"It must have been tempting but they had to get out fast and hide the stuff," I said, half to myself. "How long do you think it took them?"
"Assuming no more than two or three guys, I'd say twenty minutes. Half hour tops."
"Who was on duty?"
"Sergeant Brennan. He was in the office, said he never heard a thing."
"Is that likely? He wouldn't notice a truck pulling up?"
"Probably not. Remember, there was no fence, no gate around the place, and it was dark. They must have come in from the opposite direction, backed up to the loading dock, and broken in."
"How'd they do it? I assume the door was locked."
"It was. They popped the hinges. It wasn't hard; this building wasn't designed as a bank."
"And Brennan heard nothing?"
"It was raining to beat the band, Billy. It was windy too. I can believe it. And night duty didn't mean anything other than being ready if a call came in for something. No one ever thought we needed guards in the middle of the camp."
"Do you know if anyone checked the boot prints?"
"For what?"
"Never mind." Maybe Carrick had. Saul didn't have a suspicious nature, that much was clear. The first thing I would have done was see if any of the boot prints had a GI tread.
I scanned the room in back of the stairway. Another faded, yellowing poster was nailed to the side of a shelf. BRITISHERS, ENLIST TODAY!
"Obviously this was an English base in the last war," I said.
"Yeah, I think a lot of the local units went through here. They have some sort of militia or something."
"The Ulster Volunteer Force," I said, remembering Uncle Dan talking about the Covenant, the document many Protestants signed in their own blood, vowing to resist Home Rule for Ireland if it was granted. The UVF was formed to be ready to fight to keep Ulster British, but they didn't have to. UVF units signed up to fight in France, and this would have been where they would have been trained and turned into real soldiers.
"Something like that. I think Inspector Carrick said he'd been in the first war. Maybe he'd been through Ballykinler back then."
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe he knows the place very well." Had he signed the Covenant in his own blood? For the first time I thought about the assumption that the IRA had been behind the theft. It was fair enough, since an IRA man had been found dead nearby, but that raised the issue of who had killed him. The IRA, because he was an informer? Or the Red Hand, to confuse things?
"I'm going to the beach," I said, hoping the salt air would clear my head of the swirling suspicions and mistrust that seemed to spring from the soil of Northern Ireland.
CHAPTER NINE
Tufts of grass bent away from the sea as the breeze freshened and blew gray sand against my boots. I pulled my garrison cap down tighter and trudged across the wide dunes, watching the clouds that covered the peaks of the Mountains of Mourne in the distance. A single aircraft droned out over the Irish Sea, but other than that faint noise and the rhythmic crashing of waves, it was quiet. I moved out of the dunes and onto the beach, looking both ways for a sign of Brennan. In the distance, to my right, I saw a figure seated on a driftwood log and figured that had to be him. As I walked in his direction, I noticed how peaceful this place was, how far from the camp filled with marching men, how calming the water was with the sound of smooth stones being pulled back in the surf, and realized that I hadn't thought of beaches that way in a long time. They had become beachheads, bristling with machine guns, blood-soaked obstacles to be overcome, no longer places for solitary meditation. What did Brennan think about out here? The Germans at Salerno? The next beach the 5th Division would hit, maybe the big invasion everyone was talking about? Or did he think about where those BARs had gone to?
As I drew close, I started to call out, but stopped when I heard him speak. He was holding something in his hand, and it seemed like he was talking to it. There was no one else around. I took a few more quiet steps, and stopped.
"Now, Pig, you know that the one who gets me gets you. So you do your part, and I'll do mine. OK, Pig? That last one wasn't for either of us, and the next one won't be either. OK?" He held a small carved wooden pig in one hand and rubbed its belly with the thumb of the other. He stared at it, as if waiting for an answer.
"That sounds like one lucky pig, Sergeant Brennan."
He rolled off the log, falling behind it and reaching for a. 45 automatic in a shoulder holster. His eyes were wide in panic.
"Hold on, hold on!" I hollered, my hands outstretched. I had my own. 45 by my side and I didn't want him getting the wrong idea. He grunted, an exasperated, somewhat embarrassed look on his face.
"Jesus Christ, why'd you go and sneak up on me like that?" Brennan said. He let out a breath and gulped air into his lungs. His hand moved away from the pistol as he glanced at my lieutenant's bars. "Sir."
"I didn't sneak, I walked up. And you were deep in conversation."
"It's not a conversation. Pig doesn't talk back to me, I'm not crazy." He got back up on the log, and I joined him. He unclenched his fist, and there sat Pig, his belly smooth where Brennan had been rubbing it.
"Pig?"
"I got him onboard a troop transport from a gob who carved all sorts of animals. We have pigs at home and I like them, so I bought him."
"How'd he get so lucky?"
"You pulling my leg, sir?"
"No, I'm not. I've seen plenty of guys with good luck charms. Once you find one, you keep it. I knew a guy who had a book of matches in his pocket when the truck he was in hit a mine. He was the only one in the truck who lived, and he was convinced those matches did it. He never went anywhere without them after that. He even gave up cigarettes so he wouldn't be tempted to use them."
"Where was this guy?"
"North Africa."
"You been in combat, Lieutenant?"
"Some. How about you?" He didn't answer right away. He blew sand from a few spots where it had stuck to Pig, rubbed the animal some more, and put it in his shirt pocket, over his heart. We watched the waves curl and crash onto the shore as he pulled a pack of Luckies from his jacket. He offered me one and I declined. He flicked a battered Zippo and shielded the flame with his hand. When he lit up, he cupped the cigarette in his hand, like you would at night, in your foxhole.
"They said it was going to be easy," he began. "The Italians had just surrendered. Our officers said the beaches didn't need a preliminary bombardment, that we'd just stroll ashore. So all those big naval guns sat quiet. It was going to be easy."
"It wasn't," I said.
"No, it wasn't. Mortars and machine guns hit us as soon as the landing craft dropped its ramp and took out half the guys, everyone up front. We had to step over the bodies to get out. Then the machine guns really started up. I was the only guy to get to shore alive. Just me and Pig. There was no one else to talk to, no one else close by that I even recognized. I was scared, so I started telling Pig that nothing was going to happen to us there, more to convince myself than anything else. There was so much machine-gun fire, their tracer rounds hit my pack and it started to burn. You couldn't even lift your head up off the ground. But they didn't kill me. So I kept on talking to Pig every day. I'd tell him to watch out, to do his part, because if I went, so did he."
"It worked?"
"For ten days. We got hit hard by them Germans. They were on the high ground all around us. Seemed like the only way we had to attack was up. They had lots of tanks, too goddamn many tanks. They counterattacked one morning and them Panzer Grenadiers infiltrated our rear area. Tanks out front, Jerries behind us, mortars everywhere. I couldn't even talk to Pig, it was so loud with those 88s slamming into us. Next thing I knew, there was an explosion, some kind of fireball. My back was filled with shrapnel, they told me. I ended up in a hospital in England. When I recovered, they transferred me here. Didn't matter much to me, my buddies are all dead."