Father Dermot O’Brien received the message from Libya by the normal route for such first communications—by mail.
It was a perfectly ordinary letter, and had anyone opened it—which they had not, because the Republic of Ireland does not intercept mail—they would have found nothing of interest in it. The postmark said that it came from Geneva, as indeed it had, and the return address indicated the writer worked for the World Council of Churches, which he did not.
Father O’Brien found it in his pigeonhole in the main hall beside the refectory one morning in the early spring of 1987 as he emerged from taking his breakfast. He glanced through the other four letters addressed to him, but his gaze returned to the one from Geneva. It bore the slight pencil mark on the rear flap that told him it should not be opened in public or left lying around.
The priest nodded amiably to two colleagues about to enter the refectory and went back to his bedroom on the first floor.
The letter had been typed on the usual onionskin airmail paper. The text was warm and friendly, beginning “My dear Dermot ... ,” and was written in the tone of one old friend involved in pastoral work to another. Even though the World Council of Churches is a Protestant organization, no casual observer would have seen anything strange in a Lutheran clergyman writing to a friend who happened to be a Catholic priest. These were the days of cautious ecumenism, especially in the international field.
The friend in Geneva wished him well, trusted he was in good health and chatted about the work of the WCC in the Third World. The meat was in the third paragraph of the script. The writer said that his bishop recalled with pleasure a previous meeting with Father O’Brien and would be delighted to meet him again. The signoff was simply, “Your good friend Harry.”
Father O’Brien laid the letter down thoughtfully and gazed from his window across the green fields of County Wicklow toward Bray and, beyond it, the gray waters of the Irish Sea. The waters were hidden by the roll of the hills, and even the spires of Bray were dim and distant from the old manor house at Sandymount that contained the headquarters of his Order. But the sun shone brightly on the green meadows that he loved so dearly, as dearly indeed as he hated the great enemy that lay beyond the sea.
The letter intrigued him. It had been so long, almost two years, since he had visited Tripoli for a personal audience with Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, the Great Leader of the Libyan Jamahariya, Keeper of Allah’s Word, the man referred to as “the bishop” in the letter.
It had been a rare and privileged occasion, but despite the flowery language, the soft voice, and the extravant promises, nothing had finally been forthcoming. No money, no arms for the Irish Cause. Finally, it had been a disappointment and the man who had arranged the meeting, Hakim al-Mansour, head of the foreign arm of the Libyan Secret Service, the Moukhabarat, who now signed himself “Harry,” had been apologetic.
And now this, a summons, for that was what it was. Though no time had been suggested for the meeting with the bishop, Father O’Brien knew none was necessary. Harry meant “without delay.” Although the Arabs can delay for years when they are so minded, when Qaddafi summoned in this manner, one went—if one wanted his largesse.
Father O’Brien knew that his trusted friends in the Cause did indeed want that largesse. Funds from America were down; the constant appeals from the Dublin government—men Father O’Brien regarded as traitors—not to send arms and money to Ireland had had their effect. It would not be wise to ignore the summons from Tripoli. The snag would be to find a good excuse to travel again so soon.
In a perfect world, Father O’Brien could have done with a few weeks’ break. He had but three days earlier returned from Amsterdam, ostensibly from a seminar of the War on Want.
During his time in Europe he had been able to slip away from Amsterdam and, using funds he had earlier salted away in Utrecht, take two long-term leases in false names for one apartment in Roermond, Holland, and another in Münster, West Germany. These would later become safe houses for the young heroes who would go over there to carry the war to the enemy where they least expected it.
Traveling was, for Dermot O’Brien, a constant part of his life. His Order busied itself with missionary and ecumenical work, and he was its International Secretary. It was the perfect cover for the war. Not the War on Want, but the war against the English, which had been his calling and his life since he had held the broken head of the dying young man in Derry all those years ago and seen the British paratroopers running down the street, and spoken the last rites, and made his other, personal vow, of which his Order and his bishop knew nothing.
Since then, he had nurtured and honed his visceral loathing of the people across the water and had offered his services to the Cause. They had been welcomed, and for ten years he had been the principal international “fixer” for the Provisional IRA. He had raised the funds, moved the money from one deep-cover bank account to another, secured false passports, and arranged for the safe arrival and storage of the Semtex and the detonators.
