Braver Men Walk Away Page 13

  And now I was being watched by another hostile crowd as I went forward to check out the nail bomb, inwardly noting that because the crowd was pressing forward, the odds were probably against a booby-trap: the onlookers wouldn’t be that close if someone from the IRA hadn’t already passed the word that the device was harmless. Even so, they were too close for comfort – twenty-five, maybe thirty yards away.

  I knelt down to examine the device. A chunk of rock whistled past me and people yelled, applauded, screamed abuse; it was like trying to work in the presence of a manic Greek Chorus. I shouted to the troops to push the crowd further back, then turned back to deal with the device. Another missile was thrown by the crowd but I didn’t see or hear it. Concentrating on the suspect device, I was oblivious to everything else until a soldier touched my arm and gesticulated at my clothes.

  I had been wearing my bomb helmet and a combat jacket over my flak jacket. The outermost garment was smoking from the back, near my shoulders. I wrenched it off as well as the helmet, coughing at the sudden uprush of acrid fumes. The white smoke surged and steamed and I realized what had happened: as soon as I’d turned my back on the crowd, a bottle filled with battery acid had been thrown at me. It had hit the wall above my head and the acid had sprayed down over me. The paint peeled from my helmet and the fabric of my jacket disintegrated. It didn’t pay to think what would have happened to unprotected flesh.

  Another incident in Belfast, the bombing of the Nite Bite Snack Bar, saw me, as with the Candle, very lucky.

  It was a popular city-centre haunt patronized by those who, like the majority of Belfast folk, were determined to ignore ‘the Troubles’. Its presence was a reassurance to many that despite everything, life could still go on. The IRA decided to demonstrate otherwise.

  The building next door to the Nite Bite was undergoing major renovation. The IRA went in and placed a 20-pound bomb against a concrete pillar and surrounded it on two sides with a mini-wall of house bricks. The bomb’s blast could thus be channelled directly towards the Nite Bite Snack Bar and its unsuspecting customers.

  I arrived after the bomb had gone off. The tunnel effect of the blast had done its job: people dead, people maimed, the unassuming little rendezvous reduced to a smoking pile of rubble and glass and fractured woodwork. When a 20-pound bomb is positioned with such precision and its explosive power directed in such a way, the outcome is a foregone conclusion. The ambulances wailed in the distance.

  There was a possibility of a secondary device; I moved carefully through the wreckage. Not long before people had been enjoying a meal out. Now broken tables and chairs lay in tip-tilted confusion; smashed crockery crunched underfoot. Items of shredded clothing and purses and handbags were scattered everywhere. I made my way into the kitchen area, or what was left of it. A giant refrigerator had been blown over by the blast, the door wrenched back and the contents spilled out, most noticeably a huge pile of prime Irish pork sausages – enough to feed a small army.

  The sausages looked good. Soon they would be trampled on and scooped up and thrown away. I had a better idea: I would rescue some and we’d be able to add sausage banjos to our staple diet. I reached down and grabbed at the first sausage – and regained consciousness about thirty seconds later on the other side of the room.

  The small portable tape recorder I used on jobs to make a contemporaneous record of what I saw and found and thought told it all. After the initial thud, the tape recorder ran on for a near silent half-minute and then played back the sounds of moaning and groaning as I came round.

  I carefully hauled myself out of the debris and stood unsteadily, trying to clear my head. Then I went back to the sausages and carefully lifted them with a piece of wood. They were lying on top of a ruptured three-phase cable. A three-phase carries 440 volts – more than enough to kill. Why it didn’t kill me I don’t know.

  The sequel to the Nite Bite Snack Bar bombing came three years ago when I had a full medical, including electrocardiograph. The doctor considered the ECG results then told me to sit down. He seemed to be having trouble forming his words.

  ‘So?’ I said. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Well, Peter, it’s like this. You’ve had a heart attack.’

  ‘Never.’ I shook my head. ‘I know what a heart attack is and I definitely haven’t had one.’

