We drove back to our outpost on the lough shore. We tuned in the BBC and the latest news was that eighteen of the escapees had been captured, but the rest had got clean away. At noon we got the list of names. All of them were unknown to me except for one… and that one was Dermot McCann.
Dermot and I had gone to school together in Derry at St Malachy’s. A really smart guy, he had been Head Boy when I had been Deputy Head Boy. Handsome, good at games and charming, Dermot had planned to go into the newspaper business and possibly into TV journalism. But the Troubles had changed all that and Dermot had joined the IRA just as I had once thought of doing at around the time of Bloody Sunday.
Through various machinations I had joined the police and Dermot had served several years in the Provos before getting himself arrested. He was a highly gifted IRA explosives expert and bomb maker who had only been betrayed in the end by a grass caught dealing drugs. The grass fingered him but there was no forensic evidence so the police had fitted him up by putting a fingerprint on some gelignite. He’d been found guilty and until his escape he’d been doing ten years for conspiracy to cause explosions.
I hadn’t thought of Dermot in a long time but in the weeks that followed the break-out we learned that he had been one of the masterminds behind the escape plan. Dermot had figured out a way of smuggling guns into the prison and it was his idea to take prison officers hostage and dress in their uniforms so the guard towers wouldn’t be alerted.
Dermot got to South Tyrone and over the border into the Irish Republic. We later learned from MI6 that he and an elite IRA team had been spotted at a terrorist training camp in Libya. But even on that miserable Thursday morning on the eastern shores of Lough Neagh, with the mist rising off the water and the rain drizzling from the grey September sky, I knew with the chilly certainty of a fairy story that our paths would cross again.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
1: A Town Called Malice
2: The Dying Earth
3: The Big Red One
4: Machine Gun Silhouette
5: The Widow McAlpine
6: Someone Else’s Problem
7: She’s Got A Ticket to Ride (And She Don’t Care)
8: Veterans of Foreign Wars
9: Blood on The Tracks
10: Good Progress
11: No Progress
12: A Message
13: The Girl on The Bike
14: A Very Ordinary Assassination
15: Sir Harry
16: Salt
17: The Treasury Man
18: Not Exactly Scout Finch
19: The Chief Constable
20: The UDR Base
21: Fifteens
22: I’ve Seen Things you People Wouldn’t Believe
23: Delorean
24: People in Glass Houses
25: Into the Woods
26: Through A Glass Darkly
27: High Mass
28: America
29: Driving Under The Influence
30: Back to Belfast
31: In Extremis
32: In The World Of Light
33: Cashiered
Epilogue: A Foot Patrol Through the Abyss
About the Author
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
1: A Town Called Malice
2: The Dying Earth
3: The Big Red One
4: Machine Gun Silhouette
5: The Widow McAlpine
6: Someone Else’s Problem
7: She’s Got A Ticket to Ride (And She Don’t Care)
8: Veterans of Foreign Wars
9: Blood on The Tracks
10: Good Progress
11: No Progress
12: A Message
13: The Girl on The Bike
14: A Very Ordinary Assassination
15: Sir Harry
16: Salt
17: The Treasury Man
18: Not Exactly Scout Finch
19: The Chief Constable
20: The UDR Base
21: Fifteens
22: I’ve Seen Things you People Wouldn’t Believe
23: Delorean
24: People in Glass Houses
25: Into the Woods
26: Through A Glass Darkly
27: High Mass
28: America
29: Driving Under The Influence
30: Back to Belfast
31: In Extremis
32: In The World Of Light
33: Cashiered
Epilogue: A Foot Patrol Through the Abyss
About the Author