With his help, the bombs in Regent’s Park and Hyde Park had torn apart the young bandsmen and the horses; through his assistance, the sharpened coach bolts had scythed through the street outside Harrods, ripping out entrails and severing limbs. He regretted that it was necessary, but he knew it was just. He read the reports in the newspapers and watched beside his horrified colleagues in the television room at the manor; and he would go, when invited by a colleague in parish work, and take the Mass with a calm soul.
His problem that spring morning was fortuitously solved by a small announcement in the Dublin Press, a copy of which was still lying across his bed where he had read it while drinking his morning tea.
His room also served as his office, and he had his own telephone. He made two calls, and during the second he received a warm welcome to join the group whose forthcoming pilgrimage had been announced in the paper. Then he went to see his Superior.
“I need the experience, Frank,” he said. “If I stay in the office the phone never stops ringing. I need the peace, and the time to pray. If you can spare me, I would like to go.”
The Superior glanced at the itinerary and nodded.
“Go with my blessing, Dermot. Pray for us all while you are there.”
The pilgrimage was one week away. Father O’Brien knew he did not need to contact the Army Council to ask them also for permission. If he had news when he returned, so much the better. If not, no need to trouble the Army Council. He sent a letter to London, paying the extra to guarantee twenty-four-hour delivery, knowing it would reach the Libyan People’s Bureau—the Libyan government’s term for its embassies— within three days. That would give Tripoli time to make their arrangements.
A week later, the pilgrimage began with Mass and prayers at the Irish shrine of Knock. Thence it moved to Shannon Airport and a chartered jet to Lourdes, in the foothills of the French Pyrenees. There Father O’Brien slipped away from the crowd of lay men and women, nuns and priests, who made up the pilgrims, and boarded the small charter plane waiting for him at the Lourdes airport. It deposited him four hours later at Valletta, Malta, where the Libyans took him over. Their unmarked executive jet landed at a small military base outside Sirte just twenty-four hours after the Irish priest had departed from Shannon. Hakim al-Mansour, urbane and gracious as ever, was there to meet him.
Because of the urgency of getting back to Lourdes and rejoining the group of pilgrims, there was no meeting with Colonel Qaddafi. In fact, it had never even been envisaged. This was an operation al-Mansour had been charged to handle alone. The two men talked in a room at the base set aside for them and ringed by al-Mansour’s personal guards. When they had finished and the Irishman had snatched a few hours’ sleep, he left again for Malta and Lourdes. He was excited. What he had learned, if it came to fruition, would constitute a huge breakthrough for his Cause.
Hakim al-Mansour secured his personal interview with the Great Leader three days later. He was summoned, as always, at a moment’s notice to present himself at the place where Qaddafi was staying that day. Since the bombing of the previous year, the Libyan leader had taken more than ever to shifting his quarters from place to place, spending more and more time out in the desert, an hour’s drive from Tripoli.
He was in what al-Mansour privately called “the Bedouin mood” that day, lounging at ease on a pile of cushions in a large and ornate tent at his desert encampment, dressed in a white kaftan. He appeared as languid as ever as he listened to the reports of the two nervous ministers who sat cross-legged before him. The ministers, townsmen by birth, would clearly have preferred to be seated behind their desks. But if the Great Leader’s whim was that they squat on cushions on the carpet, they would squat on cushions.
Qaddafi acknowledged al-Mansour’s entry with a gesture of the hand to be seated to one side and await his turn. When the ministers had been dismissed, Qaddafi took a sip of water and asked for a report on progress.
The younger officer gave his report without frills or exaggerations. Like all those around the Libyan leader, he was somewhat in awe of Muammar Qaddafi. The man was an enigma, and men are always in awe of an enigma, especially one who, with a wave of his hand, could require your immediate execution.
Al-Mansour knew that many foreigners, particularly the Americans, including those at the highest level, believed Qaddafi to be mad. He, al-Mansour, knew there was nothing mad about Muammar Qaddafi. The man would not have survived eighteen years of supreme and unquestioned mastery of this turbulent, fragmented, and violent land if he had been deranged.
