The Armada Legacy (11 page)
Authors: Scott Mariani
‘Not exactly.’
‘What is wrong?’ she asked, hearing the tone of his voice.
‘I need to talk to Boonzie, Mirella. Is he there?’
‘I will call him,’ she said anxiously. A muffled clattering on the line as Mirella laid down the phone and went off to fetch her husband. Ben could hear her voice in the background shouting ‘Archibald!’. Boonzie would never have tolerated anyone but his beloved wife calling him by his real name. After a few moments, his gruff Scots voice came on the line.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve been following the British news,’ Ben said.
‘What’s going on?’ Ben could see the grizzled, granite-faced Scot standing there, his eyes narrowing in concern.
‘I have a problem, Boonzie.’
Boonzie McCulloch had been a long-serving 22 SAS sergeant, and a mentor and friend of Ben’s for many years, before he’d astounded everyone by quitting the army to settle in the south of Italy and set up a smallholding with a vivacious black-haired Neapolitan beauty he’d fallen head over heels in love with while on a few days’ leave. The flinty, battle-hardened fifty-nine-year-old had found his own private heaven at last, contentedly working his sun-kissed couple of hectares to produce the basil and tomato crop that Mirella turned into gourmet bottled sauces the local restaurant trade couldn’t do without.
But the soft life hadn’t got to Boonzie completely. He still had a few aces up his sleeve, like the small arsenal of military weaponry that had got Ben out of a sticky moment in Rome the year before. And because the SAS had always been so much more deeply embroiled in matters of political secrecy and delicacy than other British army regiments, he still carried around with him a headful of the kind of privileged information that the likes of Detective Inspector Hanratty wouldn’t have had access to in a thousand years.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Boonzie muttered when Ben had finished quickly filling him in. ‘Need help?’ He’d always been the practical type. Ben knew it would take only one word for him to lay down everything and be on the first flight to Ireland.
‘I just need to know I’m on the right track. Forsyte. Roger Forsyte. It was before my time, but it’s ringing bells.’
‘Aye, me too, laddie. Big fuckin’ bells. In some ears they havnae stopped ringing since Belfast, 1979.’
Ben nodded, but it wasn’t much of a relief to have it confirmed that his hunch had been correct. ‘The Liam Doyle incident.’
‘Think it was maybe my second stint in that godforsaken hole,’ Boonzie said, ‘maybe my third, when they found Doyle’s body. This shit was happening all the time, but they’d normally just blow your brains oot, not chop both your arms off that way. Nasty.’
‘About six inches above the wrist?’
‘With a cleaver,’ Boonzie said. ‘While he was still alive.’
‘Just like Forsyte.’
‘Then they put a nine-milly between his eyes and dumped the body out in the sticks in County Antrim. It was never confirmed that Doyle was IRA. Neither were the rest of the rumours, like who’d done it. A lot of folks were certain it wisnae the handiwork of the UVF or any of the other Loyalist bunch, though Lord knows some o’ those fuckers were even worse than the Republican boys. Let’s just say that in certain circles, it wisnae any secret who wiz behind it.’
‘And Forsyte?’
‘Roger Forsyte,’ Boonzie said. ‘Hold on a sec. I’m looking him up on the internet.’ Ben could hear a tapping of keys. ‘Here he is. Oh, aye. Marine Exploration?’ Boonzie gave a dark chuckle. ‘So that’s what former MI5 agents end up doing, digging up sunken treasure? There’s a lot of digging up to be done in Northern Ireland too. A lot of dead bodies were put in the ground in those years, and yer man’d know where to find half of them.’
‘You’re sure? Forsyte was MI5?’
‘You can bet your arse on it, Ben. I’ve seen that face before. These bastards were all over the place. And I heard the name Forsyte mentioned more than a couple of times.’
‘I need facts, Boonzie. Not surmises.’
‘Trust me. He was mixed up deep in this shite.’
Although it had taken place a decade or so before Ben had joined the army and while he was still a boy, he’d heard enough about that unsavoury chapter in Ulster’s history to know of the scandal that had erupted over the Liam Doyle incident. It was later to be overshadowed by the events of Operation Flavius during the Thatcher era, when three unarmed suspected Provisional IRA members had been shot dead in Gibraltar by the SAS amid strong concerns about government cover-ups and misinformation – but at the time the cruel, unusual nature of Liam Doyle’s murder and the mass of rumours surrounding it had sparked off a great deal of heat. Many Catholic Republicans had been convinced that the brutal killing had been sanctioned by British Intelligence.
