by Eoin Dempsey
The rain thickened and he saw a pub a few yards in the distance. It never took long to reach a pub in Derry and he ducked inside, taking a seat at the bar. It was worn, but clean and well-maintained. The other patrons inside were mainly old men, barely passing him a glance in between sups of porter and puffs of cigarettes. The barman was in his forties and wore a thick black mustache. Mick ordered a beer and sat back, still thinking about Melissa. She had become his definition of beauty and happiness in all those years inside. Her image invaded his thoughts. She must have been married by now, with children of her own. She’d have no time for an old IRA man like him, nor should she.
One of the old men let out a raucous laugh that stirred Mick from his thoughts. Glad to be offered temporary escape, he lifted the pint glass to his mouth and took a gulp of beer. Beer had never tasted this good before he was in prison -another of the benefits of losing almost sixteen years of your life. The barman flicked on the television behind the bar. A special report on the killings in Lisburn was on. The IRA had already claimed responsibility, promising to wage unceasing war against all security forces in Northern Ireland. The barman shook his head. Mick looked out the window and into the rain. He thought back to the Remembrance Day bombing in Enniskillen the previous November when the IRA had set off a bomb in the middle of a crowd gathered to commemorate fallen soldiers from the world wars. He had sat in prison with his fellow IRA inmates, watching as live pictures of the scene came on the screen in front of them. Some of the IRA men were as shaken as he was at the callous nature of a bomb set off with little warning among a crowd of civilians. Others cheered the deaths of the ten Protestant civilians. The IRA dismissed the operation as a disaster, a monumental mistake. They’d set off the bomb too early and the death they’d brought to Enniskillen that day was inflicted on the wrong people. But although the botched bombing caused them to pause and apologize for the civilian deaths, it brought no cessation to the violence that they inflicted. No meaningful change occurred. They would continue to wage their ceaseless war. The realization hit him that day, after almost fifteen years inside, that the IRA, the organization he’d joined to protect and free his community, was the greatest scourge on the people of Northern Ireland. That night he made his silent oath to cripple them in any way he could, to do something to attempt to jar the endless cycle of death and misery. But it had been easy to make silent promises on the inside.
He picked the glass up, downed the remainder of the beer and made for the door. The rain had stopped, yellow sunbeams beginning to glint through the clouds above. He walked toward the Bogside, where the memories of his youth still ran along each street corner and hid behind every hedge. He continued toward the hulking gray of the Rossville flats, still there, still standing, but not for long. They were due to be demolished. The whole place was going to change. That was only a good thing. He stopped, looking down at the spot where his father’s body had fallen, his blood spilling out onto the asphalt. There was no marker though his name was listed on the obelisk a few feet away with the other victims of the Paras that day. Mick stared at it for a few seconds and walked on, his convictions strengthened.
The burnt-out cars had gone with the barricades, all removed after the army had reclaimed Free Derry during Operation Motorman in 1972. The rubble barricade where Noel and the others had died was long gone. Few visible signs of that day remained, just random bullet holes burrowed into walls. He walked on, not seeing anyone he knew. He was glad of that. He didn’t need to have his emotions stirred by some kind of false nostalgia now. The barbershop was gone, sold off soon after he went to jail. It was still a barbershop, just run by another family now. He didn’t want to see it. Seeing it wouldn’t serve any purpose.
It took him another ten minutes to reach the street where McClean still lived. A few boys were playing football outside, all wearing either the colors of Glasgow Celtic or Derry City. Mick stopped dead, all too aware of what he was about to do. McClean’s front door opened and a teenage girl walked out. She didn’t seem to notice Mick standing on the road opposite the house. Mick let her walk down the street before approaching the house himself. He rang the doorbell. McClean’s wife answered the door.
“Hello, can I help you?”
“My name is Michael Doherty. I’m looking for Mr. McClean. I’m an old colleague of his.” Mick was amazed at the level of calm that had swept over him.
She looked him up and down with suspicious eyes. “I’ll let him know. Stay here.” She shut the door behind her, coming back thirty seconds later.
“He’ll see you in the kitchen.” She opened the door for him, and he stepped into the house. “Take off your jacket and show me your belly.”
Mick handed her his jacket and lifting up his sweater. Mrs. McClean seemed satisfied and motioned for him to walk through.
McClean looked much older than he reasonably should have, even with the sixteen years that had passed, with a graying goatee and little hair left on his head. He greeted Mick with a smile. “Welcome back, son,” he said, hugging him. Mick forced his arms around him. McClean had never spent a day in jail, not for the killing of the soldiers outside Limavady, not for anything. “Sit down there,” he continued. Mick sat in the kitchen chair. “I want to say how proud we were of you for doing your time like a man. You never opened your mouth once, and I know that can’t have been easy.”
“It wasn’t, but I’d never do that. I’d rather die than grass.” He hoped the line didn’t sound practiced. McClean seemed to buy it.
“Well, just know that it was appreciated. I spoke to your commanding officer inside. He said that you were quiet but were an excellent mediator with the prison authorities and a mentor to the younger prisoners.”
