Harry's Game Part 3

Davidson said, "I wanted to be sure that you wouldn't be too concerned about your family while you're over there. It could be important. I once had a man...'

Harry cut in, "It's not a problem. Not compared with the other ones. She'll cope.'

They went into the room where the others were waiting. Davidson thought to himself, he's a cold enough fish to succeed. It went through Harry's mind that his controller was either very thorough or on the reverse slope and going a touch soft. It was the only time the two men had anything approaching a personal conversation.

Later that afternoon it was suggested that Harry should personally meet the eye-witnesses who had been in Belgrave Square, or who had reported the jostling incident with the hurrying man in the Underground ticket area at Oxford Circus. Harry could have gone in the guise of a detective, but Davidson, after mulling it over for thirty-six hours, decided it was an unnecessary risk and sent a video camera from the Ministry round to their homes with one of the young officers in order that they could relive the moments they had been face to face with the gunman. For about fifteen minutes the elderly man who had seen a flash of the face while reading his paper, the girl with the bag of laundry, the woman exercising her dog, the driver of the ministry car and the woman who had stood immobile as the man weaved a way past her had spelled out their recollections. They were taken again and again through the short experience, milked till their impatience with their questioner grew pointed, and then left wondering why so much equipment and time was spent in merely reiterating the statement they had made to the police the previous week.

Endlessly the tapes were rerun, so that the strength of each witness's description could be tested. Hesitations about hair styles, eye colours, cheekbone make-up, nose size, all the details that make each face unique as a fingerprint were a.n.a.lysed. Davidson made up a chart where all the strong points were listed in green ink, the next category in red, the doubtful points in blue. These were placed against the photokit picture already issued by the Royal Ulster Constabulary and Scotland Yard.

There were differences, they found. Differences that would have been sufficient to prevent the young soldiers in the pub off the Broadway eight days earlier from connecting the picture they had memorized with the man they had studied, arms up and legs apart, against the wall.

'You have to know him," said Davidson--so often it became like a holed record--'You have to know about him, have a sense that when he's on the pavement and you're at the other side you'll have him straight away. It's chemistry, my boy.'

Harry thought of it a different way. He thought in a job as daft as this you need everything on your side. He reckoned his chances of seeing the man about minus nil, though he maintained a more public optimism with Davidson.

The Ministry had designed their own photokit of the man, using the Scotland Yard one as a basis, but from the eye-witness tapes they slightly altered various features, particularly the profile of the face. Their own picture was displayed around treble life-size in the rooms where the team worked, the big living-room, and the dining area at the back--and more s.p.a.ce on Harry's wall was taken up with it, alongside the maps and aerial photographs.

By the fifteenth day they were ready to push Harry out into the field, and cut the cord that held him to the security of the big house amongst the trees. Other than his sleeping time, and those hours he'd worked in his room on the voice tapes and the maps, he'd been allowed to spend little time on his own. That was Davidson's idea-- "For Christ's sake, don't let him brood on it," he told the others.

Davidson had wondered whether there ought to be some celebration on Harry's last night, and then decided against it in favour of a few gla.s.ses of beer after their final session, and another early night.

'Don't believe all that Daily Telegraph stuff about them being beaten, smashed, in their final death throes. It's nonsense. They need time to regroup, and they needed a big morale booster. They've got that, not in the killing itself, but in our failure to nab their man and lock him up. The Prods are restless now, not critical yet, but stirring the pot--just as the Proves want it.

'To be frank, Harry, we all thought they'd have had the killer by now, and for the first week at least we may have handled your preparation on that basis. The word I had last night is they haven't identified any positive clue yet. No one's losing anything by you going in. But in a strange idiotic way you have a better chance than the military clumping round and the police. It's not a great chance, but about worth taking.'

They wished him luck. A little forma'. Earry said nothing, nodded and walked into the hall and up the stairs to his room. They let him go alone.

