Lynch took the drill out of the carrier bag and switched it on. He pressed the trigger and the bit whirred and buzzed. The boy’s body went into spasm and Lynch pressed down with both his hands. The pillow and the gag stifled most of the noise.
‘Okay?’ asked O’Riordan.
‘Yeah,’ said Lynch. He looked over his shoulder and saw that Davie Quinn had his eyes closed. Lynch smiled. The first was always the hardest. Lynch placed the whirling bit against the side of the boy’s left knee with all the precision and care of a surgeon. There was very little blood as the bit tore through the flesh, then the noise of the drill changed from a high pitched whine to a dull grinding sound as it ripped through the cartilage. The drill shuddered in Lynch’s hand as the bit grated against bone and he fought to keep it steady.
Davie opened his eyes but shut them quickly when he saw the bit emerging at the far side of the knee, covered in blood and flesh and bits of white cartilage. The boy went still on the bed, his face deathly pale. They usually passed out, Lynch knew, more from fear than from the pain. If they really wanted to make the victim suffer they’d wake him up before working on the second knee, but the boy was being capped more as a warning to others than to hurt him. Lynch kept the bit turning as he pulled it out of the injured knee so that it wouldn’t jam, then wiped his forehead with the back of his arm and went back to work, drilling through the second knee as easily as the first. When he’d finished, he pulled out the bit, switched off the drill and put it back into the carrier bag. O’Riordan climbed off the unconscious boy and untied the gag. Saliva dribbled onto the pillow.
Lynch checked the boy’s wounds. There was some bleeding, but it was far from life-threatening. He took a sheet and wrapped it around the boy’s legs. ‘He’ll be okay,’ he said. ‘You can get off now, Davie.’
The three men went downstairs to the sitting room, where Paulie was standing over the woman and her daughter, his Browning in both hands. ‘Wait five minutes, then call an ambulance,’ O’Riordan told the woman. ‘Make sure they take him to the Royal Victoria and if you get the chance, ask for Mr Palmer. He’s the best for kneecaps, okay?’
The woman nodded and kissed her rosary. ‘Thanks, son,’ she whispered. The girl burst into tears and buried her head in her mother’s lap.
Lynch drove the Quinn brothers to the Falls Road and dropped them off a short walk from their home, then headed for the M2 and Ballymena. ‘Did I ever tell you about the first capping I was on?’ asked Lynch. O’Riordan shook his head. ‘It was a guy who’d been taking pictures of little boys, naked. Didn’t touch them, but he was heading that way, so he had to be taught a lesson. Do you know Paddy McKenna? He’s in the Kesh now.’
‘Heard of him, yeah.’
‘Yeah, well we picked the guy up, four of us, and took him out to Kilbride to do the dirty deed. Paddy brought the drill. It was his first capping as well. So, we have the guy pinned down in the field, and we tell Paddy to get on with it. He starts looking around. What the fuck are you waiting for, we say. “Where’s the socket?” he asks. “Where’s the fucking socket?”’
O’Riordan laughed uproariously. ‘Easy mistake to make,’ he said, wiping his eyes.
It wasn’t until they were driving down the track that led to O’Riordan’s farm that he raised the subject of Mike Cramer. ‘What did McCormack say?’ he asked.
‘Let sleeping dogs lie. That’s what he said.’
O’Riordan snorted softly. ‘Fuck that for a game of soldiers.’
‘Yeah. But what can we do? How am I going to track down a helicopter? They could have gone anywhere.’
O’Riordan shook his head. ‘Not anywhere, Dermott. What goes up must come down. And Air Traffic Control must have been tracking it. You might try asking them.’
‘Oh sure, I’ll just phone them up and ask them if they saw a helicopter pick up a Sass-man in Howth. I can just imagine their answer.’
‘It was a Sea King, wasn’t it? That’s what it looked like to me.’
‘I suppose so. It was a big bugger, that’s for sure, not a normal army chopper. I’ve never seen a red, white and blue chopper before. They’re usually grey or green.’
‘What about the Queen’s Flight?’ said O’Riordan.
‘Aye, it could have been the Duke of Edinburgh himself, coming to lift our man off. How far can they go, any idea?’
O’Riordan shrugged. ‘A few hundred miles maybe. They were heading east, but that doesn’t mean anything. They could have circled around and headed up north.’
‘Belfast? Yeah, that’s possible. Do we know anyone in Air Traffic Control?’
‘I’ll ask around. But you’d best be careful. McCormack won’t like it if he thinks you’re going behind his back.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’
‘I mean it, Dermott. McCormack is a dangerous man to cross.’
‘I know. I’ll just be making a few enquiries, that’s all.’
Mike Cramer was walking around the croquet lawn, deep in thought, when he heard the Colonel calling him from the French windows at the rear of the main building. He looked up. The Colonel was waving his walking stick as if he was trying to call back an errant retriever. Cramer smiled at the thought. A Rottweiler would be a better comparison. During his last few years in the SAS, the Colonel had tended to use Cramer on operations where the qualities of a highly-trained attack dog were more in demand than the ability to bring back a dead bird.
Cramer walked across the grass. Away to his left, by the line of tall conifers which separated the tennis courts from the lawn, stood a broad-shouldered man in a dark blue duffel coat, one of several SAS troopers on guard duty. The wind caught the coat and Cramer got a glimpse of a sub-machine pistol in an underarm holster.
The Colonel had gone back inside by the time Cramer reached the window. It led into a large, airy room which appeared to have been the headmistress’s office. The Colonel sat behind a huge oak desk. The walls were bare but there were oblong marks among the faded wallpaper where framed photographs of netball and lacrosse teams had hung for generations. As Cramer stepped into the room he noticed another man, standing by an empty bookcase. ‘Cramer, this is Dr Greene,’ said the Colonel.
The doctor stepped forward and shook hands with Cramer. He was just under six feet tall, in his early fifties with swept-back grey hair and gold-framed spectacles with bifocal lenses. He was wearing a brown cardigan with leather patches on the elbows and was carrying a small leather medical bag. ‘Strip to the waist,’ said the doctor.
‘Top or bottom?’
The doctor looked at Cramer over the top of his spectacles, an amused smile on his face. ‘Whichever you’d prefer, Sergeant Cramer.’
Cramer took off his reefer jacket and unbuttoned his shirt. The Colonel made no move to leave. He read the look on Cramer’s face. ‘You don’t mind if I stay, do you?’ he asked and Cramer shook his head.
The doctor whistled softly between his teeth as Cramer dropped his shirt onto the desk. He walked over and gently touched the thick raised scar that ran jaggedly across Cramer’s stomach. ‘Across and up. As if someone had tried to disembowel you.’
‘That’s pretty much what happened. I lost a few feet of tubing and I had to wear a colostomy bag for the best part of a year, but I guess I was lucky.’