by James Adams
“No. He’s trawled everywhere but so far it’s all just superficial stuff. Our intelligence people in Hong Kong say the word was out in the Chinese community for days that something was happening but there’s been no details. Anyway, that might be just backfilling analysis. People know about the Tunnel, know that they may get passports as a result but that’s pretty much as far as it goes. There are no names, no details on who’s doing what.
“Lin Yung is getting pretty frustrated,” she continued. “He thinks the British may cave in once the deadline gets a bit closer. He’s sure they’ll seek some kind of compromise and he’s determined to prevent that.”
Jonny felt overwhelmed by it all: the pressure of the past few days, the questioning by the COBRA team and the tension with Lisu. He rubbed his left hand across his forehead, over his eyes and down his face, squeezing his nose and compressing his mouth. He hesitated, finger tugging at his right ear. Then, before he had time to make a conscious decision, he found himself confiding in Julie.
“I’ve also got problems with Lisu. She is really upset; wants to go home. I left her a few minutes ago in tears. She’s so miserable and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do.”
“What’s the problem?” Julie asked.
“Oh, she says she hates England, hates being away from home. But there’s more to it than that. She thinks I should stop chasing Dai Choi, get on with my life. But now she’s in really bad shape. She won’t tell me what it is but something or someone is giving her a real hard time.” He took another swallow and then crossed the boundary from information to intimacy.
“At the end of the day, I think it’s us.” He saw Julie’s eyebrows rise and laughed ruefully. “No, I don’t mean you and me. I mean us, our marriage. I think that after all this time, there may be nothing left for us.”
Now that the confession had begun, he wanted to tell her everything. It seemed somehow right that he should confide in her; they had already shared so much together: the chase, the hunt and now, perhaps, the kill. The extremes of human endeavour had stripped away the normal conventions.
Her hand reached out to take his glass and their fingers touched briefly. “I’m so sorry, Jonny. This must be a tough time for you both. I can understand some of what you both feel. I’ve lived two lives for as long as I can remember. I live here but I suppose my spiritual home will always be China.”
“Do you still believe in their system?” he asked.
She paused, sipping her wine and buying time to phrase the answer. “That’s a very tough question. You have to remember that I was around after the Cultural Revolution and so I never really saw China in those times. I’ve seen the corruption of the old Communist system, the senility of much of the leadership and the struggle to balance Communism with capitalism. I suppose the answer is that I believe in the ideal but not in the reality. What I want is a government in Beijing that is really egalitarian, that does share the wealth, that embraces capitalism but controls it well enough so that it doesn’t destroy us. That is what Lin Yung wants and I think he’s right.
“I certainly believe in Beijing more than I believe in what I see around me here. There, the government takes care of all the people and there really is opportunity for all. Here you have an underclass that is forced to beg on the streets and sleep in doorways. You talk of justice for all when in reality it is for the few with money to pay for the good lawyers.”
“Huh,” Jonny grunted dismissively. “At least we don’t have a police state that arrests any dissident who raises a voice in protest against the government and then has a show trial to try and convince the world that we have justice.”
“That’s hardly fair, Jonny,” she replied. “Whatever the shortcomings of the system, and I admit that there are many, China is one country with one set of values which have come a long way in the last twenty years. In the next twenty we might see real progress for everybody. Maybe China will be the first country to have democratic socialism that actually means something, and be the first country to achieve it peacefully.”
“Yeah, and it’s just as likely to tear itself apart in another of your “cultural revolutions”,” Jonny replied sarcastically.
His cynicism infuriated Julie. “Well, at least I actually have something to believe in. What exactly do you have? A marriage that’s going down the drain or maybe is already there; a life in Hong Kong you appear to have come to despise; a country which you can no longer call home. What exactly do you believe in, Jonny? What is it you want? What are you working for?”
Jonny stared at her, silenced. Each of the statements and each of the questions crystallized the emptiness for him. She was right, he thought. There really is nothing left. It was all so hopeless, the struggle so senseless, such a waste of energy.
Seeing the despair in his face, she was instantly contrite, annoyed with herself for hurting this man who seemed so vulnerable. She moved across to sit by his side. Her hands reached out to touch his.
“Look, Jonny. This is a rough time. You’re operating in a strange country under great stress and you are bound to feel isolated. But this is as much a time of opportunity as change and you should look at the positive things in all this.”
“Well, I would like to know what they are.”
“First of all, if we pull this off, then you’ll have settled accounts with Dai Choi and maybe with Stanley Kung also, which should make up for some of the frustration back in Hong Kong. And second, you see the changeover in Hong Kong as a time of destruction. You think the Chinese are going to come in and wreck everything. Well, I’m sure you’re right — up to a point. Beijing won’t allow the corruption to continue, and they’ll change or destroy many of the traditions that have kept Hong Kong, made Hong Kong, such an anachronism all these years. But you’re not going to object to any of that, are you?”
“No,” he admitted reluctantly.
“Precisely. Then there’s the business side of things. I’ve no doubt that Beijing will put its oar in. What government can resist filling a regulation vacuum with new rules? But the essential work ethic will remain. In fact, Beijing is relying on Hong Kong to be the engine room for the capitalist revolution that has already begun in China.”
