‘I’ve an idea who it might be, yes. Willie, thanks for your help.’ Hennessy shook him by the hand and showed him out, telling Jimmy to drive O’Hara wherever he wanted to go.
Back in the study he sat behind his desk and told Kavanagh and Murphy to make themselves comfortable. He offered them tea or coffee but they declined. He didn’t offer them anything stronger because even under stress Kavanagh didn’t touch alcohol and he could already smell whiskey on Murphy’s breath and they’d all need clear heads.
‘I’m coming round to thinking that maybe you were right about what you said yesterday, Jim,’ Hennessy said to Kavanagh.
‘About going to the farm?’
Hennessy nodded. ‘I think it’s best. The weekend’s coming up, and I can just as easily run things from there, for a short time at least. Mary and I will go tonight, Jimmy and Christy can come with us and we’ll take another couple of lads with us just to be on the safe side.’
‘Ye want me to stay here?’ asked Kavanagh.
‘I want you to organise a search for this Chinaman. He shouldn’t be that hard to find, not in Belfast. There can’t be that many Chinese here, and this one’s a stranger, from London. He’s got to be staying somewhere.’
‘No problem,’ said Kavanagh.
‘And I’m bringing Sean Morrison back.’
Both Kavanagh and Murphy smiled. They knew Morrison well and had worked together on many occasions.
‘He’s still in New York?’ asked Murphy. Morrison had left Belfast more than two years earlier.
‘Yeah, he’s liaising with the various Noraid groups in North America.’ Morrison had told Hennessy he wanted to get out of Belfast for a while and his request had come at a time when fund-raising in the United States had been going through a rough patch. Morrison had made a difference, not the least because his broad Belfast accent and typical Irish good looks went down so well with the Americans. He looked just like they expected an IRA activist should, tall, broad-shouldered, with curly black hair and piercing blue eyes. He spoke well and with conviction about the aims of the organisation and the Noraid groups had used him to full advantage. Morrison had also been a great help in arranging for forged passports and visas for IRA members who wanted to get in and out of the United States without being identified, and had recently begun to form links with arms suppliers. He had been a godsend. But right now Hennessy needed someone he could trust, and he trusted Morrison with his life.
He told Kavanagh to start the hunt for The Chinaman right away, and asked Murphy to step up security arrangements around the house. He waited until he was alone before picking up the phone and calling New York.
Morrison answered on the third ring, his voice thick with sleep.
‘Good morning, Sean. What time is it in the Big Apple?’
Morrison groaned. ‘Almost five o’clock,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong, Liam?’
‘I need you back here, Sean.’
‘When?’
‘Today.’
Morrison groaned again. ‘You don’t ask much, do you?’ He didn’t ask why because he knew the security forces weren’t averse to tapping Hennessy’s phone, legally or otherwise.
‘I’d like you to come straight here, to my house,’ Hennessy continued. ‘I’ll explain everything when you arrive. How long do you think it’ll take you?’
‘Ten hours or so, Liam, a lot depends on the timing of the direct flights.’ His voice was clearer now. ‘I’ll call you if there are any problems.’
Hennessy thanked him and replaced the receiver. He picked up the wires and flash-bulb that Willie had left on his desk and toyed with them, deep in thought.
Nguyen drove the Renault to a Chinese take-away and bought six portions of plain boiled rice, three of roast pork and three of roast chicken. He told the Hong Kong Chinese behind the counter that he didn’t want any sauce or anything, just meat. The food came in the same foil containers with white cardboard lids that he’d used in his own shop in Clapham. He asked for a carrier bag, put the food in the back of the van and then drove to a pub in the countryside to buy ice. The landlord of the first place he tried said he didn’t have enough for his own use, never mind to sell to someone who wasn’t even a regular. The man behind the bar at the second pub was more sympathetic to Nguyen’s story of a wife with an arthritic leg which the doctor said would be helped if she lay with it in an ice bath. He sold him three carrier bags full of ice-cubes shovelled from a large clanking ice-machine for a nominal sum and Nguyen drove back to the guest-house as quickly as he dared. He parked the van, put the packs of ice and one of the bags of fertilizer into two holdalls and carried them inside. Mrs McAllister was dusting the hall and she smiled when she saw him. ‘Lovely day, isn’t it?’ she said.
