‘What the hell kept you!’
O’Neil looked at him in the driving mirror. ‘Another dud bloody detonator. Where in Christ’s name do you get the stuff?’
‘Come the day you need to know, I’ll tell you.’ McAlliskey took a battered tobacco tin from his pocket and started to roll another cigarette. ‘It’s set?’ O’Neil nodded. ‘Let’s go, then.’
*
They parked the car at a road end where a dirt track led up through a gate towards the woods above. Below them, the road ran steeply downwards between high hedgerows. To their left, a narrow lane led away around the side of the hill, hugging its contours before dropping down again to feed into the network of roads that fanned out through rolling farmland, south towards the Republic. O’Neil switched off the engine and killed the lights. He took a map from the glove compartment and shone a flashlight for McAlliskey to see. There were three routes traced in red, each an alternative escape to the south. They had been lettered A, B and C with a red marker. ‘To keep our options open,’ he said. ‘If anything goes wrong.’
McAlliskey nodded. He didn’t much like O’Neil, but he was thorough. And good with explosives.
They left the car and O’Neil led the way down the hill about two hundred metres. Then he stopped and whistled softly. A faint whistle answered his, somewhere away to their left, and the two men followed the sound, finding a deep-rutted tractor track that led them down to a drystone dyke at the corner of the field. A figure was crouched there, with a holdall tucked in under the wall to keep it dry. He flashed a light briefly in their faces.
‘Turn that fucking thing off!’ McAlliskey spoke softly, but his voice carried the authority of rank. The third man doused his light without a word.
‘Flaherty,’ O’Neil said.
McAlliskey crouched down beside him and saw that he was no more than a boy of sixteen or seventeen with fear in his eyes. ‘You should know better, son.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr McAlliskey.’ And there was awe in the boy’s voice. McAlliskey was almost a legend in the organization. The boy wasn’t sure what scared him more – McAlliskey or the bloody business they were about on this dark Irish night.
‘How long?’ McAlliskey asked.
‘’Bout fifteen minutes, sir.’
O’Neil opened the holdall and took out a small, hand-held radio transmitter. He extended the aerial and flicked a switch. A red light came on. He glanced at McAlliskey. ‘You sure they’ll be?’
‘They’ll be.’
And they settled back against the wall in silence, listening for the first distinctive sound of the army APC rolling up the lane towards them. From here, they had a perfect line of sight, and would see its lights early – the same lights that would illuminate the white marker O’Neil had planted at the roadside, in line with the twenty pounds of plastic explosive skilfully secreted just below the tarmac. O’Neil wondered how McAlliskey got his information. But he knew better than to ask.
McAlliskey took out his tobacco tin, leaning forward to keep it safe from the rain, and rolled another cigarette. He struck a match to light it, hands cupped around the box.
A hundred and fifty metres above them, a man lay still against a slight rise in the ground, below the shelter of the treeline. He had a livid white scar running back across one cheek where a bullet had grazed the flesh and taken off the lobe of his left ear. His dark hair was cropped short, greying at the temples. His eyes were blue and cold as steel. He saw the brief flare of the match light up the smoker’s face.
He had already picked out McAlliskey as he and O’Neil made their way across the field. Amateurs, he thought. He tucked the butt of his US M21 rifle into his shoulder. The weapon had been modified to his own specifications. He put his eye to the lens of the long, telescopic, infrared sight mounted above the butt end of the barrel, centring it on McAlliskey’s head, and he too prepared to wait.
They saw the lights of the APC before they heard the distant whine of its engine. Headlights raked the sodden green of the fallow winter fields, swinging one way then the other as the vehicle wound up the road towards them.
McAlliskey and the others crept further along the wall to a clearer vantage where a white gate opened into the lane. The man in the woods kept them in his sights and adjusted his position.
The engine of the armoured personnel carrier had become a roar now as it approached the marker on the road below. The muscles tightened across O’Neil’s chest and his finger hovered over the button on his handset. McAlliskey watched, impassive. Twenty metres, fifteen, ten. The APC lumbered inexorably towards the marker. A fine, cold sweat beaded across O’Neil’s forehead, his hands clammy. The boy glanced at him anxiously, his heart in his throat, almost choking him. The marksman in the woods focused on McAlliskey’s right temple. Gently he squeezed the trigger. The rifle sounded, like the crack of a dry branch underfoot. McAlliskey slumped forward, a neat round hole in his temple, blood gouting from the back where the bullet had passed through, taking half his head with it. O’Neil pressed the button involuntarily, and the explosion below ripped up the road, the APC still five metres short. But O’Neil barely heard it as he stared in horror at McAlliskey. He had hardly a chance to turn before the second bullet struck him full in the face, and his head cracked back against the
