Chapter XIV

He had no veteran soldiers but volunteers raw

Playing sweet Mauser music for Erin Go Bragh.

Peadar Kearney, “Erin Go Bragh”

Belfast

July 11–12, 1983

“All right, all right. Now, what’s on tonight? I should get out and enjoy the night life on my last evening in town.”

“I have to stay off the drink. I’m, well … I have some obligations tonight. After all you’ve done, I hate to leave you on your own, Terry, but …”

“I’ll come along.”

“No, no, you don’t understand. I have to be out and …”

“You’re on duty.”

“I am.”

Visions of the Belfast war zone flashed through Terry’s mind. The armoured personnel carriers, the soldiers with guns, the bullet-pocked walls and bombed-out buildings, the menacing graffiti, the tense visit to Casey’s flat. Sitting across from him was his young cousin, who would be heading out into the night to perform his “obligations.” What was Terry going to do, sit in a bar all night, skulling pints and chatting up the locals? Sit in his hotel and watch a game or a comedy on television, while a member of his family was out there risking his life?

“I’m coming with you.”

“Terry, the last thing you need is to put yourself in harm’s way again. This is the eleventh, bonfire night. The place will go up in flames at midnight to celebrate King Billy’s victory over our people in 1690.”

“Yeah, I know. We held a little symposium on the subject in the Rangers Pitch.”

“You’re having me on. Please tell me you’re not thick enough, not stupid enough, to raise that subject in a Loyalist bar.”

“It was just a few little remarks, Conn. Nothing wrong with that.”

“And you want me to bring you along tonight? Maybe we can make a picnic lunch tomorrow and enjoy the parades while we’re at it. The fecking Orangemen will be marching all day tomorrow, to rub our noses in it further, with their kick-the-Pope bands going by our churches and all over. And that will ratchet things up to an even more hysterical pitch. But we haven’t got there yet. We still have tonight to get through. The police will be out in force. Army patrols will be stepped up. Worst night of the year for you to be out on the streets of Belfast.”

“My wife would fucking kill me if she knew. What time do we head out?”

“Have you got a death wish, Terry?”

“Have you?”

“Far from it. I wish to Christ this could be resolved, and we could all get back to enjoying life, full time. But when I say resolved, I mean resolved on our terms. And history has shown us this is the only way to bring the Brits to terms. I don’t expect you to —”

“I’m hardly going to sit in my hotel room, or in a guzzling den, while my little cousin is out there risking life and limb for the cause.”

“Time to go, then. Hold on.” Conn went into his bedroom and emerged with a black shirt, which he tossed to Terry. “Put that on. Light blue is out of fashion for night work.” Terry did as he was told.

When they got outside, Terry headed to the Ford Escort but Conn went to another car. This was a Toyota Carina, a few years old. Conn caught Terry’s eye and motioned him over.

“A single man is a two-car family now?”

“No, this has been put at my disposal for the night.”

“Ah.”

Conn unlocked the doors and got into the back seat.

“What are you doing back there? So impressed with my driving to England and back that you’ve promoted me to chauffeur?”

“No,” Conn grunted, as he yanked at the interior door panel.

Terry got in on the other side, just as Conn pulled out a long package wrapped in dark rags. It wasn’t a tire wrench.

“Got another one of those?”

“No.”

Terry moved over and yanked at the panel. “Looks to me as if there’s more than one item in that stash.”

“Three.”

“So give me one.”

“Are you off your head?”

“If it’s so dangerous you need an AR-15 to protect yourself, I don’t intend to go unarmed.”

“It’s not for protection.”

“It’s for offensive action, not defence. That doesn’t give me any comfort. Hand one over.”

Conn let out a sharp sigh and reached in for a second rifle. He handed it to Terry without a word.

It was well oiled and cared for. Terry pushed the button and dropped the clip. Loaded.

“Yeah, it’s loaded, Ter; not much use otherwise. Come up front and keep it under the seat.”

Terry racked the charging handle back and checked the breech: no round in the chamber. Not yet. He replaced the magazine, and held the rifle down by his side.

“These came over on the Queen Elizabeth II — now that’s a bit of irony for you — sailing out of New York. Irish crew members bought them and smuggled them on board for the voyage to Southampton. Then they were brought here to Belfast. Where they fell into the right hands.”

They both got in the front, stashed their Armalites out of sight, and Conn started the engine. Before he shifted gears, Terry saw him make a furtive sign of the cross. Then, “Let’s roll.” He pulled out into the dark Belfast street. Terry heard the beating rotors of a helicopter and looked up in time to see an army chopper approaching the top of the Divis tower.

