Herbie still wore just his boxer shorts and Jocko was back in his sleeping bag, on his knees, and they looked at the map spread out on the low table. Cathy was between them, sitting cross legged, and Jocko had his arm on her shoulder. The map had red pencil squares, and each square a letter on it. He passed her a mug of coffee.
She was talking and the smile beamed on her. '… he'll have the bleep on him and that'll come through to here. Jimmy'11 look after that, but that's only in case we've lost him. We hope to be closer in than you. If all goes well we'll have Song Bird and Donnelly in sight
… Thanks, Bren… If it's possible we'll whistle you in. If not
…'
She didn't have to finish it. Bren stood cupping his coffee in both hands. If it was not possible to whistle up the firepower then it would be down to the two of them. He could see it on all of their faces. They didn't rate him.
'Shouldn't be a problem,' Bren said.
Cathy said she was going for a shower, and he was asleep in a borrowed sleeping bag before their three- hand card game had begun.
It was the way he had worked from the beginning. He alone knew where it was. The cache had been well made. The inside of the dustbin was bone dry. Stowed in the dustbin were plastic farm bags, tied at the neck. Inside the bags were a
Kalashnikov rifle, heavily greased, cartons of ammunition and magazines, two hand-guns, a drogue grenade, a black balaclava, camouflage denims, a pair of boots which he had oiled before they went into the sack and which were soft to the touch now, and a thermal sleeping bag. They were all dry, all as he had left them in the dustbin that he had sealed with masking tape. Jon Jo changed swiftly into the camouflage denims and pulled on his old, familiar boots, and then taking what he needed, repacking the rest, he resealed the bin and rebuilt the cover over the pit. Working fast, summoning up the urgency, because that was the way to suppress the wrenching disappointment of his homecoming.
First, he told himself, identify the tout. Second, he told himself, kill the bastard, kill the killer of old Mrs Riordan's boy, of Vinny Devitt. He would take pleasure in killing the tout. And then, then they would sit up off their arses in Dublin. The sky above Altmore would be, by Christ, on fire.
Old Hegarty, sitting motionless in the gorse with his dog, saw Donnelly fill in the pit, replace the stones over the dustbin, saw the rifle in his hand, saw him slip for cover.
He'd had his breakfast, he had sat on the toilet, he had been given his lunch box. His mother was still in her bedroom, and the children were all over her and squabbling. Siobhan opened the bedroom door. He was on his knees, half into the wardrobe. Must have been the sounds of the children, fighting, that were magnified through the suddenly opened door. She saw the bald patch on the crown of his head, his white paint-stained overalls; then the fright on his face as he swung round.
'What's you doing, Mossie?'
He held it up, the bleeper box, for explanation.
'But you don't take it.'
She saw him tremble as his teeth bit at his lower lip.
'You reckon he's back?'
She watched him force down, fumbling, the wardrobe floor.
'You'll lead them to him?'
He had the buttons of his overalls unfastened, and he was working at his belt and his zipper, and he had the elastoplast beside him.
'… God, if he knew…'
He strapped the bleeper box high under his crutch.
'He'd kill you. He'd kill the both of us, if he knew.'
She followed him out of the bedroom, and down the hall. She watched him go to the car with the lunch box in his hand. It was for money they could not spend. He had not said goodbye to his children.
He had said not a word to her. He drove away without a sign.
She was in the bathroom and washing the baby. The O.C. told her he was going out. She never asked why and she never asked where he was going to. He told her that he didn't know when he'd be back. He might have told her, but he didn't, that he had business with a man in Coalisland. He closed the door behind him and locked it with the mortise. He'd had the new locks put on all the doors since the summer, since the Protestants had been to the village bar with their guns, and he now kept his car always in the garage, and there was a new lock on the garage door. They weren't much, the precautions he by himself could take against the Protestant gunmen. One precaution was already taken, the message passed by a Nationalist councillor to a Protestant councillor, giving the cast-iron guarantee to the U.V.F. that every last one of them in their command structure would be singled out, shot down, their homes burned over the heads of their slags and their brats if one hair on the head of any of the Brigade officers of East Tyrone was harmed.
And his own private treaty was that for as long as he commanded East Tyrone, no U.V.F. officer of a comparable rank would be a target.
He unlocked the swing-back door of the garage, heaved it over. He switched on the light.
'Get it off.'
He froze.
'Shut it off.'
He saw Jon Jo Donnelly in the camouflage gear and a woollen cap rolled up onto his forehead. It was an order, and he obeyed it. He snapped the light off. 'Pull the door down.'
The door screeched on the runners as he dragged it down. The O.C. stood his ground. There was the flash of a match in the darkness and the glow of a cigarette and the smell of the tobacco.
He said it nervously, 'Great to have you back, Jon Jo.’’
'Good to be back.'
'You going well, Jon Jo?'
'I'm going alright.'
'Anything you be needing…?'
'I heard there was a tout on Altmore 'The voice was ice-cold and the cigarette burned and wavered in front of the O.C.
'I did what I was supposed, I brought the security, I handed it to them.'
'Didn't hear me criticise you, did you? Just saying that I was told there was a tout on Altmore.’’
'The security pulled the Riordan boy in, they did him.’’
'What did he confess to?' 'Don't know.'
'You didn't see what he confessed to?’’
'I wasn't shown anything, nor heard a tape?’’
'Did you think it was the Riordan boy?'
'I don't know.'
He saw the cigarette flake to the floor. He heard the scrape of the boot on concrete floor of the garage.
'When you pulled the security in, did you tell them you thought Patsy Riordan was a tout?'
The drip of the voice. No emotion, no surprise, no regret. He had only once been on an operation with the man, and he hadn't known he would be there until the last minute, and he'd been on the 50-calibre, feckin' incredible, not a bloody soldier bastard daring to show his face over the wall on the Altaglushan Bridge.
‘’ I didn't…it was after the Devitt boy was shot by the S.A. S, and Jacko from Pomeroy and Malachy from Coalisland. Only Mossie Nugent got clear… It had to be a tout.'
'When you called the security in, who did you think was the tout?'
'It was Patsy was done.'
'What did you think?'
He blurted, 'I thought it was Mossie.'
'Who named Patsy to the security?'
The O.C. said, quiet, 'Mossie did… but I'm telling you that, Mossie's no tout. We did a policeman yesterday, a Branch man. I told Mossie the evening before and we did him the next morning, late. He hadn't been warned.
Couldn't have been Mossie… but when the Devitt boy and Jacko and Malachy were shot I didn't see
