He heard the distant call from the cottage.
'Come on, Peter, tea's made. You'll catch your death out there.'
'Just coming, darling,' the target answered. 'One last load.'
The target began to push the wheelbarrow across the lawn, towards a corner of the garden where a bonfire smoked through the earlier heaps of leaves.
Jon Jo looked back to his right, up the lane, and to his left, down the lane. The lane was empty. Dusk falling, completing a November Sunday afternoon. The car was a full 150 yards away, parked through an open field gate and hidden by a hedge. He was, at the upper end of the village and on the high ground above the church and the one main road around which the community had formed centuries before. There was a haze of smoke from the chimneys that blurred the setting sun.
He took the rifle from his pouch pocket…
The target had been identified in Dublin. They had good kids who sat in the Trinity Library or the Dublin University reading rooms to browse their way through the English newspapers.
Swift movement!, and the metallic snap of the magazine slotting into the underside of the A.K. 47. The target had stopped, rooted.. .
In the Trinity Library every last book, periodical, pamphlet was collected and available to the student. A lieutenant-colonel, recently retired, formerly officer commanding a Light Infantry battalion, had written to The Times to protest that a B.B.C. documentary unfairly criticised Security Force operations in Northern Ireland. He had written from experience. His last posting had been to Belfast. The letter and the address had been noted.
The smack of the shoulder stock being wrenched back and locking.
The target recognised the sound, turned to run, cannoned into the wheelbarrow, was enmeshed for a long instant in its handles and in the spill of the loose leaves. The rifle was at Jon Jo's shoulder…
Lt-Col. Peter Beck, author of the letter, commanding officer of a Light Infantry battalion, had most vigorously, during his last tour, defended the action of his soldiers after they had shot dead two teenagers, a boy aged eighteen and a girl aged sixteen, who had crashed a roadblock. He had said then, and had been quoted on the front page of the Belfast Telegraph, that the kids were not 'joyriders', but 'car thieves, no more than common criminals who endanger the lives of civilians and soldiers alike'. He'd be a popular hit, because there had been more than a thousand following those kids' coffins to Milltown cemetery.
The target was running into the fog smoke from his bonfire. Jon Jo cocked the rifle. Twenty paces, going on twenty-five. The target stumbled in his fear, was trying to weave, trying to remember everything he had once known as commonplace…
Jon Jo squeezed the trigger. An assault rifle on semi-automatic.
There was the battering at his padded shoulder. Over the foresight and V sight the target was wavering, falling, crawling. He heard nothing. He saw the bullets puff stone shrapnel from the wall of the house, saw them punch into the target.
The rooks fled from the upper branches of the beech trees.
The target was down, deadly still, almost within reach of the back door of the house.
Jon Jo Donnelly ran, up the lane, dismantling the rifle, slowed to a walk at the end of the lane, towards the waiting car
She went in the ambulance with her husband.
It had been quick and that was luck. The retired surgeon being there had been luckier. He had recognised the blast of a high velocity rifle at the top of the village, and run as best he could towards the source of the sound. The surgeon and the ambulance man worked on the body below them to retain life.
She seemed not to hear the siren. She knew that she had left her front door unlocked and her back door wide open and that there was a pot of tea on the kitchen table. She spoke quietly, and it was as if she did not expect the two men bent over her husband to listen to her.
'He knew he was at risk, but what could we do about it? You can't just expect the government to nanny us with bodyguards. There's scores of people in the country much more in danger than we were, they can't all have an armed policeman sitting by the front door. We talked it through, we took sensible precautions like locking the garage when the car was in their, and then we just had to get on with our lives. Thats all you can do, isn't it?'
'Mrs Beck, would you tuck that blanket securely round his feet and hold them still? Thank you.' The gentle growled instructions of a man whose attention was elsewhere.
'He's such a lovely man. It's just not possible to believe that anyone could hate him enough to do this to him…'
'Shut up, Cecily, and listen…' The faint, bubbled voice from the stretcher.
She leaned forward. They had scissored through the old pullover and cut his shirt back. There were huge holes in his chest. The voice oozed from the blood mess of his jaw and mouth.
'… Big man, above average. Saw him, twice. Afternoon, second time when he aimed. Blue anorak, red shoulder…’’
'Don't strain.' dark hair, short cut, curly. Abnormally pale face. Deep eyes, far down.
Hadn't shaved.'
She had left her handbag behind She had no pen or paper. The ambulance man had a syringe poised. They already had the drips in, blood plasma and saline. She pulled a biro from the slot on the ambulance man's shoulder.
'… A.K. 47, sure of that…'
The syringe was bedded against her husband's upper arm. He was so horribly white and his breathing was sporadic, forced as if by great effort. He said nothing more.
She wrote down all that he had said on the back of her hand.
At the hospital a nurse caught her, prevented her from going all the way through into the Casualty's X-ray unit. She was sat on a chair.
She was brought tea, steaming hot and with sugar, and when a policeman came to her, she was able to dictate from her hand the description of her husband's attacker and the weapon he had used.
Bren locked the door behind him.
Cathy looked up at him. She stood square on the balls of her feet. Her hair was a mess. She blocked his way to the stairs.
'We'll just get this over first.'
She had come to his room for him when she had said she would, to the minute.
'What?'
'You were just dreadful this afternoon, and it will not happen again.'
'I beg your pardon?'
'You walk out of here. You traipse round town. Against my advice, you go wandering off out of the city centre and you end up beside Unity Flats. You're not in bloody Bognor you know, this is Belfast. 'I am a civil servant, I cannot give you my name and address…' How pompous can you get? That soldier was only a boy doing his job, you don't have to speak to him like you're Christ Almighty at a Public School. You come back here and again you take no precautions at all.
You go on behaving like that and you're going to be a serious bloody liability.'
It hurt him, but he said it. 'It won't happen again.'
'I had you followed. I wanted to see if you were worth working with.
Today's report says you are a disaster.'
'It will not happen again.'
She stared up at him, weighing whether he was worth the effort.
'Come on.'
The Commander shook the sleep from his head.
'That's a hell of a good description.'
The voice on the telephone was calm. 'There's not a great deal, really, but all four specifics, height, hair, eyes and pallor, they're all Donnelly.'
'Is my car moving?'
'Be with you in fifteen minutes.'
'But it's Jon Jo Donnelly?'
