Remote Control Read Free

into his pockets.
    Everything was closing in. I felt like a boxer – I could hear the crowd, I was listening to my seconds and the referee, I was listening for the bell, but mostly I was focused on the boy I was fighting. Nothing else mattered. Nothing. The only important people in the world were me and Bravo One.
    Through my earpiece I could hear Euan working like a man possessed, trying to get on top of the other two terrorists.
    Kev and Slack Pat were still backing me; the other two boys in our team were with Euan. They’d all still be satelliting, listening on the net so as to be out of sight of the targets, but always close enough to back us if we got in the shit.
    Euan closed in on Bravo Two and Echo One. They were coming in our direction. Everybody knew where they were, everybody would keep out of the way so they had a clear run in.
    I recognized them as soon as they turned the corner.
    Bravo Two was Daniel Martin McCann. Unlike Savage, who was well educated and an expert bomb-maker, ‘Mad Danny’ was a butcher by trade and a butcher by nature. He’d been expelled from the movement by Gerry Adams in 1985 for threatening to initiate a campaign of murder that would have hampered the new political strategy. It was a bit like being kicked out of the Gestapo for cruelty. But McCann had supporters and soon got himself reinstated. Married with two children, he had twenty-six killings linked to his name. Ulster Loyalists had tried to slot him once, but failed. They should have tried harder.
    Echo One was Mairead Farrell. Middle-class and an ex-convent schoolgirl, she was at thirty-one one of the highest-ranking women in the IRA. See her picture and you’d think, aah, an angel. But she’d served ten years for planting a bomb in Belfast and reported back for duty as soon as she’d been released. Things hadn’t gone her way; a few months earlier her lover had accidentally blown himself up. As Simmonds had said at the briefing, that made her one very pissed-off Echo One.
    I knew them both well; Euan and I had been working against them for years. I got on the net and confirmed the ID.
    Everybody was in place. Alpha would be in the control room with the senior policeman, people from the Foreign Office, people from the Home Office, you name it, every man and his dog would be there, everybody wanting to put their tuppence-worth in, everybody with their own concerns. We could only hope that Simmonds would be looking after ours. I’d only met the Secret Intelligence Service desk officer for Northern Ireland a couple of days earlier, but he certainly seemed to be running our side of the show. His voice had the sort of confidence that was shaped on the playing fields of Eton, and he measured his words slowly, like a big-time attorney with the meter running.
    We wanted the decision made now. But I knew there would be big debates going on in the ops room; you’d probably have to cut your way through the cigarette smoke with a knife. Our liaison officer would be listening to us on his radio and explaining everything that we were doing, confirming that the team was in position. At crunch time, it was the police, not us, who’d decide that we went in. Once it was handed over to the military, Kev would control the team.
    The frustration was outrageous. I just wanted to get this over.
    By now Farrell was leaning against the driver’s door, the two men standing and facing her. If I hadn’t known differently I’d have said they were trying to chat her up. I couldn’t hear what they were saying but their faces showed no sign of stress and now and then I could hear laughter above the traffic noise. Savage even got out a packet of mints and passed them round.
    I was still giving a running commentary when Alpha came back on the net. ‘Hello all call signs, all call signs, I have control, I have control. Golf, acknowledge.’
    Kev acknowledged. The police had handed over; it was Kev’s show now.
    The targets started to move away from