Free The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville Page B

might get a few, like, but not a proper stock. Nobody’s prepared for it these days.”
     
     
Caffola sighed. “Aye, I suppose that’s a good thing, really.”
     
     
“Aye,” Toner said. “We can still get the bigger kids to fill some wheelie bins with bricks and stuff. Tom’s got a big bin full of bottles in the alley behind the bar. Some of the kids could steal that, maybe.”
     
     
“Sounds like a plan,” Caffola said. The adrenalin seemed to have sobered him. “Somebody better let McGinty know. Do you want to ring him?”
     
     
“All right,” Toner said, fishing a mobile from his jacket pocket.
     
     
Caffola turned to Fegan, rubbing his hands together, a smile lighting up his face in the growing darkness. “What about it, Gerry?” he asked. “You up for it?”
     
     
“I’ll hang about,” Fegan said. “See what happens.”
     
     
“Good man.” Caffola patted his shoulder.
     
     
Young men and older boys swelled the mob. Fegan knew the cops would hold back, hoping the drama would fizzle out. Most times it would, leaving nothing more than a blackened mess for the road sweepers to clean up in the morning. Not tonight, though. Fegan could feel it like thunder in the air. The atmosphere crackled with it.
     
     
He looked up at the sky. Things had developed too quickly to get a helicopter in the air. In the old days, the Brits would have scrambled two or three of them from their bases in Holywood or Lisburn, and would’ve had the area covered in minutes. They’d be out for the funeral tomorrow, hovering high above the crowds, but the sky stayed clear this evening.
     
     
A boy, red-haired and wiry, twelve at most, pulled a lump of burning wood from the mound. He half ran, half hopped six paces and hurled the blackened timber with every bit of his strength. It clattered to the ground, throwing up red sparks, midway between the smoldering mound and the waiting policemen. The other boys gave a triumphant cheer.
     
     
“For fuck’s sake,” Caffola said. “Hey!”
     
     
He waited a moment then shouted again. “Hey! You!”
     
     
The red-haired boy turned.
     
     
“Yeah, you,” Caffola called. “C’mere!”
     
     
The boy approached slowly.
     
     
“What are you at?” Caffola asked. “Are you stupid?”
     
     
“No,” the boy said.
     
     
“Well, for fuck’s sake quit acting like it. Cover your face with something so the cameras don’t get you.”
     
     
“Okay,” the boy said. He pulled a wrinkled handkerchief from his pocket and returned to his comrades at the burning mound, tying the square of soiled material into a mask over his nose and mouth.
     
     
“Kids know nothing these days.” Caffola shook his head. “When we were kids we’d have had this place wrecked by now. Petrol bombs, concrete slabs, catapults with ball-bearings.” He grinned and pointed down the street to the Land Rovers. “And them cunts, they’d have been firing plastic bullets at us. Changed times, Gerry.”
     
     
“Yeah,” Fegan said. “Changed times.”
     
     
These streets had seen more riots than just about anywhere in the world. From the civil rights protests of the late Sixties, when Fegan was too small to know what it meant, to the groundswell of anger at internment in the early Seventies, when young men were imprisoned without trial. Journalists gave kids five-pound notes to throw stones and bottles at the Brits, hoping to set off another battle for the cameras. Then the anguish of the hunger strikes in the early Eighties when ten men starved themselves to death in the Maze, fanning the embers on the streets. No payment was needed then; rage seethed in the city, and anything could ignite the flames. Mob violence, children as weapons: those were the tactics of the time. A photograph of a bleeding child, no matter how they got injured, packed more power than a dozen bombs. Political animals like Paul McGinty learned that early on and acted accordingly. Fegan had seen it so