“I tried to help out where I could. It was us against them in there. I was in an unusual situation, being that I was the last prisoner with Special Category Status, the last of the political prisoners. It was difficult to handle sometimes, particularly during the tragedy of the hunger strikes.”
“That was a terrible time for everyone in the republican community. We did gain a lot of political traction from it, however. Those men didn’t die in vain.”
“I knew them, each one of them.” Mick saw their emaciated faces, their straggly, unkempt beards.
“I knew several of them myself. They’re venerated heroes of the cause now.”
“How is the fight against the imperialists?”
“I’m sure you see what everyone else sees on the news. We have successes and failures. The bombing in Enniskillen last year shook the entire organization to its core. The unit that carried out that attack was disbanded, but we have to move on. A worse tragedy would be if we gave up on the nationalist people of Northern Ireland because of one mistake.”
Mick tried to think of an answer to what McClean had said, but couldn’t. Nothing else remained to be said. “I want back in. I want to volunteer again.”
McClean’s face didn’t change. “Are you sure?”
“I’ve had sixteen years to think about this. I’m very sure.”
“A lot of people in your position would consider their debt to the cause paid in full. No one would hold that against them.”
“I feel I’ve more to give. I’m not as young as I was but who is? I’m more experienced now. I know what I can and can’t offer. I know the cause. I met a lot of great men during my time inside and learned a lot from them.”
“You don’t want this,” McClean stated.
“With all due respect, you don’t have any idea what I want. I want justice for the republican community of this province.”
“What about your brother? Why don’t you follow the direction he went in? He’s not going to be happy if you come back.”
“Pat’s naïve enough to think that the Brits are going to listen to the SDLP’s pleas for peace, that they pay attention to anything other than brute force. I wish we lived in a world where the SDLP held the key to a better future for Northern Ireland, but I know that’s simply n
ot the case. The future is in our hands.”
McClean stood up and offered an outstretched hand. “All right. Give me some time to think it over. I’ll give you a call in a few days to let you know what I’ve decided.”
Mick leaned forward and shook his hand.
Chapter 19
The raw desolation of the landscape mirrored the stream of thoughts flowing through Mick’s mind. He arched his body around a fallen branch, his hand on an archaic, dilapidated stone wall to keep his balance. Sweat beading on his brow mixed with spattering rain. Martin Heggarty, a twenty-five-year-old from Armagh whose brother had been shot down by loyalist terrorists a few years before, trudged several yards in front of him. They’d been walking through old disused fields, long since abandoned to the stones, and along rough-hewn country paths, hacked out of hedgerow for twenty minutes. Mick felt the strain, the bag on his back growing ever heavier but he kept on, never outwardly showing any sign of the tiredness that tightened its grip on him with every step he took. The strain of knowing that the contents of the bag would land him back in jail was the greater load to bear. They came to the end of a long hedgerow, and an old wooden sign. They carried on around the corner and saw the shed, the makeshift bomb-making factory. The landscape around the shed, picturesque as it was, seemed entirely devoid of life, absolutely barren. There was no other sign of human life in sight. The silence of the landscape lay thick in the air as if breaking it would anger some ancient god, slumbering underneath. The shed was about forty feet long by twenty feet wide, hidden away by hills and hedgerow, isolated and alone.
Martin’s silence in the car had made the one-hour drive feel much longer. With no outlet, Mick had found himself trapped inside his own head, battling every instinct. He wasn’t an expert bomb-maker by any means, but his unit commander, Bernard Quinn, had insisted he go along.
Martin looked to be in his mid-twenties, but by reputation was one of the most capable bomb makers the IRA possessed. Mick laid down his backpack on the large wooden table that dominated the shed. Cots lay along the walls, and a small larder sat in the corner filled with canned foods and water. Mick opened his bag and laid out the bomb-making kit: timing units, booby traps, watches, clocks, detonators, gelignite, and the IRA’s most favored plastic explosive of all – Semtex. They had enough between them to make several sizeable bombs.
‘This is quite a haul we have here,” Mick said, just to make conversation.
“Aye,” Martin grunted.
Mick walked the few feet back toward the door and stepped outside as Martin unpacked. The hills rolled green into the distance on every side, serene and beautiful. The place seemed sullied by what they were there to do, what so many had done before them in this same place. The gentle wind whispered through the hedgerow that surrounded them on three sides. Training for his re-entry into the IRA had been nothing like the first time. The higher ups had considered him already trained, and he’d been put on active duty almost as soon as McClean had called to tell him he was back in. Operations in Derry had been limited in the last few months, the exception being another monumental blunder in the Creggan. A local unit had booby-trapped the apartment of a local man whom they’d kidnaped, in the expectation that the security forces would search it. Some of his neighbors, worried that they hadn’t seen the man in several days, tried to check on him by climbing in the window. Two Catholic civilians in their fifties were killed, with another man critically injured. Another mistake that the IRA recanted in their most apologetic terms.
