The Savage Day - Jack Higgins [16]
There was a certain amount of traffic about, private cars mostly, nosing out of the fog, pausing at the pedestrian crossing, then passing on.
It was a typical street scene of the kind you'd expect to find in any large industrial city, except for one thing. There was a police station on the other side of the square, a modern building in concrete and glass and the entrance was protected by a sandbagged machine-gun post manned by Highlanders in Glengarry bonnets and flak jackets.
Norah Murphy leaned against the railings, clutching her case in both hands. 'Occupied Belfast, Major. How do you like it?'
'I've seen worse,' I said.
Two men came round the corner in a hurry, one of them bumping into Binnie, who fended him off angrily. 'Would you look where you're going, now?' he demanded, holding the man by the arm.
He was not much older than Binnie, with a thin, narrow-jawed face and wild eyes, and he wore an old trilby hat. He carried an attache case in his right hand and tried to pull away. His companion was a different proposition altogether, a tall, heavily built man in a raincoat and cloth cap. He was at least forty and had a craggy, pugnacious face.
'Leave him be,' he snarled, pulling Binnie round by the shoulder and then his mouth gaped. 'Jesus, Binnie, you couldn't have picked a worse spot. Get the hell out of it.'
He pulled at his companion, they turned and hurried across the square through the traffic.
'Trouble?' Norah Murphy demanded.
Binnie grabbed her by the arm and nodded. 'The big fella's Gerry Lucas. I don't know the other. They're Bradys.'
Which being the Belfast nickname for members of the Provisional branch of the IRA was enough to make anyone move fast. We were already too late. A couple of cars had halted at the pedestrian crossing and a woman in a headscarf was half-way across pushing a pram in front of her, a little girl of five or six trotting beside her. A young couple shared an umbrella behind.
Lucas and his friend reached the opposite pavement and paused behind a parked car, where Lucas produced a Schmeisser machine pistol from beneath his raincoat and sprayed the machine-gun post.
In the same moment, his friend ran out into the open and tossed the attache case in an arc through the rain and muffed things disastrously, for instead of dropping inside the machine-gun post, the case bounced from the sandbags to the gutter.
The two of them ran like hell for the shelter of the nearest side street and made it, the Highlanders being unable to open up with their machine-gun for the simple reason that the square seemed to be suddenly filled with panic-stricken people running everywhere.
The case exploded a split second later, taking out half of the front of the machine-gun post, dissolving every window in the square in a snowstorm of flying glass.
People were running, screaming, some on their hands and knees, faces streaming with blood, cut by the flying glass. One of the cars at the pedestrian crossing had been blown on to its side, the crossing itself had been swept clean.
Norah Murphy ran out into the square in what I believe was a purely reflex action and Binnie and I followed her towards the car which had turned over. A man was trying to climb out through the shattered side window, his face streaked with blood. I hauled him through and he slipped to the ground and rolled over on his back.
The woman who had been pushing the pram on the pedestrian crossing, was sprawled across the bonnet of the second car, half the clothes torn off her. From the condition of the rest of her she couldn't be anything else but dead. The young couple who had been behind her were in the gutter on the far side of the road, people clustering round.
The pram was miraculously intact, lying against the wall, but when I righted