I Hear the Sirens in the Street (39 page)

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.

Adrian McKinty
was born and grew up in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. After studying philosophy at Oxford University, he emigrated to New York City where he lived in Harlem for seven years, working in bars, bookstores, building sites and finally the basement stacks of the Columbia University Medical School Library in Washington Heights.

In 2000 he moved to Denver, Colorado where he taught high school English and started writing fiction in earnest. His first full-length novel
Dead I Well May Be
was shortlisted for the 2004 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award and was picked by
Booklist
as one of the ten best crime novels of the year. The sequel to that book,
The Dead Yard
, was selected by
Publishers Weekly
as one of the twelve best novels of 2006 and won the Audie Award for best mystery or thriller. These two novels,
along with
The Bloomsday Dead
, form the DEAD trilogy of novels, starring hitman Michael Forsythe.

In mid 2008 Adrian moved to St Kilda, Melbourne, Australia with his wife and children. His book
Fifty Grand
won the 2010 Spinetingler Award and his novel
Falling Glass
was longlisted for Theakston's Crime Novel of the Year.

The first of his Sean Duffy thrillers,
The Cold Cold Ground
, was published in 2012. The third volume,
And In the Morning I'll Be Gone
, will appear in 2014.

Visit Adrian's blog at
http://adrianmckinty.blogspot.com/

Read the first chapter of

the third volume in the Sean Duffy series

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”.