Victor O'Reilly - Games of The Hangman

"For eight hours we watched the scene below. Most of the hostages were left alive under guard, just sitting or trying to sleep on the ground, but a steady trickle was taken for the amusement of the Simbas and tortured to death. The torturing took place in a small garden at one end of the square. There was a statue there commemorating some explorer, and they used the plinth to tie their victims to.

"We lay concealed no more than fifty meters away on the second floor of the house, and we could see it all clearly by the light of huge bonfires. With field glasses, it seemed close enough to touch. We couldn't do a damn thing. We had to wait; we just had to. They screamed and screamed and screamed; all goddamn night they screamed. Men, women, and children were raped. It made no difference. They were killed in as many disgusting ways as the Simbas could devise.

"They put one little child – she couldn't have been more than four or five – between two jeeps, tied ropes to her arms and legs, and pulled her apart like a rag doll. One guy, with a beard and longish hair, they crucified. They shouted at him: ‘ Jesus, Jesus, le roi des juifs.’ He was still alive after four hours, so they castrated him. After they raped them, they made some nuns drink gasoline. Then they cut their stomachs open and set fire to their intestines. That was a big favorite. We could smell them burning from where we lay. And we could do nothing, absolutely nothing to help. We lay there with our GPMGs and FNs and rocket launchers and grenades and knives and piano wire, and we didn't even move when little babies died.

"Oh, we were a well-trained outfit, the best the Irish Army had to offer. We had discipline, absolute discipline. We had our orders, and they were sensible orders. Premature action would have been military suicide.

"And then the Simbas pulled one young nurse out of the crowd. She was tall and red-haired and beautiful. She still wore her white uniform. It happened so quickly. One of the young Simbas – some were only thirteen or fourteen and among the cruelest – picked up a panga and almost casually hacked her head off. It took only a few blows. It was quite a quick death. The nurse was Anne-Marie. We'd been married just seven weeks."

Etan had not known what to say or do. What she was hearing was so truly terrible and so much beyond her experience that she just sat there motionless. Then she put both her arms around her lover and drew him to her. After he'd finished speaking, Fitzduane had remained silent. The sun was now a dull semicircle vanishing into the sea. It had grown much colder. She could see the lights of the castle keep.

Fitzduane had kissed the top of her head and squeezed her tight. "This is a damp bloody climate, isn't it?" he had said. To warm themselves up, they played ducks and drakes with flat stones on the lake in the twilight. Night had fallen by the time they made it back to Duncleeve, debating furiously as to who had won the game. The last few throws had taken place in near darkness.

The new Jury's Hotel in Dublin looked like nothing so much as the presidential palace of a newly emerging nation. The original Jury's had vanished except for the marble, mahogany, and brass Victorian bar that had been shipped in its entirety to Zurich by concerned Swiss bankers as a memorial to James Joyce.

Fitzduane wended his way through a visiting Japanese electronics delegation, headed toward the new bar, and ordered a Jameson. He was watching the ice melt and thinking about postmortems and life and the pursuit of happiness when Gunther arrived. He still looked baby-faced, so you tended not to notice at first quite how big he was. Close up you could see lines that hadn't been there before, but he still looked fit and tough.

A wedding party slid in through the glass doors. The bride was heavily swaddled in layers of white man-made fiber. She was accompanied by either the headwaiter or the bridegroom, it was hard to tell which. The bride's train swished into the pound and began to sink. Fitzduane thought it was an unusual time of year for an Irish wedding, but then maybe not when you looked at her waistline.

The bride's escort retrieved her train and wrung it out expertly into the fountain. He did it neatly and efficiently, as if it were a routine chore or he were used to killing chickens. The train now looked like a wet diaper as it followed the bride into family life.

Fitzduane ignored the symbolism and finished his Jameson.

"You're losing your puppy fat, Gunther," he said. "You're either working too hard or playing too hard."

"It's the climate here, and I'm getting older. I think I'm rusting." The accent was German and pronounced, but with more than a hint of Irishness to it. He'd been in Ireland for some considerable time. The government had once borrowed him from Grenzschutzgruppe 9 (GSG-9), the West German antiterrorist force, and somehow he'd stayed.

"Doesn't it rain in Germany?"

"Only when required," replied Gunther. "We're a very orderly nation."

"The colonel coming?" asked Fitzduane. He patted the airline bag slung from Gunther's shoulder and then hefted it, trying to work out the weapon inside. Something Heckler amp; Koch at a guess. Germans liked using German products, and Heckler amp; Koch was state of the art. The weapon had a folding stock, and if he knew Kilmara, it was unlikely to be a nine millimeter. Kilmara had a combat-originated bias against the caliber, which he thought lacked stopping power. "The model thirty-three assault rifle?"

Gunther grinned and nodded. "You keep up-to-date," he said. "Very good. But the colonel is upstairs. You're dining in a private room; these days it's wiser." He led the way out of the bar and along the glass-walled corridor to the elevator. They got out on the top floor. Gunther nodded at two plainclothes security guards and opened the door with a key. Three were two more men inside, automatic weapons at the ready. Gunther ushered Fitzduane into the adjoining room.

Colonel Shane Kilmara, security adviser to the Taoiseach – the Irish prime minister – and commander of the Rangers, the special Irish antiterrorist force, rose to meet him. A buffet lunch was spread out on a table to one side.

"I didn't realize smoked salmon needed so much protection," said Fitzduane.

"It's the company it keeps," answered Kilmara.

Whenever Ireland's idiosyncratic climate and the Celtic mentality of many of its natives began to get him down, Kilmara had only to reflect on how he had ended up in his present position to induce a frisson of well-being.

Kilmara had been successful militarily in the Congo, and the saving of most of the hostages at Konina had been hailed as a classic surgical strike by the world press; but the bottom line had a political flavor, and back in cold, damp Ireland Kilmara was court-martialed – and found guilty. He did not dispute the finding. He had initiated the Konina strike against orders, and eighteen of his men had been killed.

On the credit side of the ledger, the operation had been a success. More than seven hundred lives had been saved, and world public opinion had been overwhelmingly favorable, so he did dispute whether charges should have been brought at all. Many others, including the officers judging him at his court-martial, felt the same way, but the verdict, once the court was convened, was inevitable. The sentence was not. It could have involved a dishonorable discharge and imprisonment or even the extreme penalty. It did not. The members of the court demonstrated their view that the institution of such proceedings against one of their own was ill judged and motivated by political malice by settling for the minimum penalty; a severe reprimand.

Kilmara could have stayed on in the army, since most of his peers regarded the verdict as technical, but a more serious shock was to follow. Under the guise of economy measures, the elite airborne battalion he had selected and trained to such a peak of perfection was disbanded.