The Glory Boys

'You are going to the girl's home, right? To the place where you hid when she came for me? That is the place that I will leave you.' Perhaps he looked for reaction, expected surprise, but there was none from McCoy, just eyes on the road, hands on the wheel, and the bead of lit sweat high on the forehead. 'There was an idea when we were planning the mission at home, that the attack should be mounted at Heathrow, at the airport as he flew to the United States. It will be harder without my friends, but it is the only possibility. I will go on foot, across country, to the airport. They told us that it was not difficult to gain entry to the perimeter, and I will see the El Al land. He will not board till the end, and I will have time, with the rifle, to get as close as I need.' impossible.' McCoy never moved his head, just the word of dismissal.

'It is not impossible, only difficult. I have the resolution now, not earlier but it has come to me. It was different earlier. I have now the will that I should have possessed when Sokarev was on the gun. But it was the first time that I had ever fired on a man. It is not easy, not the first time. It is not simple to stand and expose oneself to gunfire. I have learned much in the last hour, more than they taught me in the camp. More in the hour than in three months.'

'They'll gun you down before you set foot within two hundred yards of the plane, and you don't even know which one it will be.' Perhaps McCoy was less certain of himself, the quietness of the Arab disconcerting him. There was a strange confidence he hadn't witnessed before, somthing novel, delicate, and which he did not wish to fracture.

'The plane will be the one that is most heavily guarded.

I have ideas, and there are many grenades. The Israelis say, and they are right, that if one intends to kill there is no favour to be found in starting far back, relying on aim and the steadiness of the hand. The Israelis say you have to be close, body to body, that you have to be prepared to die yourself. They are correct. They are experts in the art of killing, and we are not. We can only learn from them.'

'We part company then. It's not part of my game.'

'Your side is more than complete. You carried me to the target, you placed the rifle in my hand. You have fulfilled your order. As long as I live I shall remember you with friendship.'

No risk of that being long, thought McCoy. Right hornets' bed we've put our stick into. But if the boy wants to go gloriously that is his concern. Not the style of Crossmaglen. Happened once in Ballymurphy, up in Belfast, when they were all twisted after Internment, and half a dozen guys went for a trot down the road and firing Thompsons from the hip at the biggest pile of sandbags and bunkers you ever saw. Had their bloody heads blown off, one after the other. Did anyone thank them for it the next week, or the next month, or the next anniversary?

Did they, shit. Just called them 'eejit bastards'.

'I'm going to the house,' McCoy said. 'She'll put me up somewhere. I have to wash the arm. Doesn't hurt so much now, but it needs cleaning. Last time they had me over the border, into Dundalk General and on the table with the knife in less than half an hour. You can't bugger with gunshot, have to clean it.'

'Where will you put the car?' asked Famy.

'At the end of the street by the house. It's a dead-end, no one'll see it there, come looking for us. We'll do the goodbye bit then.'

He'd hesitated at several of the road junctions in the last half-mile, searching for the landmarks of the streets known from the single occasion that he had walked the girl to her front door. And then there was the spread of ivy on the end brick wall, and the tree with the white-washed number on it, that was cancered by disease and that would have to be cut. She had said it was a shame, for the tree. He turned into the girl's road.

After McCoy had stopped the car he reached awkwardly toward the back floor space of the car, feeling for one of the M1s in the grip-bag and for another magazine. From the cloth sack he took two of the grenades, slipping them into his pocket where they banged together, making a dull, hidden noise, without the ring of softer, less lethal metal.

The gun he crooked under his shoulder. Then with his left hand he opened the door of the car. Famy waited for him, then pulled the bag over his seat. His rifle was loose, trailing one-handed as he walked round the front of the car. Simultaneous with McCoy he was aware of the light of another vehicle that turned into the street, and reacted as fast as the Irishman in shielding his firearm alongside the silhouette of the leg.

'Stay still till he's parked and switched off,' McCoy snapped at Famy, concerned at the intrusion, wanting to be on his way, unwilling to face interruption. They were both illuminated by the powerful undipped beams that blazed at them from twenty yards down the road. There was a sense of foolishness, of conspiracy that was unnerving.