Scoundrel

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Michael’s waiting for us.” Marty held the back door of the limousine open for me. “And there’s a fellow come over from Ireland to meet you. Brendan, his name is. Brendan Flynn. He arrived yesterday.”

  “Brendan Flynn?” That did surprise me, and it chilled me. Brendan was one of the Provisional IRA’s top men, maybe third or fourth in the movement’s hierarchy, and such men did not travel abroad for trivial reasons. But nothing about this odd deal smelled trivial; it was transatlantic air tickets, suites in the Georges V, a white limousine at Miami International. I had walked into it eagerly enough, but the mention of Brendan’s name gave the whole business a real blood smell of danger.

  “It must be something big, Paulie, for a fellow to fly all the way from Ireland. And you’ve travelled a few miles too, eh? From Paris!” Marty was fishing for news. “So what do you think it’s all about?” he asked as we swung clear of the airport traffic.

  “How the hell would I know?”

  “But you must have an idea!”

  “Just shut up, Marty.”

  But Marty was incapable of silence and, as he drove north, he told me how he had seen my sister just the week before, and that Maureen was looking good, and how her boys were growing up, but that was the way of boys, wasn’t it? And had I heard about the New England Patriots? They had been bought by the electric razor man, but they were still playing football like amateurs. A convent school could play better, so they could. And who did I think would be up for the Super Bowl this season? The Forty-Niners again?

  Marty paused in his stream of chatter as we neared the Hialeah Racetrack. He was looking for a turn-off among a tangle of warehouses and small machine shops. “Here we are,” he announced, and the softly sprung car wallowed over a rough patch of road, turned into a rusting gate that led through a chain link fence topped with razor-wire, and stopped in the shade of a white-painted warehouse that had no identifying name or number painted on its blank anonymous facade. A stone-faced man sitting in a guard shed beside the warehouse’s main door must have recognised Marty for I was casually waved forward without any query or inspection. “You’re to go straight in,” Marty called after me, “and I’m to wait.”

  I stepped through the door into the warehouse’s shadowed, vast interior. Two forklift trucks stood just inside the door, but otherwise I could see nothing except tower blocks of stacked cardboard boxes. The air smelt of machine oil and of the newly sawn timber used for the pallets, or like machine-gun oil and coffin wood. I was nervous. Any man summoned by Brendan Flynn did well to be nervous.

  “Is that you, Shanahan?” Michael Herlihy’s disapproving voice sounded from the darkness at the far end of the huge shed.

  “It’s me.”

  “Come and join us!” It was a command. Michael Herlihy had little time for the niceties of life, only for the dictates of work and duty. He was a scrawny little runt of a man, nothing but sinew and cold resolve, whose idea of a good time was to compete in the Boston marathon. By trade he was an attorney and, like me, he came from among Boston’s ‘two-toilet Irish’ the wealthy American-Irish who had houses on the Point and summer homes on the South Shore or on Cape Cod. Not that Michael was what I would call a proper attorney, not like his father who, pickled in bourbon and tobacco, could have persuaded a jury of Presbyterian spinsters to acquit the Scarlet Whore of Babylon herself, but old Joe was long dead, and his only son was now a meticulous Massachusetts lawyer who negotiated trash-disposal contracts between city administrations and garbage hauliers. In his spare time he was the Chairperson of Congressman O’Shaughnessy’s Re-election Committee and President of the New England Chapter of the Friends of Free Ireland. Michael preferred to describe himself as the Commander of the Provisional IRA’s Boston Brigade, which was stretching a point for there was no formally established Boston Brigade, but Michael nevertheless fancied himself as a freedom fighter and kept a pair of black gloves and a black beret folded in tissue paper and ready to be placed on his funeral casket. He had never married, never wanted to, he said.

  Now, in Miami’s oppressive heat, he was waiting for me with three other men. Two were strangers, while the third, who came to greet me with outstretched arms, was Brendan Flynn himself. “Is it you yourself, Paulie? My God, but it is! It’s grand to see you, just grand! It’s been too long.” His Belfast accent was sour as a pickle. “You’re looking good in yourself! It must be all that Belgian beer. Or the girls? My God, but it’s a treat to find you alive, so it is!” He half crushed me in a welcoming embrace, then stepped back and gave my shoulder a friendly thump that might have felled a bullock. It was rumoured that Brendan had once killed an IRA informer with a single flat-handed blow straight down on the man’s skull, and I could believe it. He was a tall man, built like an ox, with a bristling beard and a voice that erupted from deep in his beer-fed belly. “And how are you, Paulie? Doing all right, are you?”