He smiled, nodded and slipped by her. He put the fertilizer on the bathroom floor, dropped the ice into the bottom of the shower and listened at the door until he heard the landlady go into the kitchen. He slipped downstairs and refilled the holdalls. He carried them back up the stairs, walking softly on the balls of his feet close to the wall so that he made the minimum of noise. The less he saw of the landlady and the other guests, the better.
He entered his room and slid back the brass bolt before placing the bag on the bedcover and unzipping it. He unpacked the bag carefully, first removing the two glass bottles of concentrated acids, which he took one at a time into the bathroom and put on the floor by the shower.
He tore open the plastic bags and tipped most of the ice into the shower and then fetched a box of salt and sprinkled it over the cubes before pushing the bottles of acid into the freezing mixture.
While it cooled he emptied the holdall on to the bed. There was the bottle of glycerine, a can of motor oil, several boxes of matches, a tube of glue, a jumble of plastic piping, plastic-coated wire, a box of baking soda, a pair of washing-up gloves, a thermometer, a Pyrex measuring jug, two large Pyrex saucepans and a Teflon-covered stirrer. He took what he needed into the bathroom and switched on the light so that the ventilator would start working. The acid fumes would be painful if he inhaled them.
Nguyen had worked with explosives a lot during the war. Whenever possible the Vietcong had bought explosives or used equipment captured from the Americans, but supplies weren’t always easy to get and they were quite capable of manufacturing their own blasting gelatine, TNT, plastic or nitroglycerine. Most of the raw materials for explosives could be bought quite legally, though in the later years of the war there were restrictions on the sale of electric timing devices. Not that it mattered, though, because clockwork alarm clocks were just as good.
It took almost half an hour before Nguyen had completed the complex and dangerous series of chemical reactions that left him with an oily white substance forming a milky layer at the bottom of the measuring jug.
Nguyen settled back on the cold floor and sighed. His jaw ached and he realised he must have been grinding his teeth with the tension. He was starting to get a headache, a piercing pain behind his eyes that could be a result of the stress or more likely the effect of the fumes. He got to his feet, his knees cracking as he straightened up and walked unsteadily into the bedroom. He opened the window wide and then sat on the edge of the bed, breathing deeply to clear his head.
When he felt a little better he took the bag of fertilizer into the bathroom and tore it open. He spread out one of the empty plastic bags that had contained the ice and scooped handfuls of fertilizer on to it. it was important to get the ratio of motor oil, nitroglycerine and fertilizer right. He added the oil to the fertilizer first, kneading it like dough until it had been absorbed and then carefully poured out the nitroglycerine a little at a time, placing it back in the shower between pourings. The nitroglycerine could be used as an explosive on its own but it was dangerously unstable and would explode if knocked or dropped or if it got too hot. Once it had been mixed with the fertilizer and oil it would be quite inert until detonated but would be almost as effective.
Nguyen worked slowly an
d methodically and it took him the best part of an hour until all the nitroglycerine had been worked into the mixture and he had a dark-brown gooey paste on the plastic bag. He stripped off the gloves and laid them on the floor and went back into the bedroom. The headache was worse. He looked at his watch. It was six o’clock. He had plenty of time, so he lay down on the bed and rested.
He woke with a start two hours later when the landlady knocked on the door. ‘Would you care for a cup of tea, Mr Minh?’ she called.
Nguyen thanked her but said no and she went back down the stairs. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. The curtains were blowing into the room and the sky was darkening outside. He slid off the bed and turned on the light. There was a lamp on the dressing-table and he put it on the floor, under the window, and pulled out its plug from the mains. He spread a newspaper on the shiny wooden surface and then took the soldering iron, solder, flashbulbs and wire and put them on the newspaper. He plugged in the iron and while he waited for it to heat up he used the Swiss Army knife to cut twelve sections of wire, each about eighteen inches long, and then stripped a short section of plastic from the end of each piece. He soldered a wire to the bottom of each of the flash-bulbs, and another to the side. He used a battery to test one, touching the ends of the wires to the two terminals. It burst into white light and hissed as it melted. He tossed it on to the bed.
