Badlands

 

 

For Peter Corbin, South Armagh held a vague, comforting familiarity, like a childhood holiday haunt. After the summer smog of London, these gentle drumlin hills were something of an idyll, with the shimmering purity of the July heat haze, unspoilt, verdant pastures, and cattle shading peacefully under copses.

 

​Yet, as with everything else in this bitter land, the artlessness was cruel deception. This was the terrorist's domain, a hostile environment that had embedded people with murder in their genes. Sure, the overt menace had gone with the peace process - there were no roadblocks or barricades, no snipers or bombers – but this was still the Badlands. Corbin was well aware that sectarian activity ran on as usual, with its paramilitary training, gun-running and punishment shootings. If they had known who he was, his life would have been worthless.

 

​This whole stretch of the B30 had been resurfaced recently, completely obscuring the road repairs made after the bombing. But there was no missing the spot. It was marked by a marble monument grand enough to grace a city centre. Carved with angels, cherubs and the names of eleven dead, it screamed a grief too big to be named.

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Corbin drove on for some fifty metres, left his hire car on the verge and walked back. Close to, he could see that this was no twice-dead, neglected memorial. Brightened by an array of freshly-cut flowers, it was as highly polished and important as the day it had been erected. He stood for a brief moment, head bowed in thought. He uttered no prayer. This communion was too personal for hollow words. The false God of these dead had failed them as badly as had secular justice, and he held truck with neither. ​

 

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He added his own tribute - a single yellow rose and a freshly-pressed cloth badge with winged dagger - and then he turned away to continue his annual pilgrimage into the past.

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Old instinct, he by-passed the gate that might expose him to a watcher and forced his way through the hedgerow. The fields in these parts were tiny, barely large enough for a cow to turn in. Consequence of the Gaelic tradition of splitting land between the whole family. The whole landscape was a maze of interlocking hedges - perfect for unobserved movement, equally perfect for ambush. A real Badland.

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Following hedgelines, he continued his secret foray of guilt and regret, one that he kept quiet even from his closest friends. He made his way up the hill, cresting the ridge so that he could look down on the isolated farmhouse in the valley bottom beyond. It was a sight that plunged him from the warm sunlight of now to the cold mist of then.

 

There were four of them, Corbin and the rest of his squad, staking out the farmhouse where an IRA Command meet was due the next day. In typical SAS fashion, they had arrived after dusk, establishing individual lying up points, spaced out over the hilltop in such a way that they could change places under reasonable cover. It wasn't the best of lay-ups. Given the nature of the terrain, they were separated by barely penetrable thickets, and the weather conditions were vile, low cloud and drizzle. The LUP was just below the cloud-line when they set up, but mist was soon drifting around them.

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When he first saw the terrorists, Corbin assumed that it was an infiltration from the South, He clocked each man, faces passing through his Barr & Stroud IR18 like a slow film in negative, and braced himself as they passed within inches of trampling over him. He heard rather than saw them stop and slowly, carefully, he shifted position to regain visual contact. They were thirty metres away and clearly settling in for the night. Dickers setting up an OP for the B30 below.

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​Corbin knew that he should take them out there and then. In military terms, eliminating a unit as dangerously active as this was the right and obvious thing to do. But, in the political climate of the time, it was an action he couldn't undertake without orders. Freelancing, they would have called it.

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Using burst transmission, he contacted Hereford. There was a forty minute delay while his contact consulted London before the coded answer came back: 'Hands off. CTR takes preference.'

 

CTR takes preference! Close Target Recce over squaddie lives!

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He should have expected it. Political cowardice had reduced the world's finest killing machine to an intelligence gathering unit. Night after night they lay in their hides, watching IRA active service units moving freely around areas they had made safe for themselves by intimidation and murder. Given a free hand Corbin could have finished this phoney war within weeks.

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He swallowed his blood, warned his team and shifted his orientation so as to keep a careful eye on the terrorists. Night mist turned to dawn fog and he lost visual contact, though he could still hear them talking and shuffling against the cold.

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Around 8.15 he heard the unmistakable sound of the S55s on the road below. A brief, excited buzz came from the terrorists and suddenly Corbin knew. These guys were not here for mere observation. They were the trigger end of a bomb command wire, the other end connecting to an improvised explosive device, maybe 600lb of explosives placed in a culvert beneath the road below. They had been waiting for their target, an early morning army patrol, and intended detonating the bomb from their safe distance. He pictured the Greenjackets inside their armoured car, kids mostly, half-asleep, unaware, no presentiment of the horrible death just seconds away. Corbin had no reason to expect a live IRA operation in such close proximity to a command meet, but that was no excuse for being unready. This kind of fuck-up was always a possibility given the IRA's discrete cell structure.

 

He keyed his radio to prime his colleagues then stopped himself. His mind worked furiously. He had been ordered 'hands-off'. But, orders or no, he could not let this happen. He would say nothing over the net, just take immediate action. He could trust his team to be ready to support him. Later, he would blag the action as reactive. He rose to his knees and set the selector on his MP5 for three round bursts.

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Too late. There was a deep, underground roar followed by a deluge of debris clattering onto armour, metalled road and trees. There followed a hallucinogenic moment, then three men loomed in the fog. They were shouting, whooping, high on adrenaline. Corbin shot the nearest two, catching them with bursts of his MP5, but the third fired off two wild shots with a Browning and escaped into the fog.

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Corbin could have pursued him, run him down and killed him, but this was no place for a hot-headed Brit to be charging around. He gathered up his team and moved off towards the site of the explosion.

 

Normally, after a fire fight, exfiltration from this violent and extremely hostile area would have been a real problem. The IRA would have been scouring the countryside for them. But not this time. British Army Rapid Reaction units would soon saturate the area. It was just a question of sitting tight. The real fear for the patrol, as they crept down the hill to assess the status of the Greenjackets, was being shot by friendly fire.

 

The crater was huge but the crashed Shorland was intact. Greenjackets littered ditch and hedgerow like refugees from a stroke colony, faces red and sick-grey white, but what could you expect after being bombed in a tin can? All seemed to be intact and, for a moment, Corbin thought there were no casualties.

 

Then he saw the bus. Hurled from the road it had broken in two, each piece standing eerie and desolate in the fog-shrouded hedge. And the school children. Innocence ripped away. Young bodies disfigured beyond recognition with shrapnel, mutilated and dismembered by some pitiless, clumsy and undifferentiating Power.

 

And it was all his fault! Years of training had honed his instinct so why had he ignored it?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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