30
According to the map Elena had provided, the derelict brick and flint barn was less than a mile from Meacher's house. Fergus decided it was the perfect place to carry out the final preparations for the OP on the house.
The storm had rolled on inland but water was still tipping through the holes in the remaining roof tiles as Fergus and Danny started to unzip their day sacks.
'We'll make this place the ERV,' said Fergus. 'If we get split up make your way back here and wait for six hours. If I don't show up you get out and go to the press. Remember that – and don't go back to Foxcroft.'
'There was a reporter at the Victory Club when I was there,' said Danny. 'Bloke called Eddie Moyes. He wrote stories about you when you were in Colombia.'
'Then find him. But you make sure you get the story to one of the nationals.'
Danny nodded and took the food they'd bought on their last shopping trip from his bag. 'So what do you want me to do with this stuff?'
'Take the Mars bars from their wrappers and open the cans of luncheon meat and wrap everything in cling film.' He saw Danny's puzzled look. 'We can't just walk up to Meacher's and knock on the door, we need to know exactly who's there. We might be waiting a long time, and I get hungry, even if you don't.'
'Yeah, but why the cling film?'
'Noise. The OP could be close enough to the house to spit at. And that's why we're taking still water in plastic bottles – no cans of fizz to give us away. Until this morning we've been staying away from danger areas; now we're going into one. We've been reacting; it's time to act.'
Danny felt a surge of fear as the reality of what his grandfather had said hit home. But Fergus seemed unconcerned; he was checking the items he'd bought from the garden centre and a hardware store. He looked up and saw that Danny was staring at him. 'Something wrong?'
Danny hesitated before he replied. 'You said you'd tell me about the time you didn't own up to being scared.'
Fergus's clipped reply was tinged with irritation. 'Why d'you want to know all this? We need to get on.'
'Because . . . because I'm scared.'
Fergus dropped the hammer and bag of nails he was holding into his day sack. He nodded. 'Yeah. Yeah, course you are,' he said a lot more gently. 'Look, leave that stuff for a minute. Come and sit down.'
The steady flow of rainwater streaming down the ancient walls was beginning to slow, and they sat side by side on a pile of fallen brick and flint. 'I was nineteen, a lance corporal in South Armagh leading a foot patrol. Reckoned I was dead hard with my bayonet and my tin hat. Suddenly I turned a corner and there's a group of guys wearing masks, getting ready to ambush another patrol.'
He shook his head as he remembered the chaos of what had followed. 'All the training, slick weapons drills, everything just went out of the window because I was shitting myself. The terrorists were too. One guy – I saw his eyes go wide under his mask, we were that close – I was firing at him; he was firing at me. Firing and firing, until he went down. I killed him, but it could just as easily have been me dead in the road.'
Danny was staring down at his trainers, unable to look at his grandfather as he finished the grisly story. 'After the contact, none of my mates wanted to talk about fear. That's what young infantry battalions are like, all bravado. They just wanted the war story, maybe because they were frightened of their own fear. I wasn't man enough to say I'd been scared, terrified, I just told them what they wanted to hear.'
Fergus got up and gathered together his sleeping bag and spare clothes. 'What I learned later, as I got older, is that everyone is scared in a contact. It's fear that makes you react when you're being fired at, it's fear that makes you move towards the enemy, and it's fear that makes you do what you do to survive.' He looked at Danny. 'Being scared is good. Anyone who tells you they're never scared is a liar.'
Danny went back to his bag and continued wrapping the food in cling film. But there was something more he needed to ask. 'How many people have you killed?'
'Blimey, you don't want much, do you?' said Fergus. 'Look, that's . . . it's private . . . personal. Something I have to live with, and something I don't talk about, not even to you.'
'But how do you cope with seeing someone killed?' said Danny. 'I'm trying to understand.'
'You just deal with it,' answered Fergus as he gathered together the spare kit and clothes. 'You don't have a choice. You just deal with it.'
He hid the kit and clothes behind the pile of brick and rubble. 'We'll take only what we need, in the day sacks. We can pick up this stuff later, but I'll take the rest of the cash, just in case someone finds what we leave here. Now, let's go.'
They were still both soaked to the skin as they neared the driveway leading to Meacher's house. Danny's jeans were heavy and clung to his legs; his skin felt cold and clammy. Back at the barn he had been about to ask why they hadn't changed into dry kit, but had decided to keep his mouth shut. He knew he would find out soon enough.
The house wasn't visible from the road. The narrow, tree-lined drive bent away from the road, and thick hedgerows protected the property from prying eyes. Fergus and Danny avoided the drive and walked on further down the road.
There were no immediate neighbouring properties, and after about a hundred metres Fergus said they should push their way through the bushes and make their approach from one side of the house. They stepped over a grass verge and a small ditch and began to ease their way through brambles and thorns. Every step brought a fresh soaking as the foliage showered them with rainwater. Danny smiled to himself. Now he knew why they hadn't changed into dry kit.
Fergus wanted to carry out a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree recce of the target and find the best position for watching the front of the house. But once they broke through the scrubby stand of wild bushes and caught their first glimpse of the house and part of the gardens he realized there was a problem.
The large, double-fronted, red-brick house and its manicured gardens were entirely surrounded by a combination of tall brick wall and metre-and-a-half-high chain-link fence where the wall had crumbled away. The fence had obviously been standing there for years as thick ivy and climbing roses scrambled their way up to the top. There was no way they could get a full view of the front of the house without going into the garden itself.
Fergus whispered to Danny, 'When we approach a target we don't want any confusion over where we are, so we use colours for the different sides of the building. No matter which direction you see a building from, the colour system stays the same. The front is always white and the back is black. The right side, as you look at the front, is red and the left side is green. Understand?'
