Gerry sloshed the whiskey round his mug. Despite the open companionway the cabin was foul with cigarette smoke and reeking of unwashed bodies, whiskey and stale food. Gerry leaned back on the berth cushions. “The Provos must have made focking thousands of pounds out of having the Yanks given a focking good kicking. And others too, of course. The Dutch, now, they always wanted to be in on the thick end of it. Especially the Protestant ministers, because they wanted to prove they loved Catholics, see? But it was mainly the Americans, so it was.” He fell silent, evidently remembering the good days of home and thuggery, then, as a sudden thought blew across his mind, he frowned at me. “Is it really five million dollars we’re waiting for?”
I nodded. “It truly is.”
“In gold?”
“In gold,” I said.
“Fock me,” Gerry said wonderingly, and I knew for a second or two he was thinking of stealing the money, but then the stern call of duty made him shake his head in self-reproof. “Brendan said it was the most important mission we’d ever perform. For the movement, like?”
“I’m sure it is,” I said, “I’m sure it is,” and, the very next morning, in a cold north wind, the gold arrived.
Il Hayaween arrived before the gold. He came in a black-windowed Mercedes and was accompanied by his two dark-suited bodyguards who commandeered a fisherman to ferry all three men out to Corsaire. Il Hayaween sharply ordered Gerry and Liam to stay out of earshot below then sent his two bodyguards to wait on the foredeck. He looked at his precious Blancpain watch. “The trawler should be here by noon.”
“Good.”
He sat on the cockpit thwart after fastidiously wiping it with a linen handkerchief. He seemed awkward, but I put that down to his unfamiliarity with boats. “Is she suitable?” He waved his good left hand around Corsaire.
“She’s a pig.”
“A pig?”
“She wallows like a pregnant sow. She’s too heavy. But I can get her to America, if that’s what you wanted to know.”
“And quickly,” he said in his harsh voice.
I shrugged. “There’s a chance the Stingers will reach Ireland by April 24, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Not unless someone makes arrangements to ship them before the gold gets to Miami.”
“April 24?” Il Hayaween frowned at me.
“The seventy-fifth anniversary of the Easter Rising. Isn’t that what Flynn and Herlihy want? To give the Brits an anniversary Easter egg?”
He blinked as if he did not really understand what I was talking about, then shook his head. “The war will come sooner than that.”
“In Kuwait?” I asked.
“Of course.” He paused, staring at the withies which served instead of buoys to mark the harbor’s uncertain entrance. “We shall be relying on your organization to support Iraq’s defense against the imperialist aggression.”
I wondered what the hell I was supposed to say. There had been a time when I would have been the main conduit for passing such a message to the Provisional IRA’s Army Council, but Roisin had ended that responsibility. Nevertheless il Hayaween seemed to expect some response, so I nodded and promised to pass the message on.
He angrily shook his head as though he did not need my help to communicate with the Army Council, then laboriously raised his maimed hand to light a cigarette. “We have already received pledges of support from Ireland. But will they keep their word?” He glared at me as he asked the question.
“I’m sure they will,” I said truthfully. I was hardly surprised that the Provisional IRA had promised to support Iraq with a campaign of violence because for many years now the Arabs had been the major supplier of the IRA’s needs, and the Army Council could hardly turn down such a request from so generous a benefactor. What did surprise me was that il Hayaween was telling me of the Army Council’s promise, but his next words went some way to answering my puzzlement.
“Reactionary forces in Damascus and Tehran have suggested we should wait and see how effective Iraq’s armed forces prove before we launch a world-wide campaign of terror, but we have refused to condone such timidity.” He sucked on the cigarette as though taking strength from its harsh smoke. “We expect action, Shanahan.”
“I’m sure you’ll get it,” I said, but inside I was noting the true import of il Hayaween’s message. If Damascus and Tehran were preaching caution then there had to be deep rifts within the Palestinian ranks. Some fighters must be siding with Syria, others with neutral Iran, while yet a third faction, which il Hayaween led, was sticking with Saddam Hussein. Yet the rift plainly threatened the success of his plans for a global campaign of terror and, as those plans collapsed, he was desperately trying to keep his surviving troops in line. He was even desperate enough to seek my opinion of whether the Provisional IRA would keep their word, but I doubted he really needed to worry. The IRA’s strongest Arab link was Libya, and Libya still seemed fully committed to Saddam Hussein’s ambitions. “You’ll get your big bang from the Irish,” I reassured him.
“I want more than bombs.” He paused. A catspaw of wind skittered over the harbor and whipped his cigarette smoke toward the shore. “What’s wrong with the Russian ground-to-air missiles that Libya supplied to the IRA?” he suddenly asked me.
“As I understand,” I said, “they’re too slow to accelerate, which gives the British helicopters time to drop decoy flares. Also their range is not very great and their launchers are too heavy, which makes them awkward to move about. They’re also unreliable, sometimes they don’t fire at all.”
“But even such an unsatisfactory missile, if it works, could destroy a jumbo jet as it climbed away from London Airport?”
Christ in his benighted heaven, I thought, but I dared not show my horror. Instead I just nodded. “Oh, sure, yes.”
“If it was fired from close to the airport? Maybe from a house nearby? Or from a parked truck? Is there a suitable launching place for such a missile? You have surely been to London Airport?” Il Hayaween’s questions sounded so banal, but evil so often did.
“I’m sure it’s feasible,” I said, and tried to sound enthusiastic.
“You’re saying there is such a launching place?” he insisted.
“There is, yes.” I was thinking of the industrial estates not far from Heathrow’s runways, and I imagined a rocket streaking up from a roofless truck to tear an engine from a jetliner’s wing and bring the great machine down to explode in sliding horror on the ground. “There are plenty of suitable places,” I said equably.
“Then I shall tell your Chief of Staff that a Jewish or a British jumbo jet would be an acceptable gift in exchange for all the weapons we’ve donated to your revolution. And I can say that an expert opinion tells me that such an attack is feasible, yes?”
“Oh, indeed yes,” I said warmly, though I doubted that the Army Council of the Provisional IRA would listen to my expert opinion. It was not that such men were squeamish about civilian deaths, indeed the visionary structure of their new Ireland was built on the graves of such dead, but men like Brendan Flynn were exquisitely sensitive to the effects of bad publicity in the United States, and they knew only too well that even a handful of slaughtered American airline passengers might cause a fatal dose of realism to infect the American-Irish. The dollars of American supporters had dwindled over the years, but they were not so paltry that anyone in Belfast or Dublin would willingly abandon those donations.