Harry's Game Part 17

Harry looked at him, didn't reply and bolted from the car. He ran across the road and disappeared from McKeogh's view through the gap in the silver corrugated fence. Downs had a start of less than a hundred yards.

Talk of the initial shooting straddled the city. The first officer into the road was taken by a lance-corporal to meet the tear-swamped Mrs Duncan. Between gulps and pauses to blow her nose she told the immediate story that formed the basis of the situation report.

'He'd just left for work, Mr McEvoy, and I heard the shooting, and I ran to the door. Up the end of the street was Mr McEvoy with a gun, and one man seemed to run down the street towards this end, and he was shot. Mr McEvoy just aimed and shot him. Then another man got into the car and started to drive away, and Mr McEvoy fired at him too, and I don't know whether he was. .h.i.t or not. It was so fast. Then Mr McEvoy ran into the road waving and shouting at people in cars. Then I came indoors.'

'Who is this Mr McEvoy?" the bemused subaltern asked automatically.

'He's my lodger, been here three weeks. Quiet as a mouse, and a gentleman, a real proper man. Never spoke to anyone, and then there he was crouched behind his gun and shooting it over and over.'

The ambulance took Duffryn to hospital, and bulletins later in the day spoke of his condition as "critical'.

Frost, still in the 39 Brigade Operations Room at Lisburn, saw the reports coming in over the teletype. In rapid succession he spoke to the GOC, the Brigade commander in Londonderry--in order that the Secretary of State could be briefed when he arrived there--and finally to Davidson in London. In each case the message was substantially the same.

'At first sight it looks as though they mounted some sort of ambush for McEvoy this morning. There was a b.a.l.l.s-up on the job, and our fellow ended up shooting at least one of theirs. He's in hospital injured. Another chap escaped in a car, and when last seen McEvoy was standing out in the Falls trying the old tack of waving down a spot of transport, civilian, for hot pursuit. It gets a bit more droll each stage. He'd holed up in a small guest house just off the Falls in the Broadway section. So he's on the loose again, and it's my wager that by lunchtime the place will be buzzing a bit.'

Four minutes later the teletype was chattering again. A shot-up car had been discovered in Carlyle Circus, and a man had been taken from the back with serious gunshot wounds.

'This McEvoy, he's one of ours," said Frost to the major from his department who stood beside him.

'Working for us?" said the other man in astonishment. The clerks and corporals and duty officers strained to listen.

'Not as simple. Working for our side, but not working for us, not for this department. It's involved and complicated and a c.o.c.k-up. The guts are that the Prime Minister wanted an outsider with good cover and uncompromised, to move in and operate while controlled from London. He had a specific task, to locate the man that killed Danby. I think he did it and all the tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs as well. It's a boy called Billy Downs, from Ardoyne. The place is watched now, and we did a raid this morning but that was negative. But the whole thing went sour. This man, McEvoy, had little faith in his controller and not much more in us. Can't blame him for that. The talk I've had with his controller shows him as stupid as they come. So we had a ludicrous situation, lunatic, with McEvoy phoning his controller and pa.s.sing over information but not saying where he could be contacted. In between his weekly messages not a word from him. Revolutionary tactics, okay. Then it leaked to the opposition--how they got hold of it I don't know--complete secrecy was supposed to be the strength of the whole enterprise, and the Proves still heard about it. There was the bit in the papers this morning, that was the tip of it.'

The major nodded. He'd seen the cutting already, snipped out and noted.

Frost went on, 'Well, it seems the boyos went for McEvoy this morning to try to get him on the way to a job he'd picked up. He's cool enough, this lad. There's been quite a shoot out. McEvoy shot at least one of them. Maybe more, there's another half stiff turned up beside the Mater in a car with guns in it. It may be something to do with it. Could well be.'

One of the desk sergeants came towards the colonel pus.h.i.+ng a telephone trolley across the floor of the ops room, a light set in the handle flashed brilliantly.

'Call for you, sir.'

Frost took the phone, identified himself, and listened rather more than a minute. Then he thanked the caller, asked him quietly not to move anything, and said he would be on his way.