He was in fact a subtle and skilled political operator. He had made his mistakes, and he entertained his illusions—notably about the world outside his own country and his status in that world. He genuinely believed he was a lonely superstar, occupying the center of the world stage. He really believed that his long, rambling speeches were received with reverence by millions of “the masses” beyond his own borders as he encouraged them to overthrow their own leaders and accept his inevitable supremacy in the cause of the purification of Islam according to the message he had personally received to accomplish this task. No one in his personal entourage dared to contradict this.
But within Libya he was unchallenged and virtually unchallengeable. He relied for advice upon a small circle of trusted intimates. Ministers would come and go, but his personal inner circle, unless he suspected one of them of treachery, had his ear and wielded the real power. Few of them knew anything about that strange place “abroad.” On this, Hakim al-Mansour, raised in a British public school, was the expert. Al-Mansour knew Qaddafi had a soft spot for him. It was justified—the head of the foreign arm of the Mukhabarat had, in younger days, proved his loyalty by personally executing three of Qaddafi’s political opponents in their European bolt-holes.
Still, the Bedouin dictator needed careful handling. Some did this with flowery flattery. Al-Mansour suspected Qaddafi accepted the flattery but took it with a pinch of salt. Al-Mansour’s own approach was respectful, but he did not varnish the truth. Rather, he phrased the truth carefully and certainly did not offer all of it—that would have been suicidal. But he suspected that behind the dreamy smile and the almost effeminate gestures, Muammar Qaddafi wanted to be told the truth.
That day, in April 1987, Hakim al-Mansour told his leader of the visit of the Irish priest and of their discussions. As he talked, one of Qaddafi’s personal team of doctors, who had been mixing a potion at a table in the corner, approached and offered the small cup to Qaddafi. The Libyan leader swallowed the draught and waved the doctor away. The man packed up his medicaments and a few minutes later left the tent.
Although a year had passed since the American bombers had devastated his personal living quarters, Muammar Qaddafi had not completely recovered. He still suffered occasional nightmares and the effects of hypertension. The doctor had given him a mild sedative.
“The fifty-fifty split of the material—it is accepted?” he asked now.
“The priest will report that condition,” said al-Mansour. “I am confident the Army Council will agree.”
“And the matter of the American ambassador?”
“That, too.”
Qaddafi sighed, in the manner of one on whose shoulders too many of the world’s burdens are placed. “Not enough,” he said dreamily. “There must be more. On mainland America.”
“The search goes on, Excellency. The problem remains the same. In Britain, the Provisional IRA will exact your just revenge for you. The infidels will destroy the infidels at your behest. It was a brilliant idea.”
The idea of using the Provisional IRA as the conduit and tool of Qaddafi’s revenge on Britain had actually come from the brain of al-Mansour, but Qaddafi now believed the notion had been his, inspired by Allah.
Al-Mansour went on: “In America there is, alas, no in-place partisan network that can be used in the same way. The search goes on. The tools of your vengeance will be found.”
Qaddafi nodded several times, then gestured that the interview was over. “See to it,” he murmured softly.
The gathering of intelligence is a strange business. Rarely does one single coup provide all the answers, let alone solve all the problems. The search for the single, wonderful solution is a particularly American trait. Mostly, the picture appears as if a jigsaw puzzle is being carefully assembled, piece by piece. Usually, the last dozen pieces never appear at all; a good intelligence analyst will discern the picture from a collection of fragments.
Sometimes the pieces themselves do not come from the jigsaw picture under study at all, but from another one. Sometimes the pieces are themselves untrue. And they never lock together quite as neatly as in a real jigsaw puzzle, with the fretted edges of each and every piece matched.
There are men at Century House, home of the British Secret Intelligence Service, who are experts at jigsaw puzzles. They seldom leave their desks; the gatherers—the field agents—are the ones who bring in the pieces. The analysts try to assemble them. Before the end of April, two pieces of a new puzzle had arrived at Century House.
One came from the Libyan doctor who had given Qaddafi his medicine in the tent. The man had once had a son whom he dearly loved. The student had been in England trying to become an engineer when the Mukhabarat had approached him and suggested that if he loved his father, he should carry out a task for the Great Leader. The bomb they had given him to plant had gone off prematurely. The father had hidden his grief well and had accepted the condolences, but his heart had turned to hatred, and he passed what information he could glean from his position at the court of Muammar Qaddafi to the British.
