Chapter 3

Danny dreamed that night of the days of his youth.

Now, ordinary grown men would be dreaming about football games, young girls in the back row of the cinema or friends who they had lost contact with over the years.

In Danny's case however, he dreamed of bloody-faced men pleading for their lives, mothers and sisters crying about dead or kneecapped fathers, brothers and young lovers in the bloom of youth. He jerked and cried out softly in his sleep begging forgiveness for his sins and hoping that God was too busy to notice his un-Christian career of vengeance.

It was strange that he would dream in that manner because he had spent most of his adult life attempting to push the unwanted bloody memories into a compartment with no windows and no doors. That was a trick he had learned from a friend who had spent almost a decade behind bars in a hell that made the British penal system look like an extended cruise on the "Love Boat". It was a place where daily torture was so routine it was penciled in on every guard's notebook.

The fact that his father died in a British prison was not lost on Danny's mind and it was a fact that weighed heavily in his thoughts because he felt he was in a certain sense responsible.

He had been recruited in early days by a sad-eyed priest with a problem with the drink. It was difficult for him to remember the dour clergyman with perennial whiskey on his breath, but he could never forget his shaking hands when he gave the communion in need of a "pick-me-up" early in the morning. Everyone around him including his doting parents thought of Danny as a religious-minded young man more interested in the learning of Latin than in what was hidden under the schoolgirl's uniform skirts. That was not a negative thing in that place and at that time. Many vocations were begun with less impetus that that and with far less motivation.

The cunning priest took him to a church council conference in Dublin when he was just a lad of sixteen. Some whispers in dark corners insinuated the soft-handed priest was a little too interested in the young and handsome lad with snickers behind their hiding hands.

The priest didn't mind because it was a good cover for his true intent.

Danny never gave it a thought because he was filled to overflowing with the sights and sounds of the city and the pomp and circumstance of the ceremonies that saturated him with incense and the hot touch of candle wax on his skin.

The priest's name was Father Connelly and he was far quieter that any self-respecting priest should be. It was speculated that he had come to his vocation due to a failed love affair but that was far from the truth and ridiculous for many different reasons. He had seen his entire family wiped out by a gang of Orangemen thugs mistaking them for a rabid family of followers of a bloodthirsty local element of the Provisional Irish Republican Army.

Father Connelly became a devoted follower of the same small group when they assassinated the three evil perpetrators of the crime against his parents. Now he was a recruiter for the PIRA and used his benefit of clergy to hide his true intentions.

The conference was a cover for a meeting of the many splinters of the same covert IRA organization responsible for much of the violence in that era. Some of them were professionals and were experts in the making of bombs, the handling of weapons and the logistics of creating incidents that would remove Ireland from the hands of Whitehall. However, most were just normal folks with jobs of their own and families of their own living a double life of peaceful existence and provocateur in the dark of night with silent effectiveness.

Danny was not particularly enthusiastic about such matters at first but after long sessions of motivation building he became obsessed with the thought of driving the British from his homeland. It was a time when the "Troubles" in the north were about to get a lot hotter and blood was about to be shed in both Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods with no difference at all to the local coroner and mortician.

At the beginning Danny was assigned to a ground level bomb-making unit that was involved in the manufacture, placement and operational security for using bombs to act as levers in finding the path to freedom. He was not at all comfortable in the assignment because he was a bit afraid of the detonators and the other delicate ingredients of bomb warfare for fear he would senselessly destroy his body in search of some meaning in life. He had seen the results of the bombings up close and personal and he felt it was far too random for his liking.

Danny far preferred the feel of a firearm under his armpit or snuggled close to his body under his jacket or shirt inside his leather belt tightly cinched to handle the added weight.

His handlers saw that he was better suited to the use of firearms and was a bit of a fumbler when it came to the processing of explosives. A decision was made to transfer him from the bomb squad to the "special operations" branch of the unit and he was given a code name and two handguns of different calibers for dirty jobs that had to be taken care of with little discussion amongst the group. The smaller caliber pistol was equipped with a silencer that was of German make and it was considered a "widow-maker" of dependable effectiveness. The other was a large caliber handgun that had been used in the big war by regular army troops. It had actually seen little action in actual war despite being cleaned religiously and with many hours on firing ranges to check its precision.

Danny liked the small caliber pistol the best of all because it was virtually silent and he loved the look of it with the long dangerous silencer at the end. Besides it was much lighter and easier to carry and the weight of the ammo was a lot more reasonable if extra rounds were necessary. He became an "expert" over time in the use of both handguns and could be easily described with accuracy as an IRA "gunman".

His handlers and Danny as well knew it was the actual field operation that really counted and he was quick to accept an assignment with no curiosity about the intended target or even the time and place of the action. That was a weakness that evolved into extreme caution over time and he slowly understood that his risk was increased when he didn't know the target, hadn't searched out the best time and the ideal location for the hit and knew when it was best to postpone the action when the risk was too great.

It was this gradual experience and desire to evolve that saved Danny's life time and again and made him the field operative with the greatest span of longevity in IRA history. The other young lads with blind acceptance of orders invariably wound up dead in the middle of some street with no name to put on the toe tag.