by Joe Joyce
‘How much is it?’
‘You got it?’
‘Depends on the reward,’ Duggan laughed.
‘Five hundred dollars.’
A hundred pounds or a bit more, Duggan thought. Not bad. ‘Not enough,’ he smiled. ‘Aren’t you worried the Germans are going to hear about it?’
‘What Germans? You guys swear they’re all locked up.’
‘Their legation is bound to hear of it.’
‘So what? They can’t communicate with Berlin. Isn’t that what you tell us?’
‘As far as we know.’
‘So they have a radio?’
‘I don’t honestly know for sure,’ Duggan said, stretching the truth. G2 knew the Germans did have a radio transmitter in their legation but were using it sparingly after protests from the government. Still, it was a constant cause of complaint by the British, although they also had a radio transmitter in their offices – more than one.
‘Another thing that bugs Mr Gray,’ Linqvist said, as if he was running through a mental checklist. He’s not acting on his own initiative here, Duggan thought. But then he had never expected that he was, wondering if Linqvist’s superiors, whoever they were, knew about Gerda too. ‘Your government’s complaints about being blockaded by both sides. It’s not just General Aiken who’s been complaining about it, but Mr de Valera too.’
‘The blockades are hitting us hard,’ Duggan said, remembering what he’d been told about Aiken’s meeting with the Portuguese dictator Salazar, in which they’d agreed that the neutrals were bearing the cost of the war because of the blockades.
‘But they’re not equal. The Germans have sunk some of your ships. The British haven’t sunk any, have they? And they’re carrying most of your supplies on their convoys.’
‘But cutting back on them.’
‘Because of their losses on the Atlantic. If they really blockaded Ireland, you’d be in a very bad way. The Germans aren’t providing you with any supplies at all, are they? How would you have got to Lisbon if the British were blockading you completely?’
Duggan nodded, conceding the point. He forbore from adding that both the Luftwaffe and the RAF had taken a look at his ship and let them through, more interested in whether Linqvist was leading up to something about his visit to Lisbon.
But the American wasn’t. ‘It’s a bugbear with him, with Mr Gray,’ he said. ‘The way your people carry on as if there was this equality between the belligerents in everything from their war aims to their treatment of Ireland.’
‘It’s the only way to be neutral.’
‘President Roosevelt has found another way.’
‘America’s a long way away and it’s very powerful. The Germans obviously don’t want to draw you into the conflict.’
Linqvist took a long drink of his Guinness. ‘As I say,’ he put down the glass, ‘we could argue about neutrality all day and neither of us would be wrong.’
‘True enough,’ Duggan said, finishing his drink as well. He took the electrical diagrams he had got in Mayo from his inside pocket and handed them across the table. ‘You might want these back. Turned up in Mayo recently.’
Linqvist unfolded them, examined both sides of the sheets, and looked up. ‘What are they?’
‘I don’t know,’ Duggan said. ‘Somebody found them near the crash site, apparently.’
Linqvist looked at them again and shrugged. ‘Don’t mean anything to me.’
‘We thought it might be part of a manual. Maybe to do with your secret bombsight.’
‘Could be.’ Linqvist pursed his lips. ‘Can I keep them?’
‘Sure,’ Duggan said, satisfied that he really knew no more about them than he himself did. Less, actually. If they were part of some missing intelligence report about German weapons systems, Linqvist certainly didn’t know about it. Which meant they probably weren’t.
‘Thanks.’ Linqvist folded the documents and put them in his pocket. ‘Appreciate it.’
‘This isn’t going to improve Ó Murchú’s or External Affairs’ humour,’ Commandant McClure said as he read quickly through Duggan’s report on his conversation with Linqvist.
‘It wasn’t what I was expecting,’ Duggan said. ‘All politics.’
‘Interesting.’ McClure finished reading and dropped the typed report on his desk. ‘He doesn’t seemed very pushed about his missing bombsight.’
‘I brought up the bombsight, not him.’
‘You believe his story about offering the reward?’
