Day of Wrath

by Daniel Easterman

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

In near-future Ireland the members of the Muslim Leaders Conference are being held to ransom by a reincarnated David Koresh. Head of security, Decian Carberry, endeavours to get to the bottom of the hellish situation.

Release date: December 4, 2014

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

Belfast16 August 199-

Donegall Place, the end of the day, the City Hall in tatters between sun and shadow, the shopkeepers shutting up and setting off home, shopgirls walking to the Central Station. An army Pig took the corner slowly, and headed left into Chichester Street. From the turret, an armed soldier kept watch nervously, trusting no-one.

Gearóid Lalor watched the armoured vehicle disappear from sight before driving off. In the seat next to him Seamus Lenihan stared out the window at the emptying streets.

He’d have gone down to Bangor that night, why not? Wee Fergie McErlaine and the gang from St Malachy’s were going there to a disco, and he’d have gone with them if the call hadn’t come that morning. They were terrible idiots the lot of them, but he felt like a bit of crack and a few laughs for a change. And maybe he could have gone up the Cave Hill on Sunday with Noreen. But it was no good, their commanding officer wasn’t the sort to let his unit mess about.

‘I could have been in Bangor the night,’ he said.

‘That so?’ Lenihan did not turn his head.

‘A bunch of fellas from the old school are going down in Fergie’s car.’

‘Fergie who?’ They were turning into Donegall Street.

‘McErlaine. You know, the wee lad from Eia Street. His auld fella used to have the fish shop on Duncairn Gardens.’

‘Oh, aye, him. Sure he’s a right buck idiot.’

‘I know, but he’s all right all the same. He keeps his mouth shut.’

‘He knows he’d have it shut for him if he didn’t. All the same, you should keep well clear of him. I’ve seen him and his friends acting the fool more than once when they’ve been cut. Them ones are the kind of wee idiots that gets out of line, so they are. Your man Fergie’ll get himself lifted one day and start talkin’. You understan’ me?’

Gearóid looked at the dashboard.

‘There would’ve been no harm in it. Going down to Bangor. It’s just a bit of fun.’

‘It’d be a waste of time. Bangor’s fucked.’

‘You’re off your head. There’s nothin’ wrong with it.’

‘They fucked it up when they built that marina business. I can remember when you could go down to Bangor on the train on a Saturday and go for a swim in the Pickie Pool. When you were finished, you’d head on to Barry’s Amusements on the front. You could have a good time there for a couple of quid. There was decent dulse in them days too, not the shite they give you nowadays. The friggin’ sea’s half diseased, what with the shite and stuff they put in it. There’s God knows what coming over from England. It’s not enough they send in the army, they’re trying to poison us now and all.’

‘Do you like dulse?’

‘I like it now and then, but it’s years since I had some. You get better dulse in Donaghadee. But when was I last in Donaghadee?’

They were on the Antrim Road now, heading north. Seamus was Gearóid’s senior by a good ten years or more, a man of respect who’d done time in Long Kesh and been in and out of Castlereagh nearly as often as he’d eaten dulse, the salty dried seaweed every Northern Irishman associated with days at the seaside. And here he was, talking about the Pickie Pool and the times he’d had as a youngster. It made him sound like an old man, thought Gearóid. His own brother had been the same way, before they shot him. He wondered when Seamus had ever had time for any of that.

Himself, he could remember nothing but the Troubles. There had been ceasefires, but they had passed him by, leaving him as he had been. And since he’d been big enough to join up, he’d known very little but the movement. All the same, he wouldn’t have minded a trip to Bangor or Portrush or one of those places now and again. Just himself and a few of the lads.

But he wasn’t going for a jaunt tonight.

‘Have you any idea what’s on?’

Seamus shook his head tetchily.

‘You should know better than to ask. How the fuck should I know? I was told what you was told: be at the operations room by six o’clock and await orders. So that’s what we’ll do.’

Gearóid nodded. A volunteer never asked too many questions. It could get people talking about you, make some of them wonder if maybe you weren’t a tout. ‘Keep your gob shut an’ obey orders’ – that was the key to survival in this filthy business. If there was such a thing as survival. You kept yourself alive as best you could, for as long as you could, that was the way of it. And if you kept your nose clean and never touted or fucked up, they gave you a good funeral over at Milltown, with a beret and gloves on your coffin and a volley of gunshots over your grave.

