was talking into his radio, another was inside the car and ferreting, another had the bonnet up and was peering down into the engine.
The sergeant sneered, 'Off down the pub to get pissed up?'
'No, I'm not.'
'That's the Paddy weekend, isn't it, getting arseholed…'
'I'm not drinking, I'm driving.'
'… Then, when you're all pissed up, all arseholed, all brave, going out and blowing away a few kiddies, a few little girls. That's the fucking Paddy weekend, eh?'
It was the wind-up, nothing new.
'I'm going down the shop.'
'You're real brave bastards, aren't you? Blowing up little kiddies.
Watched it on the news, did we, Paddy, with the Missus and all your own little kiddies? Right fucking heroes, Provo shit.'
Mossie Nugent was too old to be wound up. He was thirty- seven years old. Twenty years ago he might have stuck one on the sergeant.
Just what they wanted. Grievous Bodily Harm or Criminal Assault, anything they cared to think up. He held onto the seams of his trousers, kept his hands down. The cold whipped through his cotton vest, and the damp seeped in his socks.
They were bored by the time that Pakkie Henty came along with his tractor and a load of silage, so they let him go. He dressed. He climbed back into his car and drove on.
Mossie Nugent was the Intelligence Officer of the mountain- based Company that was the driving force inside the East Tyrone Brigade.
The men from Altmore mountain dictated everything that went on in East Tyrone. And the Intelligence Officer would never have been stupid enough, knowing that he and his car were Charlie One, to carry a weapon, explosives, ammunition, or documents. He had been going to meet his O.C. They were careful now, all of them, the officers and the volunteers on Altmore. Too many roadblocks, too much military presence. He had been going for a talk. Not any more, not once he had been through a vehicle check point.
He drove to the shop in the village. He bought three tins of baked beans, and a sliced loaf, and a pound of sausages.
And he was stopped again and questioned again on his way back home. When he was let through, he waved to Pakkie Henty whose sileage trailer was still being searched.
The Commander sat straight in his chair, a cup of tea on the table beside him.
'What I can tell you, sir, is that every resource available to me is currently deployed in the hunt for this man. There is absolutely no complacency in SO 13. What it comes down to is patience…
'… Over the last three years we have recovered four lists of targets, and they added up to 210 persons and locations. Currently I have 172 of those under some form of surveillance. As I told you at the time, when your Parliamentary colleague was killed, he had attended a public meeting without notifying us. Two of the earlier bombs were against targets that had not figured on any previous list. Mr Tennyson was on one of the lists, but was not provided with protection because it was not thought he was a priority to our e n e m y… '
There was a sharp intake whistle of breath from the Prime Minister.
The Commander could happily have kicked himself. The last thing he wanted was for the Prime Minister to chide him for not regarding the lives of Tennyson and his family as 'priority'.
'… They have patience, we have to demonstrate the same quality.
Because he is intelligent, he will know that his chances of survival become slimmer with every hit. He has made one mistake alrea dy
… '
The mistake had been on the second attack. The victim, the target, the poor bastard who hadn't done anything worth dying for, had been the principal editorial writer for a tabloid newspaper, and had, late at night, answered the door bell at his mistress's flat. At a range of three feet he had been blasted back across the hallway by five shots, fired semiautomatic from a Kalashnikov rifle. Scenes of Crime had put it together rather well. He had picked up the ejected cartridge cases. He would have been wearing gloves, his hands would have been awkward. Scenes of Crime reckoned that he had shoved the cartridge cases probably into a hip pocket, and in pulling his hand back out he brought with it a?5 note. Probably his hip pocket because he hadn't seen the folded note fall to the floor. Everybody in the block fingerprinted, every regular tradesman, and the pristine thumbprint sent across the water to the R.U.C.
'… We have a name, we have evidence, we have a four-year- old photograph. It's just a matter of time, Prime Minister.'
The Commander saw the tired and wan face of the Prime Minister.
He sipped quietly at his tea.
'It's just that we seem so helpless.'
'Oh, we'll get him. Some day, some place.'
The anger started to the Prime Minister's face, the blood coursed through his cheek veins, bulged corridors on his forehead. 'When will you get him, where?'
The Commander had been back eleven days from Belfast. He had been taken for a helicopter ride. Three thousand feet up, rolling in a Lynx, clear of the range of a 12.7 mm heavy machine- gun, he had been shown the small farms, the close-set villages, and the bleak gale-swept landscape.
'When? When he comes home… Where? Where he's from, Altmore Mountain.'
There was no complaint from Ernest Wilkins, just a personal sadness. It was so hard to find the right sort of man to send across. He had thought this man ideal, and the sadness came from the knowledge that he had been wrong. He listened.
'You can understand this, Mr Wilkins. It's not what I'm supposed to say… I cared what happened to him.'
Wilkins understood well enough, and if he had appeared distracted it was probably because he was trying to imagine Brennard in this experienced man's place. It was a hell of a job to fill. He paid close attention, but he said nothing.
'Most of the time, in the early days, he was so scared that he used to shake when I met him. He was more scared of us than he was of his own, and more frightened of going back inside than anything. He loved those kids. That's what it came down to. I think he'd have topped himself if he'd gone back inside. The money was just gravy, it was the threat of going back inside that held him to us. And then he'd begun to get quite good. It wasn't high- grade stuff because he was only a bottle washer, a volunteer, but he knew what was going on and he drove a bit for them, moving stuff. That's when it starts to get really bloody, when he has something to tell you. It's my fault, you see, I put the report in to Task Co-ordinating Group. Parker wasn't there. God knows where Parker was. So I gave the report to bloody Hobbes, and Hobbes chucked it onto the T.C.G. table. They were going to do a hit. Eddie knew the guns were being moved, but he didn't know the target. It wasn't discussed properly, it was all too fast. They were moving the rifles the next evening, and a V.C.P. was set up. The police wanted arrests. It must have been something said by one of the detectives who questioned them at Gough R.U.C. Somebody slipped up, because as soon as they saw a solicitor the word was back into the system that it hadn't just been an accident. The tout hunt started. The Q.M. knew they were moving the firepower, and Eddie knew because he'd collected them from the cache, and the two guys in the car. It all pointed to Eddie
… You know what Hobbes said? Sorry, but he's such a prick, that man.
He said Eddie was nothing more than a terrorist, and not worth crying over.'
Late Saturday afternoon. The street lights on. Curzon Street deserted.
He watched from the upper window of Leconfield House as Faber came out of the main entrance and walked away to find a bus or an underground train.
He shrugged into his anorak. So difficult, Ernest Wilkins thought, to find men who were not degraded and disgusted by the Belfast work.
He came out of his office, closed the door and locked it, and walked past Brennard's clean, cleared desk. So extraordinarily difficult to find men who could cope with the Belfast work, and not be scarred.
He was out to whist that evening and should hurry himself if he was not to miss the first rubber.