  “I’m just fine.” I had meant to reward four years of silence with a harsh reserve, but I found myself warming to Brendan’s enthusiasm. “And yourself?” I asked him.

  “There’s grey in my beard! Do you see it? I’m getting old, Paulie, I’m getting old. I’ll be pissing in my bed next and having the nuns slap my wrist for being a bad boy. God, but it’s grand to see you!”

  “You should see me more often, Brendan.”

  “None of that now! We’re all friends.” He put an arm round my shoulders and squeezed and I felt as though a hydraulic press was tightening across my chest. “But, my God, this heat! How the hell is a man supposed to stay alive in a heat like this? Sweet Mother of God, but it’s like living in a bread oven.” It was no wonder that Brendan was feeling the heat for he was wearing a tweed jacket and a woollen waistcoat over a flannel shirt, just as if Miami had a climate like Dublin. Brendan had lived in Dublin ever since he had planted one bomb too many in Belfast. Now he dragged me enthusiastically towards an opened crate. “Come and look at the toys Michael has found us!”

  Michael Herlihy sidled alongside me. “Paul?” That was his idea of a greeting. We had known each other since second grade, yet he could not bring himself to say hello.

  “How are you, Michael?” I asked him. No one ever called him Mick, Micky or Mike. He was Michael, nothing else. When we had been kids all the local boys had nicknames: Ox, King, Beef, Four-Eyes, Dink, Twister; all of us except for Michael X. Herlihy, who had never been anything except Michael. The X stood. for his baptismal name, Xavier.

  “I’m good, Paul, thank you.” He spoke seriously, as if my question had been earnestly meant. “You had no problems in reaching us?”

  “Why should I have problems? No police force is watching me.” I had aimed the remark at Brendan who was a noisy and notorious beast, not given to reticence, and if he had travelled here with his usual flamboyance then it would be a miracle if the FBI and the Miami police were not inspecting us at this very moment.

  “Stop your fretting, Paulie.” Brendan dismissed my criticism. “You sound like an old woman, so you do. The Garda think I’m at another of those Dutch conferences where we discuss the future of Ireland.” He mocked the last three words with a portentous irony, then began excavating mounds of corrugated cardboard and foam packing from inside an opened crate. “I took a flight to Holland, a train to Switzerland, a flight to Rio, and then another plane up here. The bastards will have lost my footprints days ago.” His echoing voice filled the warehouse’s huge dusty space, which was lit only by what small daylight filtered past the roofs ventilator fans. “Besides, it’s worth the risk for this, eh?” He turned, lifting from the opened crate a plastic-wrapped bundle which he handled with the piety of a priest elevating the Host. Even Michael Herlihy, who was not given to expressing enthusiasm, looked excited.

  “There!” Brendan laid the bundle on a crate and pulled back its wrapping. “For the love of a merciful God, Paulie, but would you just look at that wee darling?”

  “A Stinger,” I said, and could not keep the reverence from my own voice.


  “A Stinger,” Michael Herlihy confirmed softly.

  “One of fifty-three Stingers,” Brendan amended, “all of them in prime working order, still in their factory packing, and all with carrying slings and full instructions. Not bad, eh? You see now why I took the risk of coming here?”

  I saw exactly why he had risked coming here, because I knew just how highly the IRA valued these weapons, and just what risks the movement would take to acquire a good supply. The Stinger is an American-made, shoulder-fired, ground-to-air missile armed with a heat-seeking high-explosive warhead. The missile and its launcher weigh a mere thirty pounds, and the missile itself is quick, accurate and deadly to any aircraft within four miles of its launch point. Brendan was gazing at the unwrapped weapon with a dreamy expression and I knew that in his mind’s eye he was already seeing the British helicopters tumbling in flames from the skies above occupied Ireland. “Oh, sweet darling God,” he said softly as the beauty of the vision overwhelmed him.