His report of half a conversation, which he had heard in the tent before he was dismissed, was not sent via the British Embassy in Tripoli, for this was watched night and day. Instead, it went to Cairo, arriving a week later. From Cairo it was flashed to London, where it was considered important enough to go straight to the top.
“He’s going to do what?” asked the Chief, when he was told.
“It seems he has offered a gift of explosives and weaponry to the IRA,” said Timothy Edwards, who had that month been promoted from Assistant Chief to Deputy Chief. “That, at least, seems to be the only interpretation of the overheard conversation.”
“How was the offer made?”
“Apparently via an Irish priest flown in to Libya.”
“Do we know which one?”
“No, sir. Might not be a real priest at all. Could be a cover for an Army Council man. But the offer seems to have originated with Qaddafi.”
“Right. Well, we must find out who this mysterious cleric is. I’ll tell the Box and see if they have anything. If he’s in the North, he’s theirs. If he’s in the South or elsewhere, we take him.”
“Box Five Hundred” is the in-house slang term for MI-5, the British Security Service, the internal counterintelligence arm that has the task of counterterrorism in Northern Ireland, as British territory. The SIS had the mandate for intelligence and offensive counterintelligence operations outside Britain, including the Republic of Ireland, the “South.”
The Chief lunched with his colleague, the Director General of MI-5 that same day. The third man at the table was the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee; it would be his job to alert the Cabinet Office.
Two days later, an MI-5 operation came up with the second piece of the jigsaw puzzle.
There was nothing foreseen about it; it was just one of those flukes that occasionally make life easier. A young IRA man, driving a car with an Armalite in the trunk, came up against an unexpected roadblock manned by the Royal Ulster Constabulary. The teenager hesitated, thought of the rifle in his car—which would guarantee him several years imprisonment in the Maze jail—and tried to crash the roadblock.
He almost made it. Had he been more experienced, he might have. The sergeant and two constables at the roadblock had to throw themselves to one side as the stolen car suddenly surged ahead. But a third officer, standing well back, brought up his rifle and fired four shots into the accelerating car. One of them took off the top of the teenager’s head.
He was only a messenger boy, but the IRA decided he merited a full funeral with military honors. It took place in Bollycrane, the dead youth’s native village, a small place in South Armagh. The grieving family was comforted by Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams and asked for a favor. Would they allow a visiting priest, presented as a longtime friend of the family, to conduct the funeral service in place of the parish priest? The family, hardline Republicans all, with another son serving life for murder, agreed without hesitation. The service was duly conducted by Father Dermot O’Brien.
A little-known fact about the funerals of IRA men buried in Northern Ireland is that they provide a constant and useful venue for IRA leaders to get together and confer. The ceremonies are extremely tightly controlled by IRA “hard men.”
* * *
Usually, every single person among the mourners—men, women, and children—is a staunch supporter of the IRA. In some of the small villages of South Armagh and Fermanagh and South Tyrone, entire villages down to the last inhabitant are fanatic supporters.
The TV cameras are often fixed upon the ceremony, and the IRA chiefs, shielded by the crowd even from lip-reading, can hold muttered conferences, plan, decide, relay information, or set up future operations—not always an easy task for men under constant surveillance. For a British soldier or a Royal Ulster Constabulary man even to approach a funeral party would be a signal for a riot or even the murder of the soldier, as has been proved.
So a watch is kept with Long Tom cameras, but these usually cannot detect a muttered conversation from the side of the mouth. Thus, the IRA uses the supposed sanctity of death to plan further slaughter.
When the British first learned of this, they were not slow to catch up. It was once said that the most important thing an English gentleman ever learns is precisely when to stop being one.
So the British bug the coffins.
On the night before the funeral at Ballycrane, two Special Air Service soldiers, acting under cover in civilian clothes, broke into the funeral parlor where the empty coffin stood waiting for the morrow. The body, in Irish tradition, was still laid out in the family’s front parlor down the street. One of the soldiers was an electronics expert, the other a skilled French polisher and carpenter. Within an hour they implanted the bug in the woodwork of the coffin. It would have a short life, since before noon the next day it would be under six feet of earth.