They drew up outside a terraced house in a short street off the Antrim Road, in the New Lodge district. On a gable at the entrance to the street a mural showed a masked gunman against a map of Ireland painted in orange, green and white. Beneath it ran words by Pádraig Pearse: ‘Ireland unfree shall never be at peace’, and next to them others in the same vein: ‘The fools, the fools, they have left us our Fenian dead’. It was an endless place, however changed, and the words on its walls and its people’s lips endless. As enduring as the deaths they boasted.

The door was opened from inside as they approached. They stepped into a narrow hallway, half-dark and smelling of fried sausage. Colm O’Driscoll shut the door behind them. He was grim-faced as usual.

‘Were yous followed?’ the little man asked. He had a twisted hip, some said from an accident in a game of hurley, others from a long night in Castlereagh at the hands of the Special Branch. He’d been an athlete before that, a hard player at all sorts of games.

‘No way,’ Seamus answered. ‘I’d my eyes peeled the whole time. If they were tailing us, they were smarter than the Holy Ghost.’

‘Ay, well, nowadays that’s just what the fuckers are. Come away on inside. Eugene’s here already.’

He’d heard a poem once, thought Gearóid, a long poem in English that one of his teachers had read to them in school, Father McGiolla, a squat wee man with glasses half the size of his face. It had been written by a man called Yeats, who was buried in Sligo. Gearóid had never been to Sligo, had never set foot in the South. Maybe one day, when all this was over.

Out of Ireland have we come.Great hatred, little room,Maimed us at the start.I carry from my mother’s wombA fanatic heart.

He had not understood the poem well, but McGiolla had spoken of the evil of great hatred, and his words had found some place in Gearóid’s mind. The words had not been like the words of the patriotic songs his father had taught him, but they had their own resonance and spoke with their own voice. Perhaps he should go to Sligo soon, find time to read and think. At nineteen, he had never had time for anything but hatred.

Colm O’Driscoll, standing there in his Springfield Road shoes and stained shirt, would never have fitted into anybody’s poetry book. He was a hard man, a man even his friends would take care not to cross. It was said he’d been to England before his accident and planted bombs in pubs and an army barracks, that the police on both sides of the water were mad keen to lay hands on him, but never had had a shred of evidence. He was a good man, all the same, with four weans, beautiful weans, the oldest nine, the youngest three. It was his sister brought them up now; his wife was dead, shot down by Loyalists a year gone, shot in the head while out shopping for milk. She was in Milltown cemetery with a headstone the size of a barn door.

There was food on the table, sausages and potato farls, nothing fancy, and scalding tea to wash it down. They always took plenty of tea before a mission, it kept you alert.

Eugene O’Malley was eating an iced bap, sitting in the corner as usual, tapping his foot to music he could hear in his head. He’d won first prize at the Fleadh last year, him on the tin whistle and Paddy Byrne on the guitar; and a couple of years before that he’d been the All-Ireland Whistle Champion at Boyle.

‘How’s about ye, Eugene? Have you brought your whistle along?’

‘What do you think?’ He nodded towards the door. ‘There’s some champ in the kitchen if you’d like some. It’ll still be hot. The scallions was fresh in today.’

‘No, I’m all right, I had something in town. A cup of tea and a sausage’ll do me rightly.’ He poured himself a strong cup of tea.

‘I was going to Bangor the night,’ he said.

‘You’ll be lucky.’

The door opened suddenly. It was Conor Melaugh, the officer in command of their Active Service Unit. Immediately after him, a woman stepped into the room, a stranger. No-one moved. The woman was well dressed, out of place here. Her hair was auburn, cut in a low fringe. Conor would have to have a good explanation for bringing her here: it was a strict rule that the ASUs only ever had contact with outsiders through their OCs.

‘Stay where you are, lads,’ said Melaugh. ‘I’d like yous to meet a friend of mine. This is Maureen O’Dalaigh. Yous’ll have heard her name before this. I don’t need to tell yous who she is. She has a few words to say before you go out tonight. I want yous to listen carefully.’

Gearóid whistled beneath his breath. Fuckin’ right her name was familiar. Maureen O’Dalaigh was a leading member of the Army Council, one of the top people in the movement. What was she doing here in the New Lodge on a Friday night?

