READ NINE LIVES CHAPTER ONE FREE

I was twenty — still wet behind the ears, barely old enough to vote. Yet there I was: sat in a freezing flat in Belfast, holding an envelope that marked the line between who I’d been, and who I was about to become.

The heater clicked uselessly in the corner, coughing out lukewarm air while a cold draught slipped through the rattling window frames. My fingers trembled. Not from fear, not exactly, but from the quiet throb of adrenaline building beneath my skin.

Mike, my handler, stood by the door — arms folded, face unreadable.

He wasn’t there to offer reassurance; he watched, silent, sizing me up like a man checking a tool before putting it to work.

‘This is what you’re here for.’

He sat beside Carl as I opened the envelope and laid the contents on the table — a table stained with ash and tea from jobs gone by. I spread the photographs, surveillance notes, routes, and routines in front of me.

And there he was. My first target.

Who was he? Didn’t matter. All I needed to know was he was a fucking scumbag, and if we didn’t finish the job, more innocent women and children would die.

Our work wasn’t about punishment or justice. It was about prevention. Quietly. Permanently. We only got called in when the system had already failed. If the Spooks, the RUC, or the military could’ve taken him down, they would have.

But this one — he was unobtainable. A key player in a very active IRA cell. And he wasn’t planning something small. This was headline violence — an imminent attack on innocent people in the heart of Belfast. Apart from causing more death and destruction in the region, it posed a significant threat to the already fragile peace process.

The Unit didn’t exist on paper, so any evidence obtained by them was inadmissible. Worse still, as a very active IRA terrorist, an incited sectarian killing would create even more chaos for the peace agreement — so that wasn’t an option.

This scumbag walked the streets with his head held high, taunting the RUC and the British Army to the point of unprecedented blatancy. Untouchable. And very dangerous.

There was only one way to deal with this kind of problem: unleash a highly trained lone wolf — a ghost in the shadows, bound by no laws, no rules, no conscience, to erase the problem without a trace.

Carl looked it over, eyes sharp despite his laid-back posture. Mike, still stone-faced, skimmed the pages like he was checking a shopping list, not signing off on a kill.

It wasn’t going to be an easy first job, but my oppos had been around the block, so I was confident a plan would soon be in place.

We had plenty of detail in the envelope, and the unit had already bugged the bedroom, toilet, living room, and garden of his house. They’d also set up an OP in a derelict terrace across the street. That kind of coverage meant one thing: this was sanctioned from the highest level.  We were just the sharp end.

We moved into the OP for three days and took turns watching him live his joyless little life. He was angry, paranoid, and confidently routine — which made him vulnerable.

Clearly unhappily married, with two gobshite teenagers at home — a midnight visit was out of the question.

But intelligence had identified that he liked a drink. Twice a week, like clockwork, he visited the same smoke-stained pub a mile from his house. Four hours, five pints of bitter, and two whisky chasers. Then he staggered home. Alone.

And like most creatures of habit, always the same route — across an old, dimly lit river flyover. Perfect.

The flyover would be the stage: a tragic, drunken stumble into a swollen river. But we knew it wouldn’t be that easy. This guy was highly trained. Even drunk, he could survive the fall — fight his way to the surface.

So, someone would need to make sure he didn’t come back up.

Guess who pulled that straw? Typical. New lad gets to take a swim. Can’t say I was surprised.

To do it cleanly, I’d strap twenty kilos of weights to my back and thighs — enough to drag us both under, fast. I’d also take a compact oxygen tank — enough air to hold him down through the struggle and make the underwater withdrawal to the RV.

The irony didn’t escape me. A few months earlier, I’d been sitting in a jail cell thinking my life was over. Now I was preparing to drown a man in a river. Funny what life turns you into when you stop asking questions.

With the job firmly planned, we waited for his next venture out to the pub.

Two nights later — green light. He was on the move.

We parked two streets away from the pub. Engine off. Condensation creeping up the windows.

Outside, Belfast was soaked in a thin, steady drizzle — the kind of night that hides everything.

