boys out in time.
'They didn't, of course, and Bledsoe and Wheen were brought down to the border that evening. I had drawn a Browning and a couple of clips from the QM, so that I could at least make it fast, but in the event I wasn't even able to do that.'
Meehan fell silent. His eyes were as cold and blank as pack ice.
'They had a generator there and one of those heavy-duty compressed-air staple guns .. . Do you have any idea what happens when you fire one of those things into someone s eye?'
Alex opened his mouth to speak, but found that he could say nothing.
'As the eye explodes and it goes fuckin' everywhere the staple blasts its way out through the roof of the mouth. The guy's kicking, meanwhile, and pissing himself, and generally going berserk, but the thing he can't do is make any sound, because his blood and his sinuses are pouring out of his nose and mouth. The pain has to be beyond anything you can imagine...'
'You did that?' whispered Alex disbelievingly.
'No, thank God, some other volunteer did it to Wheen. But the point is not who did it, the point is that Five, knowing what Byrne and his nut ting squads do, allowed it to happen. They had the information and they deliberately failed to act on it.
'So what happened next?'
'Byrne figured that Wheen was the tough guy and Bledsoe -if he scared him enough was going to do the talking. Well, he scared him all right. The guy was out of his head with sheer terror. But just to make sure, Byrne had the volunteer do Wheen's other eye. And then just to make the point that it was Bledsoe who was going to do the talking he cut Wheen 's tongue out. Have you ever heard a man trying to scream when his tongue's been cut out?'
Alex shook his head.
'It sounds like percolating coffee. Anyway, I stood there, my brain fuckin' turning itself inside out at this sight terror, horror, disbelief, whatever the fuck and telling myself one thing: smile, or go the same way yourself And everyone else was smiling, but I tell you they were all pretty quiet at that point.'
Alex nodded.
'So then Byrne told me to do Wheen once and for all so I pulled out the Browning ready to give him one. And Byrne says no. Hands me, of all things, a fuckin' lump-hammer and a six-inch nail ..
'And you did him with that?'
'It made this kind of .. . pl inking sound,' said Meehan reflectively.
'The guy died immediately.'
'And Bledsoe?'
'Bledsoe coughed. Told them everything. Every last thing he knew. It took hours almost light by the time he was finished.'
'And?'
Meehan nodded expressionlessly.
'Yeah, I did him too. Same way. And as I did so I promised myself that the people responsible would know the pain and the terror that these brave men had known. Whatever it took whatever it fucking took -I would make them understand.'
'Surely the people responsible were Padraig Byrne and his Provos,' suggested Alex quietly.
'Those people were evil,' said Meehan, 'but they knew they were evil. They looked evil in the eye, they embraced evil and they knew themselves for what they were. Fenwick and her people, though, were evil at a distance. They never saw the floor of that PIRA abattoir running with blood and shit, never had to look at brave men like Wheen and Bledsoe dying in indescribable terror and agony and tell themselves: yeah, I did that .
'Wise monkeys,' murmured Alex.
'For every action, there's a reaction,' said Meehan.
'My father taught me that. The universe demands balance. For as long as the lives that I had taken were unavenged, there would be no balance.'
Alex stared at Meehan. Was this insanity? he wondered. Or was it logic? Or both?
'Within the week I had been promoted to the IRA's Army Council and Padraig Byrne to the Executive. I continued to file reports to London, but I no longer had the slightest confidence they would be acted upon. I warned them of two bombs:
one in a Shankhill pub, one in a Ballysillan supermarket. Both were made by men I had trained, both were set by Bronagh Quinn. Five dead, in total, and over twenty injured. Women and children mostly, in the supermarket. One little girl was blinded when the lenses of her glasses were blown backwards into her eyes.
'There are seven people on the Provisional IRA's Army Council. At the first meeting I attended I looked round the other six faces and I realised that I had done at least as much for the movement as any of them. I had dicked, trailed, scouted, bugged, planned, organised, designed, strategised and taught. I had brought the movement's bomb-making skills into line with the best in the world. And finally, with my bare hands, I had killed. By ignoring every warning I ever sent, Fenwick and her people had made me part of the thing I had dedicated my life to destroying. Can you imagine can you imagine what that feels like?'
Alex said nothing. Didn't move. Carried on the buffeting wind distant at first and then louder was the pulse of an approaching helicopter. If Meehan heard it he ignored it.
'At that first meeting a former OC of the Armagh and Fermanagh Brigade got up. Nasty bastard, name of Halloran.'
'Dermot Halloran,' said Alex.
'The same,' confirmed Meehan.
'And he didn't fuck about.
He told us, 'Boys .. . We have a problem. We have a mole.'
There had been indications for some time, he said, that information concerning upcoming operations was reaching the Crown. Top-level information, not foot-soldier stuff. In recent days, he said, these suspicions had become cast-iron. MI-5 had an agent in place an agent whose minimum possible level of seniority was membership of the GHQ staff. That put every man in the room squarely in the frame. The Executive had men on the case, he went on. It was a process of elimination, and until that process had run its course it had been decided that all operations and meetings should be suspended.'
The rhythmic beat of the helicopter's engine and the slash of its rotors was very close now, filling their ears. The sound seemed to hold its volume for a moment, then died away. Again, Meehan showed no sign of having heard it.
'Presumably,' said Alex, 'they wanted to see who cut and ran.'
'That was my calculation. If they'd been sure they were going to identify the mole they would have just let the wheels turn. Said nothing.'
'So what did you do?'
'I drove back to the city and went home. There was a nut ting squad waiting for me and I knew then that Five had sold me out. Well, I'll spare you the details but there was a fuck of a battle. I dropped a couple of them, dived through a window and drove like fuck for Aldersgrove.'
'The airport?'
'Yeah. I was on a flight to the mainland within the hour. From that point I was totally on my own. The next morning I cleared the account MI-5 had been paying money into all those years and set about establishing a new identity.'
'Did you contact MI-5?'
'Are you joking .. . If I'd contacted them they'd have dropped my co-ordinates to PIRA. Within the week of my leaving Belfast every Provy stiffer in the Command was on my tail as it was. No, Five didn't want me alive and compromised -my story would bury them.'
'But why do you think they ignored all those warnings and let Wheen and Bledsoe and the rest of them die?'
'I thought for a long time that they simply couldn't risk me. That if they'd started acting on my warnings they'd have had to pull me out, whereas as things stood I was their man inside the IRA, the justification for their budget, their meal ticket from the Treasury. That was what I thought at first.'
