Provo. Gordon Stevens

did you last see him?’

      It was no more nor less than the families in the street expected: the Brits putting on the pressure on Orange Day, the bastards letting them know who was boss. Piss off, Sullivan’s wife began to say. The patrol pushed past her and into the hallway, searching the rooms, downstairs, upstairs. Sullivan was different, Sullivan was on the security computer as a known Provo. His wife was shouting and his children screaming. The patrol hurried past them and out of the house.

      The men in the patrol knew each other, had trained with each other, become accustomed to patrolling the streets together. Except for the two men who had joined them half an hour before and who had sat silently with them as the armoured personnel carrier swung into Beechwood Street.

      The first patrol was already pushing its way in to the next doorway, the second lieutenant still questioning the family in the hallway and the rest of the patrol searching the rooms upstairs and downstairs, running down the stairs and pushing past, out into the street and to the next address on the list. The soldiers moving quickly and confusingly.

      Six soldiers into number 47, only four out. Two – the two who had joined them thirty minutes before – through the trapdoor on the upstairs landing and into the roof space.

      The patrols were still ten houses away from Tommy Reardon’s. Abruptly the soldiers climbed back into the vehicles and the convoy screamed away as quickly and apparently as predictably as it had arrived.

      The woman who left the slightly battered Opel by the shops three corners from Beechwood Street was in her late twenties, five feet six inches tall, with brown hair – Irish hair her mother called it – and thin attractive features. She spent the next fifteen minutes observing both the alleyway which ran behind Reardon’s house, and the street itself. By the time she returned to the car it was positioned at the top of Beechwood Street.

      Cathy Nolan had been born in Northern Ireland. Her family religion was Protestant, though she herself had slipped into something bordering atheism. For four years she had served in the Women’s Royal Army Corps, the last two of them in Germany, where she had volunteered for what was described – officially, at least – as an adventure training course, but which was a front set up by the talent-spotters and run by an SAS officer from the NATO Long Range School near Lake Constance. At the end of the course she had been taken aside and the suggestion made that she might like to consider Special Duties. Three months later she had been given a new name and sent on the ten-week SAS course at Pontrilas for women undercover agents. At the end of that period, and with yet another identity, she had begun work with the 14th Intelligence Corps in Northern Ireland, based in Lisburn. For the past month she had been seconded to E4A, the RUC undercover surveillance department. The coat she wore was from Next, green but slightly faded, all the pockets with zips which she herself had added so that nothing would fall from them, and the 9mm automatic pistol she wore in the waist holster beneath the jacket was a Browning Hi-Power.

      ‘All quiet?’ Brady sat in the driver’s seat. He was slightly older, fair hair and lean face.

      The microphone in the car was voice-activated, the aerial concealed, and the two of them wore earpieces. Brady also wore a Browning Hi-Power in a waist holster on his left side, a Heckler and Koch MP5K lay on the floor between the driver’s seat and the door, covered by a folded newspaper, and the two-man back-up car was three streets away.

      ‘So far.’

      Someone was being greedy – she had first felt the unease midway through the briefing, felt it again now. The SAS were dealing with the gunmen inside the house, plus the Provo team escorting Tommy Reardon and his digger. Assuming they found him in time. E4A were assigned to tailing any IRA men who might show during the operation. The two operations fine and logical, except they were being run together. And that was the problem. Either the SAS should be inside the house, or E4A should be waiting outside. Not both. Bloody typical, she thought. Different bosses playing out the same game. Herself and Brady in the middle.

      Noel Ellis had been notified thirty minutes before and had telephoned RUC headquarters to confirm. The Special Branch man showed his identification and came straight to the point.

      ‘An employee of yours, Tommy Reardon. We need to know where he’s working.’

      Ellis and a schoolfriend, Billy Knight, had formed the building firm twenty years before. Ellis was a Catholic and Knight a Protestant. When the other man had died two years ago Ellis had deemed it fit not to change the name of the firm.

      ‘Why?’ He poured himself a Black Bush and offered the policeman one. ‘He’s a good worker, took him on myself. Not the sort to get mixed up with the wrong people. Not in trouble, is he?’

      The SB man declined the drink. ‘What site’s he working on?’

      ‘Short Street, by the docks. I wouldn’t normally know, but I was there this afternoon.’

      ‘And he’d leave his digger there?’

      Ellis began to understand. ‘Yes.’

      ‘Can I use the phone?’

      The roof space was dark and dusty. Haslam and Phillips moved carefully, picking out the rafters in the beams of the streamlight torches and transferring their weight slowly and exactly, making no noise and counting the number of houses over which they passed. Each carried a Browning Hi-Power, with spare magazines in pouches on their belts. Each wore a remote earpiece, the microphones of their Mitre radios concealed and an induction loop passing through their clothing to the hand pressure switch by their wrists. Any messages they sent would be via the car parked three streets away, the car on remote and the message relayed to control, the net they were using dedicated to the operation and verbal signals kept to a minimum in case the IRA intercepted them or the people in the houses heard them. After eighteen minutes they came to the trapdoor above the upstairs landing of Tommy Reardon’s house. Haslam clicked the switch three times – the signal to the man on listening watch that they were in position – and waited.

      In ten minutes he would die, Reardon knew. His palms were wet with sweat, and the fear drummed through his head and churned in his stomach. He followed the Sierra out of the docks area, under the motorway flyover and up Brougham Street. The route was as carefully planned as the pick-up: the building site was less than a mile and a quarter from the Crum, and where possible the route wound its way through back streets – all Catholic – with the houses on either side protecting the convoy from the eye in the sky. Only at three points would the digger be exposed, and the last of those was on the hundred-yard run-up to the prison itself.

      The convoy filtered left along North Queen Street, the sound of the digger engine drowning the whine of the surveillance helicopter hovering high in the sky half a mile away above the Falls, then turned third right into Spamount Street. The terraced houses on each side were red brick and spotlessly clean, yet in the streets to the right many of the houses were boarded up and painted with INLA slogans.

      McKendrick’s Granada was waiting on the corner of Lepper Street. As the convoy approached he slid into the passenger seat. Rorke left the Sierra, joined him, and the convoy slipped past, along Lepper Street, the Republican slogans daubed on the walls and the sides of the tower blocks to Reardon’s left. Five minutes to go, he knew, perhaps six or seven if he managed to slow down. He turned right into Churchill Street and tried to control the trembling.

      ‘Any problems?’ McKendrick sat back as Rorke spun the Granada round and headed for Beechwood Street. One last check before they cleared the area, he decided.

      ‘Should there be?’

      The Gazelle was half a mile from the convoy, the surveillance at an oblique angle to avoid detection. ‘Red Nine, Yellow.’ Communication from the helicopter was kept to a minimum, call signs omitted and codenames for locations pre-set.

      The message was relayed to the two Macrolan Land-Rovers: Red Nine the code for the location where the digger had been spotted – and from this the suggestion that the Crum was the probable target – and Yellow the code for the fact that vehicles were following the digger. And that was the problem, the SAS commander in charge of the ambush knew. Because the explosives