I Hear the Sirens in the Street

Read the first chapter of

And In the Morning I’ll Be Gone

the third volume in the Sean Duffy series

1: THE GREAT ESCAPE

The beeper began to whine at 4.27 p.m. on Wednesday the 25th September, 1983. It was repeating a shrill C sharp at four second intervals, which meant (for those of us who had bothered to read the manual) that it was a Class 1 emergency. This was a general alert being sent to every off-duty policeman, police reservist and soldier in Northern Ireland. There were only five Class 1 emergencies and three of them were a Soviet nuclear strike, a Soviet invasion and what the civil servants who wrote the manual had nonchalantly called “an extra-terrestrial trespass”.

So you’d think that I would have dashed across the room, grabbed the beeper and run with a mounting sense of panic to the nearest telephone. You’d have thought wrong.

For a start I was as high as Skylab, baked on Turkish black cannabis resin that I’d cooked myself and rolled into sweet Virginia tobacco. And then there was the fact that I was playing Galaxian on my Atari 5200 with the sound on the TV maxed and the curtains pulled for a full dramatic and immersive experience. I didn’t notice the beeper because its insistent whine sounded a lot like the red ships peeling off from the main Galaxian fleet as they swooped in for their oh so predictable attack.

They didn’t present any difficulty at all despite the sick genius of their teenage programmers back in Osaka. I had the moves and the skill and they had ones and zeroes. I slid the joystick to the left, hugged the corners of the screen and easily dodged their layered cluster-bomb assault. A lone straggler attempted to trap me with his guided missiles but I was miles too fast for him and skated casually out of his way. That survived, I eased into the middle of the screen and killed the entire squadron as they attempted to get back into formation. It was only when the screen was blank and I saw that I was nudging close to my previous high score that I noticed the grey plastic rectangle sitting on the coffee table, beeping and vibrating with what in retrospect seemed to be more than its usual vehemence.

I threw a pillow over the beeper, sat back down on the rug and continued with the game.

The phone rang and rang and finally, more out of boredom than curiosity, I paused the game and answered it. It was Sergeant Pollock, the duty man at Bellaughray Station.

“Duffy, you didn’t answer your beeper, ya eejit!” he said.

“The Soviet Armies must have blocked the signal.”

“What?”

“What’s going on, Pollock?” I asked him.

“You’re in Carrick, right?”

“Aye.”

“Report to your local police station. This is a Class 1 emergency.”

“What’s the story?”

“It’s big. There’s been a mass breakout of IRA prisoners from the Maze prison.”

“Jesus. What a cock up.”

“It’s panic stations, mate. We need every man.”

“All right. But remember this is my off day, so I’ll be on double time.”

“How can you think of money at a time like this, Duffy?”

“Surprisingly easily, Pollock. Remember double time. Put it in the log.”

“Just get down to Carrick!”

“Another fine job from Her Majesty’s Prison Service, eh?”

“You can say that again. Let’s just hope we can clean up their mess.”

I hung up, pulled the Atari out of the back of the TV and flipped on the news.

HM Prison Maze (previously known as Long Kesh) was a maximum security prison considered to be one of the most escape-proof penitentiaries in Europe. Of course whenever you heard words like escape proof you immediately thought of that other great Belfast innovation, the unsinkable ship, Titanic.

The facts came drifting out as I put on my uniform and body armour. Thirty-eight Provisional Irish Republican Army prisoners had escaped from HBlock 7 of the facility. They had used smuggled-in guns to take hostages, then they’d grabbed a laundry van and stormed the gates. One prison officer was dead and twenty others had been injured.

“Among the escapees are convicted murderers and some of the IRA’s leading bomb makers,” said a breathless young newsreader in the BBC studio.

“Well, that’s fantastic,” I muttered and wondered if it was anybody I’d personally put away.

I made a cup of instant coffee and had a bowl of Frosties to get the Turkish black out of my system and then I went outside to my waiting BMW.

“Oh, Mr Duffy, you won’t have heard the news!” Mrs Smith said to me from over the fence.

I was wearing a flak jacket, a riot helmet and carrying a Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine gun so it wasn’t a particularly brilliant deduction from Mrs S, but still I gave her a grim little smile and said, “About the escape, you mean?”

“Yes, it’s shocking, they’ll murder us all in our beds! What will I do with Stephen away on the oil rigs!”

She was an attractive woman, Mrs Smith, even in her 1950s nightdress and with rollers in her hair.

“Don’t worry, Mrs Smith, I’ll be back soon,” I said, trying to sound like Christopher Reeve in Superman II when he reassures Lois that General Zod will be no match for him.

I’m not sure she quite got the element of self-parody in my Reeve impersonation but she did lean over the fence, give me a kiss on the cheek and whisper “Thank you”.

I responded with a little nod of the head, walked down the path and got inside my BMW. Before I put the key in the ignition I got out again and looked underneath the vehicle for mercury tilt bombs. There were none and I re-entered and stuck in a cassette of Robert Plant’s Principle of Moments. This was my fourth listen to Plant’s solo album and I still couldn’t bring myself to like it. It was all synthesizers and drum machines and high-pitched vocals. It was a sign of the times, and with the year nearly over, it was safe to say that 1983 was turning out to be the worst year in popular music for about two decades.

I drove along the Scotch Quarter and turned right into Carrickfergus RUC station for the first time in a long time. It was a very strange experience and the young guard at the gate didn’t know me. He checked my warrant card, nodded, looked at me, frowned, raised the barrier and let me through.

I parked in the crappy visitors’ car park far from the station and walked to the duty sergeant’s desk.

