The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks Read Online Free Page A

out of the most secure facility in Western Europe.
    It was a major propaganda coup for the IRA. All the government at Westminster could do was order an enquiry – which spread the blame for the escape around, although it did also commend a number of the prison officers for their actions during the hectic afternoon. But there were immediate consequences for those left behind.
    The prisoners in H7 heard about the confusion at the Tally Lodge and realized that the RUC and the Army would shortly be arriving at the Maze. They returned to their cells, leaving the captured warders still tied up. The guards were eventually rescued, and that evening the H7 inmates were moved across to H8, going past a group of very annoyed prison warders armed with batons and German Shepherd dogs who took out their anger on the prisoners. Armstrong, who had been innocently caught up in the escape, was treated as an accomplice and also beaten up.
    Operation Vesper was put into effect. A cordon was established around the Maze and border patrols were stepped up to find any of the IRA men who were trying to slip through to the south. It was, as one police officer told
Time
magazine, “like trying to corner a pack of wolves”. Prisoners tried to hijack vehicles: fifteen of them including Gerry Kelly and Bik McFarlane stole cars from a local farm, but when one of them failed to move sufficiently quickly, three of them appropriated a sports car from a young lad, who they then had to ask how to operate it!
    Around half of the original group from H7 were recaptured within twenty-four hours. Three had never made it off the prison site in the first place. A group of prison warders followed some of the escapees through a hole in the fence that they had torn, out in the fields towards the river Lagan, finding pieces of discarded prison officer uniform along the way. Fired up by the news that at least one of their colleagues had been killed, they ran on the IRA men’s trail, joined by RUC officers. As the Army and RUC set up a checkpoint on the road, the warders started to investigate along the banks of the Lagan, and spotted bubbles coming up from behind some reeds. Bobby Storey and two others were caught there; Sean McGlinchey was apprehended a few minutes later. They had been free from the Maze for a mere half an hour. Storey was released in 1994, but rearrested in 1996 on other charges. Although he has been accused (under parliamentary privilege) of being head of intelligence for the IRA, he now lectures on the Maze escape.
    None of the escapees was able to meet up with the assistance that had been provided for them by the IRA GHQ; upon hearing the news of the way the break out had unfolded, they had quietly disappeared. Some escapees were caught at roadblocks, others found in the fields and nearby towns by the searching Army and RUC patrols. Patrick McIntyre and Hugh Corey held a fifty-five-year-old woman hostage in her home in the foothills of the Mourne Mountains, twenty-five miles south of Belfast, and held out for two hours before surrendering.
    Others made it considerably further. Bik McFarlane, with a group of seven others, took a family hostage at a farmhouse, and eventually they were all able to make a clean getaway when McFarlane persuaded the woman of the house not to reveal their presence. Rather than allow the IRA men to take her oldest child hostage to ensure her silence, the woman, and the rest of her family, swore on the Bible that they would say nothing for seventy-two hours. They kept to their word. McFarlane requisitioned materials from the house, and told the owner that she could collect recompense from Sinn Fein headquarters in Belfast. Then he and his group made their way along country roads at night to south Armagh, a republican stronghold where they were able to meet up with IRA colleagues and be smuggled across the border.
    Gerry Kelly and his group made their way to Lurgan, and were able eventually to make contact with republican