The Hit List (18 page)

Returning to the bank, which overhung the river by a couple of metres, he pulled two or three yards of line off the reel. If he stuck the end of the rod over the bank, he guessed, the fish would spook. So keeping well back, he took the writhing bundle of hooked worms in his hand, and lobbed it a few feet upstream of where he had seen the fish.

For a second nothing happened, then there was a loudgloop, and the fly-line started snaking through the grass. Seizing the rod, Slater held hard. The split-cane bent double, and then line started zipping through his fingers. The fish was thirty yards upstream before he managed to turn it, and this was only the first of half a dozen such runs.

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Finally the trout lay beneath him, beaten, but here the bank was too high - five or six feet above the water -- to reach it with the net.

Only one thing for it - and Slater slid feet-first into 1 the river, feeling his Italian trousers rend as he went. , He went in up to his waist, and finding his feet, quietly netted the fish. It was a beautiful thing, perhaps three ( and a half pounds in weight, and Slater watched it for ; a few moments. Then walking into shallower water he preached for a large stone and struck it sharply on the "jhead. The trout shuddered briefly, and was dead.

Climbing from the river he laid the fish and his Ltackle among the buttercups. Water streamed from his Itrousers as one by one he emptied his Wellingtons. He twas wringing out his socks when a shadow fell across f turn. It was Eve. i|j, 'What a fantastic fish! I'm impressed!'

'Well, as you can see, in the end I had to go in after Settle it man to man.'

'I see.' She picked up the rod. What fly were you sing?'

'Well. . .' began Slater, 'I. . .' 'Improvised,' Eve nodded, peering at the hook to ifhich a segment or two of worm was still attached, id fell in, obviously.' , 'Will you tell him?' asked Slater. |i('What? That you fell in? I think that's going to be

ious!'

|,"*No, that I bent the rules a bit.' |';.'What rules? I didn't hear anyone lay down any rules.'

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'You know what I mean. The rules of sportsmanship. Gentlemanly conduct and all that.'

She smiled. 'Only the Colonel and his guests fish here.'

It wasn't until late that evening, when they had eaten the fish with butter and parsley and were ensconced in a corner of the Dunns Ford Inn with a pint glass in front of each of them, that professional matters were raised.

'Tell me,' Ridley said with deliberation, 'about Operation Greenfly. And your part in it.'

'How much do you know already?' asked Slater.

'As regards the planning side of it, quite a lot. As regards what happened on the ground, rather less.'

Slater nodded. 'Well, you'll remember that the operation was set up immediately after the murder of a part-time R.UC officer called Frayn, who was shot in a drive-by outside a betting shop. Special Branch decided that it was time that three of their top operators were taken out, and handed the job to the Regiment. The targets were Henry O'Day, who shot the officer and was stupid enough to boast about it, a bomber called Frankie Coyle, and a shooter, name unknown. The operations were coded Mayfly, Cranefly and Greenfly.

'I was put on the Greenfly team that was tasked to take out the shooter. He was known to have killed at least two squaddies - a lance-corporal from the Cheshires, and a young signals guy 'who was fixing a

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mast on one of the OPs on the border - and the word that the undercover guys in the FRU were getting from their touts was that he was going to hit a checkpoint near Forkhill.

'Now I don't know who the FRU had on the inside -- as you know the Regiment are basically just called in to do the chopping - but the data was very good. The weapon had been cached on a border farm about five miles from the checkpoint, and the shooter was due to collect it some time after ten o'clock. It was December, a night with no moon, so it would be black as the ace of spades by that time. The hit on the checkpoint would probably take place within half an hour of the collection - Greenfly wouldn't want the weapon on him for a second longer than necessary; he'd want it fired, cleaned and back in the ground.

'We were desperate for Greenfly to be a success. t These shooters go off to Texas or Louisiana to do a sniper's course and when they come back the word gets around. No one says anything, but everyone knows who they are, and they become like these |' legendary figures in the community. It was a [ propaganda thing as much as anything else. We wanted fito whack him and score the Regiment a hatful of ^points with the powers that be. I'll not lie to you - we pvanted a killing and we wanted it bloody.

