pulled off the street and driven to a remote rural spot. The teenager was the son of a prominent member of the Ulster Volunteer Force, who was earmarked for persecution and then death.
Brennan would never forget it. Not because it was his first kill but because it wasn’t. He bungled the task, even though he did everything as he had been instructed. He had placed the barrel of the gun in the centre of the boy’s forehead, pulled back the hammer, looked into the boy’s eyes, uttered some farewell piss-taking comment, and slowly squeezed the trigger. Brennan had not been instructed to make such a meal of the pre-shoot chat. Lengthening the agony of his victim with his tormenting banter was a torture he decided on only at that moment. When he pulled the trigger, the gun fired, and the explosion sent the bullet through the boy’s head and out the other side. The feeling Brennan experienced the second the bullet boomed from the barrel amazed him. He felt like a god. When he pulled the pistol away from the boy’s skull he was fascinated by the wisp of smoke coming out of the entry point. Brennan remembered rubbing up some of the black powder burn around the hole with his finger and dabbing it on to the end of the boy’s nose as he said to him, ‘Rest in peace.’ Brennan and his friends then left the boy twitching in the grass and went back to the pub.
But the boy wasn’t dead. The lad was discovered a few hours later by a farmer walking his dog and rushed to hospital. The doctors couldn’t understand how he had survived such a wound, let alone with all of his faculties until they discovered the bullet had been fired at such an angle that it had travelled inside the skull along the bone precisely in the crease that separates the two halves of the brain, and missed the cerebral cortex before popping out the back. Brennan was ridiculed, but it was a lesson he vowed never to repeat.
There was one thing that niggled Brennan about this particular kidnapping, an edge he had not experienced before. He had worked against the Paras, the Marines, the RUC’s Special Branch and had had a brush or two with the SAS, but he’d never come up against Pinks before, although he knew all about them.They made him more nervous than all the other Brit units. The SAS were bad enough but the Pinks were different. If you were going to be ambushed in the middle of a job it would likely be the SAS and every Republican soldier knew that if they walked into an SAS ambush it was pretty much over, and definitely so if there were no RUC around to make sure they didn’t finish you off if you were wounded. The SAS were murdering bastards and carried handcuffs just for show. But the Pinks were worse for one important reason: they were in a unique position to play the game with a different set of rules to all the others - their own rules.
Pinks took the law into their own hands. That or they were under the command of some bastard in MI5 or 6 who gave the orders. It wouldn’t have been directed from the Brit government. The IRA had long since scared that lot into abandoning any kind of unofficial revenge killings.The politicians no longer had the backbone for that kind of game, especially now that they were part of the European Union. The only Brit unit that could plan and carry out an execution independent of any authority, with a high degree of confidence that they would not be discovered, were the Pinks. What made this all the more dangerous for Brennan was not so much that the Pinks could carry out a murder but that it seemed they were only too willing to risk illegally utilising the technology and resources of the Brit army to do so. They worked in a minefield, between the IRA and their own government.An autonomous execution squad. He knew that not all the Pinks were up to playing this high-staked game and that those who did risked their careers. But the fact remained, if you bloodied a Pink it wasn’t over just because you got away with it. You were a marked man for as long as there was one of them around willing to take revenge, and they had a lot of resources at hand to track you down. And Brennan had one of them in a box in the back of the van! Kidnapping one was the greatest wrong you could do them and they would want revenge. Brennan was not over the border yet and could breathe easier only when he was, and even then, afterwards, he would not be safe.
Fuck ’em, he said to himself.This was war. Brennan could handle it.The immediate problem was getting this one home and to the interrogators. If the RUC or army stopped them they could have a bit of a fight if there was the opportunity, and if it looked like Brennan might not win, all he had to do was give it up. The worst that would happen was jail. But if the Pinks got to them before they passed over the border that was a different story. It would be a fight to the end for someone. That made it the most exciting game he had played yet, and Brennan was up for it. If he beat them, if he got one of them home alive, he would be a legend in his own lifetime. He looked around at the two men in the back.
‘Where’re your tools?’ he growled.
The men pointed to a sack on the floor.
‘What focken’ good are they there? Put ’em in your hands, you stupid bastards.’
One of them picked up the sack and pulled out two American M16 assault rifles. He handed one to his pal.
‘Load ’em and put the safety-catches on, for Christ’s sake! Don’t they teach you morons anything at that school?’
‘Army,’ Sean suddenly warned. They all instantly looked ahead through the dirty windscreen.
A convoy of four army Landrovers headed towards them on the other side of the road. They passed by at speed, each loaded with soldiers. Sean kept an eye on the wing mirror, watching until they were out of sight.
‘Anyone catch what regiment that was?’ Sean asked.
‘Who gives a fock.Take the next right,’ snapped Brennan.
Sean turned right into a small lane. ‘About a mile to go,’ he said, wondering if that, too, would offend Brennan. But Brennan was concentrating too hard on the road, fields and sky to take any more notice of what Sean had to say.
‘Only thing we need to worry about from here on is a foot patrol,’ Brennan said.
‘Or an eagle flight,’ added Sean, referring to a common army practice of dropping patrols off in the countryside using helicopters.
‘There’s the gate,’ Brennan said, pointing up ahead. Sean slowed, turned and stopped in front of a five-bar wooden gate that led into a field. Brennan hopped out and opened the gate. Sean drove through, stopping long enough for Brennan to leap back in.
‘Stay on those tracks. Come on, come on, move it,’ Brennan said, getting impatient.
Sean set off again, following a pair of tractor ruts across a lumpy field. Brennan sat forward in his seat, looking in every direction. They passed through a gap in a hedge into another field. ‘Two football pitches and we’re home,’ he said.
Everyone could see the spindly hedgerow up ahead that was the Irish border. The van dipped and creaked in the ruts and when Sean skidded and slid a little he braced himself for a bollocking but instead it seemed Brennan was already in a celebratory mood. ‘Don’t break the van after all that, Sean me lad,’ he said in a fatherly tone. ‘Easy does it now.’
Sean dropped down a gear and drove with more care, composing himself in readiness for the victory cheer as the border inched closer.
Sean was the first to think he heard it, then Brennan detected a dull throbbing sound. About the same time they knew their ears were not deceiving them, a helicopter thundered in an arc across their front, low to the ground, its rotors facing them, pulsating loudly as it banked steeply to head around to their rear. Sean swerved hard in reaction, the van’s tyres digging into the soft earth. Everyone was ramrod straight with tension. Brennan grabbed Sean’s collar violently as he yelled: ‘Go! Go for it, you focker! Go!’
Sean lost traction as he hit the accelerator too hard and the van fishtailed. He brought it under control and drove over the ruts and dips towards the spindly hedge now a football field away.
As the helicopter came around the rear of the van, Stratton looked down on it like a hawk eyeing a rodent scurrying for its life. He grabbed a thin wire that ran across the cabin door, the emergency release cable, and yanked it hard as he booted the bottom of it. The door flew off its hinges and flapped to the ground in the downdraught and the wind tore inside the cab. Stratton turned in his seat so that he was facing outside, rested a foot on the skid below the edge of the door, and hung as far out as his seatbelt would allow so that he could comfortably fire the rifle down at a steep angle.
He gripped the SLR tightly into his shoulder and shouted into his mic, competing with the downdraught from the rotors. ‘Keep my side facing the van! . . . Did you hear me?’
‘Yes,’ the pilot replied, although he was distracted by something else that greatly concerned him.
‘Move up. Keep just ahead of the van!’ Stratton continued as he raised the barrel so that he could look along its length and sit the target on the end of it.