O’Dalaigh thanked Melaugh. She remained standing, looking at each of the men in the room in turn. She knew what they were thinking, that Headquarters had sent her in on a tout hunt, that there was an informer in West Belfast, and that Maureen O’Dalaigh had come to sniff him out. She was known for that, among other things. For laying the finger on traitors and seeing they were put out of the way. For interrogating any poor bastard that had given cause for suspicion, and getting the truth out of him whatever it cost. She was harder than any man among them. Her well-cut clothes and expensive hair-do had never stood in her way.

‘You can put your minds at rest,’ were her first words. ‘I’m not here looking for anybody. What I am here for is to give you your orders for tonight’s mission. In the ordinary way of things, that’d be the job of your OC, who’d get his instructions from the Brigade Adjutant. But this goes higher than Brigade level, and for reasons you’ll understand in a minute, your orders have to come direct.

‘Now, first things first. If anyone asks, I haven’t been here tonight. You’ve never seen me, not here, not anywhere. You’ll say nothing to anyone about the orders you’re about to receive, or the mission itself. And I don’t just mean outsiders, I mean any friends you may have in the movement, and your own families. Any hint of loose talk and the entire unit will be executed. Do I make myself clear?’

Gearóid felt a chill pass through him. She was not even offering them the option of leaving. They were soldiers fighting a war, and to leave would be desertion.

‘Conor’s got your weapons in a car outside. They’re all clean as a whistle. I had them from a special shipment that was brought in yesterday. You don’t need to know where they came from. But you can relax. They haven’t been in a cache, and the Brits haven’t come within a mile of jarking them.’

Jarking was an army term for tampering with illegal weapons, usually by planting small homing devices in the stock. The RUC or the army would get word of an arms cache, through a tout, and take the weapons off to be doctored. It had happened a lot in the seventies, less often of late. More than one volunteer had lost his life as a result of such tricks.

‘The car was taken a couple of hours ago from outside a house on the Stranmillis Road. The owner’s on holiday, so it won’t be missed for a week or two. Conor has the man’s driving licence and papers.’

O’Dalaigh paused and looked at each of them again. She was a cold bastard, thought Gearóid: you could see it right enough in her eyes. She spoke fancy too, with an accent, but better educated than the rest of them. He’d heard she was a lawyer or something. He wondered what the others were thinking. Something big was up, that was for sure. Jesus, and he could have been in Bangor.

‘You are to drive down to Malone House in the south of the city. It’s at the entrance to Barnett Park, near Shaw’s Bridge. Conor here’ll go over it all with you on the map. You’ll be carrying FNC assault rifles with night-sights – Conor tells me you’re all experienced in the use of them. You’re to go out for a recce in half an hour, so you can see the place in daylight. Then you hold off until after dark.

‘But I want you in position by eleven o’clock. Not a minute later – if you are held back for any reason and you can’t make it by eleven, the mission’s aborted. Is that clear? Good.

‘Around twelve o’clock, you’ll hear an army patrol coming down the Malone Road. One Shorland, no back-up. As well as the soldiers, there’ll be four civilians in another vehicle. They’re your targets. Once they’re out of their car, you’re to open fire. Shoot to kill, and take your time about it.’

She continued with the briefing, talking slowly, making sure they understood. None of them, herself included, would ever be sent out on a more important mission, and it was vital there were no slips of any kind.

‘Right now,’ she said, drawing to a close. ‘I want you to listen carefully. After what happens tonight, you are dead men if you stay in Belfast. You have to disappear. No-one’s to see hilt nor hair of you for a year at least. You’ll be taken straight across the border tonight. I don’t want anyone knowing where you’ve gone, and be sure none of you tries to get in touch with your families. They’ll be told you’re all right and still on active service. Once things settle down, I’ll arrange for letters to be passed.

‘Now, is there anything I’ve not made clear?’

There was a tense silence. It was hot in the little room. On the wall, a picture of the Sacred Heart glinted redly. From outside, the voices of children playing came in waves: the next generation of heroes and martyrs scrabbling on paving-stones, writing names in chalk that would one day be carved in marble. And a dog barking high and quickly, and the low, familiar growl of a Hotspur Land Rover on patrol.

