The Delta (7 page)

Sonja looked at the piece of soggy paper and memorised the grid reference before she handed it back to Jones. From a clear plastic envelope she pulled out her map of this cold and rain-swept
part of Wales, the Brecon Beacons mountains, and located the next checkpoint. The smell of the instant soup brewing over the cooker in a tin cup made her stomach rumble. Jones heard it and simply rolled his eyeballs. Sonja was soaked to the skin and her teeth were chattering. Her feet were blistered after walking fifteen miles in wet socks and boots and the skin on her back felt raw from where the pack loaded with bricks and a sandbag had chafed her.

‘Right. Fuck off, Kurtz,' Sergeant Jones said, stirring his soup.

For two weeks Sonja's mind, body and soul had been hammered and bent to within an inch of breaking in a series of increasingly gruelling tests of her stamina and basic military skills in the bleak mountain landscape. There had been lessons on unfamiliar weapons, navigation tests – like this one – and mile after mile of walking and running through the wilderness. The recruits were referred to by surname only regardless of rank. The training was a great leveller and already three-quarters of the hundred men and women who volunteered for special duty had been RTU'd – returned to their unit.

Sonja checked the luminous dial on her watch. It was three in the morning and she had been without sleep for more than twenty-four hours. Walking out of the tent, back into the rain, she lifted the compass from its lanyard around her neck and took a bearing.

‘Kurtz?' Jones called from the comparative luxury of his tent, the canvas walls snapping in the merciless wind.

Sonja looked back at him, blinking away the rain. The man winked at her.

Northern Ireland mirrored her experience so far in the army; an exciting, and at times scary, headlong rush into unending tedium. Sonja had passed her selection course and had been transferred to 16 Intelligence Company, which had started life
as an intelligence detachment in Ulster, and since then had been known simply, and obscurely, as the Det.

The Det's core business was surveillance of IRA personnel and locations. Forward-thinking for its time, in the late eighties and nineties the Det had pioneered the use of women in a special operations role. In staunchly republican villages and neighbourhoods the presence of unknown, hulking single men on surveillance was a giveaway. Female soldiers and officers had been trained in surveillance and photography. Posing as wives or girlfriends they had helped male operatives blend in on the streets of Londonderry and in the rural villages of South Armagh, and had driven vehicles dropping men off at concealed ‘hides' in the green fields of the county and townhouses of the city's republican strongholds.

Once more, Sonja found herself frustrated. Women in the Det were barred from the more dangerous missions and the best they could hope to be was ‘handbags' for male surveillance operatives. Women were banned from spending time in the concealed observation posts or hides, for the bizarre reason that if they were having their period they might give away their position to sniffer dogs. Sonja had seen or heard of no evidence whatsoever of the IRA using canines for this purpose. The Det sailed close to the wind in any case, for while women could be a useful extra layer of cover for the men, females were still technically prohibited from taking part in combat roles. While Sonja carried a nine-millimetre pistol with her, and had a Heckler and Koch machine pistol under the seat of the car she drove when dropping off and collecting male operatives, the weapons were strictly for use as a last-ditch means of self-defence if she was ever compromised.

Things changed the day two schoolteachers, friends from different sides of the religious divide, decided to pioneer a
project in which children from their respective communities would come together for joint field trips. Some outspoken parents – Catholic and Protestant – made a show of keeping their eight-year-olds home from school, but the majority of mothers and fathers were happy for the children to mix with each other. There were peace talks on at the time, brokered by the Americans, and the school excursions gained prominence in the press as a sign that things might be slowly changing in the troubled province.

The Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein were quick to deny any involvement in the setting up of the two-hundred-kilogram culvert bomb that exploded as the bus carrying forty boys and girls from warring religions, and their well-meaning teachers, passed over it. Eighteen small bodies were pulled from the twisted wreckage, and the site reduced even paramedics and firemen hardened by years of warfare to tears.