  A series of exhaustive hospital tests were arranged. They showed scarring of the cardiac tissue. The hospital consultant smiled regretfully. ‘Sorry, Mr Gurney. There are all the signs of a heart attack – unless, that is, you’ve ever suffered a severe electric shock?’

  I remembered then. ‘I did get a shock, once.’

  ‘How recently?’

  ‘Seventeen years ago.’

  ‘Must’ve been a major shock, then. What kind of work were you doing to come into contact with such a voltage?’

  ‘You might not believe this,’ I said, ‘but it had a lot to do with sausage sandwiches.’

  During my four-month tour of Northern Ireland I didn’t make more than three or four off-duty excursions. In part this was due to the lassitude that struck after the nervous intensity of operations, but mainly it was due to the risk: the IRA would dearly have loved to wipe out every EOD officer in Northern Ireland.

  Terrorist spotters would watch the camp to see which vehicles came out and then note the registration numbers of non-military vehicles. It meant we had to use nondescripts – cars which looked like average civilian vehicles – with false plates. At least there was no shortage: we worked our way through endless cars which had to be blown up because they either contained bombs or were thought to do so. We’d retrieve the plates, bring them back, and affix them to our nondescripts.

  The theory didn’t always work out in practice: one ammunition technical officer used a nondescript for a shopping trip and tagged it with plates from a car involved in an earlier incident. The only problem was, that car had been on the wanted list; before it could be taken off the list, a patrol spotted its plates on the nondescript and an EOD team was summoned. They promptly blew it up. When the ATO returned with his shopping he found his car reduced to a pile of burning wreckage and his colleagues standing around with the look of people satisfied by a job well done.

  I was tasked to the scene not because of the first report of a body in a van but because of a second report which warned of a booby-trap. The van was a medium-sized commercial which had been stolen and finally located in a quiet neighbourhood, parked innocuously against the kerb. The RUC were waiting for me when I arrived. Like me, they knew the terrorists would booby-trap anything: a car, a culvert, a corpse.

  Before I went forward the RUC detective said: ‘I wouldn’t dream of influencing the way you work, but if there’s any chance of preserving as much of the body as possible for forensic purposes … ?’

  I first checked the front of the van: nothing. I went round to the back. The rear door was partially open; I examined it carefully for signs of a booby-trap then clambered in. Boxes of meat were stacked along both sides of the van and against the far partition separating the load space from the driver’s compartment. An island was formed by more boxes stacked side by side in the middle. Blood was splattered around the van interior. A man was lying on top of the central stack.

  I moved cautiously towards him. He was lying face down, his hands tied behind his back with electrical flex. The ends of the flex had been pushed into his pockets. It could be a sign of a tidy mind or an indication of some kind of circuit. I checked him carefully, eventually determining that the flex didn’t connect up to anything. If the body was booby-trapped, the bomb would have to be underneath him. The question was: where?

  They’d made him lie down before killing him, forcing his face into a plastic tray half-filled with mince and shooting him through the back of the head. I reasoned that no terrorist would be stupid enough to position a bomb in any of the boxes underneath the mince tray and then shoot the victim from above. So if I cut a way through the boxes below the h
ead I would have safe access to the rest of the stack.

  I began with the box immediately beneath the mince tray, carefully cutting out one of its sides. This weakened the box and it collapsed. The mince tray tilted. And then the ticking started.

  Tick, tick, tick. But nothing else. I waited a lifetime until it seemed that the device wasn’t working. I could feel the inner tension beginning to ease, the paralysis of movement falling away like discarded shackles. I’d been resigned to dying – yet here I was, still hunched down next to a corpse in a meat van in old Belfast. And then I saw why.

  The sound had not been made by a timer but by a single 9mm bullet rolling across the ridges of the plastic tray. The victim had been shot several times through the head; this round had passed clean through and dropped out.