“Sasanach incoming,” Conn announced.

They passed through a residential area but, despite the mild summer night, saw very few people out. Except … “What on earth?” Terry twisted around in his seat and stared. “There’s a woman out there painting a wall. At this time of night?”

“Whitewashing it,” Conn replied without turning to look.

“Yeah. What’s with that? I’ve heard of being house-proud but that’s a bit much.”

“Not at all. Good Republican woman. The army would have come by and painted it black; she’s restoring it to white.”

“You’ve lost me, Conn.”

“You’re not thinking like a Belfast man, Terry. A white wall makes it easier for us to see the silhouette of a Brit soldier lurking in the neighbourhood. Brits don’t like that so they paint the walls black. We paint them white again.” Terry just shook his head. “You’ve a lot to learn, Burke. But the night is young.”

“If there’s anything I have to know, Burke, make sure I know it.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“The bonfires have started, I see.” There were flames shooting high all over the city and plumes of smoke. “These are all Loyalist fires?”

“These ones, yeah. Some in our crowd have a bonfire in August to commemorate the imposition of internment without trial back in 1971. Not on the scale of these ones. And before you ask, no, I don’t attend. Why should we be imitating that shower of savages?” He jerked his head in the general direction of the fires, and those stoking them.

“So the reason for this is what?”

Conn turned to look at him. “A reason? Reason doesn’t enter into it. They do it as a lead-in to the big celebrations tomorrow. The Glorious Twelfth, commemorating their victory over their Catholic neighbours nearly three hundred years ago. It’s just as sweet for them today. You’ll see them all marching tomorrow wearing their bowler hats and orange sashes, looking like a bunch of gobshites. You want to go over there, don’t you, Terry? See one of those fires.”

“Nah.”

“Sure you do.” Conn looked at his watch. “We’ve got a bit of time. Not much. Don’t roll your window down. Don’t make faces at them. And get your gun ready, just in case. Anything can happen on the Shankill Road. To two nice Catholic lads out for a tour of the city.”

He stopped and reversed, and headed in the direction of the nearest pall of smoke. As they got closer, Terry could see the flames shooting high into the night sky. Smoke and fire roiled around in a hot gaseous cloud. There were UVF and UDA insignia on the gable walls, and Union Jacks and Ulster Red Hand flags on all the lamp posts. When they got close enough to see the activity, Conn pulled to the left and stopped with the engine running. He checked ahead and behind and all around them. Terry saw revellers dancing in the firelight, arms pumping in the air. One man had his paramilitary insignia branded on his bare back; he wore a red, white, and blue top hat, and he leapt about in a drunken frenzy. Small children ran around excitedly and threw rocks into the flames. There was something undeniably primitive about the scene.

Terry tried not to think how ugly things could get if the firesetters caught on that there were papists in their midst. Tried not to think, but his mind had a mind of its own. He could see all too clearly the group’s feelings running high, a mob mentality taking over, Conn’s car being surrounded, the windows smashed, himself and his cousin being pulled from the car. He glanced at Conn and saw the tension in his face.

But tension was quickly replaced by fury, as Conn’s eyes fastened on something happening ahead of them.

“There’s our man, successor to Saint Peter himself,” he said, pointing to the top of a towering wood pile. Terry saw a figure in white collapse with the supporting beams, and it all came crashing to the earth. The crowd roared in triumph, their grins demonic in the orange light. The Pope had been burned in effigy by his sectarian opponents.

It was the kind of thing Terry would have expected to laugh off with a smart remark or a hastily composed limerick; it was merely the act of ignorant bigots, not worthy of attention. So his emotions took him completely by surprise; what he felt was a growing rage. It displaced the fear he’d been feeling only seconds before. “Why in the fuck are they allowed to get away with that? The government here allows it. That would be like, I don’t know, whites in America having permission to go onto the so-called Indian reservations and get in the faces of the Native Americans. Here it’s one guy’s victory over the guy next door, and his wife … It’s …”

“Don’t tax your brain trying to put it in context, Terry. Had enough?”

“Fuck it.”

Conn pulled out, made a turn, and left the scene. “Doesn’t take long to get the feel of this place. Am I right, Terry?”

Terry grunted his reply and stared out at the passing show. He snapped back to attention when Conn slowed and turned into a narrow street.

“Where are we?”

