Fanatics: Zero Tolerance (11 page)

An officer (
Cahal knew nothing about the army, and assumed that anyone with a peaked cap must be an officer) seemed to be stonewalling representations made to him by an angry civilian. The civilian gave the impression he was used to exercising authority, but not a politician’s kind; here was a man obviously not accustomed to being balked.

Cahal
nudged someone next to him and said in a discreet tone: “Who’s that talking with the General?”

His neighbour grinned. “I don’t know his name, but I hear he’s somebody big with the local paramilitaries.”

“Which ones?”

“Dunno. The IRA, I suppose. But they say if anybody can get us through, it’s him.”

Cahal strained to hear the conversation.

“I have no orders to allow anyone to pass,” the officer was saying in his most stolid voice.

“So what?” snapped the hard man. “You don’t have orders to allow anyone
not
to pass, do you?”

The officer faltered for only the briefest of instants. “We have already admitted more people than we can properly accommodate,” he said.

“Accommodate? What is there to accommodate? Most of these people behind me have relatives in the South of Ireland who’ll be very happy to put them up -”

“You can’t possibly know that, Sir. This is -”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“-
this is a big crowd, and getting bigger by the hour. We can’t pick and choose, and there’s no way we can let them all through.”

“Ireland is a member of the EC,” said someone else, “and we’re all EC citizens. You’ve no right to close the border against us.”

“Shut up, you,” said the hard man, “I’m dealing with this.”

“These are clearly exceptional circumstances,” said the officer. “I’m expecting momentarily to receive specific instructions regarding this situation. A state of emergency declaration and orders to close the border will probably be given any moment now -”

“But it hasn’t happened yet! It hasn’t happened! You haven’t a leg to stand on, you pompous little -” The hard man hesitated, then gathered himself for one last assault. “Look, these people are Irish. They’re Irish, do you understand?” He raised his voice to include the line of soldiers. “These are your fellow Irishmen and women. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves that you’ve been a party to this poor treatment of your own countrymen!”

“Sir!” called out a soldier from behind the nearest truck. “Call for you. Code yellow.” The officer turned gratefully away, leaving the hard man preaching insurrection to an unresponsive audience.

The officer was gone only briefly; Cahal watched him stride back with a decisive, purposeful air. He stopped in front of the hard man and unholstered his handgun. “I have just received my orders,” he called out. “No-one will be allowed to pass.” Grumbling broke out, but he raised his voice further and continued: “In fact, you had better all get out of
our
way. This column will now advance. Nothing is to be allowed to stop it.”

He started to turn away, but the hard man stepped forward quickly and put a hand on his shoulder. “No you don’t,” he said. “You listen to me. I know a bit about armies, too, if you take my meaning. And if you don’t let me and my friends past, I’ll have to see about arranging a wee visit for you from soldiers I know.”

“You don’t even know who I am,” said the officer scornfully.

“Oh, I can find out your name, and the address where any wee
wifey and kids live, too,” said the hard man. “There are ways and means. You’d better believe it.”

The officer looked at him with an unreadable expression; then something else caught his attention.
Cahal looked in the same direction and saw someone scrambling across a muddy field  on the right hand edge of the military encampment.

“Corporal,” said the officer in a voice that matched his expression, “
have that man shot.”

“Sir!” said the Corporal, taking a smart
half-step forward and dropping onto one knee. He raised the gun to his eye level and took careful aim.

Cahal
jumped at the sound of the gunshot and watched, horrified, as the man in the field spasmed, stood still for a moment, then slowly toppled and fell face down into the soft ground.

Panic broke out among the onlookers.
Cahal was jostled and pulled on all sides as those around him retreated from the Army; and because of his efforts to avoid falling and being trampled, he finished up being almost thrown into the arms of the hard man, who shoved him away angrily. Cahal landed on the ground in an untidy sprawl.

The hard man stood his ground and stared the officer right in the eye, even as the crowd thinned away around him like the tide retreating back down a beach. “You’ll pay for that,” he told the officer. “With your own blood.”

The soldier looked at him icily, then resumed his neutral, professional air. “Foolish of you to tell me,” he said. He raised his handgun and fired.

The hard man fell right on top of
Cahal, who, hardly realising that he was screaming, immediately tried to shove him off again. Cahal felt something warm and sticky fouling his hands, and screamed even harder; then it was all too much. He was aware that he had run right out of breath; then blackness closed in on him.

When he finally awoke from his swoon, he found himself lying on the side of the road. The not-as-hard-as-he-thought man lay about ten metres further along, and there was no sign of any crowd or of any soldier of whatever rank.
Cahal pulled off his T-shirt and used it as a towel for his hands, then threw it away. He hunted for his knapsack and found it after a moment or two; it had been run over by a very large number of vehicles.

He felt for a moment as if he might cry; then, sitting there in the silence, he realised there was now nothing to stop him crossing the border in style. The fourth car from the head of the queue was a BMW, and inexplicably, it did not appear to have been damaged when the
armoured cars had shunted the queue aside so they could get by. Cahal found the keys still in the ignition, and sat behind the wheel grinning like an idiot. He had always wanted his own BMW.

He was the only person from the North to cross the border at that spot the whole
day long.

*****

Private Smith and Private Jones lay in a hillside field overlooking a small market town in South Armagh.

“Heard anything?” said Private Smith.

“The Irish are all rearming,” said Private Jones. “They’re jumping at the golden opportunity the war has given them.”

