Jayne took a step back. “Semtex!” she said. “Where did you get that?”
“Don’t ask,” O'Neill said. “Remnants from some long-ago raid on an IRA arms cache south of Enniskillen. I just kept it. Thought it might be useful one day. Just don’t tell anyone.”
The other bin held electrical wire and the other components Jayne had requested. O'Neill transferred the contents of both bins into two large black backpacks, then stowed the bags in the trunk of his car, along with the tools Jayne had specified.
Finally, O'Neill drove south onto the N1 and headed toward Forkhill.
Just over an hour later he nosed his car cautiously down the gray gravel lane that led to Ronnie’s house and parked carefully behind some thick conifer trees, which shielded the Mondeo from the sight of anyone driving along the road.
Ronnie looked surprised to see Jayne but greeted her warmly, then turned to O'Neill and stood looking at him, visibly trying to work out exactly where the MI5 man fitted into the jigsaw puzzle of his memories.
“I remember you. Mother of God, you’re back for another try, are you?” Ronnie said, taking a step backward. He peered at O’Neill from the gloom of his darkened hallway. “You don’t give up, do you?”
O’Neill shrugged. “I don’t forget either. I’ve got a problem and I was hoping you might be able to help me out.”
“A problem? Duggan, I assume,” Ronnie asked. “Same as her.” He nodded toward Jayne.
“You’re on the right track,” O’Neill said.
“You’d better both come in, then,” Ronnie said, turning to Jayne. “Where’s Joe?”
Ronnie made three mugs of tea and then sat in silence while Jayne and O'Neill outlined what they suspected Duggan was doing and how he was holding Johnson at Willows Farm.
“The bastard killed Moira,” the old Irishman said, surveying Jayne and O'Neill in turn from beneath a set of black, bushy eyebrows. “So you can be sure I’m going to help you as much as I can.”
“At last,” O’Neill said, in a dry tone. “Better late than never.”
Ronnie ran a hand through his silver-gray hair. “It would seem so. But just explain to me exactly why you’re doing this.”
“Simple. Joe’s a very old friend of mine,” Jayne said. “We stand by each other.”
“Yes, and Johnson’s been prepared to stick his neck out to investigate Duggan,” O'Neill said. “Okay, he’s a professional and he’s being paid, but nonetheless, he’s taking big risks. And he was working for an old friend of mine, Michael Donovan, who was shot dead—almost certainly by Duggan. I feel I owe it to Michael to complete the thing.”
Ronnie chewed at the inside of his right cheek. “Okay. So this Michael Donovan. Why would Duggan have wanted to take him out?”
O’Neill shrugged, then took another sip of tea, looking evenly at Ronnie from across the top of the mug.
Ronnie sat back in his chair. “I see. Whatever.” He sighed and then finally said, “Okay, I’ll help you. What do you want me to do?”
Jayne began to explain her plan to rescue Johnson and the part Ronnie would need to play in assisting them.
Saturday, January 26, 2013
Forkhill
The short midwinter day had long ended by the time Jayne, O'Neill, and Ronnie drove up the long country lane through northern County Louth toward the point where the Irish Republic ended and Ulster began.
Jayne again opted for a circuitous route to approach Willows Farm from the south, partly to avoid being spotted or recorded on camera and partly to ensure that there was no surveillance, including any from MI5.
O'Neill confided that he could never feel confident that he wasn’t being watched by his employer and therefore took all possible precautions on the assumption that he was. Before leaving Forkhill, he removed the SIM card and battery from his cell phone and switched to a new pay-as-you-go card, which he slotted into a brand-new, basic Nokia phone.
Jayne watched him switch his phones around with approval. At least she was dealing with a professional.
Rain splattered across the windshield in irregular, occasionally violent squalls. The wind was audibly gathering momentum, whistling its way into every tiny crevice of O’Neill’s Ford.
Once they drew within a mile or so of Willows Farm, Jayne directed O'Neill to turn off his lights and cut to the right through the same gate she had used on her previous visit with Johnson, and to park in the same location behind the stack of silage rolls.
“Can we contact GRANITE and check what’s going on?” Jayne asked
O'Neill used his burner phone to send a short message to GRANITE. Car’s in the garage now, going for a walk.
Back came a reply. Fine. Dog’s eating his dinner. Weather outlook’s still good. Will let you know if rain clouds approaching.
There was no questioning that the weather metaphor was anything but literal. Jayne and O'Neill zipped up their black waterproof walking jackets and put on the two black backpacks containing the Semtex and other equipment O’Neill had taken earlier from the storage garage in Belfast.
Ronnie was dressed in similar gear but had no backpack. He had the look of a man who lived on exercise, nuts, and berries. Jayne had growing confidence that he could do what was required of him. In any case, his local knowledge was about to be put to the test.
“We’ll take the same route I used last time,” Jayne said. “It worked well and gave us a good vantage point over the farm. Always best to take the high ground, every time.”
She knew from years of experience how to approach such situations, albeit from in her more distant past, when she had worked on special undercover surveillance operations in territories across Europe, including Northern Ireland. It was definitely preferable to the desk-bound drudgery of her recent SIS role.