From their deep cover on a hillside above the village the next day, the SAS soldiers kept watch on the funeral, photographing every face present with a camera whose lens resembled a bazooka tube. Another man monitored the sounds emanating from the device in the wood of the coffin as it came through the village street and into the church. The device recorded the entire funeral service, and the soldiers watched the coffin re-emerge and move toward the open grave.
The priest, his cassock billowing in the morning breeze, intoned the last words and scattered a little earth on the coffin as it went down. The sound of the earth hitting the woodwork caused the listening soldier to wince, it was so loud. Above the open grave, Father Dermot O’Brien stood beside a man known by the British to be the deputy Chief of Staff of the IRA Army Council. Heads down, lips hidden, they began to mutter.
What they said went onto the tape on the hillside. From there it went to Lurgan, thence to Aldergrove airport, and thence to London. It had been only a routine operation, but it had come up with pure gold. Father O’Brien had reported to the Army Council the full details of Colonel Qaddafi’s offer.
“How much?” asked Sir Anthony, the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, two days later in London.
“Twenty tons, Tony. That’s the offer.”
The Director General of MI-5 closed the file that his colleagues had just finished reading and returned it to his briefcase. The actual tape was not present. Sir Anthony was a busy man; a written synopsis was all he needed.
The tape had been with MI-5 in London for over a day, and they had been working fast. The sound quality, inevitably, had not been good. For one thing, the bugging device had been straining to hear the words through half a centimeter of wood, and it was being lowered downward into the grave as the conversation began. For another, there were extraneous sounds: the wailing of the young terrorist’s mother nearby, the rustle of the brisk wind across the open grave and through the priest’s flowing robes, the crack of the IRA honor guard in black balaclava woolen masks firing three rounds of blanks into the air.
A radio producer would have thought the tape a mess. But this tape was never intended for broadcast. Moreover, the technology of electronic sound-enhancement is very advanced. Carefully, sound engineers had phased out the background noises, “lifting” the spoken words into a different frequency mode and separating them from everything else. The voices of the officiating priest and the Army Council man beside him would never win prizes for elocution, but what they had said was clear enough.
“And the conditions?” asked Sir Anthony. “No doubt about them?”
“None,” said the DG. “Within the twenty tons will be the usual machine guns, rifles, grenades, launchers, mortars, pistols, timers, and bazookas—probably the Czech RPG-7. Plus two metric tons of Semtex-H. Of this, half must be used for a bombing campaign on mainland Britain, to include selective assassinations, including that of the American ambassador. Apparently the Libyans were very insistent on that.”
“Bobby, I want you to take it all to the SIS,” said Sir Anthony at last. “No interservice rivalry, if you please. Total cooperation, all the way. It looks as if this will be an overseas operation—their pigeon. From Libya right up to some godforsaken bay on the coast of Ireland, it’ll be a foreign operation. I want you to give them your absolute cooperation, from you downward.”
“No question,” said the DG. “They’ll have it.”
Before nightfall, the Chief of the SIS and his Deputy Timothy Edwards attended a full and lengthy briefing at the Curzon Street headquarters of their sister service. Exceptionally, the Chief was prepared to admit that he could, in part, corroborate the Ulster information from the report of the Libyan doctor. Normally, wild horses would not drag from him the slightest admission concerning SIS assets abroad, but this was not a normal situation.
He asked for, and was given, the cooperation he wanted. MI-5 would increase surveillance, both physical and electronic, on the IRA Army Council man. So long as Father O’Brien remained in the North, the same would apply to him. When he returned to the Irish Republic, the SIS would take over. Surveillance would also be doubled on the one other man mentioned in the graveside conversation, a man well known to British security forces but who had never yet been charged or imprisoned.
The Chief ordered his own networks in the Irish Republic to keep watch for the return of Father O’Brien, to tail him, and above all else, to alert London if he left by air or sea for foreign parts. A pickup would be much easier on the continent of Europe.
When he returned to Century House, the Chief summoned Sam McCready.
“Stop it, Sam,” he said finally. “Stop it at its source in Libya or in transit. Those twenty tons must not get through.”
Sam McCready sat for hours in a darkened viewing room watching the film of the funeral. As the tape played through the entire service inside the church, the camera roamed over the graveyard outside, picking up the handful of IRA guards placed there to ensure no one came near. They were all unrecognizable in black balaclava woolen masks.
