Dave Ferman Author

In the fall of 1988, the level of Irish Republican Army (IRA) violence escalated in Ulster as the IRA urban guerilla campaign morphed from fierce internecine warfare in blue-collar neighborhoods to elite upper-class targets in government, corporate board rooms and exclusive gentlemen's clubs. All evidence pointed to a returned Irish expatriate, Sean O'Neill, a retired National Security Agency (NSA) operative and former U.S. Marine officer as the mastermind behind that tactic. Sean's sidekick in Vietnam and the Middle East, Gordy Tyler, is reactivated from retired civilian life by U.S. Naval Intelligence and loaned to NSA to go to Ireland, find Sean and bring him back to the USA by any means necessary, "dead or alive." Sean is considered an abrasive embarrassment by NSA and the U.S. Government.

Gordy and another NSA agent, Bridget Mahoney, who has loyalty and agenda issues as well as developing psychotic illusions, pose as honeymooning tourists. Bridget is equal to Gordy in all things except physical size. She has her way through feminine wiles, or by ruthlessly obliterating all opposition as well as anyone unfortunate to be caught in her crossfire.

After surviving a botched assassination attempt in a dark, narrow, 18th century cobblestone alley in Dublin in which a deformed midget CIA agent is killed, Gordy rejects the failed NSA mission plan, goes rogue and gets cheerfully loud in pubs throughout the picturesque villages along the Irish Republic/Ulster border. That ploy allows Sean to find them when he is ready to be found, and sets up the intense conclusion wherein the IRA, NSA, Scotland Yard and the British Army must cooperate to prevent a massacre of noncombatants in a soon to implode hotel in Belfast.

Set in Ft. Worth, Texas; Washington, D.C.; Dublin, Ireland; and Ulster from the storm-swept ruins of Dunluce Castle to the bloody streets of Belfast, 1988, Erin Go Kill is interwoven with international intrigue, intense personal loyalties, institutional deceptions, the excesses and aftermaths of colonial oppression, the intimate violence of sectarian warfare and its collateral victims, a budding romance between evolving adversaries, and the actual historical events in the Republic of Ireland, Ulster, and England during the fall of 1988.

1988, Erin Go Kill is an Amazon Five-Star (the highest literature grade) murder mystery/thriller as well as a cult favorite

CHAPTER 1
Welcome to Ireland

Once movie star handsome before the jaundice of viral hepatitis had taken its awful toll, the assassin had his victims lined up and bore sighted. "Ducks on a pond," he muttered, satisfied as all of the pieces of his murderous plan finally fell into place.

Moving stiffly as though it was an immensely taxing effort, he half turned toward his partner for final confirmation: a moot gesture since he had already triggered the killing mechanism deep within his psyche. Changing course was not an option.

Shifting into low gear, the assassin eased the clutch out as the powerful 12-cylinder limousine began moving smoothly although not quietly toward his intended prey.
His partner—much younger, less dissipated, but a product of the same buttoned-down mold—unconsciously leaned slightly forward toward their unsuspecting victims and nodded impatiently. "Let's get on with it," he said. Trying without success to sound coldly focused, his lowered voice caught in his throat, then bounced off-key at least half an octave higher like an overly excited adolescent.

To mask his embarrassment, the partner busied himself by jacking a 9mm hollow-point bullet into the firing chamber of his semi-automatic Makirov pistol, then mechanically lowering the hammer to the double-action setting. "Loaded and unlocked," he said as if completing a critical checklist.

As he gripped the ugly but reliable weapon in both of his hands, his arms were extended downward between his knees so that the pistol's muzzle pointed at the limousine's floorboards between his feet. Involuntarily, he began hyperventilating as he primed himself for his first professional kill.
At the same time, 50 yards into the south end of Ruby Lane, the low, distinctive clatter of an idling diesel engine—the unmistakable theme song of German automotive excellence—had intruded into Oliver Gordon ("call me Gordy") Tyler's subconscious mind. Although not uncommon on the streets of any major city in the world, that sound was disturbingly inappropriate in this extremely narrow, run-down alley in the low-rent warehouse district of Dublin, Ireland. In that fleeting moment between recognition and realization, Gordy had stopped flat footed, almost in mid-stride. Something was chillingly wrong, and he did not know what that something could be.

