Adrian McKinty - The Cold Cold Ground

I turned the Sterling on the man with the AK-47. In his excitement the muzzle on his weapon had already ridden so high that he might have been trying to bring down the Space Shuttle. I gave him a burst that ripped through the transit van’s aluminium door and ricocheted inside his body, slicing up his internal organs so badly that while the AK was still firing, blood was filling the balaclava and pouring out of his mouth.

That was enough for the driver who hit the accelerator pedal. The van leapt forward, the clutch slipped and it stalled. The driver didn’t panic.

He leaned across his dead partner, reached for something on the floor, and before I had time to react, gave me both barrels from a sawed-off shotgun.

Shotgun pellets travelled towards me at 1200 feet per second.

That’s 120 feet in a tenth of a second.

White-hot lead in my chest, neck and shoulders.

My beloved Sterling tumbling from my arms.

White-hot lead and a feeling of weightlessness.

Weightlessness and then hard cement.

Stars.

Footsteps.

The driver got out of the van. He rolled up his balaclava and walked towards me. From his jacket pocket he removed a Browning pistol fitted with a suppressor.

I almost laughed.

Why a silencer after all this?

He stood above me and looked down.

“You had to stick your fucking neb in, didn’t ya? You had to open your big yapper. Can’t you fucking take a hint? After all them ciggies we give you too,” he said.

He raised the gun.

I closed my eyes.

Held my breath.

A bang.

Silence.

When I opened my eyes again Bobby Cameron was staring at me and shaking his head. Billy White was dead to my left with the back of his head blown off.

Bobby was grinning.

“Why?” I managed.

He shrugged. “They didn’t ask me first. They didn’t ask me for permission and this is my street!”

His grin faded.

The stars faded.

I saw Laura run out of the burning hall with a blanket over her head. Smart, that lass.

I was losing a lot of blood. My head was light.

I heard sirens.

Bobby safetied the 9mm, wiped it clean and left it next to me.

I nodded.

If I lived, I’d tell them it was me.

“This is my fucking street,” Bobby said again.

In and out of the whiteness. In and out of the silence. Faces:

Mum and Dad. Laura. Matty. McCrabban. Brennan. McCallister. Doctors. Nurses. My mum again, holding my hand. Tears on her cheeks. Tears on her good blue dress. Fear in her blue-grey eyes.

Night.

An alarm.

A crisis.

Doctors younger than me. An old man I did not know. An old man startled from sleep, muttering words over me and holding a crucifix above my forehead. “ Domine sancte, Pater omnipotens, aeterne Deus, qui, benedictionis tuae gratiam aegris infundendo corporibus, facturam tuam multiplici pietate custodis: ad invocationem tui nominis benignus assiste; ut famulum tuum ab?gritudine liberatum, et sanitate donatum, dextera tua erigas, virtute confirmes, potestate tuearis, atque Ecclesi? tuae sanctae, cum omni desiderata prosperitate, restituas .”

A night boat. A night boat crossing the Irish Sea. A journey through darkness. The moon smothered by fragments of the dark. The stars mouthing hermetic songs.

A curlew on the lava beach. Auguries in the movement of the birds …

Time passed.

I could tell the different nurses by their perfumes.

I could sense the difference between the shifts.

I could tell when I was awake and dreaming.

“Ach, you’re doing much better now,” the one with the lovely Scottish accent said, touching my bruises with her fingers.

I had had surgeries to remove shotgun pellets from my stomach, right lung, ribcage and one that was nestled against my aorta.

The surgeries had been long though not difficult.

Then there had been complications.

Haemorrhaging.

An immune system attacking itself.

I had been put in an induced coma for four weeks after they had trepanned my skull to relieve the pressure on my brain.

For another fortnight they had kept me medicated and semiconscious.

When I became fully aware of where I was, it was the middle of July.

Six weeks of intensive care followed.

My condition moved from “critical” to “serious” to “improving”.

I wasn’t starved for visitors.

My mum and dad. Aunts and uncles dredged up from all over Ireland. Most of Carrickfergus RUC.

Laura.

Eventually I was moved to an open ward.

I got to know the heart patients and the car-crash victims.

The world outside the hospital continued without us.

Prince Charles married Lady Di in St Paul’s Cathedral.

Shergar won the Derby by ten lengths.

The Deputy Chief Constable came by to tell me that I had been recommended for the Queen’s Police Medal. He also told me that he personally had seen to it that I would get my full pay, minus my uniform allowance, until I could return to duty, but that to do this I would have to wave my claims under the Victims of Terrorism Compensation Act.

I signed his forms and he went away happy.

My dad went round my house, ripped out the stair and rebuilt and repainted it.

He told me that everyone on Coronation Road had been “asking for me”.

The riots continued.

The hunger strikes continued, but it was clear that they were winding down. The families of the hunger strikers appealed to the Primate of All Ireland, Cardinal Daly; he pleaded with the men in the H Blocks and many of them began ending their fast.

Seamus Moore came off along with several others.

Michael “Mickey” Devine was the last man to die on 21 August 1981. I’d known Red Mickey in Derry. Not a bad lad. He’d been arrested and sent to prison for possession of a stolen shotgun.

In the English papers the suspending of the hunger strikes was portrayed as a massive victory for Mrs Thatcher. She had not given in to the terrorists. She had won.

Nevertheless, she quietly sacked her Secretary of State for Northern Ireland — the incompetent Sir Humphrey Atkins — and brought in James Prior. Prior immediately flew to the Maze Prison and promised that if the hunger strike was formally brought to a close then the British government would “strongly consider all of the prisoners’ demands”. Journalists began leaving Belfast for new trouble spots around the globe.

In my world it was much the same.

The “gay serial killer” case was closed. Billy White was tagged as the chief suspect. Shane Davidson had been his accomplice. Two repressed self-hating secret homosexuals. They had killed Tommy Little and Andrew Young and all the others …

They were disowned by the UVF and their families. Who knew why they had done it? As a pathology or because of some dispute with Tommy Little and then the others to cover up their crime? Who can see into the hearts of men?

But I knew. There had never been a gay serial killer. Northern Ireland was not the soil in which serial killers grew. If you wanted to murder a lot of people you joined the paramilitaries and used that as cover for your sociopathic tendencies …

Anywhere else this case would have been big news, but Ulster in 1981 had other things on its mind.

I tried to forget it. I had physiotherapy to do and water therapy and exercises.

I began exercising in the hospital. My mum bought me a Sony Walkman. Crabbie brought me a mix tape of country standards. Matty brought me a mix tape of Adam and the Ants and The Human League.

I learned to walk again and I listened to music and an audiobook novel Laura brought me called Midnight’s Children .

One morning in the papers I read that at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg the case of the Dudgeon v UK had been decided against the British government. A panel of judges had ruled 15:4 that Northern Ireland’s laws against homosexuality violated the European Convention on Human Rights. Mrs Thatcher’s Attorney General said that the law in Northern Ireland would have to be changed. That homosexual acts between consenting adults would have to be made legal.