Reaper

by Hurley, Graham

  He frowned and studied his fingernails. Then he looked up, resigned.

  “Listen,” he said, “there’s someone I ought to talk to.”

  Miller looked him in the eye. “You’re right,” he said, “and quickly.”

  The man they called the Reaper left Dublin on this same Monday morning in the passenger seat of a newish Ford Escort.

  Beside him, at the wheel, was McParland, his bodyguard. By noon, they were crossing the rich flatlands of Carlow and Tipperary. They took a light lunch at a fish restaurant in Limerick, and continued south-west, towards Tralee and County Kerry. By dusk, they’d arrived at their destination, a small modern bungalow overlooking the sea at Caherdaniel, on the Ring of Kerry. Here, they would meet three other members of the Army Council, newly arrived from Belfast. With the mainland campaign beginning to falter, Scullen knew that the time had come for a fresh initiative. The Army Council, like the rich multinationals it affected to despise, had little patience with failure.

  Bumping down the narrow track towards the bungalow, Scullen gazed out at the sudden expanse of ocean, thinking again of Leeson. He’d spent the weekend pondering the consequences of the diplomat’s visit, their lunch together, what the man had told him, the things he’d left unsaid. He’d sensed at once that the intelligence was genuine, no plant. He’d recognized the anger that lay behind the easy diffidence, the man’s impatience and contempt for the politicians he was paid to serve. They’re like barnacles, he’d said. They’re brainless, and gutless, and they’ll do anything to cling to power. In the South Atlantic, to no one’s surprise, they’ll soon be facing a war. The war will be short, and nasty, the outcome almost impossible to predict.

  The word had stuck in Scullen’s mind. War. It left no room for ambiguity, or argument. The Argentinians, Leeson had remarked over the oysters, will push and push. Because we don’t take them seriously, we’ll leave them no option but to invade. After the invasion, we’ll protest. There’ll be the usual exchange of ultimatums. Then we’ll go to war.

  They’d discussed the notion for a while, two middle-aged men with a decent bottle of wine and a mutual appreciation of the absurdities of it all. Scullen had asked about details, scenarios, and Leeson had warmed to his theme, describing the plans for the Task Force, the Queen’s writ carried to the bottom of the globe by a handful of warships and a couple of thousand troops. It would, he’d said, be a last spasm of gunboat diplomacy, the final twitch of the Lion’s tail.

  At first, listening to Leeson’s acid exposition, Scullen had found the story difficult to believe. Would the Brits really go so far for half a dozen islands and a couple of million sheep? Hadn’t the new Nationality Act just denied the Falkland Islanders the right to carry a British passport? But the more he listened, the more he understood Leeson’s central thesis. That the coming war would be fought not to defend any great principle, or any vital slice of national interest, but to keep the ruling clique in power. He’d made the point several times, letting the mask slip, leaning in over the table. Sending a Task Force, he’d said, would get them out of the hole they’d dug for themselves. It would demonstrate decisiveness, iron will, the triumph of good over evil. It would proclaim those two great principles: patriotism and the rule of law. It would raise the debate above narrow party advantage. It would overshadow the real story of inertia and incompetence and sheer blind folly. It would line the country up against the forces of darkness, and it would look marvellous on television.

  The last phrase struck Scullen with some force. The mechanics of the operation would call for air cover and the landing of a sizeable expeditionary force. That meant aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships. Both kinds of warship were based in Portsmouth, and it was from Portsmouth – therefore – that the Task Force would probably sail. It would, Leeson remarked, be a rare pageant. Crowds would line the harbour walls. There’d be tiny kids, waving their fathers goodbye. There’d be young wives, stalked by the terrible prospect of widowhood. There’d be flags in the wind, tears and farewells. There’d be bands on the decks of the departing warships, and the country’s finest, dressed to attention, at the rail. The lump would rise in the national throat, and the images, live on television, would be beamed round the world in seconds. It would be grand opera, scored for Queen and country. It would be the photo-opportunity of the decade.