The fire position was in the roof of a derelict house just to the north of the Falls Road, beyond its junction with Springfield. Four of the houses had been demolished when a nineteen-year-old volunteer in the First Battalion had stumbled, knocking the arm of the battalion's explosive officer as he was putting the final touches to a seventy-five pound gelignite bomb. The officer's fingers had moved some three eights of an inch, enough to connect momentarily with the terminals that in another few minutes would have been attached to the face of a cheap alarm clock.

The explosion had left a gouged hole in the line of the street. The first house to the right after the gap was left naked and exposed to the open air. The next house down was in better shape. There was a door still in place, and the roof was largely intact. The house was empty because local housing officials had condemned it as unsafe, and gas and electricity had been switched ofi. The five houses beyond were occupied.

The man had wedged himself in the angle between the beams and the horizontal struts of the roof. Part of the time his legs were astride the struts, which cut deep into his thighs in spite of the cus.h.i.+ons he had brought with him. Otherwise he knelt, spreading his weight over two of the struts. In that position his balance was more stable, but it hurt more.

Looking down he could see through a gap in the roof where a tile had slid down into the street, shaken loose by the blast from the explosion. The tile had been only slightly above the level of the guttering and from his position his eyes were little more than four feet from it. From the hole his line of visibility took him left to the corner of the street, and across to the right the length of the frontage of three houses. On the same side of the street as the man's hiding place was the home of a Mrs Mulvenna, whose husband was currently held in Long Kesh. She always kept her frontroom light on, with the curtains drawn back, so that the light illuminated the pavement just beyond the extremity of the man's field of fire, and threw shadows into the area covered by his line of vision. It was his hope that a night patrol, their faces blackened, rubber soles on their boots, would edge away from the brightness in favour of the side of the road where they could find some false refuge in the greyness, but where i hey would be covered by the man's sights. He knew enough of the habits of the soldiers to be able to bank on one of the troops in the middle of the patrol lingering uncertainly on the corner. The soldier would need to pause for only two or three seconds to make the man's vigil worthwile.

The army were never consistent with their patrol patterns, and in the three days that he had been in the roof the man had seen only one group of soldiers. That had been in mid-morning and then, without Mrs Mulvenna's light to drive them across the street, they had come by, right underneath the hideout, and virtually out of sight. He had seen one of them momentarily then, heard their fresh, young English county voices as they pa.s.sed by unaware of his presence above.

Across the man's knee was an Armalite rifle. Small, lightweight, with shocking high velocity hitting power. The bodywork of the rifle was of black plastic, made in j.a.pan, built under licence as a copy of the American infantry's M16 weapon. The Klashnikov in London had been a luxury, an eccentricity ... for the more routine job in which he was now engaged the armalite was totally suitable.

And so he waited in the dark and freezing draughts of the roof for the twenty seconds or so it would take an eight-man patrol to move past the shadows of the three houses opposite. His eyes strained at the darkness, his ears keen to the noise of feet and the different types of shoes the civilians wore. He had cat-napped through the day to reserve his concentration for the time, fast and silent, that the soldiers would come.

FIVE.

The lady who had been walking her dog in Belgrave Square now left it at home each morning when she went to the doctor's surgery. The elderly GP allowed her to talk for at least ten minutes each morning before gently shooing her back to her flat and the hysteria and depression that had engulfed her since the shooting. The doctor appreciated the need of the widow, who had been his casual and infrequent patient for twenty-three years, to talk to some friend who could comprehend her meticulous description of the screaming woman, the man with that awful banging gun at his shoulder, the petrified children, the sirens, and the shouting, helpless policemen.

He gave her mild sedatives, but had been unwilling to prescribe habit-forming doses in the hope that time would eventually erode the images of the killing. He had been surprised and annoyed when she had told him that the detectives had been to see her again, a clear week after they had received her signature on what was described as the final and definitive statement she would need to make. She had told the doctor of the queer equipment they had brought, and how over and over she had been made to describe the man with the gun.

It had been sufficient of an ordeal for her, this last visit, to set back her recovery, and accordingly the doctor had phoned the Scotland Yard officer who was named in the papers as heading the inquiry. But such was the pressure on his time, and the size of his register, that he had taken the matter no further when told that no policeman had been to visit his patient in the last nine days. He had bl.u.s.tered a bit when he was told that, protested about the obvious inconsistency between the police story and his patient's, and then rung off. It still puzzled him.

