Harry's Game

Chapter 4

Over the next fortnight the street scene in Belfast returned to its pre-Danby level of violence. It was widely recognized that in the wake of the killing the level of army activity had risen sharply, initially in the use of major cordon and search operations, merging into an increase in the number of spot raids on the homes of known republicans on the run. The army activity meant more men were charged with offences, but alongside their appearances in court was an upsurge in street rioting, something that had previously been almost eradicated. The army’s posture was sharply criticized by the minority politicians, who accused the troops of venting on innocent Catholic householders their frustrations at not being able to find Danby’s murderer.

The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland agreed to appear on the local Independent TV station and the regional BBC news programme to answer the allegations of Protestant papers that not enough was being done — that a British Cabinet Minister had been shot down in cold blood in front of his wife and children yet his killers were allowed to go free for fear of offending Catholic opinion.

Before appearing on television the Secretary of State called a meeting of his security chiefs, and heard both Frank Scott and General Fairbairn urge caution and patience. The General in particular was concerned lest a show of strength spread over several weeks undo the gradual return to something like normality. The three men were soon to leave for their various destinations — the politician for the studio, the General for Lisburn and the Chief Constable for his modern police headquarters — but first they walked on the lawn outside the Stormont residence of the Secretary of State. Away from the listening ears of secretaries, aides and bodyguards the General reported that his intelligence section had heard nothing of the killer in Belfast and there was some concern about whether the man they sought was even in the city. The Chief Constable added to the politician’s cross in reporting that his men too had been unable to uncover any hard information on the man. But the head of his Special Branch favoured the belief that the killer was in the city, and probably back in circulation. The Chief Superintendent in charge of picked detectives had a fair insight into the workings of his enemies’ minds, and had correctly read the desire of the Provisional IRA Army Council to get their man back into the mainstream.

For three minutes they talked in the centre of the lawn. The conversation ended when the Secretary of State quietly, and more than a little hesitantly, asked the General:

‘Jocelyn, no news I suppose on what the PM was talking about?’

‘None, nor will there be.’

The General made his way back to his car, turned and shouted a brusque farewell.

As the military convoy pulled away, the politician turned to the policeman. ‘We have to have this bastard soon. The political scene won’t hold up long otherwise. And there’s a lot of restiveness among the Loyalists. We need him quick, Frank, if the sectarianism isn’t to start up again. There’s not much time…’

He walked quickly now to his big maroon Rover with its reinforced sides and extra thick windows, with machine-guns, field dressings and gas masks alongside his official cases in the boot. He nodded to his driver, and then winced as the detective sitting in front of him loaded the clip of bullets into the butt of the 9mm Browning.

The car swung out into the open road for the drive into the city, with his escort close behind to prevent any other car slipping between them. ‘What a bloody carry-on,’ the politician observed as they swept through the traffic towards the television studios.

The interview of the Secretary of State was embargoed until 18.01 hours; its full text was issued by the Northern Ireland press office to Belfast newspapers. In essence the BBC and ITV transmissions were the same, and the public relations men put out only the BBC interview.

Most of the young Protestants who gathered in the side streets off the Albert Bridge Road, pelting the armoured vehicles as they went by, hadn’t seen the interview. But word had quickly spread through the Loyalist heartlands in the east and west of the city that the British had in some way glossed over the killing, not shown the determination to rout out those Provie rats who could murder a man in front of his bairns. The battalion on duty in Mountpottinger police station was put on fifteen minute readiness, and those making their way to the prosperous suburbs far out to the east of Belfast took long diversions, lest their cars became part of the sprouting barricades that the army crash-charged with their Saracens. Three soldiers were hurt by flying debris and the Minister’s broadcast was put down as the kindling point to the brushfire that was to smoulder for more than a week in the Protestant community.

Meanwhile Harry was being prepared for the awesome moment when he would leave the woods of Surrey and fly to Belfast, on his own, leaving the back-up team that now worked with him as assiduously as any heavyweight champion’s.