  The Provos had tried other shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles. They had used Blowpipes stolen from the Short Brothers factory in Belfast, and Russian-made Red Stars donated by Libya, but neither the Blowpipe nor the Red Star was a patch on the Stinger. The big difference, as Brendan had once told me, was that the Stinger worked. It worked just about every time. Fire a Stinger and there is a multi-million-pound British helicopter turned into instant scrap metal. Fire a Stinger and the Brits cannot supply their outlying garrisons in South Armagh. Fire a Stinger and the Brits have to take away their surveillance helicopters from above the Creggan or over Ballymurphy. Fire a Stinger and every newspaper in Britain, Ireland and America sits up and takes notice of the IRA. Fire enough Stingers, Michael Herlihy believed, and there would be a bronze statue of a scrawny Boston garbage lawyer strutting his way across St Stephen’s Green in Dublin.

  “It will be the most significant arms shipment in the history of the Irish struggle,” Michael Herlihy said softly as he gazed at the unwrapped weapon, and if his words were something of an exaggeration, it was forgivable. The Libyans had sent the. IRA tons of explosives and crates of rifles, but neither bombs nor bullets, nor even the green graveyards full of the innocent dead, had yet budged the Brits one inch from Ulster’s soil. Yet Stingers, Herlihy and Brendan fervently believed, would scour the skies of their enemies and so shock the forces of occupation that, just as glorious day follows darkest night, Ireland would be freed.

  There seemed just one snag. Or rather two: both of them thin, both tall, both dressed in pale linen suits and both with dark smooth faces. Michael Herlihy made the introductions. “Juan Alvarez and Miguel Carlos.” They were not names to be taken seriously, merely convenient labels for this meeting in an anonymous Hialeah warehouse under the clattering exhaust fans that flickered the dusty sunlight. “Mr Alvarez and Mr Carlos represent the consortium that acquired the missiles,” Michael said unhappily.

  “Consortium?” I asked.

  The one who called himself Alvarez answered. “The fifty-three missiles are currently listed as US Government property.” He spoke without irony, as though I would be grateful for the information.

  “God, but it’s beautiful,” Brendan muttered. He stroked the Stinger; caressing its olive-green firing tube and folded acquisition array. The missile itself was invisible behind the membrane that sealed the firing tube.

  “And the consortium’s price?” I asked Alvarez.

  “For fifty-three weapons, señor, five million dollars.”

  “Jesus Christ!” I could not resist the blasphemy for the price had to be extortionate. I had been away from the illegal arms business for four years, but I could not believe the cost of a Stinger had escalated so high, not since the United States had been giving Stinger missiles to the Afghan mujaheddin, which surely meant there had to be other Stingers available on the black market. Yet these men expected five million bucks for fifty-three missiles?

  Alvarez shrugged. “Of course, senor, if you are able to buy the same quality for less elsewhere, then we shall understand. But our price remains five million dollars.” He paused, knowing just how deeply the Provisional IRA lusted after these weapons. “The five million dollars must be paid in gold coins, here, in Miami.”

  “Oh, naturally,” I scoffed.

  “And naturally, señor,” Alvarez went smoothly on, “a small deposit will be required.”

  “Oh! A small deposit now?” I sneered.

  “The cost isn’t your business, Paul, so shut up,” Brendan snarled. He was in love with the missiles and thought them worth any price. He took me by the arm and steered me out of the Cubans’ earshot. “The point of this, Paul, is that we already have the gold. It’s all agreed. All we need do is bring the gold here.”

  I understood at last. “In a boat? From the Mediterranean?”

  “That’s right.”

  “The Arabs are giving you the gold?”

  “And why not? Considering how rich the buggers are? They’ve got all that oil and all poor Ireland has is a bogful of wet peat. What’s gold to them, Paulie?” Brendan’s grip on my arm was hurting. “But the point of bringing you here was so you could see the Stingers for yourself. Shafiq said you’d not help us unless you knew just what it was all about, so now we’re showing you. You always were a careful man, Paulie, were you not?”

  “Except in women, Brendan?” I asked the question sarcastically, probing a four-year-old wound.

