We were each armed with a 9mm Browning automatic pistol. The four thirteen-round magazines gave me a feeling of security. The pistol grip of the 9mm protruding from the Len Dixon holster dug uncomfortably into my ribs as we drove out through the heavily reinforced gate sangar. We passed the perimeter lights and the coils of Dannet barbed wire and turned onto the main drag, heading straight for the M1. Once we got under way I removed the pistol, placed it on my lap between my legs and concealed it under a copy of the News of the World. As I read the latest ‘Gay Boys in Bondage Scandal at Guards Depot’, I held the pistol at the ready, thumb on safety-catch, trigger finger resting on the trigger guard.
Having consumed the sensational revelations, I brought my mind back to the day’s job. With my free hand I clicked open the glove compartment, rummaged among an assortment of screwdrivers and fuses, a couple of torches and an old fan belt and took out a wellthumbed Ordnance Survey map of the area. The M1 looked like a blue artery, carrying the flow of life-blood straight into the beating heart of Republican West Belfast. This was our second week, and the last couple of days had been spent driving around various locations throughout the province, familiarizing ourselves with them, getting the feel of the place. Today, the big one: Belfast, the worst urban guerrilla battleground in the Western world.
The night-time temperature had dropped well below zero. The frost had spiked the grass verges with glinting feathery crystals and fossilized the trees into frozen wayside sentinels. As we drove through the dawn, the tyres of the vehicles in front of us showered our windscreen with speckles of road grime. Taff flicked on the wipers to clear our view, but succeeded only in smearing multi-arced lines across the glass. The wash liquid had frozen solid in the hopelessly narrow plastic feed-tubes. Then the low-lying early morning sun hit the filthy screen, momentarily blinding us. As we neared the city, Divis Mountain rose through the haze like a giant submarine coming to the surface in a sea of mist. The haze almost completely obscured the scramble of houses that jostled for position on the Republican estate at the mountain’s base.
We turned off the motorway and took the west link to the Grosvenor Road roundabout. Following the left-hand lane up Grosvenor Road, we then headed straight for Provo land – past the Royal Victoria Hospital, through the traffic lights and on up the Springfield Road towards Turf Lodge. Taff navigated the area with practised ease, giving a running commentary as he drove. He had a story for every street. ‘They fired an RPG at an armoured pig from behind that wall.’ His voice drifted over the crackle of a radio transmission. ‘They commanddetonated a dustbin full of explosives from across the wasteland.’
Everywhere I looked there were reminders that this was a highly dangerous environment. Row upon row of terraced houses had had their doors and windows bricked and boarded up, their gardens reduced to bombsites. It reminded me of the photographs I’d seen of London after the Blitz. The pavements outside the pubs were barricaded with huge concrete blocks. The pub windows were caged in heavy-duty wire netting as protection against car bombs and petrol bombers. The people on the streets looked cold and hostile. The dickers were out: bands of youths stood on street corners giving us maximum eyes as we drove past, as threatening as black gangs in the Bronx. Hyperactive, they had the air of mescalin-crazed marionettes: their eyes darted up and down, their heads jerked from side to side, and every now and again their arms shot out, hands flat and outstretched, palms upward.
We were now driving through Ballymurphy estate, heading for the Bullring. We hit the Whiterock Road and turned left, the sprawling Belfast cemetery on our right. The final RV. We drove on through the bleak winter day. And then we were turning left into the Falls Road, the Provo heartland, the centre of the deadliest killing grounds in Northern Ireland. We joined the stream of traffic heading towards Divis. The volume of black taxis seemed to increase significantly, their passenger compartments crammed to overflowing. A grey-painted RUC mobile, travelling just in front, swung left up Beechmount Avenue. The hard, alert faces of the two officers in the rear scanned the rooftops and upper windows for possible sniper positions.
We swept up on the Falls past the spot where an RF guy had been shot in his car. ‘He forgot his counter-surveillance drills,’ explained Taff simply. I peered through a hole in the condensation on the side-window, past the inside lane of traffic, at the dilapidated building on the corner of the junction with Springfield Road. Two youths lurking suspiciously in the doorway attracted my attention. I had been in Ulster only a short time, but already the same instincts that had been able to detect a presence of the Adoo in Oman had been tuned to a new level of alertness to cope with the altogether more sinister threat posed by this environment. These youths signalled danger. I felt sure something was going to happen. What, and exactly how I could not tell, but something was going to happen. Without apparent movement, I adjusted my grip on the Browning pistol, and with my other hand, quietly located the exact position of the spare thirteen-round magazine. My breathing became imperceptibly quicker as the adrenaline began to flow. I glanced at the two youths out of the corner of my eye. The first youth was standing in the shadows, his head jerking swiftly from side to side as he observed the line of traffic. His mate stood slightly forward, more exposed. He was tall and arrogant-looking, his square stocky body clothed in an old bomber jacket. Both sets of eyes zapped like tracer into the rows of cars.
Then suddenly it happened.
In an instant, the tall youth was through the inside line of vehicles and around the back of the Viva, and was wrenching the driver’s door open.
‘Get out the cahr, or I’ll blow yer fecking head orf.’
The coarse, rasping West Belfast accent cut through the silence in the car. It sounded as if the ligaments in the man’s neck and throat were being stretched by some massive effort. My heart thumped and the pumping of blood beat in my ears. A flash-flood of adrenaline surged through my muscles as my hand tightened on the pistol grip of the 9mm. Only my eyes moved as I glanced over my right shoulder. The youth was standing next to Taff, jamming the door open with one leg. He tilted his head down from above the level of the car roof so that his voice would carry into the car and not alert passers-by or other drivers. All I could see was his bread-dough gut framed in the rear window of the Viva – a perfect target for a one-second double tap. I realized he could not see me from where he was. I thumbed the safety-catch on the Browning to fire, then hesitated, my breathing coming in short, shallow gasps. Where was the shooter? Show me a shooter, you bastard! Show me a shooter! His right hand was inside the unzipped bomber jacket. What happens if it’s a bluff? What happens if I shoot and kill an unarmed man? I’ll be up for murder and the Regiment will have fucked up as soon as it has arrived.
But there was also the other possibility. What if we had been tailed leaving the SF base? What if the whole thing was a carefully planned operation? What if we had been set up like Figure 11 targets? Did they think we were civvies on the way to work, or did they realize we were the Army doing an altogether different kind of job? Were we the target, or did they simply want the Viva for a car bomb? In a microsecond, I unspooled the whole of the morning’s journey in my mind, desperately scanning every single frame, reassessing every minor incident, seeking the tiniest clue towards the solution of the dilemma I was facing: to shoot or not to shoot.