Trouble

by Michael Gilbert

  “He was unable to be here himself,” said the bald man. “He asked us to take you to him.”

  “All of us?”

  “All of you.”

  “The boat has to be attended to. There is much to do.”

  A third man, who had been seated beside the driver, had now got out. A real gorilla, thought Meagher. The bald man said, without altering the polite tone of his voice in any way, “If you do not, all of you, get into the car at once, I shall be regretfully forced to throw this young sprog of yours into the sea. It’s a long drop and he’ll bounce twice on the rocks before he reaches the water.”

  The second man had the rear door of the car open. The third man had moved round behind them blocking the way they had come.

  “Since you are so pressing in your invitation,” said Meagher, “I suppose we had better accept it.”

  Bradbury Lines outside the City of Hereford looks much like any other Regimental Headquarters. It is identified by the notice-board outside as ‘HQ Signals Corps’. There was a single sentry on the gateway, which was crossed by a red and white striped pole. The closed-circuit television cameras were there too, but they were not in evidence.

  On a morning of that same week in June a ten-year-old black Humber four-seater saloon car drew up outside this entrance.

  There was nothing remarkable about either of its occupants. Reginald Mowatt, on the back seat, with a bulging brief case beside him, was fifty-ish, stoutish and placid looking. His driver, a wizened man, with the look of someone who had spent most of his life in the open; a groom, perhaps, who now looked after a car with the devotion he had previously paid to his master’s horses. The only unusual item was the .388 automatic pistol which lived in a door pocket close to the driver’s right hand.

  The sentry said, “You was here last week, wasn’t you? Thought I reckernised the car.” He lifted the pole. “You know where the office is. On the right at the far end. OK?”

  The office was part of an inner citadel which seemed to be much more effectively guarded than the rest of the barracks. It lay behind a wall of breeze blocks and a cement-faced ditch which was deep enough to halt the biggest lorry and might have puzzled a light tank. The only entrance was blocked by a double line of off-set concrete posts.

  Mowatt got out of the car, threaded his way between the posts and presented his card to one of the sentries on the inner gate. They were a hard-faced pair who wore the beige SAS beret and winged dagger and carried Sterling L34 submachine guns. One of them stayed beside Mowatt whilst the other went into the office, returned quickly and indicated that he should go in. Neither of them spoke.

  Lieutenant Colonel Every got up to greet him. He said, “I seem to remember, Reggie, that you preferred tea to coffee, so I’ve ordered some. Beer would be easier on the lining of your stomach.”

  “My stomach’s too old to enjoy beer at eleven o’clock in the morning,” said Mowatt. A s he spoke he was examining the Colonel carefully. There were the lines fencing the mouth which arrive as a man grows older, but his face was still free of the V-shaped furrow between the eyes which is the hallmark of worry and strain. His right arm, he noticed, was now out of the sling which it had been in since the IRA had bombed a lecture the Colonel was giving at the Military Studies Institute.

  He said, “We have to congratulate you. Really a splendid bag. Four hundred pounds of torpex explosive. They could have done a great deal of damage with that.”

  The Colonel made no comment until an orderly, who had brought in two mugs of tea, had left the room. Then he said, “It was a spin-off for ACID, really.”

  Mowatt nodded. He knew about the Atomic Co-ordinated Inspection Device, brain-child of the Bomb Disposal Unit. Its enthusiastic users maintained that it not only detected the presence of explosive through any thickness of cover, but, properly used, could register its precise quantity, temperature, make-up and even its likely source.

  He said, “That’s true enough. I don’t imagine anyone now fancies the chances of bringing in explosives through any of the recognised points of entry. We’ve put what you might call an acid ring round the country. They’ve had to fall back on older methods.”

  “Older methods is right,” said the Colonel. “I suppose you realise that they were copying a device used by smugglers in Napoleonic times. They used to bring kegs of brandy across and sink them close to shore, attached to floats. It wasn’t always successful. Sometimes their colleagues managed to fish them out before the Revenue officers arrived. Sometimes they got caught.”