Early on Davidson had brought him a cassette recorder, complete with four ninety-minute tapes of Belfast accents. They’d been gathered by students from Queen’s University who believed they were taking part in a national phonetics study, and had taken their microphones into pubs, launderettes, working men’s clubs and supermarkets. Wherever there were groups gathered and talking in the harsh, cutting accent of Belfast, so different to the slower more gentle Southern speech, tapes had attempted to pick up the voices and record them. The tapes had been passed to the army press officer via a lecturer at the University, whose brother was on duty on the Brigade commander’s staff, and then, addressed to a fictitious major, flown to the Ministry of Defence. The sergeant on Davidson’s staff travelled to London to collect them from the dead-letter box in the postal section of the Ministry.

Night after night Harry listened to the tapes, mouthing over the phrases and trying to lock his speech into the accents he heard. After sixteen years in the army little of it seemed real. He learned again of the abbreviations, the slang, the swearing. He heard the way that years of conflict and alertness had stunted normal conversation; talk was kept to a minimum as people hurried away from shops once their business was done, and barely waited around for a quiet gossip. In the pubs he noticed that men lectured each other, seldom listening to replies, or interested in opinions different to their own. His accent would be critical to him, the sort of thing that could awake the first inkling of suspicion that might lead to the further check he knew his cover could not sustain.

His walls, almost bare when he arrived at the big house, were soon covered by aerial photographs of Belfast. For perhaps an hour a day he was left to memorize the photographs, learn the street patterns of the geometric divisions of the artisan cottages that had been allowed to sprawl out from the centre of the city. The developers of the nineteenth century had flung together the narrow streets and their back-to-back terraces along the main roads out of the city. Most relevant to Harry were those on either side of the city’s two great ribbons of the Falls and Shankill. Pictures of astonishing clarity taken from RAF cameras showed the continuous peace line, or the ‘interface’, as the army called it, the sheets of silvery corrugated iron that separated Protestant from Catholic in the no man’s land between the roads.

The photographs gave an idea of total calm, and left no impression of the hatred, terror and bestiality that existed on the ground. The open spaces of bombed devastation in any other British city would have been marked down as clearance areas for urban improvement.

From the distance of Germany — where theorists worked out war games in terms of divisions, tank skirmishes, limited nuclear warheads, and the possibility of chemical agents being thrown into a critical battle — it had become difficult for Harry to realize why the twenty or so thousand British soldiers deployed in the province were not able to wind up the Provisional campaign in a matter of months. When he took in the rabbit warren revealed by the reconnaissance photographs he began to comprehend the complexity of the problem. Displayed on his walls was the perfect guerrilla fighting base. A maze of escape routes, ambush positions, back entries, cul-de-sacs and, at strategic crossroads, great towering blocks of flats commanding the approaches to terrorist strongholds.

It was the adventure playground par excellence for the urban terrorist, Davidson would say, as he fired questions at Harry till he could wheel out at will all the street names they wanted from him, so many commemorating the former greatness of British arms — Balkan, Raglan, Alma, Balaclava — their locations, and the quickest way to get there. By the second week the knowledge was there and the consolidation towards perfection was under way. Davidson and his colleagues felt now that the filing system had worked well, that this man, given the impossible brief he was working under, would do as well as any.

Also in the bedroom, and facing him as he lay in bed, was the ‘tribal map’ of the city. That was the army phrase, and another beloved by Davidson. It took up sixteen square feet of space, with Catholic streets marked in a gentle grass-green, the fierce loyalist strongholds in the hard orange that symbolized their heritage, and the rest in a mustard compromise. Forget that lot, Davidson had said. That had meant something in the early days when the maps were drawn up.

‘Nowadays you’re in one camp or the other. There are no uncommitted. Mixed areas are three years out of date. In some it’s the Prods who’ve run, in others the other crowd.’

It had been so simple in Sheik Othman, when Harry had lived amongst the Adeni Arabs. The business of survival had occupied him so fully that the sophistications they were teaching him now were unnecessary. And there he had been so far from the help of British troops that he had become totally self-reliant. In Belfast he knew he must guard against the feeling that salvation was always a street corner away. He must reject that and burrow his way into the community if he was to achieve anything.

Outside the privacy of his room Harry seldom escaped the enthusiasm of Davidson, who personally supervised every aspect of his preparation. He followed Harry in the second week beyond the vegetable garden to the old and battered greenhouse, yards long and with its glass roofing missing, and what was left coated in the deep moss-green compost that fell from the trees. There were no nurtured tomatoes growing here, no cosseted strawberry cuttings, only a pile of sandbags at the opposite end to the door with a circular coloured target, virgin new, propped against them. Here they retaught Harry the art of pistol shooting.