‘Right, people, gloves are off,' Captain Martin Steele told the packed briefing room of grim-looking soldiers in civilian clothes. Sonja, like many of the men, smoked during the briefing. Smoking was a means of killing time and, though she hated to admit it, a means of finding some common ground with some of the more Neanderthal of the men, who still weren't convinced of the value of women in undercover work. She, like the two other girls in the Det, June and Mary, a captain and a lance corporal, thought Captain Steele was a dish. June and Sonja had been on the same course and remembered the SAS officer as the senior staff instructor. He had returned to Ireland shortly after them and acted as a liaison between the elite regiment and the intelligence people of the Det.

‘This man,' Steele pressed a remote connected by cable to a slide projector, ‘Daniel Byrne, is believed to be the so-called True IRA's quartermaster. We believe he's the bastard who sourced
the Semtex that was used to kill those innocent little children and one of the teachers. We know precious little about the splinter group, but we do know that Byrne was disenchanted with the Provisional IRA and their part in the peace talks. We – that is, you – are going to follow and keep watch on Byrne for every second of his miserable life from now on. He's going to lead us to the rest of these animals, including their leader. One thing we know about Byrne is that like a lot of these paddies he likes a drink and a party, so be prepared for plenty of pub time.'

Steele's last remark raised a few half-hearted laughs, but there was no doubting the seriousness of the task at hand.

When Steele paused and looked around the room Sonja felt that the gaze of the blue-eyed man with the wavy jet-black hair rested on her. ‘Be careful. Very careful. Byrne will have been trained in countersurveillance and he'll be looking for you while you're looking for him. Byrne and his ilk have been shunned by the Provos. They're mad dogs, operating on the extreme edge, alone and with no care for life or humanity.'

Sonja had been paired with Sergeant Bruce Jones. The SAS man had been assigned to the Det, supposedly to boost numbers. Sonja wondered if the presence of the extra special forces soldiers on the surveillance teams was more about being in position to deliver a killing blow, if the opportunity arose, than manpower.

The world had been outraged by the chillingly casual admission by the True IRA of their actions, and the public and press across the water in the rest of Britain was baying for blood.

‘Lost eyeball,' Bruce said into the microphone concealed in the sleeve of his bomber jacket. ‘He's gone into the pub. Following him in.'

Sonja pulled the Ford Escort into the pub's car park and stopped at the far end of a row of cars, away from Byrne's
battered van. He was a plumber by trade and the stick-on sign advertised
satisfaction guaranteed
. Tell that to the bereaved families of the children and their pretty young Catholic teacher, Sonja thought, as she switched off the engine.

‘Right, let's get a drink, shall we?' Bruce made it sound like they were on a date and she admired his cool.

Sonja's heart was pounding as she followed him into the smoky pub and she felt like every eye was on them. The pub was not a known republican watering hole – Byrne was too clever to use those – but nonetheless Sonja felt she couldn't be more conspicuous as a British soldier unless she had a Union Jack tattooed on her forehead.

To Sonja's horror, Byrne, who had made straight for the bar, looked past Bruce and smiled at her as they moved past him. Sonja looked away as Jones appeared to ignore the Irishman and headed for a booth at the far end of the crowded pub. It was nothing, she told herself. The bar's clientele was mostly men, although there was a trio of young office girls sitting at one table. Perhaps Byrne just had an eye for anything in tight jeans. Sonja wore a hooded sweat jacket that was baggy enough to conceal the nine mil clipped high on her waist, but when she sat she felt it dig into the small of her back and she wondered if Byrne habitually scanned every person he saw for signs of a weapon.

‘We'll wait till he's left the bar and I'll go get us some drinks,' Bruce said under his breath as they slid into opposite sides of the booth. ‘Then … bloody hell.'

‘What is it?' Sonja's eyes widened at the groan that emanated from the sergeant who suddenly looked very pale.

‘You didn't have the kebab at lunchtime, did you?'

She shook her head. ‘I had the hot chips, remember.'

He winced as he nodded. ‘My bloody guts feel like they're
going to explode. Jesus Christ. We've got eyeball on the top X-ray in the province and I'm about to shit myself.' Bruce lowered his hand to his belly.

‘Go. I'll be fine. I'll get the drinks while you're in the bathroom,' she said.

