by James Philip
He shone a torch on the crumpled document McCormick had handed him.
“These poor fellows were killed in Omagh?” He asked, thinking aloud rather than asking a question.
“Sorry, sir?”
“Nothing. Nothing, corporal.” The boy went to the back of the truck and shone his torch inside at the four coffins lashed down within. “Bad business,” he muttered, thrusting the docket back at McCormick. “Carry on.”
Seamus McCormick fought back the urge to sigh with relief.
He had told the others to keep their mouths shut whatever happened. While he sounded and looked like what he was pretending to be, a Scot in uniform, neither of the other men fitted the bill. They looked like good Catholic boys wearing uniforms that made their skin itch and their consciences ache, and if either of them opened his mouth they would shout “IRA!”
The squaddies guarding Holyhead docks looked dozy, half-asleep but nothing was likely to wake them up so quickly as a Dublin accent and they were all fingering loaded L1A1 SLRs – Self-Loading Rifles – and probably had standing orders to shoot first and ask questions later.
“Yes, sir!” McCormick snapped to attention and threw a crisp salute. Instantly, he turned to his companions. “Put that gate back up and get onboard. Sharply now!”
The Bedford revved hard, struggled to climb out of the port up onto the A5 London Road. That was when a man knew he was back in the old country; when all roads led to London. Except, these days, they did not, of course. London no longer existed, unlike British tyranny which it transpired no amount of Soviet bombs could eradicate from the face of the Earth!
“Piece of piss!” Frank Reynolds, the younger of McCormick’s two ‘bodyguards’ chuckled in the darkness.
Seamus McCormick changed gear and let the Bedford coast down the shallow incline towards the causeway carrying the road from Holy Island to Valley on the main island of Anglesey.
“We could hit a roadblock any time,” he cautioned. “When we get to the Menai Bridge they won’t wave us through like they did back in Larne or that kid did just now. They’ll crawl over every inch of this pile of scrap. If we get unlucky they’ll take each of us inside and look at our papers with a magnifying glass.”
“Our papers are good!” Objected Sean O’Flynn the older, at twenty-three of the two IRA men hand-picked from the Kildare Brigade to accompany McCormick to England. Both Reynolds and O’Flynn were killers, men from the north, Derry, who had been at war all their short adult lives. McCormick had no illusion why two such men had been sent with him to the mainland; the IRA high command needed his technical skills but they could not bring themselves to actually trust him.
“They are as good as the guys in Dublin could make them,” McCormick reminded him. “Good enough to fool some lazy RUC,” Royal Ulster Constabulary, “boy, but things are different over here. We have to assume the Brits know we’re coming by now.”
Neither of McCormick’s watchdogs thought it was possible that they had been betrayed. Their hatred for the Brits had long since morphed into contempt and it was always a mistake to hold one’s enemy in contempt. It made one sloppy and they could not afford to make a mistake.
Frank Reynolds was the marginally more thoughtful of the IRA men.
Just twenty-one a Loyalist bully boy gang had beaten his father to a pulp when he was eleven, leaving his mother and his seven siblings alone to fend for themselves in a friendless Belfast enclave. One of his brothers was a priest, two of his sisters were married with children in the south but his mother still lived on the Falls Road in West Belfast, now an IRA-run no go area for the RUC unless the British Army rolled in with armoured personnel carriers and machine-gun carrying Land Rovers.
“We were told you’d tell us what was in the coffins when we got to the mainland?”
“We aren’t there yet,” Seamus McCormick grunted. He had refused to let either of the other men drive the Bedford. He had been trained to drive bigger vehicles than the Bedford, the Derry boys had not. The lorry was a beast, the wheel was heavy and the gear box old and worn, the engine not much better as befitted a vehicle cobbled together out of whatever could be surreptitiously liberated from scrap yards and maintenance depot disposal bins. If either O’Flynn or Reynolds tried to drive the Bedford they would attract far too much attention.
“We’re near enough to the mainland,” Sean O’Flynn decided.