Duggan shrugged. ‘It doesn’t sound likely. But politicians don’t always do things that are likely. Or even make sense.’
‘You’re speaking from experience,’ McClure said, giving him a knowing grin.
Duggan nodded, wondering how much McClure knew about his dealings with his politician uncle. Not too much, he hoped. But that was all water under the bridge. In the past. His uncle Timmy had left him alone recently. Which was a surprise, but a welcome one.
‘We better send a copy around to Mr Ó Murchú,’ McClure said. ‘He’ll be intrigued that they’re setting up another channel of communication. Intrigued, but not delighted.’
‘I want to have a look at this again.’ Duggan took the Norden bombsight box from the corner where it rested and turned it around to see the stencilled print on it. It said ‘Unit Bombsight; Model M-9’; the space for a serial number was empty. There was no mention of Norden. Was an M-9 a Norden? Or was this some other bombsight? ‘It doesn’t say that this is a Norden.’
‘What are you getting at?’
‘Maybe it’s not a Norden, but some kind of standard bombsight. And they’re only pretending that it’s the secret one.’
‘Why would they do that?’
‘I don’t know,’ Duggan admitted. ‘But there’s something funny about this whole business.’
McClure rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, pinching his nose. ‘For all we know, an M-9 bombsight is a Norden. See if the Air Corps knows its technical description.’
‘OK,’ Duggan said, making for the door.
‘Meanwhile,’ McClure stopped him, ‘open a bank account and tell your German friends how much the Yanks are offering for their bombsight.’
‘We’re going ahead with it?’ Duggan asked in surprise.
‘We are,’ McClure said.
Duggan waited, but McClure offered nothing more. ‘Any bank in particular?’ he asked, in the hope of drawing him out.
‘Any busy city-centre branch will do.’
Back in his own office, Duggan drafted a message in German for transmission, wondering about McClure’s change of mind about going ahead with the deception. It’s not a change of heart, he decided; it’s a decision from higher up. He knew McClure well enough by now to know when he wasn’t happy about something, and his whole demeanour said he was not happy about this. Which meant it was someone else’s decision to continue with the Sean McCarthy mission.
He paused for a moment over the name on the bank account, deciding it should be something random but credible, and settled on Amárach Trading. He got the phone directory, looked up branches of the National Bank and picked one in Dame Street. He was almost finished coding the German message when the phone rang.
‘Fancy a little action?’ Garda Peter Gifford asked.
‘What kind?’
‘We’re putting a posse together to chase down some baddies who’re hiding some loot they got from a crashed plane.’
‘From our crashed plane?’
‘Uh-huh,’ Gifford said. ‘According to information received.’
‘From anyone I know?’
‘Uh-huh.’
Benny Reilly, the black-marketeeer they had visited, Duggan thought, his interest quickening. ‘Where?’
‘The badlands outside town.’
‘When?’
‘An hour or so. After we’ve watered the horses.’
‘Count me in.’
‘Bring your own horse.’
Dug
gan hung up and took his Sean McCarthy passport from the drawer of his desk. He should have time to get to the bank and set up the account before meeting Gifford in Dublin Castle. He turned back at the door, reopened the drawer and took out his Webley revolver in its shoulder holster and a box of shells.
Twelve
Duggan drove fast to keep up with the convoy of Special Branch cars heading out through Donnybrook towards Bray. The road twisted and turned, the traffic of bicycles and carts and occasional cars and buses tailing off after they climbed up past the posh new houses of Mount Merrion and went through Stillorgan out into the countryside. Fields opened out on either side of the road, some with cattle swishing their tails to keep the flies away, others with ripening crops of oats and barley.
Duggan had no idea where they were going. Gifford had only had time to tell him ‘Rathmichael’ before the convoy had swept out of Dublin Castle, but Duggan had no idea where that was. Gifford’s sergeant had snapped, ‘You again,’ when he’d seen Duggan, as if that was a bad omen, and had got into the front car, with Gifford driving. Two other cars with four detectives in each had followed them. Duggan had brought up the rear in his own car.
