Scoundrel

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Of course he focking knows!” Gerry put in. The security line was a telephone number that anyone could call to lay anonymous information against the terrorists. A machine answered the call and no names were asked, which meant that more than a few personal scores were settled courtesy of the security forces.

  Liam grinned. “So we’d phone the focking Brits and we’d say that some Provos were meeting at such-and-such a house at quarter past ten the next morning, and then we’d ring off. Well, you can imagine what happened!”

  “Tell me.”

  “The Yanks would turn up” – Liam was grinning at the sheer cleverness of the ploy – “and they’d wait there, and the next thing they’d know there was a focking patrol of focking Brits, all scared out of their focking wits because they thought it might be a focking ambush, and the focking Brits would hammer into the house like it was D-Day and all they’d find was the Yanks there! But the Brits wouldn’t know they were Yanks, not straight away! They thought they were our lads! So they’d knock them about a bit, you know, give them a focking good kicking!” Liam laughed and shook his head. “It always worked! The Brits fell for it every focking time, and of course the Yanks would go home and say how focking brutal the focking Brits was, and they’d never know it was the IRA that arranged the kicking for them! And when they got home they’d send us even more money! Especially if one of their womenfolk got a hammering! Jasus! It was like stealing sweets off a baby.” He chuckled, then looked wistful. “They were good times. The best.”

  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 harbour’s uncertain entrance. “We shall be relying on your organisation to support Iraq’s defence 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 harbour and whipped his cigarette smoke towards 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.

  “You have been very helpful to me,” il Hayaween said with an awkward and seemingly unaccustomed courtesy, and I wondered why a man of his satanic reputation was taking the trouble to condescend to me, and I decided that it was a symptom of the real disaster threatening Iraq’s world terror plans. Il Hayaween’s reputation was threatened by dissension from Syria and Iran, maybe even Libya was having second thoughts about Iraq’s chances of victory, but he would not give up. He would press on to the bitter end, dreaming of airliners exploding, of all the undeserving dead whose corpses might balance the injustices of history.

  Moments later a trawler crept across the harbour’s outer bar and anchored just inside the sheltering sandbank. She carried no flag and bore no identifying number on her bows, but il Hayaween confirmed that she was the vessel carrying the gold. I hoisted Corsaire’s anchor, went alongside the ancient, rusting fishing boat and put Gerry and Liam to work carrying the heavy bags of coin from one ship to the other. As the first bags arrived I cleared Corsaire’s cabin sole and lifted her floorboards to reveal the empty belly of the boat, which looked like an elongated fibreglass bowl studded with the chunky bolts holding her massive lead-filled keel in place. It was into that long bowllike trough that we poured the gold coins, settling Corsaire even deeper into the water as the extra thousand pounds of ballast chinked into her shallow belly.

  It took two hours to make the transfer. We needed no special precautions to hide our activities for there was no possibility of interference from the Tunisian authorities, but even so the trawler’s crew seemed relieved when their job was done. Perhaps it was il Hayaween’s baleful presence that unnerved them, or maybe it was the Uzi sub-machine-guns that his two bodyguards openly carried. Whatever, as soon as he decently could, the trawler’s skipper put back to sea.

  Il Hayaween satisfied himself that the coins had been bedded down in Corsaire’s bilge. “They will be well hidden?”

  “I’ve hidden a score of cargoes this way,” I reassured him. “I’ll glass the gold into the boat and no one will be able to tell the new floor from the old.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise. Isn’t that why you’re using me? Because I’m good at this sort of thing? So stop worrying.”

  “I am paid to worry,” he said, then snapped his fingers to summon his two bodyguards. Once they had reached the cockpit he held out his hands for their two sub-machine-guns. “These are for your crew.” He laid the guns down on the cockpit thwarts.

  “Not for me?” I asked jocularly.

  “Your job is to hide the gold and carry it to America. Their job is to guard it.” By which he meant that their job was to guard me. “Throw the guns overboard before you reach Miami,” he ordered Gerry and Liam.

  “We will, sir, we will.” Even though there was nothing extraordinary in il Hayaween’s looks or manner, Gerry still seemed to realise that the Palestinian was a very Archangel of Satan while he himself, like his friend Liam, was at best only a minor imp.

  “If you fail me,” il Hayaween said to the three of us, “then I shall pursue you to the last hiding place on earth, and when I find you I shall kill you, but not quickly, not quickly at all.” He grimaced at us, perhaps meaning it to be a smile, then turned towards the fisherman’s boat that had been summoned from the quay. None of us moved as he clambered over the gunwale. I was wondering how many men, women and children il Hayaween had killed. He raised his maimed hand in a gesture of farewell as the fisherman poled the bright-painted wooden skiff back to the quay.

  I put Gerry and Liam to work again. I inflated Corsaire’s dinghy and sent Gerry ashore to collect buckets of fine sand that I poured to fill the voids between the gold coins. Then, when the sand and gold were riddled firm and smoothed over so that their top surface was a shallow reflection of the original curve of the bilge, I covered the mixture with layers of glassfibre mat and cloth strips. Liam helped me, but his capacity for even such a simple task was short-lived. “It’s focking boring,” he complained to me, then retreated to the cockpit where he lit a cigarette and stared balefully at the grey-green harbour water.