Danny nodded.
They moved along the fence, approaching the red side of the house. They reached a section where a row of evergreen shrubs on the other side screened the fence from the house.
'We'll go through here,' whispered Fergus, taking a pair of secateurs from his bag. 'Those bushes give us good cover. It's not perfect – the cut in the fence could be discovered while we're in the OP – but we'll have to chance it.'
'Can't we just climb the fence?'
'You could, but with this leg of mine I might never get over. And anyway, we'd make too much noise.'
Fergus pulled out some green fibre material, the sort normally used for putting under gravel paths to keep weeds down. He got Danny to wrap it around the bottom link, so that as he cut through the mild steel with the secateurs, the pinging sound of the steel snapping was hardly audible. When he'd finished cutting he stood up and pulled the fence apart to reveal an upside-down V shape. Rainwater from the storm-soaked plants came cascading down as the chain links gave, and they both got another drenching.
Fergus held up the cut section of fencing and told Danny to crawl through the gap with his kit. Then Danny pulled the cut fencing to his side so that Fergus could follow him through.
They pushed the cut section back into position and left it unsecured for a quick escape if necessary. They were ready to move towards the house but Fergus had one last instruction: 'We do this in bounds.'
'In what?'
'Stages. And we crawl – I can still do that. Stick to my route like glue. OK?'
They crawled on their stomachs back along the line of shrubs, with Danny following exactly as instructed. Fergus stopped behind the cover of a bush every few metres, and then looked and listened for two or three minutes before deciding on where to move to next.
After several bounds they got their first full look at the roof and brickwork of the red elevation of the house. To the right of the building itself was a moss-covered, high wall that looked even older than the one on the perimeter. Built into it was a wooden door that appeared to lead to a rear garden.
Fergus told Danny to stay with the kit and crawled further to his left. Soon he could see the gravel drive and a small Nissan that was parked in front of the house. He guessed he was looking at Mrs Meacher's run-around. Maybe the colonel wasn't at home.
Then Fergus spotted what he needed: a huge, thick bush sprawled over an area of lawn about thirty metres from the front of the house. He crawled over to the back of the bush and tuned in to the area. The field of view was perfect – he could easily see all of white, including the large front door, and there was also a good field of vision on red until the rear garden wall got in the way.
It was the perfect OP point, but before Fergus could beckon Danny over he heard a noise to his right. He froze, unable to see what was happening as the bushes were in the way.
But Danny could see. The door in the wall had creaked open and, as he watched, an old man in a flat cap and wellies walked through. He was pushing a wooden wheelbarrow that looked even older than he did. The wheelbarrow was loaded with plant cuttings, probably destined for a flowerbed somewhere at the front of the house. But not right at that moment. The effort of pushing the barrow through the gate seemed to be as much as the old boy could take. He parked the barrow close to the wall, slowly and carefully straightened up, and with a rub of his aching back, retreated through the gap in the wall and closed the door behind him.
Danny signalled to Fergus that the coast was clear and his grandfather beckoned him over.
'You never go in front of your OP because that's the area the enemy can see,' said Fergus when Danny reached him behind the bush. He motioned for Danny to look at the route they had taken. 'And on a day like this, they'd see all that.'
The marks in the wet grass were clearly visible. 'That's why you always have to think about the route you're taking and keep behind the OR'
'So how do we see through the bush if we have to stay behind it?'
'We don't need to see through it, we'll be in it.'
Twenty minutes later they were inside the bush with a clear view of the house. Using the secateurs, Fergus cut a small hole about half a metre in diameter at the bottom of the leafy shrub. He placed the small cut branches behind him and then told Danny how to make a bung from the offcuts.
While Danny worked, Fergus tunnelled his way into the centre, carefully cutting away inside the huge, old plant, and pushing the cut branches further into the bush, making the interior denser and gradually forming a cave.
When he'd finished they moved into the bush, taking their kit with them. The bung was ready to be pulled into position. Danny had tied the branches together with the garden string. It looked like a pagan bunch of flowers with a metre-long length of string dangling from the tie. Fergus pulled the bung by the string and it neatly plugged the gap in the bush. Then he took the remaining fibre material and snagged it on the branches so that it lined the inside of the OR
'Without the material, if the sun hit the bush, anyone outside would be able to see through to us,' he said. 'Our biggest weapon isn't the 9mm pistol, it's concealment.'
'What about the nails? You didn't use them.'
'As a last resort, for climbing, we could have made dumars. But like I said, I'm not up to climbing any more.'
He explained how to make dumars while continually looking through the bush towards the front of the house.
After a while the wooden door in the wall opened again and the old man reappeared, pushing an ancient black bicycle. The flowers were going to have to wait. He carefully mounted the bike and pedalled slowly down the drive.
'One less person for us to worry about,' whispered Fergus as the old boy passed within a few metres of them. The crunch of the bicycle on the gravel faded but was replaced almost immediately by the sound of an approaching vehicle.
'Maybe it's Meacher,' said Danny.
But he was wrong. A police car passed them and came to a standstill outside the house.
Two uniformed officers got out, a man and a woman. They went to the front door and rang the bell. In less than a minute the door opened and a tall, upright, grey-haired woman appeared.
'Colonel's wife,' whispered Fergus. 'I remember her.'
Mrs Meacher spoke briefly to the officers and then led them into the house. They went into a room on red and were clearly visible to Fergus and Danny through a tall window. After a couple of minutes Mrs Meacher sat down on a high-backed chair. The female officer pulled up another chair and sat next to her. It didn't look like a routine visit.