He started to protest, then clamped his jaw shut as another cramp forced him to double over at the table. ‘OK. I'll just be gone for a minute.'

Sonja shifted in her seat and forced herself to relax as she watched Jones disappear into the men's room. She ran a hand through her hair, got up and went to the bar.

‘Soda water and …' she tried to think what Bruce would want. They were undercover, but was it a good idea for him to be drinking beer or spirits if he was ill?

‘Make up your mind, love,' the elderly barman said.

‘Sure, and you can't be entering a fine establishment like the Hen and be drinking soda water.'

Sonja turned. She smiled to try and disguise the chill that ran down her spine, the likes of which she hadn't felt since she'd been confronted by a Mozambican spitting cobra for the first time in her life. It was Byrne, standing behind her, nursing a pint of Guinness. ‘Um, soda water and a Coca-Cola, please,' she said to the barman.

‘
Coca-Cola?
' Byrne said, mimicking her accent poorly. ‘You sound like you're a way from home. I would have picked you as a couple from across the water, but not that much water.'

Sonja fished in her wallet for the money, frantically wondering what to say. If he thought they were ‘from across the water', did that mean Byrne had already suspected the strangers in the bar were British agents? ‘
Ja
, I'm a long way from my 'ome,' she said, laying on a thick Afrikaans accent.

‘South Africa?' Byrne prodded.

‘Namibia, though it was called South-West Africa when I was born.'

‘Sure, and it's a shame when someone takes over your country, isn't it?'

Sonja smiled. ‘
Ja
. The bloody British and the South Africans took it from my grandfather's people in 1915. Before that we were German. Where I grew up we spoke Afrikaans and German. It was confusing.'

‘You don't say. Well, what brings you to Ireland? This part of the country's not usually recommended in the guidebooks. Most foreigners are too scared to visit Ulster.'

Sonja shrugged. ‘I grew up in a war zone. I used to load my pa's rifle for him and my mom had an Uzi she used to carry with her when she took us kids to school.'

‘Beautiful and a killer to boot, eh?'

Sonja tried to look for Sergeant Jones over Byrne's shoulder, wondering how she was going to get herself out of this mess. ‘Don't joke. I shot a man when I was fourteen.'

Byrne raised his eyebrows.

‘I didn't kill him – at least I don't think I did. The newspapers made a big thing of it at the time. It was a nice propaganda victory against the SWAPO terrorists, even if we couldn't hope to win the shooting war.'

‘SWAPO?' Byrne sipped his drink. ‘South-West African People's Organisation if I remember my limited African history. I would have said freedom fighters rather than terrorists.'

Sonja shrugged. ‘Terrorists when they're shooting at
you
. Besides, if a firefighter fights fire, then what does a freedom fighter fight?'

Byrne laughed. ‘Fair point, but you essentially had a colonial power, the Germans, subjugating the local people and then the South Africans taking over after that. You can understand the
African people fighting to take control of their homeland.'

‘I was born there, too, but we were the minority, and the minority can never win, can they?' Sonja raised her eyebrows.

Byrne looked around the bar without moving his head. ‘It doesn't mean we can't try.'

‘You're talking about Northern Ireland?' She lowered her voice. ‘The IRA?'

‘Now what gave you that idea?'

‘Minority, majority. I've read enough about this place to know the British have no place here trying to enforce a system that disadvantaged Catholics for years.'

‘And what truck does a Namibian have with the British?'

‘My mom's side are Afrikaners – my dad's German. My maternal great-grandmother died of cholera in a British concentration camp in South Africa during the Anglo-Boer War, leaving four children, two of whom later died as a result of malnutrition. My pa's people were interned during both the world wars, although I had an uncle who evaded detention and used to cache supplies for U-boats on the Atlantic Coast.'

‘Skeletons in the cupboard on the Skeleton Coast, eh?'

She smiled and sipped her drink. ‘You know a lot about Africa, for an Irishman.'

‘You know a lot about the problems here, for an African. I think your friend's coming. He's been a while in the bog and doesn't look too grand, now, does he? Who is he?'