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  Then, as suddenly as the soldiers had come they were out, barging their way past the tables, running into the street, and back to their regular routine of patrolling. There was noise again in the bar. The publican pushed the washing-up cloth, now filthy with coal smuts, across the wooden bar to the minder. The man felt good. He’d come through the first big test.

  At the big house in Surrey the team round Harry had worked him hard the first day. They’d started by discussing what cover he would want, and rejected the alternatives in favour of a merchant seaman home after five years, but with his parents dead some years back.

  ‘It’s too small a place for us to give you a completely safe identity you could rely on. It would mean we’d have to bring other people in who would swear by you. It gets too big that way. We start taking a risk, unnecessarily.’

  Davidson was adamant that the only identity Harry would have would be the one he carried round on his back. If anyone started looking into his story really deeply then there was no way in which he could survive, strong background story or not.

  Harry himself supplied most of what they needed. He’d been born a Catholic in one of the little terraces off Obin Street in Portadown. The houses had been pulled down some years ago, and replaced by anonymous blocks of flats and small houses, now daubed with the slogans of revolution. With the destruction of the old buildings inevitably the people had become dispersed.

  Portadown, the Orangeman’s town with the ghetto round the long sloping passage of Obin Street, still had its vivid teenage memories for Harry. He’d spent his childhood there from the age of five, after his parents had been killed in a car crash. They’d been driving back to Portadown when a local businessman late home on his way back from Armagh had cut across them and sent his father into a ditch and telegraph pole. Harry had stayed with an aunt for twelve years in the Catholic street before joining the army. But his childhood in the town gave him adequate knowledge – enough, Davidson decided, for his cover.

  For four hours after lunch they quizzed him on his knowledge of the intricacies of Irish affairs, sharpened him on the names of the new political figures. The major terrorist acts since the summer of 1969 were neatly catalogued on three closely-typed sheets. They briefed him particularly on the grievances of the minority.

  ‘You’ll want to know what they’re beefing about. You know this, they’re walking encyclopaedias on every shot we fired at them. There’s going to be a lot more, but this is the refresher.’

  Davidson was warming to it now, enjoying these initial stages of the preparation, the thoroughness of which would be the deciding factor whether their agent survived. Davidson had been through this before. Never with Ulster as the target, but in Aden before Harry’s duty there, and Cyprus, and once when a Czech refugee was sent into his former homeland. That last time they heard nothing, till the man’s execution was reported by the Czech news agency half an hour after a stony protest note was delivered to the British Ambassador in Prague. Post-war Albania had involved him too. Now it was a new operation, breeding the same compulsion as the first cigarette of the day to an inveterate smoker.

  Harry had come up to the table. The papers were spread out in front of him, fingers reaching and pointing at the different essentials for him to take in.

  Later he was to take many of them to his room, ask for some sandwiches and coffee and, sprawled in front of the gas fire, read them into the small hours till they were second nature. On his own for the first time in the day he too was able to assess the importance of the preparation he was undergoing, and alone in the room he allowed himself to think of the hazards of the operation in which he was now involved.

  It was past two in the morning when he undressed and climbed into bed, the papers still strewn on the rug in front of the fire.

  Chapter 4

  Over the next fortnight the street scene in Belfast returned to its pre-Danby level of violence. It was widely recognized that in the wake of the killing the level of army activity had risen sharply, initially in the use of major cordon and search operations, merging into an increase in the number of spot raids on the homes of known republicans on the run. The army activity meant more men were charged with offences, but alongside their appearances in court was an upsurge in street rioting, something that had previously been almost eradicated. The army’s posture was sharply criticized by the minority politicians, who accused the troops of venting on innocent Catholic householders their frustrations at not being able to find Danby’s murderer.

  The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland agreed to appear on the local Independent TV station and the regional BBC news programme to answer the allegations of Protestant papers that not enough was being done – that a British Cabinet Minister had been shot down in cold blood in front of his wife and children yet his killers were allowed to go free for fear of offending Catholic opinion.

  Before appearing on television the Secretary of State called a meeting of his security chiefs, and heard both Frank Scott and General Fairbairn urge caution and patience. The General in particular was concerned lest a show of strength spread over several weeks undo the gradual return to something like normality. The three men were soon to leave for their various destinations – the politician for the studio, the General for Lisburn and the Chief Constable for his modern police headquarters – but first they walked on the lawn outside the Stormont residence of the Secretary of State. Away from the listening ears of secretaries, aides and bodyguards the General reported that his intelligence section had heard nothing of the killer in Belfast and there was some concern about whether the man they sought was even in the city. The Chief Constable added to the politician’s cross in reporting that his men too had been unable to uncover any hard information on the man. But the head of his Special Branch favoured the belief that the killer was in the city, and probably back in circulation. The Chief Superintendent in charge of picked detectives had a fair insight into the workings of his enemies’ minds, and had correctly read the desire of the Provisional IRA Army Council to get their man back into the mainstream.

