left arm he would ask him who he was. If Stratton didn’t answer he was dead. If Stratton answered in his English accent he was dead. It was near impossible to perfect a convincing Northern Irish accent if one was not from these parts and few operatives bothered to try. What Stratton had seen from inside the car, which spurred his confidence and sealed the young man’s fate, was that the unfortunate Provo had obviously forgotten that his Browning 9mm semi-automatic pistol was on half-cock. A characteristic of the weapon is that when the hammer is pulled back one click, only halfway back, it is impossible to pull the trigger. To fire the gun the hammer must be pulled back a second click to full cock. The Provo was left-handed - the safety-catch, which is on the left side of the gun, is hard to operate for left-handed shooters and so cack-handers often use the half-cock as a safety device.
Stratton calmly opened his jacket and drew out his pistol. The young Provo squeezed the trigger with all his might but by the time he realised why he could not fire it and moved his thumb to the hammer to pull it back to full cock it was too late. As he dropped to the ground with two bullets through his heart Stratton dropped to one knee to engage the cover man across the street, hitting him in the body with two shots to disrupt his aim, then closing in with an aimed shot to the head to finish him.
Then there were the two rumoured unofficial kills. Graham knew for certain about one of them. Well, pretty certain. He had been on duty that night.The team had been in Warrenpoint on the south-eastern corner of the province doing a surveillance task. When it ended the team made its way back to the detachment.The journey should have taken no more than an hour and a half at that time of night. Graham had asked for a radio check fifteen minutes after the team left the area to make sure everyone was okay. He could tell from the background noise that the operatives were in their cars travelling at speed, all except Stratton, who sounded like he was using his body comms. That suggested to Graham that Stratton was outside of his car and therefore not on his way back just yet. Graham did not dare to ask Stratton what he was doing. That would have required more courage than he possessed.
Twenty minutes after the rest of the team arrived Graham watched Stratton drive in through the main gates of the compound on the security monitor. The following morning the body of a man was found on the edge of the old market square in Warrenpoint. He had been choked unconscious then his neck had been broken. It was Matthew McGinnis, a RIRA sniper known to have shot three police officers and two soldiers and a suspected accomplice in four other killings.
Graham was aware that many of the rumours about Stratton were fiction, but he believed the operative was capable of taking the law into his own hands. Since McGinnis’s mysterious death Graham had paid closer attention to Stratton’s rare comments about the war against the IRA. There was often a suggestion, if only in his tone, of his contempt for the soft-handed way the judiciary treated the more hardcore terrorists.
‘We have a possible op Kuttuc,’ Graham said to him now.
Stratton moved quickly but without fuss or change in expression. He lifted a heavy, beaten-up leather jacket off a chair and pulled it on as Graham stepped back to let him pass.
‘It’s Spinks, four two Charlie,’ Graham continued. ‘We’ve lost comms and he’s mobile south at speed still in the boot.’
Graham wondered if Stratton ever panicked about anything. He had seen him angry, but never out of control. They headed down the corridor, Graham trotting behind.
‘Standby chopper?’ Stratton asked in his usual economic way as he turned the corner towards the ops room.
‘It should be waiting for you.’
Stratton stopped at a walk-in closet just before the ops room.A wooden framework built on to one wall was divided into compartments, like station baggage lockers without the doors, fifteen of them, one for each operative. He pulled a holdall, full and heavy, out of his compartment.
‘The church?’ Stratton asked.
‘Yes. One three kilo’s on the ground in pursuit.’
‘The dyke?’ he asked.
‘And Ed.’
‘Doesn’t matter which one’s driving then, does it?’ he said, suggesting Spinks had even less hope.
There was no hint of a joke in Stratton’s dry, monotone voice, but Graham knew him well enough to know it was there and forced a little laugh. Aggy’s nickname was generally used when referring to her in her absence, even though the men felt sure she was not, or at least hoped not. No one had gotten to first base with her but most wanted to, even some of those against women in the detachments. Graham did wonder about Stratton and her though. He had watched him staring at her one night in the bar during a piss-up while she was sat with several other operatives across the room.
Stratton took an old SLR 7.62mm semi-automatic high-velocity rifle from the top shelf and a couple of twenty-round magazines of ammunition. Attached to the rifle was a heavy metal object the size and shape of a grapefruit with a wire coming from it that had an electrical adapter on the end. It was a giro steady system designed to keep the weapon as still as possible inside a moving or heavily vibrating vehicle such as a helicopter. Attached to the ejection port of the weapon was a small canvas bag to catch spent shell cases and stop them bouncing around inside the cab. He headed down the corridor to a set of double doors and pushed through them. Graham watched him go then hit the buzzer outside the operations room door.
Aggy was driving beyond her capabilities along the narrow country road lined with stone walls and hedgerows, which she had already brushed against several times, losing a wing mirror on one occasion. An endless stream of comments came from Ed, most of them in the form of clipped or unfinished shouts: ‘Don’t . . . that!’ ‘Watch for . . .’ ‘Easy, EASY!’ If Ed were honest enough he would admit that even though they were driving to save Spinks’s life he wished she would just stop the car. It was mostly fields beyond the hedgerows on either side of the road. The occasional small wood, farm and row of homes streaked by.They had needed to pass only one car so far, an elderly couple behind the wheel. It had been a tight squeeze, but incredibly they had made it without touching it, although that was when she lost the wing mirror. Ed had raised himself out of his seat as Aggy slipped through the impossible gap between the car and a stone wall.
Spinks’s car was still far ahead. Aggy had glimpses of it but didn’t feel she was gaining any ground. She was starting to experience that frustrating, useless feeling again. The kind of useless they said she was during the selection course. She knew the constant digs from the instructors were all part of the selection process, designed to test and develop her self-control and ultimately get the best out of her, but she often wondered how true the comments really were. Fast driving had never been her forte. On the course she crashed three cars; in one of those accidents she had cracked a bone in her arm. She was warned that if she wrecked one more car she would be labelled an operational hazard and would fail the course. Her final exercise had involved a high-speed chase deliberately set up by the instructors to test her. She managed to get through it without a mishap but had come close a couple of times. This was the fastest she had driven since that day, perhaps even faster, and she felt much less in control. She kept talking herself through the stages, echoing her fast driving instructor: ‘Brake on the straight before the bend, not in it. Hit the corner just a bit faster than you think you can. Balance the throttle through the turn; keep the tyres biting the road. Accelerate on the apex.’
‘Towards orange five,’ she shouted. Ed appeared not to have heard her, his eyes as wide as they could possibly stretch and locked on to the road ahead. She reached for the send button but he pushed her hand away.
‘Keep your ’ands on the wheel! I’ll do the bloody comms!’ Ed was the most sedate of all the operatives in the detachment in a dreary way - during relaxed working conditions, that is. But car chases held a special fear for him. He hated travelling fast in anything where the speed was beyond the normal design functions. Four-door cars were family vehicles intended for comfort driving, not screaming along narrow country lanes and especially not in the hands of a girl who clearly had no idea what she was doing. His last car chase had been ten years earlier. He had been the tail-end car in a line of four. It had got so hairy he pulled out letting the others go on without him. He admitted during the debriefing that he just could not keep up with the pace. Since then he was given nothing but ‘soft’ tasks. However, the problem with doing nothing but safe jobs for years was that complacency set in. The true dangers of the profession remained known, respected even, but with time there was a fogging of the grim realities. In the space of a few short minutes Ed was being fully reacquainted with one aspect of them, and that was risking one’s own life to try and save another.
