Gun Street Girl (36 page)

Ten.

Clouds. Drizzle. A curling line of blue smoke coming from the Mercedes van.

“I'm freezing,” Boyd said.

“Here,” I said, giving him my driving gloves.

“Why don't youse just arrest them now?” Peterson asked.

“They're meeting somebody. We want to lift them and their contact,” Lawson explained. “And if we arrest them as they're actually unloading the missiles we can charge them with espionage and smuggling as well as theft.”

“He's a bright lad,” McCrabban said.

“How did you end up in Carrick RUC, Lawson?” I asked.

“They said it was a good place for me to go learn.”

“Who said that?”

“Superintendent Figgis. He said that I could learn a lot from you, Inspector Duffy.”

I shook my head. “These young people, Crabbie, they look innocent enough but they're here to replace us.”

“That they are,” he agreed dourly. “Oh, I think I saw the back door of the van opening.”

The back door of the van was indeed opening from the inside.

“Where's our bloody backup?” Private Peterson whined.

“We don't need backup. We've a good position here. We'll be OK,” McCrabban said. I looked at him. That Vulcan coolness. That dour Presbyterian calm. That stiff upper lip that was invented in the Scottish kirk and the English public schools. He was a good man to have standing next to you in a pinch, or even when there wasn't a pinch.

The van door closed again.

“False alarm,” Lawson said.

The harbor was quiet. The Irish Sea was glass. The evening was so clear that you could see headlights along the B738 over the water in Portpatrick.

Both rear doors of the van opened and two men got out. One of them was Mad Dog Murphy. Another man got out of the driver's cab. It was Moony. “How did he slip past Special Branch?” McCrabban said, amazed.

It wasn't so difficult. Basements, outhouses that led on to back alleys, and if you got access to the attic you could in theory exit from any of the houses on a connected terrace.

All three of the men were armed. Two with AK-47s and one with a shotgun.

I turned to Lawson and the two soldiers. “OK, lads. Remember, no one does anything without my say-so. We're going to make arrests here tonight.
Arrests
. There are going to be no shots fired. No gunplay. No cock-ups. There's only one road in and out of Portmuck. They'll see that and they'll give up quietly if they know what's good for them.”

“Small fishing boat coming. One man in the cabin by the looks of it,” Crabbie said. “Nope, it's going past the shore, not stopping.”

He was right. The boat wasn't stopping. I scanned the horizon. No other vessels in sight, the sea empty for miles in every direction.

But there was something inherently cinematic about this place, something about it that screamed denouement.

Moony's men began unloading boxes from the Mercedes van.

“They're standing there like they haven't a care in the world,” McCrabban said.

Suddenly one of the men lit a flare and dropped it in the middle of the empty car park. Red fire and bright yellow smoke pigtailing into the night air.

“It must be handover time,” McCrabban said flatly.

“Aye,” I agreed. “But handover to whom?”

“Maybe they're coming in a fucking submarine,” Private Peterson suggested.

Suddenly we could hear the sound of an aircraft. But there was nowhere to land an aircraft. The car park wasn't nearly wide enough and the fields would be a death trap at night.

Cold sweat on the back of my neck as I began to sense that this operation was spiraling out of control.

I didn't want a balls-up. I wanted this to be clean. But how in the name of God did those jokers expect to land a light aircraft at night in the—

“It's a helicopter!” McCrabban said.

“Impossible!”

The only people allowed to fly helicopters anywhere near Northern Ireland airspace were the army and the RAF.

But helicopter it was, coming out of the night from the south-east. From England or possibly the Isle of Man. A Bell 206 painted black. No livery or markings, which gave it a sinister quality.

A helicopter? Who would have the bottle to fly a chopper into Ulster?

“Look at that bloody thing,” Private Boyd said, unconsciously standing up to get a better look.

“Crabbie! Grab that eejit.”

In slow motion McCrabban made a grab at Peterson.

His fingers reached the UDR man's belt and he pulled him down.

Too late
.

