Now and in the Hour of Our Death (23 page)

“And the fellah in Communications'll be able to open the gates of H-7 from in there?”

“Right. The timing's going to be tricky, but as long as everybody does his part, it'll work,” Eamon said. “And your part…”

“Is Smiley. I know.” Davy hoped Mr. Smiley would cooperate. He was a decent enough man—for a screw. He was just doing his job, and he'd always been fair to Davy. He'd not want to have to hurt the man. There were enough deaths on Davy's conscience. “Don't you worry your head about me doin' what I have to,” he said.

“I know that. D'you think I could have persuaded the Officer Commanding to take you on if I didn't trust you?”

“Thanks, Eamon.”

“Never mind thanks. What's the code word for it to start?” Eamon's smile had vanished.

“Bumper.”

“Right. The screws are used to hearing ‘Bumper' when someone needs the loan of a floor polisher.”

“I've to stick the gun under Smiley's nose and get him into Sean Donovan's cell. Sean and me'll get Smiley's uniform off. While I'm getting into it, Sean'll gag Smiley and tie him up.”

“And then?”

“By then the lad in the Communications Centre should be in charge and have opened the H-7 gates so we can head for the main gate.”

The main gate and then out of this fucking place. For good.

“You stay with me on the way out of H-7, Davy. You and a couple of others who'll be in guards' uniforms are going to have to bluff your way into the gate lodge and take over. We've to open the gates to the Tally Lodge from the control room in the gate lodge. The Tally's the only way out of the whole complex, and once we're in there, we'll get the main gates open and we're off.” Eamon nodded toward Davy's pocket. “You'll maybe need to use the wee .25 there.”

Davy shuddered and knew Eamon had noticed.

“Are you absolutely sure you can do it?” Eamon stared into Davy's eyes.

Davy squared his shoulders. “Aye. But only if I have to.”

“Good,” Eamon said softly. “Maybe you'll not. Maybe you'll just need to look as though you could, but, Davy? We
have
to get control and the timing
must
be absolutely spot on.”

Would it be? Davy chewed on his moustache. Would it?

Eamon held out his hand, and Davy grasped it, warmed by Eamon's touch.

“Good luck to us all, Davy. I'm counting on you.”

I'm
counting on you. Maybe that “I'm” was what would keep him going. Davy didn't give a shite for the rest of the Provos, but Eamon was a friend, the only real friend Davy had, and getting him to his Erin was nearly as important to Davy as getting himself to Fiona.

He watched Eamon move to the shelf over the sink, take his dental plate, and slip it into his mouth. “I'd not want to forget them. I'll need to look my best when I see Erin.” He grinned at Davy. “Don't you worry your head about nothing, oul' hand. We'll get you to your Fiona. That's a promise, so it is.”

After three years in a cell together, Davy wondered if Eamon could read his thoughts. “Thanks, Eamon,” he said as “Fiona, Fiona,” ran in Davy's head like a chant. Like a prayer. Like, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and in the hour of our…” No, he told himself, strangling the familiar line. No. This wasn't going to be the hour of anyone's death and certainly not his own. He'd far too much to live for. Being on the outside and seeing the grin on a kiddie's face, standing in the drizzle in the terraces at a soccer game. He wondered, did they play soccer in Canada? Jimmy would know about that. It would be great to see wee Jim again, have a pint together. And Fiona. He was going to see Fiona.

Eamon used a finger to settle the plate. His next words were indistinct. “At least I'll not be using these falsies to chew my dinner in here tonight. Dinner's not getting here. We're going to hijack the caterer's lorry, and, Davy”—Eamon took his fingers from his mouth—“when we get that lorry, we'll be off like a bunch of lilties, over the hills and far away.”

“Eamon?”

“What?”

“What'll we do if the lorry's late?”

“It won't be,” Eamon snapped, then grinned. “But if it is, I don't know about the rest of the lads, Father Davy … you and me's going to run like the hammers of hell. There'll be a whole lot of very angry screws in the Kesh.”

Davy grimaced. He'd not want to be one of the men who had volunteered to stay and keep the guards in H-7 quiet to give the escape party time to get away. Sooner or later, the guards would be released, and they'd be boiling for revenge.