When the cortege reemerged from the portico of the church to proceed to the open grave, with six masked pall-bearers carrying the coffin, McCready asked the technicians to synchronize sound and vision. Nothing remotely suspicious was said until the priest stood, his head bowed, by the grave with the IRA Army Council man beside him. The priest raised his head once to offer words of comfort to the teenager’s weeping mother.
“Freeze frame. Close-up. Enhance.”
When the face of Father O’Brien filled the screen, McCready stared at it for twenty minutes, memorizing every feature until he would know the face anywhere.
He read the transcript of the section of the tape in which the priest reported on his Libyan visit, over and over again. Later he sat alone and stared at photographs in his office.
One of the photographs was of Muammar Qaddafi, his bouffant black hair bulging from beneath his army cap, mouth half open as he spoke. Another was of Hakim al-Mansour, stepping out of a car in Paris, exquisitely tailored by Savile Row, smooth, urbane, bilingual in English, fluent in French, educated, charming, cosmopolitan, and utterly lethal. A third was the Chief of Staff, IRA Army Council, addressing a public meeting in Belfast in his other role as a law-abiding and responsible local government councilor of the Sinn Fein political party. There was a fourth picture: that of the man mentioned by the graveside as the one the Army Council would probably choose to take over and run the operation, the one Father O’Brien would have to introduce and recommend by letter to Hakim al-Mansour. The British knew he was a former commander of the IRA’s South Armagh Brigade, now removed from local tasks to head up Special Projects, a very intelligent, highly experienced, and ruthless killer. His name was Kevin Mahoney.
McCready stared at the photographs for hours, trying to glean some knowledge of the brains behind the faces. If he was to win, he would have to match his mind with theirs. So far, they had the edge. They knew, presumably, not only what they were going to do, but how they were going to do it. And when. He knew the first, but not the second or the third.
He had two advantages. One, he knew what they had in mind, but they did not know he knew. And two, he could recognize them, but they did not know him. Or did al-Mansour know his face? The Libyan had worked with the KGB; the Russians knew McCready. Had they briefed the Libyan on the face of the Deceiver?
The Chief was not prepared to take the risk.
“I’m sorry, Sam. You are absolutely not going in yourself. I don’t care if there’s only a one-percent chance they have your face on file, the answer is no. Nothing personal. But you are not, under any circumstances, being taken alive. I will not contemplate another Buckley affair.”
William Buckley, the CIA chief of station in Beirut, had been taken alive by the Hezbollah. He had died slowly and hideously. The zealots had finally sent the CIA a videotape, complete with soundtrack, as they skinned him alive. And of course he had talked, told it all.
“You’ll have to find someone else,” said the Chief. “And may the Lord look after him.”
So McCready went through the files, day after day, backward and forward, sifting and sorting, considering and rejecting. Eventually he came up with a name, a “possible.” And he took it to Timothy Edwards.
“You’re crazy, Sam,” said Edwards. “You know he’s absolutely unacceptable. MI-5 hate his guts. We’re trying to cooperate with them, and you produce this—turncoat. Dammit, he’s a literary renegade, a biter of the hand that fed him. We’d never employ him.”
“That’s the point,” said Sam quietly. Edwards shifted his ground.
“Anyway, he’d never work for us.”
“He might.”
“Give me one good reason why.”
McCready gave it.
“Well,” said Edwards, “as far as the record goes, the man’s an outsider. Use of him is forbidden. Absolutely forbidden. Is that clear?”
“Completely,” said McCready.
“On the other hand,” added Edwards, “you’ll probably follow your own instincts anyway.”
As McCready left the office, Edwards reached under the desk to flick off the hidden tape deck. Without the last sentence, he was covered. Thus are long and glittering careers created.
McCready, who had been tipped off about the tape machine by an old friend, the engineer who had installed it, muttered as he walked down the corridor, “All right, arsehole, you can start editing now.”
McCready had no illusions about the Provisional IRA. The journalists in the tabloid press who designated the Irish terrorist group as a bunch of dense idiots who occasionally got it right simply did not know what they were talking about.
