Free Solo (Aka the Cretan Lover) (v5) by Jack Higgins Page A

also. A day that was to go down in the history of the war in Ulster as Bloody Friday.
    The first bomb exploded at two-ten p.m. at Smithfield Bus Station, the last at three-fifteen at the Cavehill Road Shopping Centre.
    Twenty-two bombs in all, in locations scattered all over the city, usually where people might be expected to be present in large numbers. Protestant or Catholic, it made no difference. By the end of the day nine people were dead and a hundred and thirty injured.
    At midnight, the army was still out in force. No less than twelve of the bombs which had exploded that day were in the New Lodge Road area which was the responsibility of 40 Commando, Royal Marines.
    In a side street littered with glass and rubble, off the New Lodge Road itself, a dozen marines crouched against a wall opposite what had once been Cohan's Select Bar, which was burning fiercely. Two officers stood casually in the middle of the street surveying the scene. One was a Marine lieutenant. The other wore a paratrooper's red beret and a camouflage uniform, open at the neck, no badges of rank in evidence and no flak jacket.
    He had the dark, ravaged face of a man who had got to know the world he inhabited too well and now only had contempt for it. A small, dark man with good shoulders, full of a restless vitality which was somehow accentuated by the bamboo swagger stick he tapped against his right knee.
    'Who's the para?' one marine whispered to another.
    'Runs Special Section at Staff - Colonel Morgan. A right bastard, so I've heard,' the man next to him replied.
    On the flat roof of a block of flats seventy-five yards away, two men crouched by the parapet. One of them was Liam O'Hagan, at that time chief intelligence officer for the Provisional IRA in Ulster. He was examining the scene outside Cohan's Bar with the aid of a pair of Zeiss night glasses.
    The young man at his side carried a conventional .303 Lee Enfield rifle of the type much favoured by both British Army and IRA snipers. It had an infrared image intensifier fitted to it so that he could search out a target in the dark.
    He squinted through it now as he leaned the barrel on the parapet. 'I'll take the bloody paratrooper, first.'
    'No you won't,' O'Hagan told him softly.
    'And why not?'
    'Because I say so.'
    A Land-Rover swept round the corner below, followed by another very close behind. They had been stripped to the bare essentials so that the driver, and three soldiers who crouched in the rear of each vehicle behind him, were completely exposed. They were paratroopers, efficient, tough-looking young men in red berets and flak jackets, their Sterling submachine-guns ready for instant action.
    'Would you look at that now. Just asking to be chopped down, the dumb bastards. You'll not be telling me I can't have a crack at one of them?'
    'It would be your last,' O'Hagan told him. 'They know exactly what they're doing. They perfected that open display technique in Aden. The crew of each vehicle looks after the other. Without armour plating to get in the way they can return fire instantly.'
    'Bloody SS,' the boy said.
    O'Hagan chuckled. 'A hell of a thing to say to a man who once held the King's commission.'
    Down below, Asa Morgan climbed in beside the driver of the first Land-Rover and the two vehicles moved away.
    The Marine lieutenant gave an order and the section stood up and moved out. The street was silent now, only the flames still burning fiercely in Cohan's Bar, the occasional explosion of a bottle inside as the heat got to it.
    'Mother of God, what a waste of good whiskey,' Liam O'Hagan said. 'Ah, well, the day will come, or so my Socialist Democratic comrades tell me, when not only will Ireland be free and united again, but with whiskey on tap like water in every decent man's house.'
    He grinned and slapped the boy on the shoulder. 'And now, Seumas, my boy, I think we should get the hell out of here.'
    Morgan stood by the desk in the OC's office at the Grand Central Hotel in