First Into Action (28 page)

At least once a week Macaleany attended PIRA meetings a few miles outside of Dungannon, and it was decided to take advantage of his next one to reunite the lovers. Max and I would take Tallyho to Macaleany’s house in Dungannon.

When Tallyho arrived at the Det he was his usual bland, characterless self. He climbed into the back of my car and we sat without a word, other than Max sending coded progress reports back to the ops room while I drove into the town. It was obvious Tallyho was not looking forward to the evening.

It was dark by the time we arrived in Dungannon. Over the radio I heard that Macaleany was at his meeting. An operative remained on watch in a car not far from the venue on the Dungannon road. There was a possibility that Macaleany was having his own house watched and if Tallyho was seen going in he might get a call. Macaleany was a dangerous man and we would take no chances with Tallyho – he was on loan and we didn’t want to send back damaged goods. So the operative outside Macaleany’s meeting had a straightforward enough job: if Macaleany left early he was to run him off the road.

I stopped the car in a quiet part of the town outside the housing estate. The three of us climbed out and we made our way through the back-streets and along a path that led through the estate towards the rear of Macaleany’s house. Max split off to find a place where he could conceal himself and watch the front of the house. He reported over his radio that lights were on inside and all looked OK.

I led Tallyho down a narrow path that separated the backs of the terraced houses. It was a quiet, damp night and Tallyho’s segs on the soles of his shoes were causing me some concern.

I finally stopped him. ‘You’re going to have to take your shoes off,’ I said.

He looked down at his feet, looked at me, rolled his eyes and bent down and untied the laces. He pulled his shoes off and held them in his hands. Off we set again.

We arrived at Macaleany’s back fence. It was six feet high, wooden and in good condition. I scanned around to see if there was anyone on watch. It looked clear. I pulled myself up enough to see into the back yard. The back gate was padlocked from the inside. The kitchen light was on and there was movement within.

‘You ready?’ I asked.

He nodded.

I cupped my hands into a stirrup. He put his shoes on the ground, placed a damp, sock-covered foot into my hands and I yanked him up. He scrambled over the fence and landed on his feet the other side. I picked up his shoes and pulled myself up on to the fence to hand them to him. He was standing in a sodden, muddy vegetable patch up to his ankles and looking down at his feet. I handed him his shoes and climbed over. He walked through the muddy yard to the back door, which had a concrete step, and then, after scraping off as much mud as he could with his fingers, he put his shoes back on. He didn’t look happy.

‘Stay in the kitchen where I can see you through the window,’ I whispered.

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘I don’t want to let you out of my sight.’

He resented being told what to do, especially by some soldier half his age. He always worked alone. But he respected my position – no matter what your rank in special forces, if you’re in charge, you’re in charge of all.

I moved back into the shadows. He waited until I was hidden before knocking quietly on the door. A moment later the door opened and Macaleany’s wife stood in the doorway. Years of being married to a member of the PIRA had made her an agile thinker in potentially dangerous situations and she was well aware of the possibility of prying eyes.

‘Quickly. Come in,’ she said.

He stepped in and she closed the door. I moved to where I could see in through the window. They both stood in the room, several feet apart, talking. I could not hear, but I could tell from the body language and their reactions that he was explaining his absence. I wondered what bullshit he was giving her. Whatever he said, it was convincing. She was softening. She moved close to him and put her arms around him. They started to kiss passionately. Tallyho didn’t hang around, passed on the vol-au-vents and went straight for the main course. He reached behind her and started to pull up her skirt. He hitched it around her hips and put his hands inside her knickers to pull them down. She responded by undoing his trouser belt and pulling down his zip. Mrs Macaleany was in her late thirties and probably never once gave any consideration to exercising or the type of food she ate. Her thighs were heavy with cellulite. Tallyho grabbed great chunks of them. She pulled his trousers and underpants down and he pushed her back on to the kitchen table. His legs were skinny, hairy and white as milk. It was so obscene I could not stop myself from watching. With his raincoat still on and his pants around his muddy ankles he humped her like a Jack Russell. She was loving it.

I whispered Max’s call-sign over the radio. ‘One Four Romeo.’

