Читать книгу Charlie One - Seán Hartnett - Страница 11

PROLOGUE

HOW THE HELL DID I END UP HERE?

It was approaching 2100 hours on Sunday, 17 February 2002, and darkness had settled in completely over Northern Ireland. Three Tyrone men – Donald Mullan from Dungannon, and Seán Dillon and Kevin Murphy, both from Coalisland – moved blindly through a field in Coalisland, carrying what we suspected was an RPG 22 rocket launcher complete with warhead, something they were later acquitted of in court. A fourth – Brendan O’Connor from Pomeroy – sat in a grey Peugeot car in a nearby car park. They had target designations of ‘Charlie One’ through to ‘Charlie Four’ and were suspected members of an East Tyrone Real IRA active service unit.

Though they didn’t know it at the time, they were not alone that night and had not been for quite some time. JCU-NI operators, combined with SAS (Special Air Service) and SBS (Special Boat Service) troopers, had had the four men and the location under intense surveillance for over a week before this. And the darkness made no difference to them now: they had night-vision capabilities as part of their kits. So too did the two video-surveillance cameras positioned in the surrounding ditches, beaming images forty miles away to the operations room in Shackleton Barracks, Ballykelly, where the operations officer sat in front of his bank of monitors, ready to give the order.

As for me, I was four miles from the action, watching it all on my own personal ‘feed’ from the surveillance cameras and closely monitoring the radio network for signs of trouble. I was a nervous wreck and wondering to myself how the hell I had ended up in this situation, me, an innocent fella from Cork caught between sympathising with the nationalist community in the North and helping the British army outsmart its enemy.