Читать книгу Terry Brankin Has a Gun - Malachi O'Doherty - Страница 10

PROLOGUE

Back Then

He was driving to his death and didn’t know it. The death itself would be so sudden and decisive, he wouldn’t even have a second to anticipate it – nor would his wife and daughter beside him. They would all be torched in an instant. Horrible to think about, if you are a bomber with a conscience, but reassuringly brief.

It had been a long day. The light was dim, and the wipers slashed rivulets across the windscreen. The lights from oncoming traffic seemed brighter than usual and stung his eyes. He was tired and the drive was boring. In the back seat, his daughter switched between fidgeting and moaning. She had a little doll that one moment she was hugging close to her and the next, flopping carelessly onto the seat beside her. He checked on her occasionally in the rear-view mirror, afraid that she would slide out of her seat belt again.

Beside him, Libby selected Black Beauty from a stack of tapes in front of the gear stick and slotted it in, wishing she hadn’t to hear it through again. Paddy reached across to press the rewind button, keeping one hand on the wheel and an eye on the drab, wet, familiar road. Two hours from home. Seconds from death.

Approaching the border, he hoped that the checkpoints would not delay them. There should be a decent motorway between Dublin and Belfast but, he supposed, security took first claim on budgets. There was no point in yawning or complaining.

Men who knew all about security were waiting for a bottle-green Rover just like Paddy Lavery’s. Theirs had been a long day too, meandering around mountain roads to evade detection, crouching between gorse bushes in combats that could guard the skin against thorns but not the backs of their necks against the rain that dripped on them from the low trees they manoeuvred through. They knew that there were soldiers in hill-top towers who had cameras that could check the hair in their ears.

Clever and painstaking enough not to be seen, not even to raise a suspicion, they had collected their package, placed it and primed it and unrolled a wire to the shelter of bushes. The lookout guy would know the target by the make and colour of the car, by the number of passengers: a man and a woman – the chief constable and his wife – and their child behind them. Pity about the child. Probably grow up to be as bad as the da anyway.

The man with binoculars would signal from a rise; the other would trip the switch.

Was his daughter dozing? Paddy wasn’t sure. He’d thought wee Isobel would enjoy the drive; he’d wanted her brother Seamus to come too but knew now that two would have been double the distraction and the worry. He’d be back down this road in a couple of weeks for the All-Ireland and could make it up to the boy then.

The one with the binoculars wasn’t sure at first, but he had only about a hundred yards of road in which to make up his mind. The make was right: it was a Rover. The colour? In this light? Yeah, it was green, yes, bottle green. Do you mean wine- bottle green or beer-bottle green? But he held back because he could only see two heads. No, there was definitely someone in the back seat. Now his heart was pounding. This was on. He’d be far enough back to be safe from the blast but the suddenness of it and the noise always got you anyway. He waved a signal then lowered himself flat on the cold wet ground. He turned his face away from the car as it passed close below him.

And the blast punched his heart.

God knows what that was like for the people in the car. In the moment it had taken him to shudder and recompose himself, they had been obliterated. Then the car’s wreckage was tumbling on the road, screeching and rattling, thankfully away from him. He’d have looked silly if it had fallen on top of him. Surely they felt nothing as fire tore through them. He couldn’t help imagining it though, being scorched and torn from below. But even if there was a fraction of a second of the worst possible pain, there would be no recall of it now, in Heaven or in Hell. And he believed in neither. The Chief Con and his wife and sprog were beyond all grief and suffering. As well for them.

In an hour, he and the others on the team would be scrubbed and in a pub in Newry. The first pint would take the bitter taste out of his mouth. The second would settle him. In time, he would be warm again and among friends, who would let him sit close to the fire. And if they had to, would swear he had been there all day.