'Well, everything seemed to bear out the accuracy tef the intelligence. PIRA dickers with CB radios had een seen sniffing round the Forkhill checkpoint on ic day in question, doing a last-minute target-area

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recon -- there was one called Deathly Mary who always used to do a walk-by on foot; everyone knew her and we were certain that the shooting would be going down as planned. Scan Delaney, the owner of the farm where the shooter's weapon was cached, was known to be an IRA sympathiser, if not an actual player. His wife had left him twelve months earlier and moved to Deny, and he was living with his brother Joey, a mentally retarded boy who helped him about the farm, and his unmarried sister Bridget. Like the dickers, we had done our own close-target recce. We knew where all the exits were and we knew to within a few yards where the cache was.

'The team went in at last light. We were dropped off from an unmarked vehicle a mile away and tabbed across country to the farm. In the surrounding lanes, mobile units moved into position. A helicopter waited on stand-by ten miles out at one of the camps, turning and burning. It was a very cold, very dark night. . .'

Slater had reached his firing position, a small rise beneath a stand of firs, within twenty minutes of the drop-off. Carefully, aware that the area might easily be under night-sight observation, he had manoeuvred into place, concealing himself beneath the spreading branches and covering his body with cam-netting and foliage. Soon he was satisfied that, to all intents and purposes, he was invisible. He was in a comfortable firing position, or as comfortable as he could expect to be given the situation, and his weapon - a Heckler and

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Koch 53 sniper's rifle loaded with ten 7.62 armour piercing rounds - was readied for action on its bipod. The HK's night sight had been zeroed for 120 yards, and the sight's miniature generator was emitting its faint characteristic whistle. It was a very cold night -- by 7pm the ground was already stiffening with frost -- but the adrenaline racing around Slater's system anaesthetised ; him to the cold, to the icy flint of the ground, to , everything except his own intense concentration.

Through the night sight all that he saw was an ^undersea green. The farmhouse, a low, discoloured ^building with a slate roof, was about 120 metres in I'lront of him. Amplified green light bled through the leurtains; their edges blazed with it, as did the gap Ibeneath the back door, which gave on to a flight of steps and a stone-flagged farmyard. As Slater watched, ||k fox slunk into the yard, nosed cautiously at the Hustbins, climbed the frozen dung-heap to the wall and llooked around him.

A hunter, thought Slater. A killer like myself. Good ack to you, brother. May you be spared the shotgun id the flick of the boot on to that same dung-heap. Through a throat-mike and earpiece, Slater was in ammunication with the three other members of the sniper team, now silently readying themselves, with the outlying mobile units. As team leader he ad the position covering the most probable killing Mind; the other snipers were invisibly disposed Dund the farm as back-up. Like him they were taut ed with adrenaline. Like him they felt no cold, saw

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the night as green day. There will be a death tonight, thought Slater, and I have never felt more fully alive.

On the wall the fox stiffened, leapt to the ground and raced for cover. Soon Slater could hear the car too. And see it. A muddy Toyota hatchback, showing sidelights only, swinging carefully up the track.

'Vehicle approaching,' murmured Slater into his throat-mike.

It disappeared for a moment behind a rough coppice and was suddenly there in the farmyard, its sidelights two blinding swirls in the ghost-green landscape. In the yard, the car came to a greasy, shuddering stop. The driver stayed at the wheel, and a second figure wearing a heavy trenchcoat -- looked like military surplus, thought Slater - ducked from the Toyota.

'Target exiting vehicle.'

It was the shooter.

He would identify himself to the occupants of the farmhouse, collect the weapon from the cache, and change into 'sterile' overalls, headgear, footwear and gloves. IRA shooters, Slater knew, favoured yellow Marigold gloves as the least likely to leave any trace of forensic. Afterwards these would be burnt at the farmhouse.

The greatcoated figure hurried to the door. As he got there he pulled a mobile telephone from his pocket, thumbed it briefly, and seemed to mouth a single word. The door opened -- a blare of green-white light, swiftly extinguished - and he was inside. Get ready to die, motherfucker, thought Slater, his heart

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thumping hard at his ribs. Get ready to die. 'Target entering house. Back door.' For ten minutes nothing happened. The driver lit a cigarette, smoked it, nipped the smoking butt from the car, waited. Then the door of the house opened, and the greatcoated figure exited, his breath smoking, his ; shoulders hunched against the cold. OK, thought \ Slater grimly. OK. 'Target in view.'