'There's been shooting in Ypres Avenue, that's Billy Downs's street. Looks a bit like High Noon apparently, bodies and plenty all over the place." Frost rattled it out, hard and composed. "I think I'll go down there, so hold the fort please. And call RUG HQ, Special Branch. Ask for Rennie, Howard Rennie. He might want to come up there. It'll take me about fifteen minutes to get there. But if there's any word of McEvoy let me know right away.'

And he was gone before the major could stand on any of his dignity and complain about being kept in the dark. That Frost traditionally kept things close to his chest was small consolation. Suddenly the operations room was alive. It was seldom the staff on the first floor of headquarters were able to feel the tension of street level operations. Frost had brought them into it, though at the expense of his famous discretion. The sergeant brought the trolley over once more.

'It's a call for Colonel Frost, sir. They say it's London and personal and urgent. A Mr Davidson. The colonel called him a few minutes ago. Will you take it?'

The major took the phone. "It's his deputy here." He waited while the question was framed at the other end, then went on, "we have another wounded man, and a shooting in Downs's street in Ardoyne. Bodies but no names to match them with is the order of the morning so far. You'll have to wait half an hour or so, and then we might have the answers. Sorry, old chap, but that's the way it is.'

NINETEEN.

Feverish in the torment of her uncertainty, Billy Downs's wife had sent two of her children to the community infant creche, and dumped the others with her neighbours. In her threadbare green coat and with her bag and purse she had taken herself to the shops at the top of Ardoyne. The screw had been well twisted on her exhausted nerves.

The news programme less than two hours earlier had carried reports of the shooting at the policeman's house, amplified by eyewitness accounts. The BBC had sent a man to the house, and his story made much of the gunman who hesitated, the intervention of the child, and the wounding of the gunman. There had been a trail of blood and the policeman was a trained marksman, the report said. The Irish News, which she had seen when she took the young ones three doors down, had shown a floodlit picture of the neat bungalow and white-faced detectives working with their fingerprint kits by the front door. The paper had also spoken of the wounding of the would be a.s.sa.s.sin.

Men from the community a.s.sociation would come in later in the day to help repair the boards pulled up at dawn by the army, but for now the debris and confusion in the house and the noise of the children coupled with the danger to her husband to defeat her.

But the single factor that weighed most with her was the knowledge that the military knew of her husband, had identified him, and that their life together was effectively over. If he had survived last night then he would be on the run and go underground, otherwise the future held only the prospect of years in the Kesh or the Crumlin.

And for what?

She was not one of the militant women of the streets who blew the whistles and beat the dustbins, and marched down the Falls, and screamed at the soldiers and sent food parcels to the prisons. At the start the cause had not interested her, till parallel with the growing involvement of her husband she had become pa.s.sively hostile to the movement. That a cabinet minister should die in London, a soldier in Broadway or a policeman in Dunmurry was not the fuel that fired her. Her conviction was of far too low a grade to sustain her in her present misery.

Her purse had been full from the social security last Thursday. Now most of it was spent, with only enough for the basics of bread and milk bolstered by sausages and baked beans and tins. At the shops as she queued many eyes were on her. Word had pa.s.sed in the streets that the army had raided her house, that they were looking for her man, that he had been out all night. Over the years it had become a familiar enough situation in the little community, but that it was this family that was at the centre of the morning's swoop caused the stares, the muttered comments and the pulling aside of the front window curtains.

She glared back at them, embarra.s.sing the lookers enough to deflect their eyes. She paid for her food, pecking in her purse for the exact money, and swung out of the door and back on to the street. She had forty yards to walk to the top of Ypres Avenue.

When she turned into the narrow long street the observation post spotted her. The soldiers were concealed in the roof of the mill, disused and now converted into warehouse s.p.a.ce. They came and went by the back stairs, and where the boards were too rotten hauled themselves up by rope ladder. Once in position they put a heavy padlock on the door behind them, locking themselves in the roughly fas.h.i.+oned cubicle, constructed out of sandbags, blankets and sacking. They had some protection and some warmth: that was all. To see down the Avenue they lay on their stomachs with their heads forward into the angle of the roof with a missing tile providing the vantage point. The two men in the post did twelve hours there at a stretch, and with three other teams would rotate in the position, familiarizing themselves enough with the street so that eventually they would know each man and woman and child who lived there. The comings and goings were logged, laboriously, in a notebook in pencil, then sifted each evening by their battalion's intelligence officer. A synopsis of life in the street was sent each week to headquarters for evaluation. It was a process repeated in scores of streets in the Catholic areas of Belfast, as the security forces built up their enormous and comprehensive dossiers on the minority community.

