On her controller screen, the four men become clear. They are wearing oilskins. They are hosing down a filter rig. The ground is black with chemical waste. Byrne feels the familiar rage—a cold, procedural anger. This is not a drug deal. This is environmental murder. This is the slow poisoning of the groundwater that feeds the local wells, the streams that run into the salmon fishery.
Byrne pulls up ten feet from the van. He does not get off the trike. He is a monument. The trike’s engine idles, a deep, guttural promise. Aoife is recording everything. Trike Patrol - Irish
They dismount. This is the vulnerable moment. The trike is their mothership, their comms hub, their ballistic shield. But on foot, they are just two Guards in high-vis jackets with a telescopic baton and a can of incapacitant spray. The firearms unit is thirty minutes away. They are not here to make an arrest. They are here to observe, to record, to deter. On her controller screen, the four men become clear
He vaults back onto the trike. Aoife is already on the rear seat, the drone stowed. Byrne twists the throttle. The trike surges forward, the front suspension soaking up the rutted ground. They burst out of the pallet yard and onto the grass verge. One of the men is running toward a white van. Another is throwing buckets into the back of a pickup. The ground is black with chemical waste
Byrne nods. This is the dance. The trike is not for high-speed pursuits on the motorway. That is for the Mitsubishis and the Audi estates. The trike is for the margins . It is for the farm lanes that lead to abandoned piers. It is for the boreens that cut behind the fuel depot. It is for the land that is neither land nor sea—the transitional zone where fuel laundering, cigarette smuggling, and more organised darkness bleed into the rural landscape.
His partner tonight is Garda Aoife Ní Raghallaigh. She is twenty-nine, sharp, and thinks the trike is "a tractor for people who don’t like mud." But she volunteered for the unit. She likes the comms silence. In a car, the radio chatters. On the trike, with the helmet intercom, there is only the sound of their breathing and the growl of the Rotax engine.