Ben knew all about the ugly, complex backdrop to the incident, too. In those days, Northern Ireland had been the tense staging ground for a hidden war between Britain and America, both of which were illicitly supplying weapons and intelligence to their respective sides of the conflict. On the one hand, interests sympathetic to the Republican cause within the CIA were allegedly arming the Provos with weaponry and information to help them kill their Loyalist enemies. As part of the deal, the FBI had turned a blind eye when IRA members visited America to liaise with their secret allies there. Meanwhile, the British government and MI5 had been doing exactly the same thing to help the opposite side, by providing guns, explosives and intelligence to members of both the Ulster Defence Force and Ulster Volunteer Force against the IRA, with the tacit compliance of Northern Ireland’s police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Both sides had been guilty of all manner of atrocities, but few had been so shocking as the mutilation done to Liam Doyle.
‘Here’s what I heard, strictly off the record,’ Boonzie said. ‘One of Forsyte’s MI5 subordinates was making an undercover weapons drop-off to a UVF cell when he was nabbed by a bunch of IRA led by Liam Doyle. Never confirmed, mind. The agent’s body was dumped the same day from a moving car outside the RUC station in Dungiven. It was soon afterwards that Liam Doyle was kidnapped from his home in the middle of the night and ended up dead in a ditch with his arms hacked off. Word had it that some MI5 chappies got their arses toasted over it, but there was never any official inquiry. Just a lot of extremely pissed-off people who wanted Forsyte dead. One in particular. Liam Doyle’s brother, Fergus, swore that he’d get his revenge, no matter if it took him the rest of his life to catch up with the bastards that’d done it.’
‘Fergus Doyle.’ Ben had heard that name.
‘Bad rep,’ Boonzie said. ‘Made the Shankill Butchers look like a bunch of choirboys. He’d be an auld man now, Ben, but if he’s still alive he’s an evil bastard. This isnae something you can deal with alone. Talk to the cops, for Christ’s sake.’
‘No chance. Thanks, Boonzie. Take care.’ And before his old friend could say any more, Ben ended the call.
It wasn’t quite true to say that Ben Hope loved Ireland, at least not all of it. And Belfast was somewhere he’d chosen to avoid for a long, long while.
His first ever experience of the place had been during his early twenties, just months after finishing basic training, in his first tour of duty with the British armed forces. Join up and see the world, the recruitment campaign had said, promising everything but the hula-hula girls of the Shankill Road. The last time he’d seen it, some years later, had been as an SAS officer and a very different person from the inexperienced youth sent out with a rifle to patrol those terrifying streets.
With the SAS Ben had witnessed the tail end of the Troubles, an era that had claimed over three thousand Irish lives over four decades, as well as a good number of the British soldiers whose job it had been to try to keep the whole volatile mess under control.
Whether they should have been there at all was a question that Ben had privately asked himself many times over – but when the bullets began to zip about your ears you didn’t dwell too long on ethical or political debate, and the air had been thick with them back then. Shortly after Ben had first landed at RAF Aldergrove with his new SAS unit, a British Army Gazelle helicopter had been shot down in flames by an IRA rocket just over the border, killing the pilot and maiming three soldiers. Not long afterwards, two SAS troopers from Ben’s company had been cut down in a gun battle with the IRA outside the village of Cappagh, County Tyrone. Then just days later, the army had caught up with the gunmen after a daring but ultimately foolish attack on an RUC station with a stolen heavy machine gun mounted on a lorry. The IRA men had been switching to their getaway vehicle in a Catholic church car park when the SAS unit in pursuit had engaged with them: a bloody little firefight that had left six corpses on the ground and given Ben his first serious bullet wound.
And on it had gone. Right up until the official 1997 ceasefire, the city of Belfast and the surrounding areas had been caught up in a relentlessly violent storm of reprisals, counter-reprisals, bombings and beatings, ambushes and assassinations.