“I meant from home,” said Smith, but Jones went on as if he hadn’t heard him:

“They’ve done that in every war we’ve ever been committed to. Treacherous sods.” Jones tracked a passing civilian through the telescopic sights of his rifle, willing him to be a Republican terrorist. “I’d shoot them all for two pins.”

“That’s what we’re here for,” said Smith.

“Eh?”

“We’re bait, didn’t you know that?”

Jones almost dropped his rifle. “What are you talking about?”

“You said it yourself. The Irish must have distributed every weapon in their stockpile by now. They’ll never have a better chance to kick us out; they’d have to be stupid not to take advantage of a tactical situation like this. With McDonald in hospital fighting for his life, the rest of the Government hiding away in their nuclear bunkers, half the country in ruins...”

“But what’s that got to do with us? Why did you say we’re bait?”

“Look where we are! Don’t you feel vulnerable?” said Smith.

Jones looked around. He’d felt vulnerable from the moment they’d taken this position. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

“Yet there’s plenty of cover,” said Smith. “So you know what I think?”

“What?”

“I think the Captain has planted snipers all around here. I think he has orders to try to tempt the paramilitaries into jumping the gun, to take potshots at us that’ll give away their positions before they’re quite ready for a battle. Then our boys can just pick them off. They’ll be overconfident just now, see. They’ll have forgotten that guerrilla warfare and open battle aren’t the same at all, and being good guerrilla fighters won’t help them when they’re up against the centuries of expertise that we have behind us.”

“
Excuse me
for interrupting while you pat yourself on the back, but hasn’t it occurred to you that when this is all over we could be lying here with half a dozen extra holes in our heads?”

Smith shook his head. “The Captain won’t let it happen. Besides, he has no option but to try this. We have to smoke them out somehow.”

Jones was outraged. “That’s - that’s -” words failed him.

There was a rustling in the grass to their left. Jones almost fired at the place where it came from, but realised just in time that it was Lance Corporal Brown. Brown stopped beside them and tried to nestle into long grass that wasn’t quite long enough.

“We just got word,” he said. “The Irish Army have crossed the border. They say they’re here to help, but the Brasshats don’t trust them. We’re to keep a wary eye out for them.”

Smith and Jones looked at Brown for a moment, expecting to hear more, but he said nothing.

“Well,” said Smith in the exaggeratedly patient tone one uses when talking to a complete idiot, “do we assume they’re friend or foe? Is it okay to shoot at them?”

Brown shrugged; Smith and Jones exchanged a wide-eyed look.

“Ha!” said Jones. “As if we needed to ask!” He swore bitterly, and at length. “They’re cut from the same cloth as the IRA. They’re hardly going to miss out on the glory of a moment like this, now, are they? They’ve always wanted rid of us, and now they’ll get their wish. We’ve had it!” Jones sounded as if he might burst into tears at any moment. “They’ll pick us off one by one until there’ll be so few of us left we’ll have to abandon our uniforms and steal other clothes to blend in with the locals. We’ll be afraid to open our mouths in case we get shot for having an English accent -”

“It won’t come to that,” scoffed Lance Corporal Brown. “We’ll just be withdrawn from Ulster. Besides, we’ll be needed more at home now. The emergency services must be stretched to the limit; the order to go
home’ll be sent very soon now, I’ll bet.”

“That sounds fine,” said Jones, “except that some of us don’t know whether we still have homes to go to! Half of Britain’s in ruins, haven’t you heard?”

Brown made a tutting noise. “You don’t know that.” Then he added: “Where do you come from, anyway?”

“London,” said Jones shortly.

“Oh,” said Brown. No-one in their company had heard anything yet, but it was assumed London was bound to have been hit by a nuke; it was a pretty obvious target. “Sorry.”

A small knot of civilians had gathered on the road just below the hillside where the three soldiers lay; they gawped and grinned, apparently perfectly able to see the supposedly hidden men.

“They’re laughing at us,” said Smith. “They know we’re going to be targets very soon.”

“Sod this,” said Jones, standing up. “I’m not just lying here waiting to be shot!”

“Get down!” cried Brown. “Get down, Private!
That’s an order!”

“You know where you can stick your orders!” said Jones, and opened fire on the sneering civilians. He managed to shoot three of them before the air was suddenly full of bullets. Private Jones danced manically, then collapsed. His eyes stared indifferently as the gunfight raged around his dead body.

*****

The Irish Army contingent that approached from the South made marvelous progress, quite unimpeded by the fresh
North-Easterly breeze that wafted some very strong fallout from the Belfast bombs right over them. Their spirits were dampened a little, however, by some exceptionally poor weather later in the day which cleared the radioactive dust from the air. When the rain had eased off, the ground, and the hapless soldiers, were well dosed. A long, narrow, curving corridor which stretched across County Down from West Belfast to just North of the border in County Armagh later became known to locals variously as the no-go area, the Welsh valley, and Chernobyl Street.

The next morning, feeling poorly, they faced a company of British soldiers who’d got wind of their approach. The British were seriously outnumbered, but so far untroubled by irradiated guts.

Senior staff from each side met in the middle to parley.

The Irish commander felt every bit as bad as he looked, but tried to put a brave face on it. “We are a little anxious,” he said, “that you may have misunderstood the reasons for our presence here in the North.”

“We were feeling a little anxious ourselves,” said the British commander.

“We never came to do anything other than help,” said the Irishman.

“Help yourselves to a little extra territory, you mean,” muttered someone on the British side.

The British commander turned his head slightly in that direction and scowled. There were no further
sotto voce
contributions. “Your colleagues in Londonderry aren’t being terribly helpful at the moment,” he said.