Through the night sight he saw the shooter cross the | yard. He was carrying a gardening fork, and with this |he carefully cleared an area of dung and straw at the 5ase of the heap. Then, crouching, he lifted one of the fieavy flagstones. 'Target retrieving weapon.'

I'll take him when he straightens, Slater told himself, soon as I can see that he is holding the weapon. Jently exhaling, he placed the inverted black V of the jght above the shoulders of the crouching man. Took |p the play in the trigger. Inhaled.

The target rose, weapon in hand. Rose in profile ito the clear line of Slater's zeroed sights, the inverted meeting the perpendicular crossbar just forward of je target's ear.

Exhale to stillness. Squeeze. Muzzle-flash. The lower half of the pale green face vaporised into ack spray. The report splitting the night, punching fee compound plastic stock of the HK against Slater's julder and cheek, dropping the target like rubbish to dung-heap.

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'Contact. Target down.'

Slater, dragging his ski-mask over his eyes with his free hand, all but gagging with the release of tension, was already half-way to the fallen man. Reaching him he whipped the HK to his shoulder to deliver the killing shot but at the last moment held his fire. The target was alive, although he no longer had a jaw, or a mouth, or indeed a lower half to his face. He still had his eyes, however, and the eyes were the terrified, incomprehending eyes of a child. They held Slater's for a moment, and it seemed as if- in a last desperate plea - they were trying to smile.

From 150 yards away, as Slater froze in horror, the sniper team's number two delivered the double tap. It was a flawless display of shooting, the twin reports sounding as one, and the fallen man - now almost headless -- jerked spasmodically as his nervous system arrested. At his side lay a Match Ml 6 rifle with a telescopic sight.

His hands slippery with brain-spray, Slater swung the HK towards the car, where the driver was sitting with his hands raised in terrified surrender, and the back door of the house.

The yard flooded with the noise of running soldiers as the rest of the team closed in. Over the radio Slater heard rapid-fire instructions as an outer cordon was set up.

A long stain of blood on the ground around the fallen figure, and beyond him a sprayed and scattered mess of tissue, bone-fragments and teeth.

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And then a man in a muddy windcheater running from the house, and a wild-eyed woman in a leather jacket screaming behind him: ' You shot my little brother, you cunt! You SAS pigfucker! He was just a . . .'

And the pair of them seized - the man speechless with shock, the woman still dementedly screaming and plasticuffed.

And the words and the events finally making some sort of sense, and the icy cold kicking in, and Slater .knowing for certain that he had shot the wrong man. . .

(l

I'Joey Delaney was twenty-four years old,' said Slater, Flowering his glass, 'but his mental age was nine. The phooter had sent him out to retrieve the weapon and deliberately lent him the coat. Sent him out as a decoy case there was an SAS hit team waiting out there. Us brother Scan, who wasn't all that switched on, lidn't realise what was going down -- he just wanted to a good volunteer, doing his bit - and he let the lad out for the weapon.'

There was a long silence. Eve glanced at Slater but ; face was blank.

| 'So what happened next?' asked Ridley. |'We plasticufFed Scan and Bridget Delaney and hit farmhouse. And there was your man, cucumber |ol, in the kitchen, unzipping his overalls. He was a guy, perhaps thirty, with receding hair, anguished looking, you might say. Certainly not run-of-the-mill PIRA triggerman.'

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'And you arrested him?' asked Eve.

'We held him. I was for doing him there and then I got as far as thumbing down the safety catch - and I know the lads would have backed me up if I'd said he'd reached for a weapon. But it would have got very complicated very quickly. I could hear the chopper landing outside -- the police were on their way. And in truth no one would believe that he would have been carrying at that moment anyway. He wouldn't have been so stupid.'

'You knew that you were going to have to let him walk away?' asked Eve.

'I knew it, and he knew it. But the truth is that there was something else going on between me and this guy. Something personal. He knew what he'd made me do by sending that boy out in his place, and he knew just from looking at me in that kitchen that it was going to do me real damage. And that pleased him. I could see it in his eyes. "Shooting me won't bring him back," he said when I brought the HK up to my shoulder. "Shooting me would only make the whole thing worse. Don't you think?"