Peeler (41 page)

O’Keefe shouted again. ‘You can keep them out of here, can’t you?’

In the room to the left of the front door, Finch raised the Enfield and followed shadows down its sights. He fired once and his shot was returned by a fusillade.

‘I’ve kept whole companies of Boche out of my trench. I’ll keep these fuckers out.’

Daly came up the back stairs holding an Enfield and crate of ammunition. ‘I’ll head upstairs and see what I can pick off from the DI’s front window. We have to fire from the upstairs loopholes. We can’t even see them otherwise. Here, you and Finch lay down covering fire.’ He took another Enfield from a constable on the stairs and handed it to O’Keefe.

O’Keefe shouted instructions to Finch and raised the Enfield, keeping his body behind the wall. He fired as fast as he could, slamming back the bolt on the rifle, his rate of fire slower than it had been during the war, but steady, driven by fear. He got off five rounds to Finch’s six, Finch raising his Webley to fire twice more when his Enfield emptied.

Daly made it to the stairway, his boots skipping steps, Volunteer bullets thwacking into the stairs and the banister. O’Keefe knew that Jim was right: they had to get men into higher firing positions or they would never hold the barracks. He turned to the two constables with him beneath the stairs, each with three Enfields in their arms.

‘You lads will have to make it upstairs and fire from there. Can you do it?’

They looked pale and young, but both nodded. It was the closest they would ever get to going over the top of a trench, thought O’Keefe. He fired off the final five rounds in his Enfield and then pressed a fresh charger clip into its magazine. He shouted down the hall to Finch. The chatter of the Lewis gun started up from the roof and O’Keefe thought he could make out the red phosphorous glow of the distress flares in the night sky. Now was as good a time as ever.

‘Go!’

Six quick rounds, Finch’s six on top and the stuttering machine-gun from above. The first young constable made it to the stairs and mounted them. One round popped in response. The second – Dawson from County Down – took the corner to the stairs too quickly, his feet slipping out from under him, the floor slick with Morris’ blood. The three rifles he was holding clattered to the ground. O’Keefe reloaded and was aware of the silence of Finch’s gun. When he raised his rifle again to fire down the hallway, he saw Dawson get up, bending to gather up the rifles. A bullet struck his head and he dropped. His leg slid out from under him, as if he was trying to find a comfortable position on the floor to rest.

O’Keefe wrenched back the bolt of his carbine and fired in rage, again and again, until the magazine was empty. He handed the gun to another young constable beside him – nineteen-year-old Joseph Moran from Drogheda – shoving the box of .303 cartridges closer to him with his boot. ‘Take this and keep firing. Anyone comes through that hole in the front, kill him.’

Moran swallowed, nodded. ‘Yes, Sergeant.’

O’Keefe slapped him on the arm as he passed, then headed down the stairs, removing the Colt automatic he’d retrieved at Burleigh House from its holster under his arm.

The lower ground floor of the barracks was strangely quiet, though above O’Keefe the floorboards sounded with thumping boots and the crack of rifle fire. Then, what sounded like a ball-bearing rolling and spinning across the boards above and sudden, panicked, roared warnings of ‘Grenade!’ The blast was a muffled
whump
.

O’Keefe made his way to the cells, opening the main door and pulling the keys from the ring inside. Whoever had been on watch had abandoned his post, leaving three scared men in their cells. Hearing the keys jingle as O’Keefe took them from the ring, Constable Keane shouted, ‘Get us out of here, for the sake of Christ!’

He opened Keane’s cell first. The young man had dark circles under his eyes and his nose was broken. He looked as if he had aged ten years in the past week.

‘You’re to mind Daniel Hooey. Get him up the stairs and out the back of the barracks. We’ll put him and Connors in the sheds where it should be safe, right?’

Keane nodded. Moving quickly, O’Keefe unlocked Daniel Hooey’s cell. The prisoner lay curled in a ball on his bunk, knees pulled to his chest, muttering something unintelligible, repeating it over and over. O’Keefe thought it was something to do with his mother but didn’t bother asking, pulling him up by the arms and shoving him out the cell door. ‘Go,’ he said to Keane. ‘Get him outside.’

Seamus Connors was standing when O’Keefe unlocked his cell door. He was smiling, but O’Keefe could sense the pain beneath the smile. Unlike Keane, he bore no outward signs of a beating. O’Keefe wondered what Mathew-Pare and his men had done to him.

