Scoundrel

by Bernard Cornwell

  I could have been speaking to the wind for all the notice Halil took of me. “She has already been inspected,” he said, “and declared fit for your journey. She is thirteen and a half metres long, four and a quarter metres wide, and has an underwater depth of one and three-quarter metres. Her keel contains 3,500 kilos of lead. What more do you need to know?”

  “A lot,” I said, noting how heavily Corsaire was ballasted, which suggested her builder had been a cautious man.

  “There is no time to be particular.” Halil spoke very softly, but there was an unmistakable menace in his voice. I wanted to argue with him, but felt curiously inhibited by a sense that any opposition to this man could provoke an instant and overwhelming physical counterattack. He seemed so utterly sure of himself, so much so that, even though his vocabulary had proved he knew nothing of boats, he nevertheless had spoken of Corsaire’s sea-going qualities as though his opinion was final. Yet his next question showed how much he still needed my expertise. “How long will it take you to cross the Atlantic with her?”

  “Leaving from here?”

  He paused, as if unwilling to admit anything. “From near here.”

  “Going where?”

  Again the pause. “She will go to Miami.” Where, I thought, her delivery skipper would be murdered; one more anonymous body which would be ascribed to the drug trade’s carnage.

  “When will the voyage be made?” I asked.

  “That does not matter,” Halil said disparagingly, though in fact it mattered like hell. Any Atlantic passage undertaken before the trade winds had established themselves would take much longer than if I waited till the new year, but I sensed this man was not amenable to detail and so I made a crude guess.

  “Three months.”

  “That long?” He sounded horrified and, when I did not modify the answer, he frowned. “Why not use the engine? Can’t you put extra fuel on board and motor across?”

  “A boat like this one will only go as fast as her waterline allows.” Again I spared him the detail, and instead offered him a helpful suggestion. “Why not buy a big motor-yacht? One of those will cross much faster.”

  He made no reply, but just lifted the cigarette to his lips and this time I saw that the fingers of his right hand seemed crooked, as though the hand had been injured and never healed properly. The hand shook, so much so that he had difficulty in putting the cigarette between his lips. Water slapped at Corsaire’s hull and reflected the sunlight up through the portholes to make a rippling pattern on the saloon’s ceiling. I was soaked with sweat, though Halil seemed immune to the close humidity inside the boat. He lowered the trembling cigarette. I thought he was considering my suggestion of using a motor-yacht to transport the gold, but instead he suddenly changed the subject, asking me whether I believed America would fight to liberate Kuwait. It seemed an odd question in the context, but I nodded and said I was sure America would fight.

  “I hope so,” Halil said, “I hope so.” He spoke softly, but I sensed how badly this man wanted to see a great Arab victory in the desert. Was that why he had asked me the question, simply to satisfy his curiosity? Or was his query somehow related to this boat, and to my recruitment, and to a Stinger missile in a Miami warehouse? Those were questions I dared not ask. The truth of this operation, if it ever emerged at all, would appear in grudging increments.

  Halil was still worrying that America would not give the Iraqi army its chance of immortal glory for he suddenly took a folded sheet of newsprint from his suit pocket. “Your politicians are already trying to escape the horrors of defeat,” he said. “Look for yourself!” He pushed the scrap of newspaper across the saloon table. It was a recent front page story from The New York Times which told how House Representative Thomas O’Shaughnessy the Third had introduced a bill to Congress which, if it passed, would forbid the employment of American military forces in the Gulf for one whole year. O’Shaughnessy was quoted as wanting to give economic sanctions a chance to work before force was used. “You see!” Halil’s voice was mocking. “Even your legislators want peace. They have no courage, Shanahan.”

  I shook my head. “You know what they call O’Shaughnessy in Boston? They call him Tommy the Turd. They say he’s too dumb to succeed, but too rich to fail. He’s a clown, Halil. He’s in Congress because his daddy is rich.”

