Harry's Game (3 page)

He walked away from them, panting quietly to himself, his forehead cold with sweat, waiting for the shout behind him, or the heavy hand falling on his shoulder, and felt nothing. He walked out of the station to the car park, where the Avis Cortina waited. He stowed the gun under his driving seat and set off for Heathrow. There's no way they'll get you if you stay cool.

That was the advice.

In the late morning traffic the journey took him an hour. He'd anticipated it would, and he found he'd left himself ninety minutes for his flight when he'd left the car in the No 1 terminal car park. He locked the car, leaving the rifle under his seat with its magazine along with it.

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The police were staked out at all corners of the terminal. The man saw the different groups, reflected in their shoulder markings. Airport Police‐‐AP, T. Division of the Metropolitan‐‐T, and the Special Patrol Group men‐‐CO. He knew the last were armed, which gave him a chilled feeling in his belly. If they shouted and he ran, would they shoot him? ... He clenched his fist and walked up to the BEA ticket desk.

'The name is Jones ... you've a ticket waiting for me. The one o'clock to Amsterdam, BE 467.'

The girl behind the counter smiled, nodded, and began to beat out the instructions of the flight into her personal reservations computer. The flight was confirmed, and as she made the ticket out the terminal loudspeakers warned passengers of delays in all flights to Dublin, Cork and Shannon and Belfast. No reason was given. But

that's where all the effort will be, they'd told him. They haven't the manpower for the lot.

The man brought out the new British passport supplied for him by his unit quartermaster and walked through immigration control.

TWO

Normally the Commissioner travelled alone, with only the elderly driver for company. That afternoon sitting in the front with the driver was an armed detective. The car turned into Downing Street through the crash barriers that had been put into position half an hour after the shooting was reported. The dark, shaded street was empty of Ministerial cars, and sightseers were banned for the day. By the door two constables had established their will on the group of photographs gathered to record all comings and goings, and shepherded them into a line stretching from the railings, over the pavement and out into the parking area. The Commissioner was met in the hall, warm with its red carpets and chandeliers, and escorted to the lift. As he passed the small room to the right of the door, he noted the four plain‐clothes men sitting there. His order that the Prime Minister's guard should be doubled had been carried out. Two floors later he was led into the Prime Minister's study.

'I just wanted to see if there was anything you wanted to say before we get involved in the main scene downstairs.'

'All I can do now, sir, is say what we know, what we're doing. Not much of the first, a lot of the second.'

'There'll be a fair amount of questioning about the security round the Minister...'

The Commissioner said nothing. It was an atmosphere he was not happy in; he reflected that in his three years as Commissioner and the country's top policeman he'd never got into this 11

marble tower before, never got beyond the first floor reception salons. On the way to Whitehall he had primed himself not to allow the police to become the scapegoat, and after thirty‐six years in the Force his inclination was to be back at Scotland Yard hovering on the fifth floor by the control room, irregular as it was, but at least doing something.

There was little contact, and both acknowledged it. The Prime Minister rose and motioned with his hand to the door. "Come on," he murmured, "let's go and meet them. Frank Scott of the RUC and

General Fairbairn are coming in from Belfast in an hour or so. We'll hear them after you.'

The man was striding his way along the vast pier of Schipol Airport, Amsterdam, towards the central transit area. If his connections were working he had fifty‐eight minutes till the Aer Lingus 727 took off for Dublin airport. He saw the special airport police with their short barrelled, lightweight carbines patrolling the entrance to the pier where the El Al jumbo was loading, and had noticed the armoured personnel carriers on the aprons. All the precautions of the anti hijack programme ... but nothing to concern him. He went to the Aer Lingus desk, collected the ticket waiting for him, and drifted away to the duty‐free lounge. They'd told him not to miss the duty free lounge; the best in Europe, they'd said. Belgrave Square and the noise and the screaming were far away; for the first time in the day he felt a degree of calm.

