Pray for Us Sinners (2 page)

That morning he'd gone with his friend Jimmy Ferguson to collect the trinitrotoluene from the 2nd Battalion, Provisional IRA, explosives dump in a safe house in the Falls Road district of Belfast. The blocks were the right size to conceal in wrapping paper that had originally covered pounds of butter. Davy had snugged his packages in a basket with the rest of his groceries and walked past two British patrols on the way home to his terrace house on Conway Street.

The soldiers hadn't bothered him. He was used to troops on the streets of Belfast. The buggers had been there since 1969, with their patrols and their Saracens and their sangars—fortified observation posts.

Davy had more to worry about than squaddies clumping about in their great boots, clutching their self-loading rifles. The four pieces of TNT had been the last in the cache, and there'd been no bloody detonators. He'd had to send Jimmy off to find another source. Where the hell was Jimmy, anyway?

Davy wound three turns of tape round the middle of the charges. Damn it, he'd forgotten the scissors. He exhaled through his moustache, set the roll aside, rose, and limped to a dresser.

He glanced at a framed photograph hanging beside the hutch. A woman, midthirties, smiling in the sun, dark hair tossed by the wind. He smiled.
Aye, Fiona girl,
he thought,
you're as lovely now as when that snap was taken on Tyrella Strand
. She'd not be home until tonight, and he'd have the job finished by then, which was just as well. Fiona did not approve of his involvement with the Provos. She hadn't said so for a while, but he knew.

He opened a drawer. Where the hell were the bloody scissors? He grunted as he found them, picked them out, slammed the drawer, and stood, frowning at another faded snap on the wall. A man and woman posing stiffly in their Sunday suits.

He'd inherited Ma's eyes, though he couldn't see the blue of them in the old black-and-white. He wished he could remember her better. Remember more than her eyes. Remember more than the day Da had come home grim-faced to tell a six-year-old Davy that Ma had run off with a bus conductor and she'd never be coming home anymore.

He'd kept that picture because it was the only one of Da. Davy had been able to see how lost Da had been without her. He'd tried to be both mother and father, and he'd given Davy more than the sharp McCutcheon nose, heavy-boned height, broad shoulders, and powerful hands. He'd given Davy “the Cause” to believe in. “The Cause.” The reunification of Northern Ireland with the other twenty-six counties and the banishment of the British after eight hundred years of occupation.

Davy rubbed the web of his hand over his moustache. It was grey now, like his thinning hair. He'd had dark hair in 1952, when Da had enrolled him in the IRA as a lad of sixteen. No mucking about in the Fianna Éireann, the boys' unit. He and his friend Jimmy Ferguson had gone straight in to join the men. Men who had fought with Michael Collins against the English in the Tan War of 1920. Men who had assassinated Collins in August 1922, at Béal na Bláth in County Cork, after he had signed the bloody treaty that let England keep the six counties of Ulster. Men whom young Davy had worshipped as heroes.

A brave while ago, Davy thought, as he moved to the table, sat, and sliced through the tape. He bent to the work he'd done many times before. How many? He'd lost count. He snipped the last piece of tape and admired his handiwork. Four pounds of TNT neatly prepared. It was his job. His job for the Cause.

The Cause in the early days had been all he'd lived for. It was like having the family he had never known. The lads met clandestinely to train at night in the remote Antrim Hills. The senior men indoctrinated the recruits with tales of heroes and rebels, the litany of Ireland's glorious failures as her sons had tried to throw off the invaders' yoke.

Faith in their forefathers was all very well—he'd believed Da, believed that one day Ireland would be free, drunk it all in as a novitiate priest takes his Communion wine, swallowing with it his faith in the life everlasting—but back then the IRA had known it would take more than faith to remove the British. So Davy learned to drill, to use the old Lee-Enfield .303 bolt-action rifles, Webley revolvers, and Thompson guns. Like cowboys and Indians for grown-ups. And he'd learned to make bombs. For the Cause.

When his training was over there had been an induction ceremony. The new recruits had been called to attention: “
Paraid, aire!
” Davy, the tallest, stood on the right of the front rank. They raised their hands and repeated the IRA declaration—the organization had abandoned oaths in the twenties because the Catholic Church objected to oath-bound secret societies. “I, David O'Flahertie McCutcheon, promise that I will promote the objects of the Ó
glaigh na hÉirann
to the best of my knowledge and ability and that I will obey all orders and regulations issued to me by the army authorities and by my superior officers.”