One of the Loyalists must have seen him because a second later the wall in front of our position was lit up by tracer and AK-47 fire. Boyd was lucky he didn't get plugged.

Before we even had a chance to return fire the Loyalists had tossed a hand grenade at us, which dropped just short and blew up in front of the stone wall protecting us. Kaboom!

Another hand grenade landed dead on the wall and bounced back five feet into the air before it exploded. The entire top half of the wall collapsed and we hit the deck.

“We are the police! You are surrounded! You must surrender immediately or we will return fire!” I screamed.

“Like fuck we will!” one of the gunmen screamed back, and tracer flew around us.

Shotgun blasts began pounding into the remains of the wall.

“We're sitting ducks here!” Private Peterson yelled.

“Return fire! Fire at will!” I ordered.

The two soldiers opened up with their SLRs on full automatic. McCrabban and I fired our Glock pistols and Lawson pulled out his sidearm and began plugging away with his .38. Crack! Crack! Crack!

The hail of bullets was enough to drive Murphy and Moony behind the van.

“Moony! Listen to me. You are totally surrounded! We've got the high ground. There are half a dozen Land Rovers on the hill filled with soldiers. There's no escape! Lay down your weapons and put your hands up!” I yelled.

“No surrender!” one of the Loyalists yelled back, and all three of them began firing their AKs again. Bullets bounced all around the garden, massacring the small army of garden gnomes behind us.

I put my hands over my head and hunkered for cover under the remains of the wall.

“You lads with Moony! There's no need for any of youse to die! Did he tell you this was for the cause? It's not for the cause, it's for the fucking money!” I yelled as everyone reloaded.

“Your peeler scum tricks won't work with us, Duffy!” Moony yelled back.

“You killed Michael Kelly and his parents to protect your money, Moony. You killed a twenty-year-old barmaid just so you could get a bigger cut of the loot! And now you're going to kill these two lads with you?”

This gambit was met by another round of shotgun and AK-47 fire.

I ducked behind the last scraps of the garden wall, the bullets whizzing inches above our heads.

“Someone's going to die all right and it won't be us!” Moony mocked.

“I have a kill shot,” Private Peterson said coolly from a sniper's position.

“Take it!” I said.

Peterson shot his SLR once and his man went down.

“Ya shot Tommy! Ya fucking bastards!” Murphy yelled, and ran across the car park toward us with an AK-47 in both hands.

He didn't get fifteen feet. A hail of SLR bullets ripped through his upper chest and almost took his head off.

The final gunman was a bald guy with long sideburns and a comb-over. He was wearing jeans so tight that he could barely move in them. His shotgun had jammed and he was shooting at us wildly with a big .45 semiautomatic pistol.

“Put your hands up!” I yelled.

But he didn't put his hands up. Instead he climbed into the van and started it.

He accelerated across the car park while the two soldiers tried to take him out. He must have been wounded, or he simply panicked and lost control. He hit a speed ramp far too fast, the van shuddered, tipped over on its side, and the driver came out of the windscreen at thirty miles an hour straight into a telegraph pole.

It was over.

From first shot to last had been three minutes.

I looked for that incoming helicopter but of course it was now long gone.

We got up from our redoubt and walked down the little slope in front of the house and across the car park.

McCrabban checked for pulses on Murphy and Moony.

“Any hope?” I asked him.

He shook his head glumly. “Dead,” he said. “And that other's fella's head's been caved in.”

“I wanted a confession. I wanted to ask him how he coerced them into writing those suicide notes. Michael's suicide note anyway.”

“Probably just common-or-garden torture.”

“We did it!” Private Peterson was whooping until McCrabban shut him up.

“Find a telephone, Lawson, tell Carrick RUC what's happened,” I said to the young detective.

The air smelled of cordite and blood and burning diesel. Moonlight was illuminating a little golden trail of spent shotgun shells.

We inspected the crates and they were indeed the stolen Javelin missiles from Shorts.

I walked down to the water.

Three dead men. Three more dead men to add to the grim toll of dead men and women killed in these Troubles.