A group of men lounging against a corner in Cabinteely watched them go by, their cigarettes paused in various stages of smoking. Just before Shankill, they turned right and went by some large houses half hidden behind heavy foliage among fields rising uphill. The last car of Branch men stopped at a gateway and Duggan overtook it as the detectives piled out and climbed the gate. The lead car stopped at the next gateway and the second overtook it and turned into a laneway a little further on.
Duggan pulled in behind the lead car as one of the men in the back got out and opened a gate into a farmyard. He followed the car in and they all got out. In front of them was a large barn, one of its big doors open, sounds of movement coming from inside. The detectives all drew their revolvers, cocked the hammers. Duggan followed their example but left his hammer down.
‘Police!’ the sergeant shouted as they took up positions on both sides of the door. ‘Identify yourself and come out.’
There was no response.
Away to the left, Duggan saw the detectives from the second car coming over a barbed-wire fence and beginning to run towards the back of the barn, dodging around cocks of golden hay. He assumed the men from the third car were moving in from the other side as well.
There was a shuffling sound from inside.
‘Come on out,’ the sergeant shouted again. ‘This is the Gardaí.’
A horse neighed inside. One of the detectives laughed and another moved up to the open door and glanced inside. A moment later, he went in, leading with his revolver and shouting, ‘Hello, anybody here?’
There was nobody there. They all went in and looked around. On one side there were three stalls, one occupied by the horse, which stared back at them over a half-door. Beside the stalls, a sidecar rested on its shafts, harnesses hung on the wall, and other agricultural implements were lined up. The other side of the barn was mainly empty, a scattering of hay on the ground indicating where the new hay was going to be when it was moved in from the fields.
They all put their guns away and began to look around. One man climbed the ladder at the side of the stalls to see what was above them. He reappeared a moment later and shook his head to the sergeant. Another walked over the empty floor, kicking the thin layer of hay out of his way like a child walking through autumnal leaves. A third took up a stub-pronged hay fork, went into the unoccupied stalls and began to prod the floor through the straw.
Some of the other detectives arrived at the door and one of them shook his head to the sergeant, who turned to Gifford.
‘Sorry, Sarge,’ Gifford said, giving a helpless shrug. ‘Fucker must’ve been lying.’
The sergeant gave him a murderous look and marched to the door as the others began to follow. One of them went over to the horse and patted its forehead. The horse stepped back, away from his touch. ‘Hold on!’ the detective shouted after the others, who were going out the open door. ‘Did you hear that?’
‘What?’ the sergeant asked, stopping.
‘The horse just stepped on wood. Sounded hollow.’
The sergeant turned back. ‘Get him out of there,’ he ordered.
The detective got a halter from the wall, put it over the horse’s head, and led it into one of the other stalls. Another retrieved the hay fork and began to prod the straw where the horse had been, until he found the area that sounded hollow. He cleared away the dirty straw and revealed a trapdoor. He pulled it up and there was a ladder leading down into the dark.
‘Torches,’ the sergeant snapped. One of the men ran back to their car and returned a couple of minutes later with two torches. Three of the detectives descended into the hole and everyone waited. One of them popped his head back up and said, ‘You got to see this, Sarge.’
The sergeant disappeared through the trapdoor. Duggan caught Gifford’s eye and Gifford began whistling a vague tune. One of his colleagues punched him in the arm and said in a low voice, ‘You’ve just avoided an almighty root up the arse from a size-twelve boot.’ Gifford gave him an unconcerned grin.
A detective reappeared from the trapdoor and said to Gifford, ‘He wants you.’ He pointed at Duggan and added, ‘You too.’
Duggan followed Gifford down the ladder, through a strong smell of horse manure and into a low-ceilinged area the size of a modest living room. In the centre was a table with an oil lamp. A detective had just lit it and was adjusting the wick. Around the walls were shelves that looked like those of a well-stocked shop, laden with bottles of whiskey and other spirits, stacked packs of cigarettes, sides of bacon, large bags of sugar and boxes of tea. On the table beside the oil lamp was a weighing scales with a couple of weights stacked beside it. Grains of sugar and tea lined the joins between the rough planks of the table.
