Randall sat a full minute after DeLorean had (abruptly) hung up, the phone still in his hand, then he pressed a finger on one of the black buttons, summoning the dial tone back, and called the only Belfast number he knew by heart.
‘I was wondering when I might hear from you,’ Jennings said, as though it had been an overdue social call he was taking.
‘We need help,’ Randall said.
‘I have a feeling you are not the only ones,’ said Jennings. The help, however, arrived at the factory within the quarter hour, a mere minute or two after Randall himself, which, given, as Jennings implied, how much else was under threat that night in Belfast, was beyond better than might have been expected, though there again few places under threat that night in Belfast had quite as many millions of government money tied up in them.
The captain to whom Randall opened the Seymour Hill gate could not have been more than twenty-one, a voice as clipped as the prince whose soon-to-be bride was hogging the headlines everywhere in Britain but here. Randall had met his West Point cousins, young men passing through the military on their way to high office. He shook Randall’s hand, more gentleman than officer, then waved through four armoured cars, from the rear of which a platoon of soldiers dismounted. These were the men whose lives the DMC-12 was supposed to be going to save. They walked beside their vehicles in the lee of the body-press shop, trying to come at the Twinbrook gate unseen.
Randall went a few feet ahead of them, rounding the corner of the building nearest the gate on his own. The drive was a mess of rocks and broken glass though it was not quite the catastrophic vision Randall had imagined when he inched up the blind in his room. He quickly realised that there was not a group of people gathered outside, but two groups: the one closest to the gate itself, with their backs to him, trying to hold the other, much larger group at bay.
Seeing Randall come round the corner — or sensing somehow what was coming round the corner behind him — this group found new and more aggressive voice. They surged forward, pressing the small group back, causing the gate and the fence flanking it to shake. A man looked over his shoulder — red-faced even at that distance and in that light — lips stretched tight with the strain of trying to hold the line.
‘Are there Brits in there?’ he called to Randall.
‘Brits?’
‘Don’t fucking give me that Dumb Yank crack. These ones are shouting they seen soldiers. Did they?’
Randall glanced behind him, which was all the proof the man needed. ‘They did see them! They’re fucking in there.’
‘They’re protecting the factory.’
The red-faced man’s face got redder, closer to the fence between them. Randall recognised him now. One of the storemen. An index finger poked through. ‘We’re protecting the factory, telling these young bucks it’s supposed to be neutral. Do you not understand? It’s in more fucking danger with the Brits in there.’
Then suddenly from somewhere further back there was a shout — a cheer almost — and Randall looked up to see a black object arc overhead, trailing flame.
Instinctively he went into a deep crouch, which only delighted the shouters and cheerers and missile-throwers more. The man at the gate turned back to face them. ‘Which one of you wee fuckers threw that?’
Randall, stumbling as he tried to get to his feet again could only watch, prone, as the missile — the petrol bomb — struck the flat top of a Portakabin and spread its flames all over the tarred surface.
A voice that must have been the captain’s, though it sounded shriller, issued an order and a soldier broke cover, dragging a hose, which pulsed a couple of times, convulsed, and finally shot out water in a silvery crescent that seemed only incidentally to take in the Portakabin and its flaming roof.
Even the men who had been holding the young bucks back bellowed at this. More rocks came over the fence, more bottles. Here now was the cataclysm. Another three soldiers emerged from the shadows, short wide-barrelled guns already braced against their shoulders.
Someone had a hold of Randall by the collar and was trailing him back towards the armoured cars.
The captain had a megaphone now. ‘Move away from the gates.’ Royal command. ‘My men are under orders to fire baton rounds at identified targets only. Please, move away from the gates.’
He handed the megaphone to a soldier twenty years his senior and several ranks his junior.
‘You did the right thing requesting assistance,’ he told Randall. ‘Those men would not have been able to hold back that crowd another ten minutes on their own.’
The rocks and bottles continued to come over. The trio of soldiers continued to move their guns across the face of the crowd, trigger fingers twitching. The Portakabin roof, despite the water that was now, with two more soldiers helping hold the hose, being properly trained on it, continued to burn.
Stylianides was there, shouting, ‘I am supposed to be head of security.’
The captain laid a hand on Randall’s shoulder. ‘Try not to worry, everyone freezes their first time.’
Randall, his first time, he could not find tongue to tell the captain, did not freeze, he fled, somewhere very far inside. His helicopter had made an unscheduled landing in a clearing in torrential rain. Aftermath of an ambush. The radio operator whose call had brought them was sitting splayed-legged on the ground bleeding through the dressing on his stomach, alternating between crying and laughing. A medic was dressing a head wound nearby, the body to which the head was attached already to Randall’s eyes inert. The definitively dead were under capes, seven of them. Randall’s commander was arguing with a lieutenant, pointing at the corpses — ‘We’re supplies, we can take the wounded, but we can’t take these guys’ — and then from the edge of the clearing as the lieutenant ducked back out of the range of the rotors there came a bright light — that was all Randall could remember of it — a bright light getting brighter, brighter… blinding.
Then it was one week later and he was under a bed in a hospital in Saigon. A nurse was looking in at him through a gap in the blanket draped over the frame to make a canopy. She smiled. ‘Are you ready to come out now?’
His commander had wanted to have him put on a charge, refusal to obey an order, specifically the order to get out of the chopper when the mortar hit the clearing and the lieutenant disappeared along with the wounded radio operator and the medic winding bandages round a dead or dying comrade, who disappeared too, his head at any rate.
Dissociative fugue, was the diagnosis of the doctor who had, all unknown to Randall, been monitoring him since he had been brought in and sought sanctuary on the floor. He literally had not been himself from that moment to this.
‘Fuck fugue,’ was the commander’s reaction relayed to Randall when he was transferred at length to another supplies unit. ‘I have been in this army long enough to know cowardice when I see it.’
*
Liz heard it on the shop floor a couple of days later that, contrary to what he had told her the last time they talked, Randall had in fact gone to the States with the volunteers for retraining. Washers had phoned his Big Mate before he had even left Aldergrove for the connecting flight. Your man Randall, he told him, had weighed in while they were queuing at the check-in desk taking the piss out of each other’s passport photos: Was that before you’d the operation…? Did the cops not ask you for their photo back…? Anything to take their minds off the fact that they were to be locked in a metal cylinder for seven hours six miles above the Atlantic Ocean.