The Watchman (2 page)

The nearest man, a burly red-haired figure, sniggered.

Puck you, Bledsoe thought, shaking badly now but attempting to rally himself PIRA cunt. When the Regiment lads get here and get here they will, blowing the doors off ~f they have to I hope they blow your fucking head from your shoulders.

For a moment things seemed to coalesce in the icy air. Bledsoe was in pain, concussed and very frightened indeed, but he knew what he was going to do. Breathe, he told himself. Clear your head. Ignore the pain. Think.

And then a dark-blue figure came from one side, slammed a fist into Bledsoe's stomach and brought his knee up hard into the FRU agent's nose, splintering the bone. Blinded by the flash of his breaking nose, gagging for air, Bledsoe went down.

They're going to hit me again, he thought absently.

He was right. A steel toecap to the balls that froze his mouth into a silent scream followed by a crunching boot to the lower ribs. At least two of the ribs fractured now. His grasp on consciousness wavering, Bledsoe closed his eyes.

Hands took him under the arm, dragged him across to the trailer, slammed him against the iron tailgate and cuffed him to it, arms spread. His legs gave way for a moment and they let him hang there, drooling and half-suffocated, blood pouring down his face from his nose.

Finally he found his feet. Dragged icy farmyard air through his mouth. Opened his eyes a crack. Counted eight of them. Nine there was one he hadn't seen before, a pale-faced figure with depthless eyes who could have been any age between twenty-five and forty, and unlike the rest was not smiling.

"Name?" The speaker was the one who'd kicked him, a thin, broken-nosed guy.

Bledsoe dragged his head up. Spat blood. Cleared his throat.

"I don't know who the hell you think I am," he began blearily, 'but..."

"I'll tell ye who ye are," the thin man said.

"Ye're Sergeant Raymond Bledsoe, formerly of the Royal Military Police, presently seconded to the so-called Forces Research Unit. There's not a deal we don't know about ye, cuntie, ye can thank yer Regimental magazine for that, sae don't go gi'in us any crap.

Silence. The older man from the car regarded him levelly.

"Ye know what we want," the older man said, zipping himself into a pair of overalls with fastidious and terrifying care.

"Radio codes, SAS names, tout names everything. We can start with yer man Deavey if you like, though as ye've probably guessed by now he's not quite the tick Paddy you took him for."

Bledsoe said nothing. Stared up at the strip light, tried to distance himself from the pain of his nose and ribs.

The other man smiled.

"Ye see, unlike yer occupying army, we'll always be here. Deavey had the wit to realise that."

Bledsoe struggled to keep his expression neutral, not to rise to the bait. Here we go, he thought. As rehearsed.

"I'll talk," he said.

"But not to you. I'll talk to Adams or McGuinness or any of the executive level officers of Sinn Fein and I'll give them everything they want to know. Or Padraig Byrne."

Byrne, ostensibly a Sinn Fein councillor, was known to the security services as the chief of the PIRA's Belfast Brigade. There was purpose and calculation in Bledsoe's insistence on talking face to face with senior players: they were watched round the clock and in the event of a British agent being lifted, as Bledsoe had been lifted, this surveillance would be doubled. His trust in Connor Wheen was Bledsoe's only hope of survival. One or other would come through for him. The alternative was quite literally unthinkable.

"Ye'll talk to Byrne?"

"I will."

His interrogator looked round the room. Everyone smiled.

"Yer word on that, then, ye'll talk to Byrne?"

Bledsoe hesitated, sensing a trap. Was it really going to be this easy?

The interrogator took a step closer.

"Well?"

He nodded.

"I'll talk to Byrne. No one junior to him."

The other man nodded and glanced round the assembled faces. The smiles were wider now, displaying contempt, amusement and bad dentistry in equal measure. The man from the car shook his head, pulled a cellophane pouch of Drum tobacco from his trouser pocket and began to roll a cigarette. As he licked the paper the thin, broken-nosed man turned away, took a 9mm Browning automatic from the pocket of his boiler suit, considered it for a moment, then swung the butt backhanded and with full force into Bledsoe's broken ribs.

The pain was indescribable, an explosion of liquid fire in his chest that seemed, once again, to drain the FRU man of all coherent thought. He fell forward, hanging from the tailgate by his cuffed wrists, and for a moment saw himself as the young Provos surrounding him saw him a pallid, bloody faced flabby-arsed forty-fags-a-day chancer, close to his pension and closer to tears. As an agent handler Bledsoe's world had become that of his informers a world of beer and bar-stools and clapped-out cars.

