Stephen Leather - The Double Tap

‘Yeah, well we picked the guy up, four of us, and took him out to Kilbride to do the dirty deed. Paddy brought the drill. It was his first capping as well. So, we have the guy pinned down in the field, and we tell Paddy to get on with it. He starts looking around. What the fuck are you waiting for, we say. “Where’s the socket?” he asks. “Where’s the fucking socket?”’

O’Riordan laughed uproariously. ‘Easy mistake to make,’ he said, wiping his eyes.

It wasn’t until they were driving down the track that led to O’Riordan’s farm that he raised the subject of Mike Cramer. ‘What did McCormack say?’ he asked.

‘Let sleeping dogs lie. That’s what he said.’

O’Riordan snorted softly. ‘Fuck that for a game of soldiers.’

‘Yeah. But what can we do? How am I going to track down a helicopter? They could have gone anywhere.’

O’Riordan shook his head. ‘Not anywhere, Dermott. What goes up must come down. And Air Traffic Control must have been tracking it. You might try asking them.’

‘Oh sure, I’ll just phone them up and ask them if they saw a helicopter pick up a Sass-man in Howth. I can just imagine their answer.’

‘It was a Sea King, wasn’t it? That’s what it looked like to me.’

‘I suppose so. It was a big bugger, that’s for sure, not a normal army chopper. I’ve never seen a red, white and blue chopper before. They’re usually grey or green.’

‘What about the Queen’s Flight?’ said O’Riordan.

‘Aye, it could have been the Duke of Edinburgh himself, coming to lift our man off. How far can they go, any idea?’

O’Riordan shrugged. ‘A few hundred miles maybe. They were heading east, but that doesn’t mean anything. They could have circled around and headed up north.’

‘Belfast? Yeah, that’s possible. Do we know anyone in Air Traffic Control?’

‘I’ll ask around. But you’d best be careful. McCormack won’t like it if he thinks you’re going behind his back.’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’

‘I mean it, Dermott. McCormack is a dangerous man to cross.’

‘I know. I’ll just be making a few enquiries, that’s all.’

Mike Cramer was walking around the croquet lawn, deep in thought, when he heard the Colonel calling him from the French windows at the rear of the main building. He looked up. The Colonel was waving his walking stick as if he was trying to call back an errant retriever. Cramer smiled at the thought. A Rottweiler would be a better comparison. During his last few years in the SAS, the Colonel had tended to use Cramer on operations where the qualities of a highly-trained attack dog were more in demand than the ability to bring back a dead bird.

Cramer walked across the grass. Away to his left, by the line of tall conifers which separated the tennis courts from the lawn, stood a broad-shouldered man in a dark blue duffel coat, one of several SAS troopers on guard duty. The wind caught the coat and Cramer got a glimpse of a sub-machine pistol in an underarm holster.

The Colonel had gone back inside by the time Cramer reached the window. It led into a large, airy room which appeared to have been the headmistress’s office. The Colonel sat behind a huge oak desk. The walls were bare but there were oblong marks among the faded wallpaper where framed photographs of netball and lacrosse teams had hung for generations. As Cramer stepped into the room he noticed another man, standing by an empty bookcase. ‘Cramer, this is Dr Greene,’ said the Colonel.

The doctor stepped forward and shook hands with Cramer. He was just under six feet tall, in his early fifties with swept-back grey hair and gold-framed spectacles with bifocal lenses. He was wearing a brown cardigan with leather patches on the elbows and was carrying a small leather medical bag. ‘Strip to the waist,’ said the doctor.

‘Top or bottom?’

The doctor looked at Cramer over the top of his spectacles, an amused smile on his face. ‘Whichever you’d prefer, Sergeant Cramer.’

Cramer took off his reefer jacket and unbuttoned his shirt. The Colonel made no move to leave. He read the look on Cramer’s face. ‘You don’t mind if I stay, do you?’ he asked and Cramer shook his head.

The doctor whistled softly between his teeth as Cramer dropped his shirt onto the desk. He walked over and gently touched the thick raised scar that ran jaggedly across Cramer’s stomach. ‘Across and up. As if someone had tried to disembowel you.’

‘That’s pretty much what happened. I lost a few feet of tubing and I had to wear a colostomy bag for the best part of a year, but I guess I was lucky.’

‘And this?’ The doctor touched Cramer’s right breast. There was a mass of scar tissue where the nipple had once been.

Cramer shrugged. ‘Pruning shears.’

The doctor walked around Cramer, noting the rest of the scars on his body. He touched him lightly on the left shoulder. ‘A.45?’ he asked.

‘A.357, I think. It went right through so they never found the bullet.’

‘And this?’ The doctor pressed a small wound on the other shoulder.

‘A fruit knife.’

‘And this thin one that runs around your stomach?’

‘A Stanley knife.’

The doctor shook his head in wonder. ‘You seem to have a lot of enemies, Sergeant Cramer.’

‘Just one.’

‘One man did all this to you?’

‘It was a woman. She did most of the damage.’

‘A woman?’ The doctor whistled through his teeth. ‘I wouldn’t like to meet her on a dark night.’

‘Mary Hennessy, her name was. She was an IRA terrorist. She’s dead now.’

The doctor stood in front of him again and studied the thick scar across his stomach. ‘That must have done a lot of damage inside.’

‘Tell me about it. If I hadn’t been helicoptered to hospital I’d have died.’

‘She was torturing you, this woman?’

‘She was torturing a friend of mine. He died moments before I was rescued. She did that to my stomach just before she fled. I guess she wanted me to die slowly, in a lot of pain. She almost had her wish. The rest of the stuff she did to me two years later.’

The doctor had Cramer open his mouth and took a small torch from the pocket of his cardigan. He peered at Cramer’s throat, then pushed his fingers against the side of his neck as if checking for lumps. ‘That seems fine,’ he murmured, then he pressed Cramer’s stomach with the flat of his hand. Cramer winced. The doctor pressed again, lower this time, and Cramer grunted. ‘That hurts?’ asked the doctor.

‘A bit.’

‘Did the doctors in Madrid think that the cancer could be a result of the trauma?’

Cramer nodded. ‘That, coupled with the stress. And my drinking.’

The doctor nodded. ‘How much pain are you in, generally?’

‘Generally, it’s okay. Twinges now and then. It hurts most when I eat.’

‘What about your appetite?’

‘That’s pretty much gone. Partly because it hurts, but mainly I’m just not hungry most of the time.’

‘Bleeding?’

‘Yeah. That’s why I went to the hospital in the first place. My shit went black.’

‘And you were losing weight?’

‘I went down from 184 pounds to 170. I thought it was because I’d stopped eating.’

‘And you’re still losing weight?’ Cramer nodded. ‘The doctors in Spain, how long did they give you?’

‘Three months. Max.’

The doctor sniffed. ‘I’ve seen the X-rays, and the scans. I’d say they were being optimistic.’ He straightened up and went over to his bag. ‘I’ll give you a vitamin shot now, and some tablets to take.’

‘Not painkillers. I don’t want painkillers.’

‘Just vitamins. But you’ll be needing painkillers before long.’