  Scullen had nodded, saying very little, giving nothing away. How, he’d wondered at the end, would the crisis now develop? How would the world get the first real clues that Leeson’s careful fantasy was in some danger of coming true? Leeson had shrugged, toying with his coffee. It was now, he’d said, very simple. The players were in place. The orchestra was warming up. The curtain would shortly rise. For anyone with an interest in getting to their seats in time it was only necessary to buy a national paper. One day soon, the Argentinians would invade. Leeson’s best guess, given the circumstances, was May. But it might well be sooner.

  Scullen had noted the date, and now, the car bumping to a halt outside the bungalow, he realized again what a profitable weekend it had been. Leeson’s thoughts on events in the South Atlantic were, to say the least, provocative. But there’d been the other business, too. The cowboys from Nineteenth stepping mob-handed into the little house in Garville Street. Giving the boy, Connolly, the address had been an elementary bluff, and to be frank he was astonished that the bait had been taken. That alone said a great deal about the state of the Brit Intelligence services, always at each other’s throats, always battling for territory and advantage. But it meant something else, too. It meant that someone, between Thursday night in Belfast and Saturday morning in Dublin, had talked to the Brits. News of the address had got out. They’d been ready and waiting. Quite who that someone might be was still a matter of conjecture, though the obvious candidate was Connolly. Soon, they’d have to pull the boy in. Soon, he’d have to answer the harder questions. For now, though, he had a battle of his own to fight.

  Scullen got out of the car and smelled the clean salt air. The tiny bay, perhaps a mile across, was dotted with bungalows, recent constructions in rendered breezeblock, each with its own half-acre or so of carefully tended garden. The climate was mild down here, and stuff grew well, and even the garden at his own place, the farmhouse he’d bought, ten miles inland, up in the mountains, was already thick with early spring flowers. He paused a moment, wondering whether he might not have done better down here, on the coast, with a view of the ocean. But then he remembered the handful of nights he’d already spent at the farmhouse, camping in the empty rooms, Handel and Bach on the radio cassette player he carried everywhere, the wind in the chimney, the view down the valley into the last of the sunset, and he knew he’d made the right decision.

  He pushed in at the gate and walked up the path towards the bungalow. Like most of the places in the bay, it had been built as a second home. It belonged to a prosperous businessman from up in County Longford, a republican sympathizer who owned a string of garages, and it was on open loan to the Movement for occasional meetings, and the odd spot of enforced convalescence.

  Scullen rang the bell, smelling already the peat from the fire. The door opened, the familiar smile, and the tight, curly hair, and the bright intelligent eyes behind the thick glasses. The Chief of the General Staff was, as ever, wearing battered old corduroys, and the same plaid shirt, and a cardigan of the kind that even Dunn’s had given up stocking. He grinned at Scullen and pumped his hand.

  “You did famously,” he said, “famously. Come in. Tell us the heap of it.”

  Scullen stepped into the living room. The room ran the length of the bungalow, kitchen at one end, open fire at the other, the big picture windows making the most of the view. There was a table, and a couple of sofas, and scatter rugs on the polished wooden floor. There were good quality water-colours on the walls, and a big, red-framed corkboard hung over the worktop in the kitchen. The corkboard was covered in bits and pieces – photos, cartoons from local papers, a tide table, shopping lis
ts, kids’ drawings, layers of cheerful family graffiti that accumulated every summer. Scullen had never met the man who owned the place, but he’d been in the bungalow twice before, and he felt that he somehow knew him. From the snaps on the corkboard, he was a big man, with a belly, and a holiday beard, and a passion for deep-sea fishing, and a face full of mischief. The face, and the cottage, were a world away from Belfast.

  Scullen accepted a mug of tea and sat down by the fire. Besides the Chief, there were two other men from Belfast. He knew them well, and he told them exactly what had happened in Dublin, the raid on the house in Garville Street, Tommy O’Donovan, Tommy the Tout, expiring at the cough of a Brit firework. They enjoyed that, old scores settled, one enemy seeing off another, the neatness of it, and they enjoyed, too, what Scullen could tell them of the car chase, concluding – like him – that the rendezvous must have been blown between Belfast and London, and that their young Belfast academic probably knew how. The conversation went on for an hour or more, and at the end of it – curtains pulled against the darkness, more turf on the fire – the Chief turned at last to the real issue.