  I finished the job myself; first mixing the resin and its foul-smelling hardener, then brushing the mixed liquid on to the prepared fibre mat. That job done I went back to the cockpit to wait as the fibreglass hardened and dried. I made idle chatter with Liam and Gerry, but my thoughts were elsewhere. I was being struck by the sheer amateurishness of this operation. How was it, with all the resources of Iraq and the Palestinians behind us, and with the cunning and practice of the IRA at our side, we were still reduced to this laborious method of smuggling gold? And were these two sour boys the best guardians that the IRA could find? And was Corsaire the most reliable transport at Iraq’s disposal?

  “What are you thinking, mister?” Gerry flicked a cigarette butt into the water.

  “I’m thinking that the resin should be dry soon,” I lied.

  As darkness fell I mixed the white gelcoat with its hardener and brushed it on to the cabin sole. By midnight the new work had dried hard and the gold was thus hidden beneath a false floor. The white of the new floor was not the exact same shade as the rest of Corsaire’s interior fibreglass, but the new work would be hidden by the cabin flooring and any searcher might conclude that the shallow bilge had been left with a deliberately rough and discoloured finish simply because it was out of sight. I laid down the wooden sole, covered it with the saloon carpet, then hoisted Corsaire’s anchor. I used a flashlight to steer a cautious course across the shallows of the harbour entrance until, at last, clear of the bar and with the weight of the gold making her even more sluggish than before, Corsaire plunged her bows into a short hard wave and made Liam dive for the starboard gunwale. His gun clattered on to the cockpit’s teak grating as he retched miserably into the sea.

  I raised the yacht’s sails, shut off her motor, and took my ramshackle enterprise into the night.

  We sailed into the winter Mediterranean, a sea of short grey waves, spiteful winds, and busy sea lanes. I headed far north of the African coast, out beyond the busiest stretch of sea where the giant ships plunged blindly east and west between the Straits of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, but even in these less trafficked waters there was filth on every wave; mostly plastic bottles and bags. I remembered a friend claiming that it was possible to navigate the Mediterranean by understanding the sea’s currents and reading the town names from the plastic bags that floated out from every shore.

  My two guards, realising that their responsibilities involved wakefulness, had imposed a crude watch system on themselves which meant that on our first afternoon out from Tunisia Gerry was trying to sleep in the forecabin while the seasick Liam was slumped in the cockpit where, with an Uzi on his knee, he was trying not to show his abject misery. “If you ate less grease,” I told him, “you wouldn’t be so sick.”

  “Fried food is good for you,” he said stubbornly. “It lines the belly, it does.”

  “With what? Sump-oil? And you should give up smoking.”

  “Oh, come on, mister! What do the fo
cking doctors know?”

  “You’re so eager to die young, Liam?”

  “My grand-da, now, he smoked like a focking chimney, he did, and he had a proper fry-up every morning! Blood pudding, fried bread, bacon, eggs, ’taters, sausage, tomatoes, the works, and all of it fried in bacon fat, and he lived to be seventy-three!”

  “That’s not old.”

  “In this focking world it is.” Liam drew hard on his cigarette, then half choked as a spasm erupted in his gullet. He twisted round to vomit and the Uzi clattered on to the cockpit sole.

  “I hope that gun’s safety catch is on,” I said when he’d finished retching.

  “I’m not a focking amateur,” he moaned unhappily, then raised red tired eyes to the towering triangle of Corsaire’s mainsail. “I could murder someone for a piece of soda bread right now,” he said, and the thought of that Irish delicacy immediately sent another spasm of sickness bubbling up his throat and he gagged again, chucked away his cigarette and twisted over the gunwale to spew helplessly into the bubbling sea.

  “I can cure your seasickness,” I said when the latest bout was over.

  “How, for Christ’s sake?” He was crouching out of the wind to light a fresh cigarette.

  “A bottle of cod liver oil and a bottle of whiskey, both drunk straight down, followed by thirty-six hours of absolute agony, but after that I promise you’ll never be seasick again.”

  “Oh, my God. Oh fock.” He turned again. I had once made the same offer to Michael Herlihy, who had similarly turned it down. Michael and I had been teenagers and I had cruelly forced him into a small cat-boat and brought him ashore two hours later looking like a dead wet squirrel. I doubted he had ever forgiven me.

  Liam flopped back on the thwart and watched as I opened the engine hatch and took a wrench to the boat’s exhaust system, disconnecting the outlet pipe from the muffler. We were under sail, so the engine was cold and quiet. Then I took the thirty feet of flexible tubing from the cockpit locker and connected it to the top of the muffler with a jubilee clip. I fed the pipe’s free end through the engine compartment’s forward bulkhead and thus into the starboard lockers of the saloon. Liam, recovering from his last spasm of sickness, frowned at the serpentine loops of tubing that filled the engine hatch and cockpit floor. “What are you doing?”