He had fitted in well, but at the cost of his health and fitness.

"There's no disguise like a fat gut!" the instructors had told them at Tregaron, and Bledsoe had laughed along with the others.

Now look at him. Pathetic.

Something still beat in his chest, however, even as he hung there wheezing and gagging. Some ghost of the bloodyminded squaddie he'd once been still hung grimly on. There'll be afuck of a bang when the lads blow that door. Afuck of a bang. And the killing spree of all time.

None of these Provie cunts would live to .

A hand grabbed Bledsoe's hair and pulled his head level. Through a film of pain he saw a short, square figure walking out of the office area, a figure whose reddened and bony features, slicked-back hair and carefully buttoned Aran cardigan he recognised instantly.

"Would ye be knowing this gentleman?"

It was the gun-butt man again.

"Yeah," said Bledsoe, attempting to sneer.

"Val Doonican."

That earned him another kick in the balls and this time, as a lurching despair became one with the pain, Bledsoe kept his eyes shut.

The man in the Aran cardigan was Padraig Byrne.

No Det unit was about to follow the fucker anywhere.

He was already here wherever here was and he had probably been here for days. When Bledsoe finally reopened his eyes it was to see Byrne pulling on a boiler suit.

"Pleased to see me, Sergeant Bledsoe? You will be, that I promise." The voice was light and cultured, and somehow horribly at odds with the raw-boned features. The considered view in Lisburn barracks, Bledsoe remembered, was that Padraig Byrne took it up the arse.

"You see, Sergeant, we've got something for you."

A book hit the ground with a thump next to the FRU man's feet. What the fuck?

"Raymond John Bledsoe," Byrne continued in his soft wheedling brogue, 'this is your Death!"

There was snigger of sycophantic laughter from the young Provo foot soldiers. Opening his eyes a fraction, Bledsoe saw that the book was a Yellow Pages directory for the Newry and Mourne area. He hadn't crossed the border, then. There was still hope.

Please God, he thought, let Wheen have hooked afollow car on to that taxi. Let there be a Regiment team out there right now, taking out the sentries.

He hung on desperately to that hope. He suspected that the interrogation was about to start and he didn't know if he had any courage left to bullshit them with.

It was going to be very bad he was certain of that from the number of young guys they'd assembled, and from the hunger and expectancy on their faces.

And then, with a blast of cold air, the sliding doors opened again and a mud-spattered white van drove into the barn, shuddered for a moment in a haze of exhaust and was still. The barn doors were quickly dragged shut, then a terrible high-pitched screaming issued from inside the van. The screaming seemed to go on and on, and ended in a sound that was haW way between a retch and a whimper.

"Do you recognise that voice, Bledsoe?" asked Byrne, continuing his Eamonn Andrews impersonation.

"Yes, all the way from Lisburn barracks, Belfast, it's your old friend ..

A second naked and plasticuffed figure was dragged from the back of the van by two more boiler suited Provo foot soldiers. He had been severely beaten around the head and upper body, dirt and vomit smeared his chest and legs, and his face was a shapeless blood-smeared mask. In the middle of the room the foot soldiers kicked the new arrival's feet from under him and he fell heavily to the ground.

Byrne looked on, enjoying the moment.

"Good evening," he addressed the man on the ground.

"And thank you for joining us on this special occasion.

"Fuck you!" said the fallen man. At least that's what Bledsoe guessed that he was trying to say, but something horrible had happened to his mouth and teeth, and all that came out was a bubbling, gutter al rasp.

Bledsoe stared. Tried to beat back the worst of the fear.

With an immense effort the battered figure squinted around him, found Bledsoe, and winked one blackened and swollen eyelid. As he did so his face took momentary shape and with a sullen jolt of recognition all hope died in Ray Bledsoe.

"That's right," crowed Byrne exultantly, resuming.

"It's your old mate Connor Wheen!"

I'm dead, Bledsoe thought dully. We're both dead.

Byrne watched them, delighted with his coup. A chair was brought from the office and the two men hauled Wheen into it, forcing his cuffed hands behind the backrest.

"I know what you're wondering," said Byrne to Bledsoe with vast good humour.

