“Aye…maybe…” McCaughey conceded grudgingly after a lot of consideration, reluctant to accept defeat but unable to fault the logic. “Maybe a chance at that…” His features hardened again then as other thoughts occurred to him. “What about the Brit and the American? What happens to them?”
“The Yanks want them both handed over,” Hayes answered immediately, this time withholding nothing. “But this Kransky could be mighty useful to us, and this Turner fella too, if he can shoot as well as you say. Chances are we can come to some arrangement with ‘em if they want to sit down and talk.”
“And Lowenstein…?”
“Ahh, well the Yanks have him locked up nice and tight and that’s a fact,” Hayes shook his head, knowing there was no chance on that front. “Far as I can work out, that Jew was the one thing they wanted more than anything else outta this deal with Dublin, and there’s no chance o’ them givin’ him back. Already back in America, if the stories are to be believed.”
“Well, that’s a shame too,” McCaughey observed with a shrug, unhappy about the situation but not as concerned as he’d been about the other matters discussed. “Damn shame what they did t’ those kids he had with him, but I can’t exactly blame that on anyone but the Germans, Stephen… not even on you…!” He added with an evil smile that showed very little real humour. “Kransky seemed to think he was someone real important to the Brits and that Max Thorne fella, but I guess them and the Yanks can argue over him directly from here on… either way, it’s none o’ our business.”
“Now that’s more like it, Seán,” Hayes nodded, smiling again and starting to feel as if the mood was finally thawing a little. “What d’y’ all say now? Come on back with us now. I can have a truck up from Donegal in an hour to collect you if you’ve no car of your own. Come on in with us and get yourselves a shower and a hot meal, and tomorrow we can talk about what we can do for Eoin.”
“Sounds like a fine offer, Stephen,” McCaughey conceded, casting pointed glances at the others in the room. “What say you let us think about it for an hour or so, and we’ll call in on the radio to give ye an answer, same as we did settin’ this all up this mornin’?”
“What’s there to talk about…? I’ve given y’ me word, boys… Come in with us and we’ll sort all this out?”
“You sell a convincing story, Stephen, sure enough,” McCaughey continued, unfazed, “but grant us our little quirks and let us have a chat about it first: we still need to talk to the Yank and the Brit about it, and they’re not likely to show ‘emselves until you’ve all gone. Give me an hour, and I’ll give you our answer, right enough. Deal…?”
As frustrated and desperate to be done with the issue as he was, Hayes could see well enough he’d painted himself into a corner. He’d have to agree to the request if he wanted to maintain the outward appearance of benign conciliation, no matter how much he seethed inside over being forced to give in.
“A deal, Seán – a deal we have, indeed,” he declared a moment later, rising slowly from his seat and extending a hand that McCaughey accepted and shook after just a split-second’s hesitation. “I’ll head back to Donegal and wait for your message: I can send a truck for ye as soon as y’ give the word.”
“On the hour,” McCaughey promised with a nod as Glynn silently lifted a whisky and downed it in one gulp, his eyes a pair of icy daggers aimed right at Hayes’s heart.
“Were you alright in there, chief?” One of his guards enquired from the front passenger seat as the Tudor turned back onto the T18 ten minutes later and headed off to the south-west, toward Donegal.
“Aye, Andy; right enough under the circumstances. Glynn wanted to put a bullet in me, sure enough, and I’ve no doubt Michaels would’ve happily cut me from ear to ear as I bled out on the floor, just to make certain, but McCaughey’s got ‘em under control all the same. Hard to say, but I think I sold him on it. They wanted an hour to talk it over, then they’re gonna call through for us to come and get em.”
“We gonna wait for ‘em to let us know…?”
“What do you think…? I was hopin’ the three of us might’a been able to take care o’ things on the quite, but that’s all out the window now…”
“Northern Command’s not gonna like that.”
“I don’t give a fook about what Northern Command does or doesn’t like,” Hayes growled, his own frustration boiling over in that moment. “There’s fook-all of ‘em left now anyway, after all that shite last month.”