Distracted from his visual search for any man-sized nooks or crannies ahead and to each side of the shadow-pocked alley, Gordy turned, puzzled, to look back over his shoulder along the multi-storied, moldering brick canyon through which he and his female companion had just walked. As the deepening gloom of urban twilight enveloped all but the higher roof tops, Gordy was amazed to see a large, black Mercedes limousine of uncertain vintage try but fail to make a sharp, 90-degree turn into Ruby Lane from the too-narrow cross street behind them. With a bumper-to-bumper row of ever-present mini cars parked along both sides of that cluttered street—each abandoned half in the gutter and half onto the narrow curbside walkway in typical Irish fashion—the limousine driver had yet to find the precise angle of alignment that was critical to complete his ill-conceived maneuver on the first try.

Amazed, Gordy asked himself half out loud: "Why the heck would anyone even think of stuffing that hulking monster into a narrow alley like this?" Barely one car wide, originally designed for horses, small carts and people on foot, this still picturesque but decaying old alley was never intended for any kind of automobile; particularly a huge, luxury-sized limousine from the Bavarian autobahn.

Momentarily amused at the latest eccentricity of the local Irish, Gordy hesitated again to watch with mounting interest as the limousine backed up until all but the brightly chromed front bumper was out of sight beyond the end of the lane, then was carefully realigned for a second, more precise attempt at squeezing tightly into the narrow breech between the two furthest warehouse buildings.

"That silly clown's gonna' need a whole danged barrel full of magic K-Y Jelly to ram that big S.O.B. home," he mused as he chuckled to himself. Then, aloud to Bridget Mahoney, his lady companion, he said: "That joker must be daft!" His first full day of working with the charming if somewhat reserved Ms. Mahoney; Gordy did not want to start off on the wrong foot with even a mildly off-color remark. That was not his style.

Much shorter than Gordy and wearing stylishly fragile high heels inappropriate for walking on this uneven 18^th century cobblestone alleyway, Bridget had fallen at least a half dozen steps behind Gordy's impatient lead. "He's gotta' be flippin' crazy!" Gordy said, the amazement in his voice filling the void of her continued silence. Even if that lunatic did get his oversized bucket of precision bolts lined up without scuffing an undoubtedly expensive paint job, he would not have enough clearance to spare on either side to open even one door of that hulking monster to get out. "Absolutely daft!" Gordy scoffed. "That clown has gotta' be just flat flippin' nuts!" he said emphatically.

Suddenly, the more immediately personal aspect hit him like a truckload of bricks. The physical shock momentarily knocked much of his breath away. With no meaningful clearance to spare between fenders and solid brick walls, not nearly enough safe passage space remained for anyone unfortunate to be a pedestrian walking on Ruby Lane at that time. In effect, Gordy was staring down a block-long barrel as a tight-fitting cannon ball was being breech loaded for launching right at him and Bridget.

As they say in Texas, he had ripped his britches. Badly out of practice by his own admission, still more of a rubbernecking tourist than an on-loan reconnaissance and recovery specialist after too many years on the shelf, Gordy knew that he and Bridget had messed up miserably. Anyone with even a lick of street smarts would have immediately sprinted for safety at the first sight of anything so unusual, particularly a three-ton Teutonic roto-rooter being inserted at the other end of their own personal flush pipe.

All of those years insulated from reality in the upper crust suburbs of North Dallas had dulled his reflexes. His military "situational awareness" had been asleep at the switch. That tardy realization was far more distressing than their initial glimpse of impending doom.

Turning back around, frantically searching for an escape route in the other direction, Gordy quickly verified what he already knew, but did not want to admit even to himself. Roughly 60 to 70 yards stretched between him, Bridget and the next intersecting street. "Too far," he shouted. "We'll never outrun that big sum'bitch! No way in hell!"

Ahead of them, not a single recessed doorway, nook or man-sized cranny was visible along the unbroken line of deteriorating buildings from where they stood to the next intersection. Over the hundreds of years that this once-respectable row of hotels and businesses had evolved into low-rent warehouses, almost all of the windows and doors at street level had been permanently sealed flush with the outer walls by brick and mortar to discourage transient riff raff as well as desperate pedestrians looking for a safe haven to avoid dangerously inappropriate autobahn traffic.

As soon as the massive Mercedes had finally squeezed its bulk into Ruby Lane, its 12-cylinder, supercharged engine immediately revved to a menacing, deep-throated roar as outdated, wide-striped whitewall tires initially spun unintentionally, then found traction on the irregular cobblestones with an anguished squeal of shrill protest. Simple but effective, the cannon ball from Hell was launched and on the way.