Jayne pulled the waist strap on her backpack tight. That was enough talking. Now was the time for action; any conversation would be kept to the bare, absolute essentials.
She turned and led the way up the side of a hedge toward the wooded ridge at the top of the slope, where she turned left and followed the tree line, ensuring that they were several yards below the actual ridge in order to avoid their silhouettes being visible against the sky from below. O'Neill and Ronnie followed closely behind. None of them spoke until they had covered the mile or so that took them within sight of Willows Farm, several hundred yards below them. The light from two ground-floor windows at the rear of the farmhouse was visible, together with an outside light that appeared to be somewhere in the farmyard.
Another sharp squall of rain hammered against them, driven by a westerly wind, as they came to a halt.
“We’ll move together down the hill and against the hedge, then we’ll separate at the bottom,” Jayne said. Ronnie and O'Neill nodded, their heads bowed, jacket hoods pulled tight in an attempt to keep the rain out of their faces.
They walked slowly down the side of what she knew from her previous visit was a cow field. As the trio walked, the cattle became visible at the bottom of the slope, huddled together next to a fence that kept them out of the farmyard.
“That’s your entry point, underneath that water trough,” Ronnie murmured, pointing at a black outline that rose in front of the herd of cows. “That’s where you get covered in shit.”
Jayne didn’t need telling. She remembered how badly Johnson stank on his return from the previous mission.
However, she was looking for something else. She scanned the farmyard and the space at both sides of the farmhouse. Eventually she saw what she was looking for, barely poking out from the left side of the house.
She patted the backpack that was slung over her shoulder; it contained the Semtex, cable, blasting caps, and an infrared-controlled electronic detonator that she and O'Neill had packed in his garage that morning.
It felt like she was winding the clock back twenty-five or thirty years to the type of disruptive or diversionary operation she used to get involved with in Afghanistan during the ’80s. She had planne
d it in great detail with O'Neill, so there was no need for much talk now.
They were close to the fence separating the field from the farmyard.
“Can you check with GRANITE if it’s all clear and ask him if the security camera feeds are monitored?” she asked O'Neill.
He took out his phone and sent another text message to GRANITE. Just finished my walk. Are the kids asleep? And is anyone watching TV?
Jayne waited impatiently for a reply to come in. She certainly didn’t want to venture around to the front of the house if there were a danger that someone might emerge from the building at the wrong time. Five minutes passed by. There was still no response.
It began to rain again, sheeting sideways at forty-five degrees. This was a pain in the backside in one respect but could be helpful in another. Come on, GRANITE.
After another ten minutes, O’Neill held up his phone screen toward her, sheltering it from the rain with his backpack. Kids asleep now. Were awake before. Nobody watching TV.
“Give me a few minutes,” Jayne murmured. “I’ll be back.”
She moved to the end of the clump of gorse bushes, climbed over a wire mesh fence, and made her way down the far southern side of the farmyard, past the rear wall of the barn where she knew Johnson had previously entered, thus avoiding the camera mounted on the front. She moved into the shadows of some thick evergreen bushes that ran down the left side of the farmhouse.
She stopped and looked for what she guessed would inevitably be in place. There it was, mounted on the house wall, its lens directed toward the front of the building. Even better, she could see that there was an inch or two of exposed cable coming from the camera before it disappeared into the wall. She reached into her backpack and removed a pair of wire cutters they’d packed back at the garage.
The camera was either static or permanently trained in one direction, which again worked in her favor. She dropped to a crouch and, ignoring the hammering rain sluicing into her face, moved quickly to the house wall. There was a wire trellis below the camera, which looked just about strong enough to bear her weight. It was the only option.
She put one foot on the bottom wire, grabbed another wire above her head, and tested it. It didn’t give way, so she climbed up to the next wire. Again it held fast.
Three more wires up, and Jayne, her hair now saturated, was able to reach the short length of cable that ran from the back of the security camera into the wall. She worked one of the cutter’s blades behind the cable, then squeezed the handles hard. Eventually it sliced through the wire.
Jayne descended back down the wire trellis and dropped lightly onto the flagstone path that ran around the outside of the house.
It was unlikely that anyone would come out of the house in this weather to check the camera, even if they noticed it wasn’t functioning, which—based on GRANITE’s message—seemed equally unlikely.
From the base of the trellis, she made her way along the side of the house, dropping to all fours and crawling beneath two windows. Finally she emerged at the front, now only twenty yards away from the road. Here was a stretch of gravel driveway that formed a parking and turnaround area for cars. And there, standing only a short distance from the front door, was a gray Audi station wagon. It was parked sideways, which Jayne realized would allow her to work on the vehicle while remaining unseen on the opposite side from the house.
Now the rain was accompanied by occasional claps of thunder. The noise also neatly covered up the sound of her footsteps on the crunchy gravel.
She moved swiftly to the side of the car farthest away from the house, dropped to her knees, and removed equipment from her backpack. Working with her hands under the shelter of the car, she first placed a plastic bag—which held a small slab of Semtex to which were taped two slim tubular blasting caps—under the rear passenger side wheel.
