Because I’d already eaten, I had plenty of time to sort and check my kit: HK 53, side-arm, magazines for both, torch, knife, wire-cutters, covert radio. We’d go in wearing civilian clothes, but with our ops waistcoats on. I told all my guys to bring a pair of clean trainers for when we got inside the house; even if the people you’re looking after are about to be blown to kingdom come, they don’t take it kindly if you mess up their carpets. I also packed a roll of heavy-duty polythene and one of lightweight black cloth, for doctoring up a lookout room when we established ourselves in the target. (With film slanted across a room from ceiling to floor and the back wall blacked out, you can move around without somebody outside being able to see you.) Then I thought, if the old people are going to be in the house, we’d better take flak-jackets for them, just in case shrapnel comes through the floor or one of the doors. Also we needed a couple of big medical packs.
At 2000 the boss, Captain John Mason, was still down at TCG, so our final briefing came from Tom.
‘Just to confirm details,’ he began. ‘The PIRA’s target is Freddy Quinlan, the Unionist MP. He’s already at home with his wife. He’s been offered the chance to leave, but he’s declined. He’s that way: doesn’t rate the opposition, stupid bugger. Normally he has no security on the house whatsoever, not even any cameras. But that’s his lookout.
‘Our information is that the PIRA are planning a rocket attack. Probably a drive-past. They’ll launch an RPG7 to take out the front door, then follow up on foot to finish off anyone who has survived. That means your guys, Geordie, will want to be upstairs with the family. At the same time, it’s vital that you preserve an impression of normal activity. The curtains will be drawn, but we want people to move around the house naturally for as long as possible. OK?’
I nodded, and he went on, pushing a large-scale town plan across the table towards me, ‘Your covert approach will be through wasteland behind the house. It’s the former grounds of a mansion, gone to seed. We’ll get you dropped off here’ — he pointed with a pencil — ‘and it’ll only be a short walk in, three hundred metres at the outside. Between the edge of the park and the back garden is a wooden panel fence. Don’t go over that, in case the players have eyes-on from behind one of the adjacent properties. Get under it, or through the bottom. The back door of the house will be open for you. OK?’
Again I nodded. ‘How do we recognize the house and garden from the back?’
‘There’s a World Wildlife Fund panda symbol hung over the outside of the fence.’
‘What about the telephone? Is the line bugged?’
‘Possibly. Special Branch have told Quinlan to carry on taking normal calls, but obviously not to mention the operation.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘Anything else?’
‘A rocket will probably blow the hell out of the electrics and leave the house dark. We’d better take some ambush lights as an emergency back-up.’
‘Good thinking.’
Tom went on to brief the car-teams and the QRF. I listened with half an ear, studying the map. The old park or garden showed up as a sizeable green blob in the middle of massed streets and houses, but there was nothing to be learnt about it from where we were. The drop-off point was on the far side of the park from our destination, so all we needed to do was cross the wasteground in an easterly direction.
As soon as Tom finished, the signals corporal went through his own plan. The boss’s callsign for the night was Zero Alpha, and our house team was designated Hotel One. We were also assigned a chatter-net on a different frequency, so that if necessary we could talk to each other without cluttering up the main channel. Our car units were Mobile One, Mobile Two and so on. The house was designated ‘the target’, the back door was ‘Red’ and the front door ‘White’. Some of our guys were to mount an OP in a garden across the road — that party had the callsign Whisky. The Det, with various Delta numbers, were already out on surveillance.
A few minutes after eight a grey van pulled into the warehouse. The legend on the panel said, ‘NORTHERN IRELAND ELECTRICITY VAN — Engineering Department’, and the vehicle had a big sliding side door, excellent for an unobtrusive exit. My house team piled in and set off. With the pair of ambush lights and power-pack, my bergen was going to be quite a burden, even though we were going on such a short operation. I’m sure Pat spoke for all of us when he said, ‘I don’t like the thought of this fucking rocket coming in.’
‘Neither do I,’ I told him. ‘But as long as the house is reasonably substantial we’ll be OK upstairs.’
Peering forward through the windscreen, I said to Titch, the driver, ‘You will bring us in with the door on the kerb-side, won’t you?’
‘No sweat.’
Twenty minutes of twisting and turning through the city brought us to our objective.
‘Here’s the park now,’ said Titch. ‘I’m just running down the side of it. The lay-by’s a couple of hundred yards farther on. Stand by to debus.’
The moment he stopped I hit the handle, slid the door and was outside, landing in a shallow puddle. I took a quick look round. It was pretty good: a smallish recess at the edge of the suburban road, screened by bushes. Some traffic was passing, but none very close. Immediately behind us were the old iron railings of the mansion’s grounds, topped by two strands of barbed wire. Rather than risk getting hung up I cut through them, peeled them back and went over the railings, quickly followed by the other three. Titch had got out and opened the bonnet of the van. I saw him peering about under it with a torch, tugging at electric leads as if checking for a fault. As soon as we were clear he slammed the bonnet shut and drove off. I was pretty sure nobody had seen us.
Inside the park it was like being on an island, dark and peaceful, with the city traffic roaring and grinding round in the distance outside. As I waited for my eyes to acclimatize, one of the Det guys came up on the radio with, ‘Delta Two, a dicker’s just walked down the street past White.’
‘Sounds like the job’s going down OK,’ I whispered. ‘We’d better get in there.’
Round the perimeter of the park ran a belt of mature trees, some of them pines. The air was full of the smell of evergreens and ivy. Once through the trees, we came out on to open grass. At the edge of the cover I paused for a look round. Away to our left, a couple of hundred yards off on the crest of a rise, stood the old mansion, dark as dark, a heavy-looking Victorian building with turrets and pointed eaves. The grass we were on must once have been the lawn. Some lawn! Three or four acres, at least. We moved swiftly across it, towards more high trees on the far side. Ahead of us, between the trunks, lights were showing — the backs of the houses in our target road.
The ground beneath the second belt of trees was choked by undergrowth — diabolical bramble bushes, five or six feet high, interlaced with elder. Rather than crash through the thicket, we tried to pick a way between, only to find ourselves on the edge of a flooded area, perhaps an old pond. Pulling off, we made another approach, and soon came to a six-foot wooden fence along the backs of the gardens. A quick cast to the right brought us face-to-face with the reassuring black-and-white shape of the panda badge.
‘Pity to carve this up,’ I whispered, feeling the wooden panels.
‘It’s OK,’ answered Jimmy Adair. ‘There’s a drain running under it.’
He’d found a kind of culvert, and with a few jabs from our collapsible shovel we enlarged it enough for us to wriggle through. The back of the house was only ten metres off: whitewashed walls, several windows, the back-door conveniently screened by a projecting outhouse. A light was showing upstairs, but the curtains of that room were drawn.