It might have been like that in the old days, the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the IRA leadership was composed of a bunch of middle-aged ideologues in trenchcoats, carrying small-caliber handguns and making bombs in back-street garages from garden fertilizer. Those were the days when they could have been “taken out” and stopped in their tracks. But as usual, the politicians had got it wrong, underestimated the danger, accepted that the bombers were just an extension of the civil rights movement. Now, those days were long gone. By the mid-1980s, the IRA had graduated, becoming arguably the most efficient terrorist group in the world.
They had four qualities without which no terrorist group can survive for twenty years, as they had. First, they had a pool of tribal support, from whose youth a constant stream of new recruits could step in to fill the shoes of the dead and the “gone away”—those in prison. Although they had never had more than 150 active terrorists deployed at once and probably no more than twice that number of “active” supporters ready to offer safe houses, locations for arms caches, and technical backup, and although they had lost well over one hundred dead and several hundred gone away, the new young recruits constantly came forward from the die-hard Republican community in the North and the South to take their places. The recruit pool would never dry up.
Second, they had the safe refuge of the South, the Irish Republic, from which to mount operations into the British-ruled North. Though many lived permanently in the North, the South was always available, and into it a wanted terrorist could slip away and disappear. Had the six counties of Northern Ireland been an island, the IRA would have been coped with years ago.
Third, they had dedication and ruthlessness; there was no threshold of atrocity beyond which they would not go. Over the years, the old men of the late 1960s had been eased out, still nursing their idealistic fervor for the reunification of their island into a single United Ireland under democratic rule. In their place had come hard-nosed zealots of skill and cunning, whose education and good brains masked their cruelty. The new breed were dedicated to a United Ireland all right—but under their rule, and according to the principles of Marx, a dedication that still had to be kept hidden from their American cash-donors.
Last, they had established a constant supply of money, the real lifeblood of a terrorist or revolutionary campaign. In the early days, it had been a question of donations from the bars of Boston or the occasional local bank raid. By the mid-1980s, the Provisionals controlled a nationwide network of drinking clubs, protection rackets, and “normal” criminal enterprises that yielded a huge annual income with which to underpin the terror campaign. As they had learned about money, they had learned too about internal security, the need-to-know rule, and strict compartmentalization. The old days when they talked too much and drank too much had long gone.
Their Achilles’ heel was in the area of arms. Having the money to buy weapons was one thing. Parlaying money into M-60 machine guns, mortars, bazookas, or ground-to-air missiles was another. They had had their successes—and their failures. They had tried many operations to bring the arms from America, but usually the FBI got them first. They had had weapons from the Communist bloc, via Czechoslovakia, with a nod from the KGB. But since the arrival of Mr. Gorbachev, the Soviet preparedness to sanction terror in the West had waned and was finally disappearing.
The IRA needed arms, McCready knew; and if these were an offer, they would send in the best and the brightest to get them. Such were his thoughts as he steered his car out of the small town of Cricklade and across the unmarked county line into Gloucestershire.
The converted barn was where he had been told it would be, tucked down a side road, an old Cotswold stone affair that had once housed cattle and hay. Whoever had done the conversion to a quiet country house had worked hard and well. It was surrounded by a stone wall set with wagon wheels, and the garden was bright with late spring flowers. McCready drove through the gate and drew up outside the timber door. A pretty young woman, weeding a flowered border, put down her trowel and stood up.
“Hello,” she said. “Have you come about a rug?”
So, he thought, he’s selling rugs as a sideline. Perhaps the information about the books not selling too well was true.
“No, ’fraid not,” he said. “Actually, I’ve come to see Tom.”
Her smile faded, and an element of suspicion entered her eyes, as if she had seen men like him enter her husband’s life before and knew they meant trouble.
“He’s writing. In his shed at the bottom of the garden. He finishes in about an hour. Can you wait?”
“Certainly.”
She gave him coffee in the bright, chintz-curtained sitting room, and they waited. Conversation wilted. At last they heard the tramp of feet coming through the kitchen. She jumped up.
“Nikki—”
Tom Rowse appeared in the door and stopped. His smile did not flicker, but his eyes took in McCready and became very watchful.
“Darling, this gentleman has come to see you. We’ve been waiting. Would you like a coffee?”
He did not look at her, just kept his eyes on his visitor. “Sure, love a coffee.”
She left. McCready introduced himself. Rowse sat down. The records had said he was thirty-three. They did not say that he looked extremely fit. They did not need to.