McCormick relented; he needed the IRA men to trust him.
“Three of the coffins contain partially assembled prototype shoulder-launched General Dynamics Redeye surface-to-air missiles,” he said, having to shout above the ragged roaring of the engine. “The other coffin contains a fully assembled M171 surface-to-air missile launcher, two M-16s and three Browning forty-five pistols, around two hundred rounds of small arms ammunition, fuse wire, half-a-dozen mercury detonators and about eleven pounds of military grade plastic explosive.”
The two IRA men were dumbfounded.
A few guns and plastic explosive, or possibly good old-fashioned dynamite had been what they had assumed they were smuggling into England. But surface-to-air missiles!
Seamus McCormick would have told them more about their deadly cargo but he did not think his half-tame assassins needed to know any more. All they needed to know was one further piece of information.
“Without me you wouldn’t even be able to assemble the Redeyes without blowing yourself up. I am the only man in the IRA who actually knows how to assemble a Redeye, how to load it into the launch tube and how to fire it at an aircraft in flight. Your job is to keep me alive long enough to shoot all three at British aircraft. Do you boys have any questions?”
No, neither had a question. It was hard to ask any kind of sensible question when your lower jaw had just dropped onto your chest.
The two gunmen would learn the rest when they needed to know.
Likewise, they would learn – or rather, work out for themselves – that if everything had gone to plan another active service group would have been on the ground in England paving the way for their mission for over three weeks, but only when they needed to know it. By now there ought to be safe houses waiting, secure depots established where the ‘equipment’ in the coffins could be ‘parked’, and viable ‘launch sites’ identified and plans formulated to transfer him and the other ‘shooters’ he was going to train into position.
The object of the exercise was nothing short of striking a blow so devastating that it would undermine the British will to stay in Ireland. Leastways, that was the objective of the Irish Republican Army Council back in Dublin and the hope of the handful of lower and middle ranking Irish civil servants, policemen, soldiers and several disaffected members of the underbelly of the ruling political party in the Dail, Fianna Fáil.
It mattered little that McCormick’s own motivation was apolitical.
He just wanted revenge and he really did not care if he lived or died a minute longer than he needed; providing he lived long enough to see justice done. There would never be any solution to the ‘Irish Question’ while the English propped up the supposedly ‘Loyalist’ majority in the ‘minority’ six counties of Ireland. The RUC had not even bothered to investigate his wife’s murder. The Redcaps, the British Army’s Royal Military Police had tried to ‘look into it’ but the local Garrison Commander had quickly put a stop to that ‘nonsense’.
It did not do to upset the Protestants!
Never had two communities been so divided by the love of the same allegedly merciful God!
He did not know the names or the addresses of the cowards who had murdered his pregnant wife; but he knew where to find the people who had sent the British Army to Ulster to protect those bastards.
Vengeance will be mine sayeth the Lord...
Chapter 18
00:30 Hours
Saturday 4th April 1964
Balliol College, Oxford
The Director General of MI5 was fuming with barely concealed outrage. He had been summoned back from
Belfast at the whim of the latest chinless wonder to sit in the Home Secretary’s chair and he did not care for Roy Jenkins’s attitude.
Sir Roger Hollis, the fifty-eight year old third son of the Bishop of Taunton had been Director General of MI5 since 1956. Educated at Leeds Grammar School and Clifton College in Bristol, he had gone down four terms before he took his finals at Worcester College Oxford and joined Barclays Bank. Later he had worked as a journalist for the Shanghai Post, working in Hong Kong before finding a convivial niche with British American Tobacco between 1928 and 1936. Invalided back to Europe with tuberculosis he had unsuccessfully applied for a post with the London Times. Espionage was not, therefore, by any means his first choice of profession and there was a distinct oddness about his past career that was finally threatening to undermine his long tenure as Director General of MI5.
