Stephen Leather - The Double Tap

Davie was shouting but O’Riordan couldn’t make out what he was saying as the offside wheels of the truck left the tarmac. Wet branches slapped across the windscreen and the truck tilted sharply to the left. The truck was half off the road and the tyres on the grass verge gripped harder than those on the wet tarmac, so the more Davie braked, the more the truck veered to the left. The steering wheel twisted out of Davie’s hands. O’Riordan felt his seatbelt dig into his chest and the truck bucked and reared and slammed through the hedge. O’Riordan pitched forward, his knees thumping into the dashboard, his arms flailing with the impact. Suddenly everything went still.

O’Riordan shook his head. The seatbelt was tight up against his neck making it hard to breathe, and he felt around for the buckle. He found it and unclipped the belt, gasping for air as the nylon strap went slack. He rubbed his throat and looked across at Davie, who was hunched forward over the steering wheel. O’Riordan shook him by the shoulder. ‘Davie?’ he said.

Davie turned slowly. His eyes were glassy and O’Riordan realised he was in shock, but other than that he appeared to be unharmed. O’Riordan twisted around in his seat. ‘Paulie?’ he shouted. ‘You okay?’

‘Yeah, I think so,’ said Paulie from the back of the truck. ‘What happened?’

O’Riordan couldn’t help but grin at the banality of the question. He tried to open the door but it was jammed. ‘Davie, we’re going to have to get out your side,’ he said.

There was a hiss of escaping steam and a series of clicks from the engine as if it hadn’t quite died. Davie fumbled with the handle and pushed the door open. The truck was leaning at a forty-five degree angle and they had to drop down from the open door onto the ground. Paulie was on his hands and knees, dragging himself out of the back of the truck. Davie went to help his brother as O’Riordan surveyed the damage. The offside wheels of the truck were in a ditch and it was resting on a hedge. The front axle was broken, a shattered tree branch had speared one of the tyres and the front of the vehicle was a twisted mess. The truck wasn’t going anywhere, even if they could find some way of getting it back onto the road.

Davie helped Paulie to his feet. The truck made a groaning noise like a dying elephant and lurched further to the left, its offside wheels sinking deeper into the ditch. O’Riordan rubbed his chin, wondering what the hell they were going to do.

The car they’d hit had slewed across the road and was resting nose down in the ditch on the far side of the road. Its boot had sprung open and O’Riordan could see it was filled with suitcases. On the ground next to the car lay a small bundle of clothes, but as O’Riordan looked at it closely he realised it was a child. A boy. He went over to see if there was anything that could be done but before he even got close he could see from the blood and the angle of the boy’s neck that he was dead. He’d obviously been thrown through the windscreen on impact.

Davie came up behind O’Riordan. ‘Pat, what are we going. .?’ His voice tailed off as he saw the body. ‘Oh Jesus,’ he said. ‘Is he. .?’

‘Yeah,’ said O’Riordan. ‘Go back to the truck. Keep an eye out for other vehicles.’ O’Riordan stepped around the body of the boy and peered into the car. The driver was sprawled halfway through the shattered windscreen, his throat ripped open and his lower jaw a bloody pulp. The rain washed his blood across the bonnet, a red streak on the white metal. There was a woman in the back seat, unconscious but still held in place by her seatbelt. O’Riordan wiped his forehead with his sleeve. He shaded his eyes with the flat of his hand and peered into the car. She didn’t seem to be bleeding. She was probably the wife of the dead man, mother of the dead child. Tourists, by the look of the suitcases. ‘Christ, what a mess,’ O’Riordan muttered to himself.

He went back to the Quinn brothers. O’Riordan knew he had to make a decision, and quickly. The area they were in wasn’t highly populated, but it was only a matter of time before another vehicle came along. They could wait and hope that a van or a truck appeared which they could then commandeer and use to take away the consignment, but if the police turned up they’d be in deep trouble. If only Lynch hadn’t taken the Landrover. The Quinn brothers watched him nervously, waiting for him to make up his mind. Paulie was staring wide-eyed at the body of the boy on the ground. Davie had a hand on Paulie’s shoulder as if restraining him. The rain was coming down heavier now, the drops pitter-pattering on the roof of the truck. At least the bad weather meant they were unlikely to be spotted by a passing helicopter. O’Riordan stood with his hands on his hips and stared at the disabled truck. They could carry the arms, but not far. If they buried them in a nearby field, the police would be sure to find them.

O’Riordan turned to look at the Quinn brothers. ‘On your way, lads,’ he said. ‘Cut across the fields, keep out of sight. Get as far away from here as you can. Give it a couple of hours, then hitch. Okay?’

Davie nodded but Paulie continued to stare at the small body. ‘Paulie, there’s nothing we can do,’ said O’Riordan. ‘It was an accident.’

‘He’s okay,’ said Davie. ‘I’ll look after him.’ He pulled his brother to a five-bar gate and helped him over. They disappeared into the rain.

O’Riordan climbed into the back of the truck and ripped the polythene from the disposable bazooka. He was one of half a dozen volunteers who’d attended a training course on the operation of the M72. A former Green Beret had flown over from the States to demonstrate the firing of the weapon, using a replica.

O’Riordan walked down the road until he was some fifty metres from the truck, then dropped down into the ditch. He pulled open the telescopic launcher-tube and flipped up the front and rear sights. The M72 was surprisingly light, weighing just about three pounds. He armed it and put it to his shoulder, gripping the weapon tightly in anticipation of the recoil.

‘Jesus, what a waste,’ he whispered. He fired, and immediately there was a deafening whooshing sound as the tube jerked in his hands. The missile shot towards the truck, leaving a white smoky trail behind it. It hit the truck just behind the driver’s cab and exploded in a ball of yellow flame. O’Riordan ducked his head as bits of debris flew by him. There were hundreds of smaller bangs as the ammunition exploded. O’Riordan kept down low into the ditch until the explosions subsided. A piece of metal smacked into his shoulder but not hard enough to do any damage. It lay in the sodden grass close to his foot. It wasn’t a bullet, it looked like a piece of the truck chassis.

When he looked up again the truck was burning with thick plumes of smoke spiralling up into the leaden sky. O’Riordan went as close as he could and threw the mortar tube onto the fire. The truck was burning fiercely despite the rain and O’Riordan doubted that there’d be much of it left by the time it burned out. He ran to the gate, vaulted over it, and jogged across the recently ploughed field.

Dermott Lynch was halfway through a pint of Guinness in a pub in the Temple Bar district of Dublin when he saw the news flash. The barman turned up the volume on the television set fixed to the wall by the entrance to the Gents toilet and stood watching it, his arms folded across his chest. The RTE1 announcer was reading from a sheet of paper. A man and a child killed. A woman in hospital. At first Lynch thought it was a road traffic accident, but then the picture cut away to footage of the burnt-out wreckage of the truck half-lying in a ditch.

Lynch put down his Guinness. A cold prickling feeling ran down to the base of his spine. What the hell had gone wrong? The newsreader said that the truck was believed to have contained arms and ammunition. The police were looking for the driver of the truck, but there were as yet no witnesses to the accident. Lynch frowned. If the truck had been destroyed in the accident, what had happened to Pat and the Quinn boys?