The Secretary of State for Defence was in his office early, clearing his desk for the start of a short holiday, and arming himself with persuasive and informed argument that he would need for his nine holes with the Prime Minister. The civil servant who was briefing him on the missile gap and the sagging morale of denuded units in " crmany continued his lecture in his usual professorial manner. He id a turn of phrase that had infuriated a series of Ministers as the vil servant had progressed upwards to his position of a Man Who K,m Things. His role in the vast department was all-commanding, 'ms power and influence huge. One of the smaller cogs in his well iled machine was Davidson, and one of the less frequently men oned properties on his books was the house near Dorking.

Tentatively the Minister spoke to him.

'That suggestion of the PM about the Danby killing--you re icmber, putting a chap in there. He'll want to know ... what's happening?'

'Yes. He phoned last week. I wouldn't worry about it, Minister. We're still going over feasibility et cetera at the moment. It's not a fast business, you know; not a thing we can successfully knock off overnight.'

'Nothing definite yet, then? You've already spoken to him? That's a bit odd, isn't it? On to you direct, and by-pa.s.sing me? He may be in charge of security and all that, but it's a bit off. What did you tell him?'

'That things were in hand. That he'd get a briefing the moment there was something to report, when there were developments.'

'I think you see me as some sort of security risk or something.' The Minister grimaced. The civil servant smiled generously. The subject was terminated. It was back to rocketry and more conventional theatres of war.

Twenty-five thousand feet up, between Liverpool and the Isle of Man, Harry was working things out. The reality of it all had been brutally clear as he had stood in the queue waiting to be searched by the Securicor team at the departure gate. Whoever heard of an agent getting his own bags taken apart by his own b.l.o.o.d.y side? It was painfully clear why his promised Smith and Wesson would have to be picked up at the Belfast main post office, where Davidson was to send it to await collection. He tried to concentrate on his cover story. Merchant seaman going home after years away, land in turmoil, oppression over Jie minority. Time for all true Irishmen to get back to back, together to withstand the English b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Three hundred years post Cromwell, and nothing changed. Blood of martyrs on the streets again. Would anyone be daft enough to come back to that stinking hole, just because things were getting worse? Be out of their minds. Irish might be daft enough, have to be daft. One thing--b.l.o.o.d.y English wouldn't come home, they'd all go off to Australia or South Africa. Wouldn't catch them risking their precious lilywhite backsides.

The story was as firm in his mind as it ever would be.

He lay, half awake, half asleep, in no man's land. What of the commitment he had taken on? Motivation was vague and unthought out. It wouldn't be as strong as the other side's. No chance. Motivation was against the code with which he had been instilled. Officers didn't need motivating. It wasn't all clear.

Rights and wrongs, pluses and minuses, blacks and whites were all vague. In Northern Ireland things don't divide and coalesce neatly. That's too easy. What was it the politician had said? "Anyone who thinks he knows the answer to Northern Ireland is iil informed." Good, that. Lot of ill-informed types in the mess in Germany then. Came back with the solution worked out. One big swoop, one big push, the tough hand, the gentle hand, the "saturate them', the "pull the plug and leave them'. All the answers, none the same, but all spoken with such authority. Amazing how you can learn three hundred years" bigotry in four months looking after five blocks in a scruffy council estate.

Harry, heavy with sarcasm, had once congratulated a brother in uniform on the good fortune the other had in being able to see things so clearly. To be able with such confidence to apportion his blame and praise, culpability and credit--that made him a lucky man. In Mansoura, just out of Sheik Othman, where the gunmen were running round while the boys in Ulster were still on their iced lollies and sing-songs, it had been so much easier. The Red Cross man from Switzerland, in his little white suit, even with a big bright cross on his hat so they wouldn't throw a grenade at him from a rooftop, had come to visit the unit once. He'd said to the colonel something like, "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." The colonel hadn't liked that. Pretty heady stuff, they all thought in the mess. Such rubbish. Terrorists they were then, wog terrorists at that.

