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Liam complied, and no sooner did he settle himself into the comfortable leather seat than they roared down the driveway.

“Is he at your place?” asked the physician.

“That he is. Annie’s attending to him.”

They drove away from the village. Liam had to grip the hand rest tightly to keep from tumbling over as the doctor sped down the winding roadway as if he was in the midst of a race.

“How much blood has he lost?” the physician asked.

He downshifted to guide them around a tight left-hand turn.

Liam felt his right shoulder press up against the side of the passenger door.

“I can’t say for certain. Doc.

The living room is covered with the stuff, though Annie seemed to have the bleeding under control when I left her.”

“Good. If it was indeed a gunshot, and no vital organs were punctured, then blood loss and shock will be our next concern.”

A cat suddenly darted out in front of the car, and the alert physician instinctively yanked the steering wheel hard to the right. He hit the brakes, and the Range Rover skidded around the frightened feline.

Quick to regain control, Doctor Blackwater shifted into fourth gear and floored the accelerator. Liam’s heart was racing as he was thrown back into his seat. The engine was growling away with a deafening roar, and Liam was in the process of making the sign of the cross before him when they rounded another corner and he spotted the lights of his cottage twinkling on the nearby hillside. Liam pointed in this direction, and the physician nodded and turned them onto a pockmarked dirt trail. With the assistance of the vehicle’s four-wheel drive capability, they bounded up this pitted pathway and seconds later braked to a halt before the cottage’s front door.

Liam didn’t know what to think as he climbed out of the Rover and watched as the front door to his house opened and out came Annie.

“My, you two made it here in a jiffy,” she calmly observed.

“He seems to be sleeping a bit more comfortably now, and the blood has all but stopped flowing from his wound.”

“That’s just the news I wanted to hear,” replied the physician as he quickly made his way to her side.

“Annie, my dear, I always said you’d have made me the perfect nurse. Now let’s have a closer look at your patient to see precisely what the damages are.”

Liam followed them inside and watched as the doctor kneeled down beside the couch and began attending to his son.

“He’s a lucky one, all right,” observed the physician.

“There don’t seem to be any arteries severed, and the wound appears confined to muscle tissue. Annie, I’m going to need some boiling water and plenty of clean linen.”

“It’s on the way,” she replied.

While his wife went off to fulfill this request, Liam guardedly peeked over the physician’s shoulder. Doctor Blackwater had just given Sean a shot and was in the process of gently probing into the wound with a thin steel instrument.

“Will you be sewing it up. Doc?” asked the fisherman.

“Eventually, Liam. But first I’ve got to remove the bullet responsible for this mess. In fact, if you look right here behind this mass of flesh, you can just see the devil.”

Liam had already seen enough, and fighting back the urge to retch, he politely excused himself.

“If you won’t be needing me, Doc, would you mind if I wait this out on the back porch? I think I could use some fresh air.”

“Not at all, Liam. Hopefully, I’ll be able to join you shortly.”

The fisherman left the room just as his wife arrived with a pot of scalding water and an armful of towels.

Liam gratefully ducked outdoors. As he filled his lungs with the cool night air, his queasiness gradually left him. He realized that it was one thing to peer into the insides of a fish that he had just gutted, and another altogether to view the inner workings of his own son.

He wearily seated himself on the edge of the porch and stared out into the blackness. The stars twinkled in the heavens, while below he could just make out the ever-surging ink-black sea. His body felt heavy and fatigued, yet he couldn’t surrender to the call of sleep until he was absolutely certain Sean was out of danger.

Confident that Doctor Blackwater could do the job, Liam focused his thoughts on a different concern. For just who could have been responsible for shooting his son in the first place?

Sean’s last visit home had been during Christmas. At that time he appeared happy, the picture of a successful city dweller. His job as a construction foreman with Guinness was supposedly going splendidly. He enjoyed living in Dublin, where he had a flat of his own and was saving up for a new car. Surely it sounded as if his future financial security was all but assured. That’s why he seriously doubted that Sean would have had anything to do with a Marxist-oriented terrorist group like the IRB.

From what he understood, the Irish Republican Brotherhood recruited its members from the ranks of the economically downtrodden. They were lazy havenots who were too lazy to work for a living. So they took up arms, and disguising themselves as freedom fighters, stole, maimed, and murdered, all in the name of a united Ireland.

Liam remembered hearing about their latest offensive on the television news only last month. At this time a series of violent incidents wracked the six counties that made up Northern Ireland. Exploding bombs destroyed a number of automobiles, and when one blast went off inside a crowded public bus, over a dozen innocent citizens of Armagh were tragically killed.

Attacks on members of the RUC, Northern Ireland’s police force, were also at an all-time high during this so-called early spring offensive. Several cops were taken down by sniper fire, and during one brash attack, the main Belfast police station was hit by a mortar, resulting in horrific casualties.

The British troops subsequently sent in to quell this senseless violence fared no better. They too came under almost constant attack. Liam remembered hearing about one incident that was particularly heinous. Three off-duty British soldiers were invited by a trio of teenaged girls to join them in the outskirts of Londonderry for a party. The soldiers were not much more than teens themselves, and when they arrived, they found themselves accosted by a large group of masked gunmen.

The next morning all three of the young Brits were found in a dumpster, each sent to meet his maker by a pistol shot to the back of the head.

It was the IRB who proudly claimed responsibility for this atrocity, and other acts of violence as well.

Formed as an alternative to the more moderate IRA, the Brotherhood, as they preferred to be called, publicly declared their desired goal of driving the British out of Northern Ireland, by utilizing whatever force they deemed necessary. And once the English were gone, they would refocus their revolution to the south. The Republic of Ireland would be politically reorganized into a socialist state, and the religious hatred that had ravaged the land for centuries past would be tempered by the establishment of Marxist-inspired agnosticism.

And in such a way the “troubles” between the Protestants and the Catholics would be no more.

Liam was all for the cessation of the idiotic violence between the two religious groups. But he certainly didn’t want to have to become a godless communist to attain this goal. Freedom of choice was one of the basic rights his forefathers had fought for, and the fisherman was surely not about to surrender this privilege to a bunch of bloodthirsty terrorists who would shoot their own mothers if it would better their cause.

With his gaze locked on the twinkling heavens, Liam prayed that his son hadn’t gone and gotten himself mixed up with such a dangerous group. As it turned out, this petition was delivered just as a shooting star soared through the night sky. Liam marveled at this sight, and his thoughts went back in time to the fated night that the entire heavens seemed on fire.