Meanwhile Harry was being prepared for the awesome moment when he would leave the woods of Surrey and fly to Belfast, on his own, leaving the back-up team that now worked with him as assiduously as any heavyweight champion’s.
Early on Davidson had brought him a cassette recorder, complete with four ninety-minute tapes of Belfast accents. They’d been gathered by students from Queen’s University who believed they were taking part in a national phonetics study, and had taken their microphones into pubs, launderettes, working men’s clubs and supermarkets. Wherever there were groups gathered and talking in the harsh, cutting accent of Belfast, so different to the slower more gentle Southern speech, tapes had attempted to pick up the voices and record them. The tapes had been passed to the army press officer via a lecturer at the University, whose brother was on duty on the Brigade commander’s staff, and then, addressed to a fictitious major, flown to the Ministry of Defence. The sergeant on Davidson’s staff travelled to London to collect them from the dead-letter box in the postal section of the Ministry.
Night after night Harry listened to the tapes, mouthing over the phrases and trying to lock his speech into the accents he heard. After sixteen years in the army little of it seemed real. He learned again of the abbreviations, the slang, the swearing. He heard the way that years of conflict and alertness had stunted normal conversation; talk was kept to a minimum as people hurried away from shops once their business was done, and barely waited around for a quiet gossip. In the pubs he noticed that men lectured each other, seldom listening to replies, or interested in opinions different to their own. His accent would be critical to him, the sort of thing that could awake the first inkling of suspicion that might lead to the further check he knew his cover could not sustain.
His walls, almost bare when he arrived at the big house, were soon covered by aerial photographs of Belfast. For perhaps an hour a day he was left to memorize the photographs, learn the street patterns of the geometric divisions of the artisan cottages that had been allowed to sprawl out from the centre of the city. The developers of the nineteenth century had flung together the narrow streets and their back-to-back terraces along the main roads out of the city. Most relevant to Harry were those on either side of the city’s two great ribbons of the Falls and Shankill. Pictures of astonishing clarity taken from RAF cameras showed the continuous peace line, or the ‘interface’, as the army called it, the sheets of silvery corrugated iron that separated Protestant from Catholic in the no man’s land between the roads.
The photographs gave an idea of total calm, and left no impression of the hatred, terror and bestiality that existed on the ground. The open spaces of bombed devastation in any other British city would have been marked down as clearance areas for urban improvement.
From the distance of Germany — where theorists worked out war games in terms of divisions, tank skirmishes, limited nuclear warheads, and the possibility of chemical agents being thrown into a critical battle — it had become difficult for Harry to realize why the twenty or so thousand British soldiers deployed in the province were not able to wind up the Provisional campaign in a matter of months. When he took in the rabbit warren revealed by the reconnaissance photographs he began to comprehend the complexity of the problem. Displayed on his walls was the perfect guerrilla fighting base. A maze of escape routes, ambush positions, back entries, cul-de-sacs and, at strategic crossroads, great towering blocks of flats commanding the approaches to terrorist strongholds.
It was the adventure playground par excellence for the urban terrorist, Davidson would say, as he fired questions at Harry till he could wheel out at will all the street names they wanted from him, so many commemorating the former greatness of British arms — Balkan, Raglan, Alma, Balaclava — their locations, and the quickest way to get there. By the second week the knowledge was there and the consolidation towards perfection was under way. Davidson and his colleagues felt now that the filing system had worked well, that this man, given the impossible brief he was working under, would do as well as any.
Also in the bedroom, and facing him as he lay in bed, was the ‘tribal map’ of the city. That was the army phrase, and another beloved by Davidson. It took up sixteen square feet of space, with Catholic streets marked in a gentle grass-green, the fierce loyalist strongholds in the hard orange that symbolized their heritage, and the rest in a mustard compromise. Forget that lot, Davidson had said. That had meant something in the early days when the maps were drawn up.
‘Nowadays you’re in one camp or the other. There are no uncommitted. Mixed areas are three years out of date. In some it’s the Prods who’ve run, in others the other crowd.’
It had been so simple in Sheik Othman, when Harry had lived amongst the Adeni Arabs. The business of survival had occupied him so fully that the sophistications they were teaching him now were unnecessary. And there he had been so far from the help of British troops that he had become totally self-reliant. In Belfast he knew he must guard against the feeling that salvation was always a street corner away. He must reject that and burrow his way into the community if he was to achieve anything.
Outside the privacy of his room Harry seldom escaped the enthusiasm of Davidson, who personally supervised every aspect of his preparation. He followed Harry in the second week beyond the vegetable garden to the old and battered greenhouse, yards long and with its glass roofing missing, and what was left coated in the deep moss-green compost that fell from the trees. There were no nurtured tomatoes growing here, no cosseted strawberry cuttings, only a pile of sandbags at the opposite end to the door with a circular coloured target, virgin new, propped against them. Here they retaught Harry the art of pistol shooting.
‘You’ll have to have a gun over there — and not to wave about, Harry,’ Davidson laughed. ‘Just to have. You’d be the only physically fit male specimen in the province without one if you didn’t have a firearm of some sort. It’s a must, I’m afraid.’
‘I didn’t have one in Aden. Ridiculous, I suppose, but no-one suggested it.’
He took the gun from the instructor, grey-haired, hard-faced, lined from weather, wearing a blue, all-enveloping boiler suit and unmarked beret. He went through the precautionary drills, breaking the gun, flicking the revolving chamber that was empty, greased and black. The instructor counted out the first six shells.
Five times he reloaded the gun till the target was peppered and holed and askew.
‘It’s not the accuracy that counts so much with the first ones, sir,’ said the older man, pulling off his earmuffs, ‘it’s the speed you get the first one or two away. If you’re shooting straight enough for your opponent to hear them going by his ear that tends to be enough to get his head back a bit. But it’s getting the first one away that matters. Gets the initiative for you. There aren’t many men as will stand still and aim as you’re pulling the trigger for the first one. Get ’em going back and then worry about the aim for the third and fourth shot. And try not to fire more than the first four straight off. It’s nice to keep a couple just so that you have a chance to do something about it if things don’t turn out that well. Remember with this one it’s a great little gun, but it’s slow to load. That’s its problem. Everything else is OK.’
They went over the firing positions. Sometimes the classic right-arm-extended, sideways-on stance. ‘That’s if you’ve got all night, sir, and you don’t think he’s armed. Take your time and make sure. Doesn’t happen that often.’? Then they worked on the standard revolver-shooting posture. Legs apart, body hunched, arms extended, meeting in front of the eye line, butt held in both hands, the whole torso lunging at the target. ‘You’re small yourself then, sir, and you’ve got your whole body thrown in with the gun to get it away straight. You won’t miss often from that, and if you do you’ll give ’im such a hell of a fright that he won’t do much about it.’