Belfast Rules
Chapter 10

Copyright© 2015 by RWMoranUSMCRet

BELFAST – 1968

1968 was a year of dying in many places around the globe. It was the year of the "Tet Offensive" and the casualty figures from Southeast Asia drove a wedge into the hearts and minds of the American people as sharp and painful as the division between Irish Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.

The business of dying in Belfast was often an unexpected thing.

It didn't come just in bed after a long life of struggle to make ends meet.

It didn't come only in an accident in the middle of the street when a careless pedestrian stepped off of a sidewalk.

It didn't come solely in a hospital bed surrounded by family and friends waiting for the final moment to arrive.

Lots of times it was in a dirty alleyway down in the garbage and the trash. It came from the smashing of a single bullet in the back of the head for unspecified crimes against one side or the other. It might be when a careless husband turned the ignition key in his parked motorcar expecting to hear the roar of the engine and all he heard was the pieces of his brain splattering against the inside metal of the car.

Danny lived with all of that around him in 1968 and he was able to flourish and survive in hopes of a more peaceful time. He was a bit of protégée gunman at that time with several operations under his belt and a look of respect when he went into a meeting or sitting down in the corner of a familiar pub. His parents were proud of him but they were worried it would all come crashing down and of course it did. Later when his father was sent to Long Kesh, Danny wondered at the unfairness of it all. The poor man had done nothing to merit the punishment other than siring a suspect son. His mother died in a state of sadness when she learned of the demise of her husband in prison and it only made Danny more dedicated to the cause of Irish independence.

That was the year when he was only eighteen years old and he first noticed that his left hand and arm were shaking at times when he certainly didn't want it to shake. He started using his right hand to do the final adjustments to his improvised explosive devices and took the connections of the wires and the times slowly with the detonator saved for last. He never told any of his friends about the affliction because it would mean an end to his bomb-making assignments and his enemies might think it a weakness that they could use to their advantage.

Without specifying the exact reason, he opted to take more responsibility in the more dangerous operations involving close-up "wet work" with the hidden handguns and silencers. Even with his hand shaking, he wouldn't miss at such close range. His specialty was his ability to exit a scene of chaos quickly and blend into a crowd of innocent bystanders because of his youth and his benign appearance. It saved him time and again when the SAS and the RUC surrounded a site looking for the guilty parties. Sometimes they just arrested anyone who even looked slightly suspicious to sort them out later.

He accepted an assignment to finish off an informer up near xxxxxxxx in an area that he was familiar with because he had dated a young girl from a mixed family which he was happy to overlook because of her glorious backside. Once he had his greedy hands on that perfectly constructed work of art, he was reluctant to give it up just because her father happened to be a Protestant. Besides, she was being raised as a good Catholic girl by her devout mother who had suffered much because of her weakness in going over to the other side. Danny had met them both when the girl had dragged him inside one evening and he could tell the mother was delighted she had found a "good" Catholic boy but the father was less than enthusiastic. It was a strange situation but Danny found he admired and liked her father rather well because he was so well educated and never spoke a sarcastic word about any subject. He also liked the fact that the man was careful to never mention either politics or religion when they were together.

It turned out that entirely by coincidence my next intended target lived only a short distance from my new love interest's house and I knew the area well despite it being upper middle class and mostly of Protestant leanings. I didn't disclose my connections with the girl with my superiors because I suspected they would not be pleased that she was only "half" Catholic. I thought that was rather amusing to be half something or other when it came to religion but as I traveled later I found out it was a very serious subject for those of the Jewish persuasion.

My favorite "spotter" Lois Lynch with her petite backside and man-hating attitudes kept feeding me updates on the target's activities and his habits which usually gave me the key to finding the best way of completing the assignment. I discovered that he never missed the 5:15 bus from xxxxx to xxxxxx and that he liked to sit all the way in the back where he wasn't crowded. I decided that it would be the best place to take action and made certain that on a special Friday afternoon I was comfortably seated in the back row of the color coded bus pretending to be snoozing like some of the other passengers. I watched the target board the bus and as luck would have it he actually sat directly in front of me totally defenseless against my quick silenced round to the back of his head. It was so easy that it was almost laughable. In my haste to celebrate the impending success, I missed the slender young man with his hat pulled down low over his face sitting right behind the driver after boarding directly behind my target.

The bus was what I would call an "almost" express stopping only at a couple of vital intersections so travelers could connect to another local bus route to their homes or walk the remainder of the way if it wasn't too distant.

The target's stop was only a short distance from the terminus of the route and I planned to take the shot and get off the bus before it continued to the end of the route. My eyelids were almost completely closed and I never even considered any of the other passengers to be a threat because it was an accepted fact that hardly anyone would be packing a handgun on a public conveyance. The hard fact was that would have resulted in literally "throwing away the key" in the sense of incarceration at that time. In fact, if you were even caught with some rounds of ammo you might be seeing prison time unless you had a good explanation for their possession.

 
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