There was a common gasp of relief round the Cabinet Room, as the Commissioner went on.
‘But the Dublin airport police report that those passengers without baggage went through immigration control before we notified them.’
‘Would he have had baggage?’ It was the Prime Minister, speaking very quietly.
‘I doubt it, sir, but we’re trying to establish that with the ticket desk and check-in counter.’
‘What a cock-up.’ The Prime Minister was virtually inaudible. ‘We’ll need some results, and soon.’
From Heathrow, the Kalashnikov, swaddled in a cellophane wrapping, was rushed by squad car to Woolwich on the far side of the city, to the police test firing range. It was still white from the chalk-like fingerprint powder brushed on at the airport police station, but the airport’s resident fingerprint man declared it clean. ‘Doesn’t look like a gloves job,’ he said, ‘he must have wiped it — a cloth, or something. But it’s thorough; he’s missed nothing.’
In the suburbs of Dublin, in the big open-plan news-room of RTE, the Republic of Ireland’s television service, the central phone in the bank used by the news editor rang at exactly six o’clock.
‘Listen carefully, I’m only going to say this once. This is a spokesman for the military wing of the Provisional IRA. An active service unit of the Provisional IRA today carried out a court-martial execution order on Henry DeLacey Danby, an enemy of the people of Ireland, and servant of the British occupation forces in Ireland. During the eighteen months Danby spent in Ireland one of his duties was responsibility for the concentration camp at Long Kesh. He was repeatedly warned that if the regime of the camp did not change, action would be taken against him. That’s it.’
The phone clicked off, and the news editor began to read back his shorthand.
Ten hours later the Saracens and Pigs, on dimmed headlights, were moving off from the Belfast police stations, heading out of the sandbagged tin- and chicken-wire fortresses of Andersonstown, Hasting Street, Flax Street, Glenravel Street and Mountpottinger. Sentries in steel helmets and shrapnel-proof jerkins, their automatic rifles strapped to their wrists, pulled aside the heavy wood and barbed-wire barricades at the entrances of the battalion and company headquarters and the convoys inched their way into the darkness. Inside the armoured cars the troops huddled together, their faces blackened with boot polish, their bodies laden with gas masks, emergency wound dressings, rubber-bullet guns, truncheons and the medieval Macron see-through shields. In addition they carried with them their high-velocity NATO rifles. Few of the men had slept more than a few hours, and that cat-napping in their uniforms, their only luxury that of being able to take off their boots. Their officers and senior NCOs, who had attended the operational briefings for the raids, had slept even less. There was no talk, no conversation, only the knowledge that the day would be long, tiring, cold and probably wet. There was nothing for the men to look at.
Each car was battened down against possible sniper attacks; only the driver, the rifleman beside him and the rifleman at the back, with his barrel poked through the fine visibility slit, had any sight of the darkened, rainswept streets. No house lights were on, no shop windows were illuminated, and only occasionally was there a high street lamp, one that had survived the attempts of both sides over the last four years to destroy its brightness.
Within a few minutes the convoys had swung off the main roads and were splitting up in the housing estates, all but one on the west side of the city. Two thousand troops, drawn from six battalions, were sealing off the streets that have the Falls Road as their spinal cord — the Catholic artery out of the west side of the city, and the route to Dublin. As the armoured cars pulled across the streets, paratroopers, marines and men from the old county infantry units flung open the reinforced doors and ran for the security of their fire positions. In the extreme west, on the Andersonstown and Suffolk border, where the houses are newer and the sight therefore more incongruous, the troops were from a heavy artillery unit — men more used to manœuvring with the long-range Abbot gun than looking for cover in front gardens and behind dustbins. Away across the city from the Falls more troops were spreading into the Ardoyne, and across on the east side of the Lagan the Short Strand area was sealed.
When their men were in position the officers waited for first light. Cars that tried to enter or leave the cordoned streets were sent back. In a gradual drizzle the troops lay and crouched in the cover that they had found, thumb on the safety catch. The selected marksmen cradled their rifles, made heavier by the attachment of the Starscope, the night vision aid.
The noise started as the soldiers began the house-to-house searches. Women, mighty in dressing gowns with hair piled high by their bright plastic-coated curlers, surged from the houses to blow whistles, howl abuse and crash dustbin lids. Amid the cacophony came the beating of rifle butts on doors, and the thud of the axes and sledgehammers when there was no ready answer. Within minutes there were as many civilians on the streets as soldiers, bouncing their epithets and insults off the unmoving faces of the military. Protected by small knots of soldiers were the unhappy-looking civilian police, usually with their panting, gelignite-sniffer Labradors close by. Occasionally there would come a shout of excitement from one of the small terraced houses, the accent North Country or Welsh or Cockney, and a small shining rifle or pistol would be carried into the street, wrapped to prevent the loss of clues that would convict the still half-asleep man bundled down the pavement and into the back of an armoured truck. But this was not often. Four years of searches and swoops and cordons and arrests had left little to find.
By dawn — and it comes late as far north as Belfast, and then takes a long time coming — there was little to show for the night’s work. Some Japanese-made Armalite rifles, some pistols, a sackful of ammunition and crocodile lines of men for questioning by the Special Branch, along with the paraphernalia of terrorism — batteries, lengths of flex, alarm clocks, and sacks of potent weed killer. All were itemized and shipped back to the police stations.
With the light came the stones, and the semi-orderliness of the searches gave way to the crack of rubber bullets being fired; the streets swirled with CS gas, and always at the end of the narrow line of houses were the kids heaving their fractured paving stones at the military.
Unaware of the searches, bus drivers down the Falls Road, stopping at the lights, found youths climbing onto their cabs, a variety of pistols threatening them, and handed over their double-deckers. By nine o’clock the Falls was blocked in four places, and local radio bulletins were warning motorists once again to stick to alternative routes.
As the soldiers withdrew from the streets there were infrequent bursts of automatic fire, not pressed home, and causing no casualties. Only on one occasion did troops have enough of a target to fire back, and then they claimed no hit.
For both sides the raid had its achievements. The army and police had to stir up the pool, and muddy the water, get the top men on the other side on the move, perhaps panic one of them into a false step or a vital admission. The street leaders could also claim some benefit from the morning. After the lull of several weeks the army had arrived to kick in the doors, take away the men, break up the rooms, prise out the floor-boards. At street level that was valuable currency.