tap’ – thirteen rounds discharged from a Browning High Power handgun in under three seconds, at close range – which some had whispered might turn out useful in the mean streets of Belfast.
Not as quiet as Danny, but also just badged and clearly self-conscious with the more experienced troopers, Hugh ‘Taff’ Burgess was a broad-chested Welshman with a dark, distant gaze, a sweet, almost childlike nature and, reportedly, a violent temper when aroused or drunk. Throughout the whole SAS Selection and Training course Taff had been slightly slow in learning, very thorough at everything, helpful and encouraging to others, and always even-tempered. True, he had wrecked a few pubs in Hereford, but while in the SAS barracks in the town he had been a dream of good humour and generosity. Not ambitious, and not one to shine too brightly, he was, nevertheless, a good soldier, popular with everyone.
Last but not least was Sergeant ‘Dead-eye Dick’ Parker, who didn’t talk much. Rumour had it that he had been turned into a withdrawn, ruthless fighting machine by his terrible experience in the Telok Anson swamp in Malaya in 1958. According to the eye-witness accounts of other Omani veterans such as Sergeant Ricketts and Gumboot, Parker, when in Oman with them, had worn Arab clothing and fraternized mostly with the unpredictable, violent firqats, Dhofaris who had renounced their communist comrades and lent their support to the Sultan. Now, lounging lazily on a chair in blue denims and a tatty old ski jacket, he looked like any other middle-aged man running slightly to seed. Only his grey gaze, cold and ever shifting, revealed that he was alert and still potentially lethal.
The men were scattered all around the lounge, not speaking, pretending not to know one another. When the boat docked and the passengers started disembarking, they shuffled out of the lounge with them, but remained well back or took up positions on the open deck, waiting for the last of the passengers to disembark.
Looking in both directions along the quayside, Martin saw nothing moving among the gangplanks tilted on end, scattered railway sleepers and coils of thick mooring cables. The harbour walls rose out of the filthy black water, stained a dirty brown by years of salt water and the elements, supporting an ugly collection of warehouses, huts, tanks and prefabricated administration buildings. Unmanned cranes loomed over the water, their hooks swinging slightly in the wind blowing in from the sea. Out in the harbour, green and red pilot lights floated on a gentle sea. Seagulls circled overhead, crying keenly, in the grey light of morning.
Having previously been told to wait on the deck until their driver beckoned to them, the men did so. The last of the other passengers had disembarked when Martin, glancing beyond the quayside, saw a green minibus leaving its position in the car park. It moved between rows of empty cars and the trailers of articulated lorries, eventually leaving the car park through gates guarded by RUC guards wearing flak jackets and armed with 5.56mm Ruger Mini-14 assault rifles. When the minibus reached the quayside and stopped by the empty gangplank, Martin knew that it had to be their transport.
As the driver, also wearing civilian clothing, got out of his car, Sergeant Lampton made his way down the gangplank and spoke to him. The man nodded affirmatively. A group of armed RUC guards emerged from one of the prefabricated huts along the quayside to stand guard while the men’s bergen rucksacks were unloaded and heaped up on the quayside. There were no weapons; these would be obtained from the armoury in the camp they were going to. All of the men were, however, already armed with 9mm Browning High Power handguns, which they were wearing in cross-draw holsters under their jackets.
When the last of the bergens had been unloaded, Lampton turned back and waved the men down to the quayside. Martin went down between Ricketts and Gumboot, following the first into the back of the minibus, where a lot of the men were already seated. Gumboot was the last to get in. When he did so, one of the RUC guards slid the door shut and the driver took off, heading out into the mean streets of Belfast.
‘Can we talk at last?’ Gumboot asked. ‘I can’t stand this silence.’
‘Gumboot wants to talk,’ Jock McGregor said. ‘God help us all.’
‘He’s talking already,’ Ricketts said. ‘I distinctly heard him. Like a little mouse squeaking.’
‘Ha, ha. Merely attempting to break the silence, boss,’ retorted Gumboot, ‘and keep us awake until we basha down. That boat journey seemed endless.’
‘You won’t get to basha down until tonight, so you better keep talking.’
‘Don’t encourage him,’ Jock said. ‘It’s too early to have to listen to his bullshit. I’ve got a headache already.’
‘It’s the strain of trying to think,’ Gumboot informed him. ‘You’re not used to it, Jock.’
His gaze moved to the window and the dismal streets beyond, where signs saying NO SURRENDER! and SMASH SINN FEIN! fought for attention with enormous, angry paintings on the walls of buildings, showing the customary propaganda of civil war: clenched fists, hooded men clasping weapons, the various insignia of the paramilitary groups on both sides of the divide, those in Shankill, the Falls Road, and the grim, ghettoized housing estates of West Belfast.
‘How anyone can imagine this place worth all the slaughter,’ Taff Burgess said, studying the grim, wet, barricaded streets, ‘I just can’t imagine.’
‘They don’t think it’s worth it.’ Jock said. ‘They’re just a bunch of thick Paddies and murderous bastards using any excuse.’
‘Not quite true,’ Martin said. Brought up by strictly methodist parents in Swindon, not religious himself, but highly conscious of right and wrong, he had carefully read up on Ireland before coming here and was shocked by what he had learnt. ‘These people have hatreds that go back to 1601,’ he explained, ‘when the Catholic barons were defeated and Protestants from England arrived by boat to begin colonization and genocide.’
‘1601!’ Gumboot said in disgust. ‘The Paddies sure have fucking long memories.’
The Catholics were thrown out of their own land,’ Martin continued, feeling a little self-conscious. ‘When they returned to attack the Protestants with pitchforks and stones, the British hanged and beheaded thousands of them. Some were tarred with pitch and dynamite, then set on fire.’
‘Ouch!’ Taff exclaimed.
‘When the Catholics were broken completely,’ Martin continued in a trance of historical recollection, ‘their religion was outlawed, their language was forbidden, and they became untouchables who lived in the bogs below the Protestant towns. They endured that for a couple of hundred years.’
‘You’re still talking about centuries ago,’ Gumboot said. ‘That’s a long time to hold those old grudges. Might as well go back to the garden of Eden and complain that you weren’t given a bite of the fucking apple.’
‘It’s not the same thing,’ Martin insisted, feeling embarrassed that he was talking so much, but determined to get his point across. ‘We’re not talking about something that happened just once, centuries ago, but about something that’s never really stopped.’
‘So the poor buggers were thrown out of their homes and into the bogs,’ Taff Burgess said with genuine sympathy, his brown gaze focused inward. ‘So what happened next, then?’
‘Over the centuries, Belfast became a wealthy industrial centre, dominated entirely by Protestants. But the Catholics started returning to the city about 1800, and naturally, as they were still being treated like scum, they were resentful and struck back.’
‘Nothing like a bit of the old “ultra-violence” to get out your frustrations,’ said Gumboot, grinning wickedly. ‘Remember that film, A Clockwork Orange? Fucking good, that was.’
‘Race riots and pogroms became commonplace,’ Martin continued, now getting into his stride. ‘It burst out every five or six years, eventually leading to the formation of Catholic and Protestant militia. Civil war erupted in 1920. In 1921 the country was partitioned, with the six provinces of the North becoming a British statelet, ruled by its Protestant majority.’
‘Big fucking deal,’