In a room above a chip shop in Monaghan town, just over the border into the Republic, the Army Council met for the first time in a fortnight. Eight men round a table. Businesslike, with their pencils and notebooks round them. There was much talk of what they had seen on the earlier television news bulletins, of the film taken on the steps of St Paul’s of the arrival of government ministers and Cabinet members to the memorial service for Henry Danby.
‘Hardly what you’d call security. Sod-all protection.’
‘They all had ’tecs with them, but by the look of it only one each. Not the big man, though. He had a couple. Little film stars, you get to know them.’
‘Right open, if we wanted to put a man in again.’
‘Wide open. What those bloody papermen call a wall of steel. Nothing.’
‘It would only be a repetition. Took a lot of planning last time. Manpower. What do we achieve? There was good reason for that bastard Danby, but another man, what for?’
‘It did a fair bit for us when we got Danby. Keeping our man on the loose, that’s not done us bad.’
‘There was no sympathy for Danby. There’s no-one else we can get who is in that crowd where we would get the same reaction. The bastard was hated. Even the Prods loathed him.’
‘In London there’s no way they can guard the politicos, no way at all. They have to be out and be seen to be about. They can’t lock themselves away. You can do that from the White House, but not from Downing Street.’
‘Let’s have some talk about what we’d get from hitting them again in London.’ It was the Chief of Staff who spoke, terminating the knockabout round the table.
He made only rare incursions into the talk, preferring to let it ripple round him while he weighed the ideas before coming down in support of any one in particular. He was a hard man with few feelings that did not involve the end product. Like some cost-effectiveness expert or a time-and-motion superman, he demanded value for effort. His training in military tactics had been thorough, and he had risen to corporal in the parachute regiment of the British army. He was in his mid-thirties now and had seen active service in Aden and Borneo. He’d bought himself out at the start of the troubles and set up briefly as a painter and decorator, before going underground. When he had been voted into the number one position in the Provisionals by his colleagues it was because they knew they could guarantee he would pursue a tough, ruthless campaign. Those who believed in the continuation of the war of attrition on British public opinion had felt threatened by those they thought might compromise. The new commander was their safeguard. He was no strategist, but had learned enough of tactics on the streets of the Lower Falls where he came from. He had sanctioned the killing of Danby, and was well pleased with the dividends.
The quartermaster took it up. ‘It’s the trouble with all spectaculars. You launch them, and they succeed, and where do you go from there? Only upwards.’
The older man in the group, a veteran of ’56, who lived now in Cork, said, ‘It stirs the pot well and truly. How many bombs, how many “another soldier tonight” add up to a British Cabinet Minister?’
The quartermaster across the table was not impressed. ‘But what’s the reaction? If we did it again, they’d tear the bloody place apart. We’d not survive it. They’d be all over us. Down here as much as in the North.’
‘That’s what we have to weigh. What would happen to the whole structure? They’d go mad, knock bloody shit out of us.’ The speaker was from Derry. Young, from the Creggan estate. Interned once and then released in an amnesty to mark the arrival of a new Secretary of State. He had been in the Republic’s prisons as well, and now lived on the run as much in Country Donegal as in the maze of streets in the Creggan housing estate. ‘Our need at this moment is not to go killing Cabinet Ministers from Westminster, but winning back what we lost at Motorman when the army came into Bogside and Creggan. We have to play on the tiredness of those people across the water. There’s no stomach there for this war. They’re soft there, no guts. They’ll get weary of hearing another soldier, another policeman, another bomb, another tout. It’s the repetition that hurts them. Not another big killing. All that does is get them going. It affronts their bloody dignity. Unites them against us. We have to bore them.
‘The bigger man you get the better.’ It was a Belfast man. He was of the new school, and had come a long way since Long Kesh opened. He had pitiless eyes, wide apart above his ferret nose, and a thin, bloodless mouth. He chain-smoked, lighting cigarettes one after another from the butt of the one he was discarding. ‘The big man himself wouldn’t hurt. They never believe we mean it over there. Somehow the fucking Micks won’t actually get round to it, they say. Get the old bugger, himself, that would sort them.’
That quietened it. Then the Chief of Staff chipped in, cutting through the indecision of the meeting as he brought it to heel and away from the abstract.
‘We’ll think about it. It has attractions. Big attractions. Total war, that’s what it would mean. Davie and Sean, you’ll work for a bit on it. Have something for us in a fortnight with something concrete. I don’t want it done hasty… something in a bit of detail. Right?’
They moved on to other business.
The process of arrests went on with seeming inevitability, with frequent reunions in the Crumlin and Long Kesh. The Provisionals’ intelligence officer, who should have seen the report of that conversation between the army Brigadier and the policeman overheard at their hotel lunch, was taken into custody before the message reached him. When there was an arrest those still in the field shifted round their weapons, explosives, equipment and files, lest their former colleague should crack under interrogation and reveal the hiding places.
That message, closely written on two sheets of notepaper, remained in a safe house in the communication chain while the Third Battalion worked round to an appointment for the vacant position. The clogging in the system lasted more than a week, and when the new man came to sort through the backlog he had a table covered with reports and documents to wade through. He was into his second day before he got to the paper written by the waiter.
He was sharp enough to sense immediately the importance of what was in front of him. He read it carefully.
The man with the thin moustache looked like an army man, and from the kitchens I could see the big Ford out in the car park with the uniformed escort sitting there in the front. The other one was talking when the music stopped. He was a policeman, I think. That’s when I heard him say, ‘Special operator on the ground without telling.’ He must have realized I was standing there, and he just stopped and didn’t say anything else until I was right away from him. He looked very bothered…
That was the guts of the message. The intelligence officer had read it once, gone slightly beyond and then rapidly coursed his eyes back over it. He could imagine the situation. Military and police, not taken in on the act, and feeding their bloody faces, weeping on each other’s shoulders, stuffing the food in far away from the ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ bit. It was the sort of place you’d expect to hear a major indiscretion uttered, when they couldn’t keep their big mouths shut. That was why the waiter had been introduced onto the staff of the hotel.