Harry's Game (4 page)

The noise started as the soldiers began the house‐to‐house searches. Women, mighty in dressing‐gowns with hair piled high by their bright plastic‐coated curlers, surged from the houses to blow whistles, howl abuse and crash the dustbin lids. Amid the cacophony i came the beating of rifle butts on doors, and the thud of the axes and sledge‐hammers when there was no ready answer. Within minutes there were as many civilians on the street as soldiers, bouncing their epithets and insults off the unmoving faces of the military. Protected by small 15

knots of soldiers were the unhappy‐looking civilian police, usually with their panting, gelignite-sniffer Labradors close by. Occasionally there would come a shout of excitement from one of the small terraced houses, the accent North Country or Welsh or ('.cockney, and a small shining rifle or pistol would be carried into the street, wrapped to prevent the loss of the clues that would convict the still half‐asleep man bundled down the pavement and into the back of an armoured truck. But this was not often. Four years of

searches and swoops and cordons and arrests had left little to find.

By dawn‐‐and it comes late as far north as Belfast, and then takes

long time coming‐‐there was little to show for the night's work.

some Japanese‐made Armalite rifles, some pistols, a sackful of ammunition and crocodile lines of men for questioning by the official Branch, along with the paraphernalia of terrorism‐‐

batrics, lengths of flex, alarm clocks, and sacks of potent weed killer. THEY were itemized and shipped back to the police stations.

With the light came the stones, and the semi‐orderliness of the

.arches gave way to the crack of rubber bullets being fired; the

streets swirled with CS gas, and always at the end of the narrow line

houses were the kids heaving their fractured paving stones at the

military.

Unaware of the searches, bus drivers down the Falls Road, stop

at the lights, found youths climbing into their cabs, a variety of

pistols threatening them, and handed over their double deckers. By five o'clock the Falls was blocked in four places, and local radio bulletins were warning motorists once again to stick to alternative

routes.

16

As the soldiers withdrew from the streets there were infrequent bursts of automatic fire, not pressed home, and causing no casualties. Only on one occasion did troops have enough of a target to fire back, and then they claimed no hit.

For both sides the raid had its achievements. The army and police had to stir up the pool, and muddy the water, get the top men on the other side on the move, perhaps panic one of them into a false step or a vital admission. The street leaders could also claim some benefit from the morning. After the lull of several weeks the army had arrived to kick in the doors, take away the men, break up the rooms, prise out the floorboards. At street level that was valuable currency.

The man had seen the police convoy racing into the airport as he'd left, carrying as his sole possessions the Schipol duty free bag with two hundred cigarettes and a bottle of Scotch. As he'd come through a young man had stepped forward and asked him if he were Mr Jones. He'd nodded, nothing more was required of him, and followed the young man out of the new terminal and into the car park.

It was as they had driven past the airport hotel they'd seen the Garda cars and a van go by.

Neither driver nor passenger spoke. The man had been told he would be met, and reminded

that he must not speak at all on the journey, not even on the home run. Speech is as identifiable as a face, they explained. The car took the Dundalk road, and then on the stretch between Drogheda and Dundalk turned left and inland towards the hills.

'We'll be away over near Forkhill," muttered the driver. The man said nothing as the car bumped its way down the side road. After fifteen minutes at a crossroads, where the only building was a corrugated, iron‐roofed store, the driver stopped, got out and went inside saying he'd be a minute and had to telephone. The man sat in the car, the light‐headedness he'd felt at Schipol that afternoon suddenly gone; it was not that he was alone that worried him but that his movements and immediate future were not in his own hands. He had started to conjure up images of betrayal and capture, of himself left abandoned near the border and unarmed, when the driver walked back to the car and got in.

'Forkhill's tight, we're going farther down towards the Cullyhanna road. Don't worry, you're home and dry.'

The man felt ashamed that the stranger could sense his suspicion and nervousness. As a gesture he tried to sleep, leaning his head

against his safety belt. He stayed in this position till the car suddenly jerked and flung his head hard against the window of the door. He shot forward.

17

'Don't worry'‐‐again the self‐assured patronizing approach of the driver. "That was the crater we filled in two years ago. You're in the North now. Home in two hours.'

The driver cut back to the east, through Bessbrook and on to the )north of Newry and the main road to Belfast. The man allowed himself a smile. There was dual carriageway now, and a good fast road, till the driver pulled up outside Hillsborough and motioned to the duty free bag on the back seat under the man's coat. 'Sorry, boy, I don't want that as we come into town. Ditch it.' The man wound down his window and flung the plastic bag across the lay‐by and into a hedge. The car was moving again. The next sign showed Belfast to be five miles away.

On his return from London the previous evening, the Chief Constable had put a picked team of detectives on stand‐by to wait for information over the confidential phone, the heavily publicized Belfast phone numbers over which information is passed anonymously to the police.

They waited through die day in their ready room, but the call they hoped for never came.

There was the usual collection of breathy messages naming people in connection with bombs, shootings, locating the dumping of firearms ... but not a word even of rumour about the Danby killing. In three pubs in the centre of Belfast, British army intelligence officers met their contacts and talked, huddled forward in the little cubicles they favoured. All were to report later that night to their controller that nothing was known. While they talked, threatening, cajoling, bribing their sources, military police Land‐Rovers cruised close by. The Red Caps had not been told who they were guarding, just detailed to watch and prevent the sudden entry of a number of men into those pubs.