In Vietnam they’d had a plentiful supply of blasting caps, but they were hard to get hold of in peacetime. Not that it mattered, because the home-made explosive was sensitive enough to be detonated by a flash-bulb. Nguyen had decided he would make extra sure. He opened two boxes of matches and emptied them on to the newspaper. He stripped off the red heads until he had a pile of several dozen and then he crushed them with the blade of his knife, one at a time. Occasionally one would burst into flames as he worked and he’d use the blade to extinguish the fire. When he’d finished he had a neat pile of red powder. He smeared glue over the bulbs and then rolled them in the powder until they were completely covered. He left them to dry on the newspaper while he prepared the plastic piping. It was the sort used as drainpipes in cheap housing. He’d cut each piece with a hacksaw so that they were about a foot long. He sealed up one end of each pipe with strips of insulation tape and then took them into the bathroom. He put his gloves back on and half filled each pipe with the explosive mixture, then went back for six of the detonators. He held the wires in his left hand as he carefully eased the sticky mixture around the detonators, two for each pipe, and pressed it down. When he’d filled all three he sealed the ends closed with tape with just the wires protruding. They looked childish and inelegant, but Nguyen knew how deadly and effective they were. Properly planted in a road, they could destroy a car and leave a crater more than six feet across. All that was needed to set them off was to pass an electric current through the wires.
He wrapped them in newspaper and put them into the holdall. He placed the tools on top and zipped up the bag. Everything else he put into a black rubbish bag. He tied the top and lifted it, but realised immediately the thin plastic was in danger of tearing, so he slid it inside a second bag, and then a third, before twisting the open ends together and fastening them with tape.
It was almost ten o’clock. He lay down on the bed and looked for a while at the picture of the former American president. He closed his eyes, knowing that his internal alarm clock would wake him at dawn, but sleep eluded him at first. The face of the man who had first committed the US military to suppressing the Communists in the North floated in front of him and brought with it a flood of memories. He tried to push them away but they were persistent and eventually he surrendered to them.
Nguyen’s father was a fanatical Communist but also appreciated the value of money and when Nguyen was nine years old he sent him to live with a cousin in Hanoi, almost 250 miles to the north of their village. The cousin ran a small garage in a back street and there Nguyen learnt how to service cars and each week he sent back half of his meagre wages to his father. In the evenings he went to a night school run by a local Catholic priest where he was taught to read and write and to question the Communist views he had picked up from his father.
He turned eleven on the day that Vietnam won its battle for independence and the French pulled out and he was in the street cheering with his friends when Ho Chi Minh returned to Hanoi. There was no peace, not even when the last French soldier left Vietnam. The struggle then became a struggle between North and South. Nguyen was eighteen when the first American soldier died in Vietnam, working in an armaments factory which manufactured grenade launchers. The factory was in a ramshackle hut in a Hanoi suburb containing little more than rows of metal tables, a brick forge with bellows powered by a bicycle and a lathe run by a rusting Citroën engine that had been fixed to a heavy wooden frame. He spent four years in the factory during which time he married Xuan Phoung and she bore him two children, both girls. They were three good years, the work he did seemed distant from the fighting going on in the south and though the hours were long and the work hard they lived in a small flat in a pretty part of Hanoi and there were occasional supplies of fresh vegetables sent up from his father’s farm.
It all changed in 1967 by which time US bombs were regularly falling on Hanoi. Nguyen was drafted into the North Vietnamese Army. There were no arguments, and it didn’t matter that he had a young wife and two babies. It would have been earlier if he hadn’t been helping the war effort in Hanoi, but now they said his skills were needed down south. After two weeks basic training Nguyen was sent into action as a sapper. Before he left Hanoi he arranged for his family to leave Hanoi and stay at his father’s farm. It was a lot closer to the fighting than Hanoi, but he knew that the bombing could only get worse and that in the city there would be no one to take care of them.