  “So,” he began, “this man of yours, your diplomat, what does he do for us?”

  Scullen took his time before answering. Then he gave them the meat of the conversation at the hotel, filleting it of unnecessary detail, confining himself to the raw facts. The Brits, he told them, were shortly going to war. The war would begin with the dispatch of a Task Force. Probably from Portsmouth. Probably in May. The Task Force would sail south, and try and recapture the Falklands Islands from the Argentinians. Historically, it would be an anachronism. The expedition would belong to another, colonial age. As such, it perfectly suited what he had in mind.

  There was a silence in the cottage. The wind sighed softly in the chimney breast. The ocean lapped the rocks at the foot of the field. The Chief, like the rest of them, looked lost. “So,” he began, “this man of yours, this diplomat; why the interest? What’s in it for us?”

  Scullen shrugged at the question, and the men in the room knew at once that he considered it naïve. “He’s nicely placed,” he said, “and he has a fine sense of history.”

  The Chief leaned forward. The bonhomie, and the smiles, had gone. “Does he have access?” he said.

  Scullen nodded. “Yes.”

  “But I thought you said he’d resigned?”

  “He has.”

  “Then what use is he to us?”

  Scullen looked him in the eye. He’d inherited from his predecessor a certain degree of independence. Over two busy years, he’d enlarged these freedoms, protected from his enemies by the very man he now faced. The Chief trusted him. The Chief watched his back. But the Chief’s patience, clearly, was far from inexhaustible. Now, he put a careful hand on Scullen’s knee.

  “Padraig,” he said. “We want her dead. I thought you knew that.”

  “I do. Of course, I do.”

  “Then why are we fucking about with some burned-out diplomat? What is he to us? Does he sleep with her? Read her stories at night? What’s so special about the fella? Justifies all this?”

  He withdrew his hand, and Scullen crossed one knee over the other. The others were watching him closely, and he knew it. As long as he carried the Chief with him, everything would work. But once the Chief was lost, he’d be dead in the water. He gazed at the fire for a moment or two.

  “I agree,” he said at last, “we’re after killing her …” He paused. “But believe me, humiliation will hurt her more.”

  There was a long silence. The Chief, like the rest of them, was waiting.

  “So what do you have in mind?” he said at last.

  Scullen gazed at the floor for a moment. Then he offered a rare smile.

  “We sink one of the Brit ships,” he said, “live. On television.”

  There was a long pause. Then the Chief began to laugh. Good crack.

  “Sure,” he said, “and how in God’s name do we do that?”

  Scullen looked at him. The smile had gone.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But I’ll find a way.”

  The local Southampton paper published the article about Jude Little that same evening.

  Buddy read it at home, sitting alone in the kitchen, preparing a pot of hummus to take to Jude the following morning. He cooked for her regularly now, shipping up baskets of her favourite foods in the back of the Jaguar. He enjoyed the work, the challenge of it, the pleasure it gave her now that she was off the powdered foods. It was something positive, something real, a way forward.

  He bent to the article, sitting on the kitchen stool, stirring a pot of boiling chick peas. He’d met the journalist only three days back, before the weekend and had waved away her offer of a fifteen-minute interview in the office in favour of a restaurant meal, with fresh pasta and glasses of good Chianti while he told her everything. He told her the story in outline first; then in detail where it seemed to matter. She’d been genuinely interested, he was sure of that, and in his gruff, direct way he’d made a reasonable job of getting the important bits across. What appealed most was Jude’s age – still in her early thirties – and the fact that she was well known in riding circles around the Forest. The journalist herself had heard of her – she had a friend who was taking lessons – and she nodded when Buddy talked about Jude’s personality, her sheer physical zest, and the appalling prospects that lay before her, now that most of her body was dead.