In the first‐floor Cabinet Room the Commissioner stood to deliver his briefing. He spoke slowly, picking his words with care, and aware that the Ministers were shocked, suspicious and even hostile to what he had to say. There was little comfort for them. On top of what they had seen on the television lunch time news they were told that a new and better description was being circulated ... for the first time the policeman had the full attention of his audience.

There was a slight jostling incident at Oxford Circus this morning. A man barged his way through, nearly knocking people over, md noticeably didn't stop to apologize. Not the sort of thing that you'd expect people to remember, but two women independently >saw the television interview from Belgrave Square this morning, and phoned the Yard‐‐put the two together. It's the same sort of man i they're talking about as we'd already heard of, but a better des Cription. We'll have a photokit by four o'clock‐‐‐‐'

He was interrupted by the slight knock on the door, and the arrival of the Royal Ulster Constabulary Chief Constable, Frank Scott, and General Sir Jocelyn Fairbairn, GOC Northern Ireland. When they'd sat down, crowded in at the far end of the table, the Prime Minister began.

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'We all take it this is an IRA assassination. We don't know for what motive, whether it is the first of several attempts or a one‐off. I want the maximum effort to get die killer‐‐and fast. I don't want an investigation that runs a month, two months, six months. Every day

that these thugs get away with it is a massive plus to them. How it was that Danby's detective was withdrawn from him so soon after he'd left the Ulster job is a mystery to me. The Home Secretary will report to us tomorrow on that, and also on what else is being done to prevent a recurrence of such attacks.'

He stopped. The room was silent, disliking the schoolroom lecture. The Commissioner wondered for a moment whether to explain that Danby himself had decided to do without the armed guard, ridiculing the detective‐sergeant's efforts to watch him. He thought better of it and decided to let the Prime Minister hear it from his Home Secretary.

The Prime Minister gestured to the RUG man.

'Well, sir ... gentlemen," he started in the soft Scots burr of so many of the Ulstermen. He tugged at the jacket of his bottle‐green uniform and moved his blackthorn cane fractionally across the table. 'If he's in Belfast we'll get him. It may not be fast, but it's a village there. We'll hear, and we'll get him. It would be very difficult for them to organize an operation of this scale and not involve so many people that we'll grab one and he'll bend. It's a lot easier to get them to talk these days. The hard men are locked up, the new generation talks. If he's in Belfast we'll get him.'

It was past five and dark outside when the Ministers, and the General and the Prime Minister again, had had their say. The Prime Minister had called a full meeting of all present for the day after tomorrow, and reiterated his demand for action and speed, when a private secretary slipped into the room, whispered in the Commissioner's ear, and ushered him out. Those next to him had heard the word "urgent" used.

When the Commissioner came back into the room two minutes later the Prime Minister saw

his face and stopped in mid‐sentence. The eyes of the eighteen politicians and the Ulster policeman and the General were on the Commissioner as he said:

'We have some rather bad news. Police officers at Heathrow have discovered a hired car in the terminal car park near No 1 building. Under the driver's seat was a Klashnikov rifle. The car-park ticket would have given a passenger time to take flights to Vienna, Stockholm, Madrid, Rome and Amsterdam. The crew of the BEA flight to Amsterdam are already back at Heathrow, and we are sending a photokit down to the airport, it's on its way, but one of the stewardesses thinks a man who fits our primary description, the rough one we had at first, was in the fifteenth row in a window seat. We are

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also in touch with Schipol police, and are wiring the picture, but from the BEA flight there was ample time to make a Dublin connection. The Aer Lingus, Amsterdam/Dublin flight landed in Dublin twenty‐five minutes ago, and they are holding all passengers in the baggage reclaim hall.'

There was a common gasp of relief round the Cabinet Room, as the Commissioner went on.

'But the Dublin airport police report that those passengers with >ut baggage went through immigration control before we notified them.'