  Thomas O’Shaughnessy the Third was less than thirty years old, yet he was already serving his second term in Congress. Michael Herlihy was one of O’Shaughnessy’s staff, helping the Congressman cultivate the IRA sympathisers in his Boston constituency. I suspected Michael had been behind one of Tommy’s early crusades which demanded that the British government treat IRA prisoners according to the Geneva Convention. The campaign had collapsed in ridicule when it was pointed out that the Geneva Convention permitted combatant governments to execute enemy soldiers captured out of uniform, which meant Tommy’s bill would have given American sanction for the Brits to slaughter every IRA man they took prisoner, but the proposal had never been seriously meant, only a proof to his constituents that Tommy’s heart was in the right place, even if his brain was lost somewhere in outer space.

  I offered the cutting back to Halil. “Congressmen like O’Shaughnessy will make a lot of feeble noises, but the American public will listen to the President and, if Saddam Hussein stays in Kuwait, you’ll get your war.”

  “May God prove you right,” Halil said, “because I want to see the bodies of the American army feeding the desert jackals for years to come. In the sands of Kuwait, Shanahan, we shall see the humbling of America and the glory of Islam.”

  I said nothing; just held the cutting across the table until Halil leaned forward for it. He reached with his good left hand and, as he did, I suddenly knew exactly who this man was and why Shafiq was so terrified of him, and I felt the same terror, because this man, this unremarkable man, this ignorant stubborn man, this hater of America and self-proclaimed expert on boats, was wearing a woman’s Blancpain wristwatch.

  He was il Hay a ween.

  The Blancpain watch was an expensive timepiece enshrined in a miraculously thin case of gold and platinum. Except for its small size the watch did not appear particularly feminine; instead it looked what it was: a delicate and exquisitely elegant wristwatch. It was also a very expensive wristwatch. I knew, for I had bought it myself.

  I had bought it five years before in Vienna where Shafiq had met me in the café of the Sacher Hotel. It had been an early spring afternoon and Shafiq was lingering over a sachertorte until it was time for him to leave for the airport. We were probably talking about Shafiq’s favourite subject, women, when he had suddenly dropped his fork and cursed in Arabic. Then he switched to panicked French. “I am supposed to buy a gift! Oh God, I forgot. Paul, help me, please!” He had gone quite pale.

  There had followed a desperate few hours as we searched Vienna for a jeweller who might stock Blancpain watches. I had derided Shafiq’s urgency until he explained that it was the legendary il Hayaween who had demanded the watch, and Colonel Qaddafi himself who wanted to be the watch’s giver, and then I understood just what the price of failure might entail for Shafiq. Yet our search seemed hopeless. Blancpains were not like other watches, but were genuine old-fashioned hand-made Swiss watches, powered by clockwork and without a scrap of contaminating quartz or battery acid, and such rare timepieces needed to be specially ordered. The shops began to close and Shafiq was nearing despair until, in one of the little streets close to St Stephen’s Cathedral, we found a single specimen of a Blancpain watch. It was a rare specimen, it was expensive and it was beautiful, but it was also a woman’s watch. “Do you think he’ll know?” Shafiq asked me nervously.

  “It doesn’t look especially feminine,” I said, “just a bit on the small side.”

  “Oh, dear sweet Christ!” Shafiq liked to use Christian blasphemies, which he thought were more sophisticated than Islamic imprecations. “If it’s the wrong watch, Paul, he’ll kill me!”

  “And if
you take him no watch at all?”

  “Then Qaddafi will cut off my balls!”

  “We’ll take the watch,” I had told the shopkeeper, and proffered him my credit card.

