The Marching Season
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The Marching Season by Daniel Silva, 1960– Published: 1999 J J J J J I I I I I Table of Contents Dedication Foreword & JANUARY Chapter 1 … thru … Chapter 13 FEBRUARY Chapter 14 … thru … Chapter 28 MARCH Chapter 29 … thru … Chapter 43 APRIL Chapter 44 … Epilogue Acknowledgements J J J J J I I I I I For Ion Trewin, for friendship and faith, and as always, for my wife, Jamie, and my children, Lily and Nicholas Foreword The current period of violence in Northern Ireland, known as “ the Troubles ,” erupted in August 1969. Broadly speaking it is a conflict between Republicans, who are predominantly Catholic and who want the North to unite with the Irish Republic, and Unionists, or Loyalists, who are predominantly Protestant and want to maintain the union between Ulster and the United Kingdom. Each side has produced a veritable alphabet soup of paramilitary groups and terrorist organizations. The most famous, of course, is the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the IRA. It has carried out hundreds of assassinations and thousands of bombings in Northern Ireland and on the British mainland. In 1984 it nearly succeeded in blowing up Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her government at a hotel in Brighton, England. In 1991 it fired a mortar into Downing Street, the seat of British power. The Loyalists have their gunmen and bombers too—the UVF, the UDA, and the UFF, just to name a few—and they too have carried out appalling acts of terrorism. In fact, of the 3,500 people killed since the Troubles began, most have been Catholics. But the violence did not begin in 1969. Catholics and Protestants have been killing each other in the north of Ireland for centuries, not decades. Historical markers can be difficult to fix, but Protestants regard 1690 as the beginning of their ascendancy in the north. It was then that William of Orange defeated King James II, a Roman Catholic, at the Battle of the Boyne. To this day Protestants celebrate William’s victory over the Catholics with a series of noisy and sometimes confrontational parades. In Northern Ireland this time is known as “the marching season.” On May 22, 1998, the people of Northern Ireland voted to accept the Good Friday peace accords, which call for power sharing between Catholics and Protestants. But memories are long in Ulster, and neither side has been willing to declare that the civil war is truly over. Indeed, the period since the election has seen several acts of heinous terrorism, including the bombing of Omagh, which killed twenty-eight people—the bloodiest single act of terror in the history of the Troubles—and the arson fire in Ballymoney in which three Catholic children burned to death. Clearly, there are men of violence on both sides of Northern Ireland’s sectarian divide—Catholic and Protestant, Republican and Unionist— who cannot forget and are not prepared to forgive. Some of those men are actively plotting to destroy the peace agreement. It might happen something like this… _______________________________________ JANUARY Chapter 1 BELFAST * DUBLIN * LONDON Eamonn Dillon of Sinn Fein was the first to die, and he died because he planned to stop for a pint of lager at the Celtic Bar before heading up the Falls Road to a meeting in Andersontown. Twenty minutes before Dillon’s death, a short distance to the east, his killer hurried along the pavements of Belfast city center through a cold rain. He wore a dark green oilskin coat with a brown corduroy collar. His code name was Black Sheep. The air smelled of the sea and faintly of the rusting shipyards of Belfast Lough. It was just after 4 P.M. but already dark. Night falls early on a winter’s night in Belfast; morning dawns slowly. The city center was bathed in yellow sodium light, but Black Sheep knew that West Belfast, his destination, would feel like the wartime blackout. He continued north up Great Victoria Street, past the curious fusion of old and new that makes up the face of central Belfast—the constant reminders that these few blocks have been bombed and rebuilt countless times. He passed the shining facade of the Europa, infamous for being the most bombed hotel on the planet. He passed the new opera house and wondered why anyone in Belfast would want to listen to the music of someone else’s tragedy. He passed a hideous American doughnut shop filled with laughing Protestant schoolchildren in crested blazers. I do this for you, he told himself. I do this so you won’t have to live in an Ulster dominated by the fucking Catholics. The larger buildings of the city center receded, and the pavements slowly emptied of other pedestrians until he was quite