“Welcome to the Murph. This is the Ballymurphy housing estate.”

“Casey’s from here.”

“Yeah, it’s a Nationalist area.”

The graffiti bore that out, dedicated as it was to the Republican cause and the memory of the 1981 hunger strikers.

“We’re heading over that way, to the Springhill area. Massacre there a few years back. Well, 1972. Brit snipers opened fire and killed five people, one of them a thirteen-year-old girl. One of the victims was the priest who went to assist her. They shot him too.”

“Jesus Christ. A little girl.”

“And two boys not much older.”

“And the priest. They could hardly claim he was armed and dangerous, out there giving the last rites to the dying.”

“Father Noel Fitzpatrick. He wasn’t the first.”

“What?”

“Same thing happened in the Murph the year before. Eleven murdered by the soldiers that time. Father Hugh Mullan went to assist one of the victims. He waved a white cloth, but they shot him dead.”

“My God.”

“See, Terry, me and the other lads, we’re not out here for the sport. There’s a reason we do what we do. Now, let’s see who comes calling tonight.”

A few minutes later, Conn pulled into a laneway and opened the door panels again. He drew out two black balaclavas and told Terry to put one on.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he muttered as he brought the sinister-looking face mask down over his head.

Before long he found himself lying on a rooftop overlooking an intersection of two streets. The house was at the end of a row of identical attached houses with steep roofs and chimney pots on each one. Although he could not see them, he had been told that there was one man on the roof of each of the other three corner houses, covering the intersection. His balaclava was already saturated with the wood smoke from the fires around the city. He could see flames across the horizon.

Terry thought smuggling Jacky Casey out of Ireland in a Skyhawk had been a hair-raising escapade; now he might be on the verge of a gun battle, facing some of the best-trained soldiers in the world. What the hell was he doing here? Yes, he supported the Republican ideal; he had learned Irish nationalism at his father’s knee. But he had never considered leaving New York to take up the cause in Belfast. Now, through a set of circumstances he could not have foreseen, he found himself in the midst of the Troubles, with a rifle in his hand. The sensible thing, the rational thing, would be to stand down. But what was he going to do, climb down from the rooftop, leaving his younger cousin to face danger while he, Terry, the former Air Force officer, slunk off to safety? If word got out, he’d be a coward in his family’s eyes forever after. Terry knew he would not be able to look at himself in the mirror again, let alone look Conn Burke in the eye. He could hear his wife, Sheila, now. As she signed the divorce papers. Or the death certificate. Men! But that’s what he was, and this was something he had to do. He turned his mind to some relaxation techniques he had picked up early in his training, in order to keep his nerves under control. And he comforted himself with the thought — the hope, the belief — that he was being melodramatic, and that the evening would turn out to be an anticlimax. He and the younger Burke would climb down from the roof, having seen no action at all, and would soon be belting out “Come Out, Ye Black and Tans” in the safety of the residents’ bar at Terry’s hotel.

“No matter which way they come in,” Conn said to him in a low voice, “if an army patrol enters this intersection, we have them covered. If this is the night they’re going to kick in the doors of people living on this estate, and drag them out of their homes for interrogation, we’ll send the Brits packing.”

“And if they just roll through, and don’t get out to bother anybody?”

“We’ll take it as it comes. See what happens.”

They heard a rattling in the street then, and Terry tensed up at the sound; his cousin did the same.

“Stay down,” Conn whispered.

Dim headlights appeared, and Terry peered over the edge of the roof.

“Only a lorry,” Conn said, relief audible in his voice.

“And if it hadn’t been?”

Conn gave him a look. “You seem a little squeamish here, Terry. Didn’t you train in the U.S. military to do exactly this? Kill for your country?”

“But this is …”

“No, it isn’t. It isn’t different. British soldiers have killed our people, beaten and tortured our lads in detention. Shot a woman in the face, mother of eleven children. Shot her with one of those huge rubber bullets and blinded her, right in front of her family. I told you about the Ballymurphy and Springhill massacres. This is war, Terry.”

“Those actions are unforgiveable, Christ knows,” Terry whispered in reply, “but the IRA has done some unforgiveable things, too.”

“That’s true. I can’t deny it. But this is war and we didn’t start it. Back in 1969 when the civil rights marchers were attacked in Derry, and Catholics burnt out of their homes in Belfast, the IRA was unprepared. A bunch of Marxist blatherers, more interested in theory than practice. That’s when the Provisionals split off, armed themselves, and took up the defence of our communities. And the people appreciated —”

That’s when they heard it. Terry knew right away it was not just a lorry.