Sat geared up in the back seat, oxygen tank secure, weights tight, compass bezel set for my underwater heading, it felt like my heart was trying to escape my chest.

Mike sat in the driver’s seat. Carl watched the rear-view.

No one spoke; we knew what was about to happen.

At 23:30, the target emerged — alone, slurring, lighting a cigarette with hands that barely worked; head down, collar turned up.

We tailed him slowly, tyres whispering across the wet tarmac. No one else around. He turned onto the bridge. The flyover was as expected — half-lit, one flickering lamp at the far end. River below, black and quiet, just a faint roar from the current. The street was empty, and the drizzle deflected the light from the pavement. It was like we’d planned the weather conditions. They were perfect cover for the job.

Mike drove past the target and pulled the car into a lay-by halfway across the bridge, then killed the engine. The hum of the road vanished, replaced by the low hiss of rain on metal.

We sat in silence, hidden behind steamed-up windows, blacked out like the kit we were wearing.

Silent shadows in a steel box.

The target staggered past, oblivious. His boots slapped the tarmac, too merry to notice the eyes watching him from six feet away.

We stepped out. No noise. No words. Just movement — clean and practised. Carl out first to cause a distraction. Then me. Oxygen in place.

Black trainers soft on the road. My breath fogged inside my balaclava.

He was right where we needed him.

I approached — fast, quiet. A quick grab, a shift of weight, a silent step back — and we were airborne, flipping him over the five-foot wall to land face-down in the black water below.

The river hit like a freight train made of ice — a shock to every nerve ending. He was out cold the second his face hit the water, as expected.

The weights did their job, dragging us deep, fast. I pulled my arms tight up his back and locked my legs around his.

When the fight came — and it did come — I was ready.

He thrashed like a wild animal, but he couldn’t get leverage. I had him. Arms pinned. Legs tangled.

Panic took over. And with that came the involuntary gasps.

One mouthful. Then another. Then silence.

At ten feet down, all I could think was:

fuck me, this river is freezing.

After a full minute of dead silence, I let him go. His body drifted like a broken shadow into the black. I kicked off hard, the compass on my wrist my only lifeline as I swam blind through five brutal minutes of freezing darkness.

Midway through, I unclipped the weights and ditched them into the dirt below. Every muscle in my body screamed. My lungs burned like fire in my chest. But I held the line. I made it.

Mike opened the door enough to let me in. He’d cranked the heater and had a flask ready. I didn’t say a word as I rammed my wet gear into a holdall and pulled on dry clothes. Carl gave me a nod. That was enough.

We checked the tapes back at the OP. Everything clean. No cars. No pedestrians. No loose ends.

But I’d surfaced with more than water on me. Something had shifted. Not loud, not sudden. Like the part of me that held any trace of innocence didn’t come back up. Something had changed. And all I had now was the realisation that I had just killed a man in cold blood.

And just like that, I wasn’t pretending anymore.

I was the thing they trained me to be.

The body washed up downriver the next day. No suspicions. A tragic, drunken accident.

Belfast moved on. The IRA didn’t.

Their men were all over the house within hours — raging, mourning, reorganising. The bugs still in place picked up everything: names, plans, phone calls, panic.

By the time the original operatives took the OP back, it was a goldmine of actionable intelligence.

It sent shockwaves. The rest of his unit went to ground, plans stalled, infighting started. Within two weeks the whole cell had collapsed inward — and we didn’t lift another finger. One body in the river had undone an entire cell. Job done.

Later that night, with the whisky warming through the last of the river chill, I waited for the hit — guilt, shame, pride, something.

Nothing came. Not shock. Not denial. Just silence.

And that terrified me more than anything.

Because if it could be that easy once, it could be easier next time. And easier again after that — until the noise, the faces, the justifications… fade into background static.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about killing.

You think the first one will break you.

But what really breaks you is realising it didn’t.

I slept like a baby that night — no conscience, only silence. And in that silence, something I’d spent my whole life holding back — in playgrounds, in betrayal, in every moment I didn’t snap — finally breathed.

The monster was out.

Little did I know then how much he would grow.

You never forget your first.