The Marching Season

husband.
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    COUNTY TYRONE, NORTHERN IRELAND
    Shortly after Northern Ireland exploded into violence in 1969, British Intelligence decided that the best way to combat terrorism was to track the movements of individual terrorists. Known members of paramilitary organizations are routinely followed and monitored by British Intelligence and by E4, the special surveillance unit of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Sightings and movements are fed into a computer at army intelligence headquarters in Belfast. If a terrorist suddenly vanishes from a watch list, the computer automatically raises a red flag; the security forces assume he is probably involved in an operation.
    Surveillance of such magnitude requires thousands of officers and advanced technology. Trouble spots, like the Falls Road in Belfast, are covered by a multitude of video cameras. The army maintains a post atop the towering Divis Flats. During the day, soldiers scan the streets with high-powered binoculars, looking
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    for known members of the IRA; at night they search with infrared night-vision glasses. The security services place tracking devices in cars. They place listening devices and miniature video cameras in homes, pubs, automobiles, and hay sheds. They monitor telephones. They have even planted bugs in individual weapons to track their movements throughout the province. Sophisticated intelligence aircraft patrol the skies, looking for human activity at night where there should be none. Small pilotless drones perform low-level reconnaissance. Sensors are hidden in trees to detect human movement.
    But despite all the high-tech equipment, much of the monitoring must be done the old-fashioned way, with man-on-man surveillance. It is dangerous work, sometimes deadly. Undercover officers routinely patrol the Falls Road area of Belfast. They hide in attics and on rooftops for days on subsistence rations, photographing their quarry. In the countryside they hide in holes, behind bushes, atop trees. In the lexicon of Northern Ireland intelligence, this practice is known as "digging in." It was the method chosen to monitor the tumbledown farmhouse outside the village of Cranagh in the Sperrin Mountains.
    Graham Seymour arrived from London on the sixth day of the operation. For their static post they had chosen a clump of gorse, surrounded by a stand of tall beech trees, on a hillside about a half mile from the house. A pair of E4 officers handled the technical equipment: long-lens and infrared cameras, long-range directional microphones. They worked as quietly as altar boys and looked as young. They playfully introduced themselves as Marks and Sparks.
    Over the years the IRA had ambushed and killed dozens of intelligence officers on surveillance; even though the targets were suspected Loyalists they took no chances. Two commandos from the elite Special Air Service, the SAS, formed a protective
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    perimeter around Graham and Marks and Sparks. They wore camouflage gear and blacked out their faces with greasepaint. Twice, Graham nearly tripped over them while relieving himself in the gorse. He longed for a cigarette, but smoking wasn't allowed. After three days of eating nothing but special high-calorie sludge he was desperate for even Helen's appalling cooking. At night, sleeping on the damp freezing hillside, he silently cursed Michael Osbourne's name.
    It was clear something wasn't right about the farmhouse in the small glen below them. A pair of brothers called Dalton owned it. They tended a small flock of scrawny sheep and a few dozen chickens. Each day, once in the morning and again at dusk, they slowly walked the edge of their land, as if looking for signs of trouble.
    They received their first visitor on the tenth night.
    He arrived in a small Nissan sedan. Marks and Sparks fired away rapidly with their infrared cameras, while Graham peered down toward the farmhouse through night-vision binoculars. He saw a tall, powerfully built man with a head of unruly hair, carrying a tennis bag over his right shoulder.
    "What do you think?" Graham asked no one in particular.
    "He's trying to make it look light," Marks said, "but the shoulder strap is straining."
    "He's definitely not carrying rackets and balls in that thing," said Sparks.
    Graham picked up a small radio and contacted the RUC station in Cookstown, fifteen miles to the southeast.
    "We have company. Stand by for further instructions."
    The visitor remained inside the