  “As on this occasion. Have you got anything out of them?”

  “There wasn’t much to get. They were minor characters hired for the trip and very well paid. They were ready enough to talk. We interrogated them separately and their stories agree, so it’s on the cards that they’re speaking the truth.”

  “Then they couldn’t tell you where the stuff was going?”

  “Where it was going? They didn’t even know what it was. Or so they said. Their instructions were to rendezvous with another van in the New Forest. That was the end of their part of the job. They thought the second van might be going to transfer the stuff to a third one.”

  “They’re careful people,” said Mowatt.

  “Very,” agreed the Colonel. It seemed, for a moment, that he was not going to elaborate on this. Then he added, “You appreciate that it was considerations of this sort that decided us to stop them at the camp rather than making some attempt to follow the van.”

  “I’m sure you were right. You couldn’t risk a slip up. Much better to pick up the bird when it was under your hand.”

  When Every fell silent again he said, “What is it that’s bothering you, Colonel?”

  “We made a bad mistake.”

  “Oh?”

  “You know the way these people like to cover and double cover every contingency. Well, on this occasion they had a man on watch in the camp.”

  “Another minor character?”

  The Colonel said, “Far from it. One of the two men in England I’d give a finger off my right hand to get hold of.”

  Mowatt thought about this. Then he said, “Another finger?”

  The little finger and ring-finger of the Colonel’s right hand were missing.

  “Cheap at the price if we could get hold of the man who now calls himself Liam.”

  “Then you’re sure it was him?”

  “Not sure, no. But one of our men spotted him. He said it wasn’t so much the face as the way he moved. You know, we had a big cover party in position in case they changed the landing-point at the last moment. We had road-blocks ready, helicopters standing by and the mainline stations blocked at Lewes, Newhaven, Seaford and Eastbourne. But we didn’t catch Liam.”

  “Maybe he went under cover and waited until dark.”

  “Yes. He might have done that. Or there’s another possibility. We may have put our blocks in the wrong place. They were designed to stop a van, not a man on foot. I thought about that later and we checked up on the vehicles that had gone through the road-blocks, to find out if they might have picked up someone further on. They all said no. One of them, a man called Crombie, said it a bit too emphatically. I did wonder about him. On the whole, though, I’m glad some poor country bobby didn’t try to stop Liam.”

  Mowatt said, “Yes, I’m glad about that. He’s killed too many men already.”

  The Colonel got up and moved across to the window, as though what he had to say could not be said sitting down.

  He said, “All the same, it was a bad mistake.”

  “How do you make that out? Agreed that you lost a slender chance of laying a wanted man by the heels, but on balance it was a great success.”

  “You think so?” said the Colonel. He remained standing, staring out of the window, shifting his head slowly from left to right as though he was following the movement of someone or something outside, but Mowatt knew that he was seeing things inside his own head.

  When he spoke, it was slowl
y, as though he was dictating an official memorandum. He said, “We know quite a lot about recent IRA operations in Belgium. The man at the top seems to be a Dr. Bernard, ‘Doctor’ being a courtesy title. No connection with medicine. In fact, he was a very successful criminal lawyer. Too successful, really. When he gave up his practice, after a series of brushes with the police, he acquired control of a small private bank, Bernstorf Freres, in Ghent. A lot of the money raised by IRA sympathisers in America comes to him.”

  “Openly?”

  “Oh, certainly. Open and above board. By inter-bank transfer, I imagine. It was what happened to the money afterwards that interested us. On a recent occasion we know that most of it went to Claude Monnier, who’s a Brussels lawyer. He paid it over – less a handsome commission for himself no doubt – to one of his clients, a man called Josef Wulfkind. Josef is an exporter of high-class marble for decorating houses and gardens.”

  “Not gnomes?”

