat. Sean Thomas reached out to touch the younger man’s arm, the brief gesture intended to reassure as the moment approached.

  It was odd, he thought, how the old always had to reassure the young. There was never anyone to give him the comfort and guidance his tight stomach and sweaty armpits indicated he needed. Sean knew he was living on borrowed time. He had been active in the Movement for ten years, although for the last five he had officially been dead and buried in a clearly marked grave in the churchyard of St Mary’s at Castleblayney on the banks of Lough Muckno in the Republic of Ireland. A new identity and a move to England had kept him one step ahead of the security forces, but he knew that freedom was now measured in luck not time.

  The two men crept along the hedgerow, the wayward stems of the ancient yew dripping small spots of dew on to their dark green jerseys. If the Boys had done their work properly, the gap in the hedge should come up in about fifteen feet. Then a turn to the left, a twenty-five-yard slow walk along the grass verge of the gravel drive and the house would appear. The second window on the left should be the kitchen and — if the information was correct and the man was keeping to his routine — the family would be at breakfast, a brief meal together before the car arrived to take him up to the Ministry of Defence.

  Each man carried a 7.62 mm AKMS Kalashnikov assault rifle with a thirty-round banana magazine. The weapons were part of the shipments sent over by Colonel Gaddafi to Ireland ten years earlier. Since then the weapons had been moved from the Republic to Britain where they had remained buried in one of several caches dotted around the British countryside. The IRA maintained a logistics team on the mainland whose sole job was secreting arms and explosives in safe sites. These two weapons had been dug up from Crab Wood, a little-visited Conservation Woodland near Winchester. The two men had stripped and cleaned the weapons of their protective grease but the wet early morning air had given the dull barrels a slight sheen.

  This was the third attack Sean Thomas’s Active Service Unit from the Provisional Irish Republican Army had tried in the past two weeks. So far, they had been unsuccessful, which was why Sean himself had decided to lead this strike, to make sure they scored one. The first attack had been easy enough: fire bombs to be planted at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London’s West End where Les Miserables had been playing for years. This was the simplest form of terrorist attack. The devices could be planted and the terrorist well on his way before they detonated. There had in fact been five small incendiary bombs in a clear plastic box the size of a man’s wallet, with enough power to burn down the building. Unfortunately, the theatre had chosen that evening to try a new security system and everyone was being thoroughly searched. The girl with the bombs had panicked and instead of placing them in the theatre had gone to the Cross Keys pub in nearby Panton Street. To compound the incompetence, only one of the bombs had gone off, destroying the whole top floor of the pub. The police had recovered the rest and Sean knew that to the forensic experts each bomb was a filing cabinet filled with priceless reference material. They would know where the explosives had come from, if the bombs had been made up recently and even who had done the engineering. So he knew they knew that they were using old explosives from a cache buried five years previously. In the subtle interplay of terrorist and counter-terrorist, this was an important psychological edge for the Brits. They now understood that the ASU was being forced to use old equipment and inexperienced people so they were gaining some advantages after months of frustration.

  The second attack four days ago had been aimed at an Army Recruiting Office in Nottingham. In the past five years while Sean had been running the mainland campaign, there had been forty-five attacks of which eight had been on recruiting offices. They were “soft” targets in that they were rarely properly defended, and yet they hit the military so they had real value to the Movement. This time something had gone wrong and the two-man team had been taken. There had been the usual crowing in the media and plenty of references to brilliant detective work but no clear details on what had happened. The ASU’s intelligence section suggested that the recruiting centre attack had been foiled because of a major undercover police operation code-named Neon. They based the assessment on a single reference to Neon in the Daily Mirror. A similar reference in the Sun two years earlier had betrayed Operation Octavian, which had been set up to protect individuals thought to be likely targets of assassination by the IRA. The planners back in Dublin were convinced that Octavian had been abandoned as too costly in police manpower and cash and so the instructions had gone out for Sean’s men to hit a high-value target to make up for the bungled attack. He had personally chosen Bill Royce, an Assistant Secretary at the Ministry of Defence. Royce was not on anyone’s list that he knew of but Sean had marked him because of his involvement five years before in coordinating security policy in Northern Ireland. For the past six months, the reconnaissance unit had been gathering information on the routine of the Royce family. The dossier had been passed to Sean the previous week, complete with points of vulnerability ready marked. The file was one of two dozen that he had. Each one carried information and no instructions. There were no orders of whom to attack or when, so there could be no betrayals.

