The Break Line

Prologue: Last Light

Sunday 27 March 1994

It began a long time ago. I was nineteen then and a soldier. Not a killer.

Early that evening, I was called to Colonel Ellard’s office. He sent an orderly, who asked me to bring my rifle and follow him immediately. I asked if I was in trouble, and the orderly shrugged and smiled.

‘There’s a man with him. Smart suit. They’re in a hurry.’

We took off down the corridor at the double. The orderly smiled again and hung back, not wanting to be sent on another errand. I entered the room alone. Colonel Ellard was inside with the man who had been watching me all day. He sat at the back of the office behind the door. I couldn’t see him clearly.

That morning, when the sergeant major told us to break for a smoke, I’d noticed him standing inside the wire next to the main gate. It was not long after sunrise, and the air was still cold. He had his hands in the trouser pockets of a dark-grey suit and stared at me as I lit and then smoked half a Marlboro. The jacket had a red silk lining that flashed in the breeze and thin lapels that framed a white shirt open at the neck. I ground the cigarette out on a galvanized bin and stared back at him, and he turned and walked briskly towards the officers’ mess. He wasn’t wearing a coat and he was unshaven, which made me wonder where he’d come from.

Later that day I saw him again, speaking to Colonel Ellard. They were pointing at me as I laid out my kit – rifle, slip, scope, suppressor and a box of twenty rounds – and then he walked towards me while I lay prone on the firing line. Without introducing himself, he knelt down and asked me if I could see the retaining bolt that held the hundred-metre target in place. I looked up at Ellard, who nodded. Through the scope, I told him I could. The man asked me to shoot it. I did. Then I looked up at him. He studied my face intently, as if looking for something he’d lost, and then walked away.

I stood in the office, at ease. According to the custom at Raven Hill no salutes were exchanged, but you could never quite relax with the colonel. He was so softly spoken that it was hard to hear him on the range, and so patient with us that he made you feel, instantly, as if his entire focus was on you, and you alone. He was the last Irish officer in the British army to come up through the ranks. ‘Not from private, but from the pits,’ he told new recruits: before he enlisted he’d cut coal on his back in the Arigna mines in County Roscommon. Now Ellard walked tall. He expected, and received, absolute obedience. What we feared was not his wrath, but his disappointment. And, because they worked, we were unquestioningly dedicated to his methods. We were, all of us, terrified of him, too – because we liked him but did not understand him. I’d learned quickly in the army that there was no progress of any kind without the fuel of fear.

Sitting behind the walnut desk in his office, Colonel Ellard motioned for me to give him my rifle, so I detached the magazine and pulled back the bolt twice to show that the breech was clear and handed it over. It was his policy that our weapons were always amber: charged magazine on, nothing in the chamber. He placed it carefully on the desk.

‘Thank you. You’ll find a black Mercedes out the front. Jump in and wait. You’re not driving.’

I made to leave. He raised his right hand to stop me and nodded towards the man.

‘Max, this is Commander Knight. You are to follow orders from him as if they were given by me. He is your commanding officer until further notice.’

Knight sat behind me and said nothing. I saw his face clearly as I walked out. He’d shaved. He smiled and gave me a curt nod of recognition.

I sat in the front passenger seat. Ten minutes later, Knight stepped outside and put a rifle sheathed in a slip in the boot of the car. He joined me and took the wheel. We drove for an hour and didn’t speak. I didn’t have anything to say. It was early spring. Dun-coloured hills soaked up the last of the evening light. The clocks had gone forward that morning, and the late dusk was unsettling. We were circling a large village due west of Belfast on a metalled road coated with mud well trodden by tractor tyres and peppered with cow pats. We looped behind the tallest hill and found the moon rising above Lough Neagh.

