For King and Country Read online

  For King and Country

  Robert Asprin

  Linda Evans

  Robert Asprin Linda Evans

  For King and Country

  For David James Hollingsworth, the sunshine of our lives.

  * * *

  My deepest thanks, as always, to Robert R. Hollingsworth, military historian and battle choreographer (whose wonderful archery post graces the cover) and to his lovely wife Susan Collingwood, whose discerning eye keeps me on track. Thanks to them, as well, for the loan of their libraries and their highly limited time! I owe special thanks to Susan Gudmundsen, for climbing the immensely steep slope of Cadbury Hill, just to take photos for me. The weather was raw and thoroughly disagreeable, but up she went, into the wet clouds, to get my 360-degree panorama, which illuminated the whole climactic ending of the novel. And another special thank-you to Patricia Grohowski, for her tireless cheerleading, for pointing me in the direction of that wonderful little shop where I found the books on Glastonbury Tor, for lending me half her fascinating library, and for always finding a way to make me smile, in the midst of all the howling. I couldn't have done it without them!

  —Linda Evans

  Chapter One

  The election should have made things better.

  Would have, in fact, if held virtually anywhere else in the world. But this was Belfast, the blazing heart of Northern Ireland, where sanity was a concept seriously out of fashion. With the election only twenty-four hours old, the Irish "Troubles" were heating up again, threatening to spiral as badly out of control as they had in the middle decades of the previous century. And Captain Trevor Stirling was caught in the middle, a place where no self-respecting Scotsman had any business to be.

  Worse still, it was his ruddy birthday.

  Stirling stood gazing down at the cake for long moments, its multitude of candles a disquieting sight against the backdrop of the grim barracks. The dip and flare of the flames echoed other fires, causing Trevor to recall stories about the explosion of '69, when half of Belfast had burned. He'd lost a great-uncle in the fighting, an idealistic Scots lad sent in by Britain to keep the peace. Young Trevor McArdle, his mother's only uncle, had been caught dead in the cross fire.

  Now it was Trevor Stirling's turn.

  Memory replayed, cuttingly, the moment four years previously, when Trevor had come home to his mother's cottage an hour outside Edinburgh, bursting with the news.

  "I've just joined the Special Air Services!" he'd shouted, jubilant to be following a good half of his male progenitors.

  She'd run into the bedroom, weeping.

  He hadn't really understood why—until his unit was posted to Belfast.

  Stirling glanced up from the cake to see Murdoch, cavorting as usual in his underwear and trading ribald jokes with Balfour and Hennessey, who were shouting out punch lines above the blare of music. Good men to have at one's back in a place like this, among the best in his command, in fact, and they hadn't forgotten his birthday, despite the rising tensions and sporadic outbreaks of violence. He supposed there were worse situations in which to find oneself. Nor was he afraid of the job he'd been sent here to do. He just wished somebody else had been sent to do it, since he couldn't see either side in the centuries-old feud backing off or seeing reason.

  Stirling squinted back down at the flaming cake, attempting to count the improbable number of lit candles, and had just come to the conclusion there were seven too many, when Colonel Ogilvie sent the barracks-room door crashing back into the wall. Laughter and party uproar chopped off. Someone killed the music even as Stirling snapped around, blazing cake already forgotten. He blanched at the look on Ogilvie's face.

  "We've got riots heating up in West Belfast, boys," the colonel growled, voice harsh with strain. "Goddamned Paisleyites are burning down Clonard Gardens and ten blocks surrounding Divis Street, and the IRA's not having any of it."

  They scrambled for riot gear amidst a clang of slamming locker doors and thudding boots. Candles guttered out on the forgotten cake, puddling into rainbows of melted wax across the frosting. Chairs went crashing in the rush. Stirling prided himself on being first out the door, shoving all civilian concerns back into a little-used corner of his mind. On a job like this, anything less was suicide. Murdoch and Balfour were right on his heels, Murdoch still struggling with zippers and Velcro on hastily donned battle gear. A convoy of armored vehicles waited outside, engines idling in the muggy June heat.