  For three minutes they talked in the centre of the lawn. The conversation ended when the Secretary of State quietly, and more than a little hesitantly, asked the General:

  ‘Jocelyn, no news I suppose on what the PM was talking about?’

  ‘None, nor will there be.’

  The General made his way back to his car, turned and shouted a brusque farewell.

  As the military convoy pulled away, the politician turned to the policeman. ‘We have to have this bastard soon. The political scene won’t hold up long otherwise. And there’s a lot of restiveness among the Loyalists. We need him quick, Frank, if the sectarianism isn’t to start up again. There’s not much time . . .’

  He walked quickly now to his big maroon Rover with its reinforced sides and extra thick windows, with machine-guns, field dressings and gas masks alongside his official cases in the boot. He nodded to his driver, and then winced as the detective sitting in front of him loaded the clip of bullets into the butt of the 9mm Browning.

  The car swung out into the open road for the drive into the city, with his escort close behind to prevent any other car slipping between them. ‘What a bloody carry-on,’ the politician observed as they swept through the traffic towards the television studios.

  The interview of the Secretary of State was embargoed until 18.01 hours; its full text was issued by the Northern Ireland press office to Belfast newspapers. In essence the BBC and ITV transmissions were the same, and the public relations men put out only the BBC interview.

  Q. Secretary of State, can you report any progress in the hunt for Mr Danby’s killer?

  A. Well, I want to emphasize that the security forces are working flat out on this one. I myself have had a meeting just before this broadcast with the army commander and chief constable, and I am perfectly satisfied with the investigation and follow-up operations they are mounting. I’m confident we’ll round up this gang of thugs quickly
.

  Q. But have you any leads yet to who the killers are?

  A. I think we know who the killers are, they’re the Provisional IRA, but I’m sure you wouldn’t expect me to talk on television about the details of a police investigation.

  Q. It’s been pretty quiet for some time in Belfast, and we were led to believe that most of the IRA commanders were imprisoned . . . Isn’t it justifiable to expect rather quicker action, even results at this stage?

  A. If you mean to imply we have claimed the IRA weren’t capable of mounting this sort of operation I don’t think we have ever made that sort of assumption. We think this is the work of a small group, a very small group. We’ll get them soon . . . there’s nothing to panic about – (It was a bad word, panic, he saw it as soon as he said it. The interviewer nudged him forward.)

  Q. I haven’t heard the word ‘panic’ used before. Are you implying the public have overreacted towards the killing of a Cabinet Minister in broad daylight in front of his children?

  A. Of course, this was a dreadful crime. This was a colleague of mine. Of course, people should feel strongly; what I’m saying is that this is a last fling of the IRA—

  Q. A pretty successful last fling.

  A. Mr Danby was unarmed—

  Q. In Loyalist areas of the city the government are accused of not going in hard to find the killer because the results could antagonize Catholic opinion.

  A. That’s untrue, quite untrue. When we have identified the man we intend to get him. There’ll be no holding off.

  Q. Secretary of State, thank you very much.

  A. Thank you.

  Most of the young Protestants who gathered in the side streets off the Albert Bridge Road, pelting the armoured vehicles as they went by, hadn’t seen the interview. But word had quickly spread through the Loyalist heartlands in the east and west of the city that the British had in some way glossed over the killing, not shown the determination to rout out those Provie rats who could murder a man in front of his bairns. The battalion on duty in Mountpottinger police station was put on fifteen minute readiness, and those making their way to the prosperous suburbs far out to the east of Belfast took long diversions, lest their cars became part of the sprouting barricades that the army crash-charged with their Saracens. Three soldiers were hurt by flying debris and the Minister’s broadcast was put down as the kindling point to the brushfire that was to smoulder for more than a week in the Protestant community.

  Meanwhile Harry was being prepared for the awesome moment when he would leave the woods of Surrey and fly to Belfast, on his own, leaving the back-up team that now worked with him as assiduously as any heavyweight champion’s.

  Early on Davidson had brought him a cassette recorder, complete with four ninety-minute tapes of Belfast accents. They’d been gathered by students from Queen’s University who believed they were taking part in a national phonetics study, and had taken their microphones into pubs, launderettes, working men’s clubs and supermarkets. Wherever there were groups gathered and talking in the harsh, cutting accent of Belfast, so different to the slower more gentle Southern speech, tapes had attempted to pick up the voices and record them. The tapes had been passed to the army press officer via a lecturer at the University, whose brother was on duty on the Brigade commander’s staff, and then, addressed to a fictitious major, flown to the Ministry of Defence. The sergeant on Davidson’s staff travelled to London to collect them from the dead-letter box in the postal section of the Ministry.