Max answered instantly. ‘Send?’

‘You should see what he’s doing to her on the kitchen table.’

‘He’s not!’

‘It’s revolting.’

I don’t know if Mrs Macaleany climaxed, but Tallyho suddenly stopped and remained lying with his face buried in her breasts, his feet still on the floor, and panting. Then he got off her and pulled up his pants. She seemed satisfied, smiling sheepishly as she pulled up her knickers. They talked a little as she followed him to the back door. He was no doubt assuring her that he would see her again.

I moved back into the shadows. The light went out in the kitchen and the door opened. He kissed her quickly and headed across the garden to the fence. She watched him for a moment, then closed the door.

‘Short and sweet,’ I said as I met him at the fence.

He knew I had watched him but he showed no sign of embarrassment, or that he cared.

I helped him over the fence then joined him on the path.

‘Do I have to take my shoes off again?’ he asked.

‘No. Let’s go.’ Then into my radio. ‘One Three Charlie, towards the obvious.’

‘Roger that,’ was Max’s reply.

‘The things I do for Queen and country,’ Tallyho muttered as we walked back through the estate.

Everything worked to plan. Macaleany’s wife was happy once more and resumed shagging him. Macaleany got his promotion.

But Tallyho could not go on bonking Macaleany’s wife for ever. It was rumoured that he didn’t fancy her any more and couldn’t get it up. And so, once again, Tallyho disappeared from her life.

It was not long before Macaleany’s marriage showed signs of going on the rocks. His wife became love-sick and stopped having sex with him once again. To make matters worse, the PIRA godfathers began to grow suspicious of him. They were seeing a relationship between certain operations going wrong and his involvement in them. Instead of suspecting that his house was bugged they considered the possibility of him being a tout. If they decided that was true his days on this earth were numbered.

The image that all members of Military Intelligence are heartless, ruthless killers is fiction. Only a lot of them are. The truth is that if there is no alternative to ending a person’s life in the name of national security then so be it, but if there is, the alternative is preferred. When Macaleany’s plight reached ministerial level, an order came down that he was to be saved from any attempt on his life. They felt it was unfair that he should be executed because of a situation we had created. As he was not an actual killer, even though he had been responsible for British deaths, he had also been of use, and it was considered he should receive something in return, such as his neck. Aren’t we nice? But this was not an easy situation to solve.

Military Intelligence had two choices. They could lift Macaleany out of Ireland completely, tell him his life was in danger, get whatever else they could from him, then place him into a protection programme that meant relocating him somewhere else in the world. But knowing Macaleany, it was unlikely he would buy their story, believing it to be a sting, and would tell them nothing. As they had no legal right to hold him, he would go to the godfathers and report that the Brits had tried to recruit him. Suspicious of him already, the PIRA would now consider him a definite security risk and the likelihood of him being executed would be increased. MI’s only other choice was to do what they could to manipulate his relationship with his bosses with misinformation, and at the same time patch up his marriage. The latter course was chosen and Mr Tallyho was ordered back in.

It was not going to be as straightforward as before getting Tallyho and Mrs Macaleany together. Since Macaleany had been promoted, his movements were less predictable. His security level had gone up a notch. He stayed home a lot since most of his meetings were held at his house. But Tallyho had his own methods, and somehow contacted Mrs Macaleany. I don’t know how pleased she was to receive his message, but she agreed to meet him in a pub in Dungannon.

On the chosen night, Max and I drove Tallyho to Dungannon and parked up a few hundred yards down the street from the pub. Tallyho was armed this time. The pub was a known PIRA hangout. He could get away with a brief pint as long as he kept to himself. This was the most dangerous phase of the operation for Tallyho personally, and we were joined by another team who waited in the back of the pub in case he got into trouble. Max and I would watch the front. As in the Nairac scenario, if they were suspicious of Tallyho they would drag him outside and deal with him elsewhere. The difference was that this time we would be the ones doing the damage.