He pointed the Colt at Connors and instructed, ‘Come with me. Now.’

‘The boys’ve come to collect me, Sergeant.’

‘If you want to live, Connors, you’ll do as I tell you.’

‘Live to die a different day, Sergeant?’

‘Just move, Connors. Hanging’s better than burning alive.’

Connors stepped out of the cell then stopped, his gaze locking on something over O’Keefe’s shoulder. O’Keefe felt the presence and turned.

In the hallway outside the cells, Starkson was raising a pistol. A German Luger, O’Keefe noticed. Better than the Webley, so it was said during the war. Amazing, he thought, how the mind keeps working
.
Even when you’re about to die.

Starkson aimed the Luger at O’Keefe’s chest. O’Keefe watched the killer’s knuckle whiten as he started to pull the trigger.

Another grenade came in through the gaping front of the barracks. It skipped down the front hallway like a flat stone on water, past Finch and between the legs of Constable Moran. It hit the wall behind Moran and bounced once, twice, down the lower ground-floor stairs, sounding, for all the world, as if a child had dropped a toy. Moran shouted and covered his head with his arms. ‘Grenade!’

And then Starkson was gone. The blast from the grenade took his legs first, shattering bones and piercing his body with hundreds of tiny pieces of shrapnel. O’Keefe and Connors were knocked back by the blast, but were shielded from the brunt of it by the heavy open door of the cell. There was a deafening ringing in O’Keefe’s ears and plaster dust coated his eyes, nose and mouth. He spat on his hand and rubbed his eyes to clear them. Connors appeared to be struggling to regain his breath, his mouth gaping open as he tried to raise himself to his feet.

O’Keefe stood first, searching the floor for the Colt. Finding it, he said to Connors, ‘Get up.’

Upstairs, Finch had decided that if the Volunteers sussed the timed fuses on the grenades, they would take the barracks. Until now they hadn’t, sending the grenades sliding into the front hallway as soon as they’d pulled the pins, giving the cons time to pick them up and throw them back out. He had seen one of the young Irish lads put his foot to a rolling grenade and kick it back down the hallway and out of the barracks. Like to have that lad as a centre-half, Finch thought, and fired again.

O’Keefe made it to the top of the stairs with Connors in front of him. He had to manoeuvre around Constable Moran, who was firing as if he’d been doing it all his life. Brass shells from his Enfield clinked down the stairs in brassy, spinning arcs.

Reaching the barracks’ rear door, O’Keefe pulled it open, giving Connors a hard shove into the dark stable yard and following him out.

He was closer to Connors than he should have been, in his rush to get out of the barracks. Panic was edging at his consciousness, making his movements jerky, rash, instinctive. His ears rang and his eyes burned and watered. The notion came to him too late:
I should have put the bracelets on him
. Connors’ elbow suddenly hit O’Keefe high in the stomach, knocking the breath from his lungs, sending him tumbling back through the doorway into the barracks, directly into the line of fire at the back of the main hallway.

Connors turned and ran, making it to the steel security gate. He lifted up the steel catch. He was shouting before he had the gate open.

‘Come on, boys, take the place! In through here!’

Eakins had been packing the Ford when he heard the shouting. He recognised the voice and followed it across the stable yard – the sound of his footsteps on the cobbles lost amidst the gunfire and shouting.

He shot Seamus Connors point blank in the back of the head. Then he closed and latched the gate again and went back to his packing. The Ford was nearly loaded and they would be leaving soon. He noticed that the barracks had begun to burn in earnest now. He stood in the cottage doorway and lit a cigarette. Not his problem. The barracks could burn and every man in it. His work was done.

***

Rough hands pulled at O’Keefe’s jacket, dragging him into the cover of the back stairs. Rounds slapped the skirting boards and plaster where he’d been lying.

‘You all right, Sergeant?’ Moran was smiling, his eyes alight. When O’Keefe nodded, his breath returning, Moran stood and fired again. Moran hadn’t fought in the war – he’d been too young, O’Keefe knew – but he was born to fight. Some men were.

O’Keefe stood up and searched the ground for the Colt. Not finding it, he squeezed back down the stairs and returned with another rifle, a box of .303 cartridges and a crate of grenades. He dumped half the ammunition and set six grenades at Moran’s feet.