'Would he have had baggage?" It was the Prime Minister, speaking very quietly.

'I doubt it, sir, but we're trying to establish that with the ticket desk and check‐in counter.'

'What a cock‐up." The Prime Minister was virtually inaudible. 'We'll need some results, and soon.'

From Heathrow, the Klashnikov, swaddled in a cellophane wrapping, was rushed by squad car to Woolwich on the far side of the city, to the police test firing range. It was still white from the chalk like fingerprint powder brushed on at the airport police station, but the airport's resident fingerprint man had declared it clean. "Doesn't look like a gloves job," he said, "he must have wiped it‐‐a cloth, or something. But it's thorough; he's missed nothing.'

In the suburbs of Dublin, in the big open‐plan newsroom of RTE, the Republic of Ireland's television service, the central phone in the bank used by the news editor rang at exactly six o'clock.

'Listen carefully, I'm only going to say this once. This is a spokesman for the military wing of the Provisional IRA. An active service unit of the Provisional IRA today carried out a court-martial execution order on Henry DeLacey Danby, an enemy of the people of Ireland, and servant of the British occupation forces in Ireland. During the eighteen months Danby spent in Ireland one of his duties was responsibility for the concentration camp at Long Kesh. He was repeatedly warned that if the regime of the camp did not change action would be taken against him. That's it.'

The phone clicked off, and the news editor began to read back his .shorthand.

Ten hours later the Saracens and pigs, on dimmed headlights, were

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moving off from the Belfast police stations, heading out of the sandbagged tin‐ and chicken-wire fortresses of Andersontown, Hasting Street, Flax Street, Glenravel Street and Mountpottinger. Sentries in steel helmets and shrapnel‐proof jerkins, their automatic rifles strapped to their wrists, pulled aside the heavy wood and barbed wire barricades at the entrances of the battalion and company headquarters and the convoys inched their way into the darkness. Inside the armoured cars the troops huddled together, their faces blackened with boot polish, their bodies laden with gas masks, emergency wound dressings, rubber‐bullet guns, truncheons and the medieval Macron see‐through shields. In addition they carried with them their high‐velocity NATO rifles. Few of the men had slept more than a few hours, and that cat‐napping in their uniform, their only luxury that of being able to take off their boots.

Their officers and senior NCOs, who had attended the operational briefings for the raids, had slept even less. There was no talk, no conversation, only the knowledge that the day would be long, tiring, cold and probably wet. There was nothing for the men to look at.

Each car was battened down against possible sniper attacks; only the driver, the rifleman beside him and the rifleman at the back, with his barrel poked through the fine visibility slit, had any sight of the darkened, rain‐swept streets. No house lights were on, no shop windows were illuminated, and only occasionally was there a high street lamp, one that had survived the attempts of both sides over the last four years to destroy its brightness.

Within a few minutes the convoys had swung off the main roads and were splitting up in the housing estates, all but one on the west side of the city. Two thousand troops, drawn from six battalions, were sealing off the streets that have the Falls Road as their spinal cord‐‐the Catholic artery out of the west side of the city, and the route to Dublin. As the armoured cars pulled across the streets, paratroopers, marines and men from the old county infantry units flung open the reinforced doors and ran for the security of their fire positions. In the extreme west, on the Andersontown and Suffolk border, where the houses are newer and the sight therefore more incongruous, the troops were from a heavy artillery unit‐‐men more used to maneuvering with the long‐range Abbot gun than looking for cover in front gardens and behind dustbins. Away across the city from the Falls more troops were spreading into the Ardoyne, and across on the east side of the Lagan the Short Strand area was sealed.

When their men were in position the officers waited for first light, cars that tried to enter or leave the cordoned streets were sent back. In a gradual drizzle the troops lay and crouched in the cover that i hey had found, thumb on the safety catch. The selected marksmen cradled their rifles, made heavier by the attachment of the Star scope, the night vision aid.