  It took me a long time to work carefully through the vehicle and its contents; the interior got hotter, the smell got worse and the buzzing of the flies grew noisier. There was no booby-trap.

  I worked on conscious of what I’d thought was about to happen to me and, perhaps because of that, was more conscious than I might otherwise have been of what had actually happened to my companion. I wondered what he must have thought in the moments before his death. Perhaps he’d believed that his captors only intended to frighten him until they’d shoved his face into the tray of mince, and then he must have realized, in those few final seconds, that he was going to die.

  Somehow that job summed up Northern Ireland for me, the viciousness, the grotesque brutality, the way the ordinary all too often hid the obscene. Anywhere else, a meat van parked against a kerb would be a sign of commonplace routine, you wouldn’t look twice at such a vehicle. Unless you were in Belfast.

  Cars rather than vans were the terrorist’s preferred vehicle for a precisely targeted attack. We destroyed them because there was no point in risking a life merely to save a mass of rubber and metal.

  It sounds simple, but when a car is burning up all manner of curiosities occur – the lights come on, the horn sounds, even the starter motor sometimes whirrs; finally the handbrake cable goes. That’s why, if a car is parked on anything other than level ground, you first shoot out the kerbside tyres to stop it moving.

  Unless there’s a bomb or there’s so little in the tank that it’s filled more with petroleum gas than actual fuel, cars burn rather than explode. Only on celluloid does one see spectacular blasts of disintegrating metalwork — I know: I’ve tried shooting holes in petrol tanks. Even that only triggers fierce jets of flame.

  Cars would occasionally be burned out even when they didn’t contain bombs: sometimes you can’t be absolutely certain of a vehicle’s status until after it has been burned out. You can tell which is which by the performance of the fire: a blaze will dramatically intensify in both sound and colour when the explosive starts to burn, at which point it’s time to get out of the way and head for safety.

  For the people of Belfast this is often impossible. The city is a battlefield, and there are times when only fatalities are well documented; the injured are not news for long. One bomb blast in particular brought this home to me.

  We make it to the scene at the same time as the emergency services. The route is congested with ambulances and fire engines and police vehicles. The reflections of blue lights track in rhythmic procession across the ground-floor windows of office blocks and stores; the sirens’ yowl rises high above the centre of Belfast.

  The Saracen shudders to a stop with the escort vehicles pulling in behind. An ambulance goes past and then another; their sirens cut off in falling cadence to be replaced by the staccato of feet running across hard paving, the noise of people shouting, the softer sound of sobbing. They’re still bringing the casualties out.

  We rarely get called to a scene when the ambulance crews are still working – they don’t want us in their way and we don’t want them or anyone else in ours. We either prevent incidents or we arrive when the scene is as clear and secure as circumstance allows.

  This time though, things are different: what began as an alert has, in the course of our journey, turned into a reality. Someone is trying to explain things to me. I’m not immediately sure of the identity of the speaker because it’s impossible to look away from the surreal scene. The large building of concrete and glass has a grassy apron in front of it that’s increasingly turning to mud as more and more figures run across and the wheels of the ambulances churn up its perimeter. People are lying about on the grass as though it’s high summer in the park instead of a weekday winter’s afternoon in the city. They are obscured by coats and blankets and people clustering around them, people with dressings and bandages and soft voices and urgent hands.

  The more I see, the more I absorb the battlefield conditions. Some of the wounded are propped up against the wall, others are standing with heads bowed; still more, far more, are down on the ground, on the lawn of an office block in Belfast.

  There’s a girl near by who has no one with her. I can tell she’s young because even though she’s lying down with back half-turned her dress has a youthful style.

  Minutes seem to be ticking by and yet they’re only seconds. Everything feels slowed down because of the sheer volume of information received by the ears and the eyes, because of the way the brain chases thoughts and sensations at speeds so fast that activity actually accelerates into a kind of blurred stillness.

