I shoved Beth and Emma over the hedge and dived through the bush after them.
Bullets buried themselves in the garden path where I had just been standing.
The gunman and his companion jumped down onto the washhouse roof. Another gunman came through the back door. The man on the roof jumped down. At least three of them in the back garden now. All of them with machine guns.
And I had nothing.
I ran Beth and Emma through the Bridewells’ garden and we smashed through the wooden picket fence between us and the McMurtrys’ house.
More tracer and machine gun fire in terrifying parabolas of red death behind us.
“This way!” I said and we ran across the McMurtrys’ back yard and vaulted the low wall between the McMurtrys’ and the Ferrins’.
“There he goes!” a voice said and all three men emptied their clips after us.
A pause while they reloaded.
The air filled now with car alarms and burglar alarms, dogs barking, birds squawking, Emma screaming.
We ran through the Ferrins’ vegetable garden, demolishing their tomato plants on bamboo runners and I helped Beth climb the metal fence between the Ferrins’ and Bobby Cameron’s house.
“When you get over to the other side bang on Bobby Cameron’s back door until he opens up!” I said to Beth. The fence was seven foot tall but Beth was limber. When she dropped down on the other side I passed Emma over the top to her. Beth took her and looked at me through the wire mesh. Bobby’s was the last house on the terrace and there was no way out of his back garden but the way we’d come.
“What if Bobby doesn’t open the door?”
“He has to. If we try to go to the street they’ll kill us.”
I started climbing the fence.
The men had all reloaded now and I was an easy target. The machine guns danced and I threw myself over the lip of the fence and landed in Bobby Cameron’s garden. Beth was nowhere to be seen.
“Beth!”
“She’s inside,” Bobby said, running out the back door naked and holding an M249 light machine gun.
“Violet will look after her and the baby. Here,” he said handing me a revolver.
I took the gun and as the hit squad ran from my garden into the Bridewells’ garden we opened up on them.
The M249 is a belt-fed weapon that fires from an open bolt. When the trigger is pulled, the bolt and bolt carrier move forward under the power of the recoil spring. A cartridge is stripped from the belt, chambered, and then discharged. A simple weapon. Simple but very, very effective. The M249 can fire 200 rounds a minute. Before it was taken out of service in the US Army to be safety-featured it was known as the SAW because it could saw through just about fucking anything. Bricks, armour plate, humans …
An AK-47, even three AK-47s, were no match for this wall of death.
The SAW demolished the Ferrins’ greenhouse, the McMurtrys’ wall, my hedge. I fired the revolver at the three gunmen but it was redundant and unnecessary in the face of the M249’s devastating blanket of fire.
Brass cartridges spewed all over the garden, the SAW sang and Bobby yelled with delight: “Come on! Come and get it! Come on!”
He hadn’t hit any of the IRA hit team, but he didn’t need to. They weren’t fools. The SAW was the gateway to hell and the man wielding the M249 looked like a fucking maniac.
They ran back into my house and when the cartridges finally ran out of the belt on the machine gun I heard the Ford Transit van accelerate away down Coronation Road.
Bobby stood there, holding the smoking gun, naked, happy, the SAW’s echoes bouncing off the houses as far away as Fairview Park.
I went into Bobby’s house to check that Beth and Emma were unhurt.
I hugged them and told them it was over and then I dialled the station and told Mary to tell RUC command to set up a roadblock. It probably wouldn’t be quick enough but you never knew.
Back to the girls.
Emma and Beth were terrified but unharmed.
I hugged and kissed them both again and held them tight.
“It’s OK, it’s OK, it’s OK, baby girl. We’re safe. The bad men have gone,” I said to Emma as I held her.
Beth said nothing. She was in shock. Violet waved me away and put a blanket round her. She gave Beth a cup of sweet tea while Bobby led me out to the back garden where the smell of gunpowder and war was prehistoric and rusty and terrible and beautiful.
“Friends of yours?” Bobby asked.
“IRA hit team.”
He nodded. “No Loyalist would dare come onto my street.”
“I thought no IRA team would either.”
“They’ll know better next time. Now, listen Duffy, we have a bit of a problem. The police will be here in five minutes. This machine gun—”
“I’ll say the IRA team dropped it when they followed me out of the bathroom. I picked it up and ran with it and then turned it on them. Wipe your prints off it. And I’ll get my prints on it.”