‘Don’t spend it all in one place.’

Moran smiled and squeezed off a shot. ‘Not a bother, Sergeant.’

The smell of smoke was stronger as O’Keefe peered out over Moran’s shoulder. He could see flames licking up the paint of the front stairs and imagined he could feel the heat of the fire.

‘We have to evacuate. This place is going to go up.’

‘I’m not fucking leaving ’til those bastards leave first.’

‘You’ll go if you’re ordered, Moran.’

The young con fired and drew back the bolt, sending a spent shell spinning at O’Keefe’s chest. ‘Yes, Sergeant.’

O’Keefe went out into the barracks yard. It was relatively quiet, Connors nowhere to be seen. Two Tans had pushed the DI’s Daimler up to the wall and had taken sandbags from the guard hut at the gate to make a machine-gun post on the hard top of the car. They fired short bursts of repelling fire and appeared to be doing a good job of holding back any attack from the rear of the barracks. Two other constables were using Enfields to the same effect on the opposite wall. O’Keefe went to the sheds to check on Keane and Daniel Hooey. Keane stood when O’Keefe entered the shed.

‘Give me a carbine, Sergeant.’

‘No, but I need your help. Take the long ladder from the shed and put it up to the DI’s office window. We’re going to have to evacuate the barracks. It’s burning. Get moving.’

***

Liam Farrell watched in awe from the upstairs window at the front of McGowan’s office with Seán Brennan and McGowan himself. From their vantage point, they had an unimpeded view of the wide street in front of the barracks.

A beautiful sight to behold, Farrell thought. A glimpse of what it must have been like in the war. The muzzle flashes were like matches struck and then extinguished in the dark. The arcing tracer rounds from the machine-gun in the barracks’ attic could be sparks hammered from a blacksmith’s anvil. The muffled flash and then
whump
of exploding grenades was audible over the popping of the rifles and the
kakk-kakking
of the machine-guns. Emergency flares in the inky night sky descending like slow-falling stars. Make a wish, Farrell thought, amused at the way the mind worked, independent of external reality. This was beautiful. It was hard to imagine people dying out there.

He watched as Ballycarleton barracks started to burn, flames painting the outside walls to the side and front of the structure where the mine had detonated. Now and again he thought he could make out the shadows of Volunteers moving from one firing position to another in the darkened street. He knew for a fact there were three men behind the trough and water pump in the centre of the road, and several others at the corner of the warehouse, two buildings down from the barracks. One or two more were on the warehouse roof.

Brennan broke their watchful silence. ‘The machine-gunners are good. Targeted bursts. Keeping our boys pinned down. Easy on the ammo, keeping the barrels cool enough. They know to hold back, that our boys don’t have all night. Professionals, some of those lads.’

‘We’re not doing too badly ourselves, sir,’ Farrell said, vaguely offended by Brennan’s appraisal of the Tan gunners.

‘Oh, they’re doing all right. Getting better by the day, boy.’

McGowan took the pipe from his mouth. ‘And Connors? Will they get him out, do you think?’

Brennan was silent for a moment watching the battle, the flames from the burning barracks casting his face in a flickering, yellow light. Finally, he said, ‘I’d imagine he’s dead already. God rest him, but it saves us the job.’

Farrell was about to protest when McGowan spoke again. ‘Seems a shame, but he was a fierce loose cannon, that boy.’

Brennan gave a rueful smile in the flashing glare of the firefight. ‘Most of the best gunmen are. Reining them in, when this,’ he gestured out at the battle, ‘when all this is over. That’ll be the hard part. Connors …’ He seemed lost for words. ‘Connors, will be well missed. He’ll die a hero. It was forever coming, the bullet with his name on it.’

Liam Farrell turned his attention back to the battle outside, certain he would never understand the inner workings of the cause to which he had pledged his allegiance, nor the men who were its leaders.

***

O’Keefe headed up the front stairs, Finch and Moran laying down covering fire, IRA rounds taking out chunks of plaster, dusting his hair and clothes. The wall of the stairway was hot to the touch and smoke rose with him, beginning to scorch his throat with each ragged breath. He found Daly and two other constables firing through loopholes in the day-room that faced the front of the barracks. Two others were in the DI’s office, doing the same, one stopping to open the steel shutters while the other tossed grenades into the darkness.