and the darker background of the trees, Time was slipping by. Where was the bastard?
O.K., good game, game getting boring. How much bloody longer?
George throwing a ball for the dog, better keep the fiend well away from the vegetable patch or he'd be one dog short in a hurry. Mrs Ferguson bringing her washing back in. Ronnie hoovering away inside the Sierra. Two squirrels and four starlings competing for P.T.I. Terry's bread. And then, he saw him… He was meant to see him.
The shape in the bulky combat jacket coming through the trees. He hated th e bloody m a n God ro t t h e bastard. Pistol u p, pistol at his eye line, pistol on the moving figure and then the further target.
Remembering what he had been told. The moving figure past the target, going wide of it. Shoot the bastard. The hammer of the pistol in his ear. The further target, the moving figure, the nearer target. The whiplash of the pistol like it might take his arm out of the shoulder socket. The nearer target, the moving figure, the further target.
An awful silence around him. His finger was still squeezing the trigger. The ejected cases were beside his forehead.
The dog straining against a leash, George bellowing at him to be quiet.
Mrs Ferguson abandoning her basket and moving smartly towards the kitchen door.
Ronnie gone to ground already.
Jocelyn stood above him, contempt in his eyes. The index finger of his right hand pointed to the hole in the bulging side of his combat tunic.
'You're a right little pillock, you know that? You have one hit on the Target A, not in a stop position. You have three hits on Target B, one of which, give you the benefit of the doubt, might have dropped the man. The nearest you got to a proper hit was this…'
Jocelyn's finger jabbed at the neat hole. Three inches right and it would have been a proper hit.
'Glad I got one fucking thing right,' Bren said.
Bren thought that he had actually frightened the man.
Jocelyn said, 'My advice, if there's any real shooting to be done, leave it to Parker.'
He had the only key to the room in the house in Hackney, upstairs and overlooking the back yard. Inside the room, taped to the underside of the mattress were the keys to the Escort. There was a young couple, over from County Cork more than a year, who rented the house and used the front room upstairs and all of the ground floor. The room was Jon Jo's and, when he needed it, the car.
It would have been possible to keep the rifle and the explosives at the Hackney address, but the word in the Organisation these days was that firearms and explosives had to be kept in caches. If the couple from County Cork were turned over, then at least the hardware stayed intact.
His principal cache was hidden in the forest area between Crowthorne and Bagshot.
It was the time of greatest risk. The cache itself was brilliant. The top of the dustbin was three inches below ground level, and that was under a splayed and hall capsized holly tree. He'd taken three days to dig it, twice being unlucky with roots when he was far down into the hole. It was a good position, but once he had seen a man walking a dog not fifty yards away and the lid of the dustbin had been open, and he had, Christ, frozen. And in the autumn, when it was still warm, he had had to lie off the cache for an hour because there was a couple, men, screwing within sight of the holly tree. He was most vulnerable there because a hundred policemen could have dug in, within 200 metres of where his dustbin was buried.
He had circled the cache, the first time at a radius of 300 yards. A long way down the rough forestry track, he had seen the back of a bird watcher. The second time he came closer, within 100 yards of the cache. Each time was a risk. The cache on the Welsh coast had been watched for seven weeks by more than eighty policemen,. and two good men had been taken, gone down for thirty years. A cache had been found at Pangbourne and more men doing time,
They might shout, they might just shoot, probably they'd shout On the ground, a revolver in his ear, handcuffs on his wrists, they probably wouldn't shoot.
Thirty year s he was looking at, each time he came to a cache.
Jon Jo scuffed the earth and the leaf mould clear. Between the lid and the dustbin there was a minute piece of black insulating tape He knew exactly where it should be. That way he would he would know if the cache had been interfered with. Sometimes if a cache was found they would burrow a homing device into a weapon, or they would disarm it, or they would replace the explosive with a harmless look alike compound, or they would screw up the detonators. Mostly they would lift, or kill, whoever came to collect the weapons.
In the dustbin, in separate plastic bags sealed at the neck, were two car bombs, a larger bomb for a building, and a Kalashnikov A.K. 47 assault rifle. At the bottom of the dustbin were six loaded magazines for the rifle. Heh, and the dustbin had been filled when he had started out ten weeks before… It was like a larder at the end of the week.
He took out the rifle and two magazines.
He replaced the lid, sealed it again with black insulating tape. He pushed back the soil and the dead leaves.
Jon Jo kept watch and listened for a quarter of an hour before he crawled out from under the spread of the holly tree.
The rifle, the stock folded back against the mechanism, was in the pouch pocket of his coat.
Bren came out of the front door. It had been Ronnie's idea. Ronnie had said that it would be no problem for him to get away for five hours.
Two hours driving each way, and an hour in the small house in the Filton district of Bristol. Ronnie had said that the backing of a strong family helped a man enduring stress.
So little that he, their son, could say to Art and Sadie Brennard. His father had cancelled his evening out at the horticulture group, and his mother had missed Friday evening Bingo.
He wished to God that he hadn't come
They had eaten a high tea, scones and cakes, and when it was nearly time for him to take off again, head away out of their lives, he had said that he would be gone some time. That was a sick joke, because it was more than four months since he had last been home. He'd the impression, when they had all sat down, that his mother had expected some momentous announcement, like he'd met a girl. He told them that he was posted to Belfast. His mother, Sadie, had looked as though she might cry. His father, Art, he'd just munched at his food and lowered his head nearer his plate.
The way Bren told it, what he would be doing would be just pretty boring, pushing paper round desks. Of course, nothing about '. source units or surveillance hides, firearms or playing with men's lives or being looked after and having his hand held by Parker, of course not. He left when he could see that neither of them believed a word he said. HIS mother kissed him on the doorstep, and his father held his hand and shook it, and the voices of both of them were lost in their throats.
He tried to smile back at them. He waved from his car. Should have told them, shouldn't he, that across in Bellast there was a man called Parker who was reckoned the superstar So patronising they all were, Wilkins and Ronnie and P.T. I Terry and Jocelyn. All playing the bloody Parker tune. By the time that he had reached the motorway, joined the great horde of his fellow countrymen who gave not a toss about Northern Ireland and its war, Bren had made himself a very binding promise. He would not be bloody Parker's passenger. He was not going to be any man's bag carrier.
One more night and he would be travelling.
Siobhan Nugent stood at her kitchen window and looked out and across at the farmhouse. She was like a widow, that Attracta Donnelly, and widows gathered men to them.
Siobhan Nugent wondered if her Mossie was there, at the widow feckin' Donnelly's. If he was not there then he would be out with the wild boys, bad boys, of the mountain. She knew, certain. All of the wives and the mothers on Altmore knew if their men were involved.
Below her bungalow, below the Donnelly farm, were the scattered lights of the homes of the Altmore people. To so many of those homes, before dawn had broken, the priest had come. It was always the priest who was sent to break the news of the shooting dead of another man.
They all ended dead, or locked away.
Perhaps it were better if her Mossie were at the widow feckin' I Donnelly's.
