In the Morning I'll Be Gone (2 page)

“Don’t concern yourself, Mrs. C, 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 an ashy kiss on the cheek, and whisper “thank you.”

I responded with a little nod of the head, walked down the path, and got into my BMW. Before I put the key in the ignition I got out again and looked underneath the vehicle for mercury tilt bombs. There were none, and I re-entered and stuck in a cassette of Robert Plant’s
Principle of Moments
. This was my fourth listen to Plant’s solo album and I still couldn’t bring myself to like it. It was all synthesizers, drum machines, and high-pitched vocals. It was a sign of the times, and with the autumn upon us it was safe to say that 1983 was turning out to be the worst year in popular music for about two decades.

I drove along the Scotch Quarter and turned right into Carrickfergus RUC station for the first time in a long time. It was a very strange experience, and the young guard at the gate didn’t know me. He checked my warrant card, nodded, looked at me, frowned, raised the barrier, and finally let me through. I parked in the crappy visitor’s car park far from the station and walked to the duty sergeant’s desk. There had been a few changes. They’d painted the walls mental hospital pink and there were potted plants everywhere. I knew that Chief Inspector Brennan had retired and in his place they had brought in an officer from Derry called Superintendent Carter. I didn’t know much about him except that he was young and energetic and full of ideas—which, admittedly, sounded just ghastly. But this wasn’t my manor anymore so what did I care what they did to the old place?

Running Carrickfergus CID branch on a temporary basis was my former adjutant, the freshly promoted Detective Sergeant John McCrabban, and that was a good thing. I went upstairs, slipped into the back of the briefing room, and tried not to draw attention to myself.

“. . . might be of some use. We’re instituting Operation Cauldron. Blocking every road to and from the Maze. Our patch is the access roads to the north and east, the A2, and of course the roads to Antrim. We are coordinating with Ballyclare RUC . . .”

Carter was tall with a prominent Adam’s apple and brown curly hair. He was rangy and he leaned over the podium in a menacing way as if he was going to clip you round the ear. I listened to his talk, which spoke of dangers and challenges and finished with an echo of Winston Churchill’s “Fight Them on the Beaches” speech. As rhetoric it was wildly over the top but some of the younger reserve constables clapped when it was done. As we were filing out of the briefing room I said hello to a few old friends. Inspector Douggie McCallister shook my hand. “It’s great to see you, Sean. Jeez, if you’d been here five minutes earlier you would have caught up with McCrabban and Matty but they’re away with the riot police. How ya been?”

“I’ve been fair to middling, Douglas. How’s your new boss?”

Douggie rolled his eyes and lowered his voice: “If he wasn’t a six-footer I’d have said that he was a short man in need of a balcony.”

“Oh dear. You could always do the old Thorazine-in-the-whisky trick.”

“Total abstainer, Sean. Tea drinker. Wants to ban booze from the station, from the whole island too if his pamphlets are to believed.”

“I think they tried that approach in America with decidedly mixed results.”

“Aye well, one crisis at a time. Let me sort you out with a duty roster. Can you still drive a Land Rover?”

“Does the Pope shit in the woods?”

I got my armored police Land Rover and headed out with a group of nervous constables to a place called Derryclone on the shores of Lough Neagh. It took us over two and a half hours to get through all the police roadblocks so that we could reach our destination and set up our own roadblock. This was the much-vaunted Operation Cauldron in action.

Radio 3 was playing Ligeti’s
Requiem
and the somber mood wasn’t helped by the black clouds and the light rain and solitary crows cawing at us from sagging telegraph wires. When I opened the back doors of the Rover two of the men were reading their Gideon New Testaments, one appeared to have been crying and the sole Catholic reservist was, embarrassingly, fingering a rosary.

“Bloody hell, lads! It’s like a Juarez minibus on the
Dia de Los Muertos
in here. Come on! This is routine. We are not going to encounter any terrorist desperadoes, I promise you.”

We set up our block along the sleepy B road by Lough Neagh and after an hour or two of nothingness it was evident to even the gloomiest young peeler that none of the Maze escapees were coming our way.

We saw helicopters with spotlights flying back and forth from RAF Aldergrove and on the radio we heard that, first, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland had tended his resignation, and later that Mrs. Thatcher herself had resigned.

No such luck. No one had resigned and I prophesied to the boys that when the inquiry into the break-out was published no one above the rank of inspector would even get a reprimand. (You can read the 1984 Hennessy Report for yourself if you want proof of my uncanny fortune-telling abilities.)

Another Land Rover arrived at our roadblock from Ballymena RUC and the coppers spoke in a dialect so thick we had trouble understanding them. Much of their conversation seemed to involve Jesus and tractors, an unlikely combination for anyone who doesn’t know Ballymena. Yet another Land Rover came in the late evening: this one carrying lads from as far away as Coleraine. No one had thought to bring hot chocolate or hot cocoa or food or cigarettes, but the inspector from Coleraine RUC had brought along a travel chess set just to have the satisfaction of beating all of us. I told him my Boris Spassky story (Reporter: “Which do you prefer, Mr. Spassky, chess or sex?” Spassky: “It very much depends on the position”). But he was not impressed and mated me in eleven moves.

It began to rain harder around midnight and the night was long and cold. In the wee hours we finally stopped a car: an Austin Maxi with an elderly female driver who’d been trying to get home from church since lunchtime. In the boot, alas, there were no escaped prisoners. She did have a tin of shortbread and after some discussion, in the interests of good community relations, we let her keep it.

Bored senseless, we listened in on the confused and contradictory police radio traffic. There had been some rioting in West Belfast but this was an obvious ploy to distract the cops so central command hadn’t diverted many troops or peelers to deal with it.