alone. He walked for about a quarter mile and crossed over the Ml motorway near the towering Divis Flats. The overpass was scrawled with graffiti: VOTE SINN FEIN; BRITISH TROOPS OUT OF northern IRELAND; RELEASE ALL POWS. Even if Black Sheep had known nothing of the city’s complex sectarian geography, which was certainly not the case, the signs were impossible to miss. He had just crossed the frontier into enemy territory—Catholic West Belfast. The Falls spreads west like a fan, narrow at its mouth near the city center, broad to the west, beneath the shadow of Black Mountain. The Falls Road—simply “the road” in the lexicon of Catholic West Belfast—cuts through the neighborhood like a river, with tributaries leading into the thickets of terraced houses where British soldiers and Roman Catholics have engaged in urban guerrilla warfare for three decades. The commercial center of the Falls is the intersection of the Springfield Road and the Grosvenor Road. There are markets, clothing shops, hardware stores, and pubs. Taxis filled with passengers shuttle up and down the street. It looks much like any other working-class neighborhood in a British city, except the doorways are encased in black steel cages and the taxis never stray from the Falls Road because of Protestant killer squads. The dilapidated white terraces of the Ballymurphy housing estate dominate the western edge of the Falls. Ballymurphy is the ideological heartland of West Belfast, and over the years it has supplied a steady stream of recruits to the IRA. Bellicose murals stare over the Whiterock Road toward the rolling green hills of the city cemetery, where many of Ballymurphy’s men are buried beneath simple headstones. To the north, across the Springfield Road, a giant army barracks and police station stands like a besieged fortress in enemy territory, which indeed it is. Strangers aren’t welcome in the Murph, even Catholic strangers. British soldiers don’t set foot there without their giant armored personnel carriers called saracens—”pigs” to the people of Ballymurphy. Black Sheep had no intention of going anywhere near Ballymurphy. His destination was farther to the east—the headquarters of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, located at No. 51-55 Falls Road. As he moved deeper into the Falls, the spires of St. Peter’s Cathedral rose to his left. A trio of British soldiers drifted across the ugly asphalt square in front of the cathedral, now pausing to peer through the infrared sights of their rifles, now spinning on their heels to see if anyone was following them. Don’t speak to them , his handlers had told him. Don’t even look at them. If you look at them, they’ll know you’re an outsider . Black Sheep kept his hands in his pockets and his gaze on the pavement in front of him. He turned into Dunville Park and sat down on a bench. Despite the rain, schoolboys played football in the weak light of the streetlamps. A group of women—mothers and older sisters, by the look of them—watched carefully from the imaginary sidelines. A pair of British soldiers strode through the middle of the game, but the boys played around them as though they were invisible. Black Sheep reached in his coat pocket and withdrew his cigarettes, a ten-pack of Benson & Hedges, perfect for the perpetually tight budgets of working-class West Belfast. He lit one and returned the cigarettes to his pocket. His hand brushed against the butt of a Walther automatic. From his vantage point on the bench the man could see the Falls Road perfectly: Sinn Fein headquarters, where the target worked each day; the Celtic Bar, where he drank in the late afternoon. Dillon’s speaking to a community meeting in Andersontown at five o’clock , Black Sheep’s handlers had told him. That means he’s on a tight schedule. He’ll leave headquarters at four-thirty and walk over to the Celtic for a quick one. The door of Sinn Fein headquarters swung open. For an instant the interior lights spilled onto the rainy pavement. Black Sheep spotted his target, Eamonn Dillon, the third-ranking officer of Sinn Fein, behind only Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, and a member of the negotiating team for the peace talks. And a dedicated family man as well, with a wife and two sons, Black Sheep thought. He pushed the image from his mind. No time for that now. One bodyguard accompanied Dillon. The door closed again, and the two men moved west along the Falls Road. Black Sheep tossed his cigarette onto the ground and walked across the park. He climbed a short set of steps and stood at the intersection of the Falls Road and the Grosvenor Road. He pressed the button for the crossing and calmly waited for the light to turn from red to green.