The Armada Legacy

Chapter Fourteen

With the realisation of what had happened to Forsyte, the situation was suddenly totally altered. Things were about to turn an awful lot uglier than they already were.

Ben also knew now that there was no point in crossing back into the Republic. He was already on the side of the border he needed to be. Sitting behind the wheel of the BMW at Derry Airport, he took out his phone and dialled a number in Italy. After a few rings he heard a familiar, warm voice that would normally have made him smile. ‘Pronto?’ she said.

‘Hello, Mirella.’

‘Ben!’ She was delighted to hear from him. ‘Are you coming to see us again?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘What is wrong?’ she asked, hearing the tone of his voice.

‘I need to talk to Boonzie, Mirella. Is he there?’

‘I will call him,’ she said anxiously. A muffled clattering on the line as Mirella laid down the phone and went off to fetch her husband. Ben could hear her voice in the background shouting ‘Archibald!’. Boonzie would never have tolerated anyone but his beloved wife calling him by his real name. After a few moments, his gruff Scots voice came on the line.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve been following the British news,’ Ben said.

‘What’s going on?’ Ben could see the grizzled, granite-faced Scot standing there, his eyes narrowing in concern.

‘I have a problem, Boonzie.’

Boonzie McCulloch had been a long-serving 22 SAS sergeant, and a mentor and friend of Ben’s for many years, before he’d astounded everyone by quitting the army to settle in the south of Italy and set up a smallholding with a vivacious black-haired Neapolitan beauty he’d fallen head over heels in love with while on a few days’ leave. The flinty, battle-hardened fifty-nine-year-old had found his own private heaven at last, contentedly working his sun-kissed couple of hectares to produce the basil and tomato crop that Mirella turned into gourmet bottled sauces the local restaurant trade couldn’t do without.

But the soft life hadn’t got to Boonzie completely. He still had a few aces up his sleeve, like the small arsenal of military weaponry that had got Ben out of a sticky moment in Rome the year before. And because the SAS had always been so much more deeply embroiled in matters of political secrecy and delicacy than other British army regiments, he still carried around with him a headful of the kind of privileged information that the likes of Detective Inspector Hanratty wouldn’t have had access to in a thousand years.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Boonzie muttered when Ben had finished quickly filling him in. ‘Need help?’ He’d always been the practical type. Ben knew it would take only one word for him to lay down everything and be on the first flight to Ireland.

‘I just need to know I’m on the right track. Forsyte. Roger Forsyte. It was before my time, but it’s ringing bells.’

‘Aye, me too, laddie. Big fuckin’ bells. In some ears they havnae stopped ringing since Belfast, 1979.’

Ben nodded, but it wasn’t much of a relief to have it confirmed that his hunch had been correct. ‘The Liam Doyle incident.’

‘Think it was maybe my second stint in that godforsaken hole,’ Boonzie said, ‘maybe my third, when they found Doyle’s body. This shit was happening all the time, but they’d normally just blow your brains oot, not chop both your arms off that way. Nasty.’

‘About six inches above the wrist?’

‘With a cleaver,’ Boonzie said. ‘While he was still alive.’

‘Just like Forsyte.’

‘Then they put a nine-milly between his eyes and dumped the body out in the sticks in County Antrim. It was never confirmed that Doyle was IRA. Neither were the rest of the rumours, like who’d done it. A lot of folks were certain it wisnae the handiwork of the UVF or any of the other Loyalist bunch, though Lord knows some o’ those fuckers were even worse than the Republican boys. Let’s just say that in certain circles, it wisnae any secret who wiz behind it.’

‘And Forsyte?’

‘Roger Forsyte,’ Boonzie said. ‘Hold on a sec. I’m looking him up on the internet.’ Ben could hear a tapping of keys. ‘Here he is. Oh, aye. Marine Exploration?’ Boonzie gave a dark chuckle. ‘So that’s what former MI5 agents end up doing, digging up sunken treasure? There’s a lot of digging up to be done in Northern Ireland too. A lot of dead bodies were put in the ground in those years, and yer man’d know where to find half of them.’

‘You’re sure? Forsyte was MI5?’

‘You can bet your arse on it, Ben. I’ve seen that face before. These bastards were all over the place. And I heard the name Forsyte mentioned more than a couple of times.’

‘I need facts, Boonzie. Not surmises.’

‘Trust me. He was mixed up deep in this shite.’

Although it had taken place a decade or so before Ben had joined the army and while he was still a boy, he’d heard enough about that unsavoury chapter in Ulster’s history to know of the scandal that had erupted over the Liam Doyle incident. It was later to be overshadowed by the events of Operation Flavius during the Thatcher era, when three unarmed suspected Provisional IRA members had been shot dead in Gibraltar by the SAS amid strong concerns about government cover-ups and misinformation – but at the time the cruel, unusual nature of Liam Doyle’s murder and the mass of rumours surrounding it had sparked off a great deal of heat. Many Catholic Republicans had been convinced that the brutal killing had been sanctioned by British Intelligence.

Ben knew all about the ugly, complex backdrop to the incident, too. In those days, Northern Ireland had been the tense staging ground for a hidden war between Britain and America, both of which were illicitly supplying weapons and intelligence to their respective sides of the conflict. On the one hand, interests sympathetic to the Republican cause within the CIA were allegedly arming the Provos with weaponry and information to help them kill their Loyalist enemies. As part of the deal, the FBI had turned a blind eye when IRA members visited America to liaise with their secret allies there. Meanwhile, the British government and MI5 had been doing exactly the same thing to help the opposite side, by providing guns, explosives and intelligence to members of both the Ulster Defence Force and Ulster Volunteer Force against the IRA, with the tacit compliance of Northern Ireland’s police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Both sides had been guilty of all manner of atrocities, but few had been so shocking as the mutilation done to Liam Doyle.

‘Here’s what I heard, strictly off the record,’ Boonzie said. ‘One of Forsyte’s MI5 subordinates was making an undercover weapons drop-off to a UVF cell when he was nabbed by a bunch of IRA led by Liam Doyle. Never confirmed, mind. The agent’s body was dumped the same day from a moving car outside the RUC station in Dungiven. It was soon afterwards that Liam Doyle was kidnapped from his home in the middle of the night and ended up dead in a ditch with his arms hacked off. Word had it that some MI5 chappies got their arses toasted over it, but there was never any official inquiry. Just a lot of extremely pissed-off people who wanted Forsyte dead. One in particular. Liam Doyle’s brother, Fergus, swore that he’d get his revenge, no matter if it took him the rest of his life to catch up with the bastards that’d done it.’

‘Fergus Doyle.’ Ben had heard that name.

‘Bad rep,’ Boonzie said. ‘Made the Shankill Butchers look like a bunch of choirboys. He’d be an auld man now, Ben, but if he’s still alive he’s an evil bastard. This isnae something you can deal with alone. Talk to the cops, for Christ’s sake.’

‘No chance. Thanks, Boonzie. Take care.’ And before his old friend could say any more, Ben ended the call.