Lance-Corporal David Burns and Private George Smith had been in the mill since six that morning. They arrived in darkness and would leave long after the few street lights had come back on. They had been in Belfast eleven weeks on this tour, five more to go. Thirty four days to be exact.

To the OP they'd brought sandwiches and a flask of sugared tea plus the powerful German binoculars they used, a folded card that expanded to show a montage of the faces of wanted men, the rifles with daytime telescopic sights and also the bulging image intensifier for night work. They carried everything they needed for the day up the rope ladder to the roof. Only the radio telephone and the bulk treacle tin for emergency nature calls were permanent fixtures.

Burns, face intent behind the gla.s.ses, called out the details on the slight woman walking towards him.

'The bird from forty-one. Must have been shopping. Didn't go for long. Can't be ten minutes since she went. Looks a bit rough. Didn't find her husband, did they?'

The soldier squirmed closer to the aperture, pressing the gla.s.ses against his eyebrows, face contorted with concentration.

'Hey, Smithie, behind her. I think he's coming. Right up the top there. Sort of running. That is her old man, isn't it? Looks like him. Have a squint yourself.'

Tm not sure, not at this range. We'll be definite when he gets down the road a bit." Smith had taken over the hole. "Is he a shoot on-sight, or what?'

'Don't know. They didn't say nothing about that. I'm sure enough now it's him. Get HQ on the radio. Looks like he's run a b.l.o.o.d.y marathon. Knackered, he is.'

It was the pounding of his feet that first broke through her preoccupations. The urgency of footsteps dragged the woman away from the images of her wounded husband and the breaking of her home. She turned towards the noise, and stopped still at the sight.

Downs was struggling to run now, head rolling from side to side and the rhythm of his arm movements lost. His legs flailed forward over the last few paces to her, unco-ordinated and wild. The st.i.tch in his right side bit into the stomach wall. The pallor of his face was slug-like, excavated from under something of permanence. His face was hollow at the cheeks as he pulled the air inside his lungs, eyes fearful and vivid, and round them the skin glistened with a sheen of sweat. He was shapeless, the big sweater worn over the left shoulder and arm giving him a grotesque breadth. But as he came towards her it was the eyes that held her. Their desperation, loneliness and dependence.

She put down her shopping bag on the paving, careful that it should not topple over, and held out her arms for her man. He fell against her, stumbling, and she reeled with the sudden weight as she took the strain. Against her he convulsed as his lungs forced down the air they needed. There were words, but she could not understand them as they buried themselves in the shoulder of her coat. Far distant, on the top street corner a knot of women had gathered.

'They came for you, you know, this morning.'

'I know.'

'They searched all over, and they said they'd come again. Again and again till they got you." He nodded, numbed and shocked by the pain of the running and the throbbing in his arm. "They know, don't they? They know it all. They're not so daft as you said.'

'I was told." The voice, the speaking, was a little easier now. The air was there, coming more naturally, and the legs steadied.

As she twisted herself against him, working away from the sharpness of his collar-bone against her cheek, she felt him wince and tear away his left arm.

'Is that where they hit you? Last night it was you. At the policeman's home. Did he hit you?" The pain came and went, surging and then sagging. "Has it been looked at? Have you seen a doctor?" Again he nodded.

'Where are you going now? What are you going to do?'

'I'm going home. It's over, finished. I just want to go home.'

'But they came this morning for you," she screamed, her voice high, hysterical that he could not understand something so simple, 'They'll be back as soon as you walk through the door. They'll take you. They were crawling all through, under the floor boards, into the roof, looking for you. They took the place apart trying to find you.'

He wasn't listening. "They put a man in, just to find me." He said it with wonder, as if surprised that the enemy would cla.s.sify him of such importance that they would take a step so great. "We found him first. We went to get him this morning, and it just b.a.l.l.sed up. There's two boys shot by him, by the Englishman. And last night that was another c.o.c.k-up. That b.l.o.o.d.y copper, he...'