“Piglet,” Conn whispered. “Get down.”

Theory turned to practice in an instant on the Belfast rooftop.

The vehicle rumbled into the intersection from their right. It was a three-quarter-ton Land Rover. Terry had seen this kind of rig somewhere. A documentary? He knew it had an armour kit added to it, specifically designed for service in the North of Ireland. And it wasn’t the only army vehicle with that distinction. It came to a stop, and Conn rose enough to get a line of sight; he trained his rifle on it and waited. The first thing that emerged from the left-hand door of the armoured car was the long barrel of a gun. A soldier came into view then, stepped into the street and pivoted around, pointing his rifle ahead of him. Another soldier got out and did the same. Then both ran to the front door of the corner house across from Terry and Conn. One soldier knocked while the other faced the street, again turning from side to side with his rifle raised. Lights were on in the house, but no one came to the door. The soldiers waited. No response. They returned to the vehicle. All the while, Conn watched them like a hawk from above.

The soldiers emerged from the piglet again. This time they had a battering ram. They started for the house. Two more men came out of the vehicle with rifles, and looked around and upwards. One apparently spied someone on one of the rooftops, and he raised his rifle to firing position. Conn fired, and the soldier went down.

Two seconds later, a bullet came whizzing past Terry from behind. He whipped around and saw a second piglet in the street behind them. It had crept into the area with no lights; they had missed it, while concentrating on the patrol in the intersection. Terry saw a soldier beside the second vehicle take aim at Conn. Terry fired. He hit the side panel of the Land Rover, and the soldier flew to the rear of the truck. Had he made a dive for safety, or had the bullet ricocheted and struck him? Terry didn’t know. No time to think. Conn got two shots off at the first patrol, and a rain of bullets fell on it from the other three rooftops. The soldier Conn had hit rose from the ground and was pulled into the carrier. The two with the battering ram jumped back in, and the patrol barrelled off down the street to the left.

Conn turned and aimed at the second Land Rover behind them. A soldier was crouched beside it, his rifle pointed at a gunman on the roof across the street. Conn fired at the soldier and made a direct hit on the barrel of his gun. Defenceless, the soldier hoisted himself into the vehicle, and it moved forward into and through the intersection. Several shots rang out again from the rooftops, and there was answering fire from the back of the Land Rover. As Terry watched, a man tottered at the edge of the roof of the house opposite. The man dropped his rifle, clutched at his neck, and then fell from the roof into the street. The vehicle roared away.

Conn yelled at Terry to follow him. They descended from the roof, jumped to the ground, and Conn rapped at the back door of the house. A man came to the door, fully dressed. “Ambulance, Donal” was all Conn said. The man nodded and withdrew.

For the second time since coming to Belfast, Terry found himself tending a wounded man. Conn and two others stood facing outwards, rifles at their shoulders, providing what cover they could. Terry eased the balaclava up off the face of the fellow on the ground. He looked to be about twenty-one, with golden curls and light blue eyes that stared sightless at the heavens.

“What shape is he in?” Conn asked. Terry raised his head to see his cousin. Conn was continuously scanning the area, ready to fire.

“He’s not going to make it.”

Terry looked up at the riflemen in time to see each of them take his right hand off his weapon and make a quick sign of the cross. Standing in the street with rifles poised, they then began to pray. “Hail Mary, full of grace …” Terry joined in the prayer. An ambulance siren was approaching, and smoke wafted over them from the hellish fires across the city. “Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”

It was a quiet trip back to Terry’s hotel at the end of the night, the cousins both lost in their own thoughts about the firefight they had just survived.

When they arrived at their destination, Conn turned to Terry and made an effort at lightheartedness. “So, aside from that, Mr. Burke, how was your trip to Belfast?”

“Jesus.”

“Well, you can take comfort in the fact that you saved two lives in your short time here.”

“What?”

“You flew Jacky Casey to safety and you took out the soldier who had me in his sights.”

“I didn’t kill him!”

“Maybe, maybe not. We don’t know whether your round hit him and they dragged him into the piglet, or he got up and climbed in under his own power. Either way, your shot took him out of action at the crucial time. I’d have been a dead warrior beside you. You would have had to break the news to the family back in Dublin. Good work.”

It was one of those rare times when Terry was lost for a reply.

