Solo - Jack Higgins [25]
'The right word you've chosen, that's for sure.' Baker filled his pipe slowly. 'He must be damn near fifty now, Asa. A Welsh miner's son from the Rhondda. I don't know what happened to him earlier in the war, but I know he was one of those poor sods they dropped in at Arnhem. He was a sergeant then. Got a field commission as a second lieutenant afterwards.'
'Then what?'
'Palestine. His first taste of urban guerrillas, he used to say. Then he was seconded to the Ulster Rifles when they went to Korea. Captured by the Chinese. They had him for a year, those bastards. I know some people thought all that brainwashing stuff they used on our lads out there had really gone to his head.'
'What do you mean, sir?'
'When he came back, he wrote this treatise about what he called a new concept of revolutionary warfare. Kept quoting Mao Tse-tung as if he was the Bible. I suppose the General Staff decided he'd either turned Communist or knew what he was talking about, so they sent him to Malaya which is where I met him. We worked together for quite a time.'
'Did you do any good?'
'We won, didn't we? The only Communist insurrection since the Second World War to be successfully crushed, was Malaya.'
'I saw him again for a while in Nicosia during the Cyprus thing when I was seconded out there on the same sort of deal. Come to think of it, he'd just got married before leaving the UK, I remember that now, so the kid's age would fit. I remember hearing he was in Aden in nineteen sixty-seven because he got a DSO for saving the necks of a bunch of Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders who got ambushed in the Crater district.'
'He sounds quite a man.'
'Oh, yes, you could say that. The original soldier monk. The Army's everything to him. Family and home rolled into one. I'm not surprised his wife left him.'
'I wonder what he'll do, sir, when he hears about his daughter.'
'God knows, George, but I can imagine.'
The wind rattled the window and, outside, rain drifted across the rooftops from the Thames.
3
But in Belfast that day, extraordinary things had been happening also. A day that was to go down in the history of the war in Ulster as Bloody Friday.
The first bomb exploded at two-ten p.m. at Smithfield Bus Station, the last at three-fifteen at the Cavehill Road Shopping Centre.
Twenty-two bombs in all, in locations scattered all over the city, usually where people might be expected to be present in large numbers. Protestant or Catholic, it made no difference. By the end of the day nine people were dead and a hundred and thirty injured.
At midnight, the army was still out in force. No less than twelve of the bombs which had exploded that day were in the New Lodge Road area which was the responsibility of 40 Commando, Royal Marines.
In a side street littered with glass and rubble, off the New Lodge Road itself, a dozen marines crouched against a wall opposite what had once been Cohan's Select Bar, which was burning fiercely. Two officers stood casually in the middle of the street surveying the scene. One was a Marine lieutenant. The other wore a paratrooper's red beret and a camouflage uniform, open at the neck, no badges of rank in evidence and no flak jacket.
He had the dark, ravaged face of a man who had got to know the world he inhabited too well and now only had contempt for it. A small, dark man with good shoulders, full of a restless vitality which was somehow accentuated by the bamboo swagger stick he tapped against his right knee.
'Who's the para?' one marine whispered to another.
'Runs Special Section at Staff - Colonel Morgan. A right bastard, so I've heard,' the man next to him replied.
On the flat roof of a block of flats seventy-five yards away, two men crouched by the parapet. One of them was Liam O'Hagan, at that time chief intelligence officer for the Provisional IRA in Ulster. He was examining the scene outside Cohan's Bar with the aid of a pair of Zeiss night glasses.
The young man at his side carried a conventional .303 Lee Enfield rifle of the type much favoured