The runner had not yet returned with a gun for Hughes when the van reappeared. Five minutes had passed, yet here it was once more. Same van. Same driver. Hughes tensed, but again the van drove right past him. It continued on for twenty yards or so. Then the brake lights flared. As Hughes watched, the back doors swung open, and several men burst out. They looked like civilians – tracksuits, trainers. But one had a .45 in each hand, and two others had rifles; as Hughes turned to run, all three of them opened fire. Bullets swished past him, slamming into the façades of the forlorn houses as Hughes tore off and the men gave chase. He sprinted onto Cyprus Street, the men pounding the pavement behind him, still firing. But now Hughes began to zigzag, like a gecko, into the warren of tiny streets.
He knew these streets, the hidden alleys, the fences he could scale. He knew each vacant house and washing line. There was a quote attributed to Mao that Hughes was partial to, about how the guerrilla warrior must swim among the people as a fish swims through the sea. West Belfast was his sea: there was an informal system in place whereby local civilians would assist young paramilitaries like Hughes, allowing their homes to be used as short cuts or hiding places. As Hughes was scrambling over a fence, a back door would suddenly pop open long enough for him to dart inside, then just as quickly close behind him. Some of the residents were intimidated by the Provos and felt they had little choice but to cooperate, while others assisted out of an unforced sense of solidarity. When property was damaged in one of Hughes’s operations, he would pay compensation to the family. He cultivated the community, knowing that without the sea, the fish cannot survive. There was a local invalid who lived on Cyprus Street, ‘Squire’ Maguire, and at the height of the madness, with fires and police raids and riots in the street, residents in the area would occasionally see Brendan Hughes carrying Maguire on his back a few doors down to the pub so that Maguire could have a pint, then dutifully returning to bring him home a short while later. Once, a British soldier in the Lower Falls area caught Hughes in the sights of his rifle. Finger on the trigger, he was ready to open fire when an elderly woman stepped out of some unseen doorway and planted herself in the path of his weapon, then informed him that he would not be shooting anybody on her street on that particular evening. When the soldier looked up, Hughes was gone.
With his pursuers still clomping after him, firing wildly, Hughes veered onto Sultan Street. He had a specific destination in mind: a call house on Sultan Street. Call houses were usually regular homes, occupied by ordinary families, that happened to double as clandestine Provo facilities. Behind one particular door, on a street of identical brick houses with identical wooden doors, would be a secret refuge that could function as a safe house, a waiting room, or a dead drop. The families that lived in these homes deflected any suspicion from authorities. You might show up after midnight, haggard from a gruelling day on the run, and they would lift slumbering children out of their beds, affording you a precious night of rest.
At the corner of Sultan Street, a baker’s van was delivering bread, and as Hughes ran by it, the men behind him let off a volley of bullets, which punctured the van and shattered its windows. He kept pushing, sprinting the length of Sultan, desperate to reach the house before one of those bullets caught him. In addition to its other uses, a call house sometimes functioned as an arms depot. Hughes had become known to the British Army for his willingness to flit around the streets of the Falls area and engage their high-calibre weapons with his little World War II-era .45. The troops had developed what one later described as a ‘grudging admiration for this little bugger who had taken on an elite military unit with a handgun’. But Hughes recognised at a certain point that he needed heavier weapons if he was going to compete. One day, a sailor of his acquaintance came back from a voyage to America with a catalogue for the Armalite rifle – a lightweight, accurate, powerful semi-automatic that was easy to clean, easy to use, and easy to conceal. Hughes fell in love with the weapon. He convinced the Provos to import the Armalite, employing an audacious scheme. Cunard Lines had recently launched the Queen Elizabeth II, a luxury cruise liner that would crisscross the Atlantic, transporting well-heeled passengers between Southampton and New York. A thousand crew members worked on the ship, many of them Irish. Some of them also happened to work for Brendan Hughes. In this manner, Hughes used a ship named after the British queen to smuggle weapons to the IRA. When the guns arrived, fresh graffiti on the walls of West Belfast heralded a game change: GOD MADE THE CATHOLICS, BUT THE ARMALITE MADE THEM EQUAL.