Next she began unreeling a length of yellow and blue cable attached to each of the blasting caps as she stepped over to some bushes between the driveway and the fence that separated the property from the road.
There she connected the cable to a small black electronic detonator with a radio antenna, which she hid in the bushes, and scraped some gravel over the cable so it was invisible to all but the closest of examinations.
That done, she made her way back alongside the house and over the fence and rejoined O'Neill and Ronnie in the corner of the field. As she did so, the rain suddenly stopped.
O'Neill gave her a grin and a look of approval. The idea of using old IRA weaponry against the Republicans had clearly left him with a distinct feeling of satisfaction.
Jayne’s thoughts were less political and partisan and more practical in nature. They might need a diversion, and she had set one up. There was a long way to go before this operation was finished.
Jayne said nothing but gave a quick thumbs-up signal. She reached into her backpack, removed a small device that looked like a walkie-talkie, with a keypad and an antenna sticking out from the top, and handed it to Ronnie.
She just hoped that he had memorized the code, as instructed. The intention was for the device now positioned under the Audi to be deployed in a very specific way. If required, it would create an emergency diversion during the extraction mission, but otherwise it was meant to be used only when they got Johnson out, to provide cover while they made their getaway.
It would also have the advantage of decommissioning the dissidents’ most obvious means of road pursuit, although Jayne assumed there were other usable vehicles in the surrounding outbuildings.
There had been no further communication from GRANITE inside the farmhouse, so Jayne assumed the den remained unguarded. She needed to make sure, though, so she took her cell phone from her pocket and logged onto the monitoring website where she could view the outputs from the minicameras inside the underground complex.
Gradually the video feeds loaded, although at a much slower rate than on O'Neill’s PC. After a few minutes, only four were showing. One was in the kitchen, where GRANITE was visible, his back to the camera, apparently reading a book. There was one from the living room, which showed nobody, and two from the tunnel, again with no sign of activity. There were no outputs from the den. Jayne cursed and tapped on the refresh button. But still only four cameras appeared to be working.
“Shit,” Jayne murmured.
“What?” O’Neill asked.
“Video links to the den are down.”
Jayne used her hand to brush away the rivulets of rainwater dripping onto her cheeks from her wet hair.
She reached inside her backpack and removed a small headlamp that she pulled over her forehead. Realistically, she knew she had no choice. “Okay, screw it. Let’s go in.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Saturday, January 26, 2013
Forkhill
Thoughts of the punishment beatings and tortures handed out to IRA informers over the decades were foremost in Johnson’s mind as he lay in the semi-darkness and the damp on the mattress in Duggan’s underground den.
Cigarette burns, electric shocks to the genitals, repeated submersion in a freezing cold bath, hanging upside down from beams, iron crowbars used to break ribs, and the notorious six-pack—bullets to ankles, knees, and elbows.
Not easily depressed, Johnson had slipped into a kind of downward spiral triggered by his own thoughts. He tried to remind himself they were only thoughts. None of it had actually happened. So why dwell on it, fearing something unknown. Surely Duggan would have acted by now if he actually intended to torture him.
The problem was, Johnson had no way of discerning Duggan’s thoughts or plans.
He had also lost his sense of time. Dennehy and McGarahan had confiscated his watch and phone, so other than mealtimes, there was no way of marking what hour of the day it was.
Johnson assumed it was evening. The two Irishmen had come and gone with the usual plate of baked beans on toast, accompanied by a cup of water. There had been no sign of Duggan all day, which made Johnson th
ink he must have gone off somewhere, because previously he had been in and out the whole time.
The extended toilet break offered the previous day, which had allowed Johnson the chance to examine the dartboard, had proved a one-off. Since then he had been marched straight across to the stall, pushed in, then escorted back to the mattress immediately.
Was O’Neill able to see any of it via the hidden cameras? Again, there was no way of knowing.
Johnson sighed. He couldn’t just carry on passively accepting this; he needed to think of a way to engineer more time in the main area so O’Neill would be able to see him if he viewed the feed.
But he struggled to devise a workable plan.
As he lay there, he wondered what Jayne was doing. He hoped she escaped from the roadblock and presumed she hadn’t been trapped by Duggan. Otherwise she would likely have been brought into the bunker too. One thing was for sure: if she was free, he could rely on her doing everything possible to get him out.
Johnson’s mind drifted back to another time with Jayne, in entirely different circumstances, in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, in 1989. At the time, they were both working for intelligence services, she for the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and he for the CIA.
Their illicit affair had lasted three short months: covert meetings in each other’s apartments, snatched moments in cars and cafés, and occasional restaurant meals, dressed up as contact-building exercises. The affair had not gone down well with Johnson’s boss, Robert Watson, who was the station chief in Islamabad, part of the CIA’s Near East Division. Someone had tipped him off, and he had flown into a rant about the irresponsibility of it, asking Johnson what he thought might have been the implications had it been a Russian honeytrap. Johnson’s sarcastic comment that the British Secret Intelligence Service didn’t quite equate to the KGB added fuel to the fire.
The affair had come only a year after an incident in April 1988, when Johnson and his CIA colleague and close friend Vic Walter were on a covert mission out of their Islamabad station into Afghanistan.
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