It was only after he had been thwarted in his efforts to resume his career in journalism in the mid-1930s that he had employed the good offices of an Army friend to apply first for a position with MI5, and when he was rejected, for MI6 with the same negative result. Such was the belated and decidedly inauspicious beginning to what eventually, after these false starts, would prove to be a brilliant career. However, the fact was that he would probably never have gained admittance to the secret world of the intelligence services had he not encountered Jane Sissmore, MI5’s first female officer and since 1929 the Head of the Security Service’s Russian Desk.
They had met by chance at a tennis party.
It was Jane Sissmore, who had joined MI5 as a clerk in 1915, qualified as a barrister in her spare time and been called to the Bar in 1924 while working as a full time intelligence officer, who had eventually finessed Roger Hollis’s path entry into the MI5 in 1937. Hollis soon became Jane Sissmore’s deputy and by the 1939 he had become a fixture in the small pre-war service. If he had been fortunate to gain admittance to MI5 in the first place, his first major advancement and in retrospect, the key promotion of his career that did the most to propel him to the top of the service was fortuitous rather than earned. It happened that he was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to take advantage of his boss’s fall from grace. In November 1940 Jane – now Jane Archer since she had married John Archer a RAF officer who would later be killed in action in 1943, on 2nd September 1939, the day after Hitler invaded Poland – was sacked for ‘insubordination’.
Britain was losing the war at the timer, MI5 was a shambles but nothing mattered so much as the dignity of its then Director General. Jane Archer had denounced the then acting Director General of MI5, Brigadier Oswald ‘Jasper’ Harker as being ‘incompetent’. She was right and Harker was soon replaced but by then – notwithstanding that she was MI5’s premier Russian expert - she had been permanently lost to the service and her deputy; Roger Hollis had automatically stepped into her shoes. MI5 spent the rest of Hitler’s War fighting the intelligence organs of the German state, gaining immense experience and learning everything there was to know about that enemy, while Hollis and his small Russian Section, under-resourced and very nearly forgotten quietly went about their business. At the end of the war, the old German ‘hands’ were redundant whereas Roger Hollis was not so much MI5’s leading ‘expert’ on the Soviet Union; as the United Kingdom’s only real expert on its one remaining enemy. The rest was history, by 1953 he had been promoted to Deputy Director General. His subsequent elevation to the top chair was axiomatic when Dick White left to take over as Head of the Secret Intelligence Service in 1956.
In the way of these things it was not actually until Hollis reached the crowning pinnacle of his career in MI5, that people began to look back at his apparently brilliant, meteoric ascent and started asking themselves what precisely had been so stellar about his inexorable two-decade rise?
Although he had been knighted in 1960, Sir Roger Hollis had been the subject of a whispering campaign long before the October War. All the way back to his China days he had had an uncanny knack of collecting left-wing friends, and the very fact that he had become MI5’s ‘Soviet expert’ during and after the 1945 war dogged his steps and drip fed the rumour mill. It did not help that over the years he had developed a reputation for dourness and had become progressively less tolerant and forgiving of fools; of whom there were many in MI5 in the late forties and throughout the 1950s. Worst of all, he had always been in the long shadow of Sir Richard Goldsmith ‘Dick’ White, MI5’s wartime poster boy and the first man to be appointed Director General of both MI5, and then MI6. Moreover, while Dick White’s charm and ‘legend’ seduced the majority of his establishment peers, Hollis had singularly failed to develop the network of friends and allies in Government and the Civil Service that any self-respecting senior mandarin must if he is to do his job properly. Inevitably, once Dick White had moved on Hollis’s detractors quickly pointed out that a pygmy was now walking in the footsteps of a giant.
Sir Roger Hollis had been living with the whispering campaign and the lies people were telling about him for several years. He did not like it very much but it was not his job to be liked. What was intolerable was to be called to account by the jumped up little pipsqueak that bloody Thatcher woman had appointed Home Secretary!
Especially a little pipsqueak whose file he had read with immense interest shortly after his appointment in January. Politicians were quite happy to bandy about the less than salacious or judicious University connections of members of the security community; they were not so keen to have their own ‘student peccadilloes’ and ‘attachments’ exposed to public scrutiny!