Alerted by the rapidly increasing racket, Gordy whirled back around to look frantically over Bridget's shoulder at the only inset doorway within running distance along the entire lane. But that was at least 15 yards back TOWARD the rapidly accelerating limousine. They had one chance and only one chance, but that lay in the wholly unnatural act of running toward, rather than away from onrushing Doomsday.

"Run for that doorway. Back there!" he bellowed at Bridget as she finally became fully aware of their potentially fatal predicament.

Momentarily frozen where she stood, half turned toward him as if pleading mutely for help; a surprised, horrified, somewhat baffled expression disfigured her usually pretty face. "Gorr-deee!" she shrieked before the lump in her throat cut off all audible sound.

"Dumb damn sushi for brains," he cursed himself as he frantically dashed toward Bridget and the inset doorway beyond her. The accelerating limousine, having bore-sighted them in the harsh glare of a blinding spotlight mounted dead center on its massive front bumper, screamed like a scalded banshee from Hell. Its sonic energy surged well ahead of the massive vehicle like an all-engulfing bow wave to reverberate off the ancient brick walls and cobblestones to virtually overwhelm all other physical senses and reflexes. For a gut-wrenching second or two that seemed more like minutes, Gordy felt as if he was running in slow motion from a boogeyman in a very bad nightmare.

"She's supposed to be the friggin' professional," he protested to himself, then yelled again, "Run, damn it. Run!" There was no way that she could have heard him over the screaming, thunderous reverberating roar of the terrifying monstrosity bearing down on them like the Horses of the Apocalypse stampeding four abreast within the narrow alley.

Starting off-balance and wearing the worst possible shoes imaginable for running, Bridget had not reached her full stride when Gordy overtook her about five yards short of the doorway. With his mind focused out in front of his body, fixated on the minutest details of the pocked-marked old brick and mortar framing the inset doorway beyond her—possibly the last things that he would ever see on God's green earth—he had neither the time nor the long-lost agility to go around her. So he ran right through her, his 235 pounds taking her 125 pounds with him to safety, barely a split second before they would have become dual radiator ornaments on several tons of onrushing death and destruction.

Seeing that his intended victims had beaten him to the only sanctuary on the entire lane, the driver slammed hard on his brakes at the instant he passed within inches of their meager refuge. "Shoot the bloody buggers," he screamed. "Blow 'em away, dammit!"

Jammed awkwardly against Bridget's fanny and the mildewed wall beyond, breathless and off balance within the narrow, confining doorway, Gordy's twisting, overhand throw was more reflex than skill. In the rush of air from the massive vehicle's wake, it was hard enough and accurate enough to do the job at that short distance. The impact of a full liter bottle of Old Bushmill's Irish Whiskey shattered the limousine's rear window with a sharp, resounding explosion not unlike a cannon shot reverberating inside a cavern's walls.

With that, Gordy was out of ammunition. He had used his entire defensive arsenal. But the assassin—the dark silhouette of his stylishly long, well—groomed head of hair clearly visible through the gaping hole where his rear window had been-hunched forward and jammed hard on the gas pedal once again to burn twin streaks of pungent, acrid rubber down the cobblestone lane. Rear end fishtailing erratically, his fenders flashed bright balls of flare-like sparks in the gloom as he ricocheted off the ancient red bricks; first on one side and then on the other side of Ruby Lane.

His partner, indistinguishable, ducked frantically down toward the limousine's floorboards to avoid a second bullet, which he believed, would undoubtedly follow the first explosion. Panicked by that unexpected turn of events, he made no attempt to shoot back through the shattered rear window.

Even more ear piercing than the squalling mechanical cacophony from Deutschland—somewhat like the Doppler effect of a passing, high-speed train with siren blaring—a high-pitched shriek, feral in its pulsing shrillness, echoed and re-echoed throughout the brick and stone-lined canyon walls of Ruby Lane. Over the hood of the rapidly retreating limousine, Gordy caught a fleeting glimpse of the gimpy little guy from the Ha'Penny Bridge, code name "Butch," their only known contact in Dublin.

As he emerged from a stack of discarded cardboard boxes as if suddenly shot out of a cannon, his deformed, stubby arms pumped wildly with no coordination whatsoever as he scrambled toward the safe haven of the cross street within easy reach of an average sprinter; but a sanctuary too far away to save anyone with his obvious disabilities. Dragging his gimpy left leg in a crab-like sideways spurt of only a few dozen frenzied strides, the little man screamed a plaintively eerie "Noooooo!" the instant before he was overtaken and mauled unmercifully between the massive Mercedes' under-carriage and the irregular, grinding surface of the vintage cobblestone lane.