But in Aden Harry had thought it was obvious to even the most stupid that British society was in no way being protected by Their efforts ... business perhaps, but nothing else.

Whatever else men died for in the sharp staccato engagements of small arms fire, the green fields of home were a touch removed from the Mansoura roundabout picket, Checkpoint Golf or the Chartered Bank in Crater. As an Ulsterman, and so never allowed a posting home to fight, Harry had often wondered whether soldiering there was any different to Aden. Did all the stuff about duty, purpose and reason mean that much more just because the fighting was down by the local supermarket and not six hours away on a VC10? He reckoned he was as distinterested now in the welfare of the great body of society as he had been then. He had been given a job to do, and he was doing it because someone had to, and by a series of accidents he was better equipped than most.

But by the time the Trident was arching over the landfall to the south of Strangford Lough, Harry had decided he was not a little flattered he'd been asked. He had been chosen for a mission, after all, called for by the Prime Minister. In the close heat of the plane he thought of his wife, warmth and closeness flooding through him. It was a pity she couldn't share in his pride. The pa.s.senger across the aisle noticed the slow smile spreading across the cheeks of the man slumped by the window.

For a few more seconds Harry indulged himself, conscious of the softness of the moment. He knew from the other times of great danger that he had faced that he could coc.o.o.n himself in sentimentality for his family, for Mary and the boys. It was part of the mechanism of protection which Harry understood and cherished.

As the airliner began its appraoch across the small fields towards Aldergrove Harry fastened his belt strap, and let his thoughts turn to the man whose image was imprinted in his mind. He could see the man, could put flesh and colour and dimensions on to the dark lines of the photokit. The target. Was he an enemy? Not really. What, then, if not an enemy? Just a target. Still to be killed, no question of that. Eliminate--it rolled off Harry's silent tongue. It was the word he liked.

He was jolted awake as the wheels suspended below the wings banged down on to the scarred tarmac. The plane surged forward in the air at a little more than ninety miles an hour, bounced again, and began to slow with the application of the engine's reverse thrust.

Terminal 1, Heathrow, the first-floor cafeteria. Davidson was breakfasting with the team who had come up to see Harry off. It was a subdued meal without the frills of conversation. Not much had been said after Harry had disappeared towards the security checks. Davidson had muttered, almost audibly, "Gutsy little sod.'

'I'll take the bill," he had added, as they rose from the table, and then, as an afterthought, "I think we've told him all we could in three weeks, but it's b.l.o.o.d.y little time. To do that job properly you'd need six months. And then you couldn't be sure. Always the same when the politicians dip their toes in--short cuts. That's the order of the day. To come through with three weeks behind him he'll need to be lucky, b.l.o.o.d.y lucky.'

The anomaly of going to war in your own country was not lost on Harry. He came down the steep steps from the plane and hurried past the RAF regiment corporal, who held his rifle diagonally across his thighs, right-hand forefinger extended along the trigger guard. There were coils of barbed wire at the flanks of the terminal building, sprawled across the flower beds that had once been sufficient in themselves to mark the perimeters of the taxi-ing area. The viewing gallery where people used to wave to their friends and relatives was now fenced with high chicken wire to prevent a missile being thrown on to the ap.r.o.n; it was out of bounds to civilians, anyway. After getting his bag in the concourse Harry walked out towards the coach pick-up point. Around him was an avenue of white oil drums with heavy planks slung between them--a defence against car bombers moving their lethal loads against the walls of the buildings. He moved by a line of pa.s.sengers waiting to take the Trident back to London. They stood outside, occasionally shuffling forward with their baggage. Up at the front the searches went on in two green prefab huts. Only rarely did the faces of the travellers match the brightness of their going-away clothes: children silent, women with their eyes darting round, the men concerned with getting the cases to the search and then eventually to the plane. Greyness, anxiety, exhaustion.

Harry climbed on to the bus, and was quick enough to ensure himself a window seat near the back.