'I heard it on the radio.'

'Well, there's no point in running now. I'm finished with it. There'd be a reason to run if I was going on, but I'm not.'

'You mean all this? It's not just because you're hurt? We can get you away from here, the boys will s.h.i.+ft you.'

'It's definite," he said. He was very tired now, deeply tired and needing to sit down, to take the great weight from his legs. He picked up her shopping bag with his right hand, and draped the injured left arm over the small woman's shoulder. They began to walk by the terraced doors and the chipped and daubed red brick of the street. It was a grey Belfast morning, rain threatening, wind cold and from the east, coming in over the Lough. The two threaded a path over the fractured paving stones, past the endless heaps of dogs' mess towards the house that had become Downs's goal.

The moment the two had created for each other was broken by the footsteps behind. Instinctively both knew the noise of pursuit. In Ardoyne the knack of recognizing it was inbred.

The women on the corner were silent as Harry ran by them down the gentle incline towards where the man and his wife were walking away from him. He held the revolver close to him, rea.s.sured by the hardness of the wooden handle, roughened with age and usage. He pulled up twenty feet short of them. The pair swung round to face him.

'Don't move. Don't try to run or get your firearm. If you do I'll shoot.'

Harry barked the instructions. The harshness of his tone and its a.s.surance surprised him. He felt almost detached from the orders he was shouting.

Tut the bag down and begin to walk towards me, and slowly. Your hands on your head. The woman--she stays where she is.'

Be strong. Don't mess about with him. You'll be a long time before you s.h.i.+ft the b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Don't let him dominate you. Keep the gun on him, look at his hands the whole time. Watch the hands, and keep the gun in line. Keep it so it's only got to come straight up to fire, and the catch off. Check with the thumb that the catch is off. It is, certain. Now separate them, don't let them be together so she can s.h.i.+eld him. She'll do that, they all will, throw themselves at you to give him a yard. And shoot. If he moves shoot him. Don't hesitate. Stay still yourself. Don't march about. That disorganizes the shot you may make. Two bullets only. One up the spout, and the other in the next chamber, that's all.

Harry studied him hard. The other man, the opposition. Dirty, cowed and frightened--is that the terrorist? Is that all he is? Is that the killer in all his glory? Not much to look at, not much without his Klashnikov.

'Start walking now, and remember: keep it very cool, or I shoot. What's your name?'

'Billy Downs. You're the Englishman they sent for me? The one that had the girl killed?" They'd told him the Britisher hadn't come to take him, not to put him in the Kesh, but to kill him. The fight of survival was returning, steadily and surely. "You won't get out of here, you know. Not with me on the end of your pistol, you won't.'

He looked past Harry and seemed to nod his head into the middle distance. It was cleverly done. Good try, Billy boy. But you're with the professionals now, lad. A squaddie might have turned and given you the third of a second you needed to jump him. Not Harry. Pivot round. Get your back to the wall. Keep going till you feel the brickwork. But watch the b.a.s.t.a.r.d. All the time keep your eyes on his hands.

Faced with troops in uniform, Downs would probably have submitted without a struggle and climbed into the armoured car to start whatever segment of his lifetime in captivity they intended for him. But not this way. No surrender to a single hack sent from London to kill him watched by his wife and in his own road. For a year it would be talked about--the day when a lone Englishman came into Ardoyne and shot down meek little Billy Downs. The day the boy's nerve went.

He was formidable, this Englishman, in his old jeans and dark anorak, with the clear-cut face, softer than those fas.h.i.+oned in the bitterness of Belfast. He had not been reared through the anguish of the troubles, and it showed in the freshness of his features. But he was hard, Downs had no doubt on that. They'd trained him and sent him from London for this moment, and Downs knew his life rested on his capacity to read the expressionless mouth of his enemy. When he made his break all would depend on how well the Englishman could shoot, and, when he fired, how straight. Downs made his a.s.sessment ... he'll fire, but fire late, and he'll miss. He turned himself now from the waist only, and very slowly, towards his wife. He was close to her, much closer than Harry, and with his face in profile he mouthed from the far side of his lips, the one word.