“Those that are left will have long memories…”
“You show me an Irishman who doesn’t have a long fookin’ memory, Andy,” he snorted with derision. “There’s families I lived next to in Wexford still cryin’ about land that was taken from ‘em by Oliver –fookin’– Cromwell…! Holdin’ a grudge is our national pastime, for Christ’s sake…! If someone really wants to try somethin’, Andy, there’s nothing you, I or anyone else can do about it. Let ‘em try, and we’ll see what we see.” He sighed, giving a wave of dismissal as he sagged back into his seat in the back. “It’s not Northern Command that worries me... it’s the bloody Americans: between them and De Valera, they’ve fooked us right up and no mistake! Help from the IRA in exchange for weapons and financial support against the Germans, they said… deliver that bloody Jew to ‘em and they’ll give us everything we ever wanted.” He snorted again, this one more of disgust than derision. “Should ha’ known that was too good to be true! Me own bloody fault! Dublin just ‘forgot’ to mention that all that support comes with a couple o’ fookin’ division of American infantry to go with it! This was supposed to make Ireland safe… not leave us with the biggest force of foreign troops on Irish soil since the British fooked off back in ‘Twenty-Two!”
“You sound like you wanna do somethin’ about that.”
“Fookin’ right I do, but not right now…” Hayes shot back, fire in his eyes once more as he thought on what he considered to be a joint betrayal by the United States and the Dublin government (notwithstanding the fact that as an unofficial and unelected paramilitary organisation, the IRA itself had no intrinsic right to be consulted about any matters of Irish foreign policy).
“We lost seventy per cent of our manpower into the Irish Army in the months after Britain fell and De Valera announced that bloody armistice for all volunteers who signed up,” he continued after a short breath. “We’d get a fair few of ‘em back, I reckon, if we put out the call, but it’d still not be enough to take on the Yanks and the Irish regulars… we need ‘em right now anyway, much as I hate to admit it. Hitler’s as crazy a fucker as I’ve seen in many a day, and without the Americans, they’d take the whole bloody country in a week and still have time for a visit to mass on Sunday.” That his latest rationalisation completely contradicted his earlier reasons for being against the presence of US forces slipped by completely unnoticed.
“You want me to make the call…?” Andy asked after a moment’s silence, holding up the microphone of the portable radio set beside him on the front seat.
“I’ll do it, son,” Hayes countered with a shake of his head as he held out his hand and accepted the offered mike. “I told ‘em I’d give ‘em a truck, and a truck’s what I’ll give ‘em. It’s my decision: there’s no point having blood on your hands over it…”
It was dark by the time a green-painted, ex-army Bedford QL 15cwt (hundredweight) truck pulled up out front of the inn, its rear cargo area covered by a thick tarpaulin of similar colour. Coming to a halt perhaps twenty yards away, it carried out a short, sharp reversing turn and swung about until its rear tailgate was facing the pub’s front door. Hands appeared from within, throwing back the flaps hanging over the opening, however the actual interior remained black as pitch beneath a moonless night sky filled with a billion glittering stars.
“In position…” the radio call came through a moment later over Hayes’ radio as he waited inside the Tudor, ten miles down the road. “No observable activity…”
“OP: you’re sur
e no one’s left the building in the last hour?” Hayes demanded in a nervous tone, hanging on every word as the reply came through from another source.
“Affirmative… two unidentified males entered the pub fifteen minutes after you guys left, but we’ve had no sightings since. Can’t be one hundred per cent certain, but we believe no one has left since.” That both voices transmitting were American was something Hayes wasn’t pleased about, but he recognised the necessity of it all the same.
“That means all of ‘em are in there…” He mused, more hopeful than confident. “Proceed…” he said simply, keying the transmit button on his microphone once more.
Powerful floodlights burst into life above the roof of the Bedford, all pointing backward and bathing the whole pub in beams of stark, brilliant white that lit up the whole area in dazzling illumination. There was a few more seconds’ pause, the silence oppressive, before a long, orange gout of flame burst from the rear of the truck cargo bed in a roar and thunder of heavy machine gun fire.