By the time the coach had left the fields behind and was into the top of the Crumlin Road the man directly behind Harry was in full voice. Taking upon himself the role of guide and raconteur, outmatching those who lead crocodiles of tourists round the Tower of London and Hampton Court, he capitalized on the quiet of the bus to demonstrate his intimate knowledge of the campaign as fought so far.

'Down there on the right--you see the small lane--just round the corner where you can't see--that's where the three Scottish soldiers were murdered ... the pub ... the one that's blown up--the one we're pa.s.sing--they took "em from there and killed them down the road when they were having a slash. There's nothing to see there now ... people used to put flowers, but not now, nothing to see except there's no gra.s.s in the ditch where they got it... Army dug it all up looking for bullets, and it never grew since. Now on the left, where the road climbs up, towards the quarry, that's where the senator was killed ... the Catholic senator with the girl, they were killed up there, stabbed. Last year it was, just before the elections. Look now in front, there she is, the greatest city on earthr Down below, left, not hard left, that's Ardoyne ... over to the right that's Ballymurphy ... we're coming into Ligoniel now.'

It'll be bus trips for the j.a.panese next, thought Harry. Once they've stopped looking round Vietnam you'll be able to flog them Belfast. By special demand after the world's greatest jungle conflict, we offer you reduced rate to the longest-ever urban guerilla war. Roll up! Roll up! Get your tickets now!

'Now wait for the b.u.mps." The man behind was away again, as the bus had slowed to a crawl. "Here we go now. See we're outside a barracks ... there on the left... they all have b.u.mps outside now... stops the Proves belting past and giving the sentry a burst with a Thompson. They used to have luminous paint on them, the b.u.mps, that's gone now ... if you don't know where they are you give the car a h.e.l.l of a bang ... hit one of those at fifty and you know about it ... that's Ardoyne, now, over on the left, where the policeman is. That's a sight for the Engish, policemen with bullet-proof coats and machine guns ... won't use the army flak jackets, have their own. We cut across now, they don't rate going down the Crumlin in Ulster buses. We'll use the Shankill. Looks all right doesn't it, quiet enough? See that hole in the right? That's the Four Steps bar ... killed a fair few when that went up. Not a breath of warning. Look there on the same side, see it? That hole ... that was a furniture shop ... two kiddies died there--not old enough to walk."

'Shut up, Joe, n.o.body wants to know. Just wrap it.'

Perhaps Joe felt he had given his virtuoso. He fell silent. Harry watched out of the window, fascinated by the sights. At the traffic lights the driver nudged up to the white line alongside a Saracen armoured car. Soldiers were crouched inside the half-open steel back doors, rifles in hand. On the other side of the crossroads he watched a patrol inching its way through the shopping crowds. On all sides were the yards of pale-brown hardboard that had taken over from gla.s.s in the display windows of the stores. The policemen here had discarded their sub-machine guns, but let their right hands rest securely inside their heavy dark coats. It surprised Harry how much there was to see that could have been a part of any other British industrial city--buses, cars, people, clothes, paper stands--all merging in with the great military, umbrella that had settled itself on Belfast.

At the bus station Harry switched to another single decker that went high up on the Antrim Road to the north, speeding past the troubled New Lodge junction before cutting into residential suburbs. The houses were big, old, tall, red-brick and fading. Davidson had given him the name of a boarding house where he'd said Harry could get a room, three stops up past the New Lodge.

Harry got off the bus at the stop, and looked round to find his bearings. He spotted the house they had chosen for him and moved away from it farther down the long hill till he was one hundred and fifty yards from the seedy board with its "vacancies" sign. Then he waited. He watched the front door for twenty-five minutes before he saw what he'd half expected. A young man came out down the steps that led to the short front path. Clothes not quite right, walk too long, hair a fair bit too short.

Harry boiled. "Stupid b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Davidson, you prime b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Send me to one of your own b.l.o.o.d.y places. Nice safe little billet for soldiers in a nice Proddy area. Somewhere you won't find anything out, but you won't get shot. No, not Davidson, some b.u.g.g.e.r in intelligence in Belfast, having his own back because it isn't his caper. Sod 'em. I'm not going through all this to sit on my a.r.s.e in Proddyland and come out in a month with nothing to show. No way.'