'Scream.'

She read it in the shape of his mouth, the way the lips and gums twisted out the message. Harry didn't see the instruction, and was still concentrating on the man's hands when she yelled. It came from deep down. A fierce noise from so small a woman. Harry jerked from his pre-occupation with Downs as he searched for the source of the noise, his eyes s.h.i.+fting direction.

Downs had made his decision. Now or not at all, either now or the b.a.s.t.a.r.d has you in his own time, to shoot like a rat in a cage. He pushed his wife violently towards Harry and started for the freedom of the open street down the hill. His first two strides took him to the edge of the pavement. A flood of adrenalin ... antic.i.p.ating the shot, head down, shoulders crouched. This was the moment. Either he fires now or I make it, three, four more paces then the range and accuracy of the revolver is stretched. His eyes half closed, he saw nothing in front of him as his left foot hit hard on the steep edge of the pavement. For his heel there was support, for his sole there was nothing, only the gap between the flagstones and the gutter eight inches below. His weight was all there, all concentrated on that foot, as he catapulted himself forward, the momentum taking over.

He realized the way he was falling, and tried to twist round on to his back, but there was no time, no room. He hit the rough gravel of the road on his left arm, right on the spot where the flesh had been twice torn open by Rennie's bullet. The frail lint bandage gave no protection. With his right arm he clawed at the road surface trying to push himself uo and away from Harry, who was coming to him, revolver outstretched...

Harry saw the pain reach over and cover the man's face. He saw the hand scruffing under the body. If the man had a gun that was where it would be, down by the waist, where the hand was fumbling now. It wasn't a difficult decision any more. He raised the revolver so that the line went down from his right eye, down his right arm to the "V of the back sight and along the black barrel to the sharp foresight, and then on to the man's upper chest. He held the aim just long enough for his hand to steady, then squeezed the trigger gently into the cup of his forefinger. The noise was not great. The revolver gave only a slight kick, jolting down the rigid arm to Harry's shoulder. Below him Downs's body began to twitch, giving way to spasmodic convulsions. The blood found its own pathway from the side of his mouth out on to the greyness of the road. Like water tracking across dry earth it kept its course, faster, thicker, wider as the road discoloured with its brightness.

There was no need for the second bullet, Harry could see that.

'Why did you shoot him? He had no gun. Why did you kill him?' She was moving towards Downs, looking at Harry as she spoke. 'You didn't have to shoot. You could have run after him, and caught him. You know he was shot last night, and hit. He wasn't much opposition to you, you Britisher sod.'

She knelt down beside her husband, her stocking dragging on the harsh surface of the road. He lay on his side, and she could not cradle him as she would have wanted. Both her hands touched the face of her man, unmarked in his death, fingering his nose and ears and eyes.

Harry felt no part of the scene; but something was demanded of him, and painstakingly he began to explain.

'He knew the rules. He knew the game he was playing. He came to London and murdered the Cabinet Minister. In cold blood. Shot him down in front of his house. Then he went to ground. It was a challenge to us. He must have known we had to get him--you must have known that. It was a test of will. There was no way we could lose--we couldn't afford to.'

Harry had wondered how this moment would be. How he would feel if the man were dead, destroyed. There was no hatred, no loathing for the slight body that lay on the grit of the tarmac. There was no elation, either, that his world and his system had beaten that of the young man who they had told him was the enemy, evil, vermin. Harry felt only emptiness. All the training, all the fear, all the agony, directed to killing this awkward, shapeless nonent.i.ty. And now nothingness. He looked again at the wife as she stayed bent over her lifeless man, and began his walk up the hill out of Ardoyne.

She was watching him, hands still on the man's body when the shot came. Simultaneously with the crack she saw Harry stagger, appear to regain his balance, and then career backwards, before thudding against the front wall of a house. His arms were pressed against the middle of his chest. Then he toppled in slow motion over on to the pavement.

In the OP it was Smith who was at the aperture, giving a continuous description to the lance-corporal who relayed the message back to headquarters over the radio telephone.