  Now I had seen that same watch on Hali’s wrist, and I knew who he was: il Hayaween. Not that il Hayaween was his real name, any more than Halil was, or even Daoud Malif, which was the name usually ascribed to him by the Western press when they did not use the nickname. Il Hayaween was an Arabic insult meaning ‘the animal’ and its first syllable was pronounced as an explosive breath, but no one would dare explode the word into Halil’s face for, in all the shadowy world of terror, he was reckoned the most famous and the most lethal and the most daring of all the deadly men who had ever graduated from the refugee camps of the Palestinian exiles. In the pantheon of death il Hayaween was the Godhead, a ruthless killer who gave hope to his dispossessed people. In the gutters of Gaza and the ghettos of Hebron he was the leveller, the man who frightened the Israelis and terrified the Americans. Children in refugee camps learned the tales of il Hayaween’s fame; how he had shot the Israeli Ambassador in a tea garden in Geneva, how he had bombed American soldiers in a Frankfurt night club, how he had ambushed an Israeli schoolbus and slaughtered its occupants, and how he had freed Palestinian prisoners from the jails of Oman. Whenever a misfortune struck an enemy of Palestine, he was reputed to be its author; thus when the jumbo jet fell from the flaming skies over Scotland the Palestinians chuckled and said that he had been at work again. Some Western journalists doubted his very existence, postulating that anyone as omnipotent as il Hayaween had to be a mythical figure constructed from the lusts of a frustrated people, but he lived all right, and I was talking to him in the saloon of a French yacht in Monastir’s marina.

  Where I was not thinking straight; not yet. Terrorists live in a skewed world. Their view is dominated and overshadowed by the cause, and every single thing that moves or creeps or swarms on earth is seen in its relation to the cause, and nothing is too far away or too trivial or too innocent to escape the cause. Thus, to a man like il Hayaween, a game of baseball is not an irrelevant pastime, but evidence that the American public does not care about the monstrous crime committed against the Palestinian people; worse, it is evidence that the American people deliberately do not want to consider that crime, preferring to watch a game of bat and ball. Therefore a scheme to kill baseball spectators would be a justifiable act because it could jolt the rest of America into an understanding of the truth. Terrorists believe they have been vouchsafed a unique glimpse of truth, and everything in the world is seen through the distorting lenses of that revelation.

  So perhaps, in such a skewed world, paying for weapons with a boatload of gold makes sense.

  And risking the gold by sailing the boat across the Atlantic makes sense.

  And allowing a Palestinian terrorist to choose the sailboat makes sense.

  And involving the Palestinian’s most notorious killer in the purchase of Stinger missiles destined for Northern Ireland makes sense.

  Or maybe not.

  Halil pushed the folded newspaper cutting into his pocket. The cigarette had gone out, so now he lit another before staring into my eyes again. “Shanahan,” he said with a tinge of distaste. “You moved to Ireland when you were twenty-seven. Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You lived in Dublin for one year and in Belfast for two.”

  “Yes.”

  “You joined the Provisional IRA?”

  “That was why I went to Ireland.”

  “And the Provisional IRA asked you to live on mainland Europe?”

  “Because it would be easier to liaise with foreign groups from mainland Europe than from Ireland.”

  “Yet six years later they ceased to use you for such liaison. Why?”

  I understood that this man already knew the answers and that the catechism was not for Halil’s information, but to make me feel uncomfortable. “Because of a woman,” I told him.

  “Roisin Donovan.” He let the name hang in the stifling air. “An American agent.”

  “So they say,” I said very neutrally.

  “Do you believe she was CIA?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I assume the CIA choose their operatives more carefully. Roisin was impulsive and angry. She had a hairtrigger temper. She was not a person you would choose to keep secrets.”

  “And you?” Halil asked.

  I laughed. “No government would trust me to keep a secret. I’m a rogue. Civil servants choose people like themselves; dull and predictable and safe.”

  Halil raised the trembling cigarette. His hand quivered as he inhaled the comforting smoke and again as he rested the cigarette. “But these agents she spoke of, they were different. They were not predictable.”

  I said nothing.

  He watched me. I could hear the halyards beating on the metal mast, I could even hear the slight noise of the chronometer’s second hand ticking away above the chart table behind me.

  “These agents” – Halil broke the long silence – “would be sent from America and would have no ties to home. They would stay away for years, never talking to their headquarters, never reporting to an embassy, never behaving like an agent, but just watching and listening until, one day, they would disappear.” He made an abrupt gesture with his good hand. “They would go home with all their secrets and never be seen again.”