‘I don’t see any machine guns,’ the sergeant snapped at Gifford.
Gifford walked around, opening the tops of some sacks under the shelves.
‘Well?’ the sergeant demanded.
Gifford gave him his perplexed look and shook his head as if he couldn’t understand what had happened.
‘Who was this informant?’
‘He wouldn’t give his name,’ Gifford said. ‘Said he’d heard we were looking for some machine guns off an American plane and we should have a look here. In this barn.’
‘What are these machine guns?’ the sergeant asked, turning to Duggan.
‘There’s normally up to half a dozen on a Flying Fortress,’ Duggan said, backing up Gifford with a statement of fact intended to deceive. ‘But there was nothing there by the time we got to the crash scene. A whole lot of stuff had gone missing.’ He caught sight of a couple of bottles of Jim Beam and went over to the shelf and took one off. ‘Like this. Whiskey. Cigarettes. Exotic foods. As well as the weapons.’ He began to walk around the room, examining the shelves more closely, and found two red cartons of Pall Mall cigarettes. ‘Like these,’ he pointed at the cigarettes. ‘Looks like some of the stuff from the plane is definitely here.’
‘But no guns.’ The sergeant made it an accusation.
‘Whoever owns this knows more about what came off that plane,’ Duggan offered.
The sergeant gave an uninterested sigh and said to his other man, ‘Get the locals up here to guard this place. And find out who owns it.’ The detective nodded and went up the ladder. ‘He didn’t tell you that, did he?’ the sergeant asked Gifford.
‘No, Sarge. Just gave me directions here,’ Gifford said. ‘Very good directions.’
The sergeant reached for a bottle of Powers, pulled the cork out and took a swig of whiskey, glaring at Gifford and then at Duggan as if to dare them to say anything. Duggan turned away and began to walk around the room, examining the shelves in more detail and peering into the sacks of sugar and tea. It was unlikely anything was hidden in them, he thought: their contents were too valuable to be used
just to conceal something else.
There was a jumble of rubbish thrown in a corner: strips of brown paper, bits of newspaper that had been used as wrapping, broken bits of wood from a box. Duggan sifted through it with his foot and caught sight of what he thought at first was a magazine. He bent down and pulled it out. What had caught his eye was a cartoon-style drawing of a man with a sledgehammer smashing what looked like an engine, causing springs and washers to fly off it. Then he realised that it was a picture of a man destroying the bombsight in McClure’s office.
The page was headed ‘Field Inspection and Care’ and gave instructions for cleaning and maintaining the bombsight. He turned back some of the pages attached and found the cover. It said ‘Bombardier’s Information File’ and was marked ‘RESTRICTED’.
Duggan held it up and said, ‘This is one of the things we’ve been looking for.’ The sergeant looked less than impressed and took another swig from his bottle. Gifford gave him an aviator’s thumbs up. Duggan went back to rooting in the rubbish but found nothing else of interest.
‘Out of here,’ the sergeant said. ‘We’ve got real work to be doing.’
He led them up into the barn, still carrying the bottle of whiskey. ‘Locals on their way, Sarge,’ one of his men said, eyeing the bottle. The sergeant handed it to him and it was passed around among a few of them.
Another detective came in the gate as they were about to get into their cars. ‘This place belongs to an old fella called Mannion. He lives up the hill.’
‘Pick him up,’ the sergeant ordered.
‘Bring him to the Castle?’
‘No. Leave him with the locals.’
The detective dropped his voice. ‘He’s an uncle of one of the lads in the CDU.’
The sergeant stopped as he was about to open the front passenger door, and glowered across its roof at Gifford. ‘Fuck,’ he muttered.
Duggan read through the pages of the bombsight manual, trying to get his head around the complexities of drift knobs, dropping-rate angles and vertical-gyro settings. It didn’t make a lot of sense to him, just added up to the fact that aiming a bomb from an aircraft was a difficult business involving a lot of computations to do with wind, speed, altitude and many other factors.
