The Armada Legacy

Chapter Fifteen

It wasn’t quite true to say that Ben Hope loved Ireland, at least not all of it. And Belfast was somewhere he’d chosen to avoid for a long, long while.

His first ever experience of the place had been during his early twenties, just months after finishing basic training, in his first tour of duty with the British armed forces. Join up and see the world, the recruitment campaign had said, promising everything but the hula-hula girls of the Shankill Road. The last time he’d seen it, some years later, had been as an SAS officer and a very different person from the inexperienced youth sent out with a rifle to patrol those terrifying streets.

With the SAS Ben had witnessed the tail end of the Troubles, an era that had claimed over three thousand Irish lives over four decades, as well as a good number of the British soldiers whose job it had been to try to keep the whole volatile mess under control.

Whether they should have been there at all was a question that Ben had privately asked himself many times over – but when the bullets began to zip about your ears you didn’t dwell too long on ethical or political debate, and the air had been thick with them back then. Shortly after Ben had first landed at RAF Aldergrove with his new SAS unit, a British Army Gazelle helicopter had been shot down in flames by an IRA rocket just over the border, killing the pilot and maiming three soldiers. Not long afterwards, two SAS troopers from Ben’s company had been cut down in a gun battle with the IRA outside the village of Cappagh, County Tyrone. Then just days later, the army had caught up with the gunmen after a daring but ultimately foolish attack on an RUC station with a stolen heavy machine gun mounted on a lorry. The IRA men had been switching to their getaway vehicle in a Catholic church car park when the SAS unit in pursuit had engaged with them: a bloody little firefight that had left six corpses on the ground and given Ben his first serious bullet wound.

And on it had gone. Right up until the official 1997 ceasefire, the city of Belfast and the surrounding areas had been caught up in a relentlessly violent storm of reprisals, counter-reprisals, bombings and beatings, ambushes and assassinations.

All things considered, it wasn’t a part of the world Ben had ever wanted to return to. Yet here he was, speeding towards the city, foot on the floor and overtaking everything in sight with his windscreen wipers working flat out to beat aside the rain. He covered the seventy-mile journey from Derry in just under an hour, stopping only for fuel and to stoke himself up with a coffee and a wolfed-down sandwich at a motorway services.

As he made his way into the rain-slicked streets of Belfast, the marks of a community forever divided by hatred were painfully visible, even after years of official peace. Ben drove along a road that skirted one of the city’s ‘peace lines’, tall reinforced mesh fences and gates erected to segregate the clashing sectarian groups wherever their territories met.

It was Ireland’s own version of Apartheid, its own Berlin Wall. Union Jacks hung limply from lampposts and poles in the Protestant Loyalist districts; the Irish green, white and gold tricolour in the Catholic Republican areas. Still that same old atmosphere of cold, brooding fear. All that was missing were the military Land Rovers, the Saracen armoured personnel carriers and the checkpoints that had once been a common feature throughout the city and the surrounding area.

Ben knew the majority of the people were trying to put the past behind them. But some things never really changed, deep down. Some things never really could.

By lunchtime he was parked opposite a pub called The Spinning Jenny in the staunchly Catholic west of the city. He had a reason for being there. In its day, the place had been a watering-hole for some of Belfast’s more notorious IRA hardmen. From the look of the place, Ben reckoned it probably hadn’t changed a hell of a lot since then either.

Sitting at the wheel, he took out his phone and dialled Amal’s number. When there was no reply, he left a brief message to say he had a possible lead and would be in touch again soon. Amal didn’t need to know that the lead concerned a stone-cold IRA killer recently sated with the blood of his long-time enemy and most likely capable of just about anything.

After he’d left his message Ben spent a few minutes trawling online for any further information on Fergus Doyle that he hadn’t already researched. From what he could put together, it seemed that the man had reached the peak of his ultra-violent career in 1983, five years after the death of his brother. Boonzie had been right: the atrocities committed by the Shankill Butchers, the gang of Loyalist thugs responsible for the wholesale murder and torture of innocent Catholics throughout the better part of the seventies and early eighties, were by no means any worse than the catalogue of carnage and cruelty attributed to Doyle and his followers.

But where the Shankill Butchers had been slow-witted enough to let themselves be hunted down and caught one by one, either shot or imprisoned, Doyle had somehow managed to evade capture all these years. From the turn of the nineties there seemed to be nothing more on him. Even in terrorist circles, everyone had their fifteen minutes of fame before obscurity beckoned.

Ben studied every image he could find of the man until he was confident that he’d recognise that ugly, mean, lopsided face at a glance, even lined and wrinkled with age as it must be today. Fergus Doyle had an evil look in his eye. Ben had seen enough of the dark side of the world to know what some evil men did to women unlucky enough to fall into their hands. Trophies kept for personal amusement, battered and raped until they were finally discarded dead in a ditch; drugged-up into hopeless junkies who would prostitute themselves to anyone for another fix; sold into the international trade in human trafficking.

Fergus Doyle. Ben didn’t give a damn how old and wrinkled that face was now. He’d still happily put three bullets through it if he couldn’t have Brooke back.

And maybe even if he could.

He put his phone away, clenched his jaw hard and took three deep breaths. Then he flung open the driver’s door, got out of the BMW and crossed the road to The Spinning Jenny.