  “That was Roisin’s fantasy,” I said.

  “Fantasy?” He made the word sinister.

  “She made things up. She was good at it.”

  “She accused you of being such an agent…” He paused, searching for a definition. “An agent who does not exist,” he finally said.

  “I told you, she made it up.” Roisin had indeed accused me of being one of the secret secret agents. It had been a clever and compelling idea. She claimed that the CIA had sent agents abroad who had no links with home. There would be no threads leading back to America, no footprints, no codenames even, no apron strings. They were one-shot agents, untraceable, secret, the agents who did not exist.

  “She made it up,” I said again. “She made the whole thing up.”

  Halil watched me, judging me. I could understand the terror that such a concept would hold for a terrorist. Terrorism works because it breaks the rules, but when the authorities break the rules it turns the terror back on the terrorists. When the British shot the three IRA members in Gibraltar a shudder went through the whole movement because the Brits were not supposed to shoot first and ask questions later, they were supposed to use due process, to make arrests and offer court-appointed defence lawyers. But instead the Brits had acted like terrorists and it scared the IRA, just as il Hayaween was scared that there might be traitorous members of his organisations who could never be caught because they would never make contact with their real employers. The agents that did not exist would behave like terrorists, think like terrorists, look like, smell like, be like terrorists, until the fatal day when they simply vanished and took all their secrets home with them.

  Now il Hayaween worried at that old accusation. “Your woman claimed the CIA had infiltrated a long-term agent into the Provisional IRA with the specific intent of exploring the IRA’s links with other terrorist groups.” He paused. “That could be you.”

  “She was desperate. She was ready to accuse anyone of anything. She wanted to blind her own accusers with a smokescreen. And how the hell would she know these things anyway?” I saw that question make an impression on Halil, so I pressed it harder. “You think the CIA told her about the agents who don’t exist? You think maybe she read it in Newsweek?”

  “Maybe you told her in bed.”

  I laughed. There was nothing to say to that.

  He considered my laughter for a few heartbeats. It was not wise to laugh at Halil because he was a man whose pride was easily hurt, and a man who repaid hurt with death, but this time he let it pass.
“She blamed you for the man’s betrayal.”

  That was an easy accusation to rebut. “I didn’t know where Seamus Geoghegan was, so I couldn’t have betrayed him. I was in the Lebanon when it happened, and he was captured in Belfast.” Seamus was the Provisional IRA’s star, the il Hayaween of Ireland, and Roisin had given him to the British. Or so the Brits had said, and that accusation had finished Roisin. Her response had been to blame me, but she was the one who died.

  Yet still her accusation echoed down the years. These men needed me, or rather they needed my sailing skills, yet still they worried that I might not be what I seemed. I tried to reassure Halil. “I’ve held my secrets for four years, even though I had no prospect of being fully trusted again, so surely, if I was one of those CIA agents, I would have given up and gone home long ago?”

  “So the girl was lying?” Halil wanted to believe my denials. Not that I would have been allowed within ten miles of him if he seriously believed the old story, but he wanted to make sure.

  “Roisin saw plots everywhere. She was also a very destructive woman, and that was why she betrayed Seamus Geoghegan.”

  He frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  Dear God, I thought, but now I had to try and explain psychology to a terrorist? “Seamus is frightened of women. He’s the bravest man ever born in Ireland, but he doesn’t have the courage to ask a girl for a dance because he thinks all women are perfect. He thinks all women are the Virgin Mary. I suspect Roisin tried to seduce Seamus, failed, and so she punished him.” I could think of no other explanation. Seamus had been one of my closest friends – and perhaps still was, though it had been four years since I had last seen him. He was now in America, a fugitive from British vengeance. He had been betrayed, arrested, tried and sentenced, but a year later, in a brilliantly staged IRA coup, he had escaped from the Long Kesh prison camp. By then Roisin was dead, for her betrayal of Seamus had earned her a bullet in the skull.

  “You saw her die?” Halil asked.