Page 127 of Hang on St. Christopher

The border was even closer than I’d been expecting. In two minutes, we were at a couple of cinder blocks and a sign that said “United Kingdom: Road Closed Except for Agricultural Vehicles.”

“I would never have taken this case if I’d known there was going to be so much running,” I muttered, fumbling in my pocket for the Ventolin.

“Save your breath!” Crabbie said, and took my arm.

We reached the border, ran straight through it and up a hill.

Behind us, the shooting was still going on. The bastards would follow us here if they spotted us, so we had to keep down.

“Sir, over here!” Lawson said from a hedgerow.

“Is everyone all right?”

“Yes, sir. Some of us took a fall, but everyone’s okay.”

“Well, then, let’s go. Single file, foot-patrol stance, at the trot. I’ll go on point.”

“I’ll go on point,” Crabbie said. “You take your inhaler.”

We jogged down the hill until we reached the River Newry. Not a house or a farm to be seen. Just the fifty-meter-wide river. This part of the borderlands was very confusing indeed. If we went roughly northwest along the riverbank, we’d reach Newry; if we went southeast, we’d be back in the Irish Republic again. If we crossed the river, we’d be in the safe garrison town of Warrenpoint.

“How deep do you think that water is?” Lawson asked.

“Deep, and it’s flowing fast. It would be typical if we survived the ambush and then drowned ourselves. We’ll head toward Newry. I think it’s only a couple of miles up the road.”

Newry was a Republican stronghold and would not exactly be a welcoming bastion for a bedraggled police patrol, but there was an RUC station at the top end of town.

“This way,” Crabbie said, and I followed him with the others.

We never made it to Newry. Half a mile along the river, we came across an Ulster Defence Regiment patrol who had been summoned out of their barracks by the sound of explosions. They had set up a roadblock and were nervously pointing rifles at us as we headed toward them.

“Who goes there?” a young squaddie asked. He vibed trigger-happy teenager itching to kill someone. That would be another ironic death I didn’t want, so I put my hands in the air and yelled back: “We’re police. We got ambushed by the IRA just over the border.”

“Identify yourself!” another voice yelled.

“We’re police! Detective Inspector Sean Duffy of Carrickfergus RUC!”

“An overdue alert’s just been posted for you!” the voice said.

And the soldiers lowered their weapons.

And we were safe.

CHAPTER21

THE AFTERMATH

Two Land Rovers blown up and utterly destroyed. One man dead. You’d think that the press would see this as a disaster; but in fact, for reasons I was too stupid to understand, the local papers were portraying it as an IRA failure and something of a police triumph.

I didn’t think it was much of a triumph with a man’s guts spilled out over the countryside. And it was only relative failure compared to, say, the Warrenpoint Massacre, which took place in 1979 just two miles from where we were hit. In that incident, the IRA's South Armagh Brigade had ambushed a British army convoy with two large roadside Semtex-and-fertilizer bombs. That had been a classic guerrilla operation. The first bomb targeted a British army lorry, and the second targeted the rescue personnel sent in to deal with the first incident. IRA men in a nearby wood opened up with machine guns on the arriving troops and medics. Eighteen soldiers had been killed in that op, and another dozen seriously wounded.

Thatwas a triumphant day for the IRA.

The killing of one RUC chief inspector? It made the headlines in theBelfast Telegraph, theNewsletter,andIrish Newsbut didn’t even make it into the first five stories on the BBC news, nor did it make it onto the front pages of any of the English tabloid papers.

Of course, there would be an inquiry four or five months from now. We’d all show up in our shiny dress uniforms and give whatever official version we’d been told to give. Not the truth. Never the truth.

And I knew what was going to happen to the remains of our case. A case like this that involved the killing of a Special Branch detective could not possibly be handled in any way by a part-time CID detective out of a provincial station like Carrickfergus RUC.