Tallyho did not seem fazed by the danger. He left us and walked down the street alone towards the pub. I watched him enter. If he was not out in fifteen minutes, Max and I would go in and look for him. Under our coats, along with our usual 9mms we carried M10 Colt Ingram sub-machine-guns, a short, rectangular box-shaped 9mm weapon with a magazine capacity of thirty rounds that fired them at a rate of 950 per minute, 300 bullets per minute faster than a standard sub-machine-gun. It was an American weapon, originally designed to fit into a briefcase and could be fired by pulling a trigger in the handle. With its incredible rate of fire it could clear a crowded room in seconds. On my 14 Int selection course I saw the briefcase version demonstrated by an SAS trooper. We were all impressed, but the demonstration was made memorable by the next SAS trooper who held the briefcase in the wrong place and blew the end of one of his fingers off.

Macaleany’s wife sat alone in the pub and watched Tallyho as he walked in. They made eye contact and Tallyho indicated a beer to the barman with a grunt and threw down the correct money. He sipped some of it and caught her eye again. Then he walked out of the pub. Tallyho had the keys to my car and walked to it alone while Max and I watched from the shadows. Macaleany’s wife left the pub less than a minute later and climbed into her own car. As she drove off Tallyho followed. Max and I got into the back of the standby team’s car and followed at a discreet distance.

Unknown to us, Macaleany had been smouldering at home wondering where his wife was and went out to search for her. He arrived at the pub not long after his wife had left and was told she had been there alone.

Macaleany’s wife drove out of the town into the countryside and pulled into a quiet layby where she killed the engine and turned off the headlights. Tallyho pulled in behind her, climbed out of his car and walked towards her.

As we drove by we saw him getting into her car. We continued until we were out of sight then pulled over. Max and I got out. We climbed through a hedge and made our way down the inside of a field to where Tallyho and Macaleany’s wife had stopped. We peered through the hedge to get a look. The windows were steamed up and we could hear raised voices. Macaleany’s wife was shouting. ‘Bastard’ was the only word we could make out, and it was one she yelled several times. It looked like a scuffle was taking place inside the car. We could not tell if he was raping her or beating her up. No matter what he was doing we could not intervene. It suddenly crossed my mind that Tallyho might have decided on one solution that would probably have put things right for all concerned, himself included, and that was to kill her. I would not have put anything past him. I remembered how casually he had requested me to kill O’Sally and his partner years before because the man had been greedy. A person could know a man like Tallyho all his life and not learn anything about him. We waited for the outcome.

After a few minutes the violence stopped. I thought to myself, that’s it, he’s strangled her. Then the car began to rock rhythmically. He was not killing her but making love to her, and passionately, it seemed. We settled down to wait it out. They took a long while this time. Then after they finished they talked quietly for over an hour.

Finally, Tallyho climbed out of the car and got into his own. She started her engine, turned on the headlights, pulled away and headed in the direction of her home. Max and I climbed through the hedge and joined Tallyho in the car. He never said a word as I drove back to the Det.

When Macaleany’s wife arrived home, she found the RUC waiting for her. Her husband had been arrested and was in jail.

When Macaleany had left the pub he had gone back home to wait for his wife. At midnight, an hour after the pub had closed, he took his gun from its hidden place in the garden, climbed into his car and headed for Dungannon. He drove to the housing estate and went directly to the house several doors down the street from his former home. He kicked in the door, stormed up the stairs to the bedroom, burst in and blasted several rounds into the man lying in the bed, his wife’s childhood sweetheart, killing him.

11

I spent much of my time as a Det operator in Dungannon, County Tyrone. It was a fair-sized town, important enough to have the main hospital for the area. It always felt gloomy, like an industrial town in the Midlands mostly undeveloped since the war. The only locals I knew, by sight that is, were players, or related to them. I hardly went there in daylight and it was poorly lit at night. It had its gangs of youthful thugs who were to be avoided, especially after pub hours. We could not afford to get into a scrap. Before it got to that we would be forced to pull out our weapons – if they got their hands on them first they would probably shoot us with them – but any confrontation meant that the operative could not operate in the town or area again. In the backs of our minds we were aware that there was always the chance an attack could be a set-up. For that reason alone we were prepared to use our guns as a last resort to avoid any physical contact. There was no doubt a fun side to the town, but we never had the chance to experience it.