“Look at it this way, brother. You fired a shot for the cause.” Conn leaned over and quickly embraced him. “God go with you, Terry,” he said, and Terry got out of the car. He turned back to wave, and Conn raised his hand to his forehead and gave him a salute.

Terry did not stick around for the Glorious Twelfth parades.

†

Terry’s eyes refocused on Molly and Brennan, sitting across from him in a London flat in 1989.

“Where to begin after hearing that?” Brennan asked.

Molly was perfectly still, utterly at a loss for words.

“One thing is clear,” said Brennan. “I wondered a while ago about a little remark Finbarr made.”

“What?” asked Molly, looking as if she might prefer not to hear it.

“He was slagging you about what you were wearing. ‘Even a sniper wouldn’t take you out looking like that.’ Then he added, ‘Eh, Conn?’ Conn didn’t seem to laugh it off the way one might have expected. Gave Finbarr a silent ‘fuck off’ or something. Did this mean Conn was a sniper? Terry here put me off when I mentioned it. But now we know.”

“Now you know,” said a subdued Terry Burke.

But Conn was not the only person who had played a dramatic role in the Belfast adventure. Brennan said, “You were handy with a rifle yourself, Terrence.”

“When the occasion demanded it.”

“Jesus, Mary, and all the saints! I can’t believe the tale you just told me.”

“I still get the janglers thinking about it, Brennan, six years after the fact. But imagine how I’d feel if I’d gone out and partied, or I’d gone back to the hotel to sleep, and something had happened to Conn …” Terry picked up the Jameson and poured everyone a refill. “Of course Conn was out there all those other nights, I know. But, when I was in town, I just felt I had to back him up.”

“What I really find hard to believe,” Brennan said, “is that I never heard this from you before.”

“Never told anybody.”

“That’s not like you.”

“Neither was lying on a rooftop in Belfast in sniper position with an AR-15, facing two contingents of British troops.” He took a drink of his whiskey and savoured it for a long moment. “I’ve never known what to make of the whole thing, what attitude to take towards it. Whether I should be …”

“Bragging or complaining.”

“Yeah, whether I should be proud of it or ashamed.”

“So you fought with the IRA in the Six Counties, and our oul man doesn’t know about it?”

Terry laughed then. “He’d enjoy the story.”

“He would. What did you say to Uncle Finn, after him sending you up there in the first place to check on the young fellow?”

“I told him Conn might be putting himself in the way of harm. But Finn already knew that. That’s why Conn moved up there, I’m sure.”

“Whatever happened to the young cop you dropped off here in England? Did he ever get back to Ireland?”

“Well now, that’s what got me started on the tale in the first place. I had no idea what happened to Jacky Casey. I never saw Conn again till this trip with you and Molly, and didn’t have the opportunity to get into it with Conn. But now you tell me a man made a mysterious phone call and said, ‘Tell your brother we shared the loopy lady.’ I’m the brother. It was a message to me, from Casey.”

“Just when we thought this trip to London couldn’t get any more bizarre,” Brennan muttered.

Molly nodded. “The only thing missing is a love interest, Brennan. Maybe Terry will fill that in for us. You seem convinced that it was Jacky Casey who made the call, Ter, but we didn’t hear anything about sharing a ‘lady’ in the story you just recounted. And I’m not sure we want to.”

“I told you about the Cessna Skyhawk Casey and I flew in. Not known for their elegant interiors, the Skyhawks. Since this one was tarted up like a whorehouse, we got this joke going about the owner’s wife and her decorating efforts. The Tacky Tart, the Dotty Dowager, the Loopy Lady. That’s where that line came from.”

“Thank God it was bad design and not some poor love-struck woman left behind by the pair of you,” Molly said. “So this man may still be in England, if there was a price on his head in Belfast. Exiled because he was a target of the Irish Republican Army.”

“That would not dispose him to think too kindly of the IRA,” Brennan put in. “And if they killed a police officer here in London …”

“But,” Terry interrupted, “he would presumably think kindly of Conn.”

“And you,” Brennan said, “for the mercy flight out of Belfast. So why would he send a message through Molly to you, to make sure you heard about Conn’s fingerprints on the car?”

“Maybe,” Molly suggested, “he is telling you, ‘Terry, you lifted me out of Belfast. You saved my life. And so did Conn. But look what he’s done now. I’m a policeman. I can’t let this go.’”

They considered this in silence for a few minutes, till Brennan spoke up again. “But why tell you? This is the kind of information only the police would have. So they already have it. What is to be gained by telling any of us?”