"You're wondering if you're still north of the border, so that your SAS pals can drop in on us. Well, you know something .. ." Byrne shook his head at the sheer hilarious ness of the situation.

"You're not!"

Bledsoe felt his sanity slipping away. All that remained now was terror, pain and death. His unhinged gaze found the pale aced man, who stared back at him with ageless, unsmiling intensity. You are in hell, that gaze told him. Welcome.

Byrne turned to the pale-faced man.

"Joseph, as we agreed earlier, I'd like it to be you that does the killing." His tone was casual, conversational.

"Please," whispered Bledsoe.

"I'll tell you everything." His lips were papery and his voice was a submissive monotone.

"You can have the Det list, the SAS list, the tout list, the codes ..

Padraig Byrne frowned and looked at him intently for a moment or two as if wrestling with some complex moral or intellectual issue. Then he smiled again and turned back to the pale-faced man he called Joseph.

ONE.

Sierra Leone.

After an hour's march, Captain Alex Temple held up his hand and the patrol came to a cautious halt.

Above them the waning moon was obscured by lurid bruise-coloured rain clouds. In the forest to either side of them insects drilled and screamed. It was fifteen minutes after midnight and all six men were soaked to the skin. They were sweating too, as their dark-accustomed eyes scanned the clearing.

Alex had been right. Above the distant booming of thunder, just audible, was a faint staccato crackle.

Gunfire, surely. To his side, all but invisible in the dank shadows, Don Hammond nodded in agreement, showed two fingers two clicks ahead -and pointed up the trail. Yes, thought Alex with fierce joy. Yes! This is what I joined the Regiment for. This is what I'll do for as long as they'll let me.

He grinned at the wiry sergeant and glanced round at the four other members of Zulu Three Six patrol as they melted into the dank foliage. Immediately behind him was a sharp-faced trooper named Ricky Sutton, the patrol signaller. At twenty-three, Sutton was the youngest and least experienced member of the team. Covering Sutton's back as he worked was Stan Clayton, a long-serving and famously mouthy cockney corporal, and on the other side of the clearing, shadowy in the dimness, crouched Lance Wilford and Jimmy "Dog' Kenilworth, a corporal and a lance-corporal respectively. Like Alex, they were dressed in sodden jungle kit and webbing, and carrying M16 203 rifles and a sheathed parang.

Beneath the frayed rims of their bush-hats their faces were blackened with cam-stick. All had compasses attached to their wrists and rifles.

At Don Hammond's sign, the patrol members quietly lowered their heavy Bergan rucksacks and began to cache them. Mosquitoes whined around them, settling greedily on their hands and faces. A couple of the men had leeches visible at their necks and wrists, and Alex guessed that they all had at least half a dozen sucking away beneath their wet shirts and combat trousers.

Crouching in the dank foliage, Hammond unfurled the aerial of the sat-coin radio, and reported the patrol's position and the direction of the small-arms fire to the SAS base in Freetown. When Hammond had completed the report Alex resumed the lead scout position. Signing for the rest of the patrol to follow, he set off towards the distant gunfire.

This was it, he thought this had to be it and breathed a silent prayer of thanks to the gods of war.

He was thirty-five years old and a commissioned officer, and both facts militated against him. SAS officers, or "Ruperts' as they were known, were usually directed into planning roles, while the 'chopping' was done by the troopers and NCOs. As a Rupert, Alex was lucky to be here at all. Somehow, against all the odds, it seemed that he had been granted one last adventure.

Zulu Three Six patrol was searching for a missing ITN news crew.

The journalists reporter Sally Roberts, cameraman Ben Mills and sound recordist Gary Burge had been missing for more than thirty-six hours now. They had last been seen in the town of Masiaka, thirty-five miles inland from the capital, Freetown. Masiaka was a strategically important staging post, and its mildewed and flyblown bungalows had been much fought over in the dirty war between the Sierra Leone army and the Revolutionary United Front. At present it was in the hands of pro-government forces and so considered more or less safe for Western media teams.

According to the Agence France Presse people who'd been showing them around, Sally Roberts and her team had arrived in Masiaka intending to interview members of a notoriously volatile pro-government militia known as the West Side Boys. The ITN team had hoped to find the militia's commanders at the mildewed and bullet pocked bungalow that served as their HQ, but on arriving there had discovered that the occupants had decamped eastwards in pursuit of an RUF raiding party.