‘You’ll have to have a gun over there — and not to wave about, Harry,’ Davidson laughed. ‘Just to have. You’d be the only physically fit male specimen in the province without one if you didn’t have a firearm of some sort. It’s a must, I’m afraid.’

‘I didn’t have one in Aden. Ridiculous, I suppose, but no-one suggested it.’

He took the gun from the instructor, grey-haired, hard-faced, lined from weather, wearing a blue, all-enveloping boiler suit and unmarked beret. He went through the precautionary drills, breaking the gun, flicking the revolving chamber that was empty, greased and black. The instructor counted out the first six shells.

Five times he reloaded the gun till the target was peppered and holed and askew.

‘It’s not the accuracy that counts so much with the first ones, sir,’ said the older man, pulling off his earmuffs, ‘it’s the speed you get the first one or two away. If you’re shooting straight enough for your opponent to hear them going by his ear that tends to be enough to get his head back a bit. But it’s getting the first one away that matters. Gets the initiative for you. There aren’t many men as will stand still and aim as you’re pulling the trigger for the first one. Get ’em going back and then worry about the aim for the third and fourth shot. And try not to fire more than the first four straight off. It’s nice to keep a couple just so that you have a chance to do something about it if things don’t turn out that well. Remember with this one it’s a great little gun, but it’s slow to load. That’s its problem. Everything else is OK.’

They went over the firing positions. Sometimes the classic right-arm-extended, sideways-on stance. ‘That’s if you’ve got all night, sir, and you don’t think he’s armed. Take your time and make sure. Doesn’t happen that often.’? Then they worked on the standard revolver-shooting posture. Legs apart, body hunched, arms extended, meeting in front of the eye line, butt held in both hands, the whole torso lunging at the target. ‘You’re small yourself then, sir, and you’ve got your whole body thrown in with the gun to get it away straight. You won’t miss often from that, and if you do you’ll give ’im such a hell of a fright that he won’t do much about it.’

‘What’s he like, Chief?’ Davidson said to the instructor.

‘We’ve had better through here, sir, and we’ve had worse. He’s quite straight but a bit slow as of now. I wouldn’t worry about that. If he has to use it he’ll be faster. Everyone is when it’s real.’

Harry followed Davidson out of the greenhouse and they walked together up the brick and weed path amongst the vegetables. It was mild for November; the trees, huge above them, were already without their load of leaves and above the trees the soft meandering grey clouds.

‘I think it’s going quite well, Harry — no, I mean very well at the moment. But I don’t want to minimize anything that you’re going to have to go through. It’s all very well here, swotting for an exam if you like… but the questions themselves are very tough when you get to the actual paper. Forgive the metaphor, Harry, but it’s not an easy road over there, however much we do for you here. There are some things we can iron out at this end. Accent. It’s critical for immediate and long-term survival. You can spare your blushes but I think that’s coming along very well. Your background knowledge is fine, detail of events, names, folklore — that is all good. But there are other more complex factors, about which we cannot really do very much, and which are just as vital.’

They stopped now some twenty-five yards from the house on the edge of the old tennis court. Davidson was looking for the words. Harry wasn’t going to help him; that wasn’t his style.

‘Look, Harry. Just as important as the accent, and getting the background right, and knowing what the hullabaloo is about, is how you are going to stand up to this yourself. It’s my job to send you in there as perfectly equipped as possible. Right? Well, the thing I cannot actually gauge is how you’ll soak up the punishment of just existing there. You could have an isolation problem… loneliness, basically. No-one to confide in, not part of a local team, completely on your own. This could be a problem. I don’t know the answer to it, I don’t think you’re liable to suffer too greatly from it — that’s my reading of your file. Sorry, but we go through it most nights with a fine blade. Unless you’re aware of it, and bolt it down, there’ll come a time when you’ll want to tell someone about yourself, however obliquely, however much at a tangent. You’ll say now, never, never in a month of whatevers, but believe me it’ll happen, and you have to watch it.’