  Stirling stood by the barracks door, directing the lieutenants and sergeants who reported to him while other sections down at the next barracks did the same into a second line of troop transports. Stirling's men were counting off their squad members as they jumped into the lorries. One hundred twenty strong, in four-man fire teams, with lieutenants and sergeants shouting out their counts, the loading went smoothly, at top speed. Once the squads reporting to his section had called out their readiness by the numbers, Stirling flung himself over the tailgate of the final transport, mashing his radio send button to signal their readiness to move out.

  Lieutenant Ian Howell and Sergeants Griffin and Everleigh, with their respective teams, plus the men of Stirling's own squad, had piled willy-nilly into the armored lorry's rear compartment, slamming loaded magazines into Browning Hi-Power pistols, SA-80 rifles, and MP5 submachine guns. Stirling was glad to have an MP5 in his hands, rather than the service Patchett regular troopers were issued.

  As the lorries jerked into motion, Hennessey snarled over his SA-80. "Wish to bloody hell Ministry of Defense had never adopted these useless bits of trash. IRA's got AR-180's, why the hell don't we?"

  Lieutenant Howell muttered, "I'd like to see you try clearing snipers out of a building with those old SLRs some of the other units train with. Be bloody glad you've got an SA-80, not one of those."

  Nobody answered. They all knew exactly what Howell meant—the SLR was a good hundred and twenty centimeters long, a full meter and a third of another, impossible to take down a hallway without hanging up the muzzle on something. Hennessey growled obscenely again at the faulty magazine latch and shoved the loaded magazine in once more, ruthlessly ramming it home until it caught properly.

  "What I wish," Murdoch muttered, finally righting his uniform, "is for those johnnies in the M.O.D. to pick somebody else for riot duty. Let the RUC handle things and send us home."

  "Royal Ulster Constabulary, my arse," Balfour shot back. "Bunch of Paisleyite Orangemen, is more like, joined up after the Ulster Defense Force was outlawed, and the IRA jolly well knows it."

  Stirling just grunted. The history of conflict in Northern Ireland was twisted enough to give even the slipperiest of diplomats a raging headache. Nobody understood Ireland. Except, of course, the bloody Irish. "Might've waited a few minutes longer," he grumbled under his breath. "Would've enjoyed at least blowing out the candles."

  "Tough luck, Captain," Lieutenant Howell thumped Stirling's shoulder as the armored lorry jounced and jolted through Belfast at top speed. "And that lovely bird we hired hadn't even jumped out of the cake yet. Right raver, too, blonde and stacked, wearin' nothing but buttercream icing..."

  "Prat," Stirling grinned. "And if you think Ogilvie'd let a stripper past security... Like as not, she'd be some Provo sympathizer, or worse yet, Cumann Na Mbann, and that'd be the end of us, right quick, now wouldn't it?" The SAS had learned the hard way how things worked in Northern Ireland. Up here, the Official IRA based out of Dublin—touted by London as The Enemy for most of the twentieth century—counted for nothing. It was the Provisionals, a splinter of the Officials born in the violence of '69, calling the shots in Belfast.

  Literally.

  Mostly out of Armalite rifles. And that wasn't cou
nting all the little splinters who'd left the Provos in the '90s, at least three main groups of them, all hating the Protestant Orangemen with a peculiarly Irish virulence that spanned centuries. The newest IRA splinters made the Orangemen's paramilitaries look like schoolboys—and the Orange terror squads proudly claimed kinship with Attila the Hun.

  And every man—and woman—jack of 'em, Protestant Orange or Catholic Green, hated the British military. Impartially and with a cold, calculating violence aimed mostly at SAS troops sent in to contain the damage. As a seasoned SAS captain with a full year's experience in Belfast—during which he'd watched seventeen of his mates shot and blown to pieces—Northern Ireland gave Trevor Stirling nightmares. It was little comfort that Northern Ireland's Troubles gave London's ministry types nightmares, as well.