  “I know,” she said, “I can imagine.”

  At this, Buddy warmed to his theme, drawing on this two weeks at the Regional Unit. Spinal injury, he told her, always cut down the ones who had most to lose. It took the guys in the very middle of the rugby scrum, the bravest gymnasts, the highest divers. In Jude’s case, it had been a riding accident, not her fault, some bloody dog, but those three or four seconds, a blink of time, had put her on her back for the rest of her life. Where was the justice in that, he asked her. And what would any bloke, any husband, not do to try and get her back on her feet?

  The journalist had nodded, agreeing, writing down the odd phrase of Buddy’s. Her own boyfriend, it turned out, was a sports parachutist. The stunts he pulled scared her stiff, and she’d make sure he read the piece and understood what it meant. She couldn’t tell exactly how long that piece would be, and she’d have to be careful about saying too much about the American neurosurgeon, but she’d already got the go-ahead from the Features Editor, and the piece would definitely make the paper. All she needed now was a recent photo of Jude, and a forwarding address for any correspondence.

  Buddy had queried this latter point. Did articles like these get a big response? Did people write in with cheques? Postal orders? Offers of limitless help? The journalist had smiled and said there were no guarantees. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. She’d include the fact that he was appealing for funds, and he’d simply have to wait and see.

  Now, the lid on the saucepan, he finished the article. It was longer than he’d expected, a good half-page. It was headed “Unlucky Break”, and there was a blow-up of the photo he’d found: Jude on Duke, a year back, when they’d trailed the horses down to Dorset and ridden all afternoon on the cliffs east of Weymouth.

  He read the text of the article. The girl had woven in most of his best quotes, taking out some of the anger, underlining the pathos. She’d pointed out the obvious paradoxes – men walking on the moon and coming back to tell the tale, a lady falling off a horse and never lifting a finger again – and she’d wondered why it was that medical science couldn’t cope. She’d said that Jude would be back home soon, and that her husband planned to take her to America for a pioneering operation. She explained that the operation might not work, but that it involved no life-threatening risks. She used the word “miracle” a lot, but reminded readers that miracles didn’t come cheap. Buddy Little was trying to raise $80,000. Readers might think him a gutsy bloke for trying. It was as simple, and as bold, as that.

  Buddy read the art
icle again. There were a couple of paragraphs about his own background, and the girl had gone into some detail about the tough, seasoned ex-Navy diver who’d faced the worst the North Sea could offer, yet couldn’t come to terms with his wife’s paralysis. That seemed to Buddy to be stating the obvious, but it gave the piece an added poignancy of sorts, and he imagined that was the way they always did it. Maybe it was more effective with a bit of flannel. Maybe that’s what it took to get people to reach for their cheque-books. On the pavement, outside the restaurant, Buddy had asked her how soon he could expect any kind of response, and she’d said that was an easy one. With this kind of piece, she told him, it would be a question of days. People either gave at once, or they didn’t give at all. By the end of the week, he’d know either way.

  Buddy looked at his watch. Monday. Until Pascale had completed his assessment, he’d no idea whether Jude would even be suitable for surgery. That would take at least three weeks, and by then he’d certainly know whether or not this newspaper appeal had worked. If it did – if it raised the money, and got them over in one piece, and paid Pascale’s fees – then he’d at least have done his best. If, on the other hand, it didn’t work, then he’d simply have to find some other way of raising the money.

  He got off the stool and went across to the window, staring out into the stable yard. Friends of Jude’s from the village had taken over the riding school for the time being. They mucked out the horses in the morning, and fed them at night, and they did what they could with the programme of outstanding lessons. Their kindness was unending, and Buddy was duly thankful, but he knew from the steady list of cancellations that they didn’t have Jude’s talent for the job, her infectious enthusiasm. She’d taught by example. She’d befriended her pupils and made light of their clumsiness or fear. She’d put kids on horses, and housewives, and grandfathers, and she’d made them feel utterly at home up there. She’d even taught him to ride, for Chrissakes. But would she be able to do that in a wheelchair? With nods of her head?