  “Not gnomes,” agreed Every with one of his rare smiles. “Nothing as suburban as that. He deals in statuary and fine raw marble. He owns the only quarry of note outside Carrara, at Marche-en-Famenne. Some experts rank his stuff above the Italian. I’m told it’s the metallic salts in the limestone which give it its beautiful eggshell pattern and colouring.”

  “Marche-en-Famenne,” said Mowatt. “Rings a bell. Where did I see that name?”

  “It was in the papers a lot at the end of 1944. It was the furthest point the German tanks reached in their Ardennes push.”

  “I expect that was it.”

  “How much do you know about marble quarrying?”

  “Practically nothing.”

  “It’s really a process of sawing and splitting, but explosives are used, from time to time, to loosen different areas in the rock face. This gave Wulfkind a pretext for ordering a quantity from the Belgian arms firm, AMG.”

  “Of torpex explosive?”

  “Yes.”

  “You must correct me if I’m wrong. I know much less about these things than you do. But I’d assumed a quarry owner would use PE 808 or something of the sort. Surely nothing as dangerous as torpex?”

  “The point had not escaped us. Certainly most quarrying is done with Permitted Explosive. We could only conclude that Wulfkind spun some sort of yarn to get hold of torpex – and was very persuasive.”

  “Financially persuasive?”

  “I imagine so. He had a large fund to draw on. He would have needed to pay a fat fee to Tinus Meagher, who owns a motor fishing vessel called Petite Amie based on Het Zoute. That is, incidentally, the port from which Wulfkind ships his own stuff, so he would be likely to be in with the local characters.”

  “And I don’t suppose Wulfkind was doing this for love.”

  “No. He too, as we know, was paid very handsomely. The agreement with him was that he would be responsible for the transport of the explosive from Marche-en-Famenne, through Het Zoute, to an agreed landing place on the south coast of England.”

  “In legal terms, a CIF contract,” said Mowatt. “Carriage, insurance and freight.”

  “Right. But in this case, for ‘insurance’ read ‘assurance’. Assurance that there would be no security slip ups. That’s what he got so heavily paid for and it’s what gave him the biggest headache. He could trust Meagher, who had done a number of jobs for him before. And his nephew, who was half-witted anyway and was under Uncle Tinus’s thumb. But this operation needed a third man. And he didn’t want to bring any of the normal fishing crew into it.”

  “An MFV needs three men to run it, then?”

  “No. At a pinch a man who knew his job could handle it by himself. But this wasn’t so straightforward. The stuff had to be put down at a precise spot and buoyed. As an extra precaution against being spotted by an outsider the buoy was covered with scrim and seaweed. The trouble was that there’s a good deal of real seaweed about on that stretch of coast. Which meant that if the pick-up was to go through fast – and time was all important – the landing party had to be able to identify the buoy quickly and accurately. So what they did was to give Meagher a compass bearing to each of two posts on the beach. You follow me?”

  “You’re talking to an ex-gunner,” said Mowatt with dignity. “I follow you exactly. The beach party would take a back bearing from the posts.”

  “Right. And easy enough for them with their feet on terra firma. But not so easy for Meagher. He had to manoeuvre his boat onto the precise spot. That meant that he had to have someone with him who could handle a compass competently. And someone who could be bribed or terrorised into keeping his mouth shut afterwards. Fortunately there was a candidate for the job. A young man who, according to his own account, had been slung out of the French Navy six months before for insubordination and had been living by his wits since then, loafing round the ports and seaside resorts on the north Belgian coast, picking up a few crumbs from time to time. Meagher had heard about his murky record, which had rather amused him, and had used him once or twice to clean out his fish-hold. No one knew his real name. He called himself Dirk.”

  When the Colonel hesitated, Mowatt realised that he had reached the heart of his story. Everything that went before, Dr. Bernard the banker, Claude Monnier the lawyer, Josef Wulfkind the quarryman, Tinus Meagher the fisherman, had been an introduction to the person who mattered: the French boy, who went under the name of Dirk.