‘How long?’ asked O’Driscoll.

‘How long for what?’

‘You know right enough. How long before I can see my weans again? They’re just settling down now in school. It’s barely a year since their mother was killed.’

It was Melaugh who answered him.

‘Colm,’ he said, ‘I know well enough this is hard on you. But there’s no choice. If the weans was to come after you, they’d be followed. You know that as well as I do. I’m sorry this was sprung on you, but we couldn’t take any risks. I only knew myself earlier today. You don’t have to come on the mission. There’s no-one here’ll think any the worse of you if you don’t. You’ve given plenty to the cause.’

O’Driscoll looked steadily at his OC. He knew the man was talking a load of twaddle. You didn’t walk away from a mission at this level. If there was a word whispered about it anywhere, you’d be the first with a bullet in your head. And then who’d take care of the weans? He said nothing more.

Gearóid Lalor slumped back into his chair. He knew he was in some indefinable danger, that he was face to face at last with the brightness of martyrdom. This was something none of them would ever get out of. He looked across the room at Colm O’Driscoll and thought of another poem the man buried in Sligo had written. It made him want to weep, the beauty of the thing.

The Horses of Disaster plunge in the heavy clay:Beloved, let your eyes half close, and your heart beatOver my heart, and your hair fall over my breast . . .

And he thought about dulse, and dancing, and fish and chips, and Noreen’s hand and Noreen’s lips and Noreen’s breasts that he’d touched so rarely, and her heart that had beaten so seldom over his heart, wondering how it was that all things grew dark and ragged at the coming of night.

A light summer rain had come and gone, cutting the day in two, leaving the night humid and uncomfortable. The grass where they lay in wait was damp; not far away the river touched the air with a moist breath.

Conor Melaugh was grateful for the wet. In the summer months, the little park was popular with couples looking for a little more privacy than the average nightclub afforded. He had anticipated problems in setting an ambush even as late as this. Now, he was sure there was no-one within a radius of five hundred yards except himself and his men.

There was a rare silence all round them, into which random thoughts dropped, as though into still water. Melaugh watched clouds circle the moon. He imagined he could hear Seamus Lenihan breathing nervously a few yards away. Tension was building as midnight drew near.

Melaugh had been a full-time volunteer for seven years now, an officer commanding his own Active Service Unit for three. He had seen men come and go in that time – shot, arrested, taken for touts and executed, or just plain scared and running. Jesus, but he was scared himself tonight, who wouldn’t be? He had never been given instructions like these before, had never sat through a queerer briefing.

But the queerness of the operation was only half of it. What bothered him most was the end of it, the thing he had to do, the thing that stuck in his throat like clay. But there was no way out, there never was. O’Dalaigh had driven the point home, as if it needed reinforcing. She was a hard bitch, that one, she’d put a bullet in your head as soon as shake your hand. Her reputation went ahead of her: she was not a woman to be crossed, not if you valued your life and the lives of your family. If he disobeyed orders, she’d make him an example people would remember the length and breadth of Ireland.

They lay in a flat semi-circle facing the front of Malone House. Melaugh held the centre, with Lenihan to his left and Colm O’Driscoll beyond him at the entrance. On the right were Eugene O’Malley, the music-man, flanked by young Gearóid Lalor. Maureen O’Dalaigh had laid on a sixth man to drive the van, parked several yards up Dub Lane, ready for a quick getaway through the Upper Malone and straight down Finaghy Road to Ladybrook.

Gearóid was still thinking of Noreen, and intermittently of the night out he had missed. Not that, in truth, he had ever enjoyed much of a social life. He belonged to a staunchly Republican family, one that had given martyrs to the cause, and his childhood and youth had been committed in one way or another to the movement.

He smelled the night air and thought of Noreen again, then found himself squirming to get comfortable on the wet ground. He’d been brought up to believe in destiny: the destiny of Ireland, that would one day be free, his own destiny as a soldier fighting for that freedom. But it was hard to think of the ballads and to picture yourself as a man of destiny, striding at the head of the masses with an Armalite held high, when reality was a wet field and your knees aching as you waited to kill a man or be killed in the doing of it. He held his breath against the raw damp and the muddy smell of the ground.

