McAlliskey nodded. He didn’t much like O’Neil, but he was thorough. And good with explosives.
They left the car and O’Neil led the way down the hill about two hundred metres. Then he stopped and whistled softly. A faint whistle answered his, somewhere away to their left, and the two men followed the sound, finding a deep-rutted tractor track that led them down to a drystone dyke at the corner of the field. A figure was crouched there, with a holdall tucked in under the wall to keep it dry. He flashed a light briefly in their faces.
‘Turn that fucking thing off!’ McAlliskey spoke softly, but his voice carried the authority of rank. The third man doused his light without a word.
‘Flaherty,’ O’Neil said.
McAlliskey crouched down beside him and saw that he was no more than a boy of sixteen or seventeen with fear in his eyes. ‘You should know better, son.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr McAlliskey.’ And there was awe in the boy’s voice. McAlliskey was almost a legend in the organization. The boy wasn’t sure what scared him more — McAlliskey or the bloody business they were about on this dark Irish night.
‘How long?’ McAlliskey asked.
‘’Bout fifteen minutes, sir.’
O’Neil opened the holdall and took out a small, hand-held radio transmitter. He extended the aerial and flicked a switch. A red light came on. He glanced at McAlliskey. ‘You sure they’ll be?’
‘They’ll be.’
And they settled back against the wall in silence, listening for the first distinctive sound of the army APC rolling up the lane towards them. From here, they had a perfect line of sight, and would see its lights early — the same lights that would illuminate the white marker O’Neil had planted at the roadside, in line with the twenty pounds of plastic explosive skilfully secreted just below the tarmac. O’Neil wondered how McAlliskey got his information. But he knew better than to ask.
McAlliskey took out his tobacco tin, leaning forward to keep it safe from the rain, and rolled another cigarette. He struck a match to light it, hands cupped around the box.
A hundred and fifty metres above them, a man lay still against a slight rise in the ground, below the shelter of the treeline. He had a livid white scar running back across one cheek where a bullet had grazed the flesh and taken off the lobe of his left ear. His dark hair was cropped short, greying at the temples. His eyes were blue and cold as steel. He saw the brief flare of the match light up the smoker’s face.
He had already picked out McAlliskey as he and O’Neil made their way across the field. Amateurs, he thought. He tucked the butt of his US M21 rifle into his shoulder. The weapon had been modified to his own specifications. He put his eye to the lens of the long, telescopic, infrared sight mounted above the butt end of the barrel, centring it on McAlliskey’s head, and he too prepared to wait.
They saw the lights of the APC before they heard the distant whine of its engine. Headlights raked the sodden green of the fallow winter fields, swinging one way then the other as the vehicle wound up the road towards them.
McAlliskey and the others crept further along the wall to a clearer vantage where a white gate opened into the lane. The man in the woods kept them in his sights and adjusted his position.
The engine of the armoured personnel carrier had become a roar now as it approached the marker on the road below. The muscles tightened across O’Neil’s chest and his finger hovered over the button on his handset. McAlliskey watched, impassive. Twenty metres, fifteen, ten. The APC lumbered inexorably towards the marker. A fine, cold sweat beaded across O’Neil’s forehead, his hands clammy. The boy glanced at him anxiously, his heart in his throat, almost choking him. The marksman in the woods focused on McAlliskey’s right temple. Gently he squeezed the trigger. The rifle sounded, like the crack of a dry branch underfoot. McAlliskey slumped forward, a neat round hole in his temple, blood gouting from the back where the bullet had passed through, taking half his head with it. O’Neil pressed the button involuntarily, and the explosion below ripped up the road, the APC still five metres short. But O’Neil barely heard it as he stared in horror at McAlliskey. He had hardly a chance to turn before the second bullet struck him full in the face, and his head cracked back against the wall.
Flaherty froze in a moment of panic, two men dead beside him, the shouts of the soldiers below as they fanned out from the APC, a searchlight sweeping the hillside. He looked up instinctively towards the woods and saw, for a second, a face caught in the searchlight glare. Then he took off, running hard in the direction he knew O’Neil had left the car.
The young captain shone his flashlight on the faces of the two bodies. The first was unrecognizable, but he held the beam on the second. His sergeant arrived breathless at his side.
‘Jesus! McAlliskey!’
‘Somebody just saved our lives, Sergeant.’
The sergeant spat. ‘A lot of lives. And a lot of bloody trouble.’
Elliot walked briskly up the ramp towards the Shuttle desk and presented his ticket. He had already passed through the stringent security at this airport on the hill, above the besieged city of Belfast. No problems. He wore a neatly pressed grey suit, white shirt and dark tie. With his slim black attaché case, a raincoat over his arm, he looked like any businessman on a return flight to London. He was thirty-nine but appeared older, his face unusually tanned for the time of year. The girl who handed him his boarding card assumed he was recently returned from a winter sunshine holiday. But Africa had been no holiday. Her eyes were drawn to the scar on his cheek, which stood out white against his tan, and she noticed that his left ear lobe was missing. He returned her stare, and her eyes flickered away self-consciously. He took a seat in the departure lounge.
He would collect the second half of his fee in London. This had been a departure for him. A one-off. Although, he considered, it wasn’t really so different from what he had been doing for the last twenty years. Just better paid. And he needed the money. He hadn’t been told who his paymasters were, but had a shrewd idea. The English establishment embraced hypocrisy with a greater ease than it did democracy.
He had not been told to take out O’Neil. Only McAlliskey. But he had judged it dangerous not to take O’Neil at the same time. He had no idea why he had left the boy, nor would he ever know just how great a mistake that had been.
He had not seen the two men standing idly by a newsstand in the terminal building. One of them, little more than a boy, pale and drawn and still shaking from the horror of the night before, had nodded in his direction.
‘That’s him.’
The other had glanced at the boy appraisingly. ‘You sure, kid?’
‘Sure, I’m sure.’ The boy had watched Elliot with hate in his heart. It was a face he would never forget.
Chapter Three
I
London, December 1978
It was raining. Cold. The clutch of black umbrellas around the grave shone wet, dripping on the feet of the mourners. One of them — death was his business — held an umbrella over the vicar as he read from his prayer book. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes... meaningless words reeled off for countless dead. The vicar hurried through it. He was cold, and the umbrella was dripping on the back of his neck. He hadn’t known the woman. Another faceless soul dispatched for judgement. He wondered, wearily, what had happened to the faith he had known in his youth. Perhaps, like listening to the same piece of music over and over, faith, like the melody, palled. He glanced at the daughter and felt a stab of guilt as she stooped to throw a handful of wet soil over the coffin. The young man beside her offered his handkerchief. She waved it away.