by Duncan James
***
It had been obvious since the troubles started that there was never going to be a political solution to Northern Ireland's problems. The balance had always been wrong. Since partition: that's where the cock-up had been made. Dividing Ireland at all had been a mistake in the first place, and then they got it all wrong as well. Asking for trouble, that was. And now they've got it, and can't sort it.
At least, they could; but probably not in a democracy. Churchill had said that democracy was the worse form of government - apart from all the others. And he was usually right about most things.
Bill Clayton wondered how he knew that. Not the sort of thing that usually stuck in his mind, that wasn't.
Major William Jefferson Clayton did not appear to be one of the brightest of Army officers by any means, but somehow or other they'd managed to find him the perfect job. His father, a retired General of some repute, claimed he had been put where he could do least harm. He was by no means convinced that Bill was upholding the family's military tradition, although he did grudgingly admit that not everyone could survive in the Intelligence Corp.
Bill wasn't actually surviving at all. He was doing very well indeed, thank you. Academically, he had always struggled. He gave up History at school because he couldn't remember the dates, and did woodwork instead. He could do that while thinking about something else.
Sandhurst had been a nightmare in the classroom, and a doddle everywhere else. Bill was as tough as old boots and very fit, without really trying to be. And in spite of appearances, he was by no means brain dead either. The fact was, he was good - very good - at anything that interested him. It was that sort of brain.
And what had always interested him was finding out what people were up to. What they were really thinking. What they were really planning to do, rather than what they said they were going to do. Call it inquisitive, if you like, or even down right nosy, but give him a pile of seemingly unrelated facts and he could very soon sort the wheat from the chaff and work out what was going on.
He also had a gift for knowing what information he needed, and the skills to make sure he got it. Uncanny, really. He'd tasked any number of soldiers to seek apparently daft bits of intelligence, but they had eventually come to see how crucial they were to him. It was as if he was doing a giant jigsaw in his mind. He, and only he, knew what bits he'd got, how they would fit together, and what bits he needed to complete the picture. Indeed, only he knew what the picture was. Not the sort of thing they teach you at school. At least, not the schools he went to. It was a natural skill he had been able to fine-tune in the Army, to their great advantage. There simply weren't enough around like him.
The Army had not been slow to recognise his value in Northern Ireland. He was a widower, which gave him all the time in the world without any domestic pressures to divert his attention. He loved what he was doing and where he was doing it, and didn’t want to be posted away from the Province. So, as long as it suited the Army and Bill Clayton, that was where he was going to stay. His Headquarters at Chicksands desperately wanted him there, to lecture. But he desperately didn't want to go there, of all places. So normal rules and regulations had been bent, and his Corps had to put up with the fact that one of their men was effectively missing - at least, for the time being. And higher ranking officers at the Army’s Lisburn HQ in Northern Ireland also had to get used to the fact that he was special, and was likely to be called upon at any time to brief very senior people direct and at short notice. Where he was concerned, the chain of command virtually didn’t exist. It wasn’t always, either, that Bill chose to share all his intelligence with anyone else as a matter of routine - they’d had to get used to that, too. Altogether, an unusual situation for a relatively junior officer, but he was altogether a rather unusual man.
Those in the Security Services who knew him, - and in the other two armed services - recognised his razor sharp mind, and weren't slow to take advantage of it when they could. Some - mostly in the RAF - maintained that the words ‘Army’ and ‘Intelligence’ were contradictory. They hadn't met Bill Clayton.
He knew exactly how to sort out the Irish problem.
And he thought it was just - just - possible to get away with it, even in a democracy.
But he wasn't about to tell anyone. They wouldn't listen, anyway. Far too busy trying to recoup all that had been lost during the cease-fire. Somehow, they hadn't realised that that was all it was - a bloody cease-fire, not a surrender.
So far as he knew, he and his team had been able to keep up to speed, more or less, with what had been going on. And plenty had, of course. That's what cease-fires are for.
New people recruited. New plans drawn up. New arms and explosives bought - and some delivered. New active service units formed and trained. Some of those had been deployed to the mainland, too, like the one that did Docklands. They were new. And they were good.
But not as good as he was.
He knew who they were and where they were and all about them.
Not that he could do much about it. The normal system of justice simply wouldn’t work, in spite of all the evidence they had. It was impossible to get any witnesses to come forward. Like many magistrates and members of the judiciary, they were scared stiff - and with every cause. So it was a waste of time trying to get these people into court. There were other ways of dealing with them though, and it could be done, but not in a democracy, where nobody listened to anything at all out of the ordinary. Which is why he wasn’t about to tell anyone that he really thought they could put an end to all this nonsense, if they had the will and really put their minds to it.
But then he met junior Minister, James Anchor, quite by chance. It was an informal occasion, he remembered, and they chatted quite amicably over their drink. They got on well, swapped ideas, and there it was. They had both, it seemed, been thinking along much the same lines. They agreed to meet again. The more they met, the more their ideas developed, the military mind playing off the political. It became almost a game for them. But they resolved never to mention it to anyone else, because they knew that no one else would take it seriously.