In a grotesque black-on-dirty-mauve silhouette against the last twilight reflections from the east-west cross street ahead, as if happening in something less than real time, Butch seemed to be kicking and flailing in one last, futile attempt to beat this monstrous mauler away from his frail body with his tiny, inadequate fists.

It was no contest.

Spewed out behind the fleeing vehicle like an abandoned rag doll—a mangled sack of shattered bones and shredded flesh—the little man was dead long before his battered body stopped flopping across the gore-spackled cobblestones and accumulated filth. Even at a distance of about 40 yards, Gordy knew that there was no need to check for vital signs.

Within seconds, the battle-scarred Mercedes disappeared around the corner of the wider cross street at the far end of Ruby Lane in a peal of squalling tires, leaving an intermittent trail of black paint scrapings back to the grotesquely crumpled body that appeared more like a pile of discarded refuse than a recently breathing human being.

Searching the little body would be a life-threatening formality best ignored in an AIDS-infested world. With gore splattered and smeared everywhere, and having no protective gloves or mask, Gordy chose the prudent course. Reluctantly, he had to leave the contents of their contact's pockets to someone far better prepared to cope with the bane of the last decades of the twentieth century.

As the occasional vehicle passed by on the far cross street—their road lights like flashing strobes momentarily accentuating the faint glow of distant, low-voltage street lights—Gordy was amazed that no one seemed to be aware of the grizzly drama unfolding only a few dozen yards inside the darkening canyon that was Ruby Lane. In their haste to be anywhere else at that gloomy interval between late dusk and total darkness, none hesitated for even a moment. Nor did a couple of scurrying pedestrians who briefly appeared, then passed quickly across the maw of Ruby Lane and disappeared without so much as a sideways glance into the deepening shadows. It was as if anyone who breached that streetwise protocol-anyone who actually looked down the dark unlit canyon-would invite something unspeakable to leap out of the darkness to attack him or her with unstoppable fury.

"Oh God!" Gordy exclaimed in a hoarse whisper. "What a bloody-awful mess!" Wave after wave of staccato-like shivers wracked his body from toes to topknot, momentarily driving the critical mass of his breathing from his lungs through the swelling constriction of his clogging throat. This "routine, no-hassle" search for an old friend—Gordy's first mission with NSA, the National Security Agency, in more years than he cared to remember—was definitely not Admiral Wild Bill Wells' promised all-expense-paid vacation despite reams of official assurances from the smug, bureaucratic, know-it-alls safely tucked away in their sterile cubicles deep within the belly of the beast back in suburban Washington, D.C.

As he turned away from the bloody carnage, Gordy tried to relocate the formless shadow within the deepening dusk that was Bridget Mahoney. Still huddled mutely in the murky darkness of her recessed sanctuary, she had yet to move an inch or make a sound since colliding head-on with the pockmarked old brick doorway.

"You okay?" he asked, his voice seemingly reverberating back from the featureless darkness.

No answer. But that, he knew, was understandable. Gordy recalled the stomach-twisting, puke-sick feeling the first time he had survived almost certain death from ambush in the putrefying jungles of Vietnam so many years before. Sympathetically, he added, "Hang in there, kid. Everything's gonna' be okay."

Gordy was grateful that she was not a lady lard ass, or they would both be splattered all over that tawdry alley like their unfortunate in-country contact.

In the flickering light of a paper match from Aer Lingus' morning flight from New York City, Gordy squatted down then leaned as close as possible to the grizzly, shattered sack of lifeless human refuse. Trying to mentally reconstruct some of the features of that grotesquely peeled face before it was pounded through and under the massive Teutonic meat grinder, Gordy knew he would never be able to look at an animal roadkill again without remembering every gut-wrenching detail of this nightmarish scene. As his match burned itself out against his scorched fingernails, Gordy's ruined night vision mercifully masked hideous reality: blotted it into a black void that hovered as if self-levitated behind a swirling mass of imaginary fireflies, but left a vivid TV-like after-image burned into his memory.

Unable to fake professional detachment any longer, Gordy initially dry retched from throat to crotch as he tried to back away too late. Wracked by onrushing wave after wave of spasm-like nausea, he vomited what little was left of his in-flight snacks like a surrealistic painter's palate to mix with the bloody gore already awash in the narrow sewage gutter that formed the approximate center of such ancient lanes.

Failte chuig Eire: "Welcome to Ireland."