At thirty seconds to midnight, they heard a Norland approaching from the Malone Road, then turning into the short approach road that led down to Malone House. A much lighter vehicle accompanied it. Military precision. At midnight, the little convoy drew up at the front steps of the house, and the engines fell silent almost simultaneously.

The car was either a Jaguar or a Daimler, it was impossible to say which in the darkness. Nor did it matter. As Conor Melaugh watched through his night-sight, the rear door of the Norland opened and a patrol of six soldiers wearing flak jackets and carrying H & K MP5s jumped to the ground, two at a time. A detachment from B Company, attached to Belfast Roulement Battalion (OPCON BRB), or so O’Dalaigh had said.

As they got into position, the driver of the car got out and quickly opened the remaining doors. Four passengers stepped down, three men and a woman. Like the driver, they were dressed in civilian clothes. So far, everything was as Melaugh had been told it would be.

The four civilians started towards the house, and the driver started to close the doors of his vehicle.

Melaugh let a couple of seconds pass: he wanted the entire team to have a clear line of fire. He targeted the woman and eased back on the trigger. There was a sharp report and the woman jerked forward hard as though a brick had hit her. The men beside her started to turn, and they seemed to move in slow motion, each in a different direction, confused, their hands lifting, their heads turning, three stark silhouettes against a stone façade. And in mid-turn they twitched as though hidden fingers had pulled strings and hurled them to the ground.

Beside the Norland the soldiers stood and watched. Exactly as promised, they did not move a muscle, not even when O’Malley walked to the steps and riddled the prone bodies of the victims with round upon round of sub-machine gun fire. Melaugh saw the looks on their faces, distorted by the otherworldly glow of the night-sight. He was looking straight into their eyes, and they knew he was looking, and he knew they would kill him if they only could. Their faces were portraits of impotent rage and a terrible, deep hatred. Some of their fathers had fought in the long war too.

When the last burst of machine-gun fire echoed across the park, Conor got to his feet. He felt tired and he felt afraid. What if, after all, it was a double-cross within a double-cross? He wouldn’t have put it past O’Dalaigh and her like to offer up an entire ASU as a sacrifice for whatever had been achieved tonight.

Eugene O’Malley rejoined the others.

‘Let’s get the hell out of here, lads.’

They regrouped and hared down the lane to the van. The engine was running, ready to take off. No-one wanted to hang around. Even if the patrol back at the house stuck by their agreement, there would soon be others, both RUC and army, who would cut them down without questions or remorse.

‘It’s to make it look right,’ Maureen O’Dalaigh had said to Conor during the briefing that afternoon. ‘It would never be believed that the army opened fire and hit no-one. They’ll need a body to parade before the media, some sort of compensation for the unholy mess you and the boys will make.’

‘You want to sacrifice one of our own volunteers just to save their face?’ He had been deeply angry even then.

She had shaken her head.

‘No, not to save face. To save the whole job from being blown. That one death will make it seem real, will convince the authorities that the Brits opened fire while you were there. It has to be like that, Conor. I’m sorry, but that’s how it is.’

And that’s how it was right now. As they came to the van, Conor was next to Gearóid Lalor. He’d seen they were together.

‘Jesus, Gearóid,’ he said, the words sticking in his throat. ‘I’ve left the fucking Browning behind. Will you go back quick and get it for me while I get the lads into the van? You can’t miss it: it’s next to that big tree over there. The soldiers are watching us closely, they know who you are.’

‘Right you are, Conor. I’ll only be a wee minute.’

Conor didn’t watch. But he heard the shots well enough when the bastards opened up. By the time they finished, they must have filled the wee lad with enough bullets to make a length of lead pipe. Conor felt sick and angry and confused.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.

And he could still hear Gearóid’s voice ringing in his ears. ‘I’ll only be a wee minute.’

Area Metropolitan Police HQHarcourt StreetDublin4 September0915 hours

Declan Carberry had woken with a headache for the fourth morning in a row. There’d been three the week before. Five the week before that. ‘The Grinder’, ‘The Thumper’, and, more often than not, ‘The Detonator’. He had names for all of them, and he’d started counting. Next thing he’d be keeping a log. Onset, duration, intensity, possible cause. He’d have to call on Brannigan at this rate, but it was the last thing he wanted to do. Brannigan was the sort of doctor who liked pushing people about. ‘Take a drop of this, swallow that, stop the other.’ He’d be sure to order Declan to take time off work, and that was something he could not afford to do right now. And not next month. Or next year, for that matter.

