Bandit Country. Peter Corrigan

by the rain. Their camouflaged bergens rested between their ankles.

      They had not moved in thirty-six hours. Boyd began to wonder if the SB had been wrong. He had been tasked to provide a Reactive Observation Post to monitor an arms cache which was to have been visited last night, but no one had shown. The cache was at the base of a tree eighty metres away – they could see it plainly even with the rain. The local ASU, an IRA Active Service Unit of four men, was planning a ‘spectacular’ for the forthcoming Twelfth of July marches. Boyd and his team were to forestall them, and had been discreetly given the go-ahead to use all necessary means to achieve that aim. To Boyd that meant only one thing: any terrorist who approached this cache was going to die. It would give the Unionists something to crow about on their holiday and sweeten relations between them and the Northern Ireland Office. Boyd didn’t give a shit about either, but he wanted to nail this ASU. They had been a thorn in 8 Brigade’s flesh for some months now, though they were not as slick as their colleagues in Armagh.

      Lying beside Boyd was Corporal Kevin ‘Haymaker’ Lewis, so called because of his awesome punch. It was rumoured he had killed an Argie in the Falklands with one blow of his fist. Haymaker was an amiable man, though built like a gorilla. He had the tremendous patience and stamina of the typical SAS trooper, but he loved grousing.

      Hidden some distance to the rear of the pair were Taff Gilmore and Raymond Chandler. All troopers seemed to have some nickname or other. Taff was so called not because he was Welsh but because he had a fine baritone voice which he exercised at every opportunity. And Raymond – well, what else could the lads call someone with the surname Chandler? Some of them, though, called him ‘The Big Sleep’ because of his love of his sleeping bag.

      It was unusual for an officer to accompany an op such as this. SAS officers had on the whole stopped accompanying the other ranks into the field since the death of Captain Richard Westmacott in 1980, gunned down by an M60 machine-gun in Belfast’s Antrim Road. But Boyd loved working in the field – not for him the drudgery of the ops room in some security base. He knew that the men called him ‘our young Rupert’ behind his back, but he also knew that they respected him for his decision.

      God, the bloody rain, the bloody mud, the bloody Provos. The players, as the Army termed the key terrorist figures, were probably warm and safe in their houses. Not for them the misery of this long wait in the rain, the pissing and shitting into plastic bags, the cold tinned food.

      Boyd felt Haymaker tense beside him. His mind had been wandering. The big trooper looked his officer in the eye, then nodded out at the waterlogged meadow with its straggling hedgerows. There was movement out there in the rain, a dark flickering of shadow close to the hedge. Immediately Boyd’s boredom and weariness disappeared. The evening was darkening but it was still too light to use Night Vision Goggles, which made the darkest night into daylight. He squinted, his fist tightening round the pistol-grip of the M16. One thumb gently levered off the safety-catch. The weapon had been cocked long ago, the magazine emptied and cleaned twice in the past thirty-six hours. The M16 was a good weapon for a nice heavy rate of fire, but it was notoriously prone to jamming when dirty.

      Boyd’s boot tapped Haymaker on the ankle. He gave the thumbs down, indicating that the enemy was in sight. Haymaker grinned, rain dripping off his massive, camouflaged face, and sighed down the barrel of his own Armalite. Boyd could hear his own heartbeat thumping in his ears.

      Two men were walking warily up the line of the hedge. This had to be it – who else would be tramping the fields on such a shitty evening? Boyd forced himself to remember the mugshots of the key Tyrone players. Would it be Docherty? Or McElwaine?

      The men had stopped. Boyd cursed silently. Had they been compromised? Besides him, Haymaker was like a great, wet statue. The pair of them hardly dared breathe.

      They were moving again, thank Christ. Boyd could see them clearly now, buttoned up in parkas, their trousers soaked by the wet grass. McElwaine and the youngster, Conlan.

      The two IRA men stopped at the tree which marked the cache, looked around again, and then bent to the ground and began rummaging in the grass. One of them produced a handgun with a wet glint of metal. They were pulling up turves, their fingers slipping on the wet earth.

      Should he initiate the ambush now? No. Boyd wanted a ‘clean’ kill – he wanted both terrorists to have weapons in their hands when he opened up. That way there would be no awkward questions asked afterwards. The ‘yellow card’, the little document all soldiers in the Province carried, specified that it was only permitted to open fire without warning if the terrorist was in a position to endanger life, either the firer’s or someone else’s.

      They were hauling things out of the hole now: bin-liner-wrapped shapes.

      ‘I’ll take McElwaine,’ Boyd whispered to Haymaker. He felt a slight tap from the trooper’s boot in agreement.

      There. It looked like a Heckler & Koch G3: a good weapon. McElwaine was cradling the rifle like a new toy, discarding the bin-liner it had been wrapped in.

      Boyd tightened his fist, and the M16 exploded into life. A hot cartridge-case struck his left cheek as Haymaker opened up also, but he hardly felt it. They were both firing bursts of automatic, the heavy, sickly smell of cordite hanging in the air about their heads.

      McElwaine was thrown backwards, the G3 flying from his hands. Boyd saw the parka being shredded, dark pieces of flesh and bone spraying out from the massive exit wounds. Then McElwaine was on the ground, moving feebly. Boyd heard the ‘dead man’s click’ from his weapon and changed magazines swiftly, then opened up again. McElwaine’s body jumped and jerked as the 5.56mm rounds tore in and out of it.

      He was aware that Conlan was down too. Haymaker changed mags also, then continued to fire. When they had emptied two mags each Boyd called a halt. They replenished their weapons and then lay breathing fast, their ears ringing and the adrenalin pumping through their veins like high-octane fuel. Haymaker was struggling not to laugh.

      Boyd pressed the ‘squash’ button on the Landmaster radio to tell Taff and Raymond the mission had been a success. Then he and Haymaker lay motionless, rifles still in the shoulder, looking out on the meadow with its two shattered corpses.

      Ten minutes they lay there, not moving – just watching. Then Boyd nudged Haymaker and the big man took off towards the bodies. Boyd pressed the squash button again, twice. Taff and Raymond would close in now.

      Haymaker examined both bodies, then waved. Boyd grinned, then thumbed the switch on the radio once more.

      ‘Zero, this is Mike One Alpha, message, over.’

      ‘Mike One Alpha, send over.’

      ‘Mike One Alpha, Ampleforth, over.’

      ‘Zero, roger out.’

      Boyd had given the code for a successful operation. In a few minutes a helicopter would arrive to spirit the SAS team away. The Green Army and the police would arrive to wrap up the more mundane details. Boyd ran over to Haymaker. The big trooper was kneeling by the bodies. It was hard to see the expression on his camouflaged face in the gathering twilight.

      ‘Fucking weapons weren’t loaded, boss. The magazines are still in the hole.’

      Boyd shrugged, slipping on a pair of black Northern Ireland-issue gloves.

      ‘That’s not a problem.’

      He reached into the hole and fetched the loaded magazines that the IRA men had not had time to fix to their weapons. Then he carefully loaded the G3 and an Armalite that was still in the cache, and placed them beside the two bodies.

      ‘That’s more fucking like it. No one will whinge about civil liberties now.’

      The two men laughed. The adrenalin was still making them feel a little drunk. They turned at a noise and found Taff and Raymond approaching, grins all over their filthy faces.

      ‘Scratch two more of the bad guys, eh boss?’ Taff said.

      ‘Damn straight.’ Boyd lifted his head. He could hear the thump of the chopper off in the