  The girl is trying to get up now, so I go to her. Her movements are very awkward; I think she must still be shaky from the explosion. I can see that her arms and legs appear to be OK. I’m sure that, with my assistance, she can get up, until I’m at her side and looking into her face.

  There isn’t any sound from her. There isn’t, now, much sound from anywhere else. Sirens and shouts and sobs are muted. The distancing effect is taking hold.

  I kneel beside her on the grass. She still wants to get up but I tell her it’s not a good idea and she seems to accept that. Reassured, she lies back, resting against me. I hold her hand and say things to calm her but she has stopped struggling now. I don’t think she knows where she is or what has happened to her or who I am. I know she can’t see me because she can’t see anything. She has no face. I cradle her to me and keep the words coming from somewhere. Just once she moves her head as though listening. Through the holes where her cheeks used to be her few remaining teeth clench together, then part.

  I am reassuring her, I think, and calling for assistance. A medic arrives. Others are coming too and with them the return of sound, the return of wider vision; the world is no longer just two people on the grass in front of an office block.

  The warning said there was a bomb in a car parked near the north end of the building, so an orderly evacuation was immediately organized. The building featured emergency fire escapes at both its north and south ends – stone or concrete steps which zigzagged down behind the huge ground-to-roof windows. A concrete balustrade was built to normal hand-holding height.

  The women were brought from their offices to the south end of the building. They were still descending the emergency escape in an orderly crocodile when the bomb went off … at the south end.

  The blast dissolved the vast expanse of glass and blew it inwards, into the people on the stairs. The shards travelled at incredible speed, slashing and stabbing and slitting and slicing. Because the concrete balustrade protected the women from feet to upper waist, the breast, shoulder and facial areas took the full force of the glass storm. Without the balustrade, many would have died instantaneously. Because of the balustrade, they were cut to ribbons instead. The blast did only superficial damage to the building. Repairs were needed to the external cladding and the windows but that was all.

  The day after it happened, the news was about people being injured rather than people being killed, about a building that survived rather than a building that fell down. Because of this the media gave it less emphasis; newspapers do not sell on headlines like NONE DIE IN NORTHERN IRELAND BOMBING; BUILDING SLIGHTLY DAMAGED. Unles
s an explosion occurs in mainland Britain, and especially in London, UK national and regional Press and television will headline only those bombs which cause death and destruction, corpses and conflagration.

  Of course people might die the day after the day after a bombing, but by then it is too late because the story has been heard before. To count in the headlines it is necessary to die before the deadline.

  So I don’t know what happened to those caught up in that bombing. I don’t know if they all survived or if some of them died of their injuries in the days or weeks or months afterwards. I don’t know what has become of the girl I held to me in the intervening twenty years. If she survived, she will have become one of the hundreds maimed and crippled by the IRA. Each incident inflicts different horrors on different victims, leaves a legacy of pain and disability that goes on long after the news has been forgotten.

  Twenty years ago the IRA slightly damaged the exterior of an office block in Belfast, smashed some glass, and injured forty people. In the chronicle of IRA terrorism, it is very small beer indeed. Some who were there on that day still remember it: the ambulance crews, the doctors, the medics, the helpers, the police, the firemen, and the people like myself. Others who were there also remember it, but they have reasons more compelling than ours.

  I left Northern Ireland at the end of 1972 with memories of bombs and killings and corpses and the sound of sirens. Though many of these memories blur together because of the similarity of context, some do not. One of them is all about a girl trying to get up from the grass.

  6

  The Bungalow

  ‘Well,’ said Geoffrey Biddle, ‘Egypt it isn’t, but it can still get pretty hot.’

  My mind went back seventeen years to the explosive wave propagation test that had sent us sprinting across the sand to Geoffrey’s jeep. Now, in February 1973, we were colleagues again, this time at the top of five flights of stairs in a building with no lift: Cannon Row Police Station. Outside, a cold drizzle fell; a gunmetal-grey Thames flowed sluggishly under Westminster Bridge.