Provo. Gordon Stevens

and sucking in police and army manpower; forty minutes later a third. By three in the afternoon the security problem was escalating, the incidents building suddenly and brutally into running battles, with police and army units intended to be held in reserve suddenly committed, and men not due to be on duty until the evening called in and placed on stand-by. At four the first petrol bomb was thrown, the crowd retreating quickly and orderly and the troops following, apparently beating them back but moving into the killing zone where the Provo snipers were waiting. At 4.20 the first soldier was shot by a gunman positioned at the Divis flats, ten minutes later a second, this time fatally. At 4.40 the Belfast Telegraph received the first bomb warning of the day. Half an hour later, with just enough time to clear the area, a five-pound bomb exploded in the city centre.

      *

      Tommy Reardon parked the digger, switched off the engine, padlocked the cab, returned the keys to the site office and walked to the Transit. It was six o’clock. The other men climbed in and the van pulled out of the gates.

      At least it wasn’t dark, at least they weren’t in the country. Particularly after the first threats, and especially in the drives back from some of the sites twenty or thirty miles outside Belfast, he had prayed as they approached vehicles parked by the roadside in case they contained a bomb, or scoured the road ahead for signs of land mines and the countryside on either side from which the bombers would activate them. Had felt the panic every time a vehicle pulled in front of them in case it stopped and the men in the balaclavas leapt out and held them up, asked their names and religions, picked out the Catholics or the Protestants and took them to the ditch at the roadside. UFF or IRA, it didn’t matter. All bastards.

      The Transit turned into Beechwood Street and stopped outside his house. Reardon climbed out, shut the door, banged on the side, and watched as it trundled down the road, the exhaust rattling and the smoke hanging in the air. The street was quiet, a cluster of children playing ball and two women disappearing into a house twenty yards away. He smiled at them, walked up the path, unlocked the Yale and went inside. The smell of cooking and the sound of laughter came from the kitchen, at the rear. He dropped his bag on the hall floor, closed and locked the door, hung up his coat, kissed Marie and the kids and went upstairs. By the time he had washed and changed the supper was on the table.

      The front door bell rang.

      ‘I’ll get it.’ The boy pushed back his chair and ran into the hall. One of his son’s friends, Reardon assumed. ‘You can play after supper.’ The boy stretched up and unlocked the door, his mother just behind him.

      Rorke was wearing a donkey jacket and what appeared to be a woollen cap. ‘Is Tommy in?’ Even in the shadows of the hallway he sensed the way she tightened and smelt the fear which gripped her. ‘He left his wallet in the motor, must have dropped out. I thought he might need it tonight.’ He reached in his pocket.

      The donkey jacket was the same as all the men wore. Marie relaxed, stood back. ‘Come in, we’re just eating.’

      The Sierra at the top of the street edged forward.

      Rorke stepped inside, pulled the balaclava over his face, and spun the woman round, his left hand clamped tight over her mouth to prevent her screaming and his right hand taking the Smith and Wesson from inside the jacket. The Sierra stopped outside the house, the two men stepped nonchalantly out and walked casually up the path and into the house, pulling the hoods over their heads and taking the AK47, with its folding stock, and the Czech CZ automatic pistol from their coats the moment they were inside.

      ‘Who is it?’ Reardon leaned across and saw the figures, realized. Tried to work out whether he could get through the back door before they shot him. Whether he could at least get his daughter out.

      This happens to other people, not us, the thought screamed through Marie’s head. She grabbed the boy and held him tight as Rorke pushed them into the sitting-room. Behind him one gunman bundled Reardon and his daughter into the room and the second closed and locked the. front door, then the kitchen door at the back.

      ‘Switch on the telly and close the curtains.’

      Marie tried to stop trembling, to do as Rorke instructed. Then she stood in the middle of the floor, between the gunmen and her husband, the children clutching her skirt and the prayer running through her mind. They hadn’t shot him yet. Please, sweet Mary, Mother of God, may they have made a mistake. Please may they not have come for her husband after all.

      ‘Time to pay, Tommy.’

      The children came out of the first shock and began to sob.

      ‘Not here. Not in front of them.’ Reardon moved slightly so that he was separated from his family, so that if they shot him they wouldn’t hit his wife and children.

      ‘You think we’re going to stiff you?’ There was amusement in Rorke’s voice. ‘You think I’m going to put the muzzle of this against your head or down your throat and blow your brains out?’ His background had drained any mercy from him and his years with McKendrick had given his violence an edge, the beginning of a mirror image of the older man. ‘No, Tommy boy. We just want to borrow you for a few hours, do a wee job for us.’

      Both Reardon and his wife understood.

      ‘Get on your working coat and boots. Don’t want you driving through Belfast with your best clothes on, do we?’

      Rorke followed Reardon upstairs. When they came down again Marie and the children were on the sofa, one of the gunmen in the armchair opposite them and the other by the door.

      ‘Behave yourself and he comes back.’ Rorke looked at the woman, then at Reardon. ‘You do as we want and we don’t touch her or the kids.’

      The children were too frightened to cry.

      ‘Nice and quiet, Tommy boy. Walk to the car and get in the back.’

      He looked again at the woman. ‘Don’t worry, missus. You’ll have him back by eleven.’ If the bastard police and army could find enough of him to even fill a paper bag. No point in not giving them hope, though. Tell them the truth and one of them might try something; pretend to give them a chance and they’d do exactly as you said, even though they both knew what was going to happen. He pulled off the balaclava and the two of them walked down the path. Behind them one of the gunmen closed and locked the door. The driver of the Sierra glanced up at them and a second man opened the rear door. Reardon and Rorke climbed in and the car pulled away.

      Seven o’clock, Rorke checked his watch. In five minutes the RUC would receive its third genuine bomb warning of the day, at eight its fourth. Everything on time and going to plan. The police and army already over-extended, the evening’s bombs creating fresh diversions, the timing and location of each incident apparently random but carefully plotted to draw the security forces away from the route to the prison. And the lads waiting on the inside of the Crum for Tommy Reardon to drive his digger filled with high explosive into the front gate and blow it to kingdom come. Everything on schedule. Everything as McKendrick had foreseen.

      ‘Now, Tommy boy. Where’s that digger of yours?’

      The gap in the curtains was less than two inches wide, and the curtains themselves had not moved. Perhaps it was because she was still in mourning that she kept them that way, she sometimes told herself. Perhaps because it prevented the sunlight from damaging the furniture. Perhaps because it enabled her to see what was happening without being seen herself. There were others in the street who kept a similar watch, she knew, but they reported to the Provisionals. Beechwood Street, after all, was in Ballymurphy, part of the Catholic heartland.

      Moira Sheehan was 66 years old and widowed for the last two. She was thin, with white hair, and walked with a slight stoop. Her fingers were bent and slightly arthritic. Moira Sheehan was also a Republican. In 1980 she had voted for the hunger striker Eamon McCann, officer commanding the Provisionals in Long Kesh, when – midway through his fast and in an attempt to gain publicity for it – he had stood for the British parliament. And six weeks later she had been one of the hundred thousand who had marched behind his coffin when his pitiful remains had been laid to rest in the Republican plot