  No words passed between the two men. They had gone over the simple plan one last time in their rented Ford Orion, which was parked in a layby half
a mile away. Their weapons were cocked, a round already chambered, and the safety catches were off. There would be no telltale snick to betray their approach.

  Turning into the drive, the two men padded softly up the verge, each step leaving a distinctive impression of a dark foot against the lighter wet grass. The house emerged as a vague outline in the mist and then swiftly clarified into the shape of a large red Victorian building with the distinctive arrow-shaped attic windows pointing into the dawn. To the left of the square shape of the garage there was a door and then the diffused yellow light of a window. Their pace quickened, their steps coming faster, the impact greater in the earth as experience and caution became sublimated by the urge to convert caution into action.

  The gravel strip in front of the window was a brief obstacle, pebbles rattled underfoot and then Sean was at the window, Marty by his side, breath coming in short pants of fear. A swift, embracing glance through the window took in an older man — Sean recognized the face from the pictures painstakingly cut from newspapers and magazines over the years — a middle-aged woman — his wife perhaps? — two younger people, a man and woman — children? guests? Sean even registered the slumbering form of a golden retriever spread out in front of the Aga cooker.

  There was no time now for selection, for accurate fire, for mercy. All were targets, all reduced to participants in a war he was determined to win. As one, the two men moved their rifles up and directed the barrels through the window into the bright homeliness of the interior. Even as he squeezed the trigger and the distinctive staccato of the Kalashnikov crackled through the still dawn air, Sean’s honed survival instincts sensed danger. The very noise he and Marty had tried to avoid, the snick of a safety catch coming off, reached his brain and sounded the alarm.

  As the first burst of gunfire splintered the glass of the window and sprayed into the room, he began to turn away from his target, searching behind him for the source of the noise. Marty, less experienced, had heard nothing and continued to hose the room, the banana clip of his rifle emptying in under three seconds. Marty was still at the stage in his terrorist career where he got a voyeur’s thrill from the killing. He saw the plates on the breakfast table disintegrate, scattering cereal, milk and marmalade to splatter the four people who only now were beginning to express the first moments of terror in the face of certain death.

  The bullets followed the china as the recoil lifted the barrel of Marty’s gun so that they marched across the table, splintering the wood, until with a soft splatting sound they began to hit their real targets. The older woman was lifted up and flung backwards across the room. Marty corrected his aim, swivelling the gun to his left and then holding it as bullet after bullet made contact. Bill Royce literally fell apart, one bullet tearing off a forearm and flinging it dismissively to one side, leaving a bloody trail in its wake. Another punched a hole in his stomach, making him bend at the waist as if to genuflect before those who had planned his execution so skilfully. Already dying, Royce was hit twice more in the chest, the first round tearing away half his ribcage and the second driving through his left breast. Marty paused, inspired and overwhelmed at the carnage his weapon had caused. His vanity was to kill him.

  While Marty completed the mission, Sean spun round, gun barrel thrust before him sniffing out the sound that had warned him. To the side of the path, just feet away from where they had walked, a patch of earth beside a rhododendron bush was moving, pushed into the air by a pair of hands that had emerged at the edge.

  Sean realized it was a trap, that Octavian was still going on. They had walked right past the cops in the lair, the noise too slight to wake the dozy watchers. He had lived for many years with the expectation that his time would come like this: trapped in some obscure place far from home on a mission few knew about, his only epitaph a few lines in Republican News. He had no coherent thought of survival, no time to plan a solution. Instead, years of living on the edge propelled his body in response to the subconscious will to fight.

  As the head of the first cop emerged from the hide and the stubby barrel of a Heckler and Koch machine-pistol peeped over the edge of the hole, Sean loosed off a short burst and then dived left, rolling on the gravel, tearing knuckles and knees. The few bullets did no damage but were a brief distraction. Prone, a low profile to the enemy who were now aiming on his level, Sean brought his rifle up to squeeze off another burst which shredded the bush above the hide, raining leaves and branches on the two men below.

  There was no shouted warning to give up, no opportunity to surrender. Instead, both police ignored Sean, recognizing that firing on a flat trajectory is difficult in the calm of a range and virtually impossible in the heat of combat. Their guns turned towards Marty, who had been alerted to his danger too late. As he turned towards his partner, the first beginning of an imploring sound, half cry, half imprecation, emerging from his mouth, the two cops opened fire — but not with a “double tap”, the two carefully aimed shots that well-trained marksmen are supposed to use to dispatch killers. This was life, not fantasy. Their aim was not to execute but to destroy. The guns erupted with a ripping roar and Marty danced the tune of a mad marionette before slumping against the wall of the house, the bright red of the blood from his tom body mingling with the softer colours of the brick.

