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  In the first-floor Cabinet Room the Commissioner stood to deliver his briefing. He spoke slowly, picking his words with care, and aware that the Ministers were shocked, suspicious and even hostile to what he had to say. There was little comfort for them. On top of what they had seen on the television lunchtime news they were told that a new and better description was being circulated . . . for the first time the policeman had the full attention of his audience.

  ‘There was a slight jostling incident at Oxford Circus this morning. A man barged his way through, nearly knocking people over, and noticeably didn’t stop to apologize. Not the sort of thing that you’d expect people to remember, but two women independently saw the television interview from Belgrave Square this morning, and phoned the Yard – put the two together. It’s the same sort of man they’re talking about as we’d already heard of, but a better description. We’ll have a photokit by four o’clock—’

  He was interrupted by the slight knock on the door, and the arrival of the Royal Ulster Constabulary Chief Constable, Frank Scott, and General Sir Jocelyn Fairbairn, GOC Northern Ireland. When they’d sat down, crowded in at the far end of the table, the Prime Minister began.

  ‘We all take it this is an IRA assassination. We don’t know for what motive, whether it is the first of several attempts or a one-off. I want the maximum effort to get the killer – and fast. I don’t want an investigation that runs a month, two months, six months. Every day that these thugs get away with it is a massive plus to them. How it was that Danby’s detective was withdrawn from him so soon after he’d left the Ulster job is a mystery to me. The Home Secretary will report to us tomorrow on that, and also on what else is being done to prevent a recurrence of such attacks.’

  He stopped. The room was silent, disliking the schoolroom lecture. The Commissioner wondered for a moment whether to explain that Danby himself had decided to do without the armed guard, ridiculing the detective-sergeant’s efforts to watch him. He thought better of it and decided to let the Prime Minister hear it from his Home Secretary.

  The Prime Minister gestured to the RUC man.

  ‘Well, sir . . . gentlemen,’ he started in the soft Scots burr of so many of the Ulstermen. He tugged at the jacket of his bottle-green uniform and moved his black-thorn cane fractionally across the table. ‘If he’s in Belfast we’ll get him. It may not be fast, but it’s a village there. We’ll hear, and we’ll get him. It would be very difficult for them to organize an operation of this scale and not involve so many people that we’ll grab one and he’ll bend. It’s a lot easier to make them talk these days. The hard men are locked up, the new generation talks. If he’s in Belfast we’ll get him.’

  It was past five and dark outside when the Ministers, and the General and the Prime Minister again, had had their say. The Prime Minister had called a full meeting of all present for the day after tomorrow, and reiterated his demand for action and speed, when a private secretary slipped into the room, whispered in the Commissioner’s ear, and ushered him out. Those next to him had heard the word ‘urgent’ used.

  When the Commissioner came back into the room two minutes later the Prime Minister saw his face and stopped in mid-sentence. The eyes of the eighteen politicians and the Ulster policeman and the General were on the Commissioner as he said:

  ‘We have had some rather bad news. Police officers at Heathrow have discovered a hired car in the terminal car park near No. 1 building. Under the driver’s seat was a Kalashnikov rifle. The car-park ticket would have given a passenger time to take flights to Vienna, Stockholm, Madrid, Rome and Amsterdam. The crew of the BEA flight to Amsterdam are already back at Heathrow, and we are sending a photokit down to the airport, it’s on its way, but one of the stewardesses thinks a man who fits our primary description, the rough one we had at first, was in the fifteenth row in a window seat. We are also in touch with Schipol police, and are wiring the picture, but from the BEA flight there was ample time to make a Dublin connection. The Aer Lingus, Amsterdam/Dublin flight landed in Dublin twenty-five minutes ago, and they are holding all passengers in the baggage reclaim hall.’

  There was a common gasp of relief round the Cabinet Room, as the Commissioner went on.

  ‘But the Dublin airport police report that those passengers without baggage went through immigration control before we notified them.’

  ‘Would he have had baggage?’ It was the Prime Minister, speaking very quietly.

  ‘I doubt it, sir, but we’re trying to establish that with the ticket desk and check-in counter.’

  ‘What a cock-up.’ The Prime Minister was virtually inaudible. ‘We’ll need some results, and soon.’

  From Heathrow, the Kalashnikov, swaddled in a cellophane wrapping, was rushed by squad car to Woolwich on the far side of the city, to the police test firing range. It was still white from the chalk-like fingerprint powder brushed on at the airport police station, but the airport’s resident fingerprint man declared it clean. ‘Doesn’t look like a gloves job,’ he said, ‘he must have wiped it – a cloth, or something. But it’s thorough; he’s missed nothing.’

