Once A Pilgrim. James Deegan

TWO

       BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND TWENTY YEARS EARLIER

3.

      LANCE CORPORAL JOHN CARR hefted his rifle in his left hand and looked across the vehicle yard at the young officer.

      ‘Jesus,’ murmured Carr. ‘I reckon your missus shaves more often than he does.’

      Next to him, Corporal Mick ‘Scouse’ Parry chuckled. ‘You cheeky bastard,’ he said. ‘Fair one, mind.’

      A thin, pink dawn was just catching the top of the Black Mountain on the edge of west Belfast, but the inside of Fort Whiterock was still lit by orange sodium. In the glare of one of the lights, the second lieutenant – who was very tall and very slender – was struggling to lay out the unwieldy tribal map on the bonnet of his Snatch Land Rover.

      ‘He’s in my wagon, is he?’ said Carr, with a thin smile. ‘I think I’ll stick the lanky streak of piss up on top cover. See what he’s made of. Hopefully he’ll get a pissy nappy in the face.’

      ‘Character-building,’ said Parry, with an approving look.

      The officer finally succeeded in smoothing down the map, and now he made a show of studying it.

      ‘Look at him,’ said Carr, shaking his head. ‘The height of the bastard, he’ll make a fucking good target. Mind you, he’s a thin cunt. They’ll hardly see him if he turns sideways.’

      Scouse Parry chuckled again.

      Off to the left, near the main gate and in the shadow of the base’s massive walls, a group of soldiers – members of 7 Platoon, C Company of the 3rd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment – stood around, stamping their feet against the cold, breath forming clouds, waiting on the order to load their weapons.

      Two Snatch Land Rovers and a grey armoured RUC Hotspur idled in the background, blue diesel exhaust drifting slowly over the white-frosted tarmac.

      Two policemen leaned against their wagon, carbines slung round necks, smoking cigarettes and talking quietly about a young WPC one of them had his eye on.

      Occasional laughter erupted from the soldiers; one started coughing violently and cursed and threw away a butt.

      It was going to be a long day: patrolling and setting up VCPs in Ballymurphy, Andersonstown, and Turf Lodge till long after dark, and finishing with a shift change for the RUC at Springfield Road, before a return to the relative safety of Whiterock.

      All in the shadow of the Provisional IRA’s murderous bombers and gunmen.

      ‘I’ll go over and have a word,’ said Carr. ‘Wind him up a bit.’

      ‘Go easy on him,’ said Parry, with a smile. ‘Five minutes.’

      Carr strolled across the asphalt to where 2Lt Guy de Vere was bent over the map, trying to cram the different areas of the city – shaded orange for the Protestant sectors, green for the Catholic – into his memory.

      ‘You alright there, boss?’ said Carr.

      De Vere turned to look at him. He felt oddly intimidated by the hard-faced Scottish NCO, despite being several years older and senior in rank. He couldn’t decide whether it was down to Carr’s undeniable physical presence – he had a Desperate Dan jaw, broad shoulders and merciless eyes – or his brooding silence. The man had barely said a word to him before now, and what he did say was said in such a thick accent that subtitles would have been useful.

      At least the blokes seemed to understand what he wanted.

      ‘Fine, thanks, corporal,’ he said. ‘I was just having a last minute refresher.’

      Carr’s face was an expressionless mask, his mouth hidden by a drooping, bandito moustache of the sort the men seemed to favour.

      ‘Good idea,’ he said. ‘Mean fucking streets out there.’

      ‘Yes,’ said Guy de Vere, slightly nervously.

      A month earlier, the Paras had lost three A Coy men to a remote-controlled bomb hidden in a ruined cottage down near Mayobridge: the city just beyond the gates was every bit as hostile.

      De Vere was fresh out of the box, new in the battalion, and in the Province, and today’s was his first patrol, on his first tour. He was nominally in charge, but really his role was to watch everything that Scouse Parry and John Carr did and said, and learn.

      Not all that long ago, he’d been enjoying a lucrative career as an investment banker in Hong Kong. But, vaguely unsatisfied with life, he’d chucked all that in to come home and do something more meaningful with his life – a decision which had left his Toms shaking their heads in wonderment when they’d found out about it.

      Half an hour earlier, Carr had seen de Vere take a wander up into one of the sangars overlooking the streets outside, and he tried to imagine what the officer was thinking.

      Probably:

      Last year I was earning six figures and living the dream.

      Now I’m in a shithole where half the population wants to take my bastard head off.

       What the fuck have I done?

      ‘Boss, you’re doing top cover,’ said Carr. ‘It’ll give you a better look around so’s you can understand the Area of Operations.’

      Plus, it’ll do you some fucking good to go through what the lowest, youngest, newest crow in the multiple goes through, he thought.

      De Vere nodded. He didn’t fancy top cover one bit – you spent the whole day exposed, on offer to whoever wanted to have a pop – but he didn’t show it.

      ‘Right you are, lance corporal,’ he said.

      ‘Main thing is, keep your eyes peeled for that RPG cunt down on Kennedy Way,’ said Carr. ‘He’s an ex-French Foreign Legionnaire. Knows what he’s about.’

      De Vere nodded again: he’d had that worrying piece of information stuck into his head a few times in a series of scary briefings.

      ‘If he gets one off and it hits the wagon, that’ll seriously ruin your day,’ said the Scot, with a cheerful grin. ‘You’ll be lucky if it only takes your legs off.’

      De Vere pushed his shoulders back. He thought for a moment about the journey up from Palace Barracks the previous evening. That had been bad enough, and it had been in the back of a Saracen, a purpose-built armoured vehicle with sixteen mil of steel protecting him. Hot, and claustrophobic, but at the end of the day sixteen mil was sixteen fucking mil. The Snatch was a lot more vulnerable.

      ‘I’ll keep my eyes peeled, corporal,’ he said. ‘Don’t you worry about that.’

      ‘Good,’ said Carr. He looked at the second lieutenant more closely. ‘You okay, boss?’ he said. ‘You look a bit white.’

      ‘I’m fine, Lance Corporal Carr.’

      Carr felt for him, momentarily. He remembered his own first time out of the gate: he was a fighter by nature, but even his arse had been going a little.

      ‘Listen,’ he said, leaning in closer and lowering his voice. ‘Everyone shits themselves the first time. The trick is, dinnae let the blokes see.’ He looked over at the Toms. ‘It’ll be fine. The RA have got snipers, but they’re shite. I’ve never heard of anyone being hit in a moving vehicle. And that cunt with the RPG?’ He looked at the young officer’s rifle. ‘You see the fucker, just give him the good news with that.’

      He threw back his head and laughed, and at that de Vere felt a weight lift off his shoulders. He looked at Carr: at a shade over six feet tall, and thick-set and hard-eyed, he held his loaded 6.5kg