There’d been a few changes. They’d painted the walls blue and there were potted plants everywhere. I knew that Chief Inspector Brennan had retired and in his place they had brought in an officer from Derry called Superintendent Carter. I didn’t know much about him except that he was young and full of ideas – which, admittedly, sounded just ghastly. But this wasn’t my manor anymore so what did it matter what they did to the decor.

Running Carrickfergus CID branch was my old adjutant and sparring partner, the freshly promoted Detective Sergeant John McCrabban, and that was a good thing.

I went upstairs slipped in the back of the briefing and tried not to draw attention to myself.

“… might be of some use. We’re instituting Operation Cauldron. Blocking every road to and from the Maze. Our patch is the access roads to the north and east, the A2 and of course the roads to Antrim. We are coordinating with Ballyclare …”

Carter was tall with a prominent Adam’s apple and greying curly hair. He was rangy and he leaned over the podium in a menacing way as if he was going to clip you round the ear. I listened to his talk, which was a stab at Winston Churchill’s “Fight Them on the Beaches” speech. As rhetoric it was wildly over the top, but some of the young reserve constables clapped when it was done. As we were filing out of the conference room I said hello to a few old friends.

Inspector Douggie McCallister shook my hand. “It’s great to see you, Sean. Jeez, if you’d been here five minutes earlier you would have caught up with McCrabban and Matty, but they’re away with the riot police.”

They drew up the rosters. I went where they sent me which was a place called Derryclone on the shores of Lough Neagh. It took us over two and a half hours to get through all the police roadblocks so that we could get to Derryclone and set up our own roadblock. This was the much vaunted Operation Cauldron in action.

We set up our roadblock and guarded the sleepy road along Lough Neagh but it was soon evident that none of the Maze escapees were coming our way. We saw helicopters with spotlights flying back and forth from RAF Aldergrove and there were rumours that first, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland had resigned, and later, that Mrs Thatcher herself had resigned.

Neither were true. No one resigned and I prophesied that when the report into the break-out was published no one would get fired. The men at the roadblock were country boys from Ballymena who spoke in a dialect so thick I had trouble understanding them. Much of their conversation seemed to involve Jesus and tractors, an unlikely combination for anyone who doesn’t know Ballymena.

No one had thought to bring hot chocolate or hot cocoa or food or cigarettes. It began to drizzle around midnight and the night was long and cold.

We stopped two cars, a Reliant Robin and an Austin Maxi. Neither was filled with escaped prisoners. We listened in on the police radio traffic but it was confused and contradictory. There was rioting in West Belfast but this was an obvious ploy to distract the cops, and so central command didn’t divert many troops or peelers to deal with it. Just before dawn there was a bit of excitement on the southern part of the lough shore where an army helicopter pilot thought he had seen someone hiding in the reeds.

The radio barked into life and we and several other mobile patrols were scrambled and sent down to check it out. When we got there a small unit of Welsh Guards were shooting into the water with heavy machine guns. As the sun came up we saw that they had done a good job of massacring an exhausted flock of Greenland geese which had just touched down on their journey to the South of France.

We drove back to our outpost on the lough shore. We tuned in the BBC and the latest news was that eighteen of the escapees had been captured, but the rest had got clean away. At noon we got the list of names. All of them were unknown to me except for one… and that one was Dermot McCann.

Dermot and I had gone to school together in Derry at St Malachy’s. A really smart guy, he had been Head Boy when I had been Deputy Head Boy. Handsome, good at games and charming, Dermot had planned to go into the newspaper business and possibly into TV journalism. But the Troubles had changed all that and Dermot had joined the IRA just as I had once thought of doing at around the time of Bloody Sunday.

Through various machinations I had joined the police and Dermot had served several years in the Provos before getting himself arrested. He was a highly gifted IRA explosives expert and bomb maker who had only been betrayed in the end by a grass caught dealing drugs. The grass fingered him but there was no forensic evidence so the police had fitted him up by putting a fingerprint on some gelignite. He’d been found guilty and until his escape he’d been doing ten years for conspiracy to cause explosions.

I hadn’t thought of Dermot in a long time but in the weeks that followed the break-out we learned that he had been one of the masterminds behind the escape plan. Dermot had figured out a way of smuggling guns into the prison and it was his idea to take prison officers hostage and dress in their uniforms so the guard towers wouldn’t be alerted.

Dermot got to South Tyrone and over the border into the Irish Republic. We later learned from MI6 that he and an elite IRA team had been spotted at a terrorist training camp in Libya. But even on that miserable Thursday morning on the eastern shores of Lough Neagh, with the mist rising off the water and the rain drizzling from the grey September sky, I knew with the chilly certainty of a fairy story that our paths would cross again.

______________________

“A Sweet Little Bullet from A Pretty Blue Gun”, Thomas Waits © copyright Mushroom Music Pty Ltd on behalf of BMG Gold Songs/Six Palms Music Corporation. All print rights for Australia and New Zealand administered by Sasha Music Publishing, a division of All Music Publishing & Distribution Pty Ltd ACN 147 390 814. www.ampd.com.au. Used by Permission. All Rights Reserved. Unauthorised Reproduction is illegal.

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The right of Adrian McKinty to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Copyright © 2013 Adrian McKinty

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First published in 2013 by Serpent’s Tail,

an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

3A Exmouth House

Pine Street

London EC1R 0JH

website: www.serpentstail.com

ISBN 978 1 84668 818 8

eISBN 978 1 84765 929 3

Designed and typeset by Crow Books

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays, Bungay, Suffolk

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Works by Adrian McKinty published by Serpent’s Tail

The Dead Trilogy

Dead I Well May Be

The Dead Yard

The Bloomsday Dead

Fifty Grand

Falling Glass

The Sean Duffy thrillers

The Cold Cold Ground

I Hear the Sirens in the Street