Alan Judd - A Breed of Heroes

Charles then followed the CO out into the garden where a tunnel had been discovered, starting with a manhole cover near the wall of the house and ending in the bank of a ditch near the bottom of the garden. The man of the house said that it was the drains and that there was nothing in it except rats.

‘We’ll see for ourselves,’ said the CO. He looked around. ‘Who’s going down? Any volunteers? Somebody small.’ Charles drew himself up to his full height and could see others doing the same. ‘Nigel, you’re a little chap. You’ll do.’

Nigel Beale never liked to be reminded of his height, but he always liked to feel useful. He was clearly torn now between pleasure and humiliation. The manhole cover was pushed to one side, showing the hole to be deep, dark and stinking. Nigel began taking off his webbing while everyone else looked on with relieved curiosity — except for the CO, who said, ‘Come on, you’re not doing a striptease. Get it off.’

Charles held Nigel’s webbing and equipment, thereby, he hoped, giving the CO an impression of willing participation whilst making it slightly less likely that he would be the one sent to follow Nigel, if anyone was. It had begun to rain again. Nigel handed over his kit with an air of puzzled martyrdom and lowered himself gently into the hole. A renewed stench wafted up. ‘Don’t be too long down there,’ said the CO. ‘We’ve got a lot of work to do. And watch out for booby-traps.’

Nigel’s anxious face popped up again. ‘Anyone got a torch?’ A torch was handed to him. ‘It’s very low, sir. I’ll have to go on my belly to get along it.’

‘Well, don’t sit there talking about it. Do it.’

They saw Nigel huddle up at the bottom and then disappear head first in the direction of the ditch. There was a lot of grunting and squeezing as though he were being dragged by a rope. His lower legs and boots were still visible when there was a muffled shout and a young rat ran along his calf, jumped up out of the hole and made for the next-door garden. It was ineffectually chased by the RSM, who aimed several clumsy kicks at it and tried to hit it with his truncheon. When Nigel’s boots had vanished the watchers went to the ditch to see him come out. All they saw was two more rats, one a very large one, before Nigel clambered from the manhole he had entered. He was red-faced and puffed and covered in sludge. ‘Couldn’t get right down, sir,’ he said. ‘It gets narrower as it goes on. Thought I’d got stuck, actually.’

‘Did you find anything?’

‘No, sir, it’s clean.’ Everyone laughed, except Nigel and the CO.

‘Pity. Well done, anyway. At least you frightened the rats. Good effort.’

The CO went back into the house and Nigel began brushing himself down briskly, with little result. ‘Bloody filthy down there, you know. Really gungy. There’d better be some hot water when we get back.’

Charles handed him his kit, his pistol and his beret at arm’s length. ‘D’you think you’ll be able to clean yourself before you get back into the Land-Rover?’

Nigel pulled at some sludge that was clinging to his hair. ‘Doubt it. Don’t s’pose these bastards’ll let me use their water, if they have any. They must’ve been chuffed to blazes when they saw me go down there. Anyway, if I have to put up with that I don’t see why the rest of you buggers shouldn’t put up with me in the Land-Rover.’ He bent forward and shook himself, holding his collar back. ‘At least we know there’s nothing down there.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, that’s something, isn’t it?’

‘Did you think there would be?’

‘You never know. It’s as good a place as any. There still might be, of course, in the narrow bit. But the only way to search that is to tie a rope to one of their kids and use him as a pull-through.’

The search of the house was fruitless and they moved on to a local school, where the largest search operation was still going on. A disgruntled mob was gathered outside and there was sporadic stone-throwing which worsened while they waited for the search teams to finish. The mob grew larger and the stoning became suddenly and persistently worse, obviously a result of organisation. One soldier had his face opened up from the mouth to the ear and snatch squads were deployed. They caught two boys in their teens and brought them back behind the barricade of Pigs and Land-Rovers. One of them came from the group that had stoned the soldier and Charles saw a knee go into the boy’s groin as he was pushed into the Pig. His head came forward on to a convenient elbow and he was bundled inside. Like most arrested rioters they did not seriously struggle once arrested. They seemed overawed by the very semblance of organisation. Henry and his ambulance Pig were called to treat the injured soldier.

One rubber bullet was fired and, although the stoning continued, the crowd was kept at too great a distance to be a serious menace. They turned then to building a barricade of cars across the road out, rocking them from side to side and then turning them over. Most were old wrecks anyway but one or two were probably stolen. By this time a number of the press had arrived and hovered uncertainly between the Army and the mob, before making hurriedly for the Army as the stone barrage worsened. Charles was always surprised at the speed with which a relatively minor disturbance could become a dangerous confrontation. It needed no more than a drop of bitterness, mixed with the odd injury or two, to turn the whole thing. Charles resumed one or two acquaintances of the previous night and learned from them that trouble was breaking out throughout Belfast. There were Republican demonstrations against the shootings and Loyalist demonstrations in support of them. Londonderry was quiet and somebody pointed out that the two cities were never aflame together. The arrival of the TV men seemed once again to constitute an important part of the ritual without which no riot seemed real. The press symbolised both crowd and referee at a football match but it was a match in which the referee’s decisions were long delayed, and in which one side was able to conduct itself with regard to them alone while the other was hampered also by a set of rules known to all but applied to itself. Once the cameras were in place the game could begin in earnest.

However, it was not to be. The search teams in the school finished, with nothing found, and the CO decided to pull out. ‘You can tell your press friends we’re going home now,’ he said to Charles. ‘We’re going to walk right through their barricades, and first thing tomorrow morning when there are no press around and all these buggers are in bed I’m going to get Scoopy-do down here and dump all these old cars slap bang across their front doors. If they want to build barricades in my patch they’d better understand they’re going to get their own back. So you can tell the press it’s all over bar the shouting for tonight, once we’ve pushed that lot to one side. These people aren’t going to cause more trouble in case we search the whole area. I’m certain the bloody stuff’s here somewhere though, absolutely certain. Still, it’ll wait.’

The barricades, which were still being built, were to be taken simply by driving the Pigs through them. This pleased the press because it would be dramatic, pictorial and, above all, quick — there were other, potentially more interesting incidents in other parts of the city. The search teams were still clearing up and the Pigs were revving their engines in hungry anticipation when Van Horne told Charles that he was wanted.

‘By whom?’

‘Dunno, sir, but they’ve been calling for you for about five minutes now.’

‘Where?’

‘Out there.’ Van Horne pointed down the street at the mob.