Tom Rowse had been a captain in the Special Air Service regiment. Three years earlier, he had left the army, married Nikki, and bought a decrepit barn west of Cricklade. He had done the conversion himself, working out his rage through the long days of bricks and mortar, beams and rafters, windows and water pipes. He had hacked the rough meadow into smooth lawn, laid the flower beds, built the wall. That was by day; by night, he had written.
It had to be a novel, of course; a nonfiction work would have been banned under the Official Secrets Act. But even as a novel, his first book had caused outrage in the Curzon Street headquarters of MI-5. The book was about Northern Ireland, seen from the point of view of an undercover soldier, and it had mocked the counterintelligence efforts of MI-5.
The British Establishment can be very vindictive toward those it sees to have turned against it. Tom Rowse’s novel eventually found a publisher and came out to a modest success for a first novel by an unknown writer. The publishers had since commissioned a second book, on which he was now working. But the word had gone out from Curzon Street that Tom Rowse, former captain in the SAS, was an outsider, beyond the pale—not to be touched, approached, or helped in any way. He knew it, and he did not give a damn. He had built himself a new world with his new house and his new wife.
Nikki served coffee, absorbed the atmosphere, and left. She was Rowse’s first wife, but Rowse was not her first husband.
Four years earlier, Rowse, crouched behind a van in a mean street in West Belfast, had watched his friend Nigel Quaid move slowly forward like a giant armored crab toward a red Ford Sierra a hundred yards down the road.
Rowse and Quaid suspected there was a bomb in the trunk of the car. A controlled explosion would have disposed of it. The senior brass wanted the bomb defused if possible. The British know the identity of just about every IRA bomb-maker in Ireland. Each one of them leaves a personal signature in the way the bomb is assembled. That signature is blown apart if the bomb goes off, but if the bomb can be defused and retrieved, it provides a harvest of information: where the explosive came from, the source of the primer, the detonator, maybe even fingerprints. And even without fingerprints, usually the identity of the hands that put it together.
So Quaid, his friend since school days, had gone forward, swathed in body armor till he could hardly walk, to open the trunk and try to dismantle the antihandling devices. He had failed. The trunk lid had come open, but the device was taped on the underside of the lid. Quaid was looking downward, half a second too long. When daylight hit the photosensitive cell, the bomb went off. Despite Quaid’s armor, it removed his head.
Rowse had comforted the young widow, Nikki Quaid. The comfort had turned to affection, and affection to love. When he asked her to marry him, she had one condition: Leave Ireland, leave the Army. When she saw McCready today, she had suspected something, for she had seen men like him before. They were the quiet ones, always the quiet ones. It had been a quiet one who had come to Nigel that day and asked him to go to the mean street in West Belfast. Outside in the garden she dug angrily into the weeds while her man talked with the quiet one.
McCready spoke for ten minutes. Rowse listened. When the older man had finished, the ex-soldier said, “Look outside.”
McCready did so. The rich farming land stretched away to the horizon. A bird sang.
“I have made a new life here. Far away from that filth, from those scum. I’m out, McCready. Right out. Didn’t Curzon Street tell you that? I’ve made myself untouchable. A new life, a wife, a home that isn’t a soaking scrape in an Irish bog, even a modest living from the books. Why the hell should I go back?”
“I need a man, Tom. A man in on the ground. Inside. Able to move through the Middle East with a good cover. A face they don’t know.”
“Find another.”
“If that metric ton of Semtex-H goes off here in England, divided into five hundred two-kilo packages, there’ll be another hundred Nigel Quaids. Another thousand Mary Feeneys. I’m trying to stop it arriving, Tom.”
“No, McCready. Not me. Why the hell should I?”
“They’re putting a man in charge, from their side. Someone I think you know. Kevin Mahoney.”
Rowse stiffened as if he had been hit.
“He will be there?” he asked.
“We believe he will be in charge. If he fails, it will destroy him.”
Rowse stared out at the landscape for a long time. But now he saw a different countryside, one that was a deeper green but less well tended; and a garage forecourt; and a small body by the roadside that had once been a little girl called Mary Feeney.
He rose and went outside. McCready heard low voices and the sound of Nikki crying. Rowse came back and went to pack a suitcase.