Harry searched his face, noting for the first time since he’d come to the big house the concern of the other man. Davidson went on, ‘After Aden we’re pretty confident in your ability to look after yourself. There’s a lot in the file on that. I’ve no reason to disbelieve it, you’ve shown me none. The simple day-to-day business won’t be pleasant but will be bearable. The other thing you have to consider is if you’re discovered — what happens then? There is a fair chance that if they spot you we may be getting some sort of feedback as they build up information and we’ll have time to shift you out in a hurry. You may notice something, a tail, a man watching you, questions being asked. Don’t hang about then, just come back. What I’m getting at is difficult enough to say, but you have to face it, and you’ll be better for facing it. You have to work out how you’ll react if they take you alive.’

Harry grimaced weakly. The older man was fumbling about trying to say the most obvious thing of the whole operation, stumbling in his care not to scratch the varnish of morale that was coated sometimes thickly, sometimes sparsely on all these jobs.

‘I think I can help you,’ Harry smiled at him. ‘You want to know whether I’ve considered the question of being taken, tortured and shot. Yes. You want to know whether I’m going to tell them all about here, you and everything else. Answer, I don’t know. I think not, I hope not. But I don’t know. You don’t know these things, and there’s no absolute statement I can make that would be of any use. But I’ve thought of it, and I know what you’d hope from me. Whether you’ll get it I just don’t know.’

They began to walk again. Davidson swung his right arm round behind Harry’s back and slapped his far shoulder. Like a father, thought Harry, and he’s scared stiff. It’s always been nice and comfortable for him, sitting at a desk packing the nameless numbered men off to heaven-knows where, but this time the jungle’s been creeping a bit close.

‘Thank you, Harry. That was very fairly put. Very fair. There’s things that have to be discussed if one’s to keep these things professional. I’m grateful to you. I think your attitude is about right.’ Thank God for that, Harry thought, now he’s done his duty. We’ve had our facts of life talk, ready to go out into the big nasty world, and don’t put your hands up little girls’ skirts. God, he’s relieved he’s got that little lot over.

As they came to the paint-chipped back door, Davidson started again. ‘You know, Harry, you haven’t told us much about home, about your wife. The family. It’s an aspect we haven’t really had time to go into.’

‘There’s nothing to worry about there. Not that I know of. I suppose you never do till it’s too late to be worrying about that sort of thing. She’s very level. Not complicated. That sounds pretty patronizing, but I don’t mean that. She’s used to me going away in a hurry, at least was used to it when we were younger. It’s not been so frequent over the last few years, but I think she’s OK.’

‘Did she know what you were doing in Aden?’

Harry said it slowly, thoughtfully, ‘No. Not really. I didn’t have time or the opportunity to write. There had been those little sods rolling grenades into the married quarters and smuggling bombs in with the food and things like that. The families went home before I became involved in the special stuff. I didn’t tell her much about it when it was all over. There wasn’t much to tell, not in my terms.’

‘I’m sorry you had to come over here without being able to see her.’

‘Inevitable. It’s the way it is. She’s not very service-minded. Doesn’t live off married mess nights. Doesn’t really get involved with the army scene. I think I prefer it that way. She’d like me out, but I tell her earning anyone else’s shilling than the Queen’s isn’t that easy these days. I think she understands that.’

‘The postcards will start arriving soon. The first lot that you did. And you’d better do some more before you move on.’ Davidson sounded anxious, wanting to do it right, thought Harry. As if there was anything he could say about — what was the word he used? — this ‘aspect’ of the job. Of course she’d want to know where he was, of course if she knew she would be stunned with worry. What else could she be, and what could be done about it? Nothing.

They hesitated outside the door of the big room where the work was done.

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 exercizing 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 analysed. 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 space 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 glasses 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 Provos 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 worth taking.’

They wished him luck. A little formal. Harry 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 explosives officer as he was putting the final touches to a seventy-five-pound gelignite bomb. The officer’s fingers had moved some three-eighths 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 off. 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 cushions 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 front-room 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 they 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 worthwhile.

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 country voices as they passed by unaware of his presence above.

Across the man’s knee was an Armalite rifle. Small, light-weight, with shocking high velocity hitting power. The bodywork of the rifle was of black plastic, made in Japan, built under licence as a copy of the American infantry’s M16 weapon. The Kalashnikov 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.