Death on Gibraltar. Shaun Clarke

succession, aiming first at Malone, peppering him with 9mm bullets, then swinging the pistol towards Carson, as the first victim was throwing his arms up and slamming back against the bar, knocking over glasses and bottles, which smashed on the floor.

      Even before Malone had fallen, Carson was being cut down, jerking epileptically as other bullets smashed the mirrors, bottles and glasses behind the bar. The barman gasped and twisted sideways, wounded by a stray bullet, and collapsed as one of the other policemen also went down, hit by the last bullets of Mad Dan’s short, savage fusillade.

      Chairs and tables turned over as the customers dived for cover, men bawling, women screaming, in that enclosed, dim and smoky space. Hearing the click of an empty chamber, Mad Dan shoved the handgun back in his trousers and turned around to march resolutely, though with no overt display of urgency, through the front door, out on to the dark pavement of Donegall Quay.

      Swinging shut behind him, the door deadened the sounds of screaming, bawling and hysterical sobbing from inside the bar.

      The RUC constables and British soldiers guarding the terminal across the road neither heard nor saw anything unusual as Mad Dan walked at a normal pace back along the pavement and turned into the darkness of the alley a short way along.

      By the time the first of the drinkers had burst out through the front door of the bar, bawling across the road for help, Mad Dan, in the hijacked car, had been raced away from the scene, back to the crowded, anonymous streets of Republican Belfast.

      ‘Out ya get,’ his driver said, screeching to a halt in a dark and desolate Falls Road side-street.

      Mad Dan and the driver clambered out of the car at the same time, then ran together out of the street and back into the lamplit, still busy Falls Road, where they parted without a word.

      As the driver entered the nearest pub, where he would mingle with his mates, Mad Dan went back up the Falls Road and turned eventually into the side-street that led to the pub facing the desolate flats that had the British Army OPs on the rooftops. Though picked up by the infrared thermal imagers and personal weapons’ night-sights of the men in the OPs, Mad Dan was viewed by the British observers as no more than another Paddy entering the pub for his nightly pint or two. However, once inside he went directly to the same table he had sat at an hour ago, where Tyrone was still seated, staring up with those eyes that did indeed look no more appealing than cold fried eggs.

      ‘So how did it go?’ Tyrone asked, showing little concern.

      ‘The garden’s been weeded,’ Mad Dan told him. ‘No problem at all.’

      ‘Then the drink’s on me,’ Tyrone said. ‘Sit down, Dan. Rest your itchy arse.’

      Mad Dan relaxed while Tyrone went to the bar, bought two pints of Guinness and returned to the table. He handed one of the glasses to Mad Dan, raised his own in a slightly mocking toast, then drank. Mad Dan did the same, wiping his lips with the back of his hand.

      ‘Neutralized or semi-neutralized?’ Tyrone asked.

      ‘As cold as two hooked fish on a marble slab,’ Mad Dan replied.

      ‘Gone to meet their maker.’

      ‘Ackaye,’ Mad Dan said.

      Tyrone put down his glass, licked his thin lips, then leant over the table to stare very directly at Mad Dan with his cold eyes. ‘Sure, I want you to meet someone,’ he said.

      ‘Who?’ Mad Dan asked.

      ‘A kid called Sean Savage.’

       3

      Sean Savage loved his country. At twenty-three he was an incurable romantic who read voraciously about the history of Northern Ireland and travelled frequently across the Province by bicycle, his rucksack weighed down with books, as well as food and drink. He had done this so often that he was now considered an expert on Irish history.

      With his vivid imagination Sean could almost see the island coming into existence at the end of the Ice Age, some 20,000 years ago, when the ice melted and the land rose up to fight the stormy sea. Cycling along the spectacular crags of the North Antrim coast, he would imagine it being shaped gradually over the years as the sea eroded the land on either side of the rocks, before human habitation was known. Northern Ireland’s first inhabitants, he knew, were nomadic boatmen who had crossed from south-west Scotland in 7000 BC and left the debris of their passing, mostly pieces of flint axes, in the soil along the rugged coastline.

      Sean was particularly intrigued by those early explorers, often wishing he had been born in that distant time, sometimes even imagining that he had been one of them in a former life. One of his favourite spots was the crag surmounted by the remains of Dunlace Castle, where, sitting as near the edge of the cliff as possible, gazing down at the sea far below, he would imagine himself one of those early explorers, venturing in a flimsy coracle into the enormous cave that ran through the rock to the land.

      He was a solitary person, enjoying his own company. Shy with girls and still living with his parents in a terraced house in Republican West Belfast, he filled his spare time with evening classes on the Irish language, cycling all over Northern Ireland, and exploring and reading about the formation of the land and how those early explorers from Scotland were followed by various invaders, including the Christians, the Vikings and, finally, the Normans, who had marked their victories by building castles along the coastline. The remains of those castles still covered the land, reminding Sean that Northern Ireland had often been invaded and was still a country ruled by hated foreigners – namely, the British.

      Sean wanted to free his country. As he cycled to and fro across this land steeped in myth and legend – with ‘giants, ghosts and banshees wailing through the sea mist’, as one of the guidebooks had it – as he read his books and explored the ancient ruins or drank in the beauty of the Mountains of Mourne, the lunar landscape of the Giant’s Causeway, or the soothing green glens of Antrim, he wanted desperately to return to the past when Ireland belonged to the Irish. Like his early hero, Sorley Boy MacDonnell, who had boldly captured Dunlace Castle from the English in 1584, Sean wanted to break out of his anonymity and achieve heroic victories.

      ‘Sure, you’re just a wee dreamer,’ his friend Father Donal Murphy told him, ‘wantin’ what can’t be had. You can’t get the past back, boyo, and you’d better accept that fact.’

      But Sean couldn’t accept that fact. Like many of his friends, Father Murphy knew him as a reflective Irish-language enthusiast, rambler, cyclist, Gaelic footballer and cook. Still single, he neither smoked nor drank alcohol, rarely expressed political views, and was never seen at Republican functions. Not for one second, then, did the priest suspect that Sean was a highly active, dangerous member of the IRA.

      The nearest Sean had come to recorded involvement in the ‘Troubles’ was when, in 1982, he had been arrested on the word of an unknown ‘supergrass’ who had denounced him as an IRA hit man. Resolute in protesting his innocence, Sean was strongly defended by many friends, including Father Murphy, who all viewed the arrest as yet another example of the British tendency to imprison innocent people on flimsy evidence. Released a month later, Sean returned to his peaceful activities and, in so doing, reinforced the conviction of most of his friends that he had been wrongfully accused.

      ‘They’re so keen to find themselves some terrorists,’ Father Murphy told him, ‘they don’t bother with facts. Sure, they only had to run a proper check and they’d have found you were innocent.’

      ‘Ackaye,’ Sean replied. ‘Sure, that’s the truth, Father. They probably didn’t care who they arrested – they just needed some fish to fry. We’re all at risk that way.’

      In fact, as only a few, highly placed members of the IRA knew, Sean was a dedicated freedom fighter who would go to any lengths to get the Brits out of the Province. To this end he had joined the IRA while still at school and soon became an expert ‘engineer’, or bomb maker, responsible for the destruction