Mounted on a tripod bolted to the rear bed, the .50-inch Browning M2 hammered away at 600 rounds per minute, a torrent of thumb-sized slugs tearing through brick and stone as if it were paper. Huge holes were blasted into the walls, stitching their way along from right to left as the building began to collapse in on itself almost immediately. The gunner was well-trained, maintaining short, controlled bursts that fully destroyed any particular area before moving on to the next section of wall.
Somewhere inside, a spark from a ricochet or the flame of a broken lantern ignited the spirits already soaking into the bar and floorboards as countless bottles were shattered and smashed by the onslaught of heavy-calibre bullets. Fire sprang up from the bar end of the structure, spreading quickly to the roof and collapsing walls as the fusillade continued to tear the inn to pieces. Sparks and smoke began to pour into the sky as the burning began in earnest. Fire from the machine gun halted for just a few seconds as ammunition and a red hot barrel were both quickly changed, and then started up again, continuing its task in destroying any part of the building not already ruined or consumed by fire.
Three hundred yards away and halfway up a hill on the southern side of the T18, Glynn, Michaels and McCaughey watched impassively from a crouching position as the gunfire continued and flames rose up from the burning wreckage of the pub. Their faces were grim and their eyes cold as they listened to the chattering of the M2 Browning, the sound still quite loud and jarring even at such a distance. A few yards further on, Kransky and Turner waited patiently, also watching the show.
“I really wanted to believe him,” Glynn observed softly, loathing in his voice.
“Aye, me too, Tomás,” McCaughey admitted, sounding just as betrayed. “But we didn’t all the same, and we’re the better for it.”
“We gonna do somethin’ about it?” Michaels growled softly, angry and looking for a fight… any fight right at that moment.
“That’s a discussion for another time…” McCaughey observed, forcing his own desire for vengeance into the back of his mind for the time being. “Right now we need to get somewhere safe so we can talk about what we do next.”
“Lucky we’ve still got a few friends on this side of the river,” Michaels muttered, suddenly feeling very alone and vulnerable as the blaze down on the road continued to grow larger still. “Friends enough to look after us if we need help: not everyone down south is happy with what Hayes has been up to, and there’s a good few families in the Wexford area who ain’t forgiven him for handin’ that poor Devereux over to the Garda. Those that don’t believe it can think what they like, but we seen the truth of his treachery tonight, and that’s a fact.”
“We gotta move!” Kransky hissed softly, joining the group at the crouch with Turner following on behind. “There’s a patrol coming down the hill from the south-east, about five hundred yards away…”
He carried a pack over one shoulder accompanied by the long, thin bag that contained the pieces of his beloved sniper rifle, while the silenced MP2 was ready in his hands for any eventuality. Instead of the usual red-dot aiming unit fixed to its receiver however, he’d instead clipped a large, bulky thermal sight to its quick-detachable (QD) mount. It made the weapon unwieldy and far too top heavy, but it also allowed him to scan the surrounding area in complete darkness, with any trace of body heat standing out clear as day against the cold background of the hills at night.
“Sneaky bastards,” McCaughey spat angrily. “They must’ve come down through Keadew Upper: it’s a hard march, day or night, but there’s roads further back over the hills where they could’a been dropped off.”
“I don’t give a shit where they came from,” Kransky snapped in return. “I only care about where they’re headed, and right now they’re headed right at us…! We gotta move fellas, and we gotta go fast and quiet if we’re gonna get outta here tonight: no tellin’ how many more patrols they got out here lookin’ for us.”
“Lead the way, Richard… we’ll be at your back…”
McCaughey gave the American a reassuring pat on the shoulder before reaching down to take a pack of his own from the ground at his feet and shrug it over his shoulders as the others did the same. The group set off heading south-west with Kransky in the lead, making a slow but steady pace as he carefully picked his way across the Bluestack Hills, leaving their would-be pursuers and the Barnesmore Gap well behind in the darkness.
