Deep Black

34

A huge amount of automatic gunfire kicked off close by. From where I was, near the main entrance, tracer seemed to bounce straight up into the sky. It wasn’t necessarily a contact. After all, it was Thursday night. I went out into the garden to see if anyone had arrived early. There was no music yet but a couple of guys were preparing the barbecue. They weren’t remotely interested in the firefights as they tipped charcoal from paper sacks into two sawn-off oil drums.

I wandered over to the pool. I couldn’t see the bottom of it from where I was, but I could hear a chorus of grunts and the rhythmic slap of running feet. I went right up to the edge and looked in, just as another burst of tracer shot skywards. I saw a headful of sweaty, short, wiry ginger hair training in the semi-darkness. The last time I’d seen Danny Connor was in Northern Ireland in 1993 – in a gym, naturally.

He pounded up and down the pool, totally focused on the job in hand. I watched him for several minutes, wondering whether to interrupt. He ran to one end, did twenty press-ups, spun round, ran to the other and did some sit-ups. I started to grin like an idiot. Connor’s motto had always been: ‘I train, therefore I am’. Well, after he got married it was. Before that it was ‘Training + lots of = women pulled’. He had to do a lot of training in those days to be in with a chance. His face was covered with acne scars; it looked like someone had been chewing it. His accent did him no favours either. He came from the bit of Glasgow where everyone sounds like Rab C. Nesbit on speed. Connor hadn’t been born, he’d done star jumps out of the womb. I worked with him on and off in the late eighties and early nineties. In all that time the sum total of any conversation from him was, ‘You done yours yet?’

‘Oi, Connor! You’re getting a bit of lard on!’

He stopped running, but dropped to do some sit-ups as he looked up. I stood there and smiled, but he didn’t react. He sprinted to the other side and started to do some burpees.

I shouted, ‘Connor, you knobber. It’s Nick!’

‘Yeah, I know, don’t wear the name out. You done yours yet?’

I sat down on the edge of the pool, dangling my legs, as he thundered up and down.

We were together in an OP once, overlooking a farm. PIRA had an arms cache in one of the barns. Our information was that in the next eight days an ASU [active-service unit] was coming to lift the weapons for a hit. There were four of us in the team, and we’d been lying there for five or six days. One man was always on stag, watching the target; another was always protecting the rear. Two would be resting or manning the radio.

The success of these jobs depended on being honest with each other, not macho. If you were tired and you needed a rest, you just said so. Better that than bluff it and fall asleep on stag just as the ASU appeared. It was no bad thing to turn round and say, ‘Can someone take over for a bit, because I’m fucked?’

We were in a dip in the ground in a forestry block, no protection apart from our Gore-Tex sniper suits and M16s. Connor was doing his two hours on stag, covering the target. I was lying behind him, weapon at the ready, but resting. I felt a boot make contact with my shoulder, and looked up to see him gesturing for me to come up alongside while he kept his eyes on the barn. I thought he’d seen something, but he hadn’t. ‘Take over for half an hour, will you?’

No problems about that. I took the binos and moved into position behind the GPMG [general-purpose machine-gun]. Connor crawled backwards and I assumed he’d either got his head down or was taking a shit into a handful of clingfilm – we never left anything behind to show we’d been there – so when I heard his muffled grunts I didn’t even bother to glance behind me. Ten minutes later he was still going strong: the fucker was doing press-ups. He carried on like that a full half-hour, then slid up next to me, sweating but happy. ‘I had to get some in.’ He gulped in oxygen. ‘It’s been nearly a week.’

Twenty minutes later, he climbed the ladder to ground level. His running vest and shorts were soaking wet. His body might have been a temple, but the rest of him wasn’t exactly a work of art. He couldn’t reverse the damage years of working in the Middle East had done to the pale skin that comes with ginger pubic hair. The skin around his eyes and mouth was more creased than the bartender’s shirt. Mrs Connor called them laughter lines, but nothing was that funny. Not to him anyway.

I stretched out my hand. ‘All right?’

He gave me the once-over. ‘You’re in shit state. You still getting it in?’

‘Nah, been busy, mate.’

‘Hey, my boy’s nineteen, at university now.’

I was taken aback. Connor had gone off message. Maybe he thought I was a lost cause when it came to the god of training. ‘That old?’

‘Yep. I’m only getting it in twice a day.’ That hadn’t taken long, then. He was on a twenty-second loop. ‘I’d rather be swimming but the fuckers won’t fill the pool. They can, you know – I’ve heard other hotels have, but the fuckers here won’t fill it.’

I was dying to tell him the al-Hamra had a full pool but I’d be here all night listening to him honk about it.

‘Who do you work for?’

‘CNN. It’s a good team. I’ve been with them since Christmas. We came up from Kuwait with the Marines. It was difficult getting the training in to begin with, but there’s no problem now. If the fucking pool was working I could get some decent stuff in.’

‘What’s it like here?’

As if in answer, another burst of AK rattled around the streets somewhere beyond the safety of the garden.

‘Belfast times ten. The Yanks out here, I feel sorry for them. They haven’t got a fucking clue what they’re doing. They’re not trained for all this shit.’ He stood with his hands on his hips, panting away. ‘Even during the war, we’d be harbouring up for the night and they wouldn’t send out clearing patrols. Then they’d honk in the morning that they were getting hit. For fuck’s sake! I took two American patrols out myself, just to make sure we were secure.’

There was a massive wave of AK gunfire just the other side of the wall. This time, everyone ducked. Then we heard the warbling of the women. It was OK. It was a wedding.