  Mowatt, who headed B11, the Irish Section of MI5, was noted for his freaks of memory. A spasmodic computer, a colleague had once called him. He collected and stored miscellaneous items of information and could collate and reproduce them without conscious efforts. Now a number of such items were coming together.

  Every had married a widow called Marie-Louise Arents. Her former husband had been a senior officer in the French Navy. He had died twelve or fifteen years ago, leaving her with a small pension and a ten-year-old boy, Henri. Henri had early shown a preference for being called ‘Henry’. He had gone to an English preparatory school and then to Clifton. He had adopted British nationality and had been accepted at Dartmouth under the Special Entry Scheme. In spite of this he had managed to keep up friendly relations with his father’s family. He was, of course, bilingual. These special talents and connections had soon attracted the attention of the shadowy men who lived near St James’s Park Underground station. They saw him as ideally fitted to penetrate the growing cross-Channel organisation of the IRA. Doubly valuable because, sadly, they could expect little co-operation from their French or Belgian counterparts.

  These scraps of information had come to Mowatt at different times and from different sources. They now came together on the screen and the picture they made was disturbing. He took a few seconds to phrase his next remark, then he said, “I did wonder how you had got hold of so much information about the workings of the opposition across the Channel. Am I to understand that Dirk is our man?”

  Instead of answering the question directly, Every said, “You realise that our idea was to leave the opposition in ignorance of exactly what had happened to their cargo. They would have known, of course, that something had gone wrong. It might have been on the beach, or on the way to wherever the stuff was going. It might have been one of the dozens of slip ups which occur even in the best run operations.”

  Mowatt said, “But because Liam was on the spot and managed to escape, they would know, at once, that they’d been given away by someone with inside information.”

  “Very exact inside information, confined to a small circle. Liam and his controller on this side. Not the pick-up team. They would have been briefed at the last moment and knew very little anyway. On the other side of the Channel: Wulfkind, old Tinus Meagher, his nephew Marise – and Dirk.”

  “A small field.”

  “A one-man field. No one seriously suspected Meagher or his half-witted nephew. Wulfkind might have been playing a double game, but it was highly unlikely. The answer to the question you asked me just now is yes. Dirk was our man. His cover was good,
but not unbreakable. They would have needed only a contact in French naval circles to discover that no court-martial for insubordination had taken place within the last six months. Even without such clinching information they must have recognised at once that Dirk was the weak link in their chain.”

  “If the news got to them quickly enough, they would have been able to pick him up when the Petite Amie got back to Het Zoute.”

  “It did reach them quickly enough and they did pick him up.” Every spoke so flatly that Mowatt knew what he had to say was bad.

  “They tortured him, to get what they could out of him. Then they killed him, in an unnecessarily brutal way. His body was found in a refuse dump outside Brussels. His arms and his legs had been smashed before he died.”

  There was a long silence that Mowatt felt disinclined to break. Every came away from the window and sat down at his desk. He said, “You realise that one of their reasons for reacting in this way was because they were frightened. They had wasted a large sum of IRA money and disrupted IRA plans. That was not going to be forgotten or forgiven. The only way they can make it good is by securing an equivalent amount of explosive. Stealing it, maybe, or even paying for it themselves. And then bringing it over, successfully, on this occasion.”

  “Time is against them,” said Mowatt. “We know that their next big campaign is due to start in Central London this winter. Probably not later than the end of November or in December. Liam has promised them that.”

  “Then Liam will have his work cut out. If he is in a hurry he will have to take chances and he may make mistakes. I should be happy to see him put away, permanently.”

  Before, when speaking of the activities of the counter-revolutionary warfare team of the SAS which he headed, the Colonel had spoken of things that ‘we’ did or ‘we’ knew. Now he said ‘I’. For some reason Mowatt found this disturbing. He was fairly certain that ‘Dirk’ was the Colonel’s stepson, but he did not feel able to put this suspicion into words.