Too fuckin' bad. The stay-behinds were all Provo volunteers. They were following their orders just like him. They knew what they were letting themselves in for. Did he?

Davy touched his coat where it covered the revolver's bulge. Was he going to have to use that wee gun? Could he honestly believe the whole bloody escape wouldn't turn into the same kind of fuckup as his attempt to blow up the bridge at Ravernet nine years ago?

Even if everything did go smoothly, how the hell was he going to get to Canada. And if he did, what gave him the right to believe Fiona would give him as much as the time of day? It had been all very well for him to have seen her photo and decide without thinking, after just one glimpse of her face, that he would take the chance he'd been offered. What was he going to say to her?

He'd had nine years to think only of her. She'd had the same nine years to meet other men. He couldn't bear to think about that. Davy tried to remember what Jimmy had said in his letter. She'd been having dinner with a doctor, but she wasn't married. At least that meant if she had been out with fellahs, they hadn't been important to her, except—except when Davy had asked her to marry him back in '74, she'd refused because—he could remember the words clearly—she “didn't believe in the bourgeois convention.” Maybe she still didn't believe and was living with the doctor the way she'd lived in the wee house with Davy.

But he had to believe. He must believe as strongly as a Jesuit believed in his God that everything would be all right, even if he was deluding himself. He had to believe, and, he smiled at himself, if desperation was a great manufacturer of dreams and delusions, so what? He
was
desperate; as the whole of Northern Ireland, awash in its desperation for years, had nurtured its dreams and the delusion that it would be free.

“Cheer up, Davy. Everything's going to be fine.”

Davy shrugged, glanced at Eamon, and gave a thumbs-up. There was too much water under the bridge, all of his bridges, to turn back now.

*   *   *

“Get a move on, for fuck's sake.” Hughie Wilson pounded the steering wheel and peered through the open driver's window of his high metal-sided food lorry to see how far the tailback stretched. Not more than a hundred yards from the police checkpoint up ahead. Checkpoints were a fact of life in Ulster, but he didn't need one. Not today. This one had bloody well better not keep him too long.

It hadn't been his turn to drive, but his mate who shared the duty had phoned in sick. Hughie had been planning to go fishing. Still, the time-and-a-half money for driving on a Sunday would come in handy—bloody alimony—and if he could finish up reasonably early, he'd still have time to get down to Ballysallagh Reservoir near Bangor for the evening trout rise.

The traffic ahead inched forward. He followed. He heard the whicker of rotors and watched as a Wessex chopper hovered, veered, and headed toward Lisburn. It was probably going to Thiepval Barracks, headquarters of the British army's 39th Infantry Brigade. Helicopters were another fact of life in Ulster, like Saracen and Saladin armoured cars grumbling through Belfast: shootings, kneecappings, bombings, and still more bombings. Ireland, the “land of saints and scholars”? In a pig's arse it was, here in the charnel house of the Wee North.

The car behind him honked. Hughie engaged the gears, swearing as the worn clutch ground and the lorry jerked ahead until it was level with a grey, armour-plated Hotspur Land Rover. He stopped and waited for a Royal Ulster Constabulary officer to approach, bulky in his flak jacket, Sten gun menacing.

“How's about you?” Hughie said, resting his uniformed elbow on the edge of the window.

“Sick of doing these fucking checkpoints, that's how I am.” The constable spat, but lowered the muzzle of his gun. “Prison dinners?”

“Aye.”

“Off up the road?” The constable nodded to where the watchtowers of the Maze seemed to gnaw at the skyline.

“I've the bad lads' grub in the back of this here. Feeding time at the fucking zoo. I don't want to be late.”

“They'll hardly die of starvation for the want of a few minutes. Come on. I've to look in the back.”

“What the hell for? Do you reckon I'm a Provvie in a stolen uniform come to bust my mates out?”

“I've my job to do.”

“Yeah. Right.” Hughie climbed down from his cab and walked to the back of the lorry. He was not a patient man at the best of times. He could feel his chances of getting a bit of peace and quiet on the water slipping away because this silly bugger had “his job to do.” Could the peeler walk round the truck any more deliberately? The shite probably trained racing snails for a hobby. “Just get a move on, would you?” Hughie growled and rolled the flexible back door up to let the constable climb inside.