  Night after night Harry listened to the tapes, mouthing over the phrases and trying to lock his speech into the accents he heard. After sixteen years in the army little of it seemed real. He learned again of the abbreviations, the slang, the swearing. He heard the way that years of conflict and alertness had stunted normal conversation; talk was kept to a minimum as people hurried away from shops once their business was done, and barely waited around for a quiet gossip. In the pubs he noticed that men lectured each other, seldom listening to replies, or interested in opinions different to their own. His accent would be critical to him, the sort of thing that could awake the first inkling of suspicion that might lead to the further check he knew his cover could not sustain.

  His walls, almost bare when he arrived at the big house, were soon covered by aerial photographs of Belfast. For perhaps an hour a day he was left to memorize the photographs, learn the street patterns of the geometric divisions of the artisan cottages that had been allowed to sprawl out from the centre of the city. The developers of the nineteenth century had flung together the narrow streets and their back-to-back terraces along the main roads out of the city. Most relevant to Harry were those on either side of the city’s two great ribbons of the Falls and Shankill. Pictures of astonishing clarity taken from RAF cameras showed the continuous peace line, or the ‘interface’, as the army called it, the sheets of silvery corrugated iron that separated Protestant from Catholic in the no man’s land between the roads.

  The photographs gave an idea of total calm, and left no impression of the hatred, terror and bestiality that existed on the ground. The open spaces of bombed devastation in any other British city would have been marked down as clearance areas for urban improvement.

  From the distance of Germany – where theorists worked out war games in terms of divisions, tank skirmishes, limited nuclear warheads, and the possibility of chemical agents being thrown into a critical battle – it had become difficult for Harry to realize why the twenty or so thousand British soldiers deployed in the province were not able to wind up the Provisional campaign in a matter of months. When he took in the rabbit warren revealed by the reconnaissance photographs he began to comprehend the complexity of the problem. Displayed on his walls was the perfect guerrilla fighting base. A maze of escape routes, ambush positions, back entries, cul-de-sacs and, at strategic crossroads, great towering blocks of flats commanding the approaches to terrorist strongholds.

  It was the adventure playground par excellence for the urban terrorist, Davidson would say, as he fired questions at Harry till he could wheel out at will all the street names they wanted from him, so many commemorating the former greatness of British arms – Balkan, Raglan, Alma, Balaclava – their locations, and the quickest way to get there. By the second week the knowledge was there and the consolidation towards perfection was under way. Davidson and his colleagues felt now that the filing system had worked well, that this man, given the impossible brief he was working under, would do as well as any.

  Also in the bedroom, and facing him as he lay in bed, was the ‘tribal map’ of the city. That was the army phrase, and another beloved by Davidson. It took up sixteen square feet of space, with Catholic streets marked in a gentle grass-green, the fierce loyalist strongholds in the hard orange that symbolized their heritage, and the rest in a mustard compromise. Forget that lot, Davidson had said. That had meant something in the early days when the maps were drawn up.

  ‘Nowadays you’re in one camp or the other. There are no uncommitted. Mixed areas are three years out of date. In some it’s the Prods who’ve run, in others the other crowd.’

  It had been so simple in Sheik Othman, when Harry had lived amongst the Adeni Arabs. The business of survival had occupied him so fully that the sophistications they were teaching him now were unnecessary. And there he had been so far from the help of British troops that he had become totally self-reliant. In Belfast he knew he must guard against the feeling that salvation was always a street corner away. He must reject that and burrow his way into the community if he was to achieve anything.

  Outside the privacy of his room Harry seldom escaped the enthusiasm of Davidson, who personally supervised every aspect of his preparation. He followed Harry in the second week beyond the vegetable garden to the old and battered greenhouse, yards long and with its glass roofing missing, and what was left coated in the deep moss-green compost that fell from the trees. There were no nurtured tomatoes growing here, no cosseted strawberry cuttings, only a pile of sa
ndbags at the opposite end to the door with a circular coloured target, virgin new, propped against them. Here they retaught Harry the art of pistol shooting.

  ‘You’ll have to have a gun over there – and not to wave about, Harry,’ Davidson laughed. ‘Just to have. You’d be the only physically fit male specimen in the province without one if you didn’t have a firearm of some sort. It’s a must, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I didn’t have one in Aden. Ridiculous, I suppose, but no-one suggested it.’

  He took the gun from the instructor, grey-haired, hard-faced, lined from weather, wearing a blue, all-enveloping boiler suit and unmarked beret. He went through the precautionary drills, breaking the gun, flicking the revolving chamber that was empty, greased and black. The instructor counted out the first six shells.

  Five times he reloaded the gun till the target was peppered and holed and askew.