She looked into Jonny’s eyes, willing him to share her enthusiasm. “This is not a time for you to run away. It’s an opportunity for you to use your experience for the good of Hong Kong. Stay, Jonny. Stay on and use everything you’ve learned in your years there. Help Hong Kong make the transition. You can be a real force for change, for good. It is a chance for you to do something you can believe in.”
Her words began to beat back the tide of loneliness and depression with which he had lived for so long. Perhaps there was a chance of making a different kind of new life in the colony, of sweeping the place clean of the scum who had corrupted it for so long. It would be a vindication of everything he had tried to do during his police career. Perhaps he really could make a difference.
CHAPTER XX
As his driver negotiated the sleeping policemen under the watchful eye of the security cameras and the heavily armed guards, Bryan reflected how much Gough Barracks had changed in forty years.
On June 17, 1954, the British were made to look like the amateurs they were at the time. That morning twenty men rendezvoused in the Republican town of Dundalk for the journey over the border to Armagh and the headquarters of the Royal Irish Fusiliers in Gough Barracks in Armagh City.
The IRA had done their planning well. A week earlier two volunteers had gone to the barracks for a dance in the sergeants’ mess. During what everyone thought was a passion break, the couple made a detailed tour of the barracks sketching and noting sentries and guard posts as they strolled through the grounds.
The truck arrived at the barracks just after lunch and an IRA man approached the single sentry to ask about enlisting in the British Army. Once he was close enough, the IRA man drew his pistol and ushered the startled sentry into the guardhouse where he was tied up. The truck
then drove into the barracks and, using the guardhouse keys, the men broke into the armoury. Over the next half-hour, they loaded 250 rifles, 37 Sten guns, 9 Bren machine-guns and 40 training rifles. Others of the unit left on duty at the gate — complete with British
Army uniforms — escorted soldiers and visitors into the guardhouse where they, too, were tied up. By the time the IRA men left, there were eighteen soldiers and one civilian under guard.
After cutting the telephone lines, the IRA men drove unhindered to the border and then into the Republic. The British had been completely unprepared for such a brazen assault. The single sentry on guard duty had no ammunition for his gun; there was no effective method of raising the alarm; relations between north and south were such that it was several hours before news of the raid reached the border and by that time the IRA unit had made good its escape. It was also striking that rather than killing the British soldiers, the IRA men had simply tied them up. Nowadays such a humanitarian approach would be unthinkable.
Today Gough Barracks is a major base for the British Army in South Armagh but the lessons of that IRA raid have been well learned. The perimeter of the barracks is a six-foot-high grey stone wall which has been topped by brown ten-foot-high metal screens. A watch tower is incorporated into the wall, giving the whole place the feeling and atmosphere of a prison camp. It helps make Northern Ireland look like the colony of an occupying power.
After parking the car behind the barracks’ social club, Bryan left his driver and walked the fifty yards to a single-storey, redbrick building which until 1991 was the headquarters for special operations in the Armagh area. Known as the Task Coordination Group, the different branches of Special Forces and Intelligence would be briefed in this building before going out on an operation. Then the TCG was moved to the Mahon Road Barracks in Portadown where most of the day-to-day business is run. But some operations are still organized at Gough, partly because it is closer to the border and partly because all the equipment is there and most of the people involved are familiar with the place.
Bryan moved through a plain wooden door which was propped open by an old copy of the Belfast Telegraph jammed under it. He moved forward and stopped in front of a camera that peered down at him from the wall to his right. So many of these precautions were ridiculous, he thought. He had spent many long hours running operations from this building and he knew that if the outer door was shut then there was insufficient light for the security camera to work. The people inside always let you in anyway.
He pressed the buzzer by the door and a moment later heard the click that released the door handle. He walked in, turned right through a swing door and walked into the general office.
As always he was struck by how seedy the place looked. The door to the room is painted the colour of Newcastle Brown ale, a different shade of brown marks the coloured tiles on the floor, a third shade of lighter, brown is painted on the bottom half of the wall with a beige colouring the top half. There are seven brown desks surrounded by dark green or grey filing cabinets. It’s a sour and depressing place which the transient occupiers treat as a way station from the comfort of a proper base to the discomfort of action and back again.
The only bright spot in the room is a huge map of Northern Ireland, eight feet high and fifteen feet long. The map is covered in a plastic skin with perhaps two dozen little red boxes marked on with a chinagraph pencil. These denote out-of-bounds areas where either a covert operation is going on or a suspicious object has been spotted. The grid reference is marked on orange sticky tape which is then pinned above or below each box. A line of tape strips hangs from the bottom of the map ready for use. The red boxes are imitated on every Army map in every command post around the province to ensure that no ordinary foot patrol blunders into a covert operation or, even more important, that the two sides don’t start shooting at each other.
On the right-hand side of the map, the plastic covering had torn and was hanging slightly away from the main body. Bryan was reminded of a snake he had come across once shedding its skin. The difference here was that this skin was permanent and would probably get much worse before anything was done.