  The distraction was all Sean needed. He continued to roll, turning over and over as he strove for the cover of a large oak tree in the garden. Behind its trunk, he jumped to his feet and began to run, keeping the tree between himself and his pursuers. The first few seconds were vital, he knew. He had left behind a colleague and a friend, but Sean was focused on his own survival, the sanctuary of the safe house that awaited him.

  Three hours later, the old-fashioned black Bakelite telephone perched on the end of the long, polished wooden bar of The Felons rang. Brian Murray, who had been seated nursing his first beer of the day while idly chatting with his companion, levered himself up, walked across to the bar and picked up the receiver. He glanced in the ornate Victorian mirror over the bar, a vain man seeking reassurance. He saw a tough and confidently handsome man, and grimaced, smiling at his reflection to reveal briefly a set of strikingly white false teeth. His vanity was justified only in a long-lost youth; the face others saw already showed the dissipation of a man ten years older, the veins around his nose just beginning to show the reddish tinge of too much drink, and the small, tight eyes the suspicion and darkness of a man hardened to too long a life as a missionary among the unbelievers.

  Murray’s nickname was Spike, after his preference for kneecapping hoodlums and IRA malcontents by hammering a metal spike through the crown of the knee. Kneecapping is one of the IRA’s hallmarks. It is a painful punishment and the limping men and women in the province are a constant reminder to others of the fate that can await them. The normal method is to blow the kneecap to bits with a bullet, but using a Black and Decker drill is also popular. This grotesque and brutal method has given rise to a new term in the Irish language: “to be Decked”. But in the rather peculiar code that has evolved among IRA men, while kneecapping with a gun or even with a Black and Decker drill is considered socially acceptable, Spike’s predilection was thought very strange. However, he was in charge of the Northern Command of the IRA and so any criticisms about his personal habits were muted.

  The message was short and apparently meaningless.

  “Hello, Brian,” a woman’s voice with a soft Southern Irish accent began. “You remember that meeting we were talking about? It went well but I’m afraid your cousin has caught food poisoning. Your brother is fine.”

  Murray merely grunted and hung up the phone. The conversation had lasted no more than fifteen seconds, which the IRA believed made it impossible for the British to trace. In fact, technology was no longer dependent on time but on location. On this occasion, since the call had been made from a public call box, it would be three days before the computers at GCHQ, which record all conversations across the Irish Sea, would scroll through the databa
se pending tray and bring the message on to the screen for the analysts watching for any link between the mainland teams and their masters in Ireland.

  There was a lightness in Murray’s normally heavy tread as he moved back to the table, sat down, leaned forward and placed his mouth next to Adams’s ear before speaking. That was from across the water. Royce is dead and Thomas is OK. Marty is dead.”

  Brian noticed a brief tightening around Adams’s eyes, the only sign of distress from the Movement’s leader at the loss of one of their youngest recruits. But the image was fleeting, overlaid by the same satisfaction that Brian himself felt of a mission successfully completed and the continued survival of their most experienced operator.

  Adams’s head turned until his mouth almost covered Brian’s ear. A brief look of distaste — invisible to Murray — crossed Adams’s face as he was forced to put his mouth next to his comrade’s unwashed locks.

  Gerry Adams was the one man who could tell Murray what to do and how to do it. As the President of Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing, Adams is the establishment figure in the Movement, a savvy politician who perfectly understands the utility of covert terrorism and overt moderation. Adams was born in the Catholic heartland of West Belfast in 1948, joined the IRA’s old D company in 1965 and became one of the founders of the Provisionals when they split from the Officials in 1969. A period in jail in the early 1970s ended with his release to take part in the abortive negotiations with Home Secretary William Whitelaw. The talks were a formative experience for Adams who still believes that the British will be forced to the table again.

  In 1977, when Adams became Chief of Staff of the IRA, he organized a complete reform of the Movement to restore sagging morale and an ineffective military structure. He introduced a new cell structure which, with some refinements, remains in place today. This means that the British have found it very difficult to penetrate the IRA with agents, relying instead on technology to keep them abreast of the game.