I Hear the Sirens in the Street

“What’s the story?”

“It’s big. There’s been a mass breakout of IRA prisoners from the Maze prison.”

“Jesus. What a cock up.”

“It’s panic stations, mate. We need every man.”

“All right. But remember this is my off day, so I’ll be on double time.”

“How can you think of money at a time like this, Duffy?”

“Surprisingly easily, Pollock. Remember double time. Put it in the log.”

“Just get down to Carrick!”

“Another fine job from Her Majesty’s Prison Service, eh?”

“You can say that again. Let’s just hope we can clean up their mess.”

I hung up, pulled the Atari out of the back of the TV and flipped on the news.

HM Prison Maze (previously known as Long Kesh) was a maximum security prison considered to be one of the most escape-proof penitentiaries in Europe. Of course whenever you heard words like escape proof you immediately thought of that other great Belfast innovation, the unsinkable ship, Titanic.

The facts came drifting out as I put on my uniform and body armour. Thirty-eight Provisional Irish Republican Army prisoners had escaped from HBlock 7 of the facility. They had used smuggled-in guns to take hostages, then they’d grabbed a laundry van and stormed the gates. One prison officer was dead and twenty others had been injured.

“Among the escapees are convicted murderers and some of the IRA’s leading bomb makers,” said a breathless young newsreader in the BBC studio.

“Well, that’s fantastic,” I muttered and wondered if it was anybody I’d personally put away.

I made a cup of instant coffee and had a bowl of Frosties to get the Turkish black out of my system and then I went outside to my waiting BMW.

“Oh, Mr Duffy, you won’t have heard the news!” Mrs Smith said to me from over the fence.

I was wearing a flak jacket, a riot helmet and carrying a Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine gun so it wasn’t a particularly brilliant deduction from Mrs S, but still I gave her a grim little smile and said, “About the escape, you mean?”

“Yes, it’s shocking, they’ll murder us all in our beds! What will I do with Stephen away on the oil rigs!”

She was an attractive woman, Mrs Smith, even in her 1950s nightdress and with rollers in her hair.

“Don’t worry, Mrs Smith, I’ll be back soon,” I said, trying to sound like Christopher Reeve in Superman II when he reassures Lois that General Zod will be no match for him.

I’m not sure she quite got the element of self-parody in my Reeve impersonation but she did lean over the fence, give me a kiss on the cheek and whisper “Thank you”.

I responded with a little nod of the head, walked down the path and got inside my BMW. Before I put the key in the ignition I got out again and looked underneath the vehicle for mercury tilt bombs. There were none and I re- entered and stuck in a cassette of Robert Plant’s Principle of Moments. This was my fourth listen to Plant’s solo album and I still couldn’t bring myself to like it. It was all synthesizers and drum machines and high-pitched vocals. It was a sign of the times, and with the year nearly over, it was safe to say that 1983 was turning out to be the worst year in popular music for about two decades.

I drove along the Scotch Quarter and turned right into Carrickfergus RUC station for the first time in a long time. It was a very strange experience and the young guard at the gate didn’t know me. He checked my warrant card, nodded, looked at me, frowned, raised the barrier and let me through.

I parked in the crappy visitors’ car park far from the station and walked to the duty sergeant’s desk.

There’d been a few changes. They’d painted the walls blue and there were potted plants everywhere. I knew that Chief Inspector Brennan had retired and in his place they had brought in an officer from Derry called Superintendent Carter. I didn’t know much about him except that he was young and full of ideas – which, admittedly, sounded just ghastly. But this wasn’t my manor anymore so what did it matter what they did to the decor.

Running Carrickfergus CID branch was my old adjutant and sparring partner, the freshly promoted Detective Sergeant John McCrabban, and that was a good thing.

I went upstairs slipped in the back of the briefing and tried not to draw attention to myself.

“… might be of some use. We’re instituting Operation Cauldron. Blocking every road to and from the Maze. Our patch is the access roads to the north and east, the A2 and of course the roads to Antrim. We are coordinating with Ballyclare …”

Carter was tall with a prominent Adam’s apple and greying curly hair. He was rangy and he leaned over the podium in a menacing way as if he was going to clip you round the ear. I listened to his talk, which was a stab at Winston Churchill’s “Fight Them on the Beaches” speech. As rhetoric it was wildly over the top, but some of the young reserve constables clapped when it was done. As we were filing out of the conference room I said hello to a few old friends.

Inspector Douggie McCallister shook my hand. “It’s great to see you, Sean. Jeez, if you’d been here five minutes earlier you would have caught up with McCrabban and Matty, but they’re away with the riot police.”

They drew up the rosters. I went where they sent me which was a place called Derryclone on the shores of Lough Neagh. It took us over two and a half hours to get through all the police roadblocks so that we could get to Derryclone and set up our own roadblock. This was the much vaunted Operation Cauldron in action.

We set up our roadblock and guarded the sleepy road along Lough Neagh but it was soon evident that none of the Maze escapees were coming our way. We saw helicopters with spotlights flying back and forth from RAF Aldergrove and there were rumours that first, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland had resigned, and later, that Mrs Thatcher herself had resigned.

Neither were true. No one resigned and I prophesied that when the report into the break-out was published no one would get fired. The men at the roadblock were country boys from Ballymena who spoke in a dialect so thick I had trouble understanding them. Much of their conversation seemed to involve Jesus and tractors, an unlikely combination for anyone who doesn’t know Ballymena.

No one had thought to bring hot chocolate or hot cocoa or food or cigarettes. It began to drizzle around midnight and the night was long and cold.

We stopped two cars, a Reliant Robin and an Austin Maxi. Neither was filled with escaped prisoners. We listened in on the police radio traffic but it was confused and contradictory. There was rioting in West Belfast but this was an obvious ploy to distract the cops, and so central command didn’t divert many troops or peelers to deal with it. Just before dawn there was a bit of excitement on the southern part of the lough shore where an army helicopter pilot thought he had seen someone hiding in the reeds.

The radio barked into life and we and several other mobile patrols were scrambled and sent down to check it out. When we got there a small unit of Welsh Guards were shooting into the water with heavy machine guns. As the sun came up we saw that they had done a good job of massacring an exhausted flock of Greenland geese which had just touched down on their journey to the South of France.

We drove back to our outpost on the lough shore. We tuned in the BBC and the latest news was that eighteen of the escapees had been captured, but the rest had got clean away. At noon we got the list of names. All of them were unknown to me except for one… and that one was Dermot McCann.

Dermot and I had gone to school together in Derry at St Malachy’s. A really smart guy, he had been Head Boy when I had been Deputy Head Boy. Handsome, good at games and charming, Dermot had planned to go into the newspaper business and possibly into TV journalism. But the Troubles had changed all that and Dermot had joined the IRA just as I had once thought of doing at around the time of Bloody Sunday.

Through various machinations I had joined the police and Dermot had served several years in the Provos before getting himself arrested. He was a highly gifted IRA explosives expert and bomb maker who had only been betrayed in the end by a grass caught dealing drugs. The grass fingered him but there was no forensic evidence so the police had fitted him up by putting a fingerprint on some gelignite. He’d been found guilty and until his escape he’d been doing ten years for conspiracy to cause explosions.

I hadn’t thought of Dermot in a long time but in the weeks that followed the break-out we learned that he had been one of the masterminds behind the escape plan. Dermot had figured out a way of smuggling guns into the prison and it was his idea to take prison officers hostage and dress in their uniforms so the guard towers wouldn’t