A television monitor, which acts as a relay from the camera by the entrance door, is mounted on the wall to the left of the map. Along the next wall is a green pinboard which contains a photographic display of the latest terrorists sighted in the area and a calendar showing a bare-breasted woman leaning back against a saddled horse. This artwork is supplied courtesy of Detective Steve Potts of the Special Branch who has an account with the A1 betting shop downtown.
As Bryan walked in, a young captain, whose shoulder patch showed him to be from the Royal Green Jackets, finished speaking and hung up the telephone which dominated the desk. This was a Goliath, a coded telephone which is secure from IRA penetration for up to twelve hours. The man stood up and saluted. “Afternoon, Colonel. You’ve set us an interesting challenge this time.”
Bryan knew Richard Ellis from previous incarnations, first in the Intelligence Corps and then on detachment to Army headquarters in Lisburn where Ellis had been on the staff of Commander Land Forces with special responsibility for liaising with the RUC on covert operations. Today, Ellis was in command of the second detachment of the 14th Intelligence and Security Group, a unit of twenty men who would be handling the security for tonight’s mission. Bryan liked the man. He was enthusiastic without being gung ho and had a sense of humour which after a while became a requirement for continued sanity.
“I thought you might enjoy it, Richard. Must make a change from selling houses in the Derry,” he added with a smile.
As the conflict in Northern Ireland had expanded in the 1970s, so the British Army had developed ever more complex methods of fighting the underground war. There had been an initial deployment of the SAS by Harold Wilson in 1974 but, even before then, Brigadier Frank Kitson, fresh from Kenya and Malaya and eager to apply the lessons he had learned in other insurgencies, had established the Mobile Reconnaissance Force. This small group of soldiers used IRA informers, known as Freds, to point out other terrorists, their safe houses and their ammunition dumps. The MRF also set up a massage parlour, a laundry and a taxi service. They had some success until one of the Freds became a triple agent and betrayed the existence of the organization and some of its operations.
The Army changed its name to the 14th Intelligence Company and this evolved into the 14th Intelligence and Security Group, which is about a hundred strong and carries out the vast majority of the Army’s covert operations in Northern Ireland today. Its speciality is surveillance. The SAS tend to be used only if some extreme violence is likely.
The week before the Tunnel had been seized, a major undercover operation by the Group had resulted in the arrest of forty-five IRA supporters working in Derry, Belfast and Armagh. The Army had established Brennan’s Estate Agency to draw in the IRA who had been blackmailing such businesses to launder their money through fake mortgages and illegal property sales. For two years, it had been one of the most successful 14th Int and Sy Group’s operations ever and Ellis was understandably pleased.
“My men could do with a bit of fresh air, Colonel. Although with the forecast I’ve seen, they may get a bit wet.”
Bryan made himself a cup of instant coffee and stood sipping it, grateful for the warmth and the comfort of the hot cup in his hands. He could sense the tension beginning to mount. For some reason he had never been able to fathom, he felt it in his right lower eyelid first. Now he was conscious of it flickering and, as always, he worried that everyone could see this sign of nerves. But he knew that the eye would settle down once he was out of here and on the road.
A door at the far end of the room opened and a head with a shock of bright red hair peered round the edge, spotted Ellis and shouted, “We’re all set, Richard. Whenever you’re ready.”
“Be right with you,” he replied and turned to Bryan. “Well, Colonel, we’d better go and see what they have planned for us.”
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The two men walked through the door into a narrow corridor and then through a second door to the briefing room. This is smaller than the general office and is known to everyone in the building as the sergeant’s office. Next door is the superintendent’s office which is where operational briefings are usually given.
Bryan could see that today the sergeant’s office was needed as the five bright orange plastic chairs were already occupied and other men perched on the edge of four of the desks. The briefer, a lieutenant from the Black Watch, was sitting behind a desk in the far corner facing the room. To his right was another large map of the Province alongside an aerial photograph of Crossmaglen. To the left of the briefer was the office dart board, which has been so well used that pieces of wood and felt hang from the surface. Next to it was a line of plaques presented by men from different regiments who have passed through. The only clue to the real purpose of the room was a hand-drawn picture of three SAS soldiers in black assault gear and a limited edition print of the painting of the SAS siege of the Iranian embassy.
Bryan knew there would be no introductions here. But he had been around long enough to be able to identify everyone in the room, if not by name, certainly by affiliation. Over the years, each of the groups working for the security forces had developed clear dress codes and everyone tended to conform, consciously or unconsciously.
Box’s representative was sitting against the left-hand wall smoking a cigarette. His dark grey suit and white shirt meant little but the striped tie and the black halfbrogues were distinctive marks, as was the more expensive cut and material of the suit. Next to him was another civilian, also in a suit but with the type of soft grey shoes that Bryan always associated with state school teachers. He would be a Special Branch officer. The liaison officer from Military Intelligence headquarters at Lisburn was perched on the edge of the desk to Bryan’s left, the check of the Viyella shirt, the round-necked blue wool jumper and the olive green corduroy trousers his required civilian uniform. Despite the civilian “disguise”, he still wore his army issue watch.