'There's a man running up behind Downs. With a shooter. A revolver, looks like, a little one. Tell "em to s.h.i.+ft "emselves back at HQ. Downs has his hands up, and they're talking. Not much, but saying something.'

From the telephone set Burns called, "What about the other bloke, they want to know, what's he look like?'

'Civvies, anorak and jeans. It's a short-barrel revolver he's got, not Downs ... the other man. Scruffy-looking. He's making a run for it, Downs is. b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l, he's down, tripped himself. f.u.c.k me, he's going to shoot him, he's going to shoot him!'

High in the hidden observation post Burns heard the single shot.

'I can get the b.u.g.g.e.r, can't I, Dave? He just shot the other b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Waving a gun about and all that, it's enough.'

Smith was maneuvering his rifle into position. The old Lee Enfield with the big telescopic sight, the sniper's weapon, the marksman's choice.

'I've a good line on him from here. No problem." Smith was talking to himself, whispering into the b.u.t.t of the rifle. Burns was motionless and watched from the back of the OP nestled among the blankets and sacking as Smith drew back the bolt action, and settled himself, s.h.i.+fting his hips from side to side to get comfortable for the shot. He was a long time aiming, wanting to be certain the first time. The firing echoed round under the roof of the mill.

'Did you get him?" urged Burns.

'A real b.l.o.o.d.y peach.'

The sharpness of the pain numbed Harry. As he lay, stomach down on the pavement, he could feel nothing, his head was facing the walls of the houses away from the street. Green moss rubbed close to his nose, and beyond that lay the jagged edge of a milk bottle, and, huge and high, a front door step. There was no understanding of what had happened. Just the noise, and the helpless collapse, the blows that had carried him from his feet.

He worked his right hand slowly from under him where it had gripped his chest. The fingers were scarlet and s.h.i.+ny. The effort was so great. No strength left, no power, and endless labour just to move an arm. The action of all the muscles, all working in his biceps, his heavy shoulders, and deep behind the ravaged rib cage, combined to bring on the first stabs of agony. Bruised from his fall, his face contorted with pain, the upper teeth clamping on the softness of his lip, he struggled to control the spasms.

And with the pain came the realization of what had happened. They've had you, Harry. As you stood there like a big idiot, consumed in your inviolability, they took you. So silly. Just standing there, in the heart of Ardoyne, standing and waiting, and they obliged. His mind was clearing as the flesh and tissue round the great wound torn by the bullet throbbed out its protest. This is the way it ends, he knew that. Here against the dampened pavings, by the weeds and the fractured gla.s.s, among hatred and loathing. Some little swine out there with a rifle, taking a long time, waiting for the moment, not hurrying. That was the way death comes, Harry. Billy Downs already dead, the woman beside him; that was somewhere in the greater distance, away beyond.

Other faces were closer, sharp-etched now ... Davison, in the garden near Dorking--it'll be dangerous, he had said. Hadn't wanted to say it, thought it might frighten ... Mary came closer to him, and the boys, big faces happy with laughter, all noise and running to him. Take hold, Harry, fight it.

The impact of the shot had flung Harry several feet back before it felled him. His hands with animal instinct had closed on his stricken body, the revolver careering from his fist and bouncing into the roadway where it rested.

Harry forced himself upwards, using his right hand to provide the lever till he could jack-knife his lower body under him and spread the great weight from the arm onto his knees. The first time he failed, collapsing back into the pool of blood. Again he attempted it, this time with greater success, till, like a pantomime dog, he began to work his way up the hill. There were people at the doorways now, but none moved or spoke as the Englishman dragged his way past. A single child screamed as his opened coat slipped from his left hand fingers, and permitted a flow of blood down on to the ground and over the hardness of the pavement before his knees smeared its ordered pa.s.sage.

A hundred pairs of eyes watched Harry move away, aware that this was the effort of a man already doomed but unable to accept it. These people knew the inevitability of death, knew how a man fought to stave off its coming, and knew from the signs when he would win, and when lose. Then Englishman they knew would lose, the blood told them that, the whiteness of his face, the breathing, irregular and bubbling. And then they saw Billy Downs's wife rise up from the road where her man lay and walk with quick, neat steps towards Harry. They saw that in her path was the revolver.