Shaun Clarke - Sniper Fire in Belfast

They asked Martin if he smoked and, when he said no, blew a cloud of smoke in his face. While he was coughing, they asked him more questions. When he managed, even through his delirium, to stick to his routine answers, one of them threw him back on the freezing floor and said: ‘Let’s feed the bastard to the dogs.’

They stripped off his clothing, being none too gentle, then left him to lie there, shivering with cold, almost sobbing, but controlling himself by endlessly repeating his name, rank, serial number and date of birth.

He almost lost control again when he heard dogs barking, snarling viciously, and hammering their paws relentlessly on the closed door.

Was it real dogs or a recording? Surely, they wouldn’t … Who ? By now he was too tired to think straight, forgetting why he was there, rapidly losing touch with reality, his mind expanding and contracting, his thoughts swirling in a pool of light and darkness in the hood’s stifling heat.

A recording , was the thought he clung to. Must not panic or break .

The door opened and snarling dogs rushed in, accompanied by the shouting of men.

The men appeared to be ordering the dogs back out. When the dogs were gone, the door closed again.

Silence.

Then somebody screamed: ‘Where are you based?’

It was like an electric bolt shooting through Martin’s body, making him twitch and groan. He started to tell them, wanted to tell them, and instead said: ‘I cannot answer that question.’

‘You’re a good boy,’ the civilized English voice said. ‘Too stubborn for your own good.’

This time, when they hoisted him back on to the chair, he was filled with a dread that made him forget everything except the need to keep his mouth shut and make no mistakes. No matter what they said, no matter what they did, he would not say a word.

‘What’s the name of your squadron commander?’ the bully bawled.

‘I cannot answer that question,’ Martin said, then methodically gave his name, rank, serial number and date of birth.

The silence that followed seemed to stretch out for ever, filling Martin with a dread that blotted out most of his past. Eventually the English-sounding voice said: ‘This is your last chance. Will you tell us more or not?’

Martin was halfway through reciting his routine when they whipped off the hood.

Light blinded him.

‘I still don’t think we should do it,’ Captain Dubois said, even as he hung his neatly folded OGs in his steel locker and started putting on civilian clothing. ‘It could land us in water so hot we’d come out like broiled chicken.’

‘We’re doing it,’ Lieutenant Cranfield replied, tightening the laces on his scuffed, black-leather shoes and oblivious to the fact that Captain Dubois was his superior officer, ‘I’m fed up being torn between Army Intelligence, MI6, the RUC and even the “green slime”,’ he said, this last being the Intelligence Corps. ‘If we come up with anything, as sure as hell one lot will approve, the other will disapprove, they’ll argue for months, and in the end not a damned thing will be done. Well, not this time. I’m going to take that bastard out by myself. As for MI5…’

Cranfield trailed off, too angry for words. After an uneasy silence, Captain Dubois said tentatively, ‘Just because Corporal Phillips committed suicide…’

‘Exactly. So to hell with MI5.’

Corporal Phillips had been one of the best of 14 Intelligence Company’s undercover agents, infiltrating the most dangerous republican ghettos of Belfast and collecting invaluable intelligence. A few weeks earlier he had handed over ten first-class sources of information to MI5 and within a week they had all been assassinated, one after the other, by the IRA.

Apart from the shocking loss of so many watchers, including Phillips, the assassinations had shown that MI5 had a leak in its system. That leak, as Cranfield easily discovered, was their own source, Shaun O’Halloran, who had always been viewed by 14 Intelligence Company as a hardline republican, therefore unreliable. Having ignored the advice of 14 Intelligence Company and used O’Halloran without its knowledge, MI5, instead of punishing him, had tried to save embarrassment by simply dropping him and trying to cover his tracks.

Cranfield, still shocked and outraged by the death of ten men, as well as the subsequent suicide of the conscience-stricken Phillips, was determined that their betrayer, O’Halloran, would not walk away scot-free.

‘A mistake is one thing,’ he said, placing his foot back on the floor and grabbing a grey civilian’s jacket from his locker, ‘but to believe that you can trust someone with O’Halloran’s track record is pure bloody stupidity.’

‘They weren’t to know that he was an active IRA member,’ Dubois said, studying himself in the mirror and seeing a drab civilian rather than the SAS officer he actually was. ‘They thought he was just another tout out to make a few bob.’

‘Right,’ Cranfield said contemptuously. ‘They thought . They should have bloody well checked.’

Though nervous about his famously short-fused SAS officer, Captain Dubois understood his frustration.

For the past year sharp divisions had been appearing between the two main non-military Intelligence agencies: MI6 (the secret intelligence service run by the Commonwealth and Foreign Office, never publicly acknowledged) and MI5, the Security Service openly charged with counter-espionage. The close-knit, almost tribal nature of the RUC, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, meant that its Special Branch was also running its own agents with little regard for Army needs or requirements. RUC Special Branch, meanwhile, was running its own, secret cross-border contacts with the Irish Republic’s Gardai Special Branch. Because of this complex web of mutually suspicious and secretive organizations, the few SAS men in the province, occupying key intelligence positions at the military HQ in Lisburn and elsewhere, were often exposed to internecine rivalries when trying to co-ordinate operations against the terrorists.

Even more frustrating was the pecking order. While SAS officers attempted to be the cement between mutually mistrustful allies, soldiers from other areas acted as Military Intelligence Officers (MIOs) or Field Intelligence NCOs (Fincos) in liaison with the RUC. Such men and women came from the Intelligence Corps, Royal Military Police, and many other sources. The link with each RUC police division was a Special Military Intelligence Unit containing MIOs, Fincos and Milos (Military Intelligence Liaison Officers). An MIO working as part of such a unit could find himself torn by conflicting responsibilities to the RUC, Army Intelligence and MI6.

That is what had happened to Phillips. Though formally a British Army ‘Finco’ answerable to Military Intelligence, he had been intimidated by members of the Security Service into routeing his information to his own superiors via MI5. In doing so he had innocently sealed his own fate, as well as the fate of his ten unfortunate informants.

No wonder Cranfield was livid.

Still, Dubois felt a little foolish. As an officer of the British Army serving with 14 Intelligence Company, he was Cranfield’s superior by both rank and position, yet Lieutenant Cranfield, one of a small number of SAS officers attached to the unit, ignored these fine distinctions and more or less did what he wanted. A flamboyant character, even by SAS standards, he had been in Northern Ireland only two months, yet already had garnered himself a reputation as a ‘big timer’, someone working out on the edge and possessed of extreme braggadocio, albeit with brilliant flair and matchless courage. While admiring him, for the latter qualities, Dubois was nervous about Cranfield’s cocksure attitude, which he felt would land him in trouble sooner or later.