The blowing of the laundry van intelligence surveillance unit, when soldiers kept watch on an IRA base area from the false ceiling of a laundry van while their colleagues plied for trade below, had woken the operation directors to the needs for safeguards when their men were in the field. That was thirty months back. The tortured and mutilated body of a Royal Tank Regiment captain found just three months before had demonstrated the probability of a security leak close to the heart of the unit, and the public outcry at home at

the exposing of soldiers to these out‐of‐uniform dangers had led to a Ministry directive that military personnel were no longer to infiltrate the Catholic community, but instead stay out and cultivate their informers. Funds and the availability of one‐way air tickets to Canada were stepped up.

Quite separate from die military intelligence team, the RUC's Special Branch was also out that night‐‐men who for three years had slept with their snub‐nosed PPK Walthers on the bedside table, who kept a stock of spare number plates at the back of the garage, who stood to the side at the well photographed police funerals. They too were to report that there was no talk about the Danby killing.

18

In the small hours Howard Rennie settled on to a hard wooden chair on the first floor of headquarters down the Stormont Road, and began with painful awkwardness to type out his

first report. Some of his colleagues had already been in with the news that they had discovered nothing, that their informants were pleading total ignorance of this one; others would come after him to tell the same story. Even the recording tapes‐‐the "Confidential Line'‐‐had failed them.

As a chief inspector, Rennie had been hammering the typewriter keys for statements, criminal assessments and incident report sheets for eighteen years, but he still maintained the right-index finger, left index finger patter.

From his time in Special Branch Rennie knew the way the city could buzz after a Provisional spectacular, how rumour and gossip passed from ghetto to ghetto, carrying the message of success and with it a degree of indiscretion. That was where the Branch came in, men trained to be sensitive enough to pick up the murmurs of information. But the days of Special Branch glory in Belfast were long past.

Rennie could remember the course he'd been on in the early days before it all went haywire, and the troops arrived, when he'd been told across in England by dour‐faced men with biscuit tans from long service in the Far East and Africa that the inside work by the police was the only hope of breaking a terrorist movement in its infancy. "When you get the army in, lording it over your heads, telling you what to do, knowing it all, then it's too late. It's out of your hands by that time. The military on the streets means the enemy are winning, and that you are no longer a force for the opposition to reckon with. The army are bad news for policemen,

the only way for a counter‐terrorist operation to be successful

or the Special Branch to be in there, infiltrating, extracting knowledge at ground level.'

And they'd been right. Rennie could see that now. He and his colleagues didn't poke their noses into the corners and crannies of the Provisional heartland. They let the army do that with their fire

power and their armour plating, while the detectives sat back and contented themselves with the interrogation of the flow of arrested men. It was next best thing, but not good enough.

He'd never been much for the cloak and dagger stuff himself. Too big, too heavy, too conspicuous, not a man to flake his way into a i crowd, not ordinary enough. But there were others who had been Good at it, till the funerals became too frequent, and the Chief ('.unstable had called a halt.

19

One man, for instance, had been the king of the Branch men till he died up the Crumlin in a hail of automatic fire. Just watching the nightly riot when the sniper spotted him, and gone was a card‐index memory, a walking filing system.

Rennie's report turned out to be a drab document. A succession of negatives after a score of calls and a search through the big tin drawers that carried the buff folders and the photographs and case histories. The Chief Constable came into the room as Rennie was pushing the typewriter back across the table.

'Nothing?'

'Nothing at all, sir. It's a blind alley so far. No one saying anything. Not a word.'

'I told them in London that it'll come at this end, the man they're looking for. His equipment was too good for anyone based in London. He'll be here. How many do we know who've capable of it, capable of the discipline, of that sort of training?'

'There are quite a few," said Rennie, "but none of them out. I mid name half a dozen in Long Kesh who we would be looking for if they were free. But, taking them out of the game, I can't see anyone. A bit ago, yes, but not now.'

'I'm calling for a very big effort, maximum effort," the Chief Constable had walked away from the table and was talking half to himself, half out into the darkness beyond the shatterproof taped windows. "London have said in the past that they don't get the cooperation they're looking for when there's a big one in England, and they come here for our help. I don't want them saying that this time. God, it's a damned nuisance. All the manpower, all the effort, everything

thing that has to be dropped for a thing like this. But we have to have him.'

He looked a long time into the black distance beyond the floodlit perimeter fence. Then swung on his heel. "Good night," he said, and closed the door carefully behind him.

It'll go on a bit now, thought Rennie, every night here for the next few weeks, typing away, and with little to show for it, unless we're just lucky. Just lucky, and that doesn't happen often.

But just before midnight came the first positive identification of the killer back in the city. The duty major in intelligence section at Lisburn military headquarters, leafing through the situation reports of the evening, read that a patrol of the Lifeguards had for fifteen minutes closed the Hillsborough to Banbridge road while they investigated a package at the side of the road. It was cleared after the bomb disposal expert arrived and found the bag contained a carton of cigarettes and a bottle of Scotch, duty free and bought at Schipol airport. He hurriedly phoned his chief at home, and the RUG control centre. But, nagging at him, was the 20

question of how such an operation as the Danby killing could have been mounted, with no word coming out.

The man was asleep now, in the spare back bedroom of a small terraced house off the Ballymurphy Bull Ring. He'd come at 11.25 up from Whiterock where he had stayed since arriving in Belfast. Round him a safety system was building, with the arrangement that he'd sleep till 5.30, then move again up into New Barnsley. The Brigade staff in Belfast were anxious not to keep him long in one place, to hustle him round. Only the Brigade commander knew the value of the man the precautions were made for ... no one else was told, and in the house he was greeted with silence. He came in fast over the back fence, avoiding the kids" bikes, ducked under the washing lines and made his way through the damp, filthy scullery into the back room. The family was gathered in semi‐darkness with the television on loud‐‐Channel 9. His escort whispered into the ear of the man of the house, and was gone, leaving him. The man was not from this part of the city, and was not known anyway.