At a checkpoint below a cut in the road manned by crap hats we were joined by two soldiers in civvies – most probably from the SAS or the Det. No one saluted. They climbed in the back and seemed comfortable with Knight. They must have met before. Fifteen minutes later, we stopped again. I got out first and saw one of our passengers had a SIG semi-automatic pistol stuck in the waistband of his jeans. Knight asked me to take the rifle from the boot of the Mercedes and walk with him off the road, directly up the hill. His accent was from Dublin, sharpened in an English public school, and reminded me of my father’s Irish lilt. They would have been the same age, too, had my father lived. The man’s brogues found no purchase on the smooth grass, and more than once he stumbled so that he had to steady his ascent with outstretched palms. It had been a hot day in the end, and I’d been burned by the sun; now there was a chill, and the air was sharp and brittle again.

As we climbed higher, I began first to smell and then to hear the village. It was a Sunday. Traditional Irish music tumbled out the swinging pub door and down the hillside. A tang of roasting meat lifted on the breeze off the lake, mixing with the reek of peat smoke and wet grass.

Finally, the climb levelled off on to a broad grassy saddle. We ran slowly and at a crouch to the lee of the hill facing the south side of the village, the straps of the rifle slip bunched in my right hand. I could see the evening dew had soaked into Knight’s suit from where he had stumbled. Dark patches spread out from his knees and ringed his cuffs.

Below us, the kitchen clatter that heralded the end of dinner filtered through the half-open window of a stone house. I took a map and a pair of binoculars from one of the plain-clothed operators who’d followed us up and checked the range.

Three hundred metres away, in the failing light, I could see a family of seven lit by a single tungsten bulb, framed by net curtains darkened by smoke from the open hearth. Four children babbled and whooped, whirling round the table, licking grease off their fingers and taking empty plates to a middle-aged woman in the kitchen. She stood, as if transfixed, behind a deep butler’s sink beneath a second window. At the head of the table a man sat with another child on his lap, a young girl with long hair the colour of threshed corn. His daughter. Knight crouched next to me and handed me a loaded magazine.

‘The man at the head of the table has blood on his hands. Your orders are to kill him.’

‘Yes, sir. Understood.’

I eased the rifle from the padded slip. It was my rifle. Despite the bumps and knocks of the journey it would have kept its zero. I clipped on the magazine, adjusted the scope’s elevation drum and brought the glass in front of my eye. Inside the house I could see the stains on the man’s shirt, the shaving cut on his neck from when he’d prepared for Mass that morning. I saw his daughter’s lips moving. Their eyes were the mirror image of each other. I saw his chest rise, watched the rhythm of his breath. The target turned his face to the gathering gloom and stared out of the window, listening to the girl. I fed a round into the chamber. The wind dropped. There were no adjustments to make: safety off; weapon live.

‘Sir?’

‘Weapons free.’

The horizontal line of the crosshair ran beneath the target’s eyes. The vertical bar divided the tip of his nose. He inclined his head, resting his chin on the girl’s scalp. Time stopped. Taking the first gentle pressure on the trigger, the pad of my index finger crept to a stop, and then drew a hair’s breadth further back.

Nothing.

The clocks restarted. Only the faint dry echo of metal on metal remained above the sound of blood pumping in my ears, oxygen rushing in my throat. I cleared the breech and chambered another round. A flash of brass glinted in my right eye as the dead cartridge spun out in front of Knight’s face next to me. I settled the crosshairs. We were alone again, the target, his daughter and I. She touched his cheek. He looked out of the window straight at me, seeming to hold my monocular gaze. First pressure: already I was part of him, following the pin into the cartridge; already I was tethered to the bullet.

Again, nothing.

I gulped a lungful of air and felt the grass-wet palm of Commander Knight on the back of my right hand as I tensed and moved to rework the bolt. And then those three words that still wake me.

‘You did well.’

The firing pin had been removed from my rifle. It was the final test in Knight’s search for what he later described as a ‘legally sane psychopath’.

‘Your father,’ he said as we returned to the car, ‘would be proud of you.’