Davy was still “obeying all orders.” He rubbed his left thigh, the ache there, the reminder.

“Damn your pride, Da,” he said to the photograph. Davy thought of the months he'd spent in 1957, lying cold and lousy in a dugout in the Sperrin Mountains. One of his own bombs had detonated prematurely. Its blast had done for Davy's left thigh, killed four other men—and Da. Davy'd lain there helpless, nursed by Jimmy Ferguson until his shattered leg had healed.

Davy mumbled as he stared at his dead father's photograph. “It wasn't cowboys and Indians after that. Not for me.”

He turned back to his work. The TNT would be no bloody use until he'd built the timer. He lifted a piece of insulated wire and stripped four inches of the plastic covering away. The copper shone where the scissors' blade had scratched. He bound the metal filaments around one jaw of a wooden clothes peg and repeated the operation with a second piece of wire, wrapping it round the other jaw. The two bare pieces of metal would touch when the peg closed. He produced a packet of cigarettes and took one out. He'd have liked to have one, but—he looked at the TNT and smiled.

Davy bored a hole below the filter, threaded a piece of fine string through the hole, and bound the cigarette to the legs of the clothes peg. The tension forced the jaws apart. When lit, the cigarette would smoulder at a speed of one inch every seven minutes. It would take fifteen minutes for the string to be burnt through and the jaws to snap shut, completing the circuit. Simple but effective. At least it would be when Jimmy Ferguson arrived.

Davy tied the final knot and glanced through the window. Rain fell, splashing off the pane and making grubby streaks in the patina of industrial soot that clung to the glass. He looked at his watch. Jimmy was nearly an hour late. Had something happened to him? Christ, Davy had enough to worry about without having to be concerned about Jim Ferguson.

Sometimes Davy worried whether he still believed in the Cause. Killing soldiers was all right, but too many civilians had died for Davy's liking. They didn't attack civilians back in the fifties. Davy still wondered why his commanders called that campaign off in 1962. That was when he'd quit the IRA, what was now called the Official IRA. And he'd kept out until 1970.

When the riots started in Belfast in 1969, the remnants of the old IRA had been useless. Made no attempt to protect the Catholic ghettoes from the Protestant mobs. The folks who lived on the Falls said IRA stood for “I Ran Away.” Davy hadn't even bothered to reenlist, not until a splinter group formed in 1970—a group that promised to go after the Brits, a group that called itself the Provisional IRA. They were the hardest of the hard men and they were not going to let anything stand in the way of their goal: Brits out and a united Ireland. And that was what Davy was after, had always been after.

Freedom, he thought, was a long time coming, and was union with the Republic any closer? He nodded, reassuring himself. Aye, it was, and he believed all right,
had
to believe, that Ireland would be free. He owed it to Da and he owed it to himself to struggle on, until one day—one day soon—the British would be gone.

Davy heard the knock, rose, and limped to the front door.

“Where the fuck have you been?” Davy spat his words.

“I'm sorry, Davy.” Jimmy Ferguson's thin weasel's head twitched sharply to one side.

“Come in.” Davy stumped back to the kitchen, leaving Jimmy to close the door and follow.

Davy sat, watching Ferguson shrug out of his wet raincoat and drape it over the back of a chair.

“Look, Davy”—Jimmy's chin twitched forward and to one side—“I'm sorry. The fucking Falls is crawling with Brits. I'd to take the long way round.”

Davy grunted. He hated the way his friend shot his jaw.

“Don't be mad, Davy.”

“Sit down.”

Jimmy sat. He reached into an inside pocket of his raincoat. “I got them. Here.” He handed over a wooden box.

“Jesus, Jimmy, don't tell me you let a few Brits scare you.”

Jimmy's jaw twitched again. “Come on, Davy. You know bloody well three of the First Battalion lads was lifted in that van two days ago.” He pushed the box closer to Davy. “I couldn't have brought these if the peelers got me.”

“You think someone touted?”

Jimmy kept his gaze on the tabletop.