He took the next bus into central Belfast from the other side of the road, walked across to the taxi rank in Castle Street, and asked for a lift up to mid-Falls. Not Davidson's game, that. He wouldn't know addresses in Belfast, it would have to be one of the minions, flicking through his card index, this looks right to keep him out of mischief. Couldn't infiltrate Mansoura from b.l.o.o.d.y Steamer Point, nor the Falls from Prod country.

To the cab driver he said, "I'm working about half-way up, and looking for someone who takes in lodgers. Not too pricey. Yer know anyone? About half-way, near the Broadway. Is there anyone?'

He waited in the cab for several minutes for the other seats to be taken up in the shuttle service that had now largely replaced the inconsistencies of the bus time-table. The journey he'd made in from the airport, out on to the Antrim Road, his wait there, the trip back, the walk to the taxi rank, that delay sitting in the back waiting to go all had taken their toll in time.

Deep greyness was settling over the city, rubbing out its sharp lines, when the taxi, at last full, pulled away.

The first soldier in the patrol was up to the corner and round it before the man had reacted to the movement. The second gave him a chance to identify it as an army patrol. On the third and fourth he had begun to get an aim, and for the next man he was ready. Rifle at the shoulder. The upper part of the shadow cut out by the V of the leaf mechanism of his rear sight, and sliced by the upward thrust of the front sight at the far tip of the barrel. The fifth soldier had come fast round the corner, too close to his colleague in front, and paused for the other to move farther away before starting off again himself. He was stationary for one and a half seconds before the man fired. The shadow fell out from the darkness of the wall towards the corridor of light from Mrs Mulvenna's front room.

The man had time to see the stillness of the form, half on the pavement and half on the street, before he wormed and scrambled his way to the centre of the roof s.p.a.ce--and ran. His escape route took him along a catwalk of planks set across the gaps between the roof beams, in all traversing the roof s.p.a.ce of four homes. In the last house the light shone up among the eaves where the ceiling door had been left open for him. He swung down on to the landing, and then moved to the stairs leading to the back of the house and the kitchen. The Armalite was grabbed from him by a teenager who had been listening for the clatter of the escape across the ceiling. Within three minutes it would be in a plastic bag, sealed, and dropped under the grating in the back yard, with a thin line of dark cord tied to the bars to retrieve it later.

The man went out into the back yard, scrambled over the five-foot high fence, ducked across the back entry, and felt for the rear doors on the far side till he came to the one off the hook. It remained for him to cut through that house, and he was out in the next street. Here he didn't run, but ambled the three hundred yards farther away from the killing where he rang a front-door bell. A youth came out immediately, motioned him to a waiting car, and drove him away.

There had been no pursuit. No soldier had seen the fractional flash of the barrel as the man fired. Five of them, shouting and waving, fear in their eyes, had sunk to firing positions in the doorways of the street. Two more gathered beside their dead colleague.

Before the ambulance came it was plain that their efforts were pointless, but they fumbled the medical dressing clear from his webbing belt and placed it over the b.l.o.o.d.y chest wound.

Harry heard the single shot from far up the road when the taxi was caught in stationary traffic at the lights just beyond the huge bulk of the hospital building. As the taxi stayed unmoving, log jammed in the sea of vehicles, a convoy of armoured cars swept by up the wrong side of the road, horns blaring and headlights on. Soldiers jumped from the moving column to take up their shooting positions on the main road, while others poured into the side streets. Harry saw the blue flas.h.i.+ng light of an ambulance swing sharply out of a side street, one hundred and fifty yards up on the right, and turn down towards them. The ambulance was a Saracen with huge red crosses on white background painted on the sides. Turning his head Harry saw through the flapping open doors at the back two dark shapes bent over the top end of the stretcher. The handles of the stretcher, between them a pair of boots stuck out beyond the tailboard of the armoured car.

It was some minutes before the traffic moved again. None of the other pa.s.sengers in the cab--the old lady with her month's best shopping, or the two office girls from Andersonstown--spoke a word. When the cab reached the street corner where the ambulance had emerged the soldier in the middle of the road waved them out and to the wall. He ran his hands fast and effectively over the shoulders, torsos and legs of Harry and the driver, contenting himself with examining the women's shopping holder and the girls" bags. He looked very young to Harry.

