He searched around for the gun and had just put his hand on it when the car took a sharp corner, bounced over the verge, and slammed him into the roof of the boot. If the lid opened he would be thrown out for sure. He gave up on the gun and found his prestel by following the wire from his sleeve.
‘Four two Charlie . . .’ he managed to say before being flattened once again into the roof as the car hit another bump. ‘Four two Charlie, I’m mobile! The car’s been nicked! I repeat, I am mobile and the car’s been fuckin’ stooooleeeen!’
Ed and Aggy, driving down the road, were momentarily stunned by the transmission. Both reached to press the send button but were stopped by a voice breaking in ahead of them. It was the duty signaller on watch back in the operations room thirty-five miles away.
‘Four two Charlie, this is zero alpha, confirm your car is mobile.’
‘I’m mobile awright,’ Spinks managed to say between severely winding bumps. ‘We’re goin’ like the bleedin’ clappers! ’
‘Zero alpha, roger that,’ said the signaller, or bleep as they were affectionately called, and continued as if commentating on a bowls match. ‘One three kilo, this is zero alpha.’
Aggy went for the send button but Ed pushed her hand aside and hit it himself. ‘One three kilo here. We’re still toward four two Charlie’s static location, or previous static location. That’s not me driving.’ The way Ed spoke in his slow, laborious manner, trying to be calm and stating the obvious at such a tense moment added to Aggy’s list of Ed’s irritating habits.
‘There it is!’ she suddenly shouted as she recognised Ed’s car heading towards them on the other side of the road. As it tore past at speed they could see only one person in front and possibly another in the back seat.
Aggy pushed the send button. ‘One three kilo, four two Charlie just passed us from red four to blue seven doing about eighty, possibly two up. I’m in pursuit.’
She hit the brakes slowing the car just enough to throw it into a ‘J’ turn, which was messy. The driver’s side rear wheel spun mud in the verge as she dropped the gear and put her foot down. The engine roared. The car inched forward, finally made traction and screeched up the road. Ed held on tightly throughout the manoeuvre, one hand gripping the bottom of his seat, the other outstretched against the dashboard. His roll-up dropped out of his mouth as his foot pressed firmly into the floor, trying to push down a brake pedal that was not there.
Spinks pushed out with his arms and legs in an effort to stop being thrown around but the heavier bumps did whatever they wanted to him. The MPK5 hit him hard on the head as it made its way around the boot. He made another effort to get a hold of his pistol but it was like trying to grab a leaping fish.There was a wrenching sound and Spinks was almost blinded by the sudden light as the back seat was ripped down. A powerful arm reached in, grabbed him by his hair, and brutally dragged him halfway into the car as they drove at top speed.
‘Come on, me little Pink,’ the man said in an Irish accent.
The man moved his hand to Spinks’ throat and leaned his full weight on to it. Spinks’s face swelled as he choked and his eyes filled with liquid and went out of focus as the man kept the weight on him while he searched him. He found the small, flat radio in its harness inside Spinks’s jacket and ripped it away, pulling the wires from it. He stuck a large finger into Spinks’s ear, dug around and pulled out the tiny wireless earpiece. The man seemed to know exactly what he was looking for and where to find it. He ripped open Spinks’s shirt and felt under his armpits and around his body; he undid Spinks’s trouser belt, pulled it out as if trying to start a boat engine, and tossed it to one side; he yanked open Spinks’s trousers, tearing apart the zipper as he pulled them down to his knees.
‘Where is it?’ the man shouted as he quickly checked Spinks’s bare legs. He brutally turned Spinks on to his front and ripped up his shirt to expose his back, pushing his hand under it to feel his skin up and over his shoulders. He pulled Spinks’s underpants down far enough to expose his arse then felt around Spinks’s hips. ‘Where is it, Pink?’ he repeated threateningly. He pulled up one foot after the other and ripped Spinks’s shoes and socks off, inspecting each shoe quickly before tossing it away.
He pulled Spinks over on to his back again and gripped his throat, pressing down hard on it. ‘You know what I’m looking for, Pink, don’t you? Where is it?’
Spinks gripped the man’s wrist to try and take some pressure off his throat and shook his head in ignorance of the demand. The man shoved the end of a pistol so hard into Spinks’s cheek he shattered a molar. ‘Where is it?’ he said again. Then as an afterthought, he lifted up Spinks’s underpants with the end of his pistol to expose his balls and penis.
‘If I focken’ find it on you I’ll blow your focken dick off,’ the man said sticking the gun back in Spinks’s face. ‘Is that clear, boyo?’
Spinks blinked hard as his eyes came back into focus. It was the stranger who had been outside the church with O’Farroll.
In the ops room Graham the bleep was in top gear. He was short, hyper, anal and had a mind like a razor. His generation of signallers had to be above average intelligence, not only to operate the latest complex communications systems used by the detachment but also to wire them and several other devices such as trackers and cameras into a covert car from scratch in less than twenty-four hours. Above all they had to be calm under pressure. A good duty bleep in a crisis could mean the difference between life and death for a team on the ground. Graham reached for a row of intercom buttons on a wall and pushed one.
‘Boss!’ he called out.
While waiting for an answer he talked into the handset on its coiled flex long enough to reach across the room. ‘Four two Charlie, this is zero alpha?
The large speakers on the wall remained silent.There was no answer on the intercom either. He hit another button. ‘Boss?’Then into the handset once again, ‘Four two Charlie, zero alpha?’
The wall speakers remained silent but a refined English accent came over the tinny intercom. ‘Boss here.’
‘We have a possible Kuttuc.’
There was no reply from the boss and Graham never expected or waited for one. The boss would be running at full speed to the ops room. Kuttuc was the codename for the most feared event in an undercover operations room in Northern Ireland. It meant an operative had been kidnapped. Every operation that operative was involved in would have to be cancelled. It also had to be assumed everything that person knew about the unit and its operating procedures was compromised.The political mess would then follow. But that was much later. For the operative it meant something more immediate and much more horrific.
Graham grabbed up the phone and held it under his chin while he punched in a number. ‘Four two Charlie, zero alpha?’ he repeated into the radio handset at the same time. The phone rang in his ear. No answer came over the speakers. Someone picked up the phone the other end and a yawning voice said hello.
‘This is Camelot. We have an op Kuttuc in progress. Do you understand what I’m talking about?’
The army clerk in the Army Air Corps headquarters office half a mile up the road had no idea what Graham was talking about, but he could detect the urgency in Graham’s voice. ‘I don’t think I do,’ he said, adding ‘sir’ just to be on the safe side.
Graham instantly went up several notches towards ballistic. ‘Then go and get someone who does, preferably your boss, and each second you take is a second off a man’s life and if he dies I am going to come down there and personally rip your fucking throat out!’
Graham heard the clunk of the phone hitting the desk, then the clerk’s feet as they hurried across the office and out of the door. Graham would do no such thing, of course. He was only a junior non-commission officer, a corporal, but he had learned to sound like he was a Gorgon on the other end of a phone when he needed to.Years of being a signaller, especially in this mystery-shrouded unit, had taught him the power of the anonymous voice shouting down the other end of a communications device. Graham had used the ploy many times and if the person the other end ever asked him to identify himself he would either impersonate his boss, which he could do very well, or simply put down the phone. It was almost impossible to trace a call back to the unit.
