I Hear the Sirens in the Street

EPILOGUE: A FOOT PATROL THROUGH THE ABYSS

Images from the asymmetric wars of the future: curling pigtails of smoke from hijacked cars, Army helicopters hovering above a city like mosquitoes over a water hole, heavily armed soldiers and policemen walking in single file on both sides of a residential street …

Night is falling.

The sky is the colour of porter.

The soldiers are carrying semi-automatic SLR rifles and wearing full body armour. We, the embedded cops, are wearing flak jackets and carrying Sterling submachine guns.

We are watching windows and rooftops. We are spaced well apart so that a bomb or a rocket-propelled grenade cannot kill all of us.

Every hundred metres the pointman alternates. Every dozen paces or so the man at the rear does a one-eighty and walks backwards for a step or two.

Even we seasoned veterans are pumping adrenalin. The street is full of civilians and any one of them could be a watcher for an IRA button man, ready to detonate a booby trap under a car or dug into a road culvert. There could be unseen assassins waiting behind windows and doors with sniper rifles or anti-tank rockets.

Is this what the squaddies signed on for? These British soldiers who were brought up on Zulu and The Longest Day.

This is the way it’s going to be from now on.

Wars in cities.

Wars with civilians all around.

Make one mistake and you’re dead.

Make another kind of mistake and you’re on the TV news.

We walk through the maze of red-bricked terraced houses off the Falls Road. This part of West Belfast that has been ruined by endemic conflict and economic catastrophe and suicide martyr cult.

Bomb sites. Waste ground. Helicopters throwing up dust from pulverized brick and stone.

Recall the noise boots make on cobbles. Recall the eyes watching you. Recall the fear.

Recall the sights: the scene of a notorious ambush, the graffiti proclaiming death to enemies of the IRA, a bonfire in the middle of a street.

At a road junction a cat has been shoved into a birdcage. A young private hesitates and turns to look at his commanding officer. He wants to save the cat but everyone shakes their head at him. It could so easily be a booby trap. Such things and worse have been done in the past.

People jeer as we walk by.

Others make throat-cutting gestures.

I thought that my days of foot patrols were behind me. Already the sweat is pouring down my thighs. A kid playing kerby with a soccer ball catches my eye.

“Bang, bang, you’re dead,” he mouths at me.

I fake a bullet in my gut and he grins.

Hearts and minds.

One heart and one mind.

The patrols turns on Divis Drive.

It’s getting dark now. The sun has set behind the Knockagh. It’s cold. Later they say it might snow. We’re now at Reilig Bhaile an Mhuilinn, as the Republicans call it. Mill Town Cemetery, to you and me.

This is where the IRA buries its dead.

“Let’s take a look through the graveyard, lads,” the commanding officer says. He’s a Scot from Edinburgh. A boy really. Fresh out of Sandhurst. Must be twenty or twenty-one. A young officer of the Black Watch. My life completely in the hands of a green lieutenant walking through a city he doesn’t know, on his first or possibly second combat patrol.

We cross the Falls Road in single file.

The traffic waits for us.

We walk through the cemetery gates. An experienced staff sergeant whispers something to the lieutenant. The lieutenant grins and nods, agreeing to the sergeant’s suggestion.

I look at the other two policemen on patrol with me. They shrug. They have no idea what the squaddies are up to either.

The patrol makes straight for the Republican Plot. The graves of all the IRA men and women who have died for Ireland.

We reach the final resting place of Bobby Sands. The martyr in chief. The IRA commander in the Long Kesh prison who starved himself to death over sixty-six days.

The sergeant takes something from a pocket underneath his Kevlar jacket and leaves it on the marble headstone.

It is a packet of digestive biscuits.

The soldiers laugh.

The other policemen and myself do not.

Later …

A drive to Carrickfergus through sleet and rain. I go inside and cook sausages. I pour myself a glass of Islay whisky. I eat and drink and doze in front of the TV.

Suddenly the power flickers and goes out. I wait, but the lights don’t come back on. The IRA has undoubtedly blown up the high tension lines or a substation.

I sit in the dark drinking the peaty, smoky, pungent, almost painfully good whisky. I get bored and put batteries in the shortwave. I tune in Radio Albania, my old favourite. Dramatic piano music blares from my stereo speakers. The music ends abruptly and an announcer with an American accent continues the news bulletin in mid-sentence: “… production levels. Comrade Inver Hoxha met with a delegation of workers’ soviets and praised them for their three-fold increase in steel output.”

Later …

I stoke the fire and lie under a duvet, listening to the sounds of the outside: babies gurning, kids yelling, peelers racing along the top road, Army choppers clipping menacingly over the black water …

“I hate your drunken face!” a woman shouts over the back to backs.

“I hate yours more!” a man responds.

I put the sofa cushion over my head. And then finally there is quiet …

The TV buzzes into life at seven in the morning with the news that John DeLorean has been arrested for cocaine smuggling. DeLorean apparently thought he could sell a vast quantity of cocaine in Ireland as a way to save his ailing car company, but the whole thing was an FBI sting operation.

“The bloody F bloody B bloody I.”

I sit closer to the TV.

The DeLorean factory in Belfast has suspended operations. Three thousand workers are being laid off immediately with the effect that the unemployment rate in Belfast is going up to twenty per cent.

Men are filing out of the factory gates looking utterly bereft.

One commentator says that this marks the end of Northern Ireland as a manufacturing centre.

“Maybe the end of the province itself!” another reporter agrees.

A guy from the union comes on the tube and promises riots and demonstrations. Later that morning we get a message that leave is being cancelled. But in the end there are no riots because the unions are weak and the workers are weak and the real power in this land belongs to the men with guns.

The small crowd outside the Dunmurry plant chants “We want jobs! We want jobs!” over and over for the cameras; but eventually even they are sent scurrying inside by the bitter rain from a big storm-front which has stalled in its inexorable eastward progress and which is destined to remain over Belfast for a long, long time.