'What happened?" Harry asked.

'Shut your face, you pig-a.r.s.ed Mick.'

The taxi dropped him off seventy-five yards farther on. He was to try Mrs Duncan's. First left, twelfth door on the right: "Delrosa'.

It didn't take Harry long to settle into the small room that Mrs Duncan showed him at the back of her two-storey house--about as long as it takes to unpack the contents of a small suitcase and put them into a medium-size chest of drawers and a wardrobe. She suggested he wash his hands and then come down to the big room where the other guests would gather, first for tea, then to watch television. She asked no questions about him, obviously prepared to give the stranger time to fill in his background at his own pace. Looking across from his window, Harry could see the Falls Road where the army Land-Rovers and Saracens still criss-crossed back and forth.

There were six at tea, all eating urgently and with concentration. the way to avoid talking, thought Harry. Stuff your face, with just a mutter for the milk or the sugar, or the fresh-cut bread, and you ilnn't have to say anything. No one mentioned the shooting, but it nc into the room with the BBC local television news. Mrs Duncan ( ame from the kitchen to the doorway, leaning there, arms folded, in licr ap.r.o.n. A single shot had killed the first soldier to die in Northern Ireland for three weeks. The pictures showed troops illuminated in doorways and manning road blocks. Over the sound track but half drowned by the report came the words Tut that b.l.o.o.d.y light off.' Then there was only the meaningless picture of the tarmacadam with the dark stain on it, something for the colour TV people but just a shapeless island on Mrs Duncan's set. Then out of the blackness the overlit whitened face of the young reporter as the hand light picked him up at close range.

He had little to say. A routine foot patrol in the Broadway district of the Falls had been ambushed. A single shot had been fired, fatally wounding a soldier just as darkness was falling. He said that an extensive follow-up operation was still in progress, that the area had been cordoned off, and that all cars leaving it were being searched. The camera cut to a hara.s.sed-looking officer.

Q. What happened here, Colonel?

A. This is really a most shocking attack, a most cowardly murder. One of my soldiers was shot down in cold blood, quite without warning. A horrible, despicable crime. Q. Did your men get a sight of the gunman? A. No, it wasn't till we were engaged in an extensive followup operation-- which you will have seen for yourself--that we found the place where the gunman was hiding. He was up in the roof of a derelict house, and he aimed at my patrol through the gap left by a missing tile.

Q. Would this have been the work of an expert? A. An expert--in terrorism, yes, in killing, yes. We found sixty eight cigarette b.u.t.ts in the roof. He'd been there some time. He'd put four chairs on the staircase of the house--it's very narrow anyway. If we'd been chasing him and had run into the building those chairs would have lost us several seconds. That's the work of an expert killer. He'd chosen a house which had a communicating pa.s.sage down the length of the terrace roof. That's the way he got out.

Q. Did anyone see anything on the street?

A. I'm sure half the street knew what was going on. Lots of people, ma.s.ses of them, must have known a young man was going to be shot down in the gutter outside their homes. But I think your question is, did they identify the gunman to us? The answer there is decisively, No, they didn't. But many of them must know who the killer is--I appeal to them to use the police Confidential phone and stamp out this type of cruel, cowardly attack.

Q. Thank you, Colonel.

The programme changed to an interview in the studio. A Protestant politician and a Catholic politician were arguing over the same ground, with some minute variations, that they'd been debating on the same channel for the last four years. Between them was a link man who had been hosting them, feeding them their questions and winding them up over the same period. Before the talk was a minute old Mrs Duncan came forward like a battles.h.i.+p under power, and reached for the off switch.

'There's enough politics on the street without bringing them into my house. Just words. Won't do that young man any good. Mother of Jesus rest with him.'