Hughes was tearing along so fast that he almost passed the call house, and when he staggered to a sudden stop and swung open the door, he had acquired so much momentum that he went crashing, instead, right through the front window. He tumbled into the front room, got his bearings – and retrieved an Armalite. Then he stepped outside, saw his pursuers barrelling towards the house, trained the Armalite on them, and started shooting. The men scrambled for cover and fired back. Then, out of nowhere, two Saracen armoured vehicles materialised, rumbling down the road. They stopped abruptly, and suddenly the men were gone. Hughes stood there, panting, processing what he had just witnessed. The gunmen had been dressed like civilians. But they had escaped in a British Army vehicle. They weren’t civilians – they were British Army. That was when Hughes looked down and realised he was bleeding.
Hughes had grown up surrounded by Protestants, in a predominantly Protestant enclave of West Belfast. When he was a child, during the 1950s, many of his friends were Protestant kids. There was an old woman who lived on the street who would spit every time he passed her house and ask if he had blessed himself with the pope’s piss that morning. But for the most part he coexisted peacefully with the Protestants around him. Hughes was not yet ten years old when his mother died of cancer, leaving his father, Kevin, a bricklayer, to care for six children alone. Kevin never remarried. Two of Brendan’s brothers emigrated to Australia in search of work, and he stepped up, helping his father raise his younger siblings. Kevin would go out to work, and Brendan would be in charge of the kids at home. His father described him, in a modest expression that still counted as the highest praise, as a ‘lad you could depend upon’.
In 1967, Hughes joined the British Merchant Navy and went to sea. He voyaged to the Middle East and to South Africa, where he witnessed up close the horrors of apartheid. By the time he returned two years later, Belfast had erupted into violence. Though he never spoke of it, Brendan’s father had been a member of the IRA in his youth. One of Kevin’s friends from that era was Billy McKee, the famous hard-line paramilitary who had helped to establish the Provos, and Brendan was brought up to revere McKee as a legendary patriot and gunman. When the family walked to Mass on Sunday mornings, they would pass McKee’s house on McDonnell Street, and Brendan felt as though he should genuflect out of respect for the man. Once, in some scullery where tea was being made after a funeral, he spotted McKee in conversation with some other adults. Brendan deliberately brushed against him and felt the bracing hardness of the .45 under his belt. Unable to control his curiosity, Brendan asked McKee if he could see the weapon, and McKee showed it to him.
When Brendan Hughes left to join the merchant navy, his father made a peculiar request: ‘Never get a tattoo.’ It was common for sailors to tattoo their bodies, and Hughes would have found himself in various tattoo parlours across Europe and the Far East, waiting while his mates submitted to the needle. But he honoured his father’s request. Kevin never gave any specific rationale for the admonition, apart from suggesting, vaguely, that a tattoo was an ‘identifiable mark’. But years later, Brendan would reflect on that moment, wondering whether his father might have had some premonition about the road that he would end up taking.
At the call house on Sultan Street, he was losing blood quickly. But not from a gunshot. When he crashed through the front window, the broken glass had severed an artery in his wrist. The call house was blown now; it would not be safe to remain there. So several colleagues hustled Hughes to another house a short distance away. He badly needed medical attention, but getting him to a hospital was out of the question: the army had sent men to execute him, and there was no policy of sanctuary that might protect him in a medical facility. The alternative was getting a doctor to come to Hughes, but that would pose a different sort of challenge. The men who tried to kill him had disappeared, but Saracens were still patrolling the neighbourhood, no doubt searching for him. Hughes was trapped inside the house, like some wounded animal, the blood pumping out of his arm with each beat of his heart.
Half an hour went by.