Vagabond
Authors: Gerald Seymour
Vagabond
Gerald Seymour
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Gerald Seymour 2014
The right of Gerald Seymour to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
eBook ISBN 978 1 444 75862 7
Book ISBN 978 1 444 75859 7
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
For
Nicholas and James
and
Alfie
Contents
Prologue
Behind them a smear of a softer grey crested the mountain and the forest’s tree tops, but in front the rain, in usual obstinacy, refused to move on. They had been in the makeshift hide since an hour after dusk the previous evening, and had alternately slept and kept watch on the farmhouse. In front of them, way beyond Camaghy and Shanmaghry, and in line with the chambered grave of Neolithic times, was the building and the lit yard. Now, both were awake and alert. They watched and waited.
It was, of sorts, a reward for their patience. The flash, beyond the Pomeroy road, even in the low cloud, was brilliant.
‘That’s our baby,’ Dusty murmured.
The sound of the explosion seemed slow to reach them, as if the cloud and the rain impeded it. Desperate – as he was known with some affection inside the only family he had – thought the noise, distant and muffled, sounded like a paper bag bursting after a kid had blown it up. ‘Went off like a good one,’ he whispered into Dusty’s ear.
What Dusty had called ‘our baby’ and Desperate a ‘good one’ was likely to have been the blast of an eighth of a tonne of chemical fertiliser fired by a commercial detonator buried in the pliable putty of a pound and a half of Semtex. The flash was fast spent and the sound had dissipated against the higher slope of the mountain. The cloud was too dense for any smoke to force its way up against the rain.
They needed good hearing and the vantage-point in the hedgerow. Cattle had come close when they had first moved into the hide, dug two nights before. Cattle were always the worst. Sheep could be sent away, and most dogs could be quietened with biscuits and a tickle. Cattle lingered longest, but they had gone on before midnight and found shelter closer to the farm buildings. It was quiet around them and they could identify far-away gunfire.
Most on automatic. Few single shots. Men who didn’t engage in a primitive form of warfare might have flinched at the barrage of bullets fired around the point where the light had flashed. At least two hundred shots. Out there, the ambush team would have been slapping on fresh magazines and keeping the belts fed through the machine-guns. The noise did not have the crisp tone of a drumbeat or a champagne cork’s pop, but was a messy blur. It was the reward for waiting.
Both men – Desperate more so than Dusty – had imagination. It was easy enough for either to picture the scene close to the culvert drain that took rainwater off the fields above the lane. The culvert was of good-quality concrete and well built but had sufficient bramble and thorn growing around its mouth for it to be an ideal place to secrete an explosive device. It had, too, the necessary cover, with the reeds that grew in the field, for a command cable to be laid; would have been unwound until it reached a shed – the firing position for the bomb. The target, as they knew, was to be a Quick Reaction Force sent out from the barracks eight miles away where a fusilier unit was based. The troops would respond to a hoax call from an anonymous man, using a public phone box to report a rifle left on a verge close to the culvert. Both men, cold and soaked, would have known what had happened. In the darkness the ‘bad guys’ would have struggled to get the fertiliser, in sacks, clear of the Transit and manhandled it towards the ditch and culvert. Their last moments would have come as they slid to the concrete mouth. The night sights on the rifles and machine-guns would have locked on them. An electronic switch would have been thrown to detonate the bomb and the firing would have started. Maybe two had died in the blast, and the other two would have been cut down by the volume of bullets. All would have been mangled, body parts spread . . . Neither Dusty nor Desperate winced at what they imagined.
The rain was heavier and the shooting had stopped. They were probably too far from the culvert to hear the helicopter come in. If the shooting was over it would have been called for, and it would fly low, hugging the contours, from the barracks, and set down momentarily in the sodden field to take in the Special Forces men, the ‘Hereford Gun Club’, who had been the ambush team. Blacked up, weighed down with their kit, they would heave themselves past the helicopter’s machine-gunner and flop onto the metal floor. Then it would lift, bank and disappear. Behind the helicopter there would be a scene of carnage. Dusty and Desperate were silent. Neither was a killer at first hand: both took more responsibility than the men who had slapped in the magazines and fed the belts.
They could imagine the scene where the culvert drain bored under the lane because Desperate had been told that was where the bomb would be laid, when it would be brought there, at what time the hoax call would be made, and which men would be settling into their firing positions to wait for the military response. He knew the features of those men and their histories in the war being fought out on the shallow slopes of the mountain, and where they lived in the Townlands between the Chambered Grave and the summit point called the Seat of Shane Bearnagh. His files carried their biographies and he could trace the tribal links that held them together: he had the names of the wives, girlfriends and kids. Desperate had furnished the information that had brought the special forces up from Ballykinler. He could have predicted each moment in the killing process. He had choreographed it.
The helicopter would have gone, and the guys inside the cabin would soon be showering away the stench of cordite, then heading for the canteen and breakfast. Not Desperate and Dusty.
The cows were on the move. They came across the open field into the teeth of the wind and rain. Through his glasses, an image intensifier built into the lenses, Desperate could see their steady progress, and hear the squelch of their feet. For a full minute they masked the farmhouse and the buildings where the man stored his agricultural plant livestock lorries, the weapons and bombs he dealt with. There were no lights on in the house. It was too close to the explosion, the firing and the ambush. Desperate felt no particular satisfaction at the part he had played in the matter and didn’t imagine Dusty wanted a high-five. What both men would have liked was a cigarette – forbidden. The absence of a Marlboro Lite might have mattered more to Desperate and Dusty than their part in the deaths of four men.
They were good cows from a pedigree herd – not that they were milked by the man who owned – had owned – the farmhouse, the outbuildings and forty-nine acres of poor, if serviceable, land. They were led each morning and evening to a neighbour’s parlour and milked there. When they had come back the previous evening, the man had been flitting from his back door to his buildings and had returned with heavy-duty navy overalls. He must have forgotten the balaclavas because he’d had to return to the big shed. They’d watched him.
Dusty had dug out the pit that was the basis of their hide. He had many skills and building hides was one. They were low in the hole – bracken and gorse grew around its edge. A man would almost have stepped on them before he realised they were there. Dusty and Desperate feared the cows. The animals had the habit of coming to the hide and forming a half-moon round it, obscuring any view. Both men now sat in a pool of water that had formed in the pit. The damp penetrated their trousers and underwear, and their thermals no longer kept out the cold. It was what they did, nothing exceptional. It wasn’t exceptional either for Desperate to preside over the killing of four men. That was what he did.
Rescue came. A vixen strutted from the hedge to their right, threaded between the clumps of nettles and attracted the cattle’s attention. They veered off in pursuit of her. The view of the farmhouse was restored.
Four men would have died. There could have been no survivors. The blast of the premature detonation would have killed some and the gunfire would have done for the others. There would be another killing on the shallow slope of Altmore mountain within a week or, at most, a month. Desperate would be as responsible for the final death in this sequence as he was for the others. The cold gripped him, the damp shrivelling his skin. His eyes ached from gazing through the image-intensified lenses. He had seen the man carry the gear between the farm buildings and the kitchen door, and later had watched as the lights went on upstairs – the child being put to bed.
Late in the evening, when the wife’s television programmes were over, he had come out of the back door, then had turned, taken her in his arms and kissed her hard. A moment of seeming weakness and she had clung to him until he’d broken away and gone. They had watched him lope down the track leading from the farm to the lane and a car had come.