  In the suburbs of Dublin, in the big open-plan news-room of RTE, the Republic of Ireland’s television service, the central phone in the bank used by the news editor rang at exactly six o’clock.

  ‘Listen carefully, I’m only going to say this once. This is a spokesman for the military wing of the Provisional IRA. An active service unit of the Provisional IRA today carried out a court-martial execution order on Henry DeLacey Danby, an enemy of the people of Ireland, and servant of the British occupation forces in Ireland. During the eighteen months Danby spent in Ireland one of his duties was responsibility for the concentration camp at Long Kesh. He was repeatedly warned that if the regime of the camp did not change, action would be taken against him. That’s it.’

  The phone clicked off, and the news editor began to read back his shorthand.

  Ten hours later the Saracens and Pigs, on dimmed headlights, were moving off from the Belfast police stations, heading out of the sandbagged tin- and chicken-wire fortresses of Andersonstown, Hasting Street, Flax Street, Glenravel Street and Mountpottinger. Sentries in steel helmets and shrapnel-proof jerkins, their automatic rifles strapped to their wrists, pulled aside the heavy wood and barbed-wire barricades at the entrances of the battalion and company headquarters and the convoys inched their way into the darkness. Inside the armoured cars the troops huddled together, their faces blackened with boot polish, their bodies laden with gas masks, emergency wound dressings, rubber-bullet guns, truncheons and the medieval Macron see-through shields. In addition they carried with them their high-velocity NATO rifles. Few of the men had slept more than a few hours, and that cat-napping in their uniforms, their only luxury that of being able to take off their boots. Their officers and senior NCOs, who had attended the operational briefings for the raids, had slept even less. There was no talk, no conversation, only the knowledge that the day would be long, tiring, cold and probably wet. There was nothing for the men to look at.

  Each car was battened down against possible sniper attacks; only the driver, the rifleman beside him and the rifleman at the back, with his barrel poked through the fine visibility slit, had any sight of the darkened, rainswept streets. No house lights were on, no shop windows were illuminated, and only occasionally was there a high street lamp, one that had survived the attempts of both sides over the last four years to destroy its brightness.

  Within a few minutes the convoys had swung off the main roads and were splitting up in the housing estates, all but one on the west side of the city. Two thousand troops, drawn from six battalions, were sealing off the streets that have the Falls Road as their spinal cord – the Catholic artery out of the west side of the city, and the route to Dublin. As the armoured cars pulled across the streets, paratroopers, marines and men from the old county infantry units flung open the reinforced doors and ran for the security of their fire positions. In the extreme west, on the Andersonstown and S
uffolk border, where the houses are newer and the sight therefore more incongruous, the troops were from a heavy artillery unit – men more used to manœuvring with the long-range Abbot gun than looking for cover in front gardens and behind dustbins. Away across the city from the Falls more troops were spreading into the Ardoyne, and across on the east side of the Lagan the Short Strand area was sealed.

  When their men were in position the officers waited for first light. Cars that tried to enter or leave the cordoned streets were sent back. In a gradual drizzle the troops lay and crouched in the cover that they had found, thumb on the safety catch. The selected marksmen cradled their rifles, made heavier by the attachment of the Starscope, the night vision aid.

  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 dustbin lids. Amid the cacophony came the beating of rifle butts on doors, and the thud of the axes and sledgehammers when there was no ready answer. Within minutes there were as many civilians on the streets as soldiers, bouncing their epithets and insults off the unmoving faces of the military. Protected by small 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 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 a 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 Special Branch, along with the paraphernalia of terrorism – batteries, lengths of flex, alarm clocks, and sacks of potent weed killer. All were itemized and shipped back to the police stations.

  With the light came the stones, and the semi-orderliness of the searches 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 of houses were the kids heaving their fractured paving stones at the military.

  Unaware of the searches, bus drivers down the Falls Road, stopping at the lights, found youths climbing onto their cabs, a variety of pistols threatening them, and handed over their double-deckers. By nine o’clock the Falls was blocked in four places, and local radio bulletins were warning motorists once again to stick to alternative routes.

  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 floor-boards. 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 their car jerked and flung his head hard against the window of the door. He shot forward.

  ‘Don’t worry’ – again the self-assured, almost 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 standby 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 the 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 the 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, and 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 tal
k about the Danby killing.

  In the small hours Howard Rennie settled onto 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 would 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 courses 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, and the only way for a counter-terrorist operation to be successful is for the Special Branch to be in there, infiltrating, extracting knowledge at ground level.’