Nguyen and his fellow sappers were taken to within twenty miles of Saigon, to an area the Americans called The Iron Triangle, where they spent six months helping to build and equip a network of tunnels that housed hundreds of NVA and Vietcong soldiers. Deep underground were hospitals, training schools, supply stores and munitions factories. For weeks on end he never saw the sunlight. Nguyen was then put to work manufacturing home-made mines from captured US 105-millimetre howitzer shells of which the NVA had an abundant supply. The cash-rich Americans were notoriously careless with their equipment and there were crates upon crates of the shells for Nguyen and his team to work on.
One day when he was supervising a new batch of the mines a VC officer came to watch and began talking to him. The officer had been a mechanic many years before and it turned out that he’d originally worked in a garage in Hanoi not far from where Nguyen learnt his trade. The man complimented Nguyen on his work and after watching for a while longer he went away. The following day Nguyen was called to his commanding officer and told that he was being transferred to a Vietcong guerrilla unit. He’d asked what sort of unit and the officer had shrugged and said that it didn’t matter. Nguyen didn’t press it because he knew there was no point. He wasn’t surprised when he was told that he was ordered to report to the VC officer who’d been watching him earlier. That was when Nguyen had been taught to fight. And to kill.
Nguyen was told that he’d be working in a team of three, setting booby traps on trails used by the American forces. He was given a black uniform to replace his grey NVA fatigues, but he was told he was to keep his AK-47 rifle. And that was that. Nguyen spent almost a year living in fear, creeping out of the tunnels at night, planting mines, setting trip wires and doing everything possible to terrorise the Americans. He became expert at moving silently through the jungle and quickly learned to camouflage himself so effectively that he was almost invisible from a few feet away, even during daylight.
Nguyen himself gave little thought to the politics involved: he was happy to fight for his country and, besides, if he had ever expressed any reservations about what he was doing he would have more than likely been shot in the back of the head. But that all changed one ni
ght in the summer of 1968 while he was in temporary attachment to a VC training camp close to Chap Le. The camp was only thirty miles away from Dong Hoi and Nguyen was hoping to be granted leave so that he could visit his family on his father’s farm, when word reached him that his father had died. When he officially applied for leave it was refused, with no explanation. He went anyway, borrowing a battered Vespa scooter and driving through the night. When he arrived at the farm he was greeted by his tearful wife and children, and he learnt the full story.
A truckload of Vietcong soldiers had arrived at the farm three days earlier and demanded that they provide them with food and supplies. They helped themselves to rice from the storage sheds and half a dozen chickens. One of them untethered a bleating goat and began pulling it towards the truck. Xuan Phoung had protested that she needed the milk for her children, but one of the soldiers pushed her away and when she tried to take the goat back hit her in the stomach with the butt of his rifle. Nguyen’s father went to pick her up and the soldier turned on him, hitting him on the head. The soldiers dragged him to the truck, along with the goat, and drove off. They took him to a nearby hamlet and tied him to a stake and called out all the villagers to watch. They accused him of being a bad Communist and of conspiring against the National Liberation Front and then they slowly disembowelled him as the crowd cheered.
The old man was still dying as Xuan Phoung arrived on foot at the village, and she cut him down and cradled his head in her lap. The VC had left by then and one of the braver villagers helped bury him. No funeral, because that would antagonise the Vietcong and there would be more killings.
Xuan Phoung took Nguyen to the unmarked grave and stood with him in silence as tears ran down his cheeks. He made his mind up then, as he stood by the wet soil, and later that night he took his wife and two children, precariously balanced on the scooter as they headed south. As they got closer to the area controlled by the South Vietnamese forces he took them into the jungle, travelling by night and hiding from all patrols, US, NVA and VC, until he reached a South Vietnamese camp near Hue, on the banks of the Perfume River.
The Chinaman Page 12