And, then, Brannigan was inclined to talk, to probe. ‘Did anything happen before the headaches began?’. ‘Is there anything in particular that triggers them off?’ The man fancied himself as some sort of counsellor, in his old brogues and the Aran sweater he wore in the surgery. ‘Are you feeling anxious. Tense? Have you any special worries? When did you last have sex?’

Jesus, Declan thought, leaning across his desk and picking up the report on the bombing at O’Donoghue’s, he knew perfectly well what was wrong with him, and there were no nostrums Brannigan could give him that would make things better.

A child could have explained Declan Carberry’s headaches: a wife he no longer loved but could not divorce; a tendency to overwork; and a job as head of the Special Detective Unit, the Irish Republic’s Special Branch, with special responsibility for counter-terrorism. He was surprised it was only tension headaches. Men of his age, with his problems, dropped dead every day of the week from heart attacks. Maybe he had a brain tumour.

Even if they changed the law on divorce – which seemed as remote a prospect as ever – he would be none the better off. He still would not be able to divorce Concepta. It was bad enough that the woman had grown to be everything he detested – flashy and smug and wilful and self-pitying; but Concepta was the Taoiseach’s sister. Or, to put it historically, her brother, Pádraig Pearse Mangan, had raised himself by slow degrees from chicken farmer to TD for Limerick West, to leader of Fianna Fáil, to Prime Minister.

So, even if divorce had been legal, Pádraig Pearse would never have permitted it for his sister. Concepta was one of the great man’s brightest assets. She appeared at party functions, organized charity balls, entertained visiting statesmen and diplomats, and had very nearly taken up residence on the set of the Late Late Show. Gay Byrne loved her. Pat Kelly adored her. She was nearly as popular as the President. Every year at Christmas, the pair of them turned up at the family home outside Limerick, to be photographed with aged parents, cousins, nephews, and nieces.

Pádraig Pearse (he insisted on both names, and why not?) was a widower. The sainted Geraldine had been speeded to her eternal rest by cancer five years earlier, whereupon Concepta, ever with an eye to the main chance, stepped into the breach and sacrificed all for Ireland. ‘My brother needs me’ was her constant cry. Her only daughter was a grown woman, her husband was a busy man, so her brother and his party came first and last.

Declan sat still for a while until his head stopped spinning. When he was younger, he could at least put this sort of morning down to heavy drinking the night before; but he’d been going easy on the sauce for a couple of years now and hadn’t touched so much as a drop last night. Maybe that was what was wrong. Maybe it was time he went back to the bottle after all. His body was telling him something, that was undeniable. More’s the pity that it chose to speak in a foreign language.

Seven dead and thirty injured, and all Declan Carberry could think about was that his wife did not love him. He groaned and started going over the report for the fourth time.

The bomb had gone off in O’Donoghue’s bar in Merrion Row at a couple of minutes after nine two nights ago. To make matters worse, the place had been packed with tourists, Americans and English among them, and the fallout from that was only beginning. He had meetings to come at the British and American embassies, and if some of the injured died, you could add the French and Dutch to the list. Over at the Department of Foreign Affairs on St Stephen’s Green, the new Minister, Ciaran Clark, was fielding enquiries from all sides. He’d been on the phone to Declan a dozen times the day before, asking for assurances.

‘Assurances?’ Declan had protested. ‘What the hell do you mean “assurances”?’

‘That there’ll be no more incidents. That you have the situation under control. Jesus, man, this could kill the tourist trade for the rest of the season. And there’s the presidency of the European Commission coming up next year. We have to be able to tell people abroad this won’t happen again.’

‘Ciaran, I’m not Jesus Christ.’

‘I never thought you were. But you are the head of the Special Detective Unit, and it’s your job to keep terrorism off the streets.’

Declan had taken overall responsibility for the investigation, rather than leaving it in the hands of one of his superintendents. Two of them, Coyle and Grogan, were working closely with him, and he himself was reporting directly to the Garda Commissioner; but he’d made the bombing his personal responsibility, and he was regretting it already.

A patrol car left Area Headquarters with its sir