A youngish man, opposite across the table from Harry, said, "If they stayed in their barracks they wouldn't get shot. If they weren't here there wouldn't be any shooting. You saw what they did when they came round here a few days ago. Taking the houses apart, lifting men, and blocking the streets. Claimed then it was because of that man that got shot in London. But the searches they did were nothing to do with it. Aggro, what they were looking for, nothing more. Hara.s.sment.'

n.o.body in the room responded. The young man looked round for someone to join in argument with. Harry sided with him. "If they were as busy chasing the Prods as us, they'd find things easier for themselves.'

The other looked at him, surprised to find support, if not a little disappointed that it was an ally who had put his cap in the ring. Harry went on, "I've been away a long time, but I can see in the few hours that I've been back where all the troops are. I've been abroad, but you still read the papers, you still see the news on the telly bought from the BBC. You get to feel the way things are going.

Nothing's done about those Prods, only us.'

It was not easy for Harry, that first time. With practice he would iviin the facility to sing the praises of the IRA. But the first time lound it was hard going. Never like this in Mansoura. Never went .lown the souk and shouted the odds about what a fine bloke Quahtan As-Sbaabi was, victory to the NLF, out with the imperialists. Just kept quiet there, and scuffed around in the dirt, and watched. But a different scene here. Got to be in the crowd. He excused himself, saying he was tired and had been travelling all day, and went to his room.

six.

It was just after seven when Harry woke. He knew soon enough that this was the day he started working and moved on to active service. The euphoria of the farewells, the back-slaps and good luck calls, were over. He had arrived. Now would begin the hard work of moving on to the inside. He checked his watch. Well, twenty minutes more and then it could all begin, then he would get up.

He'd known since his training started that the initial period of infiltration was going to be the difficult part. This was where the expertise and skill entered in his file after Mansoura would count. They had chosen him after going over those files, and those of a dozen other men, because they had thought that he above all of them stood the best chance of being able to adapt in those early critical hours in the new environment.

They'd told him he must take it slowly, not lambast his way in. Not make so much of his presence that he attracted attention and with that, inevitably, investigation. But they also stressed that time was against him. They pointed to the enormous benefits the opposition were gaining from the failure of the vast military force to catch the a.s.sa.s.sin.

The dilemma was spelled out to him. How much speed could he generate? How fast could he move into that fringe world which had contact with the gunmen? How far into that world must he go to get near the nucleus of the organization where the man he hunted was operating? These were his decisions. The advice had been given, but now he had to control his own planning.

They had emphasized again and again at Dorking that his own death would be bad news all round. Enormous embarra.s.sment to HMG. No risks should be taken unless absolutely essential. It had amused him, drily. You send a man to infiltrate the most successful urban terrorist movement in the world over the last twenty-five years, and tell him if he gets shot it would be awkward. Not much time to mess about with the frills. They'd said if it was going to work out for him it would be in the first three weeks. By then they expected something to bite on ... not necessarily the man's full name but a regular haunt, the address of a friend. A hint. Anything on to which they could turn the huge and formal military and police machine. The great-force was poised and waiting for him to tell it where to hit, and that pleased him.

He was starting with little enough to go on. The same available to everyone else in the city--or virtually the same. He had in his mind the photokit picture, with the knowledge that it was superior to the one issued in police stations and army posts. But that was all that tipped the scales in his favour. Nothing else, and not much to set against the disadvantages of arriving as a stranger in a community beset by informers and on its guard against them. His first problem would be the infiltration of the Catholic population, let alone the IRA, and becoming known to people already haunted by the fear of army plain-clothes units cruising in unmarked cars, laundry vans and ice-cream trucks with hidden spy holes of the Protestant UVF and UFF killer squads. He had to win a degree of confidence among some small segment of these people before he could hope to operate with success.

Davidson had struck a chord when he said, "They seem to have the ability to smell an outsider. They close ranks well. It's like the instinct of a fox that's learned to react when there's a hostile being close by. G.o.d knows how they do it, but they have a feeling for danger. Much of it is how you look, the way you walk, the way you go along the pavement. Whether you can look as though you belong. You need confidence. You have to believe that you're not the centre of attention the whole time The first trick is to get yourself a base. Establish yourself there, and then work outwards. Like an upside-down pyramid.'