It took them three hours to do a journey that normally took fifty minutes.
The M1 north of Drogheda was half closed. Every junction had soldiers on it, waving civilian cars off at the slip roads and military traffic through. Twice James and Finn were pulled in behind a column of trucks and sat there with the engine running while a line of olive-green vehicles went past them in the fast lane, nose to tail, heading north. Once an ambulance came down the other side with its lights going and then another, and then a third. None of them had their sirens on.