  “She was more trouble than she was worth, that one.” He spoke of Roisin, but his casual tone did not entirely disguise the old hurt. He let go his bone-crushing grip and slapped my back instead. “So will you fetch the boat over? Will you do it now? Because it’ll be just like the old days! Just like the old days.”

  “Sure,” I said, “sure.” Because it would be just like the old days.

  In the old days I had been the Provisional IRA’s liaison man with the Middle East. I was the guy who made the deals with the Palestinians and who listened for hours to Muammar al-Qaddafi’s plans for world-wide revolution. I was the Provos’ sugar daddy who brought them millions in money, guns and bombs until, suddenly, they decided I could not be trusted. There was a whisper that I was CIA, and the whisper had finished me, but at least they had left me alive, unlike Roisin who had been executed on the yellow hillside under the blazing Lebanese sun.

  The Provisional IRA’s leaders claimed that Roisin had betrayed a man. Roisin had tried to shift the blame on to me, and that brush of suspicion had been enough to cut me off from the IRA’s trust. They had let me run the odd errand in the past four years, and once or twice they had used my apartment as a hiding place for men on the run, but they had not shown me any of their old confidence -until now, when suddenly they wanted a boat delivered and I was the only man remotely connected to the movement who understood the intricacies of bringing a boat across the Atlantic.

  “We would have asked Michael to bring the boat over,” Brendan explained, “but he gets sick just looking at the sea!” He laughed, and Herlihy gave him his thin, unamused smile. Michael did not like being teased about his chronic motion sickness, which seemed an unsuitable affliction for a black-gloved soldier.

  Brendan poured me a whiskey. We had gone back to his room in a waterfront Miami hotel where, bathed in blissful air-conditioning and with a bottle of Jameson Whiskey standing on the low coffee table, Brendan was explaining to me why it was necessary to bring the yacht from Europe to America. “The Cuban bastards insist on gold, so they do, and Michael tells me it would be next to impossible to find the gold over here.”

  “Treasury regulations,” Herlihy explained. He was not drinking the whiskey, but had a bottle of mineral water instead. “Any transactions involving more than ten thousand dollars must be reported to the Treasury Department. The legislation was enacted to track down drug dealers.”

  “So your old pals the Libyans obliged us,” Brendan took up the tale again. He was standing at the window, puffing at a cigarette and staring down at the pelica
ns perched on the sea-front pilings below. “I’ve seen them in the Phoenix Park zoo, so I have, but it’s not the same, is it?”

  “The Libyans are giving you the gold?” I wanted to make sure it was Libya, and not Iraq.

  “We don’t have that kind of scratch ourselves,” Brendan said happily, “but we did manage to raise the deposit. Or Michael did.”

  “You raised half a million bucks?” I asked Herlihy in astonishment. The folks in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and the other cities where the Irish-Americans lived could all be generous, but they were not usually wealthy and their donations were mostly small. And those small donations had been shrinking thanks to the politicians from the Irish Republic who had been touring America to preach that the IRA was an enemy of the south just as much as it was an enemy to Britain. Now, suddenly, Michael Herlihy had raised half a million dollars? “How the hell did you do it?”

  “It’s none of your business,” Herlihy told me sourly.

  “Your business, Paulie,” Brendan said, “is the five million in gold. The Libyans are putting it up, God bless them, but they’re insisting we make the arrangements for moving the gold from there to here, and that’s when we thought of you.” He smiled happily at me. “Can you do it now?”

  He sounded genial enough, but Brendan always sounded genial. Many men had died misunderstanding Brendan’s open, happy face and bluff, cheerful manner. Beneath it he was implacable, a man consumed by hatred, a man whose every moment was devoted to the cause. If I turned down this job he would probably kill me, and to the very last moment he would smile at me, appear to confide in me, call me ‘Paulie’, hug me, and at the end, murder me.

  I took a sip of whiskey. “Has anyone found out how much five million bucks in gold weighs?”

  “A thousand pounds, near enough,” Brendan said, then waited for my response. “Say three big suitcases?” I was not worried about the space such an amount of gold would take up, but what its weight would do to a sailboat. However, a thousand pounds of extra ballast would be nothing to a decent-sized cruiser. “Well?” Brendan prompted me.