All things considered, it wasn’t a part of the world Ben had ever wanted to return to. Yet here he was, speeding towards the city, foot on the floor and overtaking everything in sight with his windscreen wipers working flat out to beat aside the rain. He covered the seventy-mile journey from Derry in just under an hour, stopping only for fuel and to stoke himself up with a coffee and a wolfed-down sandwich at a motorway services.
As he made his way into the rain-slicked streets of Belfast, the marks of a community forever divided by hatred were painfully visible, even after years of official peace. Ben drove along a road that skirted one of the city’s ‘peace lines’, tall reinforced mesh fences and gates erected to segregate the clashing sectarian groups wherever their territories met.
It was Ireland’s own version of Apartheid, its own Berlin Wall. Union Jacks hung limply from lampposts and poles in the Protestant Loyalist districts; the Irish green, white and gold tricolour in the Catholic Republican areas. Still that same old atmosphere of cold, brooding fear. All that was missing were the military Land Rovers, the Saracen armoured personnel carriers and the checkpoints that had once been a common feature throughout the city and the surrounding area.
Ben knew the majority of the people were trying to put the past behind them. But some things never really changed, deep down. Some things never really could.
By lunchtime he was parked opposite a pub called The Spinning Jenny in the staunchly Catholic west of the city. He had a reason for being there. In its day, the place had been a watering-hole for some of Belfast’s more notorious IRA hardmen. From the look of the place, Ben reckoned it probably hadn’t changed a hell of a lot since then either.
Sitting at the wheel, he took out his phone and dialled Amal’s number. When there was no reply, he left a brief message to say he had a possible lead and would be in touch again soon. Amal didn’t need to know that the lead concerned a stone-cold IRA killer recently sated with the blood of his long-time enemy and most likely capable of just about anything.
After he’d left his message Ben spent a few minutes trawling online for any further information on Fergus Doyle that he hadn’t already researched. From what he could put together, it seemed that the man had reached the peak of his ultra-violent career in 1983, five years after the death of his brother. Boonzie had been right: the atrocities committed by the Shankill Butchers, the gang of Loyalist thugs responsible for the wholesale murder and torture of innocent Catholics throughout the better part of the seventies and early eighties, were by no means any worse than the catalogue of carnage and cruelty attributed to Doyle and his followers.
But where the Shankill Butchers had been slow-witted enough to let themselves be hunted down and caught one by one, either shot or imprisoned, Doyle had somehow managed to evade capture all these years. From the turn of the nineties there seemed to be nothing more on him. Even in terrorist circles, everyone had their fifteen minutes of fame before obscurity beckoned.
Ben studied every image he could find of the man until he was confident that he’d recognise that ugly, mean, lopsided face at a glance, even lined and wrinkled with age as it must be today. Fergus Doyle had an evil look in his eye. Ben had seen enough of the dark side of the world to know what some evil men did to women unlucky enough to fall into their hands. Trophies kept for personal amusement, battered and raped until they were finally discarded dead in a ditch; drugged-up into hopeless junkies who would prostitute themselves to anyone for another fix; sold into the international trade in human trafficking.
Fergus Doyle. Ben didn’t give a damn how old and wrinkled that face was now. He’d still happily put three bullets through it if he couldn’t have Brooke back.
And maybe even if he could.
He put his phone away, clenched his jaw hard and took three deep breaths. Then he flung open the driver’s door, got out of the BMW and crossed the road to The Spinning Jenny.
The pub was dark and drab inside, and almost empty apart from a few drinkers hunched over pints of Guinness around a table at the back. Dirty light filtered in through the windows. The place smelled of stale beer. Stale tobacco smoke too, and there were flecks of cigarette ash on the floorboards – evidently nobody had been too bothered to clean up after last night’s after-hours lock-in, when small matters like abiding by the non-smoking regulations became even less important. That was fine by Ben. He sat at the bar and mechanically lit a Gauloise.
The barman, a burly guy of about thirty, paused in the middle of polishing a pint glass, and fixed him with a belligerent eye. ‘Can’t smoke in here, friend.’
‘Right,’ Ben said, and took another drag. ‘How about a whiskey? Double.’
‘Ice?’
‘As it comes.’
When the barman slapped the glass on the scarred surface, Ben grabbed it and swallowed the liquor down in one stinging gulp. The alcohol hit his system fast, making him realise how little he’d eaten in the last couple of days. He ordered another, and a bag of crisps to go with it.