I felt sick. Ashamed. This was my op. This was my fault.

“Hey, Sean!” Crabbie yelled.

“Gimme a minute, will you?” I said, and walked along the beach next to the little harbor.

I pushed back the tears and took a deep breath.

I looked out my picture of St Michael, the Archangel, the patron saint of policemen, kissed it, and closed my eyes.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two years since my last confession,” I said quietly, and told the water about my sins, but, as usual, the cold black sea lapping against the sand refused to give me absolution.

“Thank God I'm getting out,” I muttered, and lit a cigarette.

When I got back up to the car park the Special Branch Land Rovers were arriving and cops were pouring out of them. I nodded to Spencer and McCreen.

Too late for you. Too late for all of you.

The police forensic team arrived from Belfast in white boiler suits. They set up arc lamps and began gathering blood samples and shell casings.

Chief Inspector McArthur appeared in his full dress greens. The press were with him.

“Yes, this was a joint operation between Carrick CID and Special Branch,” he was saying.

Sara Prentice was holding a tape recorder mic up to his mouth. Our eyes met. I'd broken up with her two days before. She hadn't minded in the least. She smiled at me. I nodded and walked on.

While McArthur blathered away I looked into the dead face of Tommy Moony.

I wanted a confession, Tommy. I wanted to hear you say it. You killed Sylvie McNichol and Michael Kelly and his parents. You killed them all for the promise of a pile of Yankee gold
.

I kneeled under one of the forensic team arc lamps and tried to read the truth in Tommy's cold blue eyes.

But there was no truth.

There was only death.

Always, there's only death.

28: BLUE TIGERS

Special Branch and the Ulster Defence Regiment took the credit and the headlines. The soldiers had done the killings and it was a Special Branch op. But who cares about headlines?

“Who cares about headlines?” I said to McCrabban as we sat in the incident room the next day.

“Headlines? Not me. All is vanity, saith the Lord.”

“Very true. Any word on that helicopter?”

Crabbie shook his head. No helicopter with that description had taken off anywhere in the British Isles.

Why was I not surprised?

I smelled spook. I smelled America.

I called the US consulate in Belfast to ask to speak to John Connolly to find out what he had been doing last night, but I was told that Mr. Connolly had gone back to the States and would not be returning to Ireland again.

Of course, Special Branch questioned the families of the dead men in Portmuck, but none of them claimed to have any knowledge of the Kelly murders or indeed of the stolen Javelin missiles. We had no real proof that Tommy Moony had killed Michael Kelly, but the RUC intelligence file implicated him in the deaths of nine people in the 1970s, three of whom had been killed with a single shot from a nine-millimeter pistol . . .

We had no choice but to put the case in the yellow file for inquiries that had been suspended but were still open in case further evidence came to light.

“Just once I'd like one of our homicide investigations to end in a court case and a conviction,” I said to Crabbie.

“You can't take it personally, sir,” Lawson said, bringing in the tea. “At CID training school we were told that clearance rates for homicides have been on the decline since the 1970s.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, sir. The vast majority of murders in Northern Ireland are never solved. The clearance rate is under fifteen percent when there's a terrorist dimension,” Lawson explained.

McCrabban could see that the kid was annoying me.

“Go and get some biscuits, Lawson,” he told him. “How can you have tea without biscuits? That's the first thing they should have taught you in CID school.”

“He's a good lad,” Crabbie said when he was gone.

“Matty was funnier.”

“He's not Matty, but he's a good lad.”

Lawson came back with chocolate biscuits. We drank our tea and ate our biscuits, and then we stripped the incident room until it was bare. We put the two boxes of Kelly material on the cold case shelf.

My final case for the RUC ending the way so many of the others had done with no closure and no justice.

The story the papers invented was that the stolen missiles were being shipped to apartheid South Africa. Which made sense, but it wasn't true at all. If the missiles had been going to apartheid South Africa, Special Branch would have followed all the leads and eventually, I'm sure, there would have been some kind of international inquiry involving Interpol and the governments of several countries.