Solo - Jack Higgins [49]
O'Hagan looked at his watch. 'Right on time for once.' He grinned at Morgan. 'Just think, you could have been shot by one of your own people. There's irony for you.'
'Now what?' Morgan asked.
'We get the hell out of here. Get it open, Seumas.'
In the light of the boy's torch, Morgan saw that he had pulled back the bushes revealing a manhole cover which he pulled back. He descended a steel ladder, Morgan hesitated, then went after him and O'Hagan followed, pulling the cover back into place.
Morgan found himself in a tunnel so small that he had to crouch. The boy took a large spot lamp from a ledge and switched it on. He started forward and Morgan went after him, aware of the sound of rushing water in the distance.
They came out on the concrete bank of a large tunnel and in the light of the spot he saw that a brown foaming stream coursed down the centre. The smell was very unpleasant.
'The main sewer,' Seumas said. 'All that Protestant shit from the Shankhill. Don't worry, Colonel. We'll pass right underneath and come up amongst friends in the Ardoyne.'
'Then what?' Morgan asked.
'I think, under the circumstances, we'd do better out of town tonight,' O'Hagan said. 'You, too, Asa.'
'You'll never make it,' Morgan told him. 'Not after those bombs. They'll plug every road out of the city up tight.'
'Ah, there are ways,' O'Hagan said. 'You'd be surprised. Now, let's get moving.'
They emerged some twenty minutes later in what appeared to be a factory yard behind a high brick wall. When the boy turned to the building itself Morgan saw, in the light of the spot, considerable evidence of bomb damage and that all the windows had been blocked with corrugated iron.
They paused at large double doors, locked with a padlock and chain and O'Hagan produced a key. 'This was a wholesale booze warehouse, owned by a London firm. After the third bomb, they decided they'd had enough.'
He got the doors open and Morgan and Seumas moved in. O'Hagan closed the doors and the boy fumbled in the dark. There was the click of a switch and a single bulb turned on.
'Nice of them not to cut off the electricity,' O'Hagan said.
Morgan found himself standing in a garage. In the centre there was some sort of vehicle covered with a dust sheet. O'Hagan moved across and pulled the sheet away, revealing an Army Land-Rover. The painted board mounted at the front said: Emergency - Bomb Disposal.
'Neat, eh?' O'Hagan said. 'And we've never been stopped yet. Come to think of it, you should feel right at home in this situation, Asa.' He went round to the back of the Land-Rover, opened it and took out a camouflage jacket which he threw across. 'Everything we need in here. You'll have to drop a couple of ranks though. Best I can manage are a captain's pips. I'll be sergeant and Seumas our driver.'
'To what end?' Morgan demanded. 'Where are we going?'
'You wanted to know where those Mausers came from. All right - we'll go and ask Brendan Tully.'
It worked like a charm, all the way out of the city on the Antrim Road. They were waved through three separate roadblocks by military police without hesitation and at a fourth, where there was a queue of vehicles being checked, Seumas simply sounded his horn and overtook on the wrong side of the road.
Outside Ballymena, O'Hagan told the boy to pull up at a public telephone box. He was inside for no more than three minutes. When he returned, he was smiling.
'He's expecting us. The Glenarrif road through the Antrim mountains.'
Morgan said, 'How do you explain me?'
O'Hagan grinned. 'You still speak Welsh, don't you? He loves to try out his Irish, Brendan. Learned it when he and McStiophan were in prison together. Welsh and Irish - they must have something in common surely.'
Twenty miles along the road through the mountains, they came to a sign indicating Coley to the left. Seumas turned, following a narrow, twisting road between dry-stone walls, climbing higher and higher into the mountains.
In the first grey light of dawn they came over a rise