The botched apartment bombing, which became known as the ‘Good Neighbor Bombing,’ changed the face of the IRA leadership in the city and the unit which carried it out was disbanded. A swift reshuffle followed and Mick’s name came to the fore. McClean put him forward as a smart, experienced operative with a proven record of effective operations behind him. But more important was the fact that he hadn’t talked. Nothing in the IRA’s universe was more important. Nothing was more sacred than silence and Michael Doherty was a man who could be trusted. Despite the fact that he’d only ever been on one significant operation, he was earmarked for planning roles. His first had been the robbery of a bank in Monaghan - a much-needed fundraiser. Mick had staked out the place every night for two weeks before he’d come up with the final plan. He hadn’t carried out the robbery himself or even been within fifty miles of the place when it went down, but the IRA netted almost £38,000.Mick had earned the trust of his commanding officer. No one had said it to him, but he was sure that this trip to the bomb-making factory was to be his last test.
Mick came back into the shed.
“Time to get started. We have a lot of work ahead of us,” Mick said, trying to sound as officious as he could.
They worked through the evening and into the night, until, by flickering lamplight, they ate dinner heated over a portable stove and went to bed. They’d barely spoken the entire day, and then only in monosyllabic grunts. Mick watched Martin, mimicking his every move. There had been no need for questions. Martin was a gifted bomb-maker. Mick wondered what he might have amounted to in a world where bomb-making skills weren’t valued quite so much. Martin fell asleep quickly. Mick sat up on the cot. The bombs they’d already made sat primed on the table. Neither of them had questioned how the bombs were to be used. It wasn’t theirs to query the orders that came down. Grisly pictures from news reports he’d seen on television haunted him in the darkness, of the mutilated bodies and bloody remains left in the wake of bombs just like these that they’d made.
They got to work at eight the next morning, mixing fertilizer of the type Mick’s mother had used in their garden with a pungent mixture of sulfuric acid and vinegar. Mick had little idea what he was doing, but Martin was in a more talkative mood than the previous day and was at least prepared to give him directions. Every time Mick asked him a question not related to the bombs Martin dismissed it with a razor-eyed glare. Mick felt like the young recruit under tutelage. He had no idea of Martin’s background other than what Bernard Quinn had mentioned to him in passing about his brother’s death in Armagh. Martin’s eyes never strayed from the bombs. It was as if this man had no other personality and existed only to serve the cause. He was the perfect volunteer. His fanaticism was as dangerous as the glinting blade of a machete, his glare a constant illustration of focus and intensity. He was one of the most terrifying volunteers Mick had ever met, even in prison.
Mick glanced over at Martin, who was working on the detonating system for a large Semtex bomb he’d constructed the night before. How could he let these bombs get back to the IRA? He knew what they could do, the destruction they’d cause. Mick could destroy this mission, but what was to stop Martin from making these bombs somewhere else with somebody else?
“I need to take a break,” Mick said, the pressure inside him building. He walked out and sat on the stone wall in front of the hut, which overlooked a barren green field, stones dotted across it. He thought of Pat and his family, his mother. He thought of his father, asking him for advice but no reply came, and there was only the silence of the field. The range of possibilities opened up in front of him. He could do nothing. He could make the bombs and transport them back to the safe house like he’d been ordered to do. If soldiers stopped them at a checkpoint, he’d do time again, but that seemed unlikely. There was nothing out here, and, without a tip-off the security forces would never find them. The shed looked like it’d been standing here for years, maybe even back to the civil war in the twenties. Dark thoughts began to spill into his mind. What would happen if he were to blow this place up, perhaps with Martin in it? Martin’s family would mourn his loss, but the IRA would miss his skills more. How many lives would Mick save by finishing his?
On perhaps the only occasion he’d strung more than three sentences together the day before, Martin had warned him about the dangers of the process and what chemicals had to be kept separate from one another. Mick had wanted to ask how long it would take once the chemicals were mixed for them to flame an
d explode. It was only a few feet to the door, and then only another few feet to the stone wall that would most likely be enough to protect him from the blast. It would be a risky move, not least for the flak that he’d get from the higher ups in Derry expecting the delivery of these bombs on Sunday night, but he could get around that. Bomb making factories were notoriously dangerous. Many IRA men had died in them. He’d known some of them himself. Would anyone question Martin’s death here? It wouldn’t be like killing those soldiers by the side of the road, there was a purpose to this - murder to prevent murder. He could feel the weight of Martin’s glare even though he was facing the other direction. Mick got up and walked back into the shed.
It was evening when the chance came, Martin’s shadow stretched long across the bare grass outside the hut, the smoke from his cigarette cascading into the air above him. Mick knew he had only minutes to do this. He picked up some rags he’d been using to wipe the table, bundling them into a pile. He took a vial of sulfuric acid in a shaking hand, knowing that the penalty for any mistakes here would be an instantaneous death. The pile of rags stood silent, waiting. Mick stopped himself. This idea was insane. It could explode instantly. Was this worth his life? Martin was still smoking, still facing out toward the field in front of them. Mick uncorked the sulfuric acid, which would immediately burst into flames as soon as he poured it into the petri dish. His breathing quickened, his heart racing like a piston, the acid in the beaker swishing back and forth like a raging sea. “No, no.” He put the cork back onto the bottle. Outside the hut, Martin had thrown down his cigarette and stood staring at him.