“Jimmy, who the hell's going to grass on us? Only Second Battalion command knows about us.”

Davy could hear the scuffling of Jimmy's feet on the kitchen floor. He'd no time for Jimmy's worries. “Christ Almighty, the CO's closer than fleas on a dog. What did he promise us when we joined up?”

Jimmy shot his jaw.

“Jimmy, what did Sean Conlon say?”

“That he'd keep me and you out of the regular units. We'd just have to make bombs and deliver them to safe houses.”

“Right. Sure you know we never get to meet the other men in the battalion. Who the hell could grass on us, Jim?”

Jimmy looked up. “Nobody, I suppose.”

“You suppose? Jimmy, you and me's a cell. Like your man Che Guevara's lot.” Davy saw Jimmy's lower lip trembling. Davy leaned forward and, like a lover in a candlelit restaurant, laid one palm over the smaller man's hand. “We're safe as houses.” Davy's blue eyes held Jimmy's pale ones.

“I suppose you're right.”

“Aye. Now. What's in here?” Davy lifted the box and opened the lid. He smiled. “You done good.”

Jimmy laughed, a high-pitched hee-hee. “I had to go away the hell up to Ardoyne, so I had, and get them from one of First Battalion's lads.”

Davy took a thin copper cylinder from the box. “Number sixes?”

“Aye, and I've tested them on my galvanometer. They're all dead-on.”

“Great.” Davy pulled the TNT toward him. He slipped the cap into the cap well in the end of one of the blocks. “Just the job.” He removed the cap. “I'll need to wire the circuit.” He untwisted the lead wires that came from the end of the cap.

Jimmy watched. “It's a bugger about the three lads in the van.”

“Aye.” Davy joined one wire from the cap to one from the clothes peg. He used a Western Union pigtail splice.

“Still,” Jimmy babbled on, “the timer worked, and the paper said the blast got another army bomb-disposal man. That's two more of the buggers. Some Brit called Cowan got took out a few weeks back.”

Davy finished connecting three double-A batteries to the lead from the other side of the timer. “Good. Them's our proper targets, Jim. Soldiers and policemen.”

Jimmy narrowed his eyes. “Bothers you, doesn't it, Davy, hitting civilians?”

“Aye. I don't like it. Not one bit.” He busied himself covering the bare end of the cap's other lead wire with a piece of insulating tape. “That's her now. The Active Service boys can finish wiring the detonator.”

Jimmy said, “Four pounds'll make a hell of a bang. I wonder what it's for this time?”

“What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over. If it's not the Security Forces, I don't want to know.” Davy rose, closed the lid of the blasting-cap box. “I'll hang on to these,” he said, as he carried the box to a cupboard and opened the door. He removed a bag of cat food and buried the box among the pellets. “It'll be all right in McCusker's grub 'til I get back.”

“Do you want me to come with you?” Jimmy asked, eyes averted.

“Not at all. It's not too far to the drop.”

“Thanks, Davy.”

“Never worry,” Davy said as he reached for a small sack of spuds he wanted to use to camouflage the devices. “Away on home to the missus. I'll take a wander past the nice British soldier lads that's here to protect us poor Catholics.”

 

THREE

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 4

The “nice British soldier lads” Davy was avoiding were men of 39 Infantry Brigade, which had Belfast as its tactical area of responsibility. The troops were headquartered at Thiepval Barracks on the outskirts of Lisburn.

A small, dapper man, forty-four, clean-shaven, the whites of his eyes yellowed from too much quinacrine, sat in a cramped office in one of the Thiepval's old red-brick buildings. He was worried—very worried—and as he always did when preoccupied, he toyed with a heavy signet ring. He examined the crest, a winged dagger beneath which the motto read, “Who Dares Wins.” It was the badge of 22 Regiment of the Special Air Service. The SAS.

He'd fought with them in Malaya as an intelligence and counter-insurgency officer. He'd done a second tour in Indonesia, and there, despite the quinacrine, he had contracted malaria.

In 1967 he'd been invalided out of the army, the only life he had ever wanted. He spent the intervening years living with his widowed sister Emily in the village of Bourn, outside Cambridge. Now he had a second chance, but if he didn't produce soon that chance would be gone.