Roy Jenkins viewed the MI5 man over the rims of his glasses. Before the war he had not been without his vices; he freely admitted as much to friends. He had had affairs but he had tried to be discreet. Likewise, he had a fondness for fine red wine, a thing curtailed, like his affairs by the October War. In his younger days one particular male friendship had gone beyond honest good fellowship at Balliol but that ‘involvement’ had not drawn untoward attention at the time – it had been during the war, anyway - and he could rely on the confidence of the other party. All in all he did not think that there was anything skeletal in his cupboard that the Director General of MI5 was likely to wave in his face. The trouble with people like Hollis was one simply could not afford to underestimate them.
He had only met Sir Roger Hollis two or three times since assuming his current post. The man had been pleasant enough, a little haughty and politely dismissive, clearly not wanting to trouble him with ‘technical’ security matters. Roy Jenkins had not paid great attention, or lent particular credence to any of the malicious rumours flying around the Security Service in the wake of the pre-war Philby scandal. He was a politician; he was used to constant back stabbing by people one had a right to regard as friends. MI5 had assured him that in the matter of the ‘Cambridge Spies’ appropriate inquiries had been made and all the bad eggs had been ‘purged’. MI5 housekeeping was a thing best left to the professionals, and besides, he had been confronted with bigger, more pressing issues in the last three months than the idle gossip of mischievous and disgruntled former intelligence officers.
The problem was that after his ‘little chat’ with the Foreign Secretary earlier that afternoon the ground had shifted under his feet and he had determined to radically amend his personal rules of engagement with MI5 and its uncommunicative Director General.
‘You’ll gather from my Who’s Who entry in the last edition published before the October War,’ Tom Harding-Grayson had prefaced. He had done practically all the talking during their little chat. ‘Between 1939 and 1946 I was posted to the War Office. That’s the cover all nomenclature for anybody who was engaged in intelligence work. In my case, it conceals my assignment to the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park. I was in it from the start. Well, actually from before the war because as soon as we realised the war was coming we started recruiting. We started by recruiting four men. My people called them The Wicked Uncles; two of them were certifiable geniu
ses, and the other two were not far behind.’
‘Bill Welchman and Alan Turing are two of the names in the GCHQ letter?’
‘They’d be the certifiable geniuses; the other wicked uncles were Hugh Alexander and Stuart Milner-Barry.’
‘Who exactly were your people, Tom?’ The Home Secretary had asked, thinking it a perspicacious question until Tom Harding-Grayson had smiled a particularly impish smile.
‘Now that really would be a state secret, old man.’
Because he was a pragmatic soul at heart the Home Secretary had abandoned that blind alley and inquired: ‘What can you tell me about The Wicked Uncles?’
Tom Harding-Grayson had smiled again but this time he had ruefully shaken his head. The Home Secretary had mistakenly interpreted this as a bad sign and therefore had been immensely relieved when the older man had shrugged, and rhetorically mused aloud ‘where to begin?’
He had begun ‘at the beginning’.
Roy Jenkins eyes must have been the size of dish plates by the time he finished his ten minute explanation of how it was that The Wicked Uncles had, quite literally, shortened the Second World War by years and not to put too fine a point on it, ensured that they were conversing in English not German that evening.
‘The Germans used a electro-mechanical cipher machine called Enigma which was so fiendishly efficient at coding their communications that they never once during the war suspected that it was remotely possible that anybody could break it. A message coded using an Enigma machine meant that every character of every message could be encoded in billions of different ways. However, to cut a long story short The Wicked Uncles broke the Wehrmacht Enigma, then they broke the even more fiendishly complicated Kriegsmarine U-boat Enigma, and then they helped the Americans to break the Japanese equivalent, the JN-25 code. In so doing The Wicked Uncles practically invented two entirely new sciences; the science of Traffic Analysis and the Science of Electrical Computing. Alan Turing was also interest in a thing call AI, that Artificial Intelligence to simpletons like you and I but that’s a whole story in itself.’