With their directions, using our torches, we found the fuse boxes and trip switches in the kitchen, but the system must have suffered major damage because it wouldn’t come alive again. Perhaps it was just as well.
All of a sudden Pat began to laugh. ‘No fucking damage!’ he gasped. ‘Fucking roll on!’ He was laughing so much he had to sit down. In a couple of seconds I was helpless as well, doubled up, in hysterics. I knew it was a reaction to release of tension, caused by an excess of adrenalin, but that didn’t help me stop. I realized that the Quinlans must think us incredibly callous, or crazy, or both — but again, that was no deterrent. Only when an RUC officer stuck his head round the door and said, ‘What’s so bloody funny, then?’ did we manage to pull ourselves together.
The QRF arrived, cleared the street and cordoned it off. Suddenly the house was full of people, among them a couple of firemen, and the Scene of Crimes Officer, who began taking measurements and statements, and chalking on to the landing carpet the positions from which we’d fired. A photographer took pictures of the bodies. They weren’t looking all that pretty. One had the skull split clean down the middle, over the cranium. The armour-piercing rounds had opened up his head like a melon. Grey brain was showing through the gap, and the scalp had slid over to one side, crumpling the face into folds. The eyeballs were bulging out of their sockets. Brain and blood were spattered over the wall behind. Both terrorists looked very young. As the bodies were being bundled into bags I asked the RUC man if he knew who they were, but he shook his head. ‘From the Lisburn ASU, by all accounts,’ he said, ‘but beyond that, I’ve no idea.’
Back in the warehouse we held a big debriefing. It turned out that our own reactive OP had nailed the Volvo, killing both the driver and the guy who fired the rocket. They’d captured not only the rocket launcher, but two AK 47s and a couple of side-arms as well.
At first we were baffled about how the two-man assault party had escaped detection, and where they’d come from. The car had not stopped or even slowed down, so they couldn’t have been in it. The mystery was solved by a search of the front garden, which revealed that they’d lain up in the shrubs either side of the front path. They must have slipped in there immediately after dark, before our surveillance was in place, and stuck it out for nearly five hours.
In any case, the bag for the night was four, and everyone was really chuffed that the operation had gone down. After the wash-up we all got in the bar together — RUC, the Det and us — for a few celebratory beers. By then the Det and the RUC between them had identified the dead terrorists, but the names meant nothing to me.
Among those celebrating was the guy with pink hair. When I got close to him, I began to think I’d seen him somewhere before.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I’m sure I know you. Where could it have been?’
‘Two Para,’ he said immediately, with a grin. ‘Aldershot.’
‘Right, right!’
Suddenly we were on net. His name was Mike Grigson, and though we’d never really met we’d been in the same company for a brief spell. We began to exchange chit-chat, and hit it off well. He’d done a year with the Det already, and obviously knew the score. For the past few days he’d been taken off outside duties and given some role in the head-shed, until he was fit to appear in public again.
‘What went wrong?’ I asked.
‘Duffed up the fucking mixture, didn’t I?’ he said cheerfully. ‘That’s the trouble with being fair-haired — I stand out in a bloody crowd. I was trying to do something about it.’
As for myself, I couldn’t make out whether I was on a high or a low. One moment everything seemed terrific, because it had all gone according to the book; the next, I felt terrible at having killed, or helped to kill, two people. Yet perhaps the worst thing was the realization of how difficult my self-appointed task was going to be. A major operation, with all the stops out, had accounted for four lowly paddies. How was I ever going to get near Mr Big on my own?
A couple of pints later I bought Pink Mike a drink and asked casually, ‘So, who were those players tonight?’
‘Nobody much. Rank and file from the Lisburn ASU.’
‘Had you seen them before?’
‘The two in the car, yes. The driver and the rocketeer. Not the others.’
‘How d’you recognize them?’
‘We’re out looking for them all the time. That’s our job. Besides, we’ve got dozens of mug-shots in the ops room. Covert pictures, but some of them pretty good.’
‘Could I have a look at them sometime?’
‘You’re not supposed to, really. But maybe we could fix it. Why?’
‘Just curious, that’s all.’
SIX
Ten days or so after that, just before Christmas, I had the evening off, and drove out to Helen’s Bay to see the family. It was easy enough to get away — all I had to do was clock myself out and enter my business as ‘Socializing’. I booked out one of the admin cars on the wall-chart in the ops room — a dark-blue, two-litre Sierra with the callsign Tango Four — and marked up my destination and time out, which was 1735. The car had normal covert comms; in the event of an emergency while I was out in the vehicle, the head-shed would still have the means to recall me, in the form of a bleeper which I carried in my trouser pocket. If that went off, I was to contact base immediately. The device had a switch that could be put on to ‘Pulse’, so that if a call came in a tight situation you could feel it rather than hear it, and no one else’s attention would be attracted. As an extra precaution I took along my Walther PPK; there seemed practically no chance that I would need it, but out there you can never tell.
It was already dark when I pulled out of the base and set off north-eastwards. The rush-hour traffic was heavy, and to make matters worse the bypass had been closed; at the time I assumed it was the result of an accident, but later I heard that there had been a punishment shooting incident which had left vehicles strewn all over the main road. Rather than be late, I took a risk and cut through a hard area which I knew was out of bounds. I realized this was a stupid thing to do, but I thought I could get away with it for once.
My luck was out. Travelling down the Falls Road, I saw a street protest ahead. Twenty or thirty people with placards were demanding political status for prisoners. I didn’t fancy the look of the crowd, or the thought of the dickers who might be hanging round its fringes, so I took a right into Beechmount Drive and Ballymurphy Street, across Beechmount Avenue (‘RPG Avenue’ to its fans), and so back into the Falls and Divis Street, before making my way out to the Sydenham bypass and the Bangor road.
As I drove, my mind was on recent events. Operation Eggshell had been followed by an inquest, very similar to the one staged at LATA, at which we’d given evidence from behind a screen. Our training had stood us in good stead. The terrorists had been caught fair and square; three had actually fired weapons, and the fourth had had an AK 47 in his possession, as well as a Browning pistol. So we had no trouble justifying the action we took. Oddly enough, the stress of the operation had brought on a recurrence of my nightmare, but the dream came only once, and in a less frightening form than before. All through it I remained aware that it was only a dream, and at the back of my mind I knew I was in control.