HMAS Melville, Darwin
Northern Territory, Australia
November 27, 1942
Friday
The naval base at Port Darwin had originally been constructed as a naval reserve depot early in 1935. A radio station and fuel tanks were added to the facility in the months leading up to the Second World War, and was commissioned as HMAS Melville in August of 1940. Adjacent to Larrakeyah Army Barracks and close to the centre of the town itself, it was a short drive of just a few minutes from the nearby RAAF Base Darwin. Max Thorne had only ever visited Darwin once before, and that had been some time ago in a future that no longer existed. The hot, humid, tropical settlement he stared out at through the windows of an air-conditioned Land Rover that morning was a very different town indeed to the one he recalled from his younger days.
The establishment of Darwin as a small, white settlement had taken place during 1869, although indigenous Australians of the Larrakia clans had of course already inhabited the area for thousands of years. A gold rush during the late 1800’s had boosted the population substantially during that period, while the early years of the 20th Century saw substantial political and civil unrest that eventually culminated in a union-organised march and demonstration of over a thousand protesters that became known as the ‘Darwin Rebellion.
The slide into war in the last years of the 1930s saw a huge expansion of all military installations within the town area, with major improvements to port facilities that included the building of a number of ancillary airfields, a vast increase in the number of anti-aircraft batteries stationed around the city, and the addition of anti-submarine booms across the entrance to the port, spanning the strait between Wagait Beach and East Point.
The largest improvement to infrastructure however – the one which had made all the others possible over the last two years – had been one that for the most part was not even within the town borders. One of the largest work projects ever attempted in Australia, the Adelaide-Darwin railway line had taken most of the last two years to complete, and had brought with it a huge increase in the military’s ability to defend and resupply the town, should the threat of attack materialise.
The helicopter ride out of the base was another eye-opener in itself as Thorne and Donelson and their pair of SAS escorts stared down at the bright, blue waters of Port Darwin from the rear seats of an RN (Royal Navy) Chickasaw. Seated in two rows of forward-facing seats with the troopers to the rear, all were afforded a fine view of the port and its facilities as the chopper came in from medium altitude, allowing a stunning view of the water a
nd the endless array of mangroves clustered along the coastline beyond. Air that was so humid as to almost feel moist blasted across their faces and bodies through the open side doors, while the sunglasses they all wore were only partially effective against the brilliant glare of the blazing sun against the rippling water below.
Originally a relatively small facility prior to the occupation of Britain two years before, HMAS Melville had blossomed into huge base capable of housing and servicing a large number of capital ships of the Royal Navy. Considered a primary home base for all Commonwealth and Allied naval activity that included commands from the Indian Ocean, the Pacific and the entirety of the South-East Asian, Darwin was now second only to Singapore as a primary base of operations.
At that present time, so far as Thorne could see, it was very likely that Port Darwin currently contained the largest single collection of Royal Navy warships in existence. Sweeping across the water, from his position he could quite clearly identify the aircraft carrier Indomitable and battleships Prince of Wales, King George V and Ramilles, along with the battlecruiser Repulse, a dozen assorted heavy and light cruisers, an equal number of destroyers and half-a-dozen fleet submarines.
This powerful force was also soon to be joined by the new fleet carriers Anson and Howe, vessels that had originally been laid down and launched as battleships but had been forced to flee their construction yards in Britain while still incomplete due to the invasion of September 1940. Their reconstruction and completion as aircraft carriers had since been finalised in the United States, and their arrival would provide much-needed additional striking power to the existing fleet.
It was over the battlecruiser Repulse that the Chickasaw eventually came in for landing, circling about as crewmen below cleared a narrow section of the vessel’s deck, aft of the rear main turret. Standing in the shade of the barrel of one of that huge battery’s twin 15-inch guns, a small delegation of naval officers was clearly awaiting their arrival, all wearing formal dress uniform in spite of the heat. The nature of their dress wasn’t lost on Thorne or his group, all of whom were far more casually dressed in tropical-pattern CWD: a short-sleeved khaki work shirt over DPCU pants and boots. All four also wore the standard, DPCU-pattern ‘floppy’ hat that had begun to replace the ubiquitous slouch in front line service – headgear that in US usage would become known as a ‘Boonie’.
The Dead Alone (Empires Lost Book 3) Page 42