Just before dawn there
was
a bit of excitement on the southern part of the lough when an army helicopter pilot thought he had seen someone hiding in the reeds. The radio barked into life and we and several other mobile patrols were scrambled and sent down to check it out. When we got there a small unit of Welsh Guardsmen were shooting into the water with machine guns. As the sun came up we saw that they had done a good job of massacring an exhausted flock of Greenland geese who had foolishly touched down here on their journey to the South of France.

The Ballymena boys grabbed a goose each and we drove back to our outpost. I sat up in the Land Rover cab and tuned in BBC Radio 4. The latest news was that eighteen of the escapees had been recaptured but the others had got clean away. At noon we got the list of their names. They were all unknown to me except for one . . . but that one was Dermot McCann. Dermot and I had gone to school together in Derry at St. Malachy’s. A really smart guy, he had been Head Boy when I had been Deputy Head Boy. Handsome, good at games, and charming, Dermot had planned to go into the newspaper business and possibly into TV journalism. But the Troubles had changed all that and Dermot had volunteered for the IRA just as I had once thought of doing at around the time of Bloody Sunday.

Through various machinations I had joined the police and Dermot had served several years in the Provos before getting himself arrested. He was a highly gifted IRA explosives expert and bomb maker who’d only been betrayed in the end by an informer. The grass fingered Dermot as an important player but there was no forensic evidence so some clever peeler had fitted him up by putting a fingerprint on a block of gelignite. He’d been found guilty, and until his escape he’d been doing ten years for conspiracy to cause explosions.

I hadn’t thought of Dermot in a long time but in the weeks that followed the break-out we learned that he had been one of the masterminds behind the escape plan. Dermot had figured out a way of smuggling guns into the prison and it was his idea to take prison officers hostage and dress in their uniforms so the guard towers wouldn’t be alerted.

Dermot got to South Tyrone and over the border into the Irish Republic. I heard later from MI5 that he and an elite IRA team had been spotted at a terrorist training camp in Libya. But even on that miserable Monday morning on the eastern shores of Lough Neagh with the mist rising off the water and the rain drizzling from the grey September sky I knew with the chilly logic of a fairy story that our paths would cross again.

It was late on a cold December day and Prisoner 239 was doing now what he did best: waiting. He had not always been good at this. As a boy he had been aggressive and forward. At school he had been brilliant but often impatient and rash. It was in the Maze prison where he had learned about waiting. As an IRA leader he’d often been put in solitary, where waiting had been his only companion. He had waited in the Maze for five years: learning, scheming, plotting. And here, in this concrete coffin on the edge of the desert, although it was harder to keep track of time, he was waiting again. In the first few days after his arrest he had raged and fumed and banged his fists against the iron door. “This is all a huge mistake!” he had yelled. “We were invited here!” But it hadn’t done any good. All that it had done was make them rush in with rubber hoses to shut him up.

He knew that he was not alone in the facility but here there were no prisoners in the cells on either side of him, which increased his sense of isolation, as did the high window, the enclosed exercise yard, and the guards who had been instructed never to talk to him or respond to his questions. But it only took him a few days to remember his old skills. He learned again to use the time and not to let the time use him. He read the French novels they gave him and what was left of the English newspapers after the prison censor had had his way with them. Censor is a lowly position in every culture and no doubt what the man cut from the pages revealed more than they could possibly imagine.

He began writing his thoughts down in the journals they left for him. On every other page he made drawings from memory of his mother, siblings, and scenes from Derry. He must have known that when they took him to the exercise yard or the shower block they read and photographed what he had written, but he didn’t care. He wrote poems and notes for political manifestos and stories about his childhood. Perhaps he even wrote about me although I doubt that, and certainly my name was not mentioned in the materials British Intelligence subsequently gave me. In truth I was never one of his best friends; more of a hanger-on, a runner, a groupie . . . For a while in the sixth form I was even a comic foil, a court jester . . . until he tired of me and promoted some other loser into that position.

As the weeks dragged on, Prisoner 239’s journal entries grew more elaborate. He described his experiences growing up in the Bogside in the 1950s and 1960s. He talked about that awful day in Derry when the paratroopers had shot dead a dozen civilians who had only been marching for equal rights . . . He mentioned how Bloody Sunday had galvanized him and every other young man in the city.

Including me, of course. In fact the last time I had seen Dermot McCann in the flesh was when I had meekly sought him out and asked whether I too could join the Provos. He had turned me down flat. “You’re at Queen’s University, Duffy. Stay there. The movement needs men with brains as well as brawn.”

Of course, after I had joined the peelers he had no doubt expunged all thoughts of me from his life . . .

On that last December day, Prisoner 239 had taken the thin white mattress off the bed and placed it on the cell floor. He wrote in his journal that if he lay in the corner of the cell near the door he could occasionally see a thin cirrus cloud through the high slit windows. He could smell the desert on the southern Khamseen, and although he wasn’t supposed to know where he was being held, he knew that he was southeast of Tobruk, probably less than a dozen miles from the Egyptian border. Freedom . . . if he could get out and make a break for it. And if anybody could get out of a Gaddafi dungeon it was Dermot McCann.

He lay on the floor and wrote about the sky as it changed colors throughout the late afternoon. He described the
ful
and flat bread they brought him at six o’clock. He wrote about the night-time prison symphony: keys turning in locks, the squeak of sneakers along a polished floor, men talking on the floor below, a distant radio, vermin outside in the hallway, a lorry clanking along one of the border roads and, when the wind was right, the howling of jackals at one of the desert wadis.