Hughie paced. Short, angry steps. It would take another twenty minutes to reach the barbed-wire fence that marked the perimeter of the prison property, and then he'd to drive half a mile to the Tally Lodge, the main and only entrance through the outer perimeter wall. He'd be held up there and at two more security gates ahead of the final gate into H-7 itself before he could deliver the 180 precooked Sunday dinners to the Fenian bastards.

The constable reappeared. “Away you go.”

“About fucking time.”

“Watch your lip.”

“Right, Your Eminence.” Hughie climbed back up into his cab, grunted as the gears clashed, and drove off. “And fuck you, too,” he muttered. It wasn't his fault if checkpoint duty was boring. It wasn't his fault that wearing the green uniform was an open invitation to any Provo sniper with a place to hide and an ArmaLite. The fucking peeler just, “had his job to do”? Well, so did Hughie. Peelers weren't the only ones that the Provos might target. They'd just murdered a couple of civilian contractors who'd been doing construction work for the army. They could switch their attention to anyone involved with the Security Forces, and that included food-lorry drivers. He spat through the window.

He knew he was going to be late. He didn't give a shite if that meant the prisoners would have to wait for the meals that were congealing in their tinfoil containers behind him. Hughie wanted to finish the delivery, get back home and out of his fuckin' uniform, and escape to the peace of the reservoir nestled safely behind a wall of pine-scented trees, away to hell from Belfast. He could imagine the evening sun as it would glint from the dark waters, its reflection dappled by the rings made by trout that would rise as soon as the insects started to emerge and rest on the surface to dry their wings before trying to escape from the hungry fish. And the caddis-fly hatch wouldn't be held up by fuckin' checkpoints.

*   *   *

Inside block H-7, the prison officer, George Smiley, buttoned his dark-blue tunic and turned to the communications officer, John Adams. “I'm telling you, it's all right for you in here in the Communications Centre with all your switches and alarms, steel bars round the place, electric doors.” He pointed past a solid steel door. “I've got to go out there, like Daniel in the bloody lions' den and do the head count. Some of them buggers scare the living bejesus out of me.”

“Come on, George. You know as well as I do there's panic buttons all over the corridors. One sign of trouble…”

“I know. I know. One sign of trouble, I've to push the button and alarms go off like a bunch of banshees.” George thought that John Adams looked just a shade too smug. No wonder. All
he
had to do was flick a red switch on his console and the whole block would be locked up tight, with sirens screaming and guards running to their emergency stations.

The communications officer would be in here behind as much armour plate as a Crusader tank while he, poor old George Smiley, would be locked in there with a bunch of men who were doing life for murder. Butchers who thought nothing of kneecapping some poor bastard and letting him writhe and scream before cutting his misery short with a head job. Not a day went by that he wished he'd not been laid off from the shipyards. If he hadn't, he'd not be in this bloody steel and concrete rat trap. Retirement couldn't come soon enough.

Bile burned his guts and rose in his throat. He stuck a hand in his pocket. Shite! He'd left his antacid tablets in his civvy pants in his locker.

He swallowed, tasting the sourness, regretting his carelessness and the remark he'd made about the banshee. He said, “I was just thinking I should never've said, ‘banshee.' When do you hear her? Would you mind telling me that?”

“Before someone”—Adams made his voice quaver like Peter Cushing in an old B movie—“d-i-i-i-e-e-s-s.” He rolled his eyes.

“Ha-fuckin'-ha,” Smiley said flatly.

“I'm sorry.”

Smiley saw how Adams peered at him before he said, a note of concern in his voice, “Are you starting to get the willies, George? After all your years on the job?”

Smiley crammed his peaked cap on. “I don't know. I've just this feeling…”

“Sure, we all get feelings sometimes. Cheer up. Don't let it get to you. Look on the bright side. It's not long to shift change, and we'll be out of here.” Adams yawned and stretched back in his chair. “D'you fancy a jar on the way home?”