  They heard the riot and smelled the smoke long before the lorry ground its way to a halt. A hasty roadblock had been thrown across Percy Street. The ugly sound of shouting, of sporadic gunfire, smashing glass, and the unmistakable roar of a major fire blasted into the lorry right across the open tailgate. A stink of gasoline fumes, gunpowder, and burning buildings choked the blockaded road. Stirling jammed his helmet down tighter, gripped his MP5 in a sweaty fist, and jumped down into the middle of the hell sweeping through Clonard.

  He peeled sharp left, taking up position along the wall their lorry had stopped beside, and directed his section out of their transports and into position along both sides of the street. In his own command squad, Balfour exited right, followed by Murdoch, who moved ahead of Stirling, then Hennessey, who took up position ahead of Balfour. The lorries lurched forward a few meters, giving them cover and spilling out other squads farther along the street, under Stirling's terse radio instructions. Static sputtered in his ear as more of his section reported taking up position.

  Stirling swept the area with a quick, careful scrutiny, looking for trouble spots. The Catholic neighborhood consisted mainly of rundown flats, in grubby, multistory buildings owned by Protestants who refused to grant their tenants basic civil rights, never mind ordinary maintenance and upkeep, but charged rents triple the going rate across the border in the Irish Republic. Most of the windows in Stirling's line of sight were pouring black smoke and lurid flames, the classic trademark of the Orange paramilitary terror squads. Women and children ran like screaming ants, carrying whatever they'd managed to salvage and trying to stay clear of the gun battle raging from street to street. Sporadic weapons fire cracked like distant fireworks, the sharp reports of handguns and small-caliber carbines overlain by the deeper crashes and crumps of heavy rifles.

  Stirling's hundred-twenty-man unit hadn't even finished piling out of their lorries when a howling mob of Orangemen burst into view from Divis Street, lobbing gasoline bombs through broken windows and raking the corner of Divis and Percy with small-weapons fire. Two women and several children, including a copper-haired little girl barely five years old, crashed to the pavement, screaming and writhing or bent at grotesque angles, ominously still in the glare of the flames. Then someone else opened fire from near the roof of a building three blocks distant and four Orangemen crumpled to the street, gut-shot.

  The mob scattered, burning and shooting as they went. Stirling clenched his jaw and gripped his MP5 until his knuckles whitened, aching to fire into the thick of those bastards, but he was not about to shoot live ammunition into a crowd with women and children scattered through it. His radio sputtered with Ogilvie's voice, shouting, "The police are trying to contain them before they reach St. Peter's church and the school! Move out by sections and drive those damned Orangemen back, trap 'em between the police barricades and our guns! And for God's sake, watch the rooftops, we've got IRA sniper fire coming from everywhere, they're likely to take potshots at us for the sheer fun of it!"

  "Bloody lovely!" Balfour snarled as their section ran forward in a flanking movement toward the Orangemen, leapfrogging their way under whatever cover was available. "The election of the century, they call it. Catholics claim they finally got a majority, while the Orangemen are claiming fraud, and bloody Sinn Fein's all set to vote in reunification with Dublin, like the IRA wanted for years. And now we've got the bleeding Orangemen bombing us. Goddamned Ministry of Defense would've done better to let us wipe this country down to bedrock!"

  It was a common enough sentiment in the SAS, one that Stirling didn't share, as it happened; but he understood it, only too well. "Button it, Balfour," he snapped. "Before some Orange bastard blows your head off! You can't do a job while you're complaining! And put your bloody respirator on, we're about to pump CS at them!"

  He jammed his own gas mask on, then they were in the thick of it and there was no time for anything but survival. They moved down Percy Street in relays, with McCrombie driving their armored command lorry at a slow crawl to provide cover wherever possible. Every doorway and window offering possible cover for gunmen brought sweat prickling out beneath Stirling's body armor. Unpleasant trickles ran down his brow and dripped stinging salt sweat into his eyes under the rubber mask, an added misery courtesy of the sticky, hot June weather. He blinked furiously to clear his vision, cursing the heat and the bloody "Troubles" that made tear gas necessary.

  The Orange terror squads fell back under a steady hail of tear gar canisters fired into the mob, along with rubber shot and so-called baton rounds, thick oblongs of rubber fired from 37mm grenade launchers. They fired into the street just in front of the mob, sending the rubber projectiles cannoning like super-balls hurled with enough force to break bones.

  The rioters melted into side streets to fight pitched battles with Catholic youths throwing rocks, broken bottles, and flaming gasoline bombs of their own. Orangemen shot back with pistols ranging from great-grandfather's Webley revolver to smuggled-in Makarovs manufactured three months previously in Russia, passing through three or four hands before ending on the streets of Belfast.

  Surprisingly few IRA guns answered back. The price, Stirling realized after a moment's puzzlement, of keeping guerilla weapons scattered, part of the IRA's effort to keep its arsenal out of police and army hands during neighborhood sweeps. The IRA excelled at planning terrorist hits in advance, but responding to a sudden emergency was more difficult, given the level of searches these neighborhoods routinely underwent. It was ironic; the very reason the IRA had armed itself so heavily in the first place was situations exactly like this one, starting back in '69, with Orange terror squads burning Catholic neighborhoods, shooting civilians, and the ruddy police and outlawed B Special squads helping them do it. That was the whole reason the British army had been activated, to keep Orange-controlled police and their mates in the marching societies and paramilitary units from wholesale massacre of Catholic minority neighborhoods.

  Not much had changed, since '69.

  As homemade Molotov cocktails ran short in supply, lit car flares took their place, arcing through the air, crashing through windows and igniting curtains, upholstery, anything combustible in their path. If the fire fighters weren't brought in soon, all of West Belfast would go. Stirling's section left Percy Street under cover of their armored lorry, moving down Divis Street in an effort to drive the rioters into the police barricades set up this side of the school and neighboring church. Through his gas mask, Stirling caught sight of the police squadron at last, firing lead-filled, CS-coated bean bags from their grenade launchers into the melee, bringing down combatants from a distance of several meters. A couple of the constables gripped shotguns, as well, firing shot shells loaded with miniature rubber batons.

  Unfortunately, the constables were firing indiscriminately at both Orange raiders and Catholic defenders, drawing the attention of someone with a high-powered rifle. A constable near the edge of the confusion screamed and went down, clutching his gut and bleeding between tight-clenched fingers. An instant later, a gun-wielding Orangeman suffered the same fate, sprawling under the rear bumper of a burning car.

  "Got us a sodding sniper!" Murdoch shouted, ducking down.
"Anybody see where he's firing from?"

  Stirling scanned windows in a frantic effort to spot him, while the constables broke and ran—straight for the SAS lorry they were using for cover. "Bloody damn—"

  He ate pavement as the constables skidded in. Bullets whined off concrete walls and window casements as the sniper tracked them. Policemen were shouting, "Do something! Do something, goddammit!" and Murdoch was screaming at them to shut up and keep out of the way. A stiff wind had sprung up, fanning flames and sweeping away clouds of CS gas. Stirling snatched off his gas mask, which was impeding his view, and raked the windows with a frantic gaze, looking for their hidden IRA gunman. He tracked movement at a broken fifth-story window—Christ, a ten-year-old kid without enough sense to hide, watching the riot like it was a thriller on the telly. "I don't see a thing, curse it!"

  "Maybe he's broken through a roof somewhere, shooting through a hole in the roofing tiles? They've done it before, often enough."

  Another constable went down less than a meter from Stirling's position, screaming and badly wounded. Orangemen were in retreat, firing at every window in sight, blasting away at shadows. The IRA sniper was driving them back from the church, at least, but there was no way to contain them as long as the sniper kept Stirling's section pinned, as well. "We've got us one savvy, trained sniper, here," he snarled. "Knows enough to keep back from the window, so we can't see spit!"

  He rolled prone under the fender of their stationary lorry, where McCrombie had the advantage of bulletproof glass. Stirling craned his neck into contorted positions, trying to see the uppermost windows and rooflines without exposing himself to sniper fire. He was studying windowpanes in the building across the street from their riot-happy ten-year-old when he saw it. Reflected